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Lookup NU author(s): Professor David RoseORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0).
Like the discipline of economics, the philosophy of education and educational studies are offshoots of moral philosophy. They investigate how best to realize the good as part of human existence. In economics, the purpose is to optimize the flows of exchange and the production of value for the cooperative functions of society which is a good because (and here pick your favourite) it produces autonomous individual agents; or maintains and supports personal individual liberty; or inculcates fellow feeling; or allows for more efficient production practices; or increases general welfare. Prior to doing economics, one needs to do the philosophical legwork of ethical justification. Similarly, with education; taking our pick from self-government, equality, liberty or political emancipation. Even Lyotard (Citation1991, 3), the most postmodern of postmodernists and the most sceptical of unifying systems and structures, offers us an axiomatic starting point: ‘That children have to be educated is a circumstance which only proceeds from the fact that they are not completely led by nature, not programmed. The institutions which constitute culture supplement this native lack’. Education is quintessentially human, and its emancipatory goal is quintessentially characteristic of the Enlightenment. It is a behavioural transformation. Plants can be constrained. Animals can be trained. Computers can be programmed. Dependents can be indoctrinated. Only humans, complicit in the practices and ends of education, aware of its goals and consensual to its interventions, can learn. And that is why it is so curiously problematic for posthuman discussions: will the after-human need to learn given new technological immediacies and will the goal of that education still be understood in terms of the values that the posthuman discourse itself, at best, is wary of and, at worst, outright rejects? Surely, education is the human activity or pursuit par excellence – the very sort of thing we can do and no other things can do. After all, what are you doing now as you read this?
Author(s): Rose DE
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: International Journal of Philosophical Studies
Year: 2023
Volume: 31
Issue: 4
Pages: 467-474
Online publication date: 09/02/2024
Acceptance date: 08/11/2023
Date deposited: 14/02/2024
ISSN (print): 0967-2559
ISSN (electronic): 1466-4542
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2023.2282768
DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2023.2282768
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/xcjm-gt54
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