Conference Agenda

Our presentation is part of an international project on ‘Forward to (Common) Roots – Pedagogical Terminology in Different Languages,’ on which we worked in several workshops and common papers. This project is theoretical and builds on efforts by intergenerational scholars from North America, Sweden, and Germany working collaboratively to reconnect and renew their understandings of education and pedagogy.

In this international project, a transcultural perspective on education will be provided by working on the terminologies of Bildung, learning, curriculum, didactic, education and upbringing, educational practice, and methodology. Specifically, this paper focuses on social and cultural diversity in relation to education and pedagogy.

In many nation-states, various forms of social and cultural diversity have been increasingly recognized and included in the core of educational values, practices, curricula, and research. However, because diversity is being defined almost exclusively as a difference in race, gender, and identity, how diversity is discussed, imagined, and implemented in pedagogical practice increasingly appears the same. What is missing is a notion of diversity as difference in the educational experience. In the United States, for example, diversity seems to be a standard or standard of uniformity, not multiplicity, and paradoxically is reduced to a rubric or checklist (defined by others, not in education) to demonstrate the meeting of pre-determined ends rather than a collective inquiry toward un-determined and what could otherwise turn out to be new opportunities for different ways of perceiving one and the same thing and to act upon that, or what we would argue to create the conditions for true diversity in teaching and learning.

For this ECER conference paper, we focus on and discuss the relationship between educational philosophy and policy regarding such diversity as acting upon people’s differences (s). Here we draw on Wilhelm von Humboldt (1854) and John Stuart Mill (1859) to consider questions of education and educational approach concerning tensions between the universal and the particular and, in contemporary times, between freedom and security. Highlighted will be philosophical connections to problems with current initiatives, including DEI or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

We ask how to address such questions of diversity, representation, and recognition in education and pedagogy. Following Humboldt and Mill, we would suggest that we should answer these questions not concerning special interests or “transient desires” but concerning what Humboldt called “ewig- unveränderliche Vernunft” (“eternal and immutable dictates of reason”).

Indeed, Humboldt and Mill together indicate a universalizing aspect concerning education and a full appreciation and aspiration for developing the powers of the individual by exposure to different learning experiences. That was a key and crucial insight on their part: a genuinely educational education, with authentic diversity, stems not from where one was born or to whom, nor to what conditions or demographics a student hails from. Instead, students are cut from the same cloth; humanity. We all should be equally afforded the dignity of access and opportunity. A universal education with particular diversifying experiences provides the means for cultivating the individual powers of each respective individual.

It is also worth inquiring about what exhortations from Humboldt, Mill, and others in the Continental Philosophy tradition translate to later work of influential pedagogues such as John Dewey. We seek in this paper to provide some of the tacit dimensions (Kraus et al., 2021) and revisit that lost translation to reimagine diversity in the present and future as more than a rubric or identity, as a different difference, a possibility for an experience that is different, and educational.

Recent years have seen a rise in interest in ‘character education’ in England, a broad church of initiatives aimed at developing positive personality traits like perseverance and resilience (Mills 2021). Character education’s advocates argue that the turn to character is an important corrective to the coldness of the purely civic test of ability (‘mere’ exam results), putting forward the idea that education should be about producing well-rounded individuals and not merely examination-fiends or drones for the workplace. Paradoxically, as Jerome and Kisby (2019) point out, advocates like former English Education Secretary Nicky Morgan (2017) also tend to stress, in a more outcomes-oriented way, that this turn to character will make young people particularly employable, since personality traits like adaptability can be understood as work-ready competences, or a kind of personal capital (Brown, Hesketh and Williams 2003).

Critics have argued that the character education movement often stems from a right-wing ethos. Ideas about education for character are highly individualist (as opposed to its more collectivist cousin, citizenship education), stressing hard work and personal ambition as routes to a better future: often meaning a route not just to personal fulfilment but, when it comes to working-class young people, a route out of working-class communities. Some character education initiatives in English higher education, like the University of Birmingham’s Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, have explicit links to right-wing philanthropic individuals and organisations (Allen and Bull 2018).

