Pedagogy as the theory and practice of education, concerns the act of educating and teaching. Theoretical pedagogy focuses on fundamental questions on education. Their main purpose is the search for truth and to deepen fundamental questions such as ‘Why do we organize education? What is the purpose of education? What is a teacher?’ etcetera. They generate ideas and theories about (the essence of) education. Aristotle called this kind of knowledge ‘episteme’ as scientific knowledge. Têchné is what he calls ‘practical knowledge’, it refers to craftsmanship and deals with how to act in a concrete situation.

What we see today, is an explosion of a technical-instrumental view on teaching and education. Question such as ‘How can I reach the purposes of my lesson? How can I differentiate? How can I create a powerful learning environment?’ are becoming central questions in the field of education. These technical question are been seen as a matter of competences. As we all know, a competence is expressed in terms as ‘knowledge, attitude and skills’ and refers to these qualifications that are needed in order to act in a result-related and efficient way within a certain context, i.e. the school. In other words, the OECD formulates a good teacher in terms of competences in other to be qualified as a teacher today. This qualification has to guarantee that the new generation of teachers can face the ever changing (social) reality. By describing the teacher in terms of a competent teacher, the European Union has also made clear her idea of what is a good teacher: a good teacher is a teacher who is competent and qualified to face the problems and challenges one has to deal with at school, in class and in society in general. 

The point we will make, is that the fundamental (philosophical/theoretical) question ‘what is a good teacher and education’ is already ‘overruled’ by the technical-instrumental approach of ‘How can teachers transform our children into world-citizens? What kind of competencies are needed in order to create a powerful learning environment for every child in this ever changing world?’

Facing a reality whereby teaching and pedagogical practices are instrumentalised, and teachers become performers, this paper wants to deal with the issue of what kind of knowledge and research is needed to act in this ever changing society. This paper is an attempt to rethink education. To avoid the trap of a technical and instrumental view on education a new kind of ‘knowledge’ is needed. Our research question is: What does it mean to practice an idea? Not ‘How do I have to act in order to reshape or reform the reality conform an (ideal) idea of a school or a teacher’ (cf. formation) but ‘How can I shape my existence as an idea?’ is what is at stake today. For philosophers such as Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault an ‘idea’ has never been ‘a theoretical concept’. Ideas were always seen as ‘practices’. The idea was seen as ‘a form of life’, the way one shapes oneself, even in the smallest things of life. In the same way as the categorical imperative of Kant, the idea does not refer to the materialization or the result of the act(ion), but to the form and the principles which it shapes.  As an example, we will explain what it means to practice the idea of attention or ‘being attentive’. In her book Waiting for God, Simone Weil writes that the development of the faculty of attention is the effort of every study and education.

Literature-based study, the idea of a praxis in the work of Agamben, Arendt, Deleuze and the idea of attention in the work of Simone Weil.

In her book 'Waiting for God', Simone Weil writes that the development of the faculty of attention is the effort of every study and education. Attention is not the aim of good education nor a competence or attitude of the teacher. It is more over the fundamental principle of every study and form of education. In this paper we want to deepen this idea of ‘being attentive’ as a fundamental principle for the educational praxis as such. We will show what kind of form-of-life appears to think the school, the teacher and students as such. A ‘pure praxis’ whereby the school appears as a school, the teacher as a teacher and the student as a student, this is to say, as a ‘pure idea’. We will show what it means to take in a ‘pure pedagogical’ approach of education. Approaching the school as a pure means (or, with the words of Agamben ‘means without end’) is picturing the school as the (constantly) actualization of a ‘beginning (or ‘beginterm’)’ and not the fulfilment of an ‘final term’. In order words: the idea as a ‘begin term’ that shapes a way of being – or what Epictetus once called in his book 'The Encheirdion' ‘a guiding rule’. We will conclude that thinking ‘the idea as praxis’, is a way to go beyond the gap between theoretical and practical knowledge in order to be able to ‘act’ within the complexity of the education system.

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. The University Of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1977). The life of the Mind: Thinking. London. Agamben, G. (2000). Means without end. Notes on politics (V. Binette & C. Casarino, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, D. (1969). Logique du sens. Les Éditions de Minuit. Fine, R. (2008). Judgment and reification of the faculties: A reconstructive reading of Arendt’s Life of the Mind. Philospohy & Social Criticism 34(1-2), 155-174. Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces (J. Miskowiec, Trans.). Diacritics, 16(1), 22-27. Foucault, M. (2005). The hermeneutics of the subject. Lectures at the College de France 1981-1984. (G. Burchell, Trans. & A. I. Davidson, Introd.). New York: Picador. Geerinck, I., Masschelein, J. & Simons, M. (2010). Teaching and Knowledge: a Necessary Combination? An elaboration of Form of Teacher’s Reflexivity. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(4), 379-393. Weil, S. (1951/2010). Waiting for God . Routledge.