Sharing with critical pedagogy the belief that there is no necessity in the given order of things, and that we can always begin anew with the world, the post-critical educational philosophy articulated here seeks to overcome the internal contradictions of this paradigm by positing an affirmative, educational approach to educational philosophy. This understands education not as political action, as in critical pedagogy, working in the name of emancipation, but rather, following Rancière, assumes an equality of intelligences as a starting point from which the world can be set free for the new generation. This entails a pedagogy founded on an attitude of unconditional love both of the world and of the new generation, in the Arendtian sense. In this article we formulate a set of principles that articulate what such an affirmative attitude consists of: striving for pedagogical hermeneutics (rather than defending a hermeneutical pedagogy); adhering to a principled normativity (rather than to a procedural one); taking education to be for education's sake (rather than for extrinsic goals such as global citizenship); and starting from a passionate devotion to what is good in the 'here and now' (rather than by a hatred of the world in expectation of a utopia that is never to come).

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

In this article we develop the idea that there exists a unique educational love and that it moreover can be identified as essential to education. First, developing Arendt's claim that education is about the existing generation introducing newcomers to the world, we argue that the object‐side of educational love is not the student, but first and foremost the thing that is studied in the classroom. Educational love is love for the world, not for a person. It expresses itself in the act of affirming that a particular thing is interesting: a part of the world that is worth the effort of being studied together with the new generation. Second, we follow Badiou's account of love as the labour of fidelity to the event, in order to render teaching in terms of staying faithful to one's falling in love with a particular subject matter. Teaching is therefore a continuous attempt at making this event of falling in love present in the classroom. Thus, love for the thing materialises itself in an effort to make the thing endure and to show to the next generation that it is worth of care and attention. Finally, indicating the erotic and agapeic dimension of educational love we turn to Scheler and his position on love and hate as two distinct ways of relating with the world, which respectively come down to an opening and a narrowing‐down mode of world‐disclosure.