Stud Philos Educ (2008) 27:89–102

DOI 10.1007/s11217-007-9092-9

Dystopian Reality, Utopian Thought and Educational

Practice

Marianna Papastephanou

Published online: 8 January 2008

Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract The significance of utopian thought for education can be made evident through
reconceptualizing utopia and approaching it alongside the notion of dystopia. Awareness of
dystopian elements of reality radicalizes the kind of critique that assists utopian thought
and makes engagement with it more pressing. Awareness of the lurking danger of future
dystopia goes hand in hand with a utopia that is cautious and vigilant of its own possible
turn into catastrophe. If education is not just an institution of the unreflective socialization
and social integration of the young immersed in technicist and prudentialist goals, if it is
about futurity and vision of a better world, it has to rely on, and renegotiate, utopian
thought. Yet, all this presupposes a new descriptive account of the self and the world that
breaks with the kind of anthropology and ethics that generated a particular conception of
utopia as impossible and purely oneiric.

Keywords Hope
Happiness
Ethics
Anti-utopia
2000 curriculum

Calvino
Mamet
Hesse

Introduction

Educational practice has improved: it is more progressive than authoritarian and elitist,
more democratic and open to the masses and surely more multivocal and sensitive to the
historical context than ever. Yet, it seems that precisely its de-distantiation (Mannheim), its
proximity to the needs of everyday life and its sensitivity to context have brought edu-
cational practice closer to purposes set by the market (Young 2003) that are extrinsic to the
educational ideal of human perfectibility. Lacking critical self-distance and often theorized
through a disillusioned post-metaphysical perspective, educational practice appears
insouciant. It indulges in the thought that it does its best, that, ultimately, our world is the
best possible and that any utopian attempt to change it for the better will end in disaster. In
so doing, it ignores and simultaneously fuels the dystopian elements of the present.

M. Papastephanou (&)
Department of Education, University of Cyprus, P.O. Box 20537, Nicosia 1678, Cyprus
e-mail: edmari@ucy.ac.cy

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Without underestimating the qualities of our world and its educational achievements, I
argue that the dystopian element in educational life must be acknowledged not so as to
promote cynicism and resignation but so as to motivate desire for more radical reorien-
tation. To illustrate the diagnostic character of such an acknowledgement, I read David
Mamet’s play Oleanna as an educational dystopia and, to depict the specific relation of
dystopian reality and utopian imagination that I propose, I refer to Hermann Hesse’s short
story ‘Strange News from Another Star’. However, these steps presuppose a philosophical
reworking of the notions of utopian thought and dystopian reality that I attempt elsewhere
but, for reasons of space, I cannot fully deploy here. Thus, I begin with this reworking as it
can be conveyed through the last pages of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. My strategy in this
article is not so much to thread my way through detailed argumentation but to weave
associations of utopia, dystopia and education as they emerge from various texts, the
suggestiveness of which compensates, I hope, for the unavoidably limited deployment of
the relevant argumentative material.

Preliminary Remarks

Various conceptual contents of utopia and dystopia are encountered in most cultures
(Kumar 2003) from antiquity to the present and they have, for that reason, justifiably been
recounted in almost all the recent texts in the relevant literature. Still, whereas in early
modernity the notion of utopia was embraced and projected on a temporal dimension of
fulfillment that radicalized its initial spatial and novelist character (Habermas 1994), later it
fell upon hard times. The reasons1 for this are well known and productive of very strong
anti-utopian theoretical positions. The most famous exceptions in the 20th century have
been the works of Ernst Bloch (1986) and Karl Mannheim (1960) but, despite their
influence, those works have not turned into a dominant current of thought. Conservative
and Cold War liberal attacks on the dangerous ambitions of utopianism assisted by the
downfall of revolutionary confidence have led to ‘a full-scale retreat from visions of
perfection’ (Geoghegan 2003, p. 156). The right-wing undertone, as Jameson explains, is
that ‘the system (now grasped as the free market) is part of human nature; that any attempt
to change it will be accompanied by violence; and that efforts to maintain the changes
(against human nature) will require dictatorship’ (Jameson 2004, p. 35).
But many left-wing thinkers have also maintained a negative or an ambivalent stance
toward utopia, often echoing Marx’s unease or downright rejection of the idea. This holds
as much for Laclau and Mouffe (Brockelman 2003; Cooke 2004) as it does for Žižek,
despite the fact that their anti-utopianism is fundamentally different from the one that
recruits the threat of totalitarianism (Brockelman 2003, p. 198).2 The incredulity regarding
utopia that has been brewing for some time now in postmodern thought is evident in
Derrida’s following assertion.

1
‘Utopia is treated with suspicion as impossible in principle and thus potentially dangerous and totalitarian
in practice’ (Levitas 2004a, p. 605). Isaiah Berlin (his book The Crooked Timber of Humanity is very telling)
stresses the totalizing character of utopia in a world of conflicting worldviews, a character doomed to bring
disaster, chaos and suffering (Turner 2003, p. 27). Ricoeur, Hayek and Popper (Olssen 2003), as well as
Nagel (Lassman 2003, p. 49) argue for the impossibility of utopia for most of humanity.
2
Their starting point about the impossibility of utopia derives from an anthropological rather than political
pessimism with which I take issue elsewhere.

