A step not beyond education’s autonomy

Abstract

Many arguments for education’s autonomy put forward a repeated yet undefined claim that there is an identifiable, dividing line between education and its outside, and that it is within the distinct contours of “the educational” where the nomos of its autonomy lies. Approaching this claim from a literary perspective, I conduct a critical reading of the language of education’s autonomy that runs on the interplay between internal and external laws, and thus frames education’s distinctiveness (or its indistinctiveness) as a question of governance. I claim that such emphasis on governance ties the discussion of education’s autonomy to narratives of progress associated with occidental modernity and forms a self-generating feedback loop where self-governing education and self-governing human life serve as each other’s arche and telos. As an alternative, antinomic figuration of education’s autonomy, I offer a reading of a scene from Johan Amos Comenius’s utopic novel The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart and pair it with Maurice Blanchot’s writings on the neuter. While acknowledging that an ungovernable approach to education’s autonomy poses challenges for educational thought, practice, and policy, I see that it nevertheless allows to question education’s intelligibility and progress that governance assumedly guarantees.