Widespread popular discourse, at the time of writing, is centring on the capabilities of AI technologies, among others, in utilising the readily available mass of data to augment claimed educational problems. These positions often elide the unobjective nature of algorithms and the socio-politically infused assemblages of data available, situated within the neoliberalist scientism dominating educational policy discourse. The simplicity with which datafication treats education has led to a global culture of data-driven techno-rationality that affords ultra-rapid forms of free-floating control settled (...) on an ideology of dataism. Dataism rests on the assumption that sociality and subjectification can be reduced to quantifiable data whereby the student rather than being treated as a subject comes to be treated as data doppelganger. The injustices inherent in datafication and its associated epistemes ignore hidden neoliberal inequalities and maintain the insidious coloniality inherent in advanced capitalism, while simultaneously fuelling the rapid and cyclical stripping of purpose from education itself. There is a need to problematise the hidden logics of coloniality that are both maintained and reproduced within the datafication agenda. The current article draws on decolonial theory to animate the logics of datafication through a Deleuzian reading, situated within the learnification of neoliberal education. (shrink)

The aim of education is a key question; in a certain sense it is a traditional question — viewed by some as a given. Indeed, perhaps because it appears to be self-evident, it has long since ceased to be a focus, with a number of undesirable consequences. Education invariably remains an action that is explicitly or implicitly imbued with intentionality, but if it loses sight of its goals (or, worse still, does not acknowledge them expressively), it risks becoming ethically and (...) politically ambiguous, if not downright corrupted or distorted. (shrink)

Over the last decade, there has been a growing consensus, including in Italy, that it makes sense to provide an objectively measurable empirical basis for educational policies and practices in order to escape from the uncertainty of practices based on individual experience or subjective values. The quantification of the social sphere, the “metric society” (Mau, 2019), and data-driven models of governance have led not only to “learnification”, a culture of performativity and standardised testing as the dominant model (Biesta, 2010), (...) but also to a loss of future-oriented visions as these latter are overwhelmed by statistical models of anticipation. The main aim of this paper is to critique the post-positivist epistemological assumptions of so-called Evidence Based Education as well as the neoliberal organisational models whose indiscriminate application to professionals in education robs these roles of professionalism. Secondly, based on the recent UNESCO report on the “Futures of Education”, it intends to discuss the dimension of the future as a key direction of meaning for educational policies and practices, held up as an alternative to anticipatory governance models (Robertson, 2022). (shrink)

Learning and development are well established as concepts in educational psychology. Gert Biesta has used terms such as “learnification” and “developmentalism” to describe a tendency that, in his view, removes existential qualities from teaching and education. Although important in the right contexts, the concepts do not represent the core of what education should be about, he claims. Jostein Sæther notes that in many ways he shares Biesta's view on the most fundamental quality of education, i.e., helping young people exist (...) as independent subjects in confrontation with their own will, responsibility, and freedom. In this paper, he addresses the overarching question of whether it is possible and desirable to think educationally about psychology in educational theory, specifically through relating Biesta's critique to selected handbooks, reviews, and metaliterature. Sæther does not propose integrating educational psychology into Biesta's existential theory but rather hopes to open a dialogue on different points of view that challenge each other in fruitful ways. The process of discussing certain principles, problems, and examples should yield a certain kind of “unclean” educational psychology, one that is relevant to “subjectification.” There are problems related to eclecticism and the tension between essence and existence, yet, in this context, Sæther sees a dialogical project as the only way forward. (shrink)

In recent decades, the shift towards the “learnification” of educational discourse has de facto reframed educational purposes and schooling practice, thus reframing what students should know, strive for, and, in a sense, be. In this paper, given the efforts to disrupt the dominance of learning discourse, I seek to engage regarding a specific concern, namely, the progressive removal of imagination within educational official framework. Indeed, imagination has virtually disappeared from the documents, publications, web pages and recommendations of major educational (...) agencies and institutions worldwide, with important and potentially damaging consequences for schooling, teaching and learning. Employing a Deweyan perspective, I argue that imagination plays a crucial role in the creation of pivotal educational features and phenomena, such as knowledge, inquiry, choice and deliberation, critical agency, meaning creation, and, importantly, the openness of possibilities. Therefore, the eclipse of imagination becomes, at the very same time, the eclipse of education; nurturing imagination is about nurturing education. (shrink)

