Posthumanist, new materialist, and actor–network approaches increasingly draw attention to heterogeneous configurations of humans, technologies, infrastructures, and environments in which educational practices take place. At the same time, philosophical traditions of education insist that education cannot be reduced to relational complexity, since it requires normative distinctions that allow us to recognise education as education. These lines of thought are often treated as incompatible. This article argues that this tension points to a deeper feature of educational reality. I propose the concept of the dirty ontology of education to describe the condition in which pedagogical practices must reduce the complexity of the world to make education visible, while educational actions mobilise, stabilise, and transform relations that exceed these pedagogical reductions. Educational events are thus never pure: they become possible only through the ordering of heterogeneous relations, and this ordering can never be complete. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s analysis of dirt and Bruno Latour’s account of purification and hybridity, the paper shows how pedagogical strategies of ordering inevitably generate forms of excess that destabilise the boundaries through which education is defined. Rather than locating this “dirt” outside pedagogy, the article understands it as an internal feature of educational practice. Recognising the dirty ontology of education allows philosophy of education to move beyond the opposition between pedagogies of meaning and relational ontologies, and to develop a more adequate account of education as a practice that simultaneously orders and transforms the world.
The article is a critical and contextual commentary on Morten Korsgaard’s Retuning Education. Bildung and Exemplarity Beyond the Logic of Progress. The leading idea of the review is to challenge the anti-enlightenment attitude of the book, and by the same token, to make an attempt at a defence of (modern) reason. It is also an attempt to clear Bildung’s theorists of the allegation of being idealists and Enlightenment rationalists, which is intertwined with the first. These disputes are concluded with a brief commentary on the problem of instrumentality and learning outcomes. Last but not least, it is an attempt to develop and complement the concept of exemplarity, pivotal for the book in question.
In Four Quartets and especially in that work’s final poem, “Little Gidding,” T.S. Eliot presents a picture of learning that fits with, yet differs in important respects from, Simone Weil’s ideas of decreation and attention. Weil says a human being must decreate herself, or let go of her own ideas and plans so she can attend to the people and things of the world and thereby attend to God. Eliot agrees he must empty himself of what degrades his attention to reality, but he admits he cannot long endure emptiness and the solitude it requires. Inspired by saints’ absorption in God, yet aware that perfect attention is beyond his powers, Eliot learns to observe practices by which non-saints such as himself can join together to face the divine. For Eliot, observance is a keyword with a double meaning; to learn to observe means to learn both to pay attention and to perform acts that connect you to others in a pattern of life open to ultimate reality. Eliot’s mode of observance, the essay concludes, can help students resist distraction and ground themselves in living traditions, secular or religious.
Fostering a sense of belonging has become an assumed and unquestionable ‘good’ in educational policy and practice in much of the western world, so much so that countless policies and practices are devoted to inculcating it. These activities tend to treat a sense of belonging in educational discourses as unproblematic and ignoring the moral and ethical questions inherent in the enactment. The troubling lack of conceptual analysis of the concept in public policy enables the models used to examine belonging to always be to something outside of the person. I argue that articulating a philosophical account of belonging that embraces a relational account of being in the world requires us to go deeper to consider belonging from the inside. I draw on the concept of Fictive Kinship, an anthropological term for bringing non-kin into kinship relationships I argue that the lack of acknowledgement of the difficulties in achieving these aims and the failure of its proponents to take account of the underlying philosophical issues lead us to question the practicality of the vision as currently voiced. I suggest that how to be for children are not just empirical questions as to behaviour and training for schools, but are inseparable from questions of who we are and what we care about—and that this needs to be reflected in our policy making.
