In this paper I discuss some thoughts Judith Butler presents regarding corporeal vulnerability. This might help to elucidate the problem of whether critical education is still possible today. I first explain why precisely the possibility of critique within education is a problem for us today. This is because the traditional means of enhancing a critical attitude in pupils, stimulating their self-reflective capacities, contributes to the continued existence and strengthening of the current societal and political regime. A way out of this (...) deadlock is offered from within a Foucauldian perspective. Criticality here refers to an experience of exposure and expropriation of the self. This kind of limit-experience is also of a central importance in the most recent work of Judith Butler. She links this experience to the corporeal condition of susceptibility. Our bodies have a public dimension as we are inescapably exposed to one another. The main argument of my paper has to do with whether this appeal to corporeal vulnerability might offer a new way of thinking about the public realm and about the possibility of critique, especially within the field of education. I conclude the paper by showing the originality of Butler’s thought in this respect and the possibilities it opens for thinking in a radically new way about critical pedagogy. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In this paper we explore a new way to deal with social inequality and injustice in an educational way. We do so by offering a particular reading of a scene taken from Minnelli's film The Band Wagon which is often regarded as overly western-centred and racist. We argue, however, that the way in which words and movements in this scene function are expressive of an event that can be read as a new beginning and that it is for this reason (...) in and of itself educational. By drawing on Agamben's and Cavell's insights on childhood and what it means to acquire a language, we argue that in this scene a form of childhood is displayed which denotes a general condition for education to take place in children and grown-ups alike. Hence, education can be understood as a interruption of existing power structures and as a transformation of one's existence. (shrink)

On the basis of a close reading of three authors , I try to elucidate what the growing presence of digital technologies in our lives implies for the sphere of schooling and education. Developing a technocentric perspective, I discuss whether what is happening today concerns just the newest form of humankind's fundamental dependency on a technological milieu or that it concerns a fundamental shift. From Flusser, I take the idea that the practice of writing shapes human subjectivity, as well as (...) our very sense of history and progress, and that with the advent of digital technologies the possibility of a posthistorical era is granted. I confront this idea with Stiegler's analysis of technological tools and practices as strongly materialized memories, which amounts to a plea for securing the link with the particular history behind the technologies we use. Here, education should play a conservative role and take responsibility for using technologies in a correct way. I argue that Stiegler is not wholly consistent on this point and, moreover, that his view precludes the possibility to rethink the very meaning of education under present conditions. This possibility is opened if we turn to a philosopher which is ruthlessly criticized by Stiegler for being a technophobe: Agamben. I argue, however, that a more detailed reading of Agamben—n combination with Flusser—might show a completely different and far more positive appreciation for digital technology and that this view offers an opening for rethinking what education is all about. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the musical work of classical composer Benjamin Britten as a lasting legacy for public music education. Our starting point is the contemporary urgency to rethink both public music education in general, and the public-educational significance of Western classical music in particular, in the face of the dual threats posed by anti-educational tendencies of “functionalization” and “hobbyfication.” Relating this situation to concerns already voiced by Britten in his time, we consider in what ways aspects of Britten’s (...) musical work can be shown to reveal a highly original, post-critical answer to these threats. While his pedagogical musings remain riddled with ambiguities, which readily invite critical deconstruction, our paper argues for the more affirmative option of reconceptualizing these ambiguities as constitutive tensions of a public-educational love for (classical) music. To gauge the practical implications of such a post-critical music-educational love, we analyze the concrete case of the Aldeburgh Festival, perhaps Britten’s most full-fledged effort to reclaim music as a public affair. Thinking about this case, we reflect on how Britten’s legacy could lastingly impinge on the publicness of Western classical music, as well as on ongoing and future practices of public music education in general. (shrink)

This article deals with the educational challenge of responding to the pending ecological crisis (and many other future apocalyptic scenarios that haunt our imagination). It seems we are living in a time when we have given up on the idea that progress is possible or desirable, and this questions education at its roots. In order to find a proper educational response that befits our time, it is requested that we gain a new sense of orientation (which is no longer aimed (...) at progress). This is an idea I pick up from the recent work of Bruno Latour, which is the focus of the first part of the paper. In the second part, I start fleshing out what this new orientation could look like by turning to the work of Immanuel Kant (usually regarded as one of the most outspoken defenders of education geared to progress). Nonetheless, I try to read Kant against himself, so as to show how orientation can be understood in a non-modernist manner. I connect this in the third part to the radically immanent and empiricist work of William James, and draw out in the final section how a combined reading of Kant and James offers the orientation we need. (shrink)

