Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology (Education)

No study to date has drawn extensively on the collected works – including talks to teachers and his doctoral thesis in philosophy at Oxford – or upon his biography, the collected letters, and the vast secondary literature, all of which are cited extensively in this comprehensive and original study of the teachings of George Grant.

Intended to serve both as a reference book for students of Grant as well as a textbook for students of education, the book emphasizes Grant’s timeliness and prescience in identifying and critiquing educational issues fifty years ago – academic vocationalism, educational technology, privatization of schooling, the ascendency of research over teaching – that remain relevant today.

Grant’s prescience is also demonstrated by his concerns over the fate of what he termed particularity within Canada and globally, worried that economic globalization would erase distinctive national histories and cultures. Replacing these would be a world state, universal and homogeneous, representing the worst tyranny humanity has known. Current issues of right-wing populism – notably in the UK and the US – Grant foresaw as reactions against these historical tendencies.