Liberating Education:

What From, What For?

Editors:

Igor Cvejić,
Predrag Krstić,
Nataša Lacković,
Olga Nikolić

Univerzitet u Beogradu
Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju
Title Liberating Education: What From, What For?

Editors Igor Cvejić, Predrag Krstić, Nataša Lacković, Olga Nikolić

Publisher Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade

Reviewers Ana Dimiškovska, Aleksandar Dobrijević, Zoe Hurley

Design and Layout Tijana Milojević

Proofreading Olga Nikolić

Print Sajnos d.o.o. Novi Sad

Place and year Belgrade, 2021

Number of copies 300

ISBN 978-86-80484-79-2

This volume was realised with the support of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological
Development of the Republic of Serbia, according to the Agreement on the realisation and financing
of scientific research.
Table of Contents

Igor Cvejić, Predrag Krstić, Nataša Lacković, and Olga Nikolić

Emancipation and/or Education: Challenges and Frictions 7
EDUCATORS AND EDUCATED

Igor Cvejić
The Emotional Base of Educational Process: Beyond Care
for Wellbeing 19
Aleksandar Milanković
Interactive Teaching as a Component of Social
Emancipation 35
Marija Velinov
Free Yourself from Yourself: The Ethics of the Self as an
Emancipatory Educational Practice 55
EMANCIPATION FOR AND FROM THE SOCIETY

Milica Smajević Roljić

An Interpretation of the Educational Process from the
Perspective of Kant’s Philosophy of History and
Legal-Political Theory 83
Olga Nikolić
Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Education 101
Andrija Šoć
Deliberative Education and Quality of Deliberation: Toward
a Critical Dialogue and Resolving Deep Disagreements 123
Aleksandar Ostojić
Knowledge Versus Production: Michel Serres and
Idiosyncratic Roads of Education 147
Sanja Petkovska
Decolonial Emancipation on the Postsocialist Peripheries
and the Future of Critical Pedagogy 167

EDUCATIONAL TOOLS OF EMANCIPATION

Mikhail Bukhtoyarov and Anna Bukhtoyarova

Educational Technology: From Educational Anarachism to
Educational Totalitarianism 185
Sonja Jankov
Social Turn and Operative Realism: Two Emancipatory
Methods of Contemporary Art Practices 205

Aleksandar Pavlović and Aleksandra Ilić Rajković

Neo-National Romanticism in Serbian Education:
Comparing Romantic-National and Recent Serbian History
Textbooks 223
 Igor Cvejić1
Predrag Krstić2
Nataša Lacković3
Olga Nikolić4

Emancipation and/or
Education: Challenges
and Frictions

We don’t need no education

We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

(Lyrics by Roger Waters, Pink Floyd, 1979)

The relations between emancipation, society and edu-

cation have been fraught with tensions throughout history. More
than 40 years ago, the release of Pink Floyd’s rock opera album The
Wall shook up the school and political landscape in Great Britain.
As Rogers Waters explained in the interview for the Rolling Stone
magazine in 2015, he wanted to express his own feeling of alien-
ation (Greene 2015). It was not to “accuse” teachers of the education-
al shortcomings as they would always be an “easy target”. The song

1  Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade: cvejic@instifdt.bg.ac.rs.  

2  Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade: krstic@instifdt.bg.ac.rs;
prekrst66@gmail.com.
3  Educational Research, Lancaster University: n.lackovic@lancaster.ac.uk.
4  Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade: olganikolic111@gmail.com;
olga.nikolic@instifdt.bg.ac.rs.

7
I. Cvejić, P. Krstić, N. Lacković, O. Nikolić

did have a significant emancipatory and education “life”. Soon after it

was released, it was banned in South Africa in 1980,5 as it supported
school boycott against racial inequities in education under apartheid.

Education may lead to emancipation, but it may also be precisely

what one should emancipate oneself from. Even though we are the
inheritors of the emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment, never
before have these been under such rigorous critical scrutiny as from
various intellectual traditions of the second half of the 20th century,
such as postcolonial and decolonial studies, post-structuralist thought,
feminist critique, posthumanism, etc. But precisely because the classic
educational emancipatory ideal appears both outdated and still current,
there is a great need for rethinking the idea of emancipation, along
with the role and the aim of education.

Some of the insufficiently considered issues are immediately im-

posed: Who is the subject of emancipation? Emancipation from what?
What does emancipatory education look like in practice? Does the
education that emancipates today differ from the ones before? How
can we criticize ideological, normalizing, conformist functions of
education and still argue its emancipatory role? What are the pos-
sible helpful tools and methods of emancipation through education,
how and with what purpose should they be used? How can technol-
ogy be emancipatory and what makes it anti-emancipatory? How
can the relation between educators and the educated contribute to
the growth of personal and social freedom? Ultimately, what does
it even mean to be or to become emancipated? And doesn’t setting
emancipation as the main, or the most desirable goal of education
already assume an unacceptable instrumentalization of education?

This volume gathers original contributions to these and other re-

lated issues and questions. The primary objective of this book is ex-
ploring the intersection of emancipation, society and education, from

5   The New York Times 1980. 

8
 Emancipation and/or Education

critical and theoretical lenses. In making the selection, we also cared

about their contemporary currency. Today’s world brings with it spe-
cific challenges: e.g. new distributions of geopolitical power, the cri-
sis of democracy, the rise of new technologies. Thus, we wanted this
volume to bring a fresh perspective on the ways in which the existing
educational practices should be challenged. The overall ambition is to
present studies that could contribute to the ongoing discussion and de-
bates around the role of emancipation in the 21st century, from educa-
tional perspectives.

There is a healthy body of scholarship around education and eman-

cipation in the current literature. The schools of critical theory, critical
pedagogy, poststructuralist feminism, critical race theory, and decolo-
nial studies have especially contributed to the debate.6 Although the
texts enclosed in this volume refer to these authors, we didn’t limit
ourselves to one school of thought. Instead, we decided to remain open
to diverse philosophical approaches, adding fresh perspectives from
several other disciplines as well, including sociology (Petkovska), ped-
agogy and philology (Pavlović & Ilić Rajković), and art theory (Jankov).

Even though the body of published articles and chapters is con-

siderable, collections dealing explicitly with the relation between ed-
ucation and emancipation, especially those considering this topic si-
multaneously from a variety of theoretical perspectives, such as this
one, are scarce. We believe that researchers interested in these issues
can benefit from a rich collection devoted explicitly to this topic. We

6   Jacques Rancière (Rancière 1991), Walter Mignolo (Mignolo 2000; Tlostanova & Mignolo
2012), Michael Apple (Apple 2004; Apple 1982), Henry Giroux (Giroux 1983), Peter McLaren
(McLaren 1997), and Gloria Ladson-Billings (Ladson-Billings 1997; Ladson-Billings & Tate IV
1995), in addition to having produced well-known classics, are still contributing new analyses,
providing the main references for the contemporary debate, which is actively continued, deep-
ened, and taken to the next level by Antonia Darder (Darder 2002), Gert Biesta (Biesta 2008; Bing-
ham & Biesta 2010; Osberg & Biesta 2020), Stephen Ball (Grimaldi & Ball 2021; Ball 2003), and
Noah De Lissovoy (De Lissovoy 2008; De Lissovoy 2015) among others. In addition, more recent
notable contributions to the debate include Neil Hooley (Hooley 2020), Michel Alhadeff-Jones
(Alhadeff-Jones 2018), Greg Wiggan and associates (Wiggan et.al. 2014), and Chris Sarra (Sarra
2014). 

9
I. Cvejić, P. Krstić, N. Lacković, O. Nikolić

hope to have shown through this collection how by asking about

the relation between education and emancipation, we ask about the
very purpose of education. Articles are grouped around three main
themes: the relations between educators and the educated, the use
of educational tools and practices in an emancipatory way, and the
role of education in emancipating individuals and societies from the
constraints and injustices imposed by the existing social structures.

Educators and Educated

The three chapters of this thematic whole address several chal-

lenges that arise out of the relation between students and teach-
ers, those who are educating and those who are educated. Can the
authority of teachers and the autonomy of students be reconciled?
How does a more egalitarian education look like, and how can it con-
tribute to the emancipation of students and the society as a whole?
Finally, how can we become emancipatory educators of ourselves?

The first chapter of this collection, “Emotional Base of Educa-

tional Process: Beyond Care for Wellbeing” by Igor Cvejić, treats
in the last few decades a very prominent topic of emotional invest-
ments and transfers in education. Relying on the family model and
the works of Shapiro and Helm, the author finds that asymmetrical
recognition of learners’ autonomy and emotions are not enough.
That’s what the term ‘beyond’ from the title stands for. Mutual or
joint engagement between the educator and the learner, care of all ac-
tors in the educational process, their union in recognizing each oth-
er as ‘one of us’ - these are noble and valuable suggestions that con-
clude this analysis of the feelings that underlie or surround education.

