This paper engages with the question of whether education itself goes undervalued in Alain Bergala's The Cinema Hypothesis . Bergala identifies schools as being key in providing a space in which all young people should be able to access a cinema education, but in doing so situates the school simply as a means to the end of cinephilia. While this approach does much to nurture film appreciation via educational institutions, this paper argues there is insufficient justification for why schools should engage with film education to this end in a way that distinguishes it from other forms of art provision within current curricula. An alternative approach sees the school not just as a place for teaching film, but as a place in which perceptions of teaching, learning and schooling could also be transformed by the experience of film-viewing and criticism. In re-examining the four parts that Bergala prescribes for the role of schools in fostering programmes of film education, the paper questions whether his approach promotes film-as-art at the expense of school-as-education, and suggests that the two might have more to offer one another in classroom practice than their seeming opposition implies.

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What do we mean by the word “education”? How do others know what we mean when the term is under constant revision? Do we even need definitive answers in order to speak meaningfully of it? This paper attempts to explore the potential for education’s meaningfulness via attention to its ordinary usages. In order to justify the need to be attentive to the specific instance of use, I will explore the closing down of conceptual meaning represented by acts of definition. In taking a closer look at what definitions of education try to do when they are articulated, I will follow a line of argument from Cora Diamond that the definition and explanation of a term can constitute a deflection from the difficult “reality” of educational discourse, a reality that poses its own problems in turn, but also should not be ignored. Attending to “education” as a word that appears with particular meanings in particular instances reveals the richness of the various forms it can assume. I describe this as a conceptual aesthetics of education.

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