Education and the illusions of emancipation (original) (raw)
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Rethinking Education and Emancipation: Being, Teaching, and Power
Harvard Educational Review, 2010
This essay describes two central principles for a renewed emancipatory pedagogy across educational contexts: the recognition of an essential equality between students and teachers and a liberatory agency that uncovers and builds on students' effectivity as beings against domination. While critical educational theory traditionally conceives of the human as a condition to be developed through the process of conscientization, De Lissovoy argues for the recognition of the human as the already existing fact of a body in struggle. He proposes an understanding of the human as the ontological kernel of the selves of students and teachers, as it asserts itself before contests over knowledge and identification. Building from recent work in cultural studies and philosophy that confronts the question of being as a political problem, the author develops an original understanding of emancipation as the discovery and affirmation of the persistent integrity and survival of beings in struggle.
The emancipation debates on education and curriculum : perspectives and meanings
European Conference on Curriculum Studies Future Directions Uncertain and Possibility, 2013
This article presents the results of an investigation-an exploratory study-on the emancipation concept in the field domain of curriculum theories over the theoretical debates and practices of Portuguese educators. Based on a thorough literature search and on the view of some professors from the University of Minho and Porto, we sought to understand how to scale the concept of emancipation both at the theoretical level and in curriculum practices the well, that they develop in the educational institutions. Assuming that, in addition to the theoretical component, their students embodied by the experienced, we tried to question whether educational institutions are organized or not only to facilitate (consultancy), working with labor reflection, critical thinking and autonomy of students, resulting formative processes grounded on an effective their students of emancipation. In methodological terms, the methods and theoretical research were conducted by using semi-structured interviews with educators in order to as certain how their productions offer the prospect theory, how they animate the debates the critical education and shape their practices. The results allowed us to understand that empowerment is a structural element of the critical theory, both in the discussions of the educational field and the curriculum the well, which interferes on the way they organize curriculum practices. We intend to understand how teachers work the concept of emancipation and how they do it. In this sense, while synonym of critical education, reflexive and transformative educationmediated or not by the curriculum-the emancipation has been understood and viewed the possibility to substantiate swagger and add changes in the individuals and, is consequence, in the education and society itself.
Decolonial Philosophy and Education - Full Text (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education)
“Decolonial philosophy of education” is an almost nonexistent term. Consequently, rigorous intellectual and scholarly conversations on education tend to be centered around a specific set of concepts and discourses that were (and still are) generated, picked up or analyzed by thinkers from a specific geographical and political space, such as Socrates, Rousseau, Dewey, Heidegger, and Foucault. This has led to the systemic ignoring and violating concepts and ideas generated from other spaces and lived through by other people. This legacy can also be related to some philosophical aspirations for gaining total, hegemonic, and universal perceptions and representations often formulated by male Euro-American philosophers; when this intellectual passion for universality becomes coupled with or stays silent about imperial and expansionist ambitions, it can see itself implicated in creating assimilationist or genocidal practices: in education, the manifestation of universality associated with imperialism is observed in Indian residential schools. While the words education, literacy, curriculum, learning of languages, acquiring knowledge, school, school desks, and school buildings might normally echo positive vibes for many, it can make an aboriginal survivor of an Indian residential school shudder. It is furthermore hard to ignore the aspirations for a European/Universalist definition of human and man in the famous “Kill the Indian to save the child” policy of Indian Residential Schools. However, the likelihood of deeming such assimilationist attempts as benign acts of trial and error and as events external to philosophy is generally high. Therefore, the “colonial edge” of these philosophies are, more often than not, left unexamined. This is the plane where decolonial philosopher dwell. They deliberate on essential key moments and discussions in philosophical thought that have either not been paused at enough or paused at all, and thereby question this lack of attention. There is an important reason for these intellectual halts practiced by decolonial philosophers. While these might seem to be abstract epistemic endeavors, decolonial philosophers see their work as practices of liberation that aim beyond disrupting the eminence of mainstream Euro- American philosophical thought. Through these interrogative pauses, they hope to intervene, overturn and restructure the philosophical, political and social imaginations in favor of the silenced, the ignored, the colonized, and the (epistemologically and physically) violated. This article engages with certain key decolonial theses and is concerned with the hope of initiating and further expanding the dialogues of decolonization in the philosophy of education. The article will, however, stay away from adding new theses or theories to decolonial education. The author believes that this field, much like other paradigms, either can or will at some point suffer from theoretical exhaustion. Instead, it directs the readers to pause at some of the decisive moments discussed in decolonial theories.
