This paper rethinks the fostering task of the teacher in a time when it, paradoxically, has tended to become marginalized and privatized despite its public urgency. Following post-holocaust thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, the position explored here is radical in the sense that it takes ‘the crisis of traditions’ and the erosion of a common moral ground or value basis seriously, and it is conservative in the sense that it insists on responding educationally to the call from (...) the past by returning to the moral character of our existence and our own embeddedness in the incompleteness of living traditions. The argument is that there is a difference between educating for common values—which entails a belief in pre-existing commonalities—and making values common in and through education. The latter, we argue, entails an aspiration for continuously creating new commonalities and for cultivating the ability to act and judge as a thinking moral agent in specific, lived and worldly cases. In this sense, the fostering task of the teacher is to create commonality of what is not common, turning the liberal democratic values of the past into contested objects of study. (shrink)

In a time of cultural pluralism and legitimation crisis, there is an increasing uncertainty among teachers in Sweden about with what right they are fostering other people's children. What does it mean to teach ‘common values’ to the coming generation? How do teachers find legitimacy and authority for this endeavour, not as family members or as politicians, but as teachers? To respond to this uncertainty, the paper takes the public/private distinction as a starting-point for rethinking the place of the school. (...) Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and of Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, it argues that the school is an in-between place—a place that transforms values into ‘common goods’ and turns fostering into a teaching matter. The overall purpose of the paper is to sketch out the consequences of this ‘in-betweenness’ for what it means to find one's voice as a teacher in fostering the coming generation. (shrink)

Inspired by Adriana Cavarero’s recent work on maternal inclinations as a postural term, the overall purpose of this article is to seek out a geometry of the educational relation that is alien to the masculine myth of the ‘economic man’. Drawing on Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’s critique of the marketization of education, reading their giving ‘shape and form’ to the scholastic school through the geometry of Cavarero’s ‘maternal inclinations’, the article shows how images and metaphors associated with the posture (...) of rectitude infuse the scholastic model of the school. At the same time, we argue, it testifies to a geometry of an inclined subject and, in doing so, it offers an opening for recovering the significance of the feminine and maternal to educational theory. Affirming this opening, the paper makes a shift of emphasis from scholastic techniques to educational postures. (shrink)

In recent years, there have been reports about increased religious discrimination in schools. As a way of acknowledging the importance of religion and faith communities in the public sphere and to propose a solution to the exclusion of religious citizens, the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas suggests an act of translation for which both secular and religious citizens are mutually responsible. What gets lost in Habermas’s translation, this paper argues, is the condition that makes translation both necessary and (im)possible. Drawing on (...) Walter Benjamin’s notion of the mysterious untranslatable and the task of the translator, the paper approaches translation as an ethical process involving risk, asymmetry and uncertainty. Not knowing where this risk will lead, the paper takes the ethical ambivalence at play in Jacques Derrida’s notion of the untranslatable and explores this in relation to religious difference in education. It argues that the untranslatable needs to be acknowledged in terms of a respect for difference and a limit to narration, if students with religious convictions are not to be further violated in schools. (shrink)

Taking its point of departure in the connotations to war and violence inherent in what is here called the ‘language of crisis’, the purpose of this article is to explore what it might mean to reassess the language of educational change and policy reform in the imagery of natality and birth. If the task in a ‘crisis’ is to fi ght against the crisis, eff ectively and forcefully, the argument of the paper is that the root metaphors of natality and (...) birth puts into play an imagery that makes possible a relational language for educational change and reform. If the language we use has performative consequences, the question explored is what a ‘language of natality’ can make possible as a language of struggle for education. (shrink)

Special Issue in Ethics & EducationPedagogical Forms in Times of PandemicWith the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in the Spring 2020, campus life came to a halt. In many places all over the world, p...

This paper is a response to Jan Masschelein’s keynote lecture. Taking its point of departure in a befriended support of his argument, the paper begins in the mood of affirmation as a form of critique. Thereafter it engages, first, with what it reads as a slightly retrotopian approach to digitalization in the paper. Second, it brings to attention that the gesture of rejuvenation and regeneration, which Masschelein suggests, always involves a moment of return or repetition. The question is asked what (...) form the gesture of retrieving inherited pedagogical forms from the past takes in Masschelein’s proposal, and it is suggested that such retrieving is a work of constant translation. Third, a comment is made about the advocating of orature, issuing the reminder that on-campus education usually comes without noise reduction, that is, it requires reflection also on the discord that is calibrated in and through our voices. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.