In this article, I explore the importance of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of potentiality for rethinking education. While potentiality has been a long-standing concern for educational practitioners and theorists, Agamben’s work is unique in that it emphasizes how potentiality can only be thought of in relation to impotentiality. This moment of indistinction—what I refer to as im-potential—has important implications. First, I argue that if potentiality and impotentiality are separated from one another, the result is a stratified educational system where some students (...) are commanded to actualize their potentiality in the form of standardized tests while others are abandoned by the system. Second, thinking im-potentiality enables us to move beyond problematic formulations of learning and rediscover the uniqueness of studying. Here, I offer a brief example of study through an analysis of ‘Tinkering Schools’, an alternative program founded by Gever Tulley in San Francisco. And finally, without a concept of im-potentiality, the discourse of the ‘child genius’ becomes commodified as a power to be harnessed and actualized in the name of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. Only through a return to im-potentiality can we reclaim Genius and its relationship to the question of educational freedom. (shrink)

In the novel The City and the City, by China Mieville, the reader follows the Kafkaesque journey of Inspector Tyador Borlu through a labyrinthian political conspiracy set in two politically autonomous yet territorially overlapping cities: Beszel and Ul Qoma. Although “grosstopically” interwoven like topographic doppelgangers, the two cities are perceived as distinct political and cultural territories. Even as citizens from the two cities intermingle on divided streets, live in buildings where different floors exist in different cities, and children climb on (...) trees territorially split (“crosshatched”) down the center, they must learn to “unsee” and “unnotice” one another. The major role of education is to teach .. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Both ‘philosophy’ and ‘the child’ are notions that seem to have an everlasting presence in our daily vocabulary. What is less common and perhaps lacking is any reflection on the relation between them, which is rarely a focus of the researcher’s attention. We believe that it is precisely this relation that is at stake in increasingly popular notions such as ‘philosophy for/with children’, or even in philosophy of education as such. In this article we will expand upon this claim by (...) exploring the meeting place(s) of both notions. An extensive elaboration of this relation would need not only more space than the average journal article offers, but also much more extensive research. Both ‘philosophy’ and ‘the child’—if we were to do justice to the wealth these terms offer—should each form separately the object of further research, in order to be able to pick the fruits of their shared household. We will bypass a labyrinthine study of this sort, however, and instead offer some thoughts on the cross-section of both these terms, seeking as it were what could be philosophical about the child, and where philosophy becomes childish. We hope that the reader would be so kind as to step into this brief, and somewhat associative, reasoning and find something of value in this wordplay, knowing that the more extensive treatise that the interconnection of these two realities demands is to be found elsewhere. The authors, for their part, are writing in the conviction that less can sometimes be more. (shrink)

In this article, the author rethinks critiques of the learning society using Giorgio Agamben’s theory of potentiality. Summarizing several major contributions to our understanding of the limitations of the discourse of learning, the author proposes that critics thus far have failed to fully pinpoint the exact danger of learning. Importantly, learning is not only a rejection of the democratic or political dimension of education but it is first and foremost predicated on a false ontology of potentiality. What is put at (...) risk in learning is a sacrifice of our (im)potential, our capacity to be or not to be this or that within the order of things. Through a reconstruction of Agamben’s theory of studying, the author argues for a different conceptualization of freedom in education, of teaching, and of the time of education. (shrink)

In this paper I want to analyse the meaning of education for democracy and thinking as this is generally understood by Philosophy for Children. Although we may be inclined to applaud Philosophy for Children's emphasis on children, critical thinking, autonomy and dialogue, there is reason for scepticism too. Since we are expected as a matter of course to subscribe to the basic assumptions of Philosophy for Children, we seem to become tied, as it were, to the whole package, without reservation. (...) Following ideas of Hannah Arendt, I draw attention to the instrumentalised nature of Philosophy for Children and the loss of originality that this instrumentalisation means. This does not mean that I wish to abandon Philosophy for Children. The point is rather that I want to examine whether or not another kind of philosophy for children is possible. (shrink)