Lyotard defines being postmodern as an 'incredulity toward metanarratives'. Such incredulity includes, in particular, skepticism vis-à-vis Enlightenment ideals like autonomy. Motivated by such skepticism, several educational scholars put into question education for autonomy as it is practiced in the formal settings of national school systems. More specifically, they criticize that practices of autonomy education can have certain normalizing and ideological eects that undermine the aim of creating autonomous subjects. This article examines these critiques of education for autonomy and argues that they are best understood as calls for reforming educational practices, and not as outright rejections of education for autonomy. Thus, since the allegedly 'postmodern' critiques of autonomy education cannot be plausibly understood as radical ruptures with Enlightenment ideals, the article concludes that these critiques represent (merely) constructive self-critical reflections on what Habermas dubbed the 'unfinished project of modernity'.
Autonomy, Agency and Education: He tangata, he tangata, he tangata
Postfoundationalist themes in the philosophy of education : festschrift for james d marshall, 2013
In this paper the authors take up James Marshall's work on the individual and autonomy. Their suggestion is that although the liberal notion of the autonomous individual might give us a standard of reference for the freedom of persons, the liberal tradition also circumscribes that freedom by prescribing it both as an attribute of persons and as a necessity for persons to exercise, in the form of choice, even though the range of choice is in fact limited. Starting from an account of James Marshall and Colin Lankshear's respective work on the nature of the individual, and using Heidegger, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and others, they reintegrate the individual into society as it were, and finally, search for means of escape from the determinism of ‘governmentality’. Drawing on notions such as ‘technologies of the self’, hysteria and excess, integration of body and mind, individual and environment, subject and object, they describe the difficult, hesitant work of bringing existing parameters of thought and behaviour into consciousness. Some consequences for the relations of teachers and students within the school context are suggested.
Education, Learning and Freedom
Journal of Philosophy of Education
This paper takes as its starting point Kant's analysis of freedom in the Critique of Pure Reason. From this analysis, two different types of freedom are discerned, formative and instrumental freedom. The paper suggests that much of what passes for the pedagogy of learning in UK universities takes the form of an instrumental freedom. This, however, involves the neglect of formative freedom-the power to put learning to question. An emancipatory concept of education requires that formative freedom lies at the heart of the educative endeavour, to which learning must be seen as secondary. The proposal of the two types of freedom is based on a relatively detailed consideration of Kant's Critique-this is necessary in order to ensure that the concepts of instrumental and formative freedom have a credible philosophical basis.
The German Logic of Emancipation and Biesta's Criticism of Emancipatory Pedagogy
Educational Theory, 2021
Gert Biesta has criticized Anglo-American and German models of emancipatory education. According to Biesta, emancipation is understood in these models as liberation that results from a process in which a teacher transmits objective knowledge to his or her students and cultivates student capabilities. He claims that this so-called modern logic of emancipation does not lead to freedom because it installs inequality, dependency, and mistrust in the pedagogical relationship. In this article, Antti Moilanen and Rauno Huttunen analyze whether German models of emancipatory education share the modern logic of emancipation and if they can escape Biesta's criticisms. For this purpose, they interpret Biesta's critique of the modern logic of emancipation and explicate central ideas related to the German models of critical education. They also compare the modern logic of emancipation to the German one, and they then assess German models of emancipatory pedagogy from the viewpoint of Biesta's criticisms. Moilanen and Huttunen conclude that the German models of emancipatory education present at least a partial alternative to the modern logic of emancipation. Despite this, the German models are based on the idea of education as cultivation. Because Biesta criticizes the theory of education as cultivation, it is possible to conclude that he would not accept the German models of emancipatory education. However, the German models of critical pedagogy provide answers to the following question: how can students achieve independence in the pedagogical relationship? When students take part in designing educational processes, they are summoned to assess the validity of the taught knowledge, and they practice independent decision-making at school; the pedagogical relationship, based on authority, can foster student self-determination.
The nature and value of autonomy and some implications for education Introduction
In this essay, I explore autonomy and its relationship with childhood and education using Lindley’s conception of autonomy, Schapiro and Benporath’s definitions of childhood and Amy Gutmann’s ideas about democratic education. The aim is to show that autonomy is crucial to the well-being of the individual and of the society she lives in, due to its intrinsic and its instrumental value. Consequently, autonomy should constitute one of the primary goals of education as both a prerequisite and an instrument of individual and collective happiness.