La formación docente es indispensable para responder a los requerimientos de la compleja sociedad actual. De su conocimiento, iniciativa, praxis y creatividad depende el éxito o el fracaso del sujeto que aprende. Al modificar el rol del docente se transforma la actitud de los estudiantes. ¿Cómo entender la formación filosófica transdisciplinar? Este texto responde a este y otros cuestionamientos: ¿cuáles son los planteamientos pedagógicos afines a la era digital? ¿en qué medida las TIC se encuentran al servicio de una filosofía (...) educativa transdisciplinar?, ¿cómo se explica ese enfoque en la formación del docente?, ¿cuál es la función de la formación en la innovación educativa?, ¿cómo formar para la ciudadanía mundial?, ¿cuáles son las contribuciones de las nuevas ciencias para la formación educativa? El crecimiento exponencial de la ciencia y de la tecnología nos obliga a pensar en procesos formativos innovadores. En tal sentido, resulta imprescindible el estudio de estas problemáticas. (shrink)

There is broad agreement that child labor is wrong and should be eliminated. This chapter examines the three main moral objections to child labor and considers their limitations: harm-based objections, objections from failing to benefit children, and objections from exploitation. Harm-based objections struggle with baselines for comparison and difficulties with Non-Identity problems. Even if child labor is not harmful, it may be wrong because it prevents children from enjoying other benefits, such as schooling. However, is schooling necessarily more beneficial for (...) children than work? Some kinds of child labor may not be harmful, and may benefit children, but they may still be wrong because they are exploitative. I consider some ways to address exploitative child labor, inspired by campaigns led by child workers. The chapter ends with a surprising conclusion that challenges the broad consensus with which we began: we may have duties to promote child labor. (shrink)

This article delves into ecopedagogy, grounded in the work of the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire on popular education and critical pedagogies, to teach students to critically deconstruct the subjectivity and transformability of our world (all humans, human populations) with the rest of Earth (i.e., rest of Nature). As Friere emphasized humans’ unique characteristic of ‘unfinishedness’ with abilities of self-reflexivity through our histories and goal-setting from our dreams, (environmental) pedagogues must teach toward deepened and widened understandings for praxis grounded in socio-environmental (...) justice and planetary sustainability, including disrupting anthropocentricism. This ‘unfinishedness’ has made humans agents of world-Earth unsustainably and dominance in constructing the Anthropocene, but also allows for possibilities of transformation to counter them. I argue that ecopedagogy is essential in disrupting the following falsely taught ideologies that justifies the Anthroposphere: (1) false commonsense that separates environmental and social violence (i.e., socio-environmental violence) and instills anthropocentrism that separates humans from the rest of Nature (i.e., world-Earth distancing); (2) fatalism that extinguishes hope of ending humans’ acts of unsustainable environmental violence; (3) ‘development’ for sustaining hegemony and planetary unsustainability (i.e., Development rather than development); and (4) epistemological dominance that legitimizes the first three ideologies given (e.g., epistemologies of the North). (shrink)

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. -/- Dismantling the use of the term ‘Anthropocene’ as a descriptor for our current ecological and political paradigm, this bold and resolutely original contribution proposes a restorative ethics of mutualism. An emancipatory theory intended (...) to re-invigorate human agency in the face of contemporary ecological challenges, it posits an effective means to combat the environmental destruction engendered by modernity. -/- Using ecology alongside European moral and Māori philosophies to re-conceptualise the ecological remit of politics, this book’s granular approach questions the role played by contemporary political ontologies in the separation of humans and environments, offering an in-depth view of their renewed interrelation under mutualism. -/- Ecocene Politics will be essential to researchers and students in the fields of politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and geography. It will be of further interest to those working in the fields of political ecology, environmental humanities, and Anthropocene studies, as well as to general readers seeking a theoretical approach to the political issues posed by current ecological crises. (shrink)

In the paper, the authors explore the relations between educational technology and educational ideology through the lens of philosophical inquiry. The optics of critical analysis is applied to review the instructional tools, services and systems which compose the complex picture of contemporary educational technology. The authors claim that even when initially established in the ideological domain of educational anarchism most educational technologies when being applied systemically can end up on the more oppressive side of the ideological spectrum close to educational (...) totalitarianism. They focus on the risks of technology that are growing with the social change brought by the lifelong learning paradigm in education. (shrink)