The chapter by Aleksandar Milanković “Interactive Teaching

as a Component of Social Emancipation” presents interactive teach-
ing method and argues convincingly for its vast emancipatory po-
tential. With a background in social constructivism, teaching and

10
 Emancipation and/or Education

learning are here understood and practiced as processes of commu-

nication and interaction. The aim of interactive teaching is not just
the transmission of knowledge, but a comprehensive personal devel-
opment in partnership with others. That is why, Milanković argues,
this method is suitable for developing relations between educators
and the educated that are based on equality, participation, communi-
cation, dialogue, cooperation, and solidarity, rather than the hierar-
chy inherent in the traditional ex catedra teaching. When applied to
subjects such as civic education, philosophy, sociology, history, liter-
ature, media, etc, this method exercises “active detection of modes of
coercion, power, indoctrination, and manipulation”, motivating stu-
dents to “transform, change, and improve their social surroundings”.
By stressing the importance of communication between equals, the
paper shows the way towards schools as true communities of learning.

Marija Velinov ventured to analyse the Stoics’ (primarily Seneca’s)

relationship to education through the prism of Foucault’s understand-
ing of Stoicism. Stultitia, Askesis, and related ancient concepts have been
put to the test in their connection to listening, reading, and writing as
educational practices. Emancipation emerges convincingly and inspir-
ingly out of the discussion of the liberating claim of the ethics of the self
to appropriate the truth and the becoming of the subject of truth-tell-
ing. It turns out that subjects primarily need to become independent
and free of themselves – in order to become emancipated. Foucault
evokes and interprets this wisdom of antiquity in an exceptional way –
Velinov concludes – finding it instructive for contemporaneity as well.

Emancipation for and from the Society

The largest thematic whole consists of five chapters, exploring

the complex relations of education and emancipation in the broader
social context. The papers reflect the problematic status of the En-
lightenment ideal, with some defending (Smajević Roljić; Nikolić), or
assuming it (Šoć), and others criticizing it (Ostojić; Petkovska). The

11
I. Cvejić, P. Krstić, N. Lacković, O. Nikolić

negative effects of contemporary neocolonial and neoliberal society on

education are analyzed and proposals for countering them are offered.

In the chapter “An Interpretation of the Educational Process

from the Perspective of Kant’s Philosophy of History and Legal-Po-
litical Theory” Milica Smajević Roljić outlines Kant’s understand-
ing of education in its appropriate social framework. One of the stan-
dard accounts of goals of education in Kant emphasizes their ethical
function. Accordingly, the main goals of education should be seen in
personal (moral) growth. Smajević Roljić stresses the importance of
historical-political processes, more precisely, the overlapping of Kant’s
understanding of history and legal-political theory with his account
on education. Besides the fact that goals of education and historical
processes are one and the same (according to Kant), the article reveals
the dependence of possibilities of the emancipation from the state
of development of society, i.e. the socio-political conditions which
affect not only society as a whole, but also every individual person.

In her chapter “Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Edu-

cation”, Olga Nikolić traces the development of scholarly thought on
emancipation through three canonical texts: Rousseau’s Emile, Kant’s
What is Enlightenment? and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. She juxta-
poses the key ideas of emancipation in these texts with neoliberal ideol-
ogy of education in the present day. The chapter argues that emancipa-
tion should be concerned with worthy ideals for society and education,
but it can hardly eradicate ideology, which neoliberalism falls under.
Emancipatory thought and action will always be critical of ideologies,
striving towards an emancipatory ideal, which may or may not turn
into or be abused through ideology-in-practice. The major contribu-
tion of this study is in making a conceptual distinction between ideol-
ogy and ideal, in response to the critics arguing that the Enlightenment
ideal had itself become ideological and had instrumentalized education.

Relying on the strong input of contemporary empirical research,

12
 Emancipation and/or Education

Andrija Šoć in his chapter “Deliberative Education and Quality of De-

liberation: Toward a Critical Dialogue and Resolving Deep Disagree-
ments” proposes standards that can empower deliberative education.
Šoć uses empirical evidence taken from various countries to reveal
problems that arise in the quality of deliberation. Against top-down
approaches and building on Steiner, Šoć advocates for an optimistic
bottom-up solution in education. The significance of Šoć’s account
lies in the proposal of the two-dimensional approach for formulating
goals and practices of deliberative education. Descriptive aspects in-
form us (post-hoc) about the quality of education and its malfunction-
ing. However, the description doesn’t suffice to address the question
of how we can improve it through education. For this purpose, Šoć
argues, it is better to combine descriptive aspects with the norma-
tive ones contained in Grice’s cooperation principle. In this way, the
emancipation of citizens could be enhanced not just as a realization
of the ‘dare to think’ maxim, but also in such a way that citizens will
be ready to be proven wrong by the strength of a better argument.

Michel Serres is the main character of Aleksandar Ostojić’s chap-

ter “Knowledge Versus Production”. And the former found a good
interpreter and successor in the latter: they are both wholeheartedly
opposed to the reduction of knowledge through rigorously imposed
frameworks and goals, and to the measuring of education by the scale
of efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, and other economic cate-
gories. The culprit is found in the discourse of methodocentrism, not
only for ‘bad’ science but also for colonial and imperial politics with
its single vision of emancipation. Serres’s efforts are instructive in this
regard, insofar as they “open the ways to knowledge” and the “roads
of discovery”. The hierarchy, norms, and reproduction of knowledge
are unequivocally opposed in favour of free, divergent thinking, and a
completely open dissemination of knowledge. In other words, Serres
and Ostojić warn that modern knowledge nurtured in schools is rather
a dogmatic suspension of knowledge than its inheritance, and advocate
for alternative pathways of knowledge – oriented towards innovation.

13
I. Cvejić, P. Krstić, N. Lacković, O. Nikolić

Starting from the thesis that in the contemporary world, plagued by

divisions and injustices, students’ understanding of their position in the
global market and the global division of geopolitical power significantly
contributes to their emancipation, the paper by Sanja Petkovska “De-
colonial Emancipation on the Postsocialist Peripheries and the Future
of Critical Pedagogy” defends it by discussing the main tenets of de-
colonial education. First, the author traces the historical emergence of
decolonial education in the context of the crisis of critical pedagogy. This
is followed by an overview of the main concepts of the decolonial op-
tion in the work of Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo, summed
up in the call for “learning to unlearn”. Finally, Petkovska presents two
postcolonial educational theories, by Chela Sandoval and Iveta Silova,
in order to exemplify how the field of decolonial educational studies can
contribute to emancipation in the classroom. Particular value of this
chapter lies in calling attention to the postsocialist spaces, often neglect-
ed in this context, as being in need of decolonization and emancipation.

Educational Tools of Emancipation

This thematic whole demonstrates by means of concrete examples

how educational tools (textbooks, art, technology) can on the one hand
be used to emancipate, but also how they can be ideologically abused
and serve as means of control.

In the chapter “Educational Technology: From Educational An-

archism to Educational Totalitarianism”, Mikhail Bukhtoyarov
and Anna Bukhtoyarova explore the relation between educational
technology and educational ideology with regards to an ever-increas-
ing use of technology as an educational tool. They provide a detailed
and original analysis of educational ideologies on the spectrum be-
tween educational anarchism and educational totalitarianism, with re-
spect to the use of technology in education. They focus particularly on
the growing risks of the abuse of technology in the context of social
change brought by the lifelong learning paradigm in education. They

14
 Emancipation and/or Education

observe the tendency of even the technologies originally supported by

anarchist ideas to become tools of totalitarianism when implement-
ed throughout the educational system and warn against the dangers
of justifying the use of technologies to track students’ personal data.

Sonja Jankov’s chapter “Social Turn and Operative Realism: Two

Emancipatory Methods of Contemporary Art Practices” discloses the
critical potentials of novel artistic practices. Choosing to exempli-
fy her thesis with the work of two artists, the installation What Else
Could We Talk About? by Teresa Margolles and the long-term project
Disputed Histories by Vahida Ramujkić, Jankov reveals emancipatory
potentials of the social turn in arts and operative realism. In spite of
the differences between the two approaches, the authors mentioned
combine them both. By pointing out their relational character toward
the world and the specific mode of knowledge production, Jankov con-
cludes that such socially engaged artistic methods could initiate new
forms of sociability that emancipates participants. What is crucial is
that these artistic methods can produce perspective-shifting and criti-
cal distancing in such a way as to enable participants to take an eman-
cipated view of the world, providing both openness to other’s perspec-
tives and the capability to approach problems from a ‘global’ stance.

