Bewildering Education

Theorists as diverse as Plato, Rousseau, Freire, Apple, and the New London Group have understood education as a practice that “makes” humans. Positing education as a practice of humanization has long been understood to be the highest, most lofty good. By drawing on feminism, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies, the author of this article argues that when it is understood as a practice of humanization, education is always at least virtually capable of dehumanization. Far from being the highest possible aim of education, subordinating pedagogy to humanization radically limits its scope and potential. Recent posthumanist scholarship reveals that the human is not simply a being that is, but a social construction formed and defined in relation to various non-human Others. Without these inhuman Others, “the human” could not be defined, let alone made into the dominant subject of global politics. In the final section, the author proposes an alternative theory of education that breaks with more than 2000 years of educational philosophy. The author calls it “bewildering education” since it does not seek pre-determined ends (the production of “humans”) but rather sets out to move away from this political subject without deciding in advance what its “end” will be.