Session Information
Session 11, Closing Session, Open Discussion
Papers
Time:
2005-09-10
11:00-12:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Volker Kraft
Contribution
If one considers the current debates in the field of education and the open range of diagnoses and remedies to the well-known difficulties practitioners undergo, one may realize how intricate the situation is and how little hope there is to find a single key to decipher the data and the stakes of the ongoing discourses.As a second statement, one may admit in the same time that philosophy of education, as a discipline, takes a very modest part in the debates run, by and large, by social sciences. When they raise a timid voice , philosophers either refer to historical, traditional doctrines which certainly still offer resources for finding and transferring useful concepts; or they help clarify the issues with the help of linguistic analysis; or they give a shelter for problems left unsolved by other disciplines. Rarely, they propose a new substantial educational theory. I will test this assumption by an overview of a corpus of contemporary French writings identified as philosophy of /on/for education.Now, how could or should philosophy of education navigate between two opposite dangers : neither to propose (as it no more an age for great narratives) a brand new speculative theory of education; nor to be satisfied with a mere companionship with more efficient disciplines?I assume that the philosophy of education could successfully face two challenges : one, with the help of historical research, consists in retrieving and retracing the development of the educational paradigms as they slowly emerged in European modern thought and little by little became mingled, giving the illusion of a common global market of educational ideas and values ready to be picked up.A second commitment would be the attempt to elaborate the conditions of possibility for any rational educational discourse. In the guise of a reflective theory, philosophy could contribute to set a common background for our European educational debates. Something like : an educational discourse is possible as far as we master couples of opposites like nature and culture, freedom and codes, spontaneity and receptivity, etc. as elementary themes to play variations on.My concern is not only epistemological. As a teacher educator, I daily experience the weight of an increasing dogmatism on decision-making in the class-room. I assume that the philosophical inventory of the generative models from which we derive our modern thinking along with the conceptualization of its limits may provide antidotes against recurrent forms of pedagogical fanaticism.
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