What Is This Thing Called Education?

Abstract

Education exposes a conundrum that extends well beyond government policy and beyond those working in education as a designated discipline. If education is nothing more than a human science or the achievement of satisfactory outcomes by way of testing, then education has no future. Education is the manufacture of docile subjects and (as Bernard Stiegler has argued) it will do little more than short-circuit attention. Stiegler does, however, point out that education’s power to orient bodies beyond themselves toward a complex future relies necessarily on the same technologies that contract and disorient individuals, becoming nothing more than captivation by already actualized forms. Education is at once necessary to bring forth a future distinct from what we already are, and yet that orientation toward a world of relations that is not oneself comes with the essential risk of stupidity