Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in securing the common good. The common good is never what individuals or particular groups want or desire, but always reaches beyond such particular (...) desires towards that which societies as a whole should consider as desirable. This does, of course, put the common good in tension with the desires of individuals and groups. Neo-liberal modes of governance have, over the past decades, put this particular educational set up under pressure and have, according to some, eroded the very idea of the common good. This set of contributions reflects on this state of affairs, partly through an exploration of the idea of publicness itself – how it can be rearticulated and regained – and partly through reflections on the current state of education in the ‘north’ and the ‘south.’. (shrink)

This study locates what is happening to teachers' work in the global economy. Two case studies show how teachers are simultaneously experiencing significant changes to their work, and responding in ways that actively shape these process.

In this article we engage with and against Foucault's provocation to think about diagrams of subjectivation. With Foucault we take up his meditation on spirituality and propose a Buddhist alternative to Greco-Roman technologies of self. Against Foucault's notion of an ‘arts of existence’ we suggest instead ‘cultivation of virtue’, drawing on, as an example, a famous Buddhist meditation on compassion. We conclude the article by proposing rethinking doctoral supervision in terms of a cultivation of virtue.

This paper assumes that educators are now involved in a struggle for their souls and for the souls of their students. The idea of the soul in this case is not the religious one, but the soul invoked by Foucault to name that aspect of self, that ‘exists, or is produced … within the body … or born … out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint’. Neoliberalising social policy not only aims to transform structures and enact new technologies of (...) control but also involves the transformation of values and cultures, and hence the formation of new subjectivities. With that in mind this paper argues for an education understood as experiments with alternative modalities of self-formation that are responsive to the key challenges of our times. The paper experiments with as aphoristic style and hence is structured through six fragments that provide various takes on this problematic, including: an autobiographical moment; a brief rendering of Foucault’s genealogy of the relationship between truth and the subject; Hadot’s genealogy of philosophy; various definitions of spirituality; and an account of Buddhist epistemology that distinguishes knowing and realization. The paper concludes by arguing for a Buddhist inspired pedagogy that is defined in terms of the relationships between teacher, student and realization. From such a perspective, it is not identity work that is the ethico-political project of our times, but of learning how to quite literally get free of our self. (shrink)