This paper revisits the scope of Catherine Malabou’s thinking as a development of the ontological turn in continental philosophy. It puts this excursion of thinking alongside an account of education in modernity as the apotheosis of biopower. It aligns biopower, as manifest in education, as form of ‘technological enframing’. In this it challenges the dominant assumption that education is somehow, ultimately, independently of its manifest form, a force for good. Foregoing the idealist addiction to education as redemption, then, it sees (...) Malabou’s contribution as significant in terms of a fundamental, ontological rethinking of education and the social politics of our time. It is argued that Malabou’s contribution offers a significant contribution to rethinking education as biopower and clearing away the dominant, redemptive myths of modern and contemporary ontotheology. This is a position never entertained in the field of philosophy of education. (shrink)

Beginning with a reconsideration of what the school is and has been, this paper explores the idea of the school to come. Emphasizing the governmental role of education in modernity, I offer a line of thinking that calls into question the assumption of both the school and education as possible conduits for either democracy or social justice. Drawing on Derrida’s spectral ontology I argue that any automatic correlation of education with democracy is misguided: especially within redemptive discourses that seek to (...) liberate education from its present enclosure. This rereading of the field of education in the light of an account of the fundamental ontology of its key institution problematizes all rhetorics of education as social salvation. Education, it proposes, cannot be conceived as the ideal soul of a corrupted or as yet defective body, the school. Education—having taken on the character of an ontotheological principle—has become a governmental instrument as much as its specific institutions. This ontological condition can be understood within various accounts of the nature of contemporaneity. This paper considers the monstrous proposal that education be abandoned as the grounds for social, ethical and cultural redemption. The good news is that this abandonment opens the possibility for thinking beyond education, a beyond that is also beyond the strictures of instrumental rationality. (shrink)

In recent years, aggressive and conservative nationalistic forces have been growing stronger worldwide (Rydgren 2018). Increased random terrorist attacks are now occurring in sites previously thoug...

In 2001, China’s moral education curriculum reform called for a returning to life as a radical shift from its previous empty sermonic pedagogy, hoping to cultivate its twenty-first century children into ethical humans. Accordingly, a notion of ‘human ecology’ appeared in the post-2001 textbook design, which became ‘co-being with’ in the latest 2016 textbook redesign. This paper picks up this co-being with as a philosophical, ethical, and ecological notion and scrutinizes its relevance to the discursive construction of China’s moral child (...) in two steps. First, it draws upon Heidegger’s thinking and the Chinese Daoist ecological understanding to explicate the philosophical significance of this ‘co-being with’ for moral education. Second, it unpacks the discursive embodiments of this ethical–ecological co-being with in connection with the construction of moral subjects in the post-2001 and 2016 textbooks. Through rigorous textual analysis, this paper finds that the post-2001 textbook discourses embody an instrumental trope and a subject vs object binary style of reasoning, which possibly makes egoistic rather than ethical children. The 2016 textbook discourses, especially those on the theme of co-being with, however, constrain the above instrumentality and envision cultivating ethical children. This paper argues this theorized co-being with provides some implications for moral education in China and the world, meanwhile raising some pedagogical challenges as well. (shrink)

This paper, rather than providing a comprehensive discussion around Paulo Freire’s ideas, focuses on one aspect of his body of work: colonialism. The emphasis is on the ‘oppressor consciousness’ and cultural invasion (seen in its broadest context to include institutional colonialism with special reference to the traditional, modernizing and prophetic church. It also deals with the complex issue of language in postcolonial contexts, with special reference to education in Guinea Bissau and its implications for other colonial contexts.

The main objective of this article is to analyze the cognitive level of the activities in History textbooks in Spain, England, and Portugal in the transition stage from Primary to Secondary Education (11–13 years), according to the country of origin, typology, and the concepts and disciplinary contents included. The design of this research is quantitative, descriptive, and cross-sectional. The non-probabilistic sample consists of 6,561 activities contained in 27 school textbooks from Spain, England, and Portugal. Descriptive and contrast analyses have been (...) carried out using parametric tests. The results indicate that textbooks from Spain and Portugal mainly include activities situated between a basic and intermediate cognitive level while in England, the cognitive level of activities is medium or high. The ANOVA and TukeyBtests show significant differences between the cognitive level required in the activities and the typology of exercises, the concepts, and historical contents worked on. The activities with higher cognitive level correspond to those of creation and essays, the exercises that work on empathy and historical relevance, and that contain activities of social and economic history. In contrast, the activities with the lowest cognitive level are short questions and objective tests, those that work on first-order concepts (data and concrete facts), and those on the History of Art. The conclusion is that there is a need for a balanced presence of first-order content and historical thinking skills, the application in the classroom of a more active student-centered methodology, and the teachers’ conception of history teaching that prioritizes historical skills. (shrink)

