Introduction

The thought behind this issue of Radical Teacher was vague and simple. We editors* and most of our contributors do political battle and daily work as if in the "long march through institutions" (Gramsci), on the way to a better world—or maybe not, but we keep slogging. Even back in 1975, not many of RT's founders hung on to 1960s dreams of revolution, or even of a united movement towards it. But we retained the same goals, the same allies, the same enemies: "a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal," our cover says. Suppose, on the other hand—and the other hand was shaking its fist at us editors pretty insistently—suppose the long march reaches some really different terrain. Capitalism could run out of oil or water. The polar ice caps could melt, sinking the Maldives and Bangladesh like Atlantis. The United States could squander what is left of its wealth in endless wars. Casino capitalism's house of derivatives could come crashing down. What would the long march be like if it fell into a monstrous pothole, we asked? Since we do not know the answer, why not do an issue of RT on teaching in bad times, and reflect on what radical teaching might and should be if there are historical eruptions and discontinuities in our near future. That was the vague but simple thought.

Well, surprise. Casino capitalism did crash, while we were in an early stage of planning; and naturally, the crash of 2008 influenced our development of this issue. Here are the questions we posed in our call:

• +. how are hard economic times affecting students' economic choices?

• +. how are they affecting the educational system as a whole?

• +. how can progressives in K-12 and higher education promote radical understandings of the depression?

• +. can we teach better and more directly about capitalism as a system?

• +. can we better dismantle the ideologies of patriotism, masculinity, markets, and individual choice that are so stupefying now?

• +. does the crisis call for new courses, curricula, or pedagogies?

• +. does it call for new kinds of activism in and around education, given the crisis of funding that faces us?

At the end of the call, we added, "And if you would rather discuss teaching about the other crises—war, oil, climate, and so on—please feel free." But our economically based questions were given added emphasis by the harsh realities of 2008-09, and most of the proposals and manuscripts that came to us were about those realities. And just part of one article in the issue is about another kind of disaster, hurricane Katrina, which Nicole Pagan treats as itself made by our economic system. My aim in this introduction, therefore, is to repackage some other looming crises with economic collapse, in an attempt to flesh out the "what if?" question that prompted us to do a bad times issue.

So: what if apocalypse comes at us in the guise of economic depression, to be sure, but also of peak oil, or peak water, or rapid and freakish climate change, or ecological crisis, global economic depression, further immiseration of poor people and poor regions, failure of the imperial wars to which our new administration is as committed as was the old, failure of states and social systems, resistance movements far larger than Al Qaeda, or the use of a few nuclear bombs. Some of these scenarios seem to me unlikely, some all but certain. My aim is not to argue for any of them: although I confess a personal attraction to doomsday scenarios, I can also appreciate the silliness latent in a list such as this.

For instance, you go off to your 9:00 class one Wednesday having heard on National Public Radio (NPR) that South Florida is under water; that the Cuban government is rounding up "yacht people" and sending them back to Miami; that southern Arizona is being evacuated because of no water; that gas cost on average $20.00 a gallon at the pump last week; that the official unemployment rate hit 25%; and that the Taliban have established martial law throughout Pakistan. Will you arrange the...