Jordi Collet-Sabé & Stephen J. Ball, (2024). The School Is Irredeemable: Proposing Discomfort for a Different Future for Education. In: Beasy, K., Maguire, M., te Riele, K., Towers, E. (eds) Innovative School Reforms. Education, Equity, Economy, vol 11. Springer, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64900-4_11
Abstract
The chapter argues that the modern school is an ‘intolerable’ institution. Contrary to the sensibilities of educational research that look for more and/or better schooling as a way of making education more equal and more inclusive, our position is against the modern European school as an institution of normalisation and exclusion within which equality and inclusion are impossible. Using Foucault’s strategy of reversal and the commons approach as a critical mirror, we propose the urgency of creating times and spaces of discomfort as a commoning activity in education. We thus ask fundamental questions of both the modern episteme and prevailing truths of education; ourselves as modern educators; and schools as places of persistent failure and irredeemable injustices. The reversal strategy and the commons as critical tools are used to create discomforts and to re-politicise, question and unlearn the current ethics of extinction. This opens up new possibilities for the ethics of continuance; a new order of things that can allow for new grammars of living, new subjectivities, new forms of educating. Finally, the chapter offers some sketches of what a new education could look like. That is, an education understood as self-formation, as the care of the self, others and the world as a political activity more related to ethics than to truth.
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