This chapter explores the personal and professional obstacles faced by Humanities and Social Science scholars contemplating pre-publication of their scholarly work in an on-line network. Borrowing a theoretical framework from the radical educational theorist Ivan Illich, it also develops the idea that pre-publication networks offer higher education a bottom-up, decentralized alternative to business-modeled e-learning. If learners would only embrace this more anarchical medium, appreciating writing for pre-publication as a process of open-ended discovery rather than product delivery, then the prospect of (...) deinstitutionalizing e-learning could become an exciting new reality. The chapter’s methodology is a combination of normative-theoretical analysis and small sample (n=2) case study based on the author’s personal and professional experiences. While the generalizability (or external validity) of the conclusions is limited, the author hopes to motivate further inquiry into the connection between on-line pre-publication and e-learning. (shrink)

Anarchism is by far the least broadly understood ideology and the least studied academically. Though highly influential, both historically and in terms of recent social movements, anarchism is regularly dismissed. Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach is a welcome addition to this growing field, which is widely debated but poorly understood. Occupying a distinctive position in the study of anarchist ideology, this volume, authored by a handpicked group of established and rising scholars, investigates how anarchists often seek to sharpen their message and (...) struggle to determine what ideas and actions are central to their identity. Moving beyond defining anarchism as simply an ideology or political theory, this book examines the meanings of its key concepts, which have been divided into three categories: Core, Adjacent, and Peripheral concepts. Each chapter focuses on one important concept, shows how anarchists have understood the concept, and highlights its relationships to other concepts. Although anarchism is often thought of as a political topic, the interdisciplinary nature of Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach makes it of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences, liberal arts, and the humanities. (shrink)

During the second half of the 20th century education has been recognized as a human right in several international conventions, and the UN also holds that “Education shall be free” and that “Elementary education shall be compulsory” (UN, 1948, Article 26). The education-as-a-human right-project could be viewed as a good intention of global inclusion in recognizing that all individuals have a right to education in virtue of being humans, and the idea of education as a human right thus has a (...) tremendous global significance. However, if we look at this more critically, the education-as-a-human right-project, may not only be grounded in altruistic good intensions for the disadvantaged. The term “elementary education”, or sometimes “primary education”, which is used in several human rights-documents seems to suggest that it is some sort of formalized education. It would be useful however to make a distinction between formal and informal education, as well as between teaching, learning, education and schooling, in the discussion of the right to education and specifically in the discussion concerning education as a “human right”. There is obviously a difference between the right to teach, the right to learn, the right to education and the right to schooling. And how are these rights related to compulsory schooling, compulsory education and the supposed duty to teach and duty to learn? A further concern is what makes this a human right rather than for example a juridical right as a citizen. By addressing these questions within a theoretical framework of social ontology and ameliorative conceptual analysis I believe that we can find new ways of dealing with fundamental problems within philosophy of education such as the nature, purpose and aims of education as well as the right to education. (shrink)

Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres' work in the context of late 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres' philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres' unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres' work into a promising philosophy (...) of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres' commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres' philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. Showing how Serres' philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life. (shrink)

The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the (...) live event of the lecture. We adopt a phenomenological approach inspired by Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, which assumes that a gesture like note-taking is always an event of thinking with media in which a certain freedom is expressed. But Flusser’s description of note-taking focusses on the individual note-taker. What about students’ note-taking in a lecture hall as a collective gesture? Nietzsche considered note-taking ‘mechanical,’ as if students were automatons who mindlessly transcribed a verbal flow, while Benjamin considered it an inaesthetic gesture: at best, boring; at worst, ‘painful to watch.’ In contrast, we argue that the educational potentiality of note-taking—or better, note-making—can be grasped only if we account for its mediaticity (as writing that displaces the voice), together with but distinct from its political potentiality as a collective mediality (as a ‘means without end’). Note-taking enables us to see how collective thinking emerges in the lecture, a kind of thinking that belongs neither to the lecturer nor the student, but emerges in the relation of attention established between the lecturer, students and their object of thought. (shrink)

