Staging the Crisis: Teaching, Capital, and the Politics of the Subject

Abstract

This article proposes a philosophical reconstruction of the subject of the educator as the agent of curriculum. Starting from recent work in critical theory and philosophy, it describes the process of the existential crisis of the educator as the first step toward a truly critical education. The article argues that philosophy of curriculum must be concerned not just with forms of thought but also with forms of being—with the very ground of the subject and its real. This political ontology of the subject suggests a process of reconstruction consisting of several stages: the disclosure of ideology and complicity, the investigation of the process of interpellation, and the creation of a fundamentally collective educational practice. It is only on the basis of the effective staging of this crisis at the heart of the teaching subject that a meaningful critical pedagogy and curriculum can be articulated. The article concludes with a description of the outlines of such a critical education, as they emerge through the process of reconstruction described above.

Notes

Notes

1 In this sense, we should recognize that the zealously “scientific” school leaders and researchers that Tyack (1974) calls “administrative progressives” are in their own way also true representatives of the progressive moment, not simply its false prophets.

2 The Althusserian tradition, both in its loyalties and departures from Althusser’s original insights, has provided the most interesting of these interventions.

3 This is why Freire’s central concern in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1997b) is with the crisis of revolutionary leadership, and only after that, with the dialectics of subject and object at the level of the consciousness of the oppressed.

4 On this basis, Noddings (1992, 2003) consistently defends a form of curriculum differentiation that would deny many children “traditional academic preparation.”