In the final chapter of the collection, Aleksandar Pavlović and

Aleksandra Ilić Rajković follow the routes of the neo-romantic
discourse in educational policy from the constitution of the mod-
ern Serbian state in the second half of the nineteenth century to the
breakup of communism as the official Yugoslav ideology and the rise
of nationalism from the 1990s onwards. Thoroughly laid out basics
and main landmarks of the Romantic-national ideas of education are
compared, in this particularly striking review, with the current Ser-
bian history readers for primary and secondary schools. The author’s
diagnosis concludes that we are “still far from the emancipation of pu-
pils and the education system from the neo-romantic idea of nation
and national identity”. The proposed therapy is to include and respect

15
I. Cvejić, P. Krstić, N. Lacković, O. Nikolić

different sources and views on the same events in the teaching pro-
cess, whereby students would be able to gain a more comprehensive
view of both their own past and their neighbours’ through active
learning. Thus, this approach can “contribute overall to a more realis-
tic, nuanced and reconciliatory perception of their present problems”.

The questions posed in this volume were originally shaped through

discussions within the Edulab: Laboratory for Educational Strategies,
a group of researchers and practitioners of education coming from the
fields of philosophy, pedagogy and education studies, literary theory,
art history, and political science. Edulab was formed at the Institute for
Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, with an aim to
offer a fresh theoretical perspective on education through interdisci-
plinary scientific research. Additionally, Edulab aims at making edu-
cational themes more present in the public and finding ways for the
results of the theoretical work and public engagement to be applied in
practice.

We believe that this collection contributes to these goals.

References:

Alhadeff-Jones, Michel (2018), Time and the Rhythms of Emancipatory

Education: Rethinking the Temporal Complexity of Self and Society.
New York: Routledge.
Apple, Michael (2004), Ideology and Curriculum. Third Edition. New York
& London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Apple, Michael (ed.) (1982), Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Educa-
tion: Essays on Class, Ideology, and the State. London/Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Ball, Stephen (2003), “The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performa-
tivity”. Journal of Educational Policy 18 (2): 215-228.

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 Emancipation and/or Education

Greene, Andy (2015), “Roger Waters on ‘The Wall,’ Socialism and His
Next Concept Album”, RolingStone, novembar 2.
Available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/rog-
er-waters-on-the-wall-socialism-and-his-next-concept-album-53352/
(viewed 29 September, 2021).
Grimaldi, Emiliano and Stephen J. Ball (2021), “The Blended Learner:
Digitalisation and Regulated Freedom - Neoliberalism in the Class-
room”. Journal of Education Policy 36 (3): 393-416.
Biesta, Gert (2008), “Toward a New “Logic” of Emancipation: Foucault
and Rancière”. Philosophy of Education Archive: 169-177.
Bingham, Charles W. & Gert Biesta (2010), Jacques Rancière: Education,
Truth, Emancipation. London: Continuum.
Darder, Antonia (2002), Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love.
Colorado: Westview.
De Lissovoy, Noah (2015), Education and Emancipation in the Neoliberal
Era: Being, Teaching, and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
De Lissovoy, Noah (2008), Power, Crisis, and Education for Liberation:
Rethinking Critical Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Giroux, Henry (1983), Theory and Resistance in Education. Westport,
CT: Bergin and Garvey.
Hooley, Neil (2020), Constructing Pragmatist Knowledge: Education, Philoso-
phy and Social Emancipation. New York: Routledge.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria & William F. Tate IV (1995), “Towards a Criti-
cal Race Theory of Education”. Teachers College Record, 97 (1): 47–68.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria (1997), The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of
African-American Children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
McLaren, Peter (1997), Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dis-
sent for the New Millennium. Boulder: Westview Press.
Mignolo, Walter (2000), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Sub-
altern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Osberg, Deborah & Gert Biesta (2020), “Beyond Curriculum: Ground-
work for a Non-Instrumental Theory of Education”, Educational Philoso-
phy and Theory 53 (1): 57-70.

17
Rancière, Jacques (1991), The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellec-
tual Emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Sarra, Chris (2014), Strong and Smart - Towards a Pedagogy for Emancipa-
tion: Education for First Peoples. New York: Routledge.
Tlostanova, Madina V. & Walter D. Mignolo (2012), Learning to Un-
learn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Wiggan, Greg, Lakia Scott, Marcia Watson & Richard Reynolds (2014),
Unshackled: Education for Freedom, Student Achievement, and Personal Eman-
cipation. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
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September, 2021).
 

18
 EDUCATORS AND EDUCATED

Igor Cvejić1

The Emotional Base of

Educational Process:
Beyond Care for Wellbeing

This paper starts from the presupposition that the necessity

of the education of “immatures” does not rest primarily on biologi-
cal or empirical reasons, but on normative ones. As argued by Tamar
Schapiro (Schapiro 1999), on a recognition of moral autonomy and
responsibility. This immediately opens the problem which Schapiro
(Ibid.) calls a “problem of childhood”. On the one hand, autonomy is
not something that (passively) happens. On the other hand, autonomy
does not arise only from a set of choices and actions of immatures.
Thus, the main aim of education could be overcoming the addressed
problem.

In the second part of the article, I will address Schapiro’s solu-

tion, as well as criticisms of that solution. However, the central goal
of this paper will be to designate essential emotional relations be-
tween the educator and the learner. First, we must consider that an
educator must be capable of showing care for a learner perceived as

1  Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade: cvejic@instifdt.bg.ac.rs.  

19
Igor Cvejić

an autonomous agent, beyond (usually patronizing) care for wellbe-

ing, even if this care is no more than therapeutic trust. To be more
precise, an educator needs to have emotional capacities to care for
that which the learner cares for, i.e. that which Bennet W. Helm
calls care about an agent as such. In other words, emotional process-
es must include a recognition of learners’ emotions. This is still not
enough, because this one-sided (weak) asymmetric relation cannot
explain how the educator’s authority could influence learner’s auton-
omy. In order for this to happen, educational process must involve a
mutual engagement between the educator and the learner, so learners
can adopt the influence of the educator’s evaluations on the basis of
their own autonomous evaluative perspective, without undermining
their own autonomy. This is the relation we paradigmatically find
in friendship. Thus, educational processes seem to have to involve
(quasi-)friendship without equality. I will argue for an alternative view
– to understand educational processes as joint engagements, involving
mutual care between its actors, who treat each other as “one of us”.

Emotions and Normative Reasons for Education

and Emancipation

The role of emotions in education could be studied for various rea-

sons. One of them is certainly related to a motivational role emotion
plays in the learning process. Positive emotions can encourage students
to engage in a learning activity. However, negative emotions can also
stimulate intensive positive attitude toward learning (e.g., shame for
failing an exam etc.). Apart from these psychological and motivational
effects, emotions can also have an impact on social cohesion, either be-
tween a teacher and his/her students or between students. Moreover, it
is widely recognized that emotion influences cognitive capacities, for ex-
ample, by stimulating attention and memory. What applies to students
also applies to teachers. Careful research of the impact emotions have in
education could help us to develop various strategies and plans and gen-
erally lead to what might be called an emotional economy in education.

20
 The Emotional Base of Educational Process

For similar reasons we study the role particular emotions have in ed-
ucation, e.g. guilt, shame, pride, joy, fear etc. The focus here is not on
general motivational or cognitive impact, but on various positive and
negative impacts of a specific emotion. However, the main end of it is
the development of emotional economy.

None of this will be a topic in this article. I am starting from three

presuppositions that immediately explain in what way emotions are
important for education. (1) The first is one of the presuppositions of
relational education, that stipulate that education is above all about the
relation between its actors. (2) The second presupposition is that every
interpersonal relation could be explained in terms of emotions which
are involved. The idea that emotions “color” interpersonal relation is
not new, but this does not mean that every interpersonal relation is
based on intensive emotions between the parties (like love, for exam-
ple). The point is, rather, that even a relation deprived of emotions
could be explained in emotional terms – as colored with indifference.
The question would be: how is the relation between actors in education
emotionally colored? This question does not require us saying anything
prescriptive about these relations. (3) However, I also think that the
bases of emotional relations in educational processes are normative.
This means that there is a kind of commitment by those who are (in-
tentionally) involved in educational processes, to how this relation
ought to be. What follows from the third presupposition is that reasons
for teacher/student relation cannot be articulated in merely descriptive
terms but a normative one (roughly speaking, it is about rights and
responsibilities). The least complicated way to address the necessity of
education in the relation between adults and infants is to point out
its biological reasons. We are all born without skills and knowledge
required for our own preservations and we must acquire them from
those who already have them – this could be a catchline of this ap-
proach indicated already in the myth of Prometheus who provided us
with the understanding of fire (see Plato 1996). Even if this approach
cannot explain the necessity of education (as we know it), the argu-

21
Igor Cvejić

ment can be strengthened with the claim that we live in extraordinary

complex societies and that different knowledge should be acquired to
cope with the challenges of living in such societies (see Dewey 2001).
In the end, it seems that this is the reason why we pack out our children
to school. Of course, education does not only serve the preservation of
life. Education is also about the development of skills and knowledge
which could provide us some extra benefit. This benefit is very often
manifested in the agreement about mutual use of other party’s resourc-
es (a student pays a teacher to provide them with skills and knowledge).