This article explores the uses of Agamben’s philosophy for understanding the educational meaning of practices that typically take/took place at school, such as the collective rehearsal of the alphabet or the multiplication tables. More precisely, I propose that these forms of ‘practising’ show what schooling, as a particular and historically contingent institution, is all about. Instead of immediately assessing the ‘practice of practising’ in terms of learning outcomes, I turn to Bollnow’s attempt to analyze this phenomenon in a substantially educational (...) way, which for him essentially consists in opposing practising and learning. I show that his analysis is superficial and that we need Agamben’s notion of ‘potentiality’ in order to come to grips with the sense of this phenomenon. This will allow to see that practising concerns an uncommon way to relate to a subject matter that makes possible a transformation of individual and collective existence. The main objective of this investigation is not to hold a plea for reintroducing obsolete pedagogical methods, but to rethink the very meaning of education. (shrink)

In this article we focus on note taking as a practice that is fundamental to (higher) education. We argue that note-taking should not primarily be regarded as a method that supports effective learning, but as formative of the student herself (making her attentive and granting possibilities for self-transformation). Hence it is a practice that has educational meaning in and of itself. It is a pedagogical form in its own right. We go on arguing that the practice of lecturing can itself (...) be seen as a form of note taking and that both phenomena are not only closely related, but also that note making and lecturing consist of reciprocal operations. Studying on the basis of one’s notes comes down to the reverse operation the teacher had to perform when preparing her lessons. Moreover, thanks to making notes during a class students have a deeply embodied sense of what it means to generate and to construct new arguments and ideas. (shrink)

In this article, I critically engage with a vital assumption behind the work of Paulo Freire, and more generally behind any critical pedagogy, viz. the belief that education is fundamentally about emancipation. My main goal is to conceive of a contemporary critical pedagogy which stays true to the original inspiration of Freire’s work, but which at the same time takes it in a new direction. More precisely, I confront Freire with Jacques Rancière. Not only is the latter’s work on education (...) fully predicated on the idea of emancipation. For both Freire and Rancière, literacy initiation practice can be seen as an archetypical model for understanding the emancipatory moment in education. For both, educational practices are never neutral, as they decide to a great extent on the fate of our common world. Reflecting on similarities and differences in both their positions, I will propose to conceive of critical pedagogy in terms of a thing-centred pedagogy. As such, I take a clear position in the discussion between teacher- and student-centred approaches. According to Rancière, it is the full devotion to a ‘thing’, i.e. to a subject matter we study, which makes emancipation possible. Over and against Freire’s defense of emancipatory education, I highlight with Rancière the importance of educational emancipation. (shrink)

In this article Joris Vlieghe defends the view that technologies of reading and writing are more than merely instruments that support education, arguing that these technologies themselves decide what education is all about and that they form subjectivity in substantial ways. Expanding on insights taken from media theory, Vlieghe uses the work of Bernard Stiegler in order to develop a “technosomatic” account of literacy initiation, that is, a perspective that zooms in on the physical dimensions of how (...) to operate writing and reading technologies. He argues that that the bodily gestures and disciplines that constitute literacy give rise to a particular space of experience, which comes down to a heavily embodied, first-hand sense of what it means to be able to produce script. Vlieghe contends that the advent of digital writing and reading technologies implies a fundamental shift in this sense of ability, and that in order to understand digital literacy we need to take into account the technosomatic aspects of learning to read and write with digital media. (shrink)

This article discusses, from a theoretical and philosophical perspective, the meaning and the importance of basic literacy training for education in an age in which digital technologies have become ubiquitous. I discuss some arguments, which I draw from the so-called literacy hypothesis approach, in order to understand the significance of a ‘traditional’ initiation into literacy. I then use the work of Bernard Stiegler on bodily gestures and routines, related to different technologies, in order to elaborate and criticize the claims the (...) literacy hypothesis makes. Bringing together insights from both the literacy hypothesis approach and Stiegler's work, I defend the view that there exists an essential difference between traditional and digital literacy, and I try to argue for the introduction of a spelling and grammar of the digital in the educational curriculum. (shrink)

