Passive EducationThis paper does not present an advocacy of a passive education as opposed to an active education, nor does it propose that passive education is in any way 'better' or more important than active education. Passive education is instead described and outlined as an education which occurs whether we attempt it or not. As such, the object of critique for this essay are forms of educational thought which, through fate or design, exclude the passive dimension, either within or outside of formal educational settings. An underlying component of this argument is therefore also that education does occur outside of formal educational settings and that, contra Gert Biesta and his critique of 'learnification ' (2010 and 2012), we may gain rather than lose something by attending to it as education.To have one's teaching or learning marked by a passive disposition is totally at odds with the contemporary logic of education which values activity itself as the ultimate measure of educational engagement. Every text included on a syllabus must have a prescribed purpose, rather than being presented as an object for passive learning: a means to let another voice in, without the aim of converting it into something for one's own use. Even 'experiential' or play-orientated models of education are reliant on activity and easily assessable progress. 'Experiential' education requires activity and purposefulness from the student and the teacher. Passive education, on the other hand, can change us without us quite knowing how or in what way. It might only change us for a little while -our perceptions, our sense of self, our internalised hierarchies of value -but this change is itself an education: a passive education. Anecdotally the passive education that art and literature "This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Bojesen, E. (2016). Passive Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol. 0 , Iss. 0,0, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1200003 . This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving." © 2017 Wiley-Blackwell often offers might be one of the reasons why so many students dislike studying texts or art they have enjoyed because it imposes a formal narrative which 'educatively' invalidates their own passive educational experience. The same is true of any educational experience superficially reduced to a particular purpose. But its odd disharmony of purpose and excess of purpose is why literature and art is especially important in education. Of course there are many repeatable physical or metaphysical gestures which continue to work within given structures and for many this would be considered education's primary or crucial social function.However, if education is for all intents and purposes the researching, teaching and learning of repeatable gestures (even if these gestures were broadened to include the acquisition of repeatable affects) it would never be conceivable outside of ...
This paper argues against dominant philosophical interpretations of Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener and submits it to an educational reading. It problematizes readings (such as those of Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, and the Occupy Movement) where the character of Bartleby figures a way of being that allows us to escape or challenge our contemporary political and educational exigencies. Our contention is that an encounter with Bartleby is not politically or educationally enabling, but provokes the Lawyer, despite himself, to encounter the unedifying limits of any educational practice and discourse, as well as his necessary complicity in the context that supports them. We argue that anyone interested in education or politics would do much better to scrutinize their unavoidable affinity with the Lawyer, instead of projecting fantasies of escape on the character of Bartleby, who, in the end, only figures a giving up on life. Herman Melville's short story Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street narrates the gradual decline of a scrivener, or copyist, called Bartleby, who stops working and eventually ceases living. This occurs much to the confusion and eventual consternation of his kindly employer, the Lawyer, who finds that he cannot reason with or appeal to Bartleby. As we outline below, the enigma of Bartleby continues to stimulate thought and practice, with Melville's story achieving the status of a key philosophical and political, as well as literary, text. In such commentary Bartleby has served divergent ends, ranging from his co-option as a political role model, to the suggestion that Bartleby points beyond politics, revealing the limits of contemporary political thought. We review these readings, which range from radical left, humanist interpretations of
This article introduces a form of 'conversation' distinct from dialogue or dialectic to the context of educational theory, practice, and research. Through an engagement with the thought of Maurice Blanchot, this paper outlines the conditions he attributes to conversation in the form of plural speech, its relationship to research, how it can be educational, and speculatively concludes by considering how it can operate productively within and around educational institutions. As such, this paper provides an original intervention into educational philosophy and theory, which relies on a close reading of key sections of Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation, and reflections on the distinctiveness of his argument in relation to contemporary theoretical approaches, as well as the significance of his thought and its application here to the broader questions of what nonprescriptive theory might have to offer educational research and practice. ARTICLE HISTORY
Positive ignorance is the putting in to question of, and sometimes moving on from, the knowledge we think we have, and asking where it might be just or helpful to do so. Drawing primarily on the work of Barbara Johnson, this article shows how the notion of positive ignorance might be offered as a tool in the context of education and educational research. Partly a critical development of Richard Smith's argument in 'The Virtues of Unknowing', I attempt to understand 'unknowing' as an active rather than passive form of 'not knowing', in a manner that challenges some aspects of 'the virtues of unknowing' and its concomitant epistemological and ethical positions, not least those tied to Smith's advocacy for what he calls the 'well-stocked mind'. Unknowing, in my reading, is not a dispositional acceptance of the desirability of nonknowledge, instead, unknowing is a means of epistemological resistance, especially against that which, often with very real social and political consequences, is presented as self-evident.
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