Taste for democracy: A critique of the mechanical paradigm in education

Abstract

In this article we argue for the need to rethink the crisis of democracy both within and beyond education (Toft and Rüsselbaek Hansen, 2017). This crisis can be explained variously, depending on how it is understood and on what basis. From our point of view, and with inspiration from thinkers as Nietzsche, Arendt, Agamben and Rancière, we argue that the crisis of democracy in today's schools is related in part to the weak form of authority ascribed to certain individual and collective aesthetic experiences. The scientific experience has been assigned a strong form of 'evidenced based authority'. As a result of a powerful belief that not all forms of experiences, for instance the aesthetical ones, which are not based on a mechanical logic, are worth paying attention to and are of value, scientific experience has gained hegemonic status. Illustrated by several examples, which stem from both Danish and Canadian educational contexts, we show how aesthetic experiences have the potential to revitalize democratic practices and undermine tyrannical regimes of technocracy in education. We recommend that the concept of Bildung (self-cultivation), which is orientated towards vertical (Apollonian) as well as horizontal (Dionysian) transcending processes, must be given renewed attention. Opportunities for students to play with and suspend the social order, even temporarily, are important if students are to experience themselves, others and the world in new ways. By engaging students' aesthetic sensibilities in multiple ways, playful schools both produce and provoke the dominant social order thereby fostering students' taste for democracy.

Digital technologies, big data and ideological (neoliberal) fantasies

“…If we want to support democratic experiences, conversations and struggles in education and thereby the freedom to think, speak and act in ways not mechanically regulated by numbers, we must question the distribution of the sensible in education (Rüsselbaek Hansen & Phelan, 2019). We must: challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.…”

The tyranny of student satisfaction: Cruel optimistic fantasies in education

“…A common and expected task in education is to transcend personal idiosyncrasies by introducing the students to new knowledge, insights, and provocative ideas and dangerous perspectives that can broaden their intellectual horizons and support their abilities to critical thinking and political and democratic engagement (Rüsselbaek Hansen and Phelan, 2019). What is odd is that this is not an issue that seems to be interesting at a political level.…”

“…Another well-known critique of neoliberalism is how it has decoupled the historical close link between democracy and education (Biesta, 2007; Brown, 2015). This is despite the fact that a central educational task is to support and establish living democratic practices on a daily basis (Clarke and Phelan, 2017; Heimans, 2020; Uljens and Ylimaki, 2017) and provide students with opportunities to engage intellectually and critically, as political subjects, in complicated and democratic conversations about the purpose of education and what education can and should be about (Rüsselbæk Hansen and Phelan, 2019). Stated differently, the students must be able to problematize what has become self-evident, they must risk losing what they thought they knew, they must be willing to leave their position as customers, they must critically reflect on their objects of desires, and they must address “dangerous” issues and knowledge that resist neoliberal forms of symbolization.…”

Studious Play as an Archê of Creative Music-Making: Repositing “the Scandal of Democracy” in Music Education

“…It must be emphasized that such a vision, which builds on and radicalizes the CMinED heritage that sought to build important links between democracy, creativity, and autonomy, retains a deeply critical stance toward market-based instrumentalization of music learning resulting from the deluge of neoliberalization of education that "amplifies voice, while paradoxically curtailing agency" (Schmidt 2021). Neoliberalization of education imposes a mechanistic framework that severely undermines the democratic mission of education (Ball 2003, Gielen 2013, Rüsselbaek Hansen, and Phelan 2019. It also trivializes "creativity" by viewing it as an integral aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset that, as we are told, needs to be cultivated in an education that prepares the young for 21st century challenges (for a critique of these developments see Baldacchino 2013, Darras 2011, Kalin 2018, Kanellopoulos 2015, Kanellopoulos and Barahanou 2020.…”