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Although there is a critical potential in utopia which one should no doubt never
completely renounce, above all when one can turn it into a motif of resistance against
all alibis and all ‘realist’ and ‘pragmatist’ resignations, I still mistrust the word. In
certain contexts, utopia, the word in any case, is all too easily associated with the
dream, with demobilisation, with an impossibility that urges renouncement instead of
action (Derrida 2000, p. 8).3
Education as theory and practice could very well answer Derrida’s concerns. Theory
aspires to formulate an appropriate regulative ideal; practice aspires to approximate it, but,
more than that, practice raises a demand for ‘here and now’ that prevents the degeneration
of the ideal into an ever receding futurism. It also provides means for critiquing and
modifying the ideal through the scrutiny that actuality invigorates and recharges. Besides,
utopia and education have a common denominator: the former presupposes the plasticity of
humanity, the latter constantly moulds and remoulds it. However, the anti-utopian loss of
faith in human malleability has pervaded education too,4 thus having a share in the edu-
cational failure to meet the task of forging a better humanity. The oscillation between
positive and negative treatments of utopia marked the modernist conception of education
as a project for future betterment of humanity––with the negative stance toward utopia
increasingly gaining a sweeping force. Given that education has played an important role
in many utopian projects or novels (Peters and Humes 2003, p. 429), it is ironic that utopia
has fallen into educational disrepute. What is alarming, though, is the political quietism
that results from the fact that philosophy of education loses much critical force when it
gives in so light-heartedly to anti-utopian trends.
Yet the interest in utopia is now being renewed both in general philosophy5 and in
philosophy of education (Halpin 2001a, p. 300) through a series of books, special issues
and conferences on utopian imagination. The educational comeback of utopia can be found
in three trends: (a) the educational critical response to Futures Studies (Peters and Humes
2003); (b) the radical transformation approach to education (which preserved the utopian
element all along from Freire down to Giroux and McLaren); and (c) the reformist
approach to educational practice from Dewey down to recent thinkers (Halpin 2001a;
Demetrion 2001) favouring piecemeal pragmatist utopian change.
Despite their being valuable and very welcome in their capacity to invigorate philo-
sophical dialogue and reorient education to more critical and futurity-inspired aims,
educational approaches to futurity often succumb to systemic imperatives. In Peters’ and
Humes’ words, ‘now that the question of futures is subjected to its own disciplinary
formation and methodologies, educational futures tend to be more mundane and technical,
or both, especially when they are harnessed as official policy narratives’ (2003, p. 431). Or,
most of the attempts to retrieve utopia lack the comprehensiveness that is necessary if the
old, faulty lines are to be avoided. For instance, in much of the relevant material, utopia is
more historically mapped rather than revisited through the prism of contemporary

3
This Derridean idea suffers from genetic fallacy but this argument cannot be developed here for reasons of
space.
4
Adorno criticizes this as follows. ‘Not only does society, as it is presently structured, keep people
immature but every serious attempt to shift it–I’m avoiding the word ‘educate’ deliberately–to shift it
towards maturity is immediately met with indescribable resistances, and all the evil in the world at once
finds its most eloquent advocates, who will prove to you that the very thing you are attempting to achieve
has either long been overtaken or is utopian or is no longer relevant’ (Adorno and Becker 1999, p. 32).
5
See for instance the CRISPP special issue on utopia in 2000, the proceedings of the 2005 conference on
the role of utopia in 21st century ideology etc.

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philosophy. Or, when it is reformulated, its renegotiation occurs within the confines of a
particular tradition, e.g. pragmatism, liberal realism, or Marxism and it is almost always
negligent of, or dissociated from, the kindred notion of dystopia. The latter is often pre-
sented as the polemical other of utopia, that is, the inexorable and hard reality of failed
dreamworld. The importance of dystopia for education as a diagnostic but also critical tool
of pathologies is, to my knowledge, totally absent. This neglect in the received view of the
complementary role of dystopia is accompanied by a failure to provide or imply a different
anthropology or, in other words, a different descriptive frame6 that would justify utopian
normativity. As a result, the normative force of utopia is attenuated through limitations
imposed along pragmatist and realist lines.7
In what follows, I sketch some general ideas for a rehabilitated utopia coupled with,
rather than in opposition to, the notion of dystopia.

