Introduction

This volume seeks to address in new ways educators’ and decision-makers’ concerns about extremism and extremist sympathies among a significant number of relatively well-educated young people in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The contributors hail from a wide array of academic backgrounds: religious and moral education, anthropology, development studies, sociology, political science and philosophy, as well as practitioners in education, religion and the third sector. In their different ways, the contributors seek to advocate a renewed emphasis on liberal education for our times, to foster students’ powers of questioning, criticality and imagining egalitarian futures as the way forward in contesting all forms of extremisms in education and in the wider society.