Is physical presence an essential aspect of a rich educational experience? Can forms of virtual encounter achieve engaged and sustained education? Technophiles and technophobes might agree that authentic personal engagement is educationally normative. They are more likely to disagree on how authentic engagement is best achieved. This article argues that educational thinking around digital pedagogy unhelpfully reinforces this polarising debate by failing to recognise that digitalisation is, as Stiegler has argued, pharmacological: both a poison and a cure. I suggest that (...) Biesta’s critique of learnification can be applied to online learning, but that any such application does not sufficiently acknowledge the pharmacological nature of modern technology. While Stiegler has something important to contribute on the relation between technology, attention and education, I suggest his account is rather too bound up with critical theories of technology. In the end I turn to philosophers of religion, such as Eliade and Smith to suggest different ways of conceiving the role of attention in education that does set technologies up over/against the formation of attention essential to education. (shrink)

A defining aspect of our modern age is our tenacious belief in technology in all walks of life, not least in education. It could be argued that this infatuation with technology or ‘techno-philia’ in education has had a deep impact in the classroom changing the relationship between teacher and student, as well as between students; that is, these relations have become increasingly more I–It than I–Thou based because the capacity to form bonds, the level of connectedness between teacher and students, (...) and between students has either decreased or become impaired by the increasing technologisation of education. Running parallel to this and perhaps exacerbating the problem is the so-called process of ‘learnification’, which understands that teachers are mere facilitators of the learning process, rather than someone with an expertise who has something to teach others. In this article, I first assess the current technologisation of education and the impact it has had in relations within the classroom; second, I characterise Buber’s I–It and I–Thou relations and its implications for education; finally, I investigate through a thought experiment if the development of AI could 1 day successfully replace human teachers in the classroom. (shrink)

There has been a shift from teaching to learning, the so-called process of ‘learnification’, which promotes the idea that teaching should be primarily concerned with the creation of rich learning environments and scaffolding student learning. In doing so, this process of ‘learnification’ has also attacked the idea that teachers have something to teach and that students have something to learn from their teachers. The influence of constructivism, and thinkers like Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner in this paradigm shift is (...) quite evident; however, this gives rise to a tension in what a teacher is and what teaching entails, because the teacher, by definition, is someone who has something to teach students, and not merely a facilitator of the learning process. Moreover, because of constructivism and ‘learnification’, current educational practices and policies seem to pay little attention to the importance of ‘relations’ and ‘the encounter with the Other’, which become merely desirable by-products. In this article I criticise constructivism and ‘learnification’ by proposing that the teacher is a community ‘builder’ and teaching a ‘situational revelation’, while also emphasising the importance of ‘relations’ in the educational process. The starting point for my discussion is a much neglected passage of I and Thou where Martin Buber discusses the importance of the ‘living centre’ [lebendigen Mitte] for ‘true community’ [Die wahre Gemeinde] formation. (shrink)

In this article I draw on Lauren Berlant's notion of ‘cruel optimism’ to identify and untangle how the prevailing sense of ‘optimism’ in education works against our common hope or collective striving for what is educational in education. In particular, I discuss how the ‘cruel optimism’ that invites individuals to constantly innovate and improve themselves through ever more learning leads ultimately to a sense of ‘presentism’, ‘privation’ and ‘loneliness’, which comes to threaten the role that education plays in sustaining and (...) forging a common world. Proposing that education is where the concern with ‘passing-on’ properly takes place, I discuss how education can tend to and pine towards something larger and more durable than the individual acquisition of knowledge and skills that serve immediate transient interests. As an exemplar of a place of ‘passing-on’, I ask us to consider how education invites us to affirm the ‘living-on’ of the question of what it might mean to live together after all: to forge, sustain and pledge something of significance in common amidst what is constantly passing away. In this sense, I seek to gesture to the possibility of hope within education: a sensibility and affirmation for ‘passing-on’ and ‘sur-vivance’. Such a hope might help to address the cruel depravity and isolation affecting our time that is caught up in the ‘learnification of education’. (shrink)

