Philosophy of Education Today: Diagnostics, Prognostics, Therapeutics and Pandemics

Dear Colleagues, 

To offer a critical political outlook on reality, educational philosophy typically relies on descriptions of today’s world on account of its thorny, pressing issues. This reliance on historical currency and topicality is often expressed with medical tropes such as viral times, disease, symptoms, recovery, ills, plagues, melancholy, trauma, pathologies, pathos, and apathy, for which education or various educational values are said to offer therapy. Medically metaphorizing politics has had a long philosophical history since antiquity, but recently it has become a standard and safe expression of Zeitgeist responses to troubling realities in modalities of cure and therapeutics. Most educational-philosophical projects and writings try to show the significance of their chosen and favored normative values (e.g., inclusion, democracy, justice, posthumanism, the decolonial) precisely in and for the world of today. The latter is described through homogenized and homogenizing temporal terms such as “times of crises”, “times of disaster”, “viral times”, “pandemic times”, “viral times”, and “uncertain times”, as if the world of today and its crises or disasters were experienced in a similar manner by all people across spaces. Zeitdiagnosen, diagnoses of the times, are then followed by prognoses, prescriptions, and remedial measures that often have dubious political implications, since, in their zeal to cure, they may cause further damage in an autoimmune manner.  

Exemplary of such medical metaphors applied to reality is the current overwhelming frequency of discussing “education in the times of the viral”. It is said that we are now living in pandemic times that invite remedial responses to the challenges that the viral brings about on a global scale. The world is viral in that it suffers from the threat of a medical virus and also in its being interconnected through unprecedentedly fast dissemination of information, some of which is fake news. By stopping, altering, or deferring our routine practices and by demarcating a distinct and uncharacteristic period of time, medical emergencies such as pandemic events, and their quick transformation into new global discourses via the internet, become the setting or backdrop against which much educational normativity is deployed. This call for papers invites explorations of educational philosophy as a response to “our times” but also welcomes problematizations of the politics of “our”, the “times”, the medicalization of today, and the uncritical reliance of educational philosophy itself on accounts of the global that make educational normativity dependent on, and answerable to, the world of today.

In other words, the call for papers invites investigations of so far neglected self-reflective, meta-critical issues of educational philosophy: how does philosophy of education relate to understandings and tropes of the times? Additionally, to what degree does philosophy of education succumb to medicalizations of politics that may expose it to the risk of being consumed by the very metaphors on which it capitalizes? 

Some related questions are as follows: What can educational philosophy offer to humanity by way of cure, generally and at a given time? What is the epoch that invites a nuanced and cautious educational-philosophical therapeutic response? How self-reflective is educational philosophy concerning its own political operations when it tries to be “competitive” and to prove to other sciences and to research funding organizations that its contribution lies in offering “cures”? What’s the politics of an educational philosophy that desires so much to be up-to-date and to display its practical value by offering “solutions” to current, conspicuous pathologies? Is the polarization between “healthy” and “ill” that is operating beneath dominant educational visions itself a “healthy” thing or is it a moralist vehicle for introducing and legitimizing ever new forms of totalitarianism? What are the new binarisms of “privileged social agents” versus their “dangerous others” that thereby remain overlooked and unaccounted for?

Prof. Dr. Marianna Papastephanou
Dr. Kalli Drousioti
Guest Editors

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• pandemic
• philosophy of education
• critique
• totalitarianism
• politics