Session Information
13 SES 06 A, Free Schools, the Third Term, and the Body
Paper Session
Contribution
The naturalization of the economic rationality in education and its consequences such as managerization, accountability and focus on employability of learning results, provides philosophers of education with a difficult task. On the one hand, according to G. Biesta, the key issue is to ask anew a forgotten but fundamental question about the meaning of good education (Biesta, 2010). On the other, the task seems to lie in providing educational researchers with an alternative language, thus making them capable of transcending the dominant rationality. In this second perspective we try to establish the conditions of possibility of imagining a reality exterior to the dominant system (Masschelein, 1998), while at the same time making it capable of resisting the inclusive tendencies of the logic of capital (Badiou, 1997). The main issues in this perspective are: the process of instrumentalization of schools vis-à-vis the external economic, political and social aims (Masschelein & Simmons, 2013); technologization of the educational goals and results (Biesta, 2014); contractualization of educational relations (Masschelein & Simmons, 2008; Biesta, 2006), and last but not least, a domination of the language of competence and development (Biesta, 2014).
Those elements not only shape the ways in which schools function, but also subject the individuals’ identity to the economic logic, organizing the ways they think about their lives, forming their imagination, and imposing a certain norm of what is seen as a ‘proper’ educational choice (Masschelein & Simmons, 2008). Unfortunately, all attempts of transcending this economized perspective by individual emancipatory projects are doomed to failure. Either because they are based on instrumental logic of self-betterment (which is the same logic that is criticized in the economized perspective) (Masschelein, 2004), or, because they propose alternatives that are grounded in the conservative, hierarchical structure of educational relations (Rancière, 1991).
I argue that to construct a new language of education we need to abandon the „subjective paradigm” of change, with subjects playing the parts of emancipators or the emancipated. Philosophy of education should be focused on the elements that are, in a radical way, exterior to the system. This external mediator between the status quo and its negation, and in the case of education, between the two constitutive elements of pedagogical relation – the teacher and the pupil, cannot be reduced to the dominant rationality or its opposites, but is something forgotten/excluded/absent and at the same time rich in transformative potential.
This pedagogy of the „third term” or pedagogy of mediation, is focused on the mediator (event, thing, world) that dispossess of existing identities and forms subjects in entirely new ways.
At the core of my proposition lies A. Badiou’s philosophy of “material dialectic” (Badiou, 2009). Badiou suggests a widening of the dichotomy between the being and the world by establishing a relation with a third element – the event, which suspends everyday rationality and marks the beginning of something new.
The concept of the pedagogy of the „third term” is also based on theories of philosophers such as J. Ranciere, B. Latour, and the pedagogical ideas of J. Dewey, and P. Freire. The main aim of my presentation is to define the concept of the third term, and show its potential in the creation of new educational language, and the alternative way of organizing educational practice.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Biesta, G. (2010). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy. Paradigm Publishers. Masschelein, J. (1998). How to imagine something exterior to the system: Critical education as problematization. Educational theory, 48(4), 521-530. Badiou, A. (1997). Saint Paul: The foundation of universalism. Stanford University Press. Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2013). In defence of the school. A public issue. TStorme. Biesta, G. (2014). The beautiful risk of education. Paradigm. Simons, M., & Masschelein, J. (2008). The governmentalization of learning and the assemblage of a learning apparatus. Educational Theory, 58(4), 391-415. Biesta, G. (2006). Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future. Paradigm Publishers, PO Box 605, Herndon, VA 20172-0605. Masschelein, J. (2004). How to conceive of critical educational theory today?. Journal of philosophy of education, 38(3), 351-367. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Badiou, A. (2009). Logics of worlds: Being and event II (Vol. 2). Bloomsbury Publishing. Todd, S. (2010, March). Pedagogy as transformative event: Becoming singularly present in context. In PESGB conference, Oxford.
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