Better Worlds: Education, Art, and Utopia provides a fresh examination of utopia and education. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on literature and the visual arts as well as traditional non-fiction sources, the authors explore utopia not as a model of social perfection but as the active, imaginative building of better worlds. Utopian questions, they argue, lie at the heart of education, and addressing such questions demands attention not just to matters of theoretical principle but to the particulars of everyday life and experience. Taking utopia seriously in educational thought also involves a consideration of that which is dystopian. Utopia, this book suggests, is not something that is fixed, final, or ever fully realized; instead, it must be constantly recreated, and education, as an ongoing process of reflection, action, and transformation, has a central role to play in this process.

"Roberts and Freeman-Moir (both, Univ. of Canterbury, New Zealand) resist the typical notion of utopia as a perfect world. Their central claim is that utopia is a space in which to imagine better worlds. In chapter 1, the authors provide the reader with a substantial foundation from which to understand their central claim and provide examples within education and educational policy to further understand why utopia is important. Subsequent chapters provide examples in art, literature, and, more broadly, aesthetics in order to demonstrate how the notion of utopia can be understood as an important quest for the possible as opposed to the perfect when considering education and policy. A strength of the book is the wide range of examples used to develop the ideas presented. For instance, the authors use works of fiction (e.g., books by Hermann Hesse and Fyodor Dostoevsky), as well as authors often considered more "academic" (e.g., Iris Murdoch and Paulo Freire) to explain the range of possibilities in their claims about utopia. These entry points and various examples are helpful to the reader less familiar with the ideas and provide multiple opportunities to imagine how utopia could lead to the construction of better worlds. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, research faculty." - CHOICE

"[The book] cover[s] interesting and thought-provoking topics of potential use for those working in the theological school classroom. . . .Roberts and Freeman-Moir take the reader through a sweeping survey of topics." - Reflective Teaching