Session Information
13 SES 11, A Plea for Potentialism in Education
Symposium
Contribution
The working hypothesis of this paper is that educational philosophy has been privileging actuality over and against potentiality. Beginning with Plato's Meno (2010), we see that education concerns the drawing out of what is already existing within the student. Thus we cannot really learn anything new. The teacher can merely make explicit the knowledge which the student always already knows. Thus, what is actual (the implicit knowledge we carry with us) determines in advance that which is possible. This privileging of what is actual as the determining factor for education carries through much of educational philosophy and comes to take many various forms. In phenomenological education, as espoused by Merleau-Ponty (2012), one can only learn what the body always already knows in advance of our conscious recognition. In critical pedagogy, there is the assumption that one can only learn what is determined in advance by one's position within the social relations of production or by one's ontological vocation (as with Freire). And in progressivism, as Gert Biesta (2014) has recently pointed out, constructivism can never expose the student to anything outside of their existing world, interests, and desires. In all cases, the inheritance of Plato is clear: learning concerns the always already. It is a repetition of what is actually existing thrown into relief, brought to conscious thought, turned into a vocation, and so forth. Yet there are dangers associated with actualism in education which these positions do not adequately address. First, there is the danger of determinism. It is my contention that racism is always a form of actualism wherein the potential of the individual to be otherwise is reduced to their actual skin colour. The second danger is developmentalism. When one starts from the point of what is actual, then such actuality is not negated by developed through learning so as to become manifest to itself (in Hegel's language, more determinant). The problem here is not so much discrimination (as with the first danger) but with the erasure of the contingency of existence. Instead of the potential to be otherwise than, we have nothing less than a pure necessity: things must be such and such a way. A critique of actualism thus opens up the space to think the beginning of educational practice free from what is actual, and returns us to the question of what could be otherwise, what remains in potential.
References
- Biesta, G. (2014). The beautiful risk of education. Boulder (CO): Paradigm. - Plato (2010). Meno (Alex Long, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Merleau-Ponty. M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception (D.A. Landes, Trans.). Oxford: Routledge.
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