In this article we focus on note taking as a practice that is fundamental to education. We argue that note-taking should not primarily be regarded as a method that supports effective learning, but as formative of the student herself. Hence it is a practice that has educational meaning in and of itself. It is a pedagogical form in its own right. We go on arguing that the practice of lecturing can itself be seen as a form of note taking and (...) that both phenomena are not only closely related, but also that note making and lecturing consist of reciprocal operations. Studying on the basis of one’s notes comes down to the reverse operation the teacher had to perform when preparing her lessons. Moreover, thanks to making notes during a class students have a deeply embodied sense of what it means to generate and to construct new arguments and ideas. (shrink)

This special issue aims to explore what is educational in the seemingly humble gesture of making notes: not only how and why the practice of note-taking is educative in and of itself, but also what it says about education as such. The contributions to the issue each highlight different aspects of note-making and approach it differently, but all assume that note-making is an educational practice that merits philosophical study. Interestingly, they mostly focus on note-making as a non-digital practice (putting aside (...) the use of laptops for note-making in class), perhaps because most were written prior to the great digitisation ushered in by educational institutions’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Let us first address how we see the different aspects of note-making highlighted by the contributions to the issue. (shrink)

In this short reply to Riis’ paper I first deal with his perceptive defence of ICT literacy, to which I fully subscribe, showing how his ideas might gain from highlighting the ‘technical’ dimensions involved in literacy practices. Second, this will allow me to make some comments regarding the curricular and organizational aspects of contemporary education, which forms the largest part of his paper. My main line of criticism towards Riis’ paper is that I defend a ‘technical’ rather than a ‘non-technical’ (...) account of digital literacy. (shrink)

In this article I try to conceive a new approach towards laughter in the context of formal schooling. I focus on laughter in so far as it is a bodily response during which we are entirely delivered to uncontrollable, spasmodic reactions. To see the educational relevance of this particular kind of laughter, as well as to understand why laughter is often dealt with in a very negative way in pedagogical contexts, this phenomenon should be carefully distinguished from humor or amusement. (...) I build my argument for a smaller part on the basis of conceptual analysis, and to a greater extent on Bakhtin’s work on the transition from Medieval folk culture to Modern civilized culture, in which he claims that a reduction from laughing as a strongly physical experience to mere forms of amusement or humor actually implies that laughter no longer possesses its inherent equalizing and communizing potential. In a sense, laughter forms a threat to any organization of social existence according to similarities and differences in identity and position, and this explains why we usually try to suppress it, or why we try to render it functional in view of the continuation of a societal regime or pedagogical order. More positively formulated, laughter may be said to have an intrinsic educational meaning, because it allows a significant transformation of individual and collective existence. (shrink)

This paper attempts to reassess the educational affordances of digital screens, at a time when their educational impact has become incontournable, but is also increasingly growing suspicion. To bypass the redundancies of overly critical theoretical approaches, the paper foregrounds the subjectifying potentialities of the screen’s elusive technological ‘plasticity’. After the introduction, in which some pedagogical misgivings about the digital screen are addressed, we turn to Marie-José Mondzain’s historico-philosophical genealogy of iconoclasm. Trying to make sense of the aesthetic-political ambivalence that shrouded (...) the icon’s screenic agency within a Christian ‘economy of salvation’, and which climaxed in a politics of strictly economic equivalency, we concur with Peter Szendy that this ambivalence still haunts the icon’s contemporary heirs. By pedagogically re-reading Szendy’s alternative account of ‘iconomy’ we are subsequently led to make a case for exceeding neoliberal screening politics through an affirmation of the digital screen’s radical plasticity. Along with Yves Citton, we suggest, in our conclusion, that this post-critical affirmation calls for an ‘iconomical’ practice of care-ful experiments with the screen’s dynamic technologies. Instead of combating or adapting to its aesthetically dazzling algorithms, educational practices are required that allow these algorithmic quantities to qualitatively differentiate the uses that educands make of them. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the possibilities that works of art might possess for looking in original and unforeseen ways into something that, at first sight, has little to do with arts and artistic practice. To be more precise, we present here three artistic representations, taken from various times and style periods, that depict a well-known figure in art history: angels. A detailed description and analysis of these images give us the opportunity to figure out something about another figure, which (...) is fascinating to us as philosophers of education: the teacher. Our basic intuition is that the way in which three important artists—Albrecht Dürer, William Hogarth, and Paul Klee—have tried to capture and trace out... (shrink)

