Post-critical pedagogy is an attempt to step outside the endless repetition of critical research in education. ‘Posting’ critique and thereby posing the question of alternatives works against a stagnating tendency for current educational debates to appear unsatisfactory, paralysing, and tedious. This essay describes the limits of critical pedagogy and possibilities of a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. It is structured according to the term’s three elements of ‘critique’, ‘post’, and ‘pedagogy’. For each of these elements, the essay describes two ways of understanding; not to play them off against each other, but to show how manifold post-critical pedagogy can and should be. The essay concludes with a proposal of three analytical dimensions for further work on a post-critical pedagogy.
This paper tackles the question of in which sense, if any, educational theory should be considered as ‘political’. From a pragmatist perspective it evaluates three meanings of the term: first, the political as an exception, such as Rancière’s interruption of the existing order, and second, the political as something that is always already given, such as in Derrida’s concept of iteration. Third, the paper turns towards Rorty’s plea for understanding philosophy as cultural politics, i.e., as intervention into the ongoing public discourse. It is argued that this third meaning of the term is better suited for understanding the political of educational theory as it is realistically modest and enables to analyze the political effectiveness of educational theory. These considerations are framed by both a reflection on the very possibility of drawing distinctions between theory and politics as well as an outlook on possible consequences following from an understanding of educational theory as cultural politics. In the outlook, the paper asks why we can hardly see any publicly relevant educational theory and provides suggestions for a “caring critique”, a careful attitude towards our own researching practices, situations, and assemblies.
This contribution discusses objections to and concerns with the concept of post-critical pedagogy in general and Wortmann’s introduction to the topic in issue 9 of On Education (Wortmann, 2020) in particular. In the first section, Selma Haupt identifies three main issues as missing in post-critical pedagogy: first, the lack of a concrete notion of what counts as critical pedagogy, second the lack of criteria for what is good in education, and third the lack of connection to established research traditions within education. In the second section, Kai Wortmann responds to these issues, and in the third section, Selma Haupt reflects on her reading of post-critical thinking. While objections remain, she attempts to capture what post-critical pedagogy may mean.
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