Response to the Symposium on Education's Autonomy

• In Event: Education's Autonomy

Abstract

The job of a commenter is to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in the arguments put forward by this symposium. My contribution will foreground a paradox having to do with conceptions of strength and weakness at work in these various attempts to conceive of education as an autonomous undertaking, which is to say, capable of formulating aims and objectives that are intrinsic to education rather than imposed on it. Bookending the arguments for the need to think “educationally about education” are a paper that rejects the idea that schooling can in anyway foster educational autonomy- whether for schools or students - and a countervailing attempt to map a “strong theory of education” in the hopes of protecting the study of education from its current sidelining by the learning and social sciences in particular. Alongside these strong claims for and against the idea of education as a self-governing enterprise capable of generating its own standards and objectives are three papers that offer up weaker arguments for thinking about education in non-instrumental terms. My response will make a case for educational autonomy that rests on these weak claims rather than a strong theory of education. Given the elusiveness of the claim that we can delineate what is educational about education, it seems fitting to make such a case.
The weakness of the arguments for education’s autonomy are sometimes belied by a seeming grandiosity of the claims, such as the idea, put forward in one paper in this symposium, that schools should focus students’ attention on the question of what it means to be human. Underdeveloped in the paper is an understanding of the frailty of the condition of human plurality as Arendt understands it – hence the need for education into the conditions of being human, albeit that such an education is at best a tenuous undertaking. At other times, the weakness of arguments for education is precisely the point, as is the case in the paper about education as remainder, i.e. that which is left over or left out of analyses of education when education is treated as a point of application. The paper reverses this tendency by positing Arendt’s conception of natality as both a point of departure for education and a viable educational aim. Like plurality, natality is a weak concept in the sense that it is unpredictable and comes with no guarantees. I will make a case for thinking of the weakness of notions like plurality and natality as a theoretical strength for education insofar as these concepts uncouple education from its tendency to over promise.
The final paper in this symposium invites us to consider the ways in which heteronomy is inscribed in every effort to achieve autonomy. Every desire to escape a condition places us in a particular relationship with it, which means essentially, that there is no exit. The pursuit of education’s autonomy is bound to disappoint. This too must be grappled with. A weak conception of educational autonomy might be a good way to proceed.

Author

• Natasha Levinson, Kent State University