All of this can only explain education in terms of the development

of skills and techniques and most probably in terms of supporting in-
fants’ growing desires. However, the merely descriptive explanation
cannot disclose why parents may require their children to eat vegeta-
bles even if they protest, or why a mentor may insist that a student’s
thesis should be changed even if the student is not satisfied with the
offered solution. The question is why do we treat someone differently and
hold them responsible in a different way than we hold ourselves and others
equal to us; not taking their actions seriously in the same way and as if we
have a kind of paternalistic obligation toward them? Reasons for this, as
argued by Tamar Schapiro, could only ever be normative (Schapiro
1999). This means that one who has to learn is treated as someone
who is lacking the kind of authority to make required decisions. Of
course, this is primarily applicable to parents/child relations. Schapiro,
relying on her Kantian background, argues that lacking specific moral
autonomy (authority to attribute decisions to one’s own will) is the
constitutive reason for why we treat someone as a child and have the
obligation to educate them.

The same normative model has been replicated in schools and even
in higher education (the mentor/student relation). Moreover, it could
be argued that the same model is applicable whenever someone is not
treated as an equally dignified member of a particular community of
respect (see Helm 2017), like for example in the academic community

22
 The Emotional Base of Educational Process

– where the student is yet to acquire authority through education (e.g.

authority to decide if a theoretical argument is sound, how refined an
artwork is, how good is an architectural project or what is the best
course of an educational strategy). Of course, presuming that any adult
(at least hypothetically) can withdraw their consent to being a mem-
ber of such society and that we are not talking about general moral
autonomy, but about authority in a specific area of social engagement.

It may look like I am recklessly widening Schapiro’s conception

of the child to different social spheres, but it is actually the opposite.
Schapiro has developed her notion of the child from Kant’s political
philosophy, from The Doctrine of Right (Schapiro 1999: 718). One of
her main arguments come from Kant’s distinction between pre-po-
litical and political (civic) society. The former refers to the state of
nature in which individuals both need and lack the capacity to make
claims about right and justice, and thus have to “pull themselves to-
gether” to express general will and form a civic society (Schapiro
1999: 728; Kant MS, AA 06: 312–3). Schapiro suggests that for pre-
cisely the same reason the “undeveloped human beings are those who
have yet to achieve the requisite form of integration” (Schapiro 1999:
728). Her second main argument comes from Kant’s distinction be-
tween active and passive citizens. Passive citizens, according to Kant,
are those who cannot partake in public life: minors (vel naturaliter vel
civiliter), impoverished, economically dependent, (controversially) all
women etc. (Kant MS, AA 06: 314). However, passive citizenship is
for Kant a deviant state, it “seems to contradict the concept of a cit-
izen as such” (Ibid.). Thus, Kant suggests that the state has a duty to
help everyone to find their way up to active citizenship (Kant MS, AA
06: 326).2 Schapiro argues for the twofold obligation principle in the
adult/child relation: (1) obligation to help children work their way out
of childhood and (2) obligation to refrain from acting in ways which
hinder children’s development as deliberators (Schapiro 1999: 735).

2   For an exploration of this argument in more detail see Nikolić & Cvejić 2017.

23
Igor Cvejić

To sum it up, Schapiro claims that the main normative reason for
adult/child relation is related to a specific lack of autonomy in imma-
tures, but the same normative model (with some restrictions) applies
for every situation in which education takes place. A child lacks its
autonomy due to the incapacity to attribute decisions to one’s own
will, while adults may lack authority due to a lack of education in
certain areas – what Schapiro calls “domains of discretion” (Schapiro
1999: 733–4). While Schapiro’s focus is on the concept of the child,
I am more interested in the normative basis of education in general.

It is worth remembering that Kant uses a metaphor of immaturi-

ty in a much wider context of societal emancipation: “Enlightenment
is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is
the inability to use one understanding without guidance from anoth-
er” (Kant WA, AA 06: 35). Immediately, Kant suggests a difference
to literal immaturity: “Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies
not in lack of understanding, but rather of resolve and courage to use
it without direction from another” (Ibid.). Obviously, Kant does not
think that normative reasons for education disappear once we become
adults, even if our predicament changes. He does not see a solution
to this in paternalistic education, but rather in hope “that the public
should enlighten itself” (Ibid.).

In the previous paragraph I explained the presuppositions that de-

fine the scope of this article. I presupposed that education could be
understood as a relation between actors which is (normatively) based
on the care for the development of one’s autonomy or authority (in
the relevant matter). This could certainly exclude some educational
practices which are not normative (such as the mere cramming of in-
formation or mere training), but it certainly applies to all cases where
education is needed, either for gaining moral autonomy, facing the so-
cietal challenges or exercising particular social engagements. My aim
is not to neglect them, but to focus on such examples of educational
practices which involve normative reasons. This clarification helps to

24
 The Emotional Base of Educational Process

advance further the question of how relations in education should be

emotionally colored.

“The Problem of Childhood”

This (quasi) paternalistic approach to education does not come

without a price. It appears that any paternalism would be prima facie
morally wrong. Even if we could accept such paternalism, it can justify
only assistance to attain the autonomy through learning and not coer-
cion to exercise it. However, the main problem is not the alleged moral
incorrectness of paternalism, but the fact that it seems to contradict its
own aims. If a child is to attain autonomy, it could not do this through
mere tutelage, merely by guidance, as something that just happens to
them. The problem with autonomy is not just about the correctness of
decisions, but about their attributability – can one identify decisions as
one’s own and hold themselves responsible (Schapiro 2003: 592). Thus,
autonomy cannot be acquired with a mere following of the correct de-
cisions of the tutor, because reasons for doing it will always be external.
At least partly, autonomy has to be exercised in order to be learned.

However, this will not work the other way around. Acquisition
of autonomy cannot be simply the result of an action or series of
actions of a person prior to acquiring it. This is because, before ac-
quiring autonomy (or appropriate authority in the case of adult per-
sons), one does not possess criteria for what decisions to measure
as their own. Moreover, if one could acquire autonomy by mere ac-
tion of one’s own, there would be no need to learn it, and no need
for education. Taking this into consideration, it could be argued that
a child is in a paradoxical situation if he/she is to become an adult
person: he/she cannot do it either by following outside guidance or
by actions of their own. This predicament Schapiro calls “the prob-
lem of childhood” (Schapiro 1999, 2003). Like the previous con-
clusion made by Schapiro, this paradox also has its source in Kant:

25
Igor Cvejić

One of the greatest problems of education is how to unite sub-

mission to the necessary restraint with the child’s capability of
exercising freewill —for restraint is necessary. How am I to devel-
op the sense of freedom in spite of restraint? I am to accustom my
pupil to endure a restraint of his freedom, and at the same time I
am to guide him to use his freedom aright. (Kant Päd, AA 09: 453)

Schapiro sees the solution in the concept of play.3 She offers several
characterizations of play which explains its crucial role in the develop-
ment of autonomy. It is only in play, according to her, that children are
able to act the part of full agents:

By engaging in play, children more or less deliberately “try on”

selves to be and worlds to be in. This is because the only way
a child can “have” a self is by trying one on. It is only by adopting
one or another persona that children are able to act the part of
full agents, to feel what it must be like to speak in their own voic-
es and to inhabit their own worlds. […] Play is children’s form of
work, for their job is to become themselves. (Schapiro 1999: 732)

The second thing important to notice is that, according to Schap-

iro, play is the characteristic form of child’s action:

If action proper is conduct which issues from an established delibera-

tive perspective, and if children have yet to develop such a perspective,
then children are (at least across some essential domains) not in a po-
sition to act. But neither can they give up on action. As such, their only
option is to play – to act the part, so to speak, of one who can act. Play
is thus children’s characteristic form of action; it is the form of action
which is appropriate to them qua children. (Schapiro 1999: 732–3)

3  The notion of play has an important role in the history of education. A source of it is, again,
Kant who used this concept as an aesthetic notion – with one of its main functions being precisely
the harmonization of the rules of law with freedom (Kant KU, AA 05). From this discussion
Shiller develops his letters on aesthetic education (Shiller 2004). Schapiro indicates that concept
of play should not be seen here as an extension of Schiller’s work and positions herself as “ag-
nostic” regarding the question could her notion of play even be connected with Kant’s concept
(Schapiro 1999: 732).

