Putting the pandemic on the table: what does this crisis reveal about the essence of education?

ABSTRACT

The period March 2020–March 2021 marks the time reference for this theoretical study as it denotes the initial surge of the Pandemic, where whole societies were destabilized by the ferocity of Covid-19. Within this context, I posit COVID-19 as a transforming event: one that exhausts worlds. Drawing from Jan Masschelein’s works on Arendt and the architecture of public education, the question at hand is how does Covid-19, as a transforming event, affect and change the very essence of education? I begin by comparing two definitions of crisis, Arendt’s notion of krisis, with philosopher Peter Pal Pelbart’s thinking around crisis, illness, and ‘exhaustion.’ I conclude by identifying an ‘inconsequential’ architectural space, a ‘spandrel.’ This spatial by-product, revealed during the Pandemic, is located within the very design of the ‘perfect’ public school, schole: the Arendtian ‘table.’ This spandrel aligns with Fernand Deligny’s ‘primordial communism.’

KEYWORDS:

• Pandemic
• essence of education
• Jan masschelein
• primordial communism
• Fernand deligny

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The concept of a ‘world’ I draw from the chapter, ‘The Ontological Structure of Everyday History-Making,’ by C Spinosa, F. Flores, and H Dreyfus, (1997). Drawing their inspiration from Heidegger, Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus explain, ‘A world for Heidegger has three characteristics. It is a totality of interrelated pieces of equipment … to carry out a specific task … these tasks are undertaken to have a specific purpose … finally this purposive activity enables those performing it to have certain identities’ (author’s emphasis, 17). Masschelein and Simon’s public classroom (2010) is Heideggerian a world: i.e. an architectural space with a meaningful sense of what constitutes its equipment (e.g. the table), defines its purpose (as putting the object on the table to freely study it), and names the identities of its community (the teacher and students ‘freely’ studying around the table).

2. As Stephen Jay Gould (1997) explains, the spandrel is an architectural term used ‘to designate the class of forms and spaces that arise as necessary byproducts of another decision in design, and not as an adaptations for direct utility in themselves’ (10750).

3. To capture a significance of this spandrel, a conceptual and perceptual shift is required in our thinking about education’s essence. This shift in our perception amounts to allowing for a Gestalt shift in the interpretation of architecture around the table. Hence, given the Gestalt switching the spandrel is said to both exist and not exist at the same time, i.e. the appearance of the spandrel is dependent on perception’s Gestalt shift, where this shift in perception is similar to the quantum effect called a ‘superposition’ (see Carroll 2019, 34–38), so to speak, where an electron is not located until measured by an observer, i.e. the electron is both here and not here at the same time.