The indoctrination debates have been a key feature of the philosophy of education over the past 50 years. While it is generally acknowledged that the pejorative associations of indoctrination only emerged over the last 100 years, those normative associations are widely taken to be an essential part of the concept itself as are the positive connotations of education. I explore some of the problems of assuming that the term must refer to something negative and the essentialism that this implies. The (...) attempt to ‘transvaluate’ indoctrination results in the claim that the concept is virtually indistinguishable from education. Drawing on Ivan Snook's Indoctrination and Education, I examine several candidates for indoctrination to show that the pejorative label is not a good fit. I argue that much of what is framed as indoctrination turns out to be either impossible–implausible or necessary–inevitable; the fact that there is scarcely a gap between these extremes should give us pause to wonder about this term and its relation to education: By providing a term for those influences of which we generally disapprove, does the concept of indoctrination act as a way for educationalists to uphold and protect the normative view of education (that education must aim for something intrinsically worthwhile)?Eds.: This paper forms part of a Special Issue entitled ‘Beyond Virtue and Vice: Education for a Darker Age’ in which the editors invited authors to engage in exercises of ‘transvaluation’. Certain apparently settled educational concepts (from agency and fulfilment to alienation and ignorance) can be reinterpreted and transvaluated (in a Nietzschean vein) such that virtues become vices, and vices, virtues. The editors encouraged authors to employ polemics and some occasional exaggeration to reimagine educational values that are all too readily accepted within contemporary educational discourses. (shrink)

Nothing reveals the differences between an internal (i.e., inherently pedagogical) reflection on educational processes and an external (i.e., derived from a philosophical, sociological, psychological, theological or other perspective) more clearly than the differing attitudes towards alienation. Looked at from outside a pedagogical context, alienation appears only negative, deserving nothing but contempt and rejection; examined from inside a pedagogical framework, it proves to be a conditio sine qua non, the process through which transformative education is possible. This article juxtaposes both perspectives (...) in order to defend the conviction that within educational reflections, only an inherently pedagogical, i.e., positive, understanding of alienation is persuasive, whereas other approaches by definition either are outside of pedagogical reflections or belong to a kind of metaphysical thinking that nowadays seems rather outdated. This paper forms part of a Special Issue titled ‘Beyond Virtue and Vice: Education for a Darker Age’, in which the editors invited authors to engage in exercises of ‘transvaluation’. Certain apparently settled educational concepts (from agency and fulfilment to alienation and ignorance) can be radically reinterpreted such that virtues can be seen as vices, and vices as virtues. The editors encouraged authors to employ polemics and some occasional exaggeration to revalue the educational values that are too readily accepted within contemporary educational discourses. (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of time in education. It argues that the neoliberal capitalist construct of time as a resource to be deployed in service of labour—ever-accelerating—has permeated education, with implications for curriculum, teaching, and learning. To slow the effects of neoliberal capitalism in schools requires a reconsideration of time that permits both different understandings of how time is encountered and different values orienting how one spends one’s time. Using Hägglund’s argument for finitude and Levinas’ idea of time as (...) a gift, the paper articulates the philosophical rationale and pedagogical implications for making the most of one’s educational time. (shrink)