26
 The Emotional Base of Educational Process

The third important characteristic of play is its provisional status,

or as Shapiro says “the status of a rehearsal or an experiment (even if
it is not undertaken ‘for fun’)” (Schapiro 1999: 733). The provision-
al status of play justifies the modification of our reactive attitudes
toward children. We do not take child’s actions seriously as we do
those of adults, which is due to its experimental nature. By experi-
menting, children have the opportunity to introduce their own prin-
ciples of action, to create their own evaluative perspective, while at
the same time, they are not treated as equally responsible as adults.

Adults also have a role in this play. They have to provide chil-
dren with good models of autonomy to “choose” from and help
children choose from these models. This is manifested through a
twofold strategy. One part of it is to exercise limited discipline (re-
wards and punishments) in order to regulate children’s choices:

Discipline is one way of guiding such “choices”, but in using disci-

plinary force, the idea should always be to act as a surrogate con-
science. The pain of discipline, like that of conscience, must serve to
awaken children to a sense of their own freedom and responsibility
rather than to remind them of their subjection to an external author-
ity. (Schapiro 1999: 736)

The other part of the strategy is to explain the relevant principles

behind these limitations:

[…] we are to explain to children the principles behind the limits we

impose on them. Moreover, to the extent they are capable of raising
principled objections to those limits, we are to evaluate those objec-
tions with an open mind. (Ibid.)

These two parts, of course, interact and accompany each other in

order to help children to be free to control themselves.

There are at least two problems with this strategy that I will just

27
Igor Cvejić

briefly address. The first concern is the possibility of adults differenti-

ating if a child’s action actually has a provisional status of play. It seems
that we need to know whether children are acting “playfully” or seri-
ously in order to be able to estimate the appropriate level of account-
ability (Helm 2007:218). Without it we will never have a reason to
hold them responsible. Schapiro’s distinction between provisional and
proper action does not provide us with such reasons. More important
problem is to understand how are we able to intervene, especially when
things are already going wrong. In other words, the problem is in how
to motivate children to act from their own authority. We might correct
some of children’s “deviant” motivations (e.g. selfish interest) through
reward/punishment mechanism. However, it is not clear how these
reasons could ever be their own and not external. We might instruct
children to be helpful to others, but the act would again come from
selfish reasons – to receive reward and avoid punishment. If we are to
explain principles of action that should be adopted, it remains unclear
why children should adopt them rather than react to it negatively (e.g.
“I understand it, but I simply do not care”, Cf Helm 2009: 218–9).

This does not mean that we are helpless to help children develop
their autonomy. Rather, it indicates that Schapiro failed to address the
relationship between parents and children. This emotional relation-
ship which implies mutual care is crucial for understanding how chil-
dren can access the reasons they previously did not have.

Care for Well-Being and Care About an Agent as Such

Whatever approach to the question of necessity of education we

might take, it presupposes certain relations of care. Above all, an edu-
cator cares for their protégés, or parents care for the well-being of their
child. Note that this care can also be instrumental, e.g. if educator’s care
for pupil is merely because this is what he/she is paid for. This distinc-
tion is not important here. Even if that is the case, a teacher is expected
to care for pupils as a part of their job. As the above argument shows,

28
 The Emotional Base of Educational Process

care should at least partially address the development of the autonomy

and authority of one who is educated. It doesn’t mean that educators
should be particularly emotional and oversensitive. The point is that
such care is part of the normative situation. By entering the education-
al process, an educator has taken a duty to care about the development
of those who are under their guidance. In that sense, it would not be
rational for an educator not to feel the specific appropriate emotion of
care in relevant situations, i.e. it would be wrong.

This care could be understood as care for well-being. It is especially

the case when we talk about parents’ care for their children. However,
the well-being of a person can be understood in many different ways.
Someone could think, for example, that well-being is a matter of un-
derstanding and adopting fairness. We could also refer to physical or
economic well-being. Nevertheless, all these conceptions of well-being
presuppose that educator possesses a conception of the good. This is the
same conception of the good he/she should convey. A part of well-be-
ing of a person could also be their autonomy. However, if we speak
about the development of autonomy, we have to go beyond mere care
for the well-being and beyond the educator’s conception of well-being,
i.e. educator has to care about protégés as (potential) agents.

What does it mean to care about others as agents? It means that

we accept that others have their own preferences, desires, focuses,
their own cares and evaluative perspectives. To care about others as
agents means that their objectives, also have import for me, or that I
share their import and care for those things that have import for them.
Thus, caring about someone as an agent means that you don’t just care
merely for his/her well-being, but also for the things he or she cares
about. In other words, it presupposes dynamical intentionality toward
someone else and his/her evaluative perspective, in relation to which
we constitute our subfocuses. Practically, it means that what primarily
has import to someone else, has import to me, through the fact that he/
she, as a subject of import, has import for me.

29
Igor Cvejić

When I get a paper rejected because of an undeservedly negative

referee report, my anger consists in the feeling of the import of my
scholarship as such impressing itself on me in the present circum-
stances in such a way that I am pained by the offense that rejection
presents […]. Such anger differs from the anger I would feel on behalf
of a colleague I care about in similar circumstances […]. Thus in be-
ing angry on her behalf, the pain I feel consists in part in the feeling
not only of the import she (the focus) has to me but also of the import
her scholarship (the subfocus) has to her, so that the rejection feels
bad because of its bearing on the well-being of both her scholarship
and her; in this respect my anger on her behalf differs phenomeno-
logically from my anger at my own paper’s rejection. (Helm 2009: 89)

This short excursion of explaining the different types of care could

help us to understand more deeply the relation between an educator
and those who are being educated. The work on developing one’s au-
tonomy presupposes care about other as agent (even if it is being just
a therapeutic entitlement). It is by caring for what the student cares
about that an educator affirmatively influences the development of
autonomy. Educator has to be able to exercise relevant emotions re-
lated to the student’s projects. For example, a mentor should care for
his student’s care about doing a Ph.D. in feminism and become frus-
trated if this project hits an obstacle – not because he cares for fem-
inism as a topic, but because he should care for feminism as a part of
his care for his student. On the contrary, if a mentor cares only for
his own conception of the wellbeing of his student and, for exam-
ple, imposes the topic on her, the mentoring would be mere tutelage.

Access to External Reasons

The previous argument can solve only part of the problem. Care
about pupils as (at least potential) agents could save them from be-
ing exposed to the paternalistic hegemony. However, this argument
cannot answer why a student should be motivated to adopt the edu-
cator’s model. The whole problem comes down to the fact that rea-

30
 The Emotional Base of Educational Process

sons for acting in a different way would ever be educator’s reason and
not their own – it would be external to them. Of course, the previ-
ous argument doesn’t claim that an educator will persistently have a
positive attitude towards students’ desires. Students’ desires could
come in conflict with the educator’s conception of well-being (e.g.
the concept of fairness) and in that case, the educator has to find a
way to influence student’s valuation with his own concept, without
undermining their autonomy. If these reasons are a force external to
a student, then we find ourselves again in the problem of childhood.

Now it is time to introduce the second part of the relations which

is normatively expected in educational process: the care of the students
about the teacher, or more precisely about his/her own conception of
the relevant good. One of the main assumptions of education is that
teacher knows more – without it the education as we know it would
make no sense. However, the teacher’s knowledge or evaluations could
be entirely foreign to students. Except in the case in which a student
cares about what a teacher cares for. In caring about a teacher, a student
should be able to care for the teacher’s concepts (e.g. that of fairness) in
the way the teacher cares about it and because the teacher cares about it.
In doing so, the pupil doesn’t need to have this concept elaborated. His/
her care for fairness is just a matter of his/her commitment to teacher’s
care. This interpersonal relation enables students to access reasons that
might seem external to them (teacher’s reasons). As a part of this care, a
student might get frustrated in the name of the teacher because he/she
is acting unfairly even if he/she doesn’t fully understand this concept.
It is through these shared concerns that the student begins to adopt
the teacher’s model of acting, that is, to learn (Cf Helm 2009: 237).

