1 What Children Ask from Us: Education and Worldlessness in the Anthropocene Ingerid S. Straume Introduction Education is traditionally seen as the process whereby children – as newcomers to the world – are guided by adults into the community of shared meaning, which Hannah Arendt has described as a common world. According to Arendt (2006a), being an educator means to accept a position of authority whose hallmark is responsibility for the world such as it is. For only responsible adults can assist children into a position of renewing the world when their time comes. Contemporary social philosophers take a similar approach to educational authority, notably Foros and Vetlesen (2015) and Vetlesen and Willig (2018), but this time the question of what it means to be responsible for the world is immensely expanded. Where Arendt during the 1950s and 1960s was concerned with the continuation and renewal of humanity and saw the need to protect the public realm where politics and individual freedom reigns, Vetlesen and his co-authors are urging educators to consider the greatest challenges of our time, and quite possibly, of all times: climate change and ecological crises. Accordingly, the task of renewing our common world – the purpose of educational authority for Arendt (2006a) – is now set in a time where human beings through their activities are destroying the ecological life conditions for themselves and for many other species. What this means is well captured by the scientific framework called “a safe operating space for humanity” (Rockström et al. 2009), which defines nine geological and environmental boundaries for the levels of emissions, depletion, diversity etc. that must not be overstepped in order to preserve an inhabitable biosphere on the planet. At the moment of writing, two of these boundaries are overstepped and two more are in the process of being so. And while our own species, being extremely adaptable, may survive in some form or other, many other