Is education exhausted?

Abstract

In the article I argue that the category of exhaustion constitutes the key to contemporary instrumental education. In my analysis I draw from Sloterdijk’s diagnosis of modern consciousness and the Deleuzian concept of exhaustion. My contention is that an explanation for a durable rule of market logic can be found in the fact that traditional narratives, that is, narratives which place God or Reason as arche of the world, have expired and exposed the emptiness. The space, not occupied anymore by God or Reason, has become empty and as such needed to be filled in. As this (empty) space cannot be filled by the humanities with their so-called higher values, an economic narrative has taken over this task and, as a further consequence, transformed education into its instrument. However, neither the content of traditional narratives, nor economic ones, directly produce this emptiness, since it is an effect of the exhausted life. In my contribution I argue that a triangle consisting of higher values, economic values and the (empty) space is a sort of trap caused by two ways of being of the exhausted life, that is, by judgement and domination. Moreover, I will attempt to show that a shift to non-instrumental education present in the field of contemporary philosophy of education is also a problem within the exhausted life. In addition, perhaps the only chance to overcome this exhaustion lies in negation, which is found through despair.

Refusing Teachers and the Politics of Instrumentalism in Educational Policy

“…53 And while this negation frustrates those well-trained attachments to the instrumental impulse seeking an end, it "does not," as Katarzyna Dworakowska writes, "involve filling the (empty) space with another narrative." 54 By understanding teachers' resistance to their instrumentalization by policy in terms of an ontological politics of refusal, this analysis, perhaps in a way that is undesirable in a conclusion, stops short of satisfying any demand for what comes after these refusals. The protests have not ended, and international education policies show no sign of abating in their instrumentalization of teachers as the most important in-school factor in raising student achievement.…”