Session Information
Session 9B, Education Policy and Curriculum Development in the Knowledge Society
Papers
Time:
2005-09-09
13:00-14:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Bo Dahlin
Contribution
Different perspectives in the philosophy of language, identifiable as post-structuralist perspectives have brought to the surface some challenges in how and what to think of education, and of knowledge. While an idea of Contemporary Knowledge Society is increasingly stressed as premise for education, there might be some sense in a vitalised thinking around questions about the contemporary, knowledge economies and society. From the perspectives of market ideology, knowledge tends to be implicitly understood as a means for production and economical growth. The performance artist Joseph Beuys' slogans "Art=Capital" and "Every man, an artist", emphasises other perspectives of knowledge economies, which might be more in line with insights from a post-structuralist approach. Using perspectives inspired by Jacques Derrida and James Joyce, I will propose a radicalisation of a Socratic position pointing to the possibilities on the borders of, or beyond, a classical dialectic approach, intimating an academic/pedagogical duty that might exceed implementation, and adaptation to a society's "here and now". A special challenge in the attempt to take up this duty is how to question an implicit utopianism as kind of imperialistic idealism. The market ideology might be identified as such a paradoxical idealism, when presented as reality itself, or as a Law of Nature, a narrative or, in Barthes terminology a mythology, based upon the notion of a society's "metabolism" as main subject. This, and other imperialistic idealisms might be challenged by a principle of the antagonist, internal to language as such, detectable as a principle of initiation in Ulysses and transferable by a derridean oevre from the genre of literature into the field of philosophy and of education. A fear of this principle of the antagonist might be spotted in educational "quality" reforms initiated by politicians and a governmental bureaucracy, these reforms being based upon assessments, achievement of prescribed results and external and internal control. The radicalisation of a Socratic position comes from a change of focus, from possible and impossible answers towards emphasising the Question as education's most sacred territory. Securing an empty space for Truth, pedagogues might promote different fields of knowledge and abilities without tying these up to any fixed description of reality in general, and especially challenging the notion of a market ideology as reality itself.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.