Utopia and Dystopia

The term ‘utopia’ describes a literary genre of concrete oneiric pictures of the good life as
well as abstract socio-political philosophical projects (Kumar 2003, pp. 63–65), dream-
worlds imagined and dreamworlds attempted. However, the urge to utopia is not identical
with its articulation into a project (Bauman 2003, p. 11). From Bloch and Mannheim down
to Bauman, utopian urge is articulated as a universal impulse to measure life as it is by a
life as it might or should be. Thus the distinction is between utopian urge and its modernist
specification through redemptive projects. The latter took a vast number of forms but it can
be said to have sedimented into two basic routes to utopia. The one describes utopia in
terms of an ‘abrupt transition between two discontinuous states’. The other ‘sees it in terms
of steady progress along a continuous path’ (Lassman 2003, p. 51). Although both have
been associated with revolutionary change or eschatology pertaining to various forms of
leftism, the linear historical evolutionary element is present in capitalism too, for which
utopia becomes a natural outcome of the dynamics of modern societal development, its
predictability and securitization.
Another distinction concerns the specification of vision: the notion of utopia unravelled
historically through subsequent shifts of emphasis from territoriality to finality (Bauman
2003). Whilst in Thomas More and in most other literary constructions of utopia deter-
minations are spatial, for the socio-political version of utopia-as-project, determinations
are temporal. True, there have also been instances of utopian thought such as the theo-
retical justification of British colonialism where the metaphysical capitalist finality meets
territoriality in conceptions of colonial additions as Promised Land, but, generally, the axis
of space was usually opposed to that of time. For obvious reasons, both (or their
6
Why such works on utopia and education, despite their merits and their being valuable in bringing the
topic back to the educational agenda, do not go far enough, is explained via their implicit anthropological
philosophical assumptions. Thus, elsewhere my concern is to examine the faulty descriptive frame that
blocks stronger revisions of the terms.
7
The idea is that when utopian efforts aspire to something beyond the axes set by neo-pragmatism and
some version of realism, by some kind of anthropological necessity, dystopia will be the inescapable
conclusion. The term ‘realistic utopia’ encountered in Rawls, McIntyre etc and the term ‘pragmatist utopia’
in Rorty exemplify the presence of utopian energies in political philosophy and their attenuation through a
less imaginative invocation of the potential for changing historical reality. These approaches seem to have
determined the course of the revival of utopian thought in general philosophy and philosophy of education,
and the treatment of the anthropological grounds of utopia that I propose elsewhere aims to contribute to an
enrichment and redirection of this course.

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combination) attracted fierce attacks for their stasis and homogeneity as well as for
tyrannical historicism. Objecting to the architectural and urbanistic (Bauman 2003, p. 14)
modern origins of territorial utopian determination and to the finality and teleology that led
to the totalitarianism of the past, a revival of utopian thought is rather to be preconditioned
on spatial and temporal indeterminacy. In Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1997, p. 164), a
passage that echoes Oscar Wilde’s (in Kumar, 1991, p. 95) view that a map of the world
that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at reads as follows:
The Great Khan’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in
thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun,
Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.
Kublai asked Marco: ‘You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me
toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us’.
‘For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing’.
Thus, we may rescue utopia by arguing against the metaphysical stagnation of the locat-
ability of the perfect eternal and static city and by promoting the utopia that is critical not
only of the present but also of the closure of previous utopias (Geoghegan 2003, p. 152).
Indeed, it may be shown that finality is extrinsic to the demand for the common good,
obfuscatory and even detrimental to it. For we may argue, following Turner, that ‘the
excesses of totalitarian regimes flowed not from a belief in universal happiness or truth, but
from a belief that ‘‘history’’ might be the ultimate legitimation for political practice’ (2003,
p. 44, fn 1).8
Does this relativization of time and space mean that we must lose all interest in those
ports ‘for which we cannot draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing’? A ‘yes’
answer privileges form over content: in Habermas, Honneth and Seel’s approaches (Cooke
2004, p. 416), formalism empties utopia from specific contents of the good life. However,
my answer to the above question is ‘no’, we must not lose our interest in the various
contents of utopias. We must turn to them not just because of their motivational role9 but
also because of their significance for discerning what would be worth pursuing. For, after
all, what more distinguishes the utopia of Mussolini’s fascism (Burdett 2003) from various
teleological utopias, other than their contents, that is, their definition of the good? The last
section of this paper will clarify my position on a possible content of utopia, but here it is
important to see first where we stand after a post-metaphysical critique of utopia.
So, if the wrongheaded revolutionary confidence in the past emanated from an escha-
tological and messianic conception of human history that is now implausible and obsolete,
is there space for a new utopian thought in postmodernism (Kumar 2003, p. 74)? ‘Can one
portray the good society in the terms of irony, scepticism, playfulness, depthlessness,
ahistoricity, loss of faith in the future’ (Kumar 2003, p. 74)? My response is positive
regarding irony, playfulness and ahistoricity but negative regarding scepticism and
depthlessness; a new utopian thought can combine a loss of faith in the future with some

8
For instance, the idea that socialism would come when time was ripe was politically detrimental for the
chances of the Austrian left to oppose Nazism. See Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies or, for a brief
account of this point see Magee (1985, pp. 11–12).
9
As Cooke explains, ‘formality is not a necessary component of utopian thinking that seeks to avoid ‘bad
utopianism’, ‘finalism’ and ‘totalitarianism’. Rather, formality is a pragmatic requirement of such thinking.
A projected utopian image must be indeterminate enough to appeal to a wide range of social agents with
varying evaluative commitments and convictions, yet determinate enough to motivate them to engage in
transformative social action’ (2004, p. 427, fn 16).