Note that Helm’s solution to the problem of childhood is very much

different from Schapiro’s two-pronged strategy. Motivation for adopt-
ing the educator’s model is not imposed externally (through punishment
or rewards), but it is rather rooted in interpersonal relations between
teacher and students through their shared emotional concerns. Accord-

31
Igor Cvejić

ing to Helm, this is the only way we can escape the problem of childhood:

[…] I have argued, through a properly paternalistic loving relation-

ship the parent can impose rational pressure on the child so as to
instill certain cares and values in her; given the shared concerns and
the way in which the parent’s concepts inform those concerns, such
an imposition is not the result merely of external forces acting on
the child but is rather a means of enabling the child’s conscience, her
sense of responsibility for her cares, her actions, and her identity.
Moreover, it is only because reasons are at stake (rather than mere
external force) that we can make sense of those having access to those
reasons as being potentially responsible for the outcome. To the ex-
tent that the child’s access to these reasons is essentially interperson-
al, so too is the responsibility for her coming (or failing to come) to
care about or value appropriate objects: that responsibility is to that
extent shared between the child and the parent. (Helm 2009: 259)

Education as Joint Engagement: Final Remarks

In the previous chapters, I have presented Helm’s solution to the

problem of childhood, introduced by Shapiro. Helm argued for the
crucial role of emotional relations between child and parent in solv-
ing the problem. It is through this emotional relation of care that ed-
ucators pursue their care, not merely about imposed conception of
the well-being of a child, but also about cares and projects the child
has, and vice versa. By caring about what parents care about, children
get access to reasons that would otherwise remain external to them.
This is of particular importance, because if those reasons remain ex-
ternal, education would always remain trapped in the problem of
childhood, for children would not have proper motivation to act.

In my view, this same problem can be found in education-

al processes. Thus, it seems that the relation of mutual care is a
necessary condition for effective education (presupposing that
reasons for education are normative). Of course, it is not a lov-
ing relationship like between parents and children. It might seem

32
 The Emotional Base of Educational Process

that the proper description would be to understand this rela-

tionship as an asymmetric quasi-friendship type of relationship.

However, it is not only problematic to view student/teacher re-

lation as friendship, but it could also be something impossible to
achieve in large educational institutions. The first problem is that it
is hard to achieve friendship with a large amount of students. The
second problem is that friendship could undermine teacher’s author-
ity. The third problem is that it might seem peculiar to think that
this relation could so easily influence other domains of one’s life, as
it happens in friendship. On the other side, it might be the case to
have a problem in private life influence the educational process.

The better alternative could be to understand educational process-

es as joint engagements. Educational processes are, certainly, collective
efforts, those in which each actor (both students and teachers) partake
with their tasks. As a part of the collective body, they also share con-
cerns about each other. This doesn’t mean that they are to establish
intimate identification as friends do. Rather, other actors (in the ed-
ucational process) are identified as those who belong to it, as “one of
us” (Cf Helm 2009). “Being one of us” presupposes certain care about
others as agents, as a part of our care for the collective efforts we are in.

This interpretation makes it possible to correctly understand nor-

mativity embedded in emotional relations between students and a
teacher. There is certainly no obligation for their friendship, but they
have to treat each other as “one of us”. Normative demands imposed
by the very acknowledgment of an educational process as a collective
effort, are to take care of this collective action as plural, as “ours”. It is
from this care that we are committed to caring about other actors of
this process as “one of us”. This is what constitutes the rationale of emo-
tional relations in educational processes. These are precisely the kind
of emotional relationships that are necessary to fulfill the normative
role of education – the development of one’s autonomy and authority.

33
References:

Dewey, John (2001), Democracy and Education. State College:

The Pennsylvania State University.
Helm, Bennet W. (2009), Love, Friendship and the Self. Intimacy, Identi-
fication, and the Social Nature of Persons. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.
Helm, Bennet W. (2017), Communities of Respect. Grounding Responsibility,
Authority, and Dignity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Kant, Immanuel, (KU, AA 05), Kritik der Urteilskraft, Gesammelte
Schriften, Band 5. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zur Berlin
[1790].
Kant, Immanuel, (MS, AA 06), Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte
Schriften, Band 6. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zur Berlin
[1797].
Kant, Immanuel, (Päd, AA 09), Pädagogik, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 9.
Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zur Berlin [1803].
Kant, Immanuel, (WA, AA 06), „Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist
Aufklärung?“, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Band 6. Deutsche Akademie der
Wissenschaften zur Berlin [1784].
Nikolić, Olga and Igor Cvejić (2017), “Social Justice and the Formal
Principle of Freedom”. Filozofija i društvo 28 (2): 270–284.
Plato (1996), “Protagoras”, in: The Dialogues of Plato. Volume 3.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 87–168.
Schapiro, Tamar (1999), “What is a Child?”. Ethics 109: 715–738.
Schapiro, Tamar (2003), “Childhood and Personhood”. Arizona Law
Review 575 (45): 575–594.
Schiller, Friedrich (2004), On the Aesthetic Education of Man. New York:
Dover Publications.

34
 Aleksandar Milanković1

Interactive Teaching as
a Component of Social
Emancipation

Introduction

In this paper, we shall argue that interactive teaching, as a spe-

cific teaching practice with proper theoretical background, in addition
to the undisputed, affirmed and demonstrated pedagogical contribu-
tions and developmental values, also has a social emancipatory potential.
First, we shall present characteristic questions about emancipation
in education, then we shall give basic clarifications about interactive
teaching, its theoretical framework, and its practical aspects. In the
end, we shall point out its emancipatory potential, with a few possible
critical remarks to the presented thesis.

First of all, we should make a terminological clarification. In ev-

eryday language and in most cases, the meanings of interactive and
interactivity are identified with the application of electronic or digital
tools and devices which serve as auxiliary teaching tools, toys, games,
or elements for various workshops. The word interactive in the context
of interactive teaching has nothing to do with that meaning and that
application of the term. Of course, this does not imply that within the
interactive teaching practice certain interactive digital tools cannot be
used, but their use or application does not by itself mean interactivity.

1   Member of Edulab: Laboratory for Educational Strategies of the Institute for Philosophy and
Social Theory: radujtesetrgovi@gmail.com.

35
Aleksandar Milanković

Besides, in this paper, we shall consider education concrete-

ly, in the classroom or a university hall – in the real situation of a
school as a community of learning. In this respect, our paper is just a
theoretical introduction to possible empirical research of the im-
plementation of interactive education in schools and of its so-
cial outcomes and effects that could be marked as emancipatory.

Education and Emancipation

In the last decades, a great deal has been written and spoken about
emancipation. Numerous articles and books examine various aspects
of the concept of emancipation and its kin concepts. Besides, the pos-
sibilities of social emancipation in its practical sense are numerous.
Interest in the problem of emancipation in the contemporary critical
theory is based on Marx’s conception of original human emancipation
as a value per se (Comminel 2019: 65-89). Different authors analyse the
dialectics of the concept of emancipation, problematizing its meaning
and implications in connection to the paradoxical consequences of its
correlation with the concepts of power and force (Laclau 2007: 1-19).

The problem of emancipation is equally actual in education. Dif-

ferent authors in critical pedagogy examine and problematize the pos-
sibilities of emancipation in education in the world in which we live
and work amidst the “vulgar display of power”2, the world in which
we are exposed to the effects of predatory culture, with life reduced to
the relations of hunters and hunted or predators and prey, as Peter
McLaren formulates it (McLaren 1995: 1-18). As it becomes clearer
and clearer that we live in a world with a very high degree of con-
trol of human lives through systematic power and the distribution of
a more or less disguised coercion, questions increasingly arise con-
cerning the role of education in such conditions. Can education offer
any direction towards liberation, independence, equality, autonomy,
freedom – against the world of power and coercion? The questions

2   The title of Panthera’s album in 1992.

36
 Interactive Teaching as a Component of Social Emancipation

are important but, at the same time, paradoxical, since education is a

systematically organized public activity, regulated by laws and other le-
gal acts, with a complex governing structure, with a series of ready-
made systematic solutions, with clear educational strategies and poli-
cies, which are all supported, directed, and determined by the state
mechanism (Hebib 2009: 14-106). The situation is the same in the case
of private education, except for the difference in terms of deregulated
market and a higher degree of autonomy of private capital.

When one looks at different official educational documents in

Serbia, one can notice many words and phrases with an emancipatory
connotation (for example – The Law on Secondary Education - Zakon
o srednjem obrazovanju i vaspitanju 2013: 5-6). But what do they really
mean in continual and long practice? Why would the state, as the main
organizer and provider of finances for educational processes, promote
and affirm emancipatory practices and, systematically and in prolonged
periods, educate people which will always turn against the coercion and
display of power, people looking to reach high degrees of equality and
independence, people turned to cooperation instead of competition? Is
it reasonable to expect that the system, based on the legitimate use of force,
will nurture and educate people to strive for freedom, to live for free-
dom, to live outside such a system and against any force at all? Are the
ideals of self-realization and overcoming alienation reasonable at all?
These are just some of the typical questions that remain open and that
are the sources of numerous examinations and inquiries in social theory
– from sociology, through philosophy of education, to critical pedagogy.

