Teaching as a gesture of non-indifference and the presence of the school in dark times

Abstract

In this paper, I address Biesta’s notion of world-centred education via a special focus on the school as a site of teacherly gestures. To begin with, I interpret ‘world-centredness’ – qua that which goes ‘beyond learning’ – through a deployment of tenets from Arendt and her appropriation of Marx’s and Heidegger’s motifs. Within this horizon, I proceed by means of two (ultimately interwoven) argumentative trajectories. On the one hand, I introduce the question of the school by discussing Eckart Liebau’s ideas (and Biesta’s appropriation of them) on how to frame the relation between the school and society, in order to vindicate a truly educational understanding of the school, as something distinct from a mere learning environment. On the other, I engage with Biesta’s critique of the impulse society as fundamentally inimical to the task of education and I complement it with some insights about consumerism and its dissolving effects on the democratic ethos. In this context, I suggest – by idiosyncratically entwining the intuitions of two Italian writers, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia – that we can see the consumerist society as a ‘regime of indifference’ and a new form of ‘fascism’. These two trajectories converge on a discussion of Biesta’s dialogue with Klaus Prange’s operational pedagogy and a re-description of teacherly gestures as gestures of non-indifference and, thereby, as animated by an ‘antifascist’ tension. Accordingly, the school as a site of teacherly gestures that point to the world is granted a democratic mission, inscribed in the very operations which take place in that domain.