In contrast to China’s efforts to upgrade its system of governance around a stupefying amount of data collection and electronic scoring, countries committed to democracy and human rights did not upgrade their systems. Instead, those countries ended up with surveillance capitalism. It is vital for the survival of those ideas about governance to perform such an upgrade. This paper aims to contribute to that goal. I propose a framework of epistemic actorhood in terms of four roles and characterize digital lifeworlds (...) and what matters about them both in terms of how they fit in with Max Tegmark’s distinctions among stages of life and in terms of how they generate their own episteme, the data episteme, with its immense possibilities of infopower. Epistemic rights that strengthen existing human rights – as part of a fourth generation of rights – are needed to protect epistemic actorhood in those roles. In the long run, we might well need a new kind of right, the right to the exercise of genuinely human intelligence. (shrink)

There is no shortage of pedagogical theories from the tradition formal methods of instruction to the free-play methods of unschooling. A sharp shift in education and instruction models took place with the introduction of critical pedagogy. The focus was no longer on the authority of the teacher and the submissive, passive approach taken by the learner, but rather on the engagement between the two. Still, even when critical pedagogy is utilized in a formal model of education something is missing from (...) the system—experiential learning. Although the unschooling method has been criticized it does provide the benefit of experiential learning. This paper explores the nature of education and evaluates models and theories of pedagogy with the conclusion that a paradoxical approach in which there is a merger between the formal guidelines set by traditional educational models and the experiential learning methods of unschooling approach best prepares learners for the world and to be engaged citizens. Although what, precisely, this paradoxical system would entail is not discussed in this paper, it opens the door for further discussion on the topic and for consideration of the theories which have attempted to do exactly this and improve upon them going forward. (shrink)

This study examines how meritocracy as a collective social imaginary promoting social justice and fairness reproduces class and caste inequalities and fosters ethical violence. We interrogate discourse of merit in the narratives of the professional–managerial class-in-making at an Indian business school. Empirically, we draw on interviews, full-text responses to a qualitative questionnaire, and a student’s poem. We describe how business school students articulate merit as a neoliberal ethic, emphasizing prudential, enterprising attitudes, and responsibility. However, this positive, aspirational façade of merit (...) masks practices of ethical violence, wherein individuals invoke an ethical principle as grounds for moral condemnation and linguistic injuries. These practices of ethical violence desubjectify disadvantaged students and result in silence as a form of inequality. We contribute to organizational research on inequalities by foregrounding ethical violence and desubjectification. We detail the possibilities of discursive agency in contesting and interrupting ethical violence. (shrink)

The paper addresses the issue of the corporeal dimension of the learning process. The problem of the material side of education has emerged within the emancipatory education project, but, as will be argued, this was limited to a critique inspired by Marxist tradition. The perspective on the materiality of education offered by Freire’s and Illich’s works can be significantly enriched by contemporary political thought. The latter perceives materiality in its complexity, that is, as economic conditions but also as the inherent (...) needs stemming from our bodily condition. As will be demonstrated, the contemporary reflection could serve as a critique, one on the limited character of Freire’s and Illich’s emancipatory education, as well as providing ideas which might expand their project. (shrink)

The article sets out a framework for analysing the way discourses construct legitimation for social practices in public communication as well as in everyday interaction. Four key categories of legitimation are distinguished: 1) ‘authorization’, legitimation by reference to the authority of tradition, custom and law, and of persons in whom institutional authority is vested; 2) ‘moral evaluation’, legitimation by reference to discourses of value; 3) rationalization, legitimation by reference to the goals and uses of institutionalized social action, and to the (...) social knowledges that endow them with cognitive validity; and 4) mythopoesis, legitimation conveyed through narratives whose outcomes reward legitimate actions and punish non-legitimate actions. Examples are drawn from texts legitimating or de-legitimating compulsory education, including children’s books, brochures for parents, teacher training texts, and media texts. (shrink)

Ivan Illich was a heavy critic of traditional schooling. His proposals were disregarded, perhaps too quickly, for various reasons. This paper, based on review research, aims to add to a current (re)reading of Illich, seeking to answer the following question: what is the relevance of Illich’s proposal for a successful education in an increasingly digitalised society? The results of this research allow concluding, on the one hand, that Illich’s proposal to replace strict schooling with (self)training networks in a society that (...) is increasingly digitalised and linked by the internet may offer potential benefits, and it is worth, at least, of an in-depth analysis. On the other hand, provocative scholars that allow us to get out of any ideologically and socially delimited system have the merit of helping to provide instruments that enable a better understanding of the present and, consequently, a rationale for the options for the future. Ivan Illich is one of these scholars. (shrink)

