Reflections on the "Counter" in Educational Counterpublics

In this essay, Judith Suissa draws on the tradition of radical and alternative education, and on some philosophical literature on democratic politics and the role of the political imagination, in order to suggest some ways of thinking about what constitutes an educational counterpublic that are different from those suggested in recent work by philosophers of education. Building on arguments by Nancy Fraser and others about the vital role of counterpublics in the political life of democracies, Suissa suggests that creating educational spaces where the formation, development, imagining, and nurturing of such counterpublics can occur is an important aspect of this role

Pedagogies of Indignation and "The Lives of Others"

Neel Mukherjee’s novel, The Lives of Others, which depicts characters dealing with a situation of extreme and violent oppression, is used as the basis for looking more closely at some of the theoretical assumptions about hope, agency and critical consciousness that underpin Critical Pedagogy. It is suggested that it may be educationally and philosophically valuable to reflect on the ethically troubling choices that individuals in extreme situations make in their fight against oppression, and to ask questions about the risks and the costs involved when people, through a process of critical consciousness, become fully free to claim their moral and political agency

Integral education and Pring’s liberal vocationalism

A central strand in Richard Pring's philosophical work has the rejection of the 'false dualism' between the liberal and the vocational. In examining dualism, Pring's work has oriented just to the world of academic philosophy of education, but to the world of educational policy and practice, particularly in relation to shifts and innovations in the area of vocational education and training. The idea of integral education was a central feature of the writings of leading nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anarchist thinkers, and the educational experiments associated with the anarchist tradition. The anarchist ideal of integral education for all was an ideal of a 'respect for labour, reason, equality and freedom' intended just to articulate a philosophy of education that reflects a conception of the person, but to challenge a political and economic reality in which a whole class of children were excluded from academic education and condemned to a life of labour under conditions that threatened individual freedom and dignity

Oikophobia and not being at home: educational questions

In this paper, I explore some of the ways in which the notion of ‘home’ has been invoked in the context of ideas about belonging and nationalism in the wake of the recent EU Referendum in Britain. I focus particularly on Roger Scruton’s account of ‘oikophobia’, and explore some ways in which, while questioning the pathologisation of ‘not belonging’ implied in Scruton’s account, we can nevertheless put the notion of ‘home’ and its political significance at the heart of our discussions about the educational response to contemporary debates on belonging, migration and movement

Anarchist Education

In this chapter I will discuss how the anarchist objection to the state and the defence of central anarchist values, such as mutual aid, autonomy and cooperation, yields a distinct perspective on debates about the aims of education. I will draw on historical accounts of anarchist educational experiments to explore how their pedagogical practices, organisation and content constituted a radical alternative to mainstream forms of educational provision in different historical periods and will reflect on the relevance of these alternatives in contemporary educational contexts. My discussion will incorporate both formal and informal education and will address central issues within educational philosophy and theory, such as the relationship between education and social change, the moral legitimacy of educational intervention and the conception of human nature. I will argue that the anarchist tradition of educational thought and practice, while overlapping in some respects with forms of libertarian, progressive and democratic education and with critical pedagogy, offers a unique perspective on issues such as the above, and a valuable set of resources with which to critique some dominant trends in contemporary educational policy and practice

Writing philosophically about the parent-child relationship

The discussion in this extract is illustrative of the approach we adopted in our initial conversations that led to the preparation of the book proposal, and later throughout the whole process of writing the book. In collecting material throughout this process, we often found ourselves sharing examples of descriptions of parenting (for example, in magazines and websites aimed at parents, in parenting guides and self-help books, or in policy documents and media reports on the role of parents), and expressing our frustration at the sweeping generalisations that seemed typical of such accounts (e.g. the tendency to make statements beginning with ‘Children are...’, ‘Parents should...’ or ‘Research shows that...’). In trying to express this frustration, we found ourselves reaching towards an articulation of what it was that these kinds of accounts left out in their depiction of the experience of being a parent, and how they seemed to be failing to do justice to the complexities of the daily lived experience of being a parent. At the same time, we found ourselves drawn to first-person accounts of the experience of being a parent that we encountered in novels, magazines, or simply in the process of talking to other parents and to each other about our own experiences. Our actual writing process, then, often began with simply describing such experiences and sending our descriptions to each other so that we could comment on what we thought was significant or valuable in them, and then seeing how they fitted in with the general critical view we were in the process of developing. So, for example, in the above extract, imagining the scene of a mother with a screaming toddler in the supermarket, which we describe in everyday language, allowed us to make the conceptual points about the irreducibly ethical significance of parents’ daily interactions with their children, and the impossibility of imposing any definitive model of choice or closure on the ways in which parents respond to such situations, in a concrete and accessible manner