Education and the Love for the World: articulating a post-critical educational philosoph

Abstract

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).

Dewey in Transition: Towards a Pragmatist Ethics of Recognition in Schools

“…Characterising pragmatism as a 'reconstructionist' endeavour, as a matter of creative renewal, that operates in different areas of human activity relates with a particular idea of hope. This has recently been cooperatively explored (Oliverio, 2019;Schwimmer, 2019;Thoilliez, 2019c;Wortmann, 2019), in the context of the current discussion on post-critical pedagogy (Hodgson et al, 2017(Hodgson et al, , 2018. The potential of the pragmatist tradition to address current educational issues will be addressed in the forthcoming Educational Theory Summer Institute 2020 ' we must understand their functional changing roles in human experience, inquiry and discourse.…”

Redefining education and politics: On the paradoxical relation between two separate spheres

“…As already indicated, the line of criticism just pursued cannot be the last word on this matter, as we would in such a case play the game of critique ourselves. Hence, what we propose is to take a different approach (see Hodgson et al., 2017), more specifically to disentangle, in the remaining part of this contribution, the political and the educational. Following an idea developed by Arendt (1961b) in the 1950s, it could be argued that education and politics are two separate spheres, each with their own logic, and that it might be very dangerous when the logic of politics comes to decide what should happen within the sphere of education.…”

Is education exhausted?

“…(Carusi, 2017)Despair seems to be the only offspring of the exhausted life and in this frame of reference, first of all, I want to explore this issue. In other words, I suggest that when thinking of despair and education, we should go beyond the perspective in which despair is perceived as a component of teachers’ work (Liston, 2000), a reaction of educators to a certain political situation (Ali-Khan and White, 2019) or an educative element of the human condition (Jaarsma et al., 2015; Roberts, 2016). Consequently, our thinking of despair cannot be limited to perceiving it as an experience of ‘persistent discomfort’ (Roberts, 2016: 19) or a feeling of ‘perpetual unease’ (Roberts, 2016: 19), which evoke our capacity for reflective, critical thinking and openness to others.…”