Hampir dalam setiap bidang, setidaknya para pembuat kebijakan berusaha semaksimal mungkin mengamankan masyarakat dan negara dari Pandemi COVID-19 yang sedang berlangsung. Kebijakan mengenai aktivitas atau kegiatan yang tidak begitu penting diperintahkan untuk dilakukan secara daring. Salah satunya, dalam bidang pendidikan. Tidak ada lagi proses belajar-mengajar konvensional, duduk di ruang kelas dan mendengarkan dosen/guru menjelaskan. Kini pelajar/mahasiswa/guru/dosen dapat duduk di rumah masing-masing untuk melakukan proses transfer of knowledge. Namun, kenyataan tidak berjalan selancar seperti apa yang diharapkan dalam kebijakan. Proses belajar-mengajar tidak (...) dapat diubah dalam waktu yang singkat. Banyak dilema-dilema dan problema sistematik-struktural di dalam dan di luar pendidikan itu sendiri. Akibatnya, jika sistem pendidikan gagal beradaptasi, ini berpotensi melahirkan suatu generasi terpelajar yang menurun kualitasnya, dan mempengaruhi harapan bonus demografi yang akan terjadi beberapa tahun kedepan. (shrink)

The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the (...) live event of the lecture. We adopt a phenomenological approach inspired by Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, which assumes that a gesture like note-taking is always an event of thinking with media in which a certain freedom is expressed. But Flusser’s description of note-taking focusses on the individual note-taker. What about students’ note-taking in a lecture hall as a collective gesture? Nietzsche considered note-taking ‘mechanical,’ as if students were automatons who mindlessly transcribed a verbal flow, while Benjamin considered it an inaesthetic gesture: at best, boring; at worst, ‘painful to watch.’ In contrast, we argue that the educational potentiality of note-taking—or better, note-making—can be grasped only if we account for its mediaticity (as writing that displaces the voice), together with but distinct from its political potentiality as a collective mediality (as a ‘means without end’). Note-taking enables us to see how collective thinking emerges in the lecture, a kind of thinking that belongs neither to the lecturer nor the student, but emerges in the relation of attention established between the lecturer, students and their object of thought. (shrink)

There is a loud and persistent drum beat of support for schools, for citizenship, for diversity and inclusion, and increasingly for labor market readiness with very little critical attention to the assumptions underlying these agendas, let alone to their many internal contradictions. Accordingly, in this book I examine the philosophical, motivational, and practical challenges of education theory, policy, and practice in the twenty-first century. As I proceed, I do not neglect the historical, comparative international context so essential to better understanding (...) where we are, as well as what is attainable in terms of educational justice. I argue that we must constructively critique some of our most cherished beliefs about education if we are to save the hope of real justice from the rhetoric of imagined justice. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 709-715.

In this essay I question the liberal faith in the efficacy and morality of citizenship education (CE) as it has been traditionally (and is still) practiced in most public state schools. In challenging institutionalized faith in CE, I also challenge liberal understandings of what it means to be a citizen, and how the social and political world of citizens is constituted. I interrogate CE as defended in the liberal tradition, with particular attention to Gutmann’s ‘conscious social reproduction’. I argue that (...) CE in practice does not operate on the bases of non-repression or non-discrimination, and has weak claims for legitimacy. In fact, CE in many forms reproduces social inequalities, and contributes to the expulsion of disadvantaged students from schools and from the ranks of recognized citizens. (shrink)

In the space of their 16-month posting to Poland, the 500 men of Police Battalion 101 genocidally massacred 38,000 Jews by rifle and pistol fire. Although they were acting as members of a formal security force, these men knew that they could avoid participation in killing operations with impunity, and a substantial minority did so. Why, then, did so many participate in the genocidal killing when they knew they did not have to? Landmark historical studies by Christopher Browning and Daniel (...) Goldhagen proffer contrasting explanatory answers to this troublesome question. This article focuses on a criticism that has often been leveled at the internal coherence of Goldhagen’s controversial explanatory theory. Goldhagen’s explanation is that the men freely, willingly, and responsibly participated in the genocidal killing because of their beliefs about Jews—beliefs that they were causally determined to hold. Critics charge that this is incoherent: How could perpetrators have been passive recipients of determinist... (shrink)