In the terms of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), I argue that we can think of the turn to character education as an increasing folding of domestic values into the educational sphere. By domestic values I mean a concern with interpersonal relationships, and with questions of character and personality, when it comes to suggesting who higher education – and specifically non-vocational and general higher education – is for. This understanding goes beyond thinking about character as a desired outcome of education, to suggest that character is here being tested for. The suitability of this or that person for a particular educational opportunity here rests, in part, upon their domestic worth, or character.

Andrew Sayer’s (2020) recent Sociology article was an important intervention in debates about character’s ‘uses and misuses’ (461), in which he argued that character can be a valuable term, notwithstanding its frequent use for conservative ends. He argued that thinking about an individual’s character is a more or less inevitable feature of human assessment (a species of his broader concept of lay normativity or everyday morality – see also Sayer 2005, 2011), and thus cannot be avoided. He argued that instead of arguing against character assessments in general, we should turn our attention to which character traits are prized. For example, he stresses that current, right-wing notions of character tend to reduce character to the ‘executive virtues’ (Sayer 2020: 464) of grit and so on, rather than moral and collectivist virtues like gratitude.

This paper builds on Sayer’s argument by demonstrating the importance of context for ascertaining whether a concern with character is appropriate or not in different educational situations. It goes further than asking which traits are prized to asking where they are prized, and how actors make decisions about the appropriateness of thinking about character in this or that setting.

The problem of violence rarely reaches center stage in philosophical and theoretical discourses concerning education. Yet violence is inherent to many – perhaps all – educational practices. Education often involves coercion, enforcement and punishing, and school education takes children away from their homes and families, submitting them to sets of rules and regulations they seldom wish to obey. At the heart of every discussion of the legitimacy of educational practices, therefore, lie the questions of whether they exert violence on the educated, what is the nature of this violence, and how its application may be prevented or at least minimized.

My talk will address these questions through the writings of Walter Benjamin, which receive growing attention in contemporary educational discourse (Lewis 2020; Johannsses & Zechner 2022). My point of departure will be Benjamin’s early and enigmatic essay “Critique of Violence” (1978 [1921]). Although education is by no means a central theme in this text, it appears in a crucial moment, as an example of what Benjamin calls “divine violence”. Benjamin presents such violence as transcending both forms of violence which originate in myth: law-making violence, which constitutes the legal order, and law-preserving violence, which protects an already-existing legal order. Against these two forms of violence, Benjamin describes divine violence as “law-destroying”: recognizing no boundaries, it strikes without spilling blood. While mythical violence, in both its functions, “is bloody power over mere life for its own sake”, divine violence is “pure power over all life for the sake of the living” (297).

How can we understand the link Benjamin draws between divine violence and education? Clearly the category of divine violence is not reserved to religion or theology, nor is God the only one to exert it; but in what sense is it manifest in education? Educational violence seems more likely to be classified as law-preserving, for it teaches to obey the law and conform to the legal order, and also as law-making, since educational institutions (similar to police practices, in an example Benjamin gives) operates through countless regulations they make within their wide operating field. I argue that Benjamin had in mind a kind of education through tradition, a transmission of knowledge and skills which allows for negotiation and transformation, by focusing on “the indispensable ordering of the relations among generations […], not of children” (Benjamin 2002a [1926]).

My talk will develop this point by appealing to Benjamin’s writings on childhood and youth (2022b [1938]), but will also link this conception of divine educational violence to the pedagogical implications of the scholastic method presented in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977 [1928]). Following the work of Ori Rotlevy (2017; 2020), I read Benjamin’s discussion of the scholastic treatise, which does not proceed argumentatively but rather presents the topic at hand digressively through contradictory citations and remarks, as an educational process in which the student’s mind undergoes a significant transformation. It is a spiritual exercise aimed at extracting the subject from contemplation in an attempt to school the mind in attunement with the intentionless, a manner of thought not based on the subject’s position, on the relation of a subject intending an object. Such scholastic education, I argue, fits the idea of what Benjamin calls “divine violence”.

[An earlier version of this proposal was accepted to ecer2020 – which was canceled due to covid19 – and I did not have the chance to work on it since then].