International schools and the world: Divergent realities, uncomfortable truths, and the anthropocene

The autonomous and franchised international schools' context tends towards starry eyed conscience marketing to supply a very real bottom line. Despite this, these schools live or die by authenticity and quality. Educators and their students are often deeply invested in the rising calamity of our time and demand real, cogent, and affective practice and policy from their schools. Any senior leader in this sector can easily struggle to locate their school in a 21st century reality of melting icecaps, species extinction, hyperbolic injustice and inequity, particularly balancing these facts with the consumer narratives of their customers. Educational leaders then are often faced with little more than the ubiquitous reproduction of privilege for a banal cosmopolitan class of individualist consumers, where school values act to sanctify personal inequity and school membership confers the absolution of the confessional. This work is notable for its critical engagement with a phenomenon of lapsed moral and epistemological rigour at a time when crises threaten humanity's ongoing existence.