This article considers key differences and similarities between Freirean and Taoist ideals. I limit my focus to the Tao Te Ching (attributed to Lao Tzu), paying brief attention to the origins of this classic work of Chinese philosophy before concentrating on several themes of relevance to Freire's work. An essay by James Fraser (1997), who makes three references to the Tao Te Ching in his discussion of love and history in Freire's pedagogy, provides a helpful starting point for investigation. A (...) summary of Fraser's account is followed by a more detailed discussion of the meaning of ‘action’ and ‘non‐action’, the nature and role of knowing and knowledge, and the relations between ignorance, happiness and education for Freire and Lao Tzu. I conclude that while the differences between these two systems of thought are significant and must be acknowledged, reflection upon these differences has the potential to be educationally productive. (shrink)

In this article we consider the material dimensions of schooling as constitutive of the possibilities inherent in “fixing” education. We begin by mapping out the problem of “fixing education,” pointing to the necrophilic tendencies of contemporary education—a desire to kill what otherwise might be life-giving. In this sense, to “fix” education is to make otherwise fluid processes-of-living static. We next point to the material realities of this move to fix. After establishing the material consequences of perpetually fixing schools, we provide (...) a brief overview of two critical perspectives that might be shown as attempts to “unfix” education: critical pedagogy and unschooling. Though both offer critiques of normative education, these approaches are also bound by their failure to fully engage with the material dimensions of schooling. As such, both critical pedagogy and unschooling inadvertently cut off key possibilities for human flourishing within educational environments. In their rush to “unfix”—to counter the necrophilic tendencies of contemporary education—these approaches exclude or otherwise foreclose upon resistive challenges to the normative order that extend from the margins. In response, we turn to the possibilities for unschooling within the materially public spaces of schools. These are the spaces where fixity fails—possibility extends from unschooling in schools, from unfixing the process of fixing education. We end by considering the possibilities inherent in Community Service Learning as a valuable means to engage in a radically public, and unfixed, educational system. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that potentialism is uniquely able to articulate the value of educational practices that lack the kind of directionality commonly associated with educational activities. It does so by operating with radically different assumptions about the nature and value of education – assumptions that can be derived from the basic premise of progressive education that education needs to be rooted in experience. I follow here a line of thought that leads from Dewey’s notion of experience aimed at (...) new and better experiences, to Ivan Illich’s emphasis on the experience of the new, to Gert Biesta’s idea that education needs to allow students to bring something new into the world, to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’ emphasis on the experience of the possibility of the new. Finally, drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben and Tyson E. Lewis, I show how a potentialist notion of experience operates with a different temporality, enabling us to think of the experience of the potentiality of the new as such as what accounts for the educational value of non-directional practices – not only in spite of, but because of their lack of directionality. (shrink)

Ever since Kant asked: “How am I to develop the sense of freedom in spite of the restraint?” in his lecture on education, the tension between necessary educational influence and unacceptable restriction of the child’s individual development and freedom has been considered an educational paradox. Many have suggested solutions to the paradox; however, this article endorses recent discussions in educational philosophy that pursue the need to fundamentally rethink our understanding of education and upbringing. In this article it is argued that (...) it is incomprehensible to describe an intervention of an educator as a constraint on a child’s actions and that such an intervention would be in need of justification; as Kant and many others after him have done. Educational intervention should not be understood as a restriction of a child’s endeavour to learn, because any educational intervention is educational. Furthermore, it is argued that the notion of restraint is based on the concept of human beings as radically separated which lead to the assumption that education is restrictive per se. In contrast, this article argues that indoctrination, manipulation, and coercion are rather phenomena within our educational forms of life. Recognizing the interrelations between human beings should play a constitutive part in the conceptualisation of individual freedom. A bond with others is the foundation upon which a child develops its own identity and an understanding of itself as an agent who can express its own will and takes responsibility for its words and actions. (shrink)

In the past fifty years, hundreds of definitions of 'literacy' have been advanced by scholars, adult literacy workers, and programme planners. This paper analyses three major approaches to the problem of defining literacy: quantitative, qualitative and pluralist. The pluralist perspective, while not without its difficulties, appears to have the most to offer in understanding literacy in the contemporary world.