Within the framework of an interdisciplinary project on epistemic strategies in text and talk, this article examines such strategies in a secondary school textbook on social science. After a summary of current insights into the theory of knowledge in philosophy, psychology and linguistics, it is shown how discourse presupposes and expresses knowledge, with special emphasis on discourse processing and learning from text and its applications in education. The specific aim of this article is to study in some detail how exactly (...) ‘new’ knowledge is formulated in pedagogical discourse, and how ‘old’ knowledge is presupposed in a lesson on migration. We thus are able to describe the categories of, and the functional relations between, old and new knowledge, as discursive manifestations of underlying cognitive strategies of teaching and learning. It was also observed that in textbooks what is purported to be presented as knowledge often has an ideological basis. (shrink)

This inclusive cross-cultural study rethinks the nexus between engineering education and context. In so doing the book offers a reflection on contextual boundaries with an overall boundary crossing ambition and juxtaposes important cases of critical participation within engineering education with sophisticated scholarly reflection on both opportunities and discontents. -/- Whether and in what way engineering education is or ought to be contextualized or de-contextualized is an object of heated debate among engineering educators. The uniqueness of this study is that this (...) debate is given comprehensive coverage – presenting both instrumentally inclined as well as radical positions on transforming engineering education. -/- In contextualizing engineering education, this book offers diverse commentary from a range of disciplinary, meta- and interdisciplinary perspectives on how cultural, professional, institutional and educational systems contexts shape histories, structural dynamics, ideologies and challenges as well as new pathways in engineering education. Topics addressed include examining engineering education in countries ranging from India to America, to racial and gender equity in engineering education and incorporating social awareness into the area. -/- Using context as “bridge” this book confronts engineering education head on. Contending engineering ideologies and corresponding views on context are juxtaposed with contending discourses of reform. The uniqueness of the book is that it brings together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences and engineering from Europe – both East and West – with the United States, China, Brazil, India and Australia. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the importance of wonder in human flourishing and is orientated towards the dynamics between the two, but with an emphasis on how the former is important for illuminating the latter. It begins with a preliminary sketch of both wonder and human flourishing and subsequently moves on to highlight three aspects of human flourishing: 1) ‘Individuality’, 2) ‘Relations’ and 3) ‘The political’, and why these play to wonderment.

On November 4, 2008 California voters passed Proposition 8, and accordingly same-sex marriage was banned under the state constitution. Proposition 8 is now being considered by the Supreme Court. The proposition has sparked national debate about the nature of the relationship between the state and citizens’ sexuality and corresponding rights; calling into question the practice of allocating rights and privileges on the basis of sexuality and family form. Proponents of the proposition, who can be classified as predominantly socially conservative, want (...) to maintain the status and privileges of marriage for heterosexuals; arguing that allowing same-sex marriage threatens the legitimacy, sanctity and strength of traditional heterosexual marriage . This article examines the extent to which three Californian pro-same-sex marriage organizations (Equality California, Join the Impact, and the Courage Campaign) have challenged and/or appropriated social conservative and neoliberal discourses in their effort to gain access to the rights and privileges that are currently administered through marriage. (shrink)

Literary texts activate ones’ metaphorical sensibilities to the myriad possibilities for reflecting on our own lives while inviting us to imagine the complex experiences of others. Readers’ ability...

This paper explores the connections between School Effectiveness as a research paradigm and developments in policy and practice. With a particular focus on the English school system, ‘effectiveness’ is examined as a discourse which underpins the accountability regime, and in terms of its influence on the related field of School Improvement. Anti-democratic tendencies in areas such as school leadership, teacher professionalism, curriculum and pedagogy are related to a failure, at the heart of the ‘effectiveness’ concept, to give critical consideration to (...) social and educational aims. (shrink)

In the educational psychology literature, self-regulated learning is associated with empowerment, agency, and democratic participation. Therefore, researchers are dedicated to developing and improving self-regulated learning pedagogy in order to make it widespread. However, drawing from the educational philosophy of Paulo Freire, teaching students to regulate their learning can be tied to a curriculum of obedience, subordination, and oppression. Using Freire’s discussion of concepts such as adaptation, prescription, and dependence, I suggest that self-regulated learning: targets individual psychological changes that render individuals (...) adaptable to existing social orders; is guided by a logic to prescribe a certain kind of self; and produces a relationship of dependence as learners depend on teachers for learning the necessary scripts to regulate their learning. This analysis points to ethical complexities related to teaching students to academically self-regulate. (shrink)

This thesis is a critical examination of the history of philosophies governing public education in the United States. The first half, chapters one through six, outlines American conceptions of the role of the school in relation to the state and to democracy. The second half is an account of critical progressive philosophies that have challenged the American status-quo since the independence. The main argument that I propose here is that the creation of an education system in America has followed the (...) philosophies of federalism and private democracy. These philosophies are economically centered and define the citizen in economic terms. Progressive educators have long questioned this definition and seek to redefine citizenship to describe participatory democracy, and communication based on experience and an ethic of care. (shrink)