Noah De Lissovoy formulates these problems in a general way:

The problem of education is the problem of unwinding the human

body and soul from this intricate clockwork of not merely the cor-
rect and commendable but also the apparently self-evident and in-
evitable. It is the problem of rescuing being from what is, a what is that
has conquered every other possibility to give itself the status of fact
and truth. (De Lissovoy 2015: 75)

37
Aleksandar Milanković

Numerous authors considered these problems – from Freire, Il-

lich, Rancière, to McLaren or De Lissovoy. What is the sense, or the
essence of education, if human beings, after they finish every educa-
tional cycle, acquire useful competencies but remain powerless and
closed in the fields of power, exposed to different modes of subtle or
brutal coercion, unequal opportunities, uneven positions, uneducat-
ed to cope with the world of force and coercion, to overcome it, to
step out of the relations founded in domination? Why still education?
Does it accomplish or establish any of the great and important aims
or ideals of our civilization? Or, as the mathematician and philoso-
pher Alfred N. Whitehead asks – where are the ideals in our con-
temporary education, are they here at all? (Whitehead 1967: 14, 29)

Teaching as a Communication Process

Coming back to the classroom, to the basic, concrete situation in

the educational process, to teaching and learning, the crucial property
of teaching is the relation between a teacher and pupils, and that rela-
tion is founded upon communication and interaction (Gudjons 1993:
156-157). Interaction is the series of mutually induced, reflexively
connected, and jointly generated acts, with emphasized properties of
reciprocity and circulation (Bratanić 2006: 29-38). In the process of
teaching, there is more than just communication between the teacher
and a pupil, there is communication between the teacher and many
pupils and communication between the pupils themselves, which con-
stitutes teaching as a complex relational phenomenon. In it, the net
of relations constitutes itself on many levels simultaneously and if
we take an average class consisting of 25 to 30 pupils as an example,
we can create a sketch of these levels. It is important to note that the
number of levels cannot be reduced to a simple sum because in the
processes of interaction relations converge to create new personal and
social plans and a certain aspect of group intentionality, nonreducible
to a sum of individual intentions and volitions (Searle 2002: 90-105).

38
 Interactive Teaching as a Component of Social Emancipation

In addition to the interpersonality there is a dimension of in-

trapersonality: of processes inside individual persons, their expe-
riences, emotions, mental states which affect relations with oth-
er persons. Moreover, besides conscious, intentional acts, which
have already been marked as one of the key segments of the teach-
ing process, in interpersonal and intrapersonal relations subcon-
scious levels of mental life play a significant role (Bratanić 2006: 32).

In teaching, personal and professional communication over-

laps. To understand the complexity of teaching as a relational phe-
nomenon, we should bear in mind the differences between per-
sonal and professional relations (personal: without objective or
material purpose, subjective, non-hierarchical, inclined toward weak-
ening aggression - professional: with objective and material purpos-
es, hierarchical, latently aggressive, objective) (Bratanić 2006: 33-34).

If we compare the properties of personal and profession-

al relations, then a logical question arises: how do these differ-
ences (sometimes even radical) mutually conform, how do they be-
come concordant, where are the accents, how do they become artic-
ulated in mutual relations of pupils and a teacher? As we stated be-
fore, the relations between the teacher and pupils are both professional
and personal, but, given the institutional circumstances and differ-
ences in age, experience, and education, they are neither entirely re-
ciprocal nor entirely equal (Bratanić 2006: 34-35). The absence of to-
tal reciprocity affects the disbalance in the distribution of subject and
object positions in the teaching process, considering a priori distribut-
ed, assigned, and awarded social and institutional roles in the school.

The relations, communication and interaction in the teaching pro-

cess are not just a form in which the process is ongoing, they are, at the
same time, the content of the process, because through and by different
relations and interactions pupils learn social acts, values of solidarity
and group organizing, mutual appreciation, appreciation of individual

39
Aleksandar Milanković

differences, self-respect and respect for other persons and personalities.

A particularly important segment is also the development of the culture
of dialogue, where the dialogue is not just a tool or means for a certain
purpose, but a goal per se (Milin 2016: 50-91; Freire 2000: 87-124).

Theoretical Framework of Interactive Teaching

Interactive teaching constitutes the process of learning and edu-

cation in social interactions between pupils and a teacher, not to be
reduced merely to the transmission of information and knowledge,
or to the cognitive adoption of curricular materials and content (Su-
zić 2006: 119-130; Roeders 2006:157-161). This doesn’t imply that
there is no transmission of information about cognitive content at all.
It just means that social interaction comes to the foreground in the
classroom. Interactive teaching predominantly consists of interactive
methods of learning with special emphasis on methods based on cer-
tain forms of group and cooperative work, present continuously during
an educational cycle. This is particularly important because every mode
of teaching contains some interactive methods or a certain degree of
interactivity, more or less represented in the process. But, in interac-
tive teaching, the learning process is entirely impregnated with group
activities and interactive methods such as team method, mosaic-meth-
od, cooperative sketching of maps, collaborative learning, collabora-
tive scripts, group discussions and debate, guided fantasy, evocations
(Pavlović Breneselović, Radulović 2014: 40-44; Roeders 2006: 161).

In interactive teaching, the process is not directed only toward the

cognitive level and transmission of knowledge. The roles of subjects
and objects change because pupils themselves take the role of orga-
nizers of the educational process. Learning is conceived as a mul-
tifarious and diversified activity, it develops non-linearly on many
levels, and teacher’s narration is reduced to a minimum, while the
emphasis is on dialogical communication of all pupils (Roeders 2006:
163-164). When it comes to properties of the dialogue in interactive

40
 Interactive Teaching as a Component of Social Emancipation

teaching, considering group modes of work, the dialogue could be

marked as poli-dialogue and the narration between different partici-
pants of the process is crisscrossed, taking place on many levels, de-
pending on the task. Teaching materials, tasks and procedures circu-
late through different groups, according to certain rhythm and order,
just as procedures of group formation are not static, but changeable.
The teaching process is entirely oriented toward pupils and is centred
around their activities and engagement (Roeders 2006: 157-160).

In terms of theory, interactive teaching arises from socio-construc-

tivism, developed in the first half of the XX century but it combines
various approaches in a new and refined didactical amalgam. The so-
cio-constructivist conception of the human mind conceives the mind
as a field of different intersecting processes, which are derived from
social interactions – and that conception overcomes the traditional
conception of the mind as an exclusively individual ability (Pavlović
Breneselović, Radulović 2014: 26). That radical change in the concep-
tion of the mind is a result of many transformations in philosophy,
pedagogy, and psychology. Wittgenstein formulated this concisely:

In the consideration of our problems, one of the most dangerous

ideas is that we think with or in our heads. The idea of a process in
the head, in a completely enclosed space, makes thinking something
occult. (Wittgenstein 1974: 106)

The basic framework of socio-constructivism builds on the con-

cept of the social formation of mind (Wertsch 1985: 209-232).

According to social constructivism, a pupil is actively engaged

in a social process, rooted in a social environment, supported by so-
cio-cultural tools. The teaching process promotes activation of the
pupil’s subjective experience, subjective interpretations, and forma-
tion of subjective meanings, which correlate with the objective en-
vironment. There are many interactions between the pupil and the
environment, which means that social surroundings and the socio-cul-

41
Aleksandar Milanković

tural context is the primary source and basis of learning (Pritchard,

Woollard 2010: 2-20). Social constructivism, grounded in the works
of Vygotsky, puts emphasis on social surroundings and process-
es and on the cultural context: learning is understood as a process of
interactions between socio-cultural impulses and their individual in-
ternalizations and constructions in the process of co-construction
(Pritchard, Woollard 2010: 2-20; Vulfolk, Hjuz, Volkap 2014: 63-133).

In social constructivism, social interaction is a crucial factor for

the development of learning. Vygotsky points out that every func-
tion of child’s cultural development manifests itself two times: in
the first step, it manifests itself on the social, inter-psychological
level, and in the second step, it manifests itself on the individual, in-
tra-psychological level. Moreover, all higher activities have their
roots in interpersonal, social relations (Pritchard, Woollard 2010:
2-20; Vulfolk, Hjuz, Volkap 2014: 63-133). Socio-cultural tools (sym-
bols, signs, tools in the socio-cultural surroundings of an individ-
ual – artworks, textbooks, materials) also have an essential function
since they mediate between social and individual abilities and activi-
ties and support the internalization process (Radulović 2017: 31-50).

The learning process is conceived in its transformative as-

pect. Learning induces transformations in an individual’s self-un-
derstanding, in his or her beliefs and behaviour. Learning is the
source of transformations of perspectives or focal points through
which previous experience is observed and critically examined,
both on the rational, objective, and cognitive level and the intu-
itive, subjective, and imaginative level (Mezirow 1991: 17-33).