Continental philosophies of science tend to exemplify holistic themes connecting order and contingency, questions and answers, writers and readers, speakers and hearers. Such philosophies of science also tend to feature a fundamental emphasis on the historical and cultural situatedness of discourse as significant; relevance of mutual attunement of speaker and hearer; necessity of pre-linguistic cognition based in human engagement with a common socio-cultural historical world; role of narrative and metaphor as explanatory; sustained emphasis on understanding questioning; truth seen as horizonal, (...) aletheic, or perspectival; and a tolerance for paradoxical and complex forms of expression. Continental philosophy of science is thus more comprehensive than philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, including (and as analytic philosophy of science does not tend to include) perspectives on the history of science as well as the social and practical dimensions of scientific discovery. Where analytic philosophy is about reducing or, indeed, eliminating the perennial problems of philosophy, Continental philosophy is all about thinking and that will mean, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche emphasize, making such problems more not less problematic. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight why R. S. Peters' conceptual analysis of ‘education’ was such an important contribution to the normative field of philosophy of education. In the article, I do the following: 1) explicate Peters' conception of philosophy of education as a field of philosophy and explain his approach to the philosophical analysis of concepts; 2) emphasize several (normative) features of Peters' conception of education, while pointing to a couple of oversights; and 3) suggest how Peters' analysis might be (...) used to reinvigorate a conversation on one central educational aim—that of how we might educate citizens for the 21st century. (shrink)

The deep and lasting changes to human behaviour that are required to address the global environmental crisis necessitate profound shifts in moral foundations. They amount to a change in what individuals and societies conceive of as progress. This imperative raises important questions about the justification, ends, and means of large-scale changes in people’s ethics. In this essay I will focus on the ends—the direction of moral change as prescribed by the goal of sustainable human flourishing. I shall present a meta-ethical (...) critique of anthropocentrism and propose that only an ecocentric ethic can support the sustainable flourishing of humanity. This proposition does not necessarily contradict itself. My claim will be that the values subsumed under the broad concept of anthropocentrism are categorically counterproductive, informing an undesirable concept of “progress”. I support this claim with two lines of argument. On the one hand, the end values of anthropocentrism are shallow and the “flourishing of humanity” is ill-defined. The conceptual constraints of anthropocentrism itself preclude a more concise definition which would take into account the utter dependence of the flourishing of humanity on the health of ecological support structures. On the other hand, pursuing the values that inform the actions of anthropocentrists (which may be identical with the “flourishing of humanity”) leads to unintended and undesirable outcomes, even from the view of the anthropocentrist herself. Those problems are not encountered with an ecocentric ethic, and the conceptual steps necessary to adopt it are not insurmountable. (shrink)

In this report on an interview-based school case study undertaken with seven school leaders using component theory analysis and the hermeneutic method, we reveal the relational essence of learning design at the Australian Science and Mathematics School. The phenomenon of learning togetherness presents, forged by deliberately practised notions of contributive leadership within open learning spaces and ongoing attention to new interdisciplinary curriculum forms. This case study highlights the phenomenological nature of a school that has been deliberately purposed for deep collaborative (...) learning forms, respecting student and teacher ideas in the process, and marginalising habitual industrial school design forms that constrain effective student and teacher learning. The study has relevance for school leaders and teachers wishing to pursue new school design forms within enabling learning cultures that attend more closely to the learning needs of young people poised to enter the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions. (shrink)

University education is full of promise. Indeed universities have the capacity to create and shape, through staff and students, all kinds of enthralling ‘worlds’ and ‘new possibilities of life’. Yet students are encouraged increasingly to view universities as simply a means to an end, where neoliberal education delivers flexible skills to directly serve a certain type of capitalism. Additionally, the universal challenge of technological unemployment, alongside numerous other social issues, has become educationalised and portrayed in HE policy, as an issue (...) to be solved by universities. The idea that more education can resolve the problem of technological unemployment is a political construction which has largely failed to deliver its promise. In this article, we look at educationalisation in hand with technologisation and we draw on a Critical Discourse Analysis of HE policies, to demonstrate the problems arising from taken for granted visions of neoliberal social development related to education,... (shrink)

This paper addresses the question ‘what is school?’, and argues that the answer to this question has an essential political dimension. I focus on two very different attempts to characterize school – Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’s In Defence of the School – and demonstrate that both texts miss the political potential which is inherent in school. The two texts are analyzed along two relational axes: relations between school and society, and relations between children and (...) political subjects. Illich rejects children’s de-politicization while accepting the assumption that school operates according to a similar logic as society in general. Masschelein and Simons, on the other hand, advocate a separation between school and society, but also accept the separation of children from politics. I aim to integrate Illich’s analytical categories into Masschelein and Simons’ discussion, in order to mark important directions for political struggles both over and within s... (shrink)

