What is known as the post-critical approach to education and educational research is fundamentally about formulating an alternative stance next to the dominant critical perspective. The issue with this last approach is that, laudable as its intentions might be, it runs the risk of becoming ineffective. In focusing on exposure and debunking, it gets caught in a repetitive and formulaic gesture that is fundamentally about diminishing reality, rather than adding to it. Over and against this, post-critical pedagogy is concerned with affirming things and practices that are valuable in themselves (despite the many evils endemic to the world we live in). In this contribution I want to come back to this discussion in view of the current situation which is characterized by an inflation of the word crisis. This might inadvertently cause this expression to become wholly insignificant. For this reason, our present condition might be termed one of post-crisis. What then would it mean to give a post-critical reading of crisis, i.e. an affirmative redemption of it? Going back to the original meaning of the word– casting a judgment – I suggest that we stand a lot to learn from looking at concrete educational practices in the arts world, and more to the point the way in which in art class ‘a’ critique is performed: an affirmative way of coming together around each student’s publicly displayed creation, to form a commonly shared judgment and with the straightforward aim of making the artwork better (eg the DasArts feedback method). Drawing from Kant’s analysis of the aesthetic judgement and Arendt’s rendering of his work, I try to flesh out the educational meaning of this kind of critical endeavour (also beyond the walls of the arts school). Casting a public and affirmative judgment exceeds the very possibility of applying a standard that exists independently of the creation to be evaluated. And yet we must come to a judgment, we must perform crisis. This is to say that standards need to be renegotiated each time. This focus on the here-and-now comes with a suspension of the typical modern temporality of progress. This is however not a plea for pure subjectivism or relativism, but on the contrary for paying heightened attention to concrete things to be assessed. It concerns an affirmative critique which remains immanent to the educational practice which is concerned with the matter at hand, i.e. the creation of interesting art works.

Arendt, H. (1992) Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago : University of Chicago Press. DeCaroli, S. (2020). Arendt’s Krisis. Ethics and Education 15 (2), 173-185. Hodgson, N., Vlieghe, J. and Zamojski, P. (2017). Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy. Punctum Press. Kant, I. (2005) Critique of Judgment (J.H. Bernard, Trans.). Mineola (NY): Dover Publications