In recent years, the relation between studying and learning has been a topic of debate. This article is mainly interested in a concept of study practices, conceived of as practices that are strongly engaged with issues of living together in a superdiverse city. Such practices firstly require to think the relation between studying and learning in other-than-oppositional terms, and secondly, to raise questions concerning the political role of education. The aim of the article is double in that it wants to (...) further elaborate the concept of study practices in relation to a concrete practice on the one hand, and, on the other, that it has the objective to rethink in educational terms the notion of solidarity—deeply entwined with matters of living together in superdiversity. These aims are pursued based on an analysis of the study practice of System_D, a film festival in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Brussels, drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway. (shrink)

In this article, I deal with the transition from traditional ‘school’ forms of instruction to educational processes that are fully mediated by digital technologies. Against the background of the idea the very institution ‘school’ is closely linked to the invention of the alphabetic writing system and to the need of initiating new generations into a literate culture, I focus on the issue of literacy training. I argue that with the digitization of education, a fundamental transition takes place regarding what it (...) means to be literate, but also what it means to educate and to be educated. I do so by developing a ‘techno-somatic’ approach, which means that I look at the use of concrete instructional technologies, and the bodily disciplines that are involved. I set out a double comparison in which I contrast existing, ‘traditional’ ways of learning how to read/write with the way in which literacy training looked like before the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and with the initiation into literacy in the Chinese/japanese language, on the other hand. I argue that these comparisons shed light on the differences between traditional and digital literacy. More precisely, I show that in each case, a different relation toward what it means to produce script is involved. As such, both forms of literacy go together with different spaces of experience and senses of being-able, and therefore with altogether different ideas of what education is all about. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we argue that it is possible to approach teaching from a fully affirmative perspective: as an educational practice that has its own internal logic and intrinsic value. By analysing a fragment from one of the Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts presented in this article as a teaching event, we show that when starting from an empirical example of teaching it is possible to distinguish principles and gestures that testify to an ontological dimension of teaching. This is possible, (...) however, only when a particular reading of this empirical material is applied. We call this an immanent reading, as opposed to a transcendent reading. It should be clear that this kind of inquiry we briefly demonstrate here is exactly a post-critical attempt to re-establish our affirmative relation with one of the most devalued, repressed, and neglected educational practice, namely teaching. (shrink)

In this article, I go deeper into the educational meaning of tiredness. Over and against the mainstream view that tiredness is an impediment for education, I show that this phenomenon is intrinsically meaningful. My arguments are based, first, on a detailed phenomenological analysis of tiredness, as proposed by Buytendijk. Tiredness can be defined as the point where lack of willpower and lack of ability become utterly indistinguishable. Second, I turn to Agamben’s genealogy of the will, which shows that willpower was (...) invented in order to control a more original, but also more arcane sense of what it means to be able to do something: potentiality. I argue that tiredness, as analysed by Buytendijk, is a state of potentiality. As such it has the power to interrupt the contemporary ordering of society and of the realm of education, which is fully predicated upon individual wilful self-commandment. More positively speaking, tiredness has an important educational value in that it grants the opportunity of beginning anew with the world. This article is also an attempt to show how phenomenological work and genealogical approaches can inform one another. (shrink)

In this article I deal with the impact of digitization on education by revisiting the ideas Neil Postman developed in regard with the omnipresence of screens in the American society of the 1980s and their impact on what it means to grow up and to become an educated person. Arguing, on the one hand, that traditionally education is profoundly related to the initiation into literacy, and on the other hand, that the screen may come to replace the book as the (...) prevailing educational medium, Postman’s theses are worth reconsidering. Moreover I propose to develop further one strain of thought in Postman’s work, viz. the interconnectedness of technological inventions, material practices and ideas regarding what education is all about. As such I analyse in great detail the differences between traditional and digital literacy by looking from a material and practical perspective at how we relate to books and screens. This is not a normative analysis, but one that aims at fleshing out differences in spaces of experience. As such I wind up with suggestions regarding the affordances that a new form of literacy, no longer based on the model of the book, might bring about. (shrink)

This handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education combined with an up-to-date selection of the central themes. It includes 95 newly commissioned articles that focus on and advance key arguments; each essay incorporates essential background material serving to clarify the history and logic of the relevant topic, examining the status quo of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discussing the possible futures of the field. The book provides a state-of-the-art overview of philosophy (...) of education, covering a range of topics: Voices from the present and the past deals with 36 major figures that philosophers of education rely on; Schools of thought addresses 14 stances including Eastern, Indigenous, and African philosophies of education as well as religiously inspired philosophies of education such as Jewish and Islamic; Revisiting enduring educational debates scrutinizes 25 issues heavily debated in the past and the present, for example care and justice, democracy, and the curriculum; New areas and developments addresses 17 emerging issues that have garnered considerable attention like neuroscience, videogames, and radicalization. The collection is relevant for lecturers teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of education as well as for colleagues in teacher training. Moreover, it helps junior researchers in philosophy of education to situate the problems they are addressing within the wider field of philosophy of education and offers a valuable update for experienced scholars dealing with issues in the sub-discipline. Combined with different conceptions of the purpose of philosophy, it discusses various aspects, using diverse perspectives to do so. Contributing Editors: Section 1: Voices from the Present and the Past: Nuraan Davids Section 2: Schools of Thought: Christiane Thompson and Joris Vlieghe Section 3: Revisiting Enduring Debates: Ann Chinnery, Naomi Hodgson, and Viktor Johansson Section 4: New Areas and Developments: Kai Horsthemke, Dirk Willem Postma, and Claudia Ruitenberg. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis introduction sets a framework for the special issue on Education and Hope which contains a selection of papers presented at the 16th Conference of the International Network of Philosophers of Education. It sketches the issue of how education and hope are closely intertwined notions. This introduction also gives an overview of the articles included in this issue and how they are thematically arranged. In a short conclusion the issue of hope is related to the issue of speed and slowness.

This article is part of a special issue which builds on Italo Calvino’s memos for the next millennium. More specifically, this paper gives an educational reading of the quality of exactitude. This quality is at the heart of what education is all about, viz. learning to give an adequate response to what things in the world demand of us – students and teachers. This demands the collective building of a capacity to see the world in the same way. Hence, an (...) education under the banner of exactitude is an education of the senses. It is argued for that such an education is an apt way to respond to the societal and ecological challenges we are increasingly faced with. This is made more concrete by fleshing out an alternative account of STEAM education. (shrink)

The background of the argument Joris Vlieghe develops in this article is the idea, proposed by neopragmatic scholars, that a way of aptly dealing with the societal issues that have come about in the wake of a global ecological crisis consists of engaging in practices of study. This involves thinking, a concept that needs to be reconsidered from an educational perspective. Hence the article turns to John Dewey's classical pragmatic account of thinking, so as to show that this (...) Deweyan approach could be enriched by reading it together with Giorgio Agamben's reflections on this matter. This allows for rendering with greater accuracy certain aspects of thinking that unearth its properly educational meaning: that thinking is necessarily a collective endeavor that is driven by an interruption of our habitual ways of living together with a view toward envisaging truly alternative futures. Thinking is a risky experience in which the foundational subject disappears. Such a view allows, furthermore, for the reconceptualization of thinking in a posthumanist key. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the educational value of raising the human body at school. Drawing inspiration from the work of Giorgio Agamben, I develop a new perspective that explores the possibility of taking the concept of physical education in a literal sense. This is to say that the specific educational content of physical education (in contradistinction to organized sporting life outside school) resides in its concentration on the physical ?as such?. This is not an obvious path to explore, because (...) defenders of physical education as a rule have to compete against the (dualist) prejudice that this discipline is merely an instrument to train the body or to keep it fit, and that it therefore should not be considered as a serious endeavour. Therefore, more often than not, apologists try to justify the relevance of physical education on the very ground that it is a practice that is concerned with something ?beyond? the merely physical that is at stake in movement activity. I argue, however, that this line of thought excludes the possibility of conceiving an alternative approach that relates the concentration on ?entirely physical? activities (as opposed to ?merely physical? activities) to an experience of potentiality. I develop this idea on the basis of an analysis of repetitive, rhythmical and collective body-exercise (e.g. running in a group or basic callisthenics). (shrink)

Why ask ‘what after post-modernism’? This question implies that postmodernism, as a grand narrative, recently withered away, that this is an event educators should be concerned with, and that it ca...

