New populism and education: from target to response
FORUM - Print ISSN 1474-7685 - Online ISSN 2047-7171
Volume 68 Number 1 (2026)
New populism and education: from target to response
Charlotte Haines Lyon pages 10‑19
DOI: 10.3898/forum.2026.68.1.02
Abstract
New populism, characterised by cultural grievance, conspiratorial thinking and hostility to expertise, poses a distinct threat to education. This article examines how education has become a target of populist delegitimisation, with educators framed as woke elites ‘poisoning’ children. However, it also argues that education offers a crucial site of response. Drawing on Zembylas, the article contends that critical thinking alone is insufficient to counter populism’s affective appeal. Instead, education must develop students’ capacity to examine their own emotional responses to political rhetoric. Through ‘pedagogies of discomfort’ and the cultivation of love as political practice, education can resist populism’s inward-looking binaries and nurture the relational capacities that democratic life requires.
To cite this article
Charlotte Haines Lyon (2026) New populism and education: from target to response, FORUM, 68(1), 10-19 . https://doi.org/10.3898/forum.2026.68.1.02