The Beginning of Learning's Logic, the Demise of Emancipatory Teaching

• In Event: Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: Education and the Limits of Learning: How Much Learning Does Education Need?

Abstract

In this presentation I will recount the story of a reverse-integrated elementary school that opened its doors in 1968. In this elementary school, white children were bussed into a primarily black neighbourhood school. This educational experiment, it will be recounted, was both highly successful and deeply flawed. It will be argued that a certain logic of learning, as early as the 1960’s, created the circumstances for this experiment to go awry. Such a logic was already foreclosing the teacher’s ability to teach in emancipatory ways. The presentation will then draw on the work of Hannah Arendt, showing that Arendt, in her work Between Past and Future, had identified the trajectory of learning’s logic as early as 1961. She would not have been surprised that emancipatory teaching has been assailed by the logic of learning for the past half century. Subsequently, I will draw a distinction between Arendt’s analysis of educational authority as it stood fifty years ago, on the one hand, and the current predicament of educational authority when the logic of learning has become fully ensconced, on the other. I will argue that whereas Arendt identified a “crisis in education,” we have now inherited a new version of that crisis. Our new version has not only mis-represented the authority of the teacher, but it has mis-represented teaching per se. In order to combat this new crisis, the case will be made that the time has come to embrace, and foster, the uniqueness of the teacher’s relational authority.

References:
Arendt, H. (2006). Between Past and Future. (New York: Penguin Classics).

Author

• Charles Bingham, Simon Fraser University