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faith in the glimpse of the unexpected and the possibility to discern it. This is how Polo
responds to Khan’s question about utopia in Calvino’s Invisible Cities:
At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous
landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the
crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the
perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by inter-
vals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the
city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scat-
tered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps
while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can
hunt for it, but only in the way I have said (1997, p. 164).
Human freedom as constant creative reaction to empirical reality precludes a totalizing and
non-revisable determination of utopian contents (Cooke 2004, p. 421). Along with it, the
finitude of human existence, the limits of knowledge and existential scope, preclude the
finality of the perfect time and the finalism of the perfect space. Utopia emerges only as a
possibility,10 felt through disconnected instances of the good embedded in everyday life
and in various social contexts. Of course, the most immediate and fashionable objection to
all this is the danger of dystopia. The original meaning of utopia, the good place that is no
place, is transformed into ‘the good place that can be no place, and which, in seeking a
place, becomes its opposite, dystopia’ (Levitas 2003, p. 3).11
Already the great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that
menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave
New World.
He said: ‘It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it
is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us’ (Calvino 1997, p.
164).
What is reflected here is the commonplace idea that utopia is doomed to turn into its
opposite. We see how dystopia becomes a weapon against radical imagination. ‘Dystopias
have been deployed to stifle necessary and beneficial change by making people fearful of
such change, with the paradoxical outcome that the failure to change plunges society
further into the mire’ (Geoghegan 2003, p. 151).
However, things appear different if we add some nuance to the standard notion of
dystopia. There is the kind of dystopia that does precisely what has been described so far
and emanates from an anti-utopian outlook. Following Moylan (2000), I define the anti-
utopian as the belief that utopia is inherently dangerous and inevitably leads to totalitar-
ianism. The dystopia that derives from such anti-utopianism depicts ambitious experiments
that have gone wrong and chastises the hubristic character of utopian imagination. The

10
On utopia as a possibility, see, for instance, Lukács’ early writings. Unlike his later ones, characterized
by the determinacy with which they predict utopia as a future possibility, his early writings do not claim that
utopia should be theorized as the outcome of an identifiable process of social change. ‘Utopia is instead used
only as a hermeneutic device, a ground upon which to criticize the dystopian present and a means by which
to stretch the critical imagination’ (Price 1999, p. 68). Like the early Lukacs, I believe that we should
deliberately avoid any systematic theory of society and the temptation to elaborate a course of social action
that is likely to realize utopia. Like his, my goal is also to simply allow ‘utopia to appear as a possibility–
albeit one among many–in spite of the alienated, dystopian quality of life in the present-day world’ (Price
1999, 80).
11
A very early example of joining utopia and its dystopian degeneration is Aristophanes’ Pluto.

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moral is, as Geoghegan puts it, ‘leave the path of tradition or minimal reform and the gulag
beckons’ (2003, p. 152). However, there is also a dystopia that is not the opposite of utopia
and is termed ‘critical dystopia’, which contains, ‘both in form and content, a destabilizing
element of dogged hope’ (ibid). According to Jameson, it is important to distinguish
between the anti-utopia that expresses the anti-revolutionary ideology for which utopias
inevitably lead to repression and dictatorship and the dystopia ‘which is necessarily a
critique of tendencies at work in capitalism today’ (2004, p. 41). Dystopia, then, is not ‘the
opposite of utopia, as is sometimes maintained; anti-utopia is the real opponent’ (Geog-
hegan, 2003, p. 153). In exaggerating the faults of the system, this kind of dystopia
revitalizes the urge for change, the yearning for a better life.
How are the redefined utopia and dystopia entangled? Just as everyday life stores
utopian moments, likewise it stores dystopian elements.12 This is how Polo responds to
Khan’s fears of dystopia.
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is
already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together.
There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the
inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky
and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who
and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give
them space (Calvino 1997, p. 165).
Fragmentary and discontinuous hope intersects with instances of lived nightmare. But
failure to perceive these dystopian instances normalizes them and blocks the effort to
pursue the utopian moment. Such uncritical normalization often derives from memories of
past disheartening experiences when utopian energies produced a chaos and a terror that
was worse than the one they were unleashed to fight. I have argued that what remedies this
normalization of societal symptoms is the turning of dystopia not against utopian imagi-
nation but against the dominant reality. Thus, although I agree with much of what is being
written about the significance of utopian thought in education (Halpin 2001b, p. 110ff), I
believe that this significance could be more adequately theorized and defended through an
examination of the way in which dystopia and utopia intersect.
A discussion of dystopian elements in educational reality can function as a directive of
utopian thought toward alternative futures and away from existing pathologies mistaken as
inevitable. A discussion of the possible slippage of ambitious ideas for change into dys-
topian distortions can function as a corrective of utopian thought that enlarges its
imaginative reach: utopian theory should deal not only with ideal contents but also with
their possible degeneration. Educational dystopia then becomes not a discourse of fore-
casting but of foreboding, mixed with tenacious hope.

Education and Dystopia: Mamet‘s Oleanna

Mamet’s Oleanna serves as an illustration of my argument about the role of dystopia as a

critical device that unmasks educational pathologies13 and complements utopian

12
‘The nightmarish quality of everyday life runs up against the epic quality of the absolute, not as elements
that are extraneous to each other but as mutually reinforcing tendencies’ (Osborne 2003, p. 131).
13
For an account of educational pathologies that utopian thought might help us confront, see Halpin
(2001b, p. 105).

