Chairs: Valentina Dascanio (University of Rome, Italy) & Hans Schildermans (University of Vienna, Austria)
Defining the nature and purpose of education can never do justice to the variegated contextual histories of intellectual and political discourse on education across different times and places. The contemporary tendency to narrow down the concept of education to learning, often emphasising the figure of the learner, justifiably concerns many educational researchers.
Historically speaking, different ideals and discourses have informed how societies have understood the aims of educational practices, institutions, and systems. Concepts such as paideia, humanitas, bildung, perfectibilité, or liberal education, only give a first impression of the divergent intellectual histories of education thought in different cultural traditions.
Today, the discourse of learning has made a certain claim on the educational imagination, thereby narrowing down understandings of educational institutions, experiences, and practices. Because of the multiple dimensions and levels of analysis that this question brings with it, there is a need for a complex, context-sensitive approach, particular to comparative education, that allows for identifying and deciphering the effects of the primacy given to a certain idea of learning, at the expense of other educational vocabularies.
It therefore seems necessary to critically analyse comparatively the reductionism brought about by discourses of learning. The working group aims to address the intellectual histories of educational ideas and to rekindle the educational imagination through alternative understandings of education and its relation to society, humanity, and the planet.
The following questions are deemed particularly relevant in light of the working group’s aims:
- How to rethink the long-held ideals that have provided the ideological support for our educational institutions in ways that respond to contemporary concerns? How to do this without falling into the danger of reducing education to a solver of social problems?
- To what degree and in what terms is the increasing focus on learning changing the pact between society, educational institutions, the individual, and the planet? What are the risks and what are the possible alternatives?
- How does the learning discourse constrain public debates about the role of education systems in various contexts? To what extent is there a conceptual impoverishment because of this undue attention for learning and how can we draw on rich historical traditions of educational thinking to think differently?
- Which philosophies of education have perhaps been sidelined or marginalized in the coming into being of modern education systems? How can we do justice to subaltern styles of educational reasoning within Europe and beyond?