This paper points out the way in which ‘educational’ and ‘communicative action’ are to be related. It is shown that earlier attempts to put Habermas’ ideas to use have led to a dead end because they do not realize clearly that the new basic notion introduced by Habermas, namely ‘communicative action’, is the expression of a ‘communicative turn’. It is argued that Habermas' concept expresses a radical new attempt to grasp the intersubjective character of social action. Next implications of this (...) communicative turn for the concept of education as a social praxis are indicated. Education can be conceived of as a praxis responding to the vulnerability of a communicative self. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An examination of contemporary publications in the philosophy of education reveals that the authority of the teacher is being eroded. As teachers derive their authority from the democratic state and its compulsory education laws, the undermining of their authority indicates the undermining of the authority of the democratic state and its laws. A comparison between Plato and Dewey from this point of view reveals that this state of affairs is the upshot of the collision between the principle of authority (...) and the principle of liberty, and that this collision constitutes the basic problem of democracy as well as of education for democracy. The challenge to contemporary education is consequently that of exploring ways leading to the rehabilitation of the authority of the teacher. (shrink)

… power is never uni dimensional; it is exercised not only as a mode of domination, but also as an act of resistance or even as an expression of a creative mode of cultural and social production outside the immediate force of domination.The point is important in that the behavior expressed by subordinate groups cannot be reduced to a study of domination or resistance.Clearly, in the behavior of subordinate groups there are moments of cultural and creative expression that are informed (...) by a different logic, whether it be existential, religious, or otherwise.Our faith is ultimately in individuals and their potentialities.In saying this, I do not mean what is sometimes called individualism as opposed to association.I mean rather an individuality that operates in and through voluntary associations.If our outward scene is one of externally imposed organization, behind and beneath there is working the force of liberated individualities, experimenting in their own ways to find and realize their own ends.The testimony of history is that in the end such a force, however scattered and inchoate, ultimately prevails over all set institutionalized forms, however firmly established the latter may be. (shrink)

Although the members’ categories associated with institutional settings may seem obvious, more can be said about the actions that make them noticeable and persistent across contexts. This study investigates how epistemic stance displays make the standardized relational pair ‘teacher–student’ relevant during writing conferences in a US university. Analysis of the interaction between teachers and their students shows that teachers tended to display more knowledgeable stances concerning writing and institutional practices, whereas students displayed knowledgeable stances with respect to their own papers, (...) indexing the immediate relevance of the ‘teacher–student’ relational pair and a tension between authority and autonomy. Further analysis reveals that participants also mentioned past and future writing activities, thus indexing the persistence of the ‘teacher–student’ pair as well as the emergence of the category ‘autonomous writer’. Additionally, participants’ orientation to the more general ‘writer–reader’ pair also functioned to index the persistent and emergent aspects of these categories. (shrink)