Recognising the relevance of Iris Marion Young's work to education, this article poses the question: given Iris Young's commitment to both social justice and to recognition of the political and ethical significance of difference, to what extent does her position allow for transnational interventions in education to foster democracy? First, it explores some of Iris Young's arguments on the relationship between democracy and social justice, with particular reference to their implications for education. Second, I argue that if her ideas are (...) extended to the issue of global justice, the strategies which she offers should be extended, at least when it comes to educational intervention, to allow for a wider range of actions in support of global justice through education for democracy than Iris Young's work so far seems to allow. The wider range of strategies which I propose call on western feminists and their governments to do more to promote democracy and social justice globally. This can be done in ways that are consistent with Iris Young's stipulation that transnational interference is permissible if undertaken against dominative harm. (shrink)

We here analyse the ethical dimensions of the UK's ‘Research Excellence Framework’, the latest version of an exercise which assesses the quality of university research in the UK every seven or so years. We find many of the common objections to this exercise unfounded, such as that it is excessively expensive by comparison with alternatives such as various metrics, or that it turns on the subjective judgement of the assessors. However there are grounds for concern about the crude language in (...) which for example all relevant scholarship becomes called ‘research’ and publications become ‘outputs’. The focus on the impact of research, which was a new feature of the most recent exercise, is particularly problematic, creating as it does a tendency to what Aristotle called alazony, self-aggrandisement, on the part of academics. We conclude that the REF is a mixed good from an ethical point of view, and that more could be done to mitigate its more unfortunate features. (shrink)

This paper reassesses a perennial concern of philosophy of education: the nature of the educational community and the role of the teacher in relation to such a community. As an entry point into this broader question, we turn to Philosophy for children, which has consistently emphasized the importance of community. Yet, not unlike pragmatist notions of community more broadly, the P4C community has largely focused on the goal-directed, purposive, aspect of the process of inquiry. The purpose of our paper is (...) to move beyond P4C in order to theorize a non-instrumental, in-tentional, educational community without pre-conceived goals or intentions. Drawing largely from the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, we describe the P4C-classroom as one that refuses to be operative and thus undermines the taken-for-granted logic of means and ends that underlies how educational communities are typically depicted and justified. Again drawing from Agamben, we identify the specific ways in which the experience of love and friendship constitute the in-tentional community. The silence of the voice of the teacher enables the experience of love and friendship to come about. Being included as an exclusion via his/her silence, the teacher is neither immanent nor transcendent but alongside the community as a paradigm of friendship. (shrink)

Since Dilthey we have become used to thinking of reason as having a cultural and historical setting. If we take this insight seriously, then critical rationality or critical thinking can no longer be conceived of as context-free skills. This paper takes up the line of thought that is elaborated by Christopher Winch in his ‘Developing Critical Rationality as a Pedagogical Aim’ and seeks to explicate it by drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of ‘language games’ and on the re-evaluation of ‘thinking’ (...) by Theodor Ballauff (a German philosopher of education who was influenced by Martin Heidegger). The overcoming of a solipsistic and idealistic conception of thinking raises questions regarding the pedagogical settings and aims, as well as the problems over the limits of critique in education. A comparison of Ballauff's and Winch's positions reinforces the sense of the significance of critique: although the role of critical rationality within education is ambiguous and precarious, the investigation of autonomy (as an educational goal) shows that critique cannot be limited in any straightforward way. (shrink)

The ‘European Space of Higher Education’ could be mapped as an infrastructure for entrepreneurship and a place where the distinction between the social and the economic becomes obsolete. Using Foucault's understanding of biopolitics and discussing the analyses of Agamben and Negri/Hardt it is argued that the actual governmental configuration, i.e. the economisation of the social, also has a biopolitical dimension. Focusing on the intersection between a politicisation and economisation of human life allows us to discuss a kind of ‘bio‐economisation’ , (...) a regime of economic terror and learning as investment. Finally it is argued how fostering learning, i.e. fostering life could turn into ‘let die’ and even into ‘make die’. (shrink)

'International' and 'internationalisation' are two terms frequently used today in association with the university. In this paper I consider the way in which the notion of internationalisation connects to the contemporary university, which I have termed 'Neo-liberal'. I begin by outlining the main characteristics of the contemporary university and then discuss some of the problems that arise in relation to the notion of internationalisation; it is strongly associated with an economic rather than a cultural imperative. Alternatives to the Neo-liberal model (...) of the university are then considered and rejected. In the final section of the paper I suggest a different interpretation of internationalisation, one that is cultural rather than economic because such an internationalisation degenerates into instrumentalism and robs higher education of what should be essential to it. (shrink)