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educational discourse by giving it a new impetus. A revocation of the present becomes tied
with the invocation of a better future that has to be striven for.14 The title Oleanna refers to
a utopia where all goods are accessible and ready for consumption with no effort or energy
spent on acquiring them, but the play unfolds as depiction of an educational dystopia. John,
a professor of education, is in his office talking on the phone about the new house he is
buying, while Carol, a student, has been asked to his office to talk about her essay mark
being a fail. When they start talking, their communication is most of the time either
distorted or disrupted: she cannot understand the words he uses, they interrupt each other
and they get interrupted by a series of phone calls about his house. Carol tries to explain
apologetically that she did all she was told (she bought and read John’s book) but she just
cannot understand the material at all (p. 9). Contrasting the extra-mural with the academic
world, she says:
there are people out there. People who come here. To know something they didn’t
know. Who came here. To be helped. To be helped. So someone would help them. To
do something. To know something. To get, what do they say? ‘To get on in the
world’. How can I do that if I don’t, if I fail? But I don’t understand. I don’t
understand. I don’t understand what anything means ... and I walk around. From
morning ‘til night: with this one thought in my head. I’m stupid (p. 12).
John takes an interest in the case, despite his initial hurried dismissal of her protests. ‘I’m
not your father’ (p. 9), he had said, but now he wants to deploy his good pedagogical tactics
to undo her negative self-image, to give her a new chance to learn and to enlighten her about
the vices of the educational system. Schooling makes students internalize failure and give in
to self-fulfilled prophecy; it is tyrannical and authoritarian. But Carol does not pay much
attention to his words. What she is really interested in is her grade (p. 24). He quickly gets
the distraction of the grade out of the way by granting her an ‘A’ and offering to teach her
the material all over again (p. 25). Full of faith in the power of his progressive questioning of
the system, a questioning that has secured him the publication of a book, an imminent tenure
and a high salary, he sets out to convince Carol that he is on her side and that she can learn.
‘I’m talking to you as I’d talk to my son’ (p. 19), he now says. What we may perceive as
Carol’s inability owed to a long series of educational misfires is expected to be overcome in
a couple of sessions with John. In an interestingly subversive move, we see John attacking
the system and Carol becoming more confused and more defensive, since, to her, education
is the only road to success. Act One ends with a further failure of communication. Carol is
about to open up and talk about herself (p. 38): ‘I always ... all my life ... I have never told
anyone this...’ (p. 38). But, that very moment, the phone rings. John picks it up; it is about a
surprise party in the new house to celebrate the tenure announcement and, as he has to go to
his party, the secret Carol was about to tell is forgotten.
In Act Two we are informed about Carol’s formal complaint against John of sexual
harassment and John now appears to have faith in the very system he was condemning. He
had talked previously to Carol about the ‘bad committee’ that had put him to the test, that, in
his exact words, had people ‘voting on me I wouldn’t employ to wax my car’ (p. 23). Now he
is saying, ‘the Tenure Committee will meet. This is the process, and a good process. Under
which the school has functioned for quite a long time. They will meet and hear your com-
plaint–which you have the right to make; and they will dismiss it’ (p. 45). As the act unfolds,
John displays the same concern about his material goods that are at stake now that his tenure

14
Dystopian depictions of educational reality are significant for diagnostic and remedial intervention in
educational matters and for radicalizing educational demands for systemic change.

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is suspended because of Carol, as Carol did in the first act regarding her grade. Carol, who
was instructed to make the complaint by a group, which remains anonymous throughout the
play, is now articulate and eloquent in promoting this new ‘we’. ‘You mock us. You call
education ‘‘hazing’’, and from your so-protected, so-elitist seat you hold our confusion as a
joke, and our hopes and efforts with it’ (p. 52). John’s attempt to convince Carol to withdraw
the complaint fails and the act ends with John restraining her from leaving.
In Act Three this is construed as attempted rape on the grounds of which John will lose
his job. John appears cautious and tries to appeal to her feelings. Once again, Carol attacks
him from a position of power, the power she now has over his future. She accuses him that
he does not believe in ‘freedom of thought’. You believe, she says, ‘in a protected hier-
archy which rewards you. And for whom you are the clown. And you mock and exploit the
system which pays your rent’ (p. 68). The new, empowered Carol of the third act does not
gain her power from an abstract sense of justice or the force of the better argument or the
influence of transformative teaching and emancipatory learning material. She draws power
from the system itself which she turns against John through the help of a group that directs
her legal moves. Carol cynically leaves us think that sexual harassment is not really the
issue; it is unclear whether she had consciously twisted the meaning of his words to use it
against him or she had truly mistaken his intentions. What mattered to her was that newly
acquired power over him. He argues that what he said or did was devoid of sexual content,
and she retorts: ‘I say it was not. I SAY IT WAS NOT. Don’t you begin to see ...? Don’t
you begin to understand? IT’S NOT FOR YOU TO SAY’ (p. 70). And she is ready to
withdraw the complaint only on the condition that he agrees to give up his academic
freedom to choose the taught material. She gives him a list of texts that she and her group
want removed from the syllabus. When John reads the list and sees his own book there, he
refuses point blank to proceed. ‘I’ve got a book with my name on it. And my son will see
that book someday. I have a responsibility ... to myself, to my son, to my profession’ (p.
76). The play ends15 with a violence and power symbolism: John picks up a chair, raises it
above his head and advances on her; she cowers on the floor below him, he looks at her and
lowers the chair and she says: ‘Yes, that’s right’ (p. 80).16
Mamet’s controversial play has not been understood as an educational dystopia17
because it has mostly been read as a story of sexual harassment and a satire of the excesses
of political correctness. Against this, I read Oleanna as an educational dystopia, a
‘mocking Doppelgänger’ [double] (Kumar 2003, p. 71) of the idea that autonomy, critique
and emancipation can be effected without major changes in the system of schooling and in
society. Alluding to an old utopian attempt in Wisconsin,18 the title Oleanna is in stark