This paper outlines and reviews three forms and associated discourses of the 'knowledge economy': the 'learning economy', based on the work of Bengt-Åke Lundvall; the 'creative economy' based on the work of Charles Landry, John Howkins and Richard Florida; and the 'open knowledge economy' based on the work of Yochai Benkler and others. Arguably, these three forms and discourses represent three recent related but different conceptions of the knowledge economy, each with clear significance and implications for education and education policy. (...) The last provides a model of radically non-propertarian form that incorporates both 'open education' and 'open science' economies. (shrink)

In the past fifty years, hundreds of definitions of 'literacy' have been advanced by scholars, adult literacy workers, and programme planners. This paper analyses three major approaches to the problem of defining literacy: quantitative, qualitative and pluralist. The pluralist perspective, while not without its difficulties, appears to have the most to offer in understanding literacy in the contemporary world.

Against the background of the many attacks on the school as being outdated, alienating, ineffective and reproducing inequalities we offer a morphological understanding of the school as distinguished from functionalist understandings and idealistic understandings. Our educational morphology approaches the school as a particular scholastic ‘form of gathering’ i.e. a particular time–space–matter arrangement that deals in a specific way with the new generation, allows for a particular relation to the world, and for a particular experience of potentiality and of commonality. We (...) elucidate how this form performs particular operations of suspension, profanation and formation of attention and how these operations imply a slowing down and an opening of future. Finally, we emphasise the potenti.. (shrink)

The infamous story of a young office clerk called Meursault has long entertained literary critics, scholars, musicians, artists and school teachers for the light and shadow that it reveals around and on the human condition. His character has been lauded as existential hero and rebuked as lacking agency. In this article, his story, in Camus’ The outsider, is explored as an educational challenge to a society to reflect on the territory it occupies, and the ways in which the sociopolitical machinery (...) deals with perceived anomalies. The article explores notions of normalcy and ordinariness in relation to Meursault’s thinking and experience in order to consider the idea of what lies outside, or beyond, thinking about education. The argument here is that Meursault’s failure to intervene in his own life challenges both the ways in which we are ordinarily educated and the ways in which we ordinarily resist our education. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that the work of Giorgio Agamben provides us with a theory of studious play which cuts across many of the categories that polarize educational thought. Rather than either ritualized testing or constructivist playfulness, Agamben provides a model of what he refers to as studious play—a practice which suspends the logic of both ritual and play. In order to explore this notion of studious play, I first articulate Agamben’s fleeting remarks on the topic with an important (...) problematic found in his early, literary work: transmission. If ritual transmits cultural traditions to ensure continuity with the past, and play as constructivist invention makes such transmission impossible, then studious play transmits transmissibility itself as a pure potentiality. Studious play accomplishes this peculiar educational task by suspending without destroying traditional things: laws, signs, and so on. I end the essay with a consideration of the ontological status of suspended things, arguing that they are transformed into toys via the action of study. Finally, I give a literary example of studious play found in Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten in which the school itself is imagined to be a kind of toy. (shrink)

Italian priest, essayist, and intellectual of the twentieth century, Ernesto Balducci identified the crucial turning points of the new millennium by advancing original perspectives capable of opening unusual future scenarios. Sensitive to emergences of society (pollution, wars, ecological collapse), he retraces the causes in the more general ?crisis of modernity,? proposing a new paideia and a new model of thought. He theorizes the construction of a novel planetary horizon that presupposes not only the building of new organizational structures, but also (...) the achieving of an authentic ?anthropological mutation? capable of inverting the course of history. While the old ethics were anthropocentric, founded on the supremacy of humankind over the world and nature, the new ethics is planetary, meaning that humankind must no longer be used as the parameter, but instead, the global horizon over which the effects of his or her actions extend. (shrink)

This article addresses the causal powers associated with the social phenomena of alternative schooling for youth at risk. It stems from a doctoral thesis, Alternative Schooling Programs for At Risk Youth: Three Case Studies, which addresses wider issues integral to alternative schooling: youth at risk, alternative schooling models, and literacy. This article explores one aspect of alternative schooling: the historical causal factors involved in the establishment and continuance of three alternative case-study models in Queensland, Australia. By adhering to Bhaskar’s transformational (...) model of social activity, social structures and individuals will be analytically distinguished to uncover their separate causal powers and how these have effected the establishment and continuance of three alternative schools. (shrink)