This paper focuses on the status of the content of education and how the content might be rethought by drawing on speculative realist thought. Drawing on our previous work (Bengtsson 2022), where we differentiate between the content of education and the object of education that this content refers to, we aim to provide an object-oriented ontological differentiation between sensible object and real object (Harman 2011) in order to break with the correlationist reduction of the object of education to the content of education as always already incorporated into human practice and historicity. The paper is to outline, against the background of the German Geisteswissenschaftliche Didaktik (curriculum theory based on the epistemological principles of Geisteswissenschaft), how the theory of curriculum and instruction is based on expressions of correlationist thought- We will here specify by relating to Klafki’s (2013, 1959) and Menck’s (1986) influential work what the consequences are for the conception of the content of education (Unterrichtsinhalt) as well as how this conception frames the project of education as a project of self-cultivation and formation (Bildung). By critiquing the consequences of a reduction of the content to a conflation of its position in nature and culture, we illustrate how content only attains a stable educative substance by an appeal to a static notion of nature and how the determinism of a static and universal educative substance is only partially bracketed by the appeal to human exceptionalism and agency in relation to the appropriation of that content in culture (Bildung of humanity) and the project of self-formation (Bildung of the individual self). The correlationist conflation of those two positions of the content leads here to explanatory difficulties with regard to the relation between the Bildung of self and humanity, as well as how the stability and substance of the content in the natural world can be maintained in the context of the Anthropocene. By rehabilitating the notion of the object of education, we aim to explore how objects have a form of agency that shapes self-formation and the formation of humanity. We draw here on the concept of “allure” in Harman´s (2010, 2011) work to illustrate how the object of education exerts a form of causal aesthetic influence on individuals and humanity’s Bildung. This is particularly relevant for ESE and how we - as humans - come to know ourselves in the Anthropocene, which will be further addressed in the paper.

Bengtsson, S. L. (2022). Didaktiken efter idealismen: Undervisningsobjektets återkomst i antropocen. Pedagogisk Forskning i Sverige. Harman, G. (2010). Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. Zero Books. Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. Zero Books. Klafki, W. (1959). Das Pädagogische Problem des Elementaren und die Theorie der kategorialen Bildung. Beltz Verlag. Klafki, W. (2013). Kategoriale Bildung: Konzeptionen und Praxis reformpädagogischer Schularbeit zwischen 1948 und 1952. Verlag Julius Klinkhardt. Menck, P. (1986). Unterrichtsinhalt oder Ein Versuch über die Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit im Unterricht. Peter Lang.