Session Information
13 SES 05 A, Teacher and Teaching
Paper Session
Contribution
We are currently living in the learning society. In it, the ideal citizens are eternal learners who, because they have to live in a world that changes at a dizzying pace, must subject themselves to continuous re-training to stave off the permanent threat of their own obsolescence. As a corpus of expert knowledge on education, pedagogy may have been overly quick to accept a social project with the word “learning” in its name, as if that were enough to warrant the educational dimension of that project. For that matter, some philosophers of education refuse outright to reduce education to “learning” and the subsequent hardships of the “learning society” in education. These philosohers are, among others, Jan Masschelein and Marteen Simons, who recover the essence of the Greek concept “scholé”, in contrast to the modern school, which has been reduced to a “learning environment” (2013) ; Tyson Lewis, who highlights the educational dimension of “study” in a pedagogical context ruled by learnification (2013); Joris Vlieghe looks into school traditional forms of practising together and in a repetitive manner that suspend the concrete outcome pursued by learning strategies (2011). The present research takes that same critical tack, and, as such, it is leaded by the following research question: What alternative to learning can be suggested, from the field of Philosophy of Education?
The main objective of this research is to provide further thought to the concept of aprendizaje, in Spanish, orapprentissage, in French, a concept which has two possible translations in English: ‘learning’ or ‘apprenticeship’. This research defines itself in particular as a tentative second look at aprendizaje, but this time in terms of “apprenticeship” rather than of “learning.” However, apprenticeship conjures up images of a training period, and thus of the working world. Furthermore, it has been criticized that the language of skills and competencies is taken directly from the domain of vocational training. Thus, this concept of apprenticeship does not seem to be the best candidate for being considered as an alternative to “learnification”. Nevertheless, as I will attempt to show in this paper, apprenticeship unfolds an educational dimension that clashes with the de-formative project of the “learning society”.
In order to look into the concept “apprenticeship”, I have examined Étienne Boileau’s Livre des Métiers (1879), the first collected edition of regulations of most of the crafts and trades in the city of Paris, published in the thirteenth century. Being the first major document of labor law, it set the standard in France and inspired some other european countries for more than five centuries. The Livre des Métiers provides a good reflection of what apprenticeship meant in those days: the period of training one had to undergo in order to enter a trade. There is a very clear reason why the matter of apprenticeship holds such an important place in the guildsmen’s statutes: the Livre des Métiers is insistent on the idea that the products must be “made well” and that apprenticeship is a way to ensure such “well-done work”. This is one of the main differences with learnification, in words of Gert Biesta (2005), which aims to “have things done” in a short time, not necessarily in a good way. In this paper, I attempt to explore this among other differences between apprenticeship and learning, drawing on certain texts of our European philosophical tradition, such important as Plato’s Meno (2004) and Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1994).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Boileau, É. (1879). Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris : XIIIe siècle. Le livre des métiers d'Étienne Boileau. R. de Lespinasse y F. Bonnardot (Eds.) Paris: Imprimerie Nationale. Recuperado de: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k110190t/f1.image Biesta, G. (2005). Against learning. Reclaiming a language for education in an age of learning. Nordisk Pedagogik, 25 (1), 54-66. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and repetition, London, The Athlone Press. Lewis, T. (2013). On Study: Giorgio Agamben and educational potentiality. London & New York: Routledge. Masschelein, J. y Simons, M. (2013). In defence of the school. A public issue. Leuven: E-ducation, Culture & Society Publishers. Plato (2004). Meno. Oxford: Oxbow books. Ruitenberg, C. (2009). Distance and defamiliarisation: Translation as philosophical method. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43 (3), 421-435. Sennett, R. (2000). The corrosion of character. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Sennett, R. (2009). The Craftsman. London: Penguin. Vlieghe, J. (2013). Experiencing (im)potentiality. Bollnow and Agamben on the educational meaning of school practices. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32 (2), 189-203.
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