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FrancoAngeli Journals

Articoli

N. 1 Special Issue (2025)

Education as Resisting the Coming Barbarism: A Post-critical perspective on Education, the School and Teaching in the Face of Social- and Environmental Catastrophe

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/erpoa1SI-2025oa19366
Inviata
10 febbraio 2025
Pubblicato
18-11-2025

Abstract

This article addresses the call for education to engage with contemporary social and environmental challenges, whilst preserving its pedagogical integrity. By focusing on the genuinely educational core of the school and teaching we want to avoid falling in the trap of instrumentalizing education or functionalizing it in order to resolve societal problems, however, we will argue that its precisely these ‘essential characteristics’ of education and the school which might offer a response to the challenges we’re facing nonetheless. We intend to take up the matter of our current global predicament and frame it as an educational problem, drawing on several educational attitudes such as giving orientation, enabling agency and fostering a belief in ‒ and responsibility for ‒ the common world. In doing this we will argue for the correspondence between a logic of education and a logic of care for the world. We therefore end with a defense of the institution of the school and a more ‘traditional’ account of teaching against discourses which seek to frame it as outdated or inherently unsustainable, and we propose to emphasize the role it plays in fostering a renewed relation to the world. The purpose of this article, referring the title of a work by Isabelle Stengers, is a resistance to the oversimplification and impoverishment of our thinking (on education) and ways of (educational) life. Our account is therefore post-critical in the sense of that we intend to affirm the richness of an autotelic understanding of education, as well as its significance for finding ways to live more responsibly and sustainably.

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