Conference Agenda

This symposium addresses, from somewhat different perspectives, the rise of identity as a shaping feature of not only the discursive politics of education but, increasingly, the spaces of pedagogy and curriculum. The claims to the import of identity are driven by often competing ideological perspectives. Hence, one element has seen the resurgence of nationalisms while another, the emergence of an assumed right to not be offended by others opinions and beliefs. Allied to these twin concerns is the role of the State and its agencies (including education) in facilitating a closure of disagreement. The elision of the respective responsibilities of childhood and adulthood, the emerging primacy of of the post-anthropocene orthodoxy, the State's preference to promote certtain kinds of progressive discourse over more traditional or conservative forms all serve to reduce the import of dissonance to the maintenance of a healthy liberal democracy. None of the presentations intend to deny the significance of myriad progressive views on educational purpose and practice but do wish to lay bare some of the inconsistencies and unintended consequences that might flow from the two easy adoption of liberal nostrums while exposing their significant if attenuated links to regressive forms of educational endeavour.

In this the presenters here will take seriously the post Second World War concern to see education as a critical partner in the maintenance of the social contract and, in turn, a means for securing liberal democracy. They will examine the State’s role with respect to the private spaces of the family and identity preferences.

In all of this, the presenters will explore the necessity of a more public questioning of, what may be considered the increasingly interventionist nostrums of the state/the institutions of educated opinion. Amongst other lenses the presenters will draw upon Arendt, Levinas and Lysgaard to draw a critical eye on the homogenising impulses of so many different features in and of education. Many of these impulses produce forms of self-regulation that may both educationally and politically be counterproductive with respect to liberal democracy.

At the heart of this endeavour is a wish to expose,explore and analyse the myriad contradictions and confusions that have emerged in recent decades with regard to human identity and difference and attempt to offer some suggestions by way of a corrective to what the presenters, in their different ways, consider to be educational and cultural cul de sacs.

The daily contributions of online readers to the Financial Times offer a window into one of the most fracturing features of contemporary educational politics - the impulse to pit generations and communities against each other. 'Baby boomers' have squandered the future'; 'Gen Z are spoiled and mentally fragile...', so the arguments go. With a glance to neither the past nor the future, readers are quite content to pillory and vilify a demographic of which they are not a part as, in some way, morally, intellectually, culturally and/or politically deficient. Sub-group identification has become an increasingly common feature of our social life. Paradoxically, in education this impulse to foreground factional identity is often and increasingly manifest in the claim of a 'Right' not to have one's personal or group identifier subject to what is considered by such persons as an offence in attitude, word or behaviour. A third feature of these tendencies, which prima facie appears to be different but which, I hope to illustrate, has a number of important commonalities in education, is the collapse of the distinction between childhood and adulthood. All three of these cases are connected in that, I will suggest, 1. they gradually dissolve the fabric of the social contract which underpins liberal democracy. 2. they distract and deflect attention from a crucial concern for securing the social contract- class and poverty. Of course economists, such as Minouche Shafik consider that the social contract is secured by the redistribution/targeting of resources though even here she is aware of the centrality of education to facilitating and securing such redistribution. But, education after the post War liberal democratic settlement in Europe was, amongst other things, concerned to promote and secure a legitimate space for dissonance and disagreement. Consequently I will go on to argue that these contradictory impulses to erase the spaces of disagreement and dissolve legitimate difference in kind and responsibility undermines education in support of a social contract in the service of liberal democracy. If we are to maintain the social contract and its attendant liberal democratic consensus we need to refurbish our educational conversation (inc. in the curriculum) so that it reduces the import of identity, allows for the promotion of disagreement and recognises the limits of the State.

Kristiina Brunila & Leena-Maija Rossi (2018) Identity politics, the ethos of vulnerability, and education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50:3, 287-298 Minocuhe Shafik, (2022) What We Owe Each Other: A New Social contract, NJ, Princeton. James Conroy (2004) Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Imagination, Education and Democracy, New York and Bern, Peter Lang. James Conroy (2019) Caught in the Middle: Arendt, Childhood and Responsibility, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(1)23-42

The existence of the UNCRC is premised upon the inequality or not-sameness of children and adults: protection and provision rights are necessary because of children’s different vulnerability, dependence and needs; participation rights are circumscribed by stipulations regarding their age and maturity. The field of childhood studies challenges the distinctions made between adults and children to test the boundaries of the categories. The radical wing of this important task explores the elimination of age-based discrimination altogether. A case in point is the notion of ‘Childism’ as formulated by Professor John Wall and promoted by the Childism Institute at Rutgers University. Wall’s Childism is a fascinating attempt to engage Ricoeurian phenomenology to establish the absolute equality of adults and children. The argument turns on the idea ghat children are indistinguishable from adults in their relation to the world, and second, adults are the same as children in terms of their vulnerability to harm or being subject to change. In other words, children and adults are indistinguishable from one another in relation to their agency and vulnerability, leading to an assertion of ethical symmetry and reciprocity of responsibility. Losing any meaningful distinction, equality loses the normal presumption of difference and collapses into identity. I propose that this is a faulty and harmful move, which removes warranted discrimination and misrepresents the primordial relation of mother (parent) and child. I suggest that we would be better with Levinas than Ricoeur in understanding the adult-child relation.

Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press. Ricoeur, (1992). Oneself as another. P Chicago: Chicago University Press. Wall, J. (2010). Ethics in light of childhood. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press

Spanning the sectors from pre-school to universities and lifelong learning, the discourse of ‘the Anthropocene’ and ‘the Post-Anthropocene’ has emerged in recent years across Europe as a powerful driver in the variously-labelled projects for supporting learning for sustainability and the collective educational response to the climate crisis. Originating in post-War scientific assessments of the adverse human impact on the global ecosystem, the Anthropocene has been taken up enthusiastically in areas as varied as the arts and humanities, the life sciences, post-colonial historical enquiry, radical green politics and, increasingly, environmental education, everywhere as a tool for historicising and critiquing anthropocentric human predation. The broad critical vocabulary that it furnishes is now mainstreamed into much learning and teaching in schools and universities as part of the mobilisation of the young in the active creation of sustainable futures. This paper seeks to step back from the normative concepts of the (Post)-Anthropocene in order better to evaluate them and to highlight certain unrecognised perils for education within them. From a detailed inventory of these, the paper spotlights in particular the growing danger of a fatalistic anti-humanism epitomised in the recurrent (Post)-Anthropocene repudiation of human exceptionalism, human privilege, and human transcendence of nature––elements that are repeatedly condemned in this analysis as the root causes of modern humanity’s unconstrained exploitation and destruction of the planetary ecosystem. Questioning what it suggests is the flawed historical reasoning and the defective philosophical, anthropological and theological calculations propelling this argument––including the often highly selective and misleading uses of indigenous epistemologies––the paper concludes by calling for a rehabilitation in our educational institutions of the global humanist heritage of critical reasoning in which the recognition of human primacy is inseparable from its ethical responsibilisation.

Bonneuil, C. (2016). The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. London: Verso Green, J. (2021). The Anthropocene Reviewed. London: Dutton Lysgaard, J. L et al. (2019). Dark Pedagogy: Education, Horror and the Anthropocene. New York: Springer Nørreklit, L. & Paulsen. M. (2022). To Love and Be Loved in Return: Toward a Post-Anthropocene Pedagogy and Humanity. In M. Paulsen et al, Pedagogy in the Anthropocene. London: Palgrave, 217-240. Scranton, R. (2015). Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. London: City Lights. Vetlesen, A. J. (2019). Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism and the Limits of Posthumanism. London: Routledge

After the Second World War, rituals and ritualistic practices were met with distrust and resistance both in society more generally and in education, for good reasons. Later in the twentieth century, advocating ritualistic practices was seen as incompatible with the development of a school for differentiated, pluralistic societies and their homogenizing function was met with skepticism among the foremothers and forefather of progressive, liberal education. Today, the scene is both different and more complex and on the one hand we are witnessing a “return of ritual” in schools (partly fueled by the marketization of education and the desire among private actors in the sphere of education to enhance order and discipline in the classroom) and, on the other, there seems to be an almost sacred focus on the veneration of the individual for which ritualistic, collective practices are counterculture. Drawing on ritual theorist with psychoanalytical and anthropological perspectives, the claim is made that rituals create a subjunctive, an “as if” or “could be” mode of relationality that makes imagined communities and shared worlds possible whilst recognizing the ambiguity and plurality that is always already at play in human relationships. The paper explores the consequences of ritual and the potential of the “subjunctive form” for pedagogical settings, and it is argued that the main obstacle for putting the subjunctive into play is the modern, protestant, concern for sincerity and authenticity – two ways of framing human experience that have been (and still are) dominant in both contemporary culture and modern education but stand in tension with the form of ritual. Hence, in a Europe that seems to be losing its sense of community, this paper explores the possibility to rejuvenate the pedagogical potential of rituals and ritualized practices in and for educational settings.

Anderson, B. (1983/2006). Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. and extended ed.). London: Verso. Arendt, H. (2006). Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought. New York: Penguin Books. Bernstein, B. et al. (1966) ‘Ritual in Education’, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 251.772, pp. 429–36. Masschelein, J and Simons, M. (2021). Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education. Leuven: E-ducation, Culture & Society Publishers. Peters, R. S. (1966) Ethics and Education. London: George Allen & Unwin. Seligman, A.B. (2008). Ritual and its consequences: an essay on the limits of sincerity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.