15
Towards the end, John tells his wife on the phone ‘I can’t talk now, Baby’ and Carol, on the way out, tells
him: ‘don’t call your wife ‘‘baby’’’ (p. 79). Infuriated, John begins to beat her shouting: ‘You think you can
come in here with your political correctness and destroy my life?’ (p. 79).
16
In a Pinteresque manner, Mamet finishes the play with that enigmatic phrase that can be interpreted in
many ways. We could interpret this ending as an assertion that in this system of acting and communicating
the only effective means is domination in various forms and the only model of the teacher and student
relation that survives is the one of asymmetrical power and control.
17
A reason for this neglect of the dystopian depiction of educational reality in the play is, I believe, the
failure to perceive the irony of the title of the play. The title Oleanna has been treated as enigmatic and
obscure and many critics of the play emphasize its supposed irrelevance to the play.
18
In his commentary, Daniel Rosenthal notes: ‘Oleanna was a failed nineteenth-century Utopian commune
in Wisconsin, so there is an immense, ironic gap between the title’s allusion to an idyllic community in
which men and women live in harmony and the dramatisation of an academic community riven by sexual
and linguistic and argument’ (in Mamet 2004, p. xxvii).

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98 M. Papastephanou

contrast to the dystopian world described in the play. That the actual Oleanna utopia failed
is an additional allusion to the hopeful beginnings of educational ideas going wrong in
practice. Yet, a further allusion of the title to an old folk song where utopia is exhausted in
commodities and facile unreflective gratification19 gives it a whole new dimension, since
the events of Oleanna are set against a background of ‘getting on in the world’ where
students strive for easy achievement. Students are presented as lacking cultural capital,
being thus unable to decode the educational message. They desire to know but only for
external reasons, for obtaining degrees that will open for them the way to success. They
seek proof of knowledge, not learning itself, going after whatever is of social value and can
be cashed out as distinction.20 And they are prepared to seize the opportunities that life
offers and to utilize the system for self-serving purposes. In this respect, Carol is indeed an
achiever.
But the play depicts a dystopia because all the characters involved in it are complicit.
‘When the professor has control and power, he is distorted by the system; when the student
has it, she is distorted as well. The fault is not in the individual psychology of each
character, as it would have been in modernist realism, but, rather, in the system as a whole’
(Sauer 2005, p. 6).21 The professor who appears at first glance progressive and dedicated
proves to be deeply conventional and motivated by a shallow educational ‘fashion’. This
character typifies how a realistic or pragmatist utopia presents a ‘safe’ questioning of the
system; a protected anarchy that, by leaving true hierarchies unaffected, is shattered by
them. Education is expected to effect the appropriate societal change of values and con-
ceptions of the good life; yet education cannot just be the source of such transvaluation: it
has to be simultaneously its effect, since, without serious systemic societal change, edu-
cational redirection remains an empty letter.22 Is any of this in mind when education is
designed?

Educational Theory and Practice: The 2000 Curriculum

Our journey through texts takes us now to the 2000 British curriculum that came to replace
the 1988 curriculum. The 1988 curriculum was limited to ‘bland truisms’ (White 2004, p.
2) but its successor is far more determinate. The 2000 curriculum is much clearer about its
values, aims and purposes, since those are exposed in a separate section constituting the
‘opening pages of the Handbook for teachers on the National Curriculum post-2000’ (ibid).
Reading through, we do not encounter utopia or dystopia; I suspect that the authors of the
2000 text would give an anti-utopian response to the why of this omission. The word
‘change’ appears as a fact of economic, social and cultural reality with which we ‘need to
be prepared to engage’ (ibid, p. 3); it is absent as a signifier of conscious and intentional
socio-political project. There is no account or characterization of society as a whole (in its

19
Like the Land of Cockaygne whose inhabitants, as Halpin explains (2001a, p. 302), ‘want for nothing
materially and where there is super-abundance of food and drink’ and nobody works to obtain all this, the
song Ole Anna describes a materialist utopia.
20
Elsewhere, I attempt a more detailed discussion of the pedagogical issues involved in the play by
employing Bourdieu and also Adorno’s Theory of Halb-Bildung.
21
Yet, it is important not to take Oleanna as an anti-utopia instead of a dystopia. Just as in the case of
Kierkegaard’s thought, mobilizing a fierce anti-system rhetoric ends up in systematically precluding certain
possibilities, especially the possibility of utopian social change (Price 1999, p. 73).
22
For this reason, I approach Oleanna as a satire of educational progressivism and its facile assumptions
that good educational ideas are all we need to create a felicitous world of education.

