In this essay, which is a response to five papers on Heidegger and education but can also be read independently, I argue that it is only when we introduce the German distinction between "Bildung" and "Erziehung" that it becomes possible to discuss in sufficient detail the possibilities and limitations of a Heideggerian account…

Rabelaian carnivalesque provided philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin with a means of exploring the significance of humour through an examination of Middle Age peasant culture and the influence of the Renaissance on its legitimacy. This article argues that a similar phenomenon exists in modern educational settings and provides evidence to suggest that very…

This article draws on Hannah Arendt's analysis of authority in education, along with her insights into the workings of the imagination and the thinking process, to argue that participation in education should be conceived as an invitation to become towards the world. The potential of this invitation, the article argues, is located in the…

In this article, I argue that Paulo Freire's liberatory conception of education is interesting, challenging, even transforming because central to it are important aspects of education which other philosophers marginalise. I also argue that Freire's critics are right when they claim that he paid insufficient attention to another important aspect of…

The notion of a community of inquiry has been treated by many of its proponents as being an exemplar of democracy in action. We argue that the assumptions underlying this view present some practical and theoretical difficulties, particularly in relation to distribution of power among the members of a community of inquiry. We identify two…

Badiou's philosophy of the "event" has itself become an event of sorts for contemporary social and political theory. It has broken radically with a set of propositions concerning the operation of power, the status of knowledge, and the possibility of action that were for some time considered nearly unquestionable, in many ways defining what Badiou…

Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) write that "the greatness of philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts" (p. 34). The author finds this one of those provocative Deleuzian statements that seems straightforward but is best considered askew. If one goes after it…

Michel Foucault sought to understand how and why it is that people in the West, in their arduous and incessant search for truth, have also built into and around themselves intricate and powerful systems intended to manage all that they know and do. While little of Foucault's work directly concerns itself with the historically recent phenomenon of…

In this article, the authors deal with the question whether the concept of "Bildung" or "cultivation/edification" is still a concept which one can use to analyse and criticise actual developments in the field of education (both in thought/discourse and in action/technique) which are themselves related to broader social transformations often…

Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony--not so much a theory of domination as a theory of the manufacturing of commonsense--offers a way to break into the myth of leadership as always already tied to practices of domination. His complex accounting of leadership's "necessary" relationship to the pedagogic and hegemonic constitute an…