Bewildering Education

Abstract

Theorists as diverse as Plato, Rousseau, Freire, Apple, and the New London Group have understood education as a practice that “makes” humans. Positing education as a practice of humanization has long been understood to be the highest, most lofty good. By drawing on feminism, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies, the author of this article argues that when it is understood as a practice of humanization, education is always at least virtually capable of dehumanization. Far from being the highest possible aim of education, subordinating pedagogy to humanization radically limits its scope and potential. Recent posthumanist scholarship reveals that the human is not simply a being that is, but a social construction formed and defined in relation to various non-human Others. Without these inhuman Others, “the human” could not be defined, let alone made into the dominant subject of global politics. In the final section, the author proposes an alternative theory of education that breaks with more than 2000 years of educational philosophy. The author calls it “bewildering education” since it does not seek pre-determined ends (the production of “humans”) but rather sets out to move away from this political subject without deciding in advance what its “end” will be.

Notes

1. I wish to thank Kyle Greenwalt and the four anonymous reviewers at Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy for extensive and incisive comments on earlier versions of this text. All remaining errors and lacunae are entirely my own.

2. This conception is not unique to critical pedagogy, however. As I discuss below with reference to the New London Group's work in literacy studies, prevailing pedagogical practices also aim for the production of “the human,” even when they do so implicitly.

3. As I discuss below, many posthumanists use the adjective “posthuman” to refer to an age, condition, or body. As I use the term, it means something more conceptual and less empirical. There are a number of posthumanist thinkers—Spinoza and Nietzsche come to mind—who wrote about getting beyond the human before the rise of cybernetics, computers, and other central concerns for many posthumanists. See also Snaza (in press).

4. Emile: “Forced to combat nature or the social institutions, one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time” (p. 39). In the chapter of Homo sacer “Biopolitics and the Rights of Man,” Agamben (1998) zeroes in on this same distinction: “In the phrase La déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, it is not clear whether the two terms homme and citoyen name two autonomous beings or instead a unitary system in which the first is always included in the second. And if the latter is the case, the kind of relation that exists between homme and citoyen still remains unclear” (pp. 126–127). Later in the chapter, Agamben links this “unclear” distinction to the “totalitarian” states of the mid-twentieth century (p. 130).

5. In the chapter of Democracy and education (1916) titled “The Democratic Conception in Education,” John Dewey very clearly explains the differences among these three thinkers when it comes to how they view schooling in relation to society.

6. The relation here between literacy, “the human,” and recognition is complex. Rather than elaborate here, I am pursuing this problem in a separate essay.

7. Freire: “For the oppressors, ‘human beings' refers only to themselves; other people are ‘things'” (p. 57).

8. This is, of course, a view shared by both Hegel (with his Master/Slave) and Marx (with his Bourgeoisie/Proletariat).

9. Freire takes this postcolonial notion of the “new man” from the final pages of Fanon's (1963) The wretched of the Earth: “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man” (p. 316).

10. Here, Freire borrows directly from Hegel: “Strictly speaking, ‘here,' ‘now,' ‘there,' ‘tomorrow,' and ‘yesterday' do not exist for the animal, whose life, lacking self-consciousness, is totally determined. Animals cannot surmount the limits imposed by the ‘here,' the ‘now,' or the ‘there'” (Freire, p. 99). In Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1969), we read: “Human Desire, therefore, must win out over this desire for preservation. In other words, man's humanity ‘comes to light' only if he risks his (animal) life for the sake of his human Desire… [A]ll human, anthropogenetic Desire—the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, the human reality—is, finally, a function of the desire for ‘recognition'” (p. 7). For more on Freire's differentiation of human and animal see Roberts (2000), pp. 41–43.

11. It is well-known that such rights are only imperfectly applied.