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Dystopian Reality, Utopian Thought and Educational Practice 99

local and global manifestations); rather, a positive outlook on it seems to run through the
text, as students are encouraged to appreciate human achievement in varied fields. The
curriculum seems quite pleased with things as they are: there is no negative critique,
let alone dystopian accounts of reality, no mention of pathologies; and the word ‘problems’
comes up as something that able students qua critical thinkers should aspire to solve. Thus,
the society that is almost absent from the text but to which the aims are ultimately
addressed seems to be, precisely through this lack of any reference to its condition, an
accomplished utopia.
However, there is margin for improvement: the pupils educated along the lines of this
curriculum will be enabled to ‘make a difference for the better’ (ibid, p. 3). Now a realistic
or pragmatist utopia begins to rise from this text. The 2000 curriculum’s aims and purposes
‘present a picture of the kind of pupil that the school curriculum can ideally help to foster’.
The ideal pupil ‘is an informed, caring citizen of a liberal democratic society’ (White,
2004, p. 4).23 It is evident that, as Levitas argues, political anti-utopianism bolsters support
for liberal capitalism while concealing the utopian grounds of capitalism itself (2003, p. 3).
So, what does this repressed utopia consist of? We read that pupils should become
‘capable of contributing to the development of a just society’ (White, 2004, p. 4). Can a
politics of the future be achieved independently of a politics of the past? For instance,
could some awareness of the white Rhodesian colonial sponsoring of destructive counter-
movements in Mozambique, resulting in the displacement of 2 million people and the loss
of many lives (McClintock 1994, p. 259), find a word in edgeways in a 2000 curriculum, a
millenium or maybe millenarian curriculum? No, there is no mention of any pending
historical debt to anyone, no ethical handling of memory, no redirection on grounds of
lessons from the past so that the past is not reenacted; only knowledge and understanding,
amongst other things, of history and world culture. Of course, it will be no small feat that
the pupils will be challenging discrimination and stereotyping (p. 4), the only cases of
pathologies mentioned in the 2000 curriculum. Their vociferous, symbolic violence and
perhaps their tangible implications seem easily to be cured through political correctness24
and the obsession not to offend the other. In Oleanna, Carol destroys John’s and his wife’s
life but she is sensitive to John’s politically incorrect way of addressing his wife: ‘Don’t
call your wife ‘‘baby’’,’ Carol orders the professor.
Like in most other utopias, in repressed utopias too, all is about happiness. ‘Happiness
and more happiness are desired now as they used to be in the bygone times of utopia-
writing; but happiness means now a different today rather than a more felicitous tomorrow,
as it did in the past’ (Bauman 2003, p. 23). It is a today of seized opportunity, achievement
and excellence. The aims of the 2000 curriculum read as follows. ‘Aim 1: The school
curriculum should aim to provide opportunities for all pupils to learn and to achieve. Aim
2: The school curriculum should aim to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural
development and prepare all pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences
of life’ (White 2004, pp. 3–4). The first aim of the 1988 curriculum, that is, ‘to promote the
spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of
society’ (White 2004, p. 2) remains intact in the 2000 curriculum, except for the last words:
‘of society’. The meritocratic utopianism of egalitarian formalism and the utilitarian
utopianism of earthly paradise (rendered as a dystopia in Oleanna) are expected to prepare

23
Knowledge, understanding and skills will equip students ‘for their future lives as workers and citizens’
(ibid, p. 3).
24
For a very apposite summary of Žižek’s critique of the politically inoperative coupling of the battle
against discrimination and political correctness see Brockelman (2003, p. 194).

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100 M. Papastephanou

the individual for what the future has in store, a future that is understood as a sequence of
disconnected moments of individual concernful dealings. And so happiness becomes ‘a
private affair; and a matter for here and now. The happiness of others is no more––or
better be no more––a condition of one’s own felicity. Each moment of happiness is, after
all, lived through in a company that may still be around, but more likely will not be, when
the next moment of happiness arrives’ (Bauman 2003, p. 23). The insistence of the 2000
curricular aims, practically, on pupils’ ‘getting on in the world’, reflects a privatization of
hope, as imagination and happiness are ‘instructed to steer clear of societal harbours and on
no account cast there their anchors’ (Bauman 2003, p. 21).

