The proliferation of digital devices in educational settings has contributed to the decentralization of knowledge from teachers and established textbooks to fluid online personalized resources, and from blackboards as spaces of materialization of this knowledge to personal screens. In this new constellation, school practices such as reading,…

In 2016 Bruno Latour delivered a lecture at Cornell University in which he responded to what he called the actual situation of disorientation and (literal) lack of common ground by offering some "hints for a neo-Humboldtian university." One hint he offered was that we should consider pedagogy as the frontline for staging an approach to…

In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its "old-fashioned" pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their…

Inspired by Hannah Arendt, this contribution offers an exercise of thought as an attempt to distil anew the original spirit of what education means. It tries to articulate the event or happening that the word names, the experiences in which this happening manifests itself and the (material) forms that constitute it or make it find/take (its)…

Against the background of the many attacks on the school as being outdated, alienating, ineffective and reproducing inequalities we offer a morphological understanding of the school as distinguished from functionalist understandings (sociological or economical perspectives in terms of functions and roles) and idealistic understandings…

Starting from a distinction between a critical and an ascetic tradition in philosophy and taking into account their different stances towards the present, the article proposes a practice of philosophy of education within the ascetic tradition. In this tradition, the work of philosophy is in the first place a work on the self--that is,…

Starting from a Foucaultian perspective, the article draws attention to current developments that neutralise democracy through the "governmentalisation of democracy" and processes of "governmental subjectivation". Here, ideas of Ranciere are introduced in order to clarify how democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of "political…

As a response to "Le Fils," a film directed by the Dardenne brothers, we explore the idea of speaking as an invitation and juxtapose it against ideas of speaking as a transactional, calculative, calibrated, activity. Speaking tends to be understood as a relatively straightforward matter: as a means of communication structured by such values as the…

This article takes up a text that Ranciere published shortly after "The Ignorant School Master" appeared in French, "Ecole, production, egalite" ["School, Production, Equality"] (1988), in which he sketched the school as being preeminently the place of equality. In this vein, and opposed to the story of the school as the place where inequality is…

This article explores how universities can function as spaces where a world citizenship takes shape. First, Kant's distinction between the "private use of reason" and "domestic gathering", on the one hand, and the "public use of reason" and "public gathering", on the other, is elucidated. This distinction is used, secondly, to argue that the…

Background/Context: The article reflects on the public role of education on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Hannah Arendt's essay, "The Crisis in Education" and in facing the current transformation of public policy into "new public management." Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Based on Arendt's essay,…

Schools and classrooms, as well as the work place and the Internet, are considered today as learning "environments". People are regarded as learners and the main target of school education has become "learning" pupils and students how to learn. The roles of teachers and lecturers are redefined as instructors, designers of (powerful) learning…

In this essay, Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein reconsider the concepts "educationalization" and "the grammar of schooling" in the light of the overwhelming importance of "learning" today. Doubting whether these concepts and related historical-analytical perspectives are still useful, the authors suggest the concept "learning apparatus" as a…

Following Foucault, "critique" could be regarded as being the art not to be governed in this way or as a project of desubjectivation. In this paper it is shown how such a project could be described as an e-ducative practice. It explores this idea through an example which Foucault himself gave of such a critical practice: the writing (and reading)…

The increasing emphasis on participation in education offers the starting point for this paper. Participation appears to be a strategic notion in a particular problematisation of education: this is installed through certain ways of speaking and writing (discourse) and through certain procedures, instruments and techniques that are proposed and…