This paper does not present an advocacy of a passive education as opposed to an active education nor does it propose that passive education is in any way ‘better’ or more important than active education. Through readings of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and B.S. Johnson, and gentle critiques of Jacques Rancière and John Dewey, passive education is instead described and outlined as an education which occurs whether we attempt it or not. As such, the object of critique for this essay (...) are forms of educational thought which, through fate or design, exclude the passive dimension, either within or outside of formal educational settings. An underlying component of this argument is therefore also that education does occur outside of formal educational settings and that, contra Gert Biesta and his critique of ‘learnification’, we may gain rather than lose something by attending to it as education. (shrink)

After outlining the renascent interest in teaching within contemporary educational theory, the present paper engages with a reflection on teaching beyond the predominant learnification and the related emphasis on efficacy as a primary value. In this endeavour, the theme of teachers’ demoralization is introduced in a philosophical-educational key, by deploying an existential perspective. Within this horizon, a special focus is on failure construed as intimately linked with the ‘essence’ of education qua an encounter of free beings and as a (...) possibility inherent to the dignity of teaching. In conclusion, some implications of this recognition of the ‘significance’ of failure are indicated in regard to teacher education. (shrink)

Metaphors help us understand a concept by resorting to the imaginary because it is sometimes difficult to do so through the use of words alone. Thinkers have made use of metaphors to not only describe ‘falling in love’, ‘the pain of losing someone dear to us’, but also to describe particular concepts both in arts and sciences. In fact, the use of metaphors in some disciplines, particularly the sciences, is now regarded as something essential for the development of the field. (...) We note that influential philosophers of education, such as Martin Buber, Paulo Freire, Michael Apple, Gert Biesta and Ilan Gur-Ze’ev have also made use of metaphors to discuss education and specific issues in educational contexts. In this article, we do two things: we discuss the methodological importance of metaphors in helping us make better sense of concepts and particular problems; building on this methodological discussion, we critically discuss the problems posed by the current processes of ‘marketisation’ and ‘learnification’ in education. We conclude by arguing that metaphors do not provide us with ultimate answers to the problems we face; rather, they help us unveil a diversity of novel perspectives and a world of new possibilities. (shrink)

Like other parts of the social system, education is becoming an information-driven venture: data technologies pervade all levels of the system. This datafication of education seems to take place alongside a general turn to learning that Gert Biesta has called learnification: a progressively singular focus on the manipulable features of individual learning in education. Given rapidly rising levels of datafication, it seems timely to take up Luhmann and Schorr’s contention that education entails a technology deficit and discuss datafication as (...) reflection issue in the system of education. Against their argument that human learning is not amenable to a technology, I develop the counter-argument that data technologies are replacing human learning outright with data at the level of organisation. Data thus present a concretely digital form of what Raf Vanderstraeten has called education as an ersatz order. In a data-driven form of organising education, human dimensions of learning become secondary to a systemic dimension: making learning visible as data and so susceptible to databased manipulation. The text treats school-wide positive behaviour support interventions as an evidence-based exemplar of this trend towards datafication in the system of education. (shrink)

O artigo apresenta um estudo teórico sobre o pensamento de Gert Biesta, filósofo e educador holandês, internacionalmente reconhecido como referência no campo da Pedagogia Crítica. Tem como objetivo pôr em discussão o conceito learnification, criado pelo autor e posteriormente traduzido por aprenderismo, considerando ser esse uma importante referência para orientar estudos e práticas na perspectiva de problematizar o discurso educacional dominante. Como método, apresenta um procedimento complementar aos estudos bibliográficos, qual seja, a análise de vídeos referentes a palestras disponibilizadas (...) pelo autor no ambiente virtual YouTube. Com base na Análise Textual Discursiva, foram tomados como objeto de estudo três vídeos, a saber: “Good education in the age of measurement”; “Being home in the world” e “The beautiful risk of education”. Os vídeos correspondem, respectivamente, a palestras realizadas pelo autor, em diferentes eventos educacionais, entre os anos de 2013 e 2017, perfazendo um período de seis anos e contando com um intervalo de dois anos entre cada palestra selecionada. Resulta deste estudo uma compreensão ampliada do conceito, cuja complexidade buscamos expressar a partir de quatro palavras-chave: mensuração, qualificação, mercantilização e egocentrismo. Cada uma das referidas palavras-chave dá pistas para compreender o conceito, bem como para sugerir a continuidade de estudos sobre o pensamento do autor. Nesse sentido, as considerações finais apresentam questionamentos, com vistas ao aprofundamento de estudos, convidando ao diálogo. Como conclusão, reitera-se a importância do pensamento de Gert Biesta e a relevância da compreensão acerca do conceito learnification/aprenderismo, concebendo-o como significativa contribuição para orientar estudos e práticas no campo da Pedagogia Critica, na perspectiva de pensar/fazer uma boa Educação na era da mensuração. (shrink)