Utopia and Ethics: Conclusion

Can a fragmentary and discontinuous hope suffuse educational practice with a new impulse
and guiding thread? Can we foster a public docta spes, an educated hope, through cognitive
transformation so that social agents ‘are brought to see the pernicious effects of social
mechanisms and institutions’ (Cooke 2004, p. 418) and aspire to change them? I believe
that what is presupposed is not yet another utopian educational construction to contrast
with Oleanna, but, rather, an illustration of the direction of the societal change that con-
ditions educational change. Thus, utopian thinking becomes ‘the ability to conjure up vivid
ethical pictures of a ‘‘good society’’ that would be possible only if certain hostile social
conditions were transformed’ (emphasis mine) (Cooke 2004, p. 419).
The pictorial aspect that is necessary for a vivid ethical approximation of the good
society can be enhanced by contrasting an ethical utopian construction with a dystopian
depiction of reality. A form of perfection negates a specific form of imperfection or, in Sir
Francis Bacon’s words, ‘in order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be
present’. Hermann Hesse’s short story ‘Strange News from Another Star’ is a case in point.
In it, a dystopia and a utopia are contrasted as two distinct and parallel worlds. Written in
1919, this is a story about a utopian province of a star that suffers great loss in human life
because of an earthquake. The custom demands that the dead be decorated with flowers,
but most gardens were also destroyed. The people of the utopia send an adolescent to the
King of the star to ask for help. On the way to the King, the messenger is accidentally
diverted to another star, where he encounters destruction, misery and the amassed bodies of
killed soldiers and civilians. Shocked by a situation that he only knew from stories, he
meets the King of this dystopia and talks about the meaninglessness of war and antago-
nism. He then leaves, accomplishes his mission and returns home, where, after a while, the
visit to the dystopia seems more like a nightmare rather than a fact.
When we approach this story heuristically and not didactically, bypassing the dated
romanticist undertones of organicism, moralism, wholeness and unity, we find elements
that illustrate the content of utopia as a specific conception of the good. It has been noted in
a previous section that the latter requires some indeterminacy in order to give human
finitude its due but also some determinacy in order to motivate critique and action. The
utopia that Hesse depicts is indeterminate in many respects. Although it is a post-
Enlightenment short story, it does not draw on the resources of the times, namely, science,
technology and a possible global order. Unlike other utopian fantasies, it is not about a land
of plenty. Unlike Hesse’s futuristic utopian Bildungsroman, The Glass Bead Game, that is
marked by the modernist dream of a universal language (Peters and Humes 2003, p. 429),
this short story is not about an educational utopia. It concentrates exclusively on ethics and
not on sophistication or intellectual, aesthetic and technological perfection. The merits of

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Dystopian Reality, Utopian Thought and Educational Practice 101

its utopia are ethical and the suffering in its dystopia is not subtle, e.g. the unpredicted
ramification of an inhuman perfection.25 On the contrary, it is obvious and ordinary: the
usual trials of humanity such as war, antagonism and destruction. There is no predictive or
planning emphasis, no teleological linearity but rather a comparative relational sense of
historical improvement: the utopian space is a symbol of a higher level humanity, one that
has overcome the past in which other spaces (otherwise co-temporal) live. In this way,
dystopian space is not just surpassed, a stirring memory of humanity’s unhappy childhood,
but it is a prolonged past, a reenacted past, an uncanny entrapment in repetition. Remi-
niscent of Arcadia, Hesse’s utopia is not about eternal life but about a special way of
viewing mortality and the lived experience of the distinction between existential and
ethical evil, misfortune and cruelty. Reminiscent of Adorno’s statement in Minima Moralia
that ‘there is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any
more’ (cf Levitas 2004b, p. 613), Hesse’s story is premised on a salient ethic of mutual
help, disinterestedness and avoidance of harm. Thus, the utopia that inspires it is not an
abstract metaphysical idea of all-round human perfection up to the transcendence of death,
but rather ‘the inner-worldly product of the realization that human beings can do something
to relieve misery on this earth’ (Turner 2003, p. 32).
The ethical content of utopia and the precondition of all attempts at educational change,
the minimal determinacy required for judging various utopian aspirations, can be found in
the chasm that separates the utopian and the dystopian citizen and becomes evident from
their dialogue. In addressing the ruling elite of dystopia, the messenger states: ‘a dream of
terror, so your life seems to me, and I do not know whether you are ruled by gods or
demons’ (Hesse 1976, p. 58). To the King of the dystopia who took his lived reality for
granted as unchangeable and ‘natural’, the child (messenger and symbol of utopia) seemed
a paradox: in many ways this stranger ‘seemed a cultivated, mature, and incredibly
enlightened spirit, but in others like a small child whom one must spare and not take quite
seriously’ (Hesse 1976, p. 58).
Finally, we notice in this story, just as in some other literary works, that utopia is
symbolized by the child, this young messenger who encountered the dystopia. Being a site
of promise, the plasticity of childhood places utopia at the heart of education. If society
ever realizes that the ultimate secret of seduction is a vision that transcends the mundane,
the enterprise of education to cultivate an ‘uncompromising marvellous otherness’
(Geoghegan 2003, p. 156) will be set on course. For, what is missing in much educational
theory and practice is ‘ecstasy’ (Turner 2003, p. 41) and a glimpse of life as it might be. If
in a depiction of a dystopian reality, in Oleanna, students desire most to ‘get on in the
world’, then, the proper space of utopia is the education of desire. ‘This is not the same as
‘‘a moral education’’ towards a given end: it is rather, to open a way to aspiration, to ‘‘teach
desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way’’‘
(Thompson, in Levitas 2003, p. 7).

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