After the revolution: education and the power of disappointment

Abstract This article attends to the negative emotion of disappointment, which is commonly read as the opposite of hope, a positive attitude that has received much recent attention in philosophy of education. It asks whether, and if so how, disappointment might in fact serve as an important, even invaluable, attitude that merits cultivation in civic and moral education. This inquiry turns to three sets of sources: American Transcendental pastor Theodore Parker's famous statement that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice and that line's uptake by later political visionaries; analytic philosophy's limited but significant inquiries into disappointment as distinct from despair and related to hope; and Mary Shelley's novels Frankenstein and The Last Man, which are philosophical as well as literary explorations of the different meanings of disappointment, hope, and despair. Disappointment, the article concludes, is an appropriate and educational response to failed hopes, an emotion that merits appreciation and cultivation in civic and moral education.