Die Naturalistische Auffassung der Pädagogik scheint unaufhaltsam voranzuschreiten, wie es an der globalen Tendenzen der „learnification“ der Erziehung ablesbar ist. Naturalistische Ansätze hinterlassen in der Pädagogik sichtlich widersprüchliche Konsequenzen: die Hervorhebung der vorbestimmten und der plastischen Merkmale der menschlichen Natur und ferner die Hervorhebung der aktiven und der rezeptiven Seiten der menschlichen Plastizität. Um die komplizierte Beziehungsstruktur dieser doppelten Beidseitigkeit zu erläutern, wird auf die geschichtliche Ursprungsphase der pädagogischen Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Naturalismus zurückgegriffen: eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Evolutionstheorie in (...) der Pädagogik in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. und am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The politics of lifelong learning and learnification have triggered educational philosophy’s justified indignation and blanket critiques of learning. The market logic of learning has, meanwhile, seized the city and caused a further educational-philosophical reactive response, which I critique in the form that it has taken inter alia in many prominent recent educational-philosophical works. After explaining what I mean by ‘reactive response’ I focus on the educational-philosophical reaction to the shift toward lifelong learning. Then I move to how this (...) shift has been translated into a discourse of city learning and how some educational theory responds to this discourse. My critique concludes with suggestions for an ethic of stereoscopically tackling facets of learning. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the relationship between teaching and learning. Whereas particularly in the English language the relationship between teaching and learning has become so intimate that it often looks as if ‘teaching and learning’ has become one word, I not only argue for the importance of keeping teaching and learning apart from each other, but also provide a number of arguments for suggesting that learning may not be the one and only option for teaching to aim for. I (...) explore this idea through a discussion of the relationship between teaching and learning, both at a conceptual and at an existential level. I discuss the limitations of the language of learning as an educational language, point at the political work that is being done through the language of learning, and raise epistemological and existential questions about the identity of the learner, particularly with regard to the question what it means to be in and with the world in terms of learning as comprehension and sense making. Through this I seek to suggest that learning is only one possible aim for teaching and that the learner identity and the learning way of engaging with the world puts the learner in a very specific position vis-à-vis the world, one where the learner remains in the centre and the world appears as object for the learner’s acts of learning. That it is possible to teach without requesting from students that they learn, comprehend and make sense, is demonstrated through a brief account of a course in which students were explicitly asked to refrain from learning and were instead asked to adopt a concept. I show how this request opened up very different existential possibilities for the students and argue that if we value such existential possibilities, there may be good reasons for freeing teaching from learning. (shrink)

In this article, I contextualize the community of inquiry approach, and Philosophy for Children, within the current milieu of education. Specifically, I argue that whereas former scholarship on Philosophy for Children had a tendency to critique the problems of teacher authority and knowledge transmission, we must now consider subtler, learner-centered scenarios of education as a threat to Philosophy for Children. I begin by offering a personal anecdote about my own experience attending a ‘reverse-integrated’ elementary school in 1968. I use this (...) anecdote to show the detrimental aspects of the turn to learning—and the concomitant turn away from teaching—over past five decades. I go on to detail what I call “the logic of learning.” The logic of learning has five components: 1) That learning has a theory, or ‘logic,’ in other words, that learners can be figured out. 2) That learning is instrumental, that people need to learn things in order to acquire something that will be obtained after the learning is complete. 3) That learning concerns normation, or, some people get learning ‘right’ while others do not. 4) That teaching is the same as instruction, so that teaching always means delivering knowledge to students. 5) That authority should reside as a possession of the learner, and thus authority is understood as a thing rather than a relation. I show that these elements of the logic of learning stand in the way of the goals of Philosophy for Children, and that opponents of Philosophy for Children have used these elements to assail the Philosophy for Children project. I continue by describing a relational understanding of authority. I demonstrate the importance of relational authority and relational teaching as key components of Philosophy for Children. In conclusion, I argue that Philosophy for Children needs to spearhead a movement of relational teaching. (shrink)