Against School: Thinking Education Differently

Description

This book invites the reader to think education against, beyond and without the school and its paraphernalia. To think about ‘education’, rather than schooling, and what kind of education is relevant to and needed now in the complex, difficult and dangerous world we live in. That invitation means testing our limits, questioning and changing ourselves and thinking the practice of education differently. The book is not about tinkering, improving, reforming – it about clearing away the detritus of the school and using the space created to explore education as self-formation and commoning. It will be of interest to scholars and graduate students of alternative education, schooling, educational policy and philosophy, and the sociology of education. Acknowledgements Contents About the Authors 1 The Limit Attitude: Becoming Foreign to Ourselves There Is No Alternative Neoliberalism Universalism Thinking Education Differently: Testing Our Limits Tools for Thinking Education Differently About the Book References 2 Giving Up on Hope and Embracing Despair: Putting Sociology in Its Place Giving Up on Hope Doing What Comes Naturally Take Life, Let Live Sociology, the Teacher, and the State An Opaque Complicity Critique References 3 Questioning the Sociology of Education: An Archaeology of Social Relations Epistemic Exclusions Methodology Matriarchal Societies and Commons-Based Societies: Critical Elements of Each Pre-Modern Episteme The Matriarchal Episteme The Modern Epistemic Bias Contrasted with the Matriarchal Episteme The Commons-Based Society The Episteme of the Commons The Modern Epistemic Bias in Contrast to the Episteme of the Commons Questioning (Statistical) Normality Questioning Analytical Perspectives Questioning Patriarchal Hierarchy Conclusion References 4 The Impossibility of the School: An Epistemological Critique Introduction: Discomforts with the Modern School The Problem Is School Itself The Modernist Truth of Schooling Against and Beyond School Unthinking Education Conclusion References 5 A Sustainable Life Beyond School: A Different Episteme for Education Introduction Mass Modern Schools and Life Continuance Some Possibilities for Thinking Education Differently The Formation and Enactment of Practices Within the School Presumes a Pre-eminent Individuality Rather Than a Recognition of Community The School as a Non-place and Decontextualised Institution Schools Against the Common (Good) Commoning Education as Self-Formation Commoning as Self-Formation? The Care of the Self and Others Conclusion References 6 Education and Social Infrastructures: Facing Up to Extinction Ethics Introduction Schools as Enclosures Trying a New Episteme for Education Social Infrastructures Opening ‘the Possibility of the Impossible’; Common(ing) Education Prolepsis Conclusion References 7 The ‘Problem’ of the ‘Teacher’: Pedagogy’ as the Theatre of Subject Formation Unfreezing Relations of Power The Teacher as an Epistemological Problem A Teacher Who Is Not ‘Mired in the School’ (Smyth et al., 2003) Education as ‘How Not to Be Governed’ The Ethics of Life Continuance over and Against the Ethics of Extinction: Education as a Space of Heterotopia Conclusions References 8 (Without) Conclusions: Making Up an Ecological Subject Rage Modern Education as Part of the Enclosures Project The Practice of Freedom as an Ethical/Aesthetic Endeavour That Must Be Learned An Ecological Subjectivity for a Different Education The Politics of the Governed: A New ‘Ontological Politics’ A Commoning Approach for a Different Education (Non) Conclusions References Index