This article is concerned with the possibility of conceiving a form of social critique that has its locus in the human body. Therefore I engage in a close reading of the work of Butler which can be analysed as an elaboration of a Foucaldian critical ‘virtue’. In order to elaborate and to refine my ideas I go deeper into the criticisms McNay has uttered regarding the very impossibility of taking any distance from a given social or political order within a (...) Foucaldian–Butlerian framework. I show that there is no need to have recourse to a phenomenological perspective, as McNay claims, in order to achieve ‘critical distance’. On the contrary, I argue that it is imperative to explore a register of bodily experience that entails self-expropriation and which is linked to an attitude or ‘ethos’ that renounces any judgemental perspective. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this reply to Agbaria’s reflections on religious authority I first make a distinction between three forms of authority: theological, sociological and educational. Defending the need for a purely educational account of authority, I develop with Arendt a thing-centered approach towards education. This allows me to transcend the traditional opposition between teacher – and student-centered views in education. From this perspective I argue for making a further distinction, viz. between religious education and education about religion. I will defend the last (...) approach towards teaching about religion and conclude this reply by making some suggestions regarding what this teaching entails with reference to religious painting. (shrink)

In this introduction we give a short account of the general idea of the symposium dedicated to the idea of antifascist education. The point of departure of all three contributions is Tyson Lewis’ book ‘Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education: From Riddles to Radio (SUNY 2020). We turn attention to the way the idea of antifascist education is understood throughout Lewis’ book, as it avoids the danger of treating fascism as a touchstone for education through giving the account of the ways education (...) is antifascist as such. We conclude with the overview of the arguments presented by the contributors of the symposium. (shrink)

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)

This paper primarily aims at conceptualizing a new philosophical approach to literature education, one that we—in the vein of certain pedagogical trends—propose to call “thing-centered”. Point of departure is the ongoing confrontation with a two-sided educational problem: on the one hand, the confrontation with the steady decline of younger generations’ engagements with ‘classical’ literature; on the other hand, that with the unsatisfactory answers which either accept this development, in light of the world’s irresistible digitization, or try overcoming it through a (...) more student-centered, ‘biographical’ appropriation of literature. Beyond the more immediate didactical difficulties which this two-fold problem poses, we ask ourselves the question whether it is not time for a more fundamental renewal of our understanding of literature’s contemporary educational significance. In answering this question, for which we turn to such diverse authors as Rousseau, Deleuze and Calvino, it is argued that if education is to continue its care for both classical literacy and literary classics—and not so much against as in relation to ascending digital literacies—a more radically immanent, thing-centered perspective is likely to prove the most sustainable, in the sense of enabling truly new, ‘care-ful’ literary-educational practices to emerge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper we explore the possibility of rethinking the concept of emotional intelligence within the context of education. By developing a pedagogical dialogue with Michel Henry’s phenomenology of incarnation, we try to move beyond existing models of emotional intelligence by shifting the emphasis from the intellectual significance of emotion to a more original incarnate affectivity within intelligence, understood as lived sense-making. We claim that this ontological and ontogenetic perspective on emotion puts it at the heart of education. Yet only (...) because it evokes an understanding of education which is expressly non-functionalist: a disruptive, even dreadful event that marks the threshold and tension between what Henry terms Life and World. More than simply learning us to manage our emotions or recognize the value of experiences, emotional intelligence is about the very making of World out of Life, a Life that is at once radically subjective and communal. (shrink)

Ever since its publication in 1947, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus,1 his last major novel, has triggered many discussions and scholarly analyses. Evidently, the fictitious life story of Adrian Leverkühn, the genius composer who strikes an unsavory bargain with the devil, abounds in literary artifice and ingenuity, drawing to that end from a nigh bottomless reservoir of extremely variegated cultural references.2 Leaving out strictly literary analyses, most critical attention for Mann's version of the Faust myth is centered on its politico-aesthetical motifs—its (...) allegedly strong Nietzschean-Adornian bias.3 This is understandable, not only considering Mann's vocal interest in these philosophical traditions but also... (shrink)

Abstract:In this paper we reconceptualize general music education as a "classical music education," departing from speculative reflection on the notion of conducting. We constitute this notion as an interpretative axis connecting, on the one hand, a different perspective on what classical music might mean in the context of general education, and, on the other hand, a more dynamic, techno-ecological concept of both music and education. This paper develops these connections by thinking along with a concrete specimen of classical music in (...) the strict sense, Mahler's First Symphony, in order to show exactly how thinking about such works may actually take on an aspect that is classical in a more properly general educational sense. Beyond a dichotomy between aesthetical and praxial appraisals of the classical musical work, with their exclusive emphases on intelligible form and socio-critical praxis respectively, our idea of classical music education implies a dynamic (re)conducting of the works. Through practices of (re)conducting, music education can treat works, not as static monuments of eternal beauty or instances of socio-historical criticality, but as catalysts of self-differentiating, transhuman musical experiences—of playing, listening, composing, and thinking—in which human, instrumental, and other techno-ecological agencies mutually transform each other. (shrink)