A vital component of the theoretical background of interactive

teaching is the theory of multiple intelligences: human intelligence is
no longer conceived as a uniform ability or as a one-dimensional lin-
ear predisposition, but as ramified and divergent (Gardner 2011: ix-
xv). Interactive teaching promotes diverse types of intelligence such

42
 Interactive Teaching as a Component of Social Emancipation

as interpersonal, intrapersonal, visual-spatial, or bodily-kinaesthetic

intelligence, while traditional teaching puts emphasis on linguistic
and logical-mathematical intelligence, with the corresponding empha-
sis in curricula, teaching materials, contents, and methods (narration,
conversation, text, reading, calculations) (Armstrong 2006: 8-11).

Interactive teaching is grounded in the concept of human develop-

ment, instead of the concept of academic achievement, with an empha-
sis on cooperativity and non-competitiveness in the process of teach-
ing and learning (Armstrong 2006: 34-47). Overcoming the traditional
mononarrative model of lecturing and the instrumental value of dia-
logue, interactive teaching is based on new explorations of language,
communication, and dialogue (Freire 2000; Milin 2016). Dialogue is
conceived as a multi-channelled state of communication, manifested
on many levels, in many directions, with ramified narration and text,
displayed in varied materials and media besides speech acts (diaries,
questionnaires, notes, posters, cards, pupils’ diaries and protocols, etc.).

Emancipatory Potential of Interactive Teaching

Emancipatory potential of this teaching mode clearly manifests it-

self in its cooperativist paradigm, group activism and its emphasis on
the social dimension of learning.

If we consider basic theoretical and practical properties of in-

teractive teaching and its practice in concrete situations in school,
in the classroom, all that implies that cooperation, solidarity, group
activism and communal, supportive ethos are in the foreground of
interactive teaching. Even the process of preparing the exam Inter-
active Teaching at the Centre for Teacher’s Education (CON), on the
Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade consists of student’s group work:
groups of students write a script, a scenario, or a synopsis for a school
class lesson and then they hold a school class as a group (Pavlo-
vić Breneselović, Radulović 2014). Social cooperation is at the core

43
Aleksandar Milanković

of interactive teaching. This type of teaching process promotes joint

perspective and collective intentionality – and these unite every in-
dividual contribution but also unleash new values which transcend
a simple sum of individual contributions (Searle 1990: 90-104; Ni-
kolić, Cvejić 2020: 7-24). Interactive teaching implies convergence
of individual and social development in the process of learning, in-
tensifying personal relations between participants. Also, collective
work has the potential to release unexpected new solutions and ideas.

Interactive teaching is very convenient for promoting pupils’ ac-

tivism and different civic actions or initiatives in local communities,
due to its orientation toward social environment and its collective
work dynamics. Interactive teaching diminishes hierarchical, ver-
tically established roles and functions between teachers and pupils.
The teacher’s role is entirely cooperative, entirely supportive, pupils
and teachers are equal participants in the process. Teachers slightly
moderate and pedagogically motivate and enrich the process (Pavlo-
vić Breneselović, Radulović 2014: 87). This implies a completely new
situation in the classroom, without hierarchical relations and author-
itarianism in communication between teachers and pupils. It also im-
plies new modes of pupil’s behaviour – without revolt, hidden angst,
or latent rebellion, induced by hierarchy or by an authoritarian context
of classroom governing. These factors promote an egalitarian con-
text in the classroom and, through active experience of equality and
joint commitment, prepare pupils to recognize and to become sen-
sitive to inequality, discrimination, and injustice in social relations.

Besides, if intelligence is defined as an ability to actively change

conditions in human surroundings and discover new ones, in-
teractive teaching gives a major contribution; one of its crucial
points and values is motivating pupils to problematize conditions,
processes, and events in their surroundings, to transform them,
change them and improve them (Knežević Florić 2006: 206-207).

44
 Interactive Teaching as a Component of Social Emancipation

Collective work and pupils’ cooperation in interactive teaching di-

minish pupils’ insecurity, strengthen mutual peer support, raise moti-
vation, and have the potential to overcome prejudices and stereotypes
– with special emphasis on the perspective of the other (Roeders 2006: 157-
193). This promotes development of empathy, solidarity, and altruism
– important properties of social relations, significant for participation
in the improvement of social life. In addition, interactive teaching pro-
motes friendship, overall social orientation and connection, as well as
the ability of pupils to support each other (Roeders 2006: 187-193).

Interactive teaching induces and promotes imagination and antic-

ipation of possible situations and possible alternative outcomes of acts
– one of its characteristic methods is guided fantasy (Pavlović Brene-
selović, Radulović 2014: 43; Roeders 2006: 161). If applied continuously
and often, it can be useful to discover different alternatives to the given
state of conditions. Imaginative and anticipative learning promote and
motivate moving toward the zone of proximal development, in accor-
dance with Vygotsky – in that process a child notices new, previously
unnoticed possibilities, a child becomes what is not yet (Wertsch 1985:
67). Imagination and anticipation are very convenient to articulate re-
formistic, utopistic or messianic ideas of social change, typical for ado-
lescence and for adolescents’ inclination toward hypothetical thinking
and reflecting upon different possibilities of life, in accordance with
Piaget (Moshman 2009: 263-264). Adolescents’ inclination toward re-
formistic ideas can be especially developed through collective work and
in different modes of pupils’ participative actions in their community.

Interactive Teaching as a Component of Social

Emancipation

If we consider the duration of educational cycles – e.g., in Serbia it

is eight years of elementary school, four years of secondary school and
years of higher or high education – so, if we consider the processual
aspect of education, its connected cycles, its intermediary phases and

45
Aleksandar Milanković

periods, its slow duration and development – it is clear that every sin-
gle process has to be long lasting and continuous. Short-term, sporadic
actions, ad hoc solutions or approaches, no matter how good or impor-
tant they can be, cannot produce any lasting or consistent result. Be-
sides, every single process has to be synchronized with all other pro-
cesses, as well as with the general direction of educational development.
The fact is that interactive teaching is not generally applied, accepted,
integrated, or represented in teaching practice in Serbia. The only sub-
ject in which it is marked as one of the main modes of teaching is civic
education. But civic education is a subject with only one class per week
– in other words, interactive and cooperative modes of work are an
exception and a sporadic practice in the general process of teaching. Some
practices reveal that interactive practice is convenient for elementary
schools – like the examples of a teacher from Prijepolje, Dragan Kuveljić
(Kuveljić 2019) or Predrag Starčević from Pančevo, show. But that just
shows that interactive teaching is more an exception than an established
mode of teaching, which leaves quite a space for potential research.

The interactionist concept of education puts social change, di-

minishing and eliminating indoctrination, and activism toward just
social relations in the foreground (Mitrović, Radulović 2011: 148-
149). If we consider that education consists of long and continuous
processes – and that it cannot be claimed with total certainty that
these processes lead toward achieving all educational goals upon
completion – it is obvious that duration and continuity are nec-
essary conditions for any change or transformation in education.

From all of the above it can be concluded: interactive teach-

ing has the potential to be a component of social emancipation un-
der the condition that it is applied and integrated in the teaching pro-
cess in the long term, consistently, continuously. We can mark some
important elements of emancipatory potential of interactive teaching:

46
 Interactive Teaching as a Component of Social Emancipation

1. if interactive teaching became a widespread mode of teaching,

it would affect the development of social consciousness of all par-
ticipants in school life. Social interactions and collective initiatives
would become an integral factor of pupils’ everyday behaviour.
The development of social engagement consciousness and exer-
cise in active detection of modes of coercion, power, indoctrina-
tion, or manipulation would pervade the overall teaching process.
Concrete and operative actions and solutions, developed through
interactive learning would lead to a realistic perspective of social
activism, its impact and practical results, real possibilities, and op-
erative and proper means of achieving the goals of social activism.

2. Durable and consistent motivation and promotion of pupils’ au-

tonomy, of their autonomous initiative and joint actions to achieve
different goals would become an integral part of everyday school
life. The pupils would continuously invent and practice different
modes of communicating with public services, to engage in ob-
jections, petitions, appeals or initiatives. They would also perform
joint analyses, interpretations of legislative documents in different
discussion groups. They could give their own propositions of dif-
ferent legislative documents or formulations, as outcomes or prod-
ucts of collective work (for example, the pupils could write their
version of the Constitutional Act, which could be a useful activity
for a very important school subject Constitution and Civil Rights).

3. As a result, durable collective cooperative work would con-

stitute learning as a genuine social process in which the focal
point is the mediation between individuals and their social en-
vironment. It would also prepare pupils for different modes
of joint actions in adulthood, through learning about differ-
ent legal aspects of formal joint associations (which is already
a part of the civic education curriculum in Serbia). Besides,
collective cooperative work would prepare pupils for differ-
ent informal modes of collective action, such as art collectives.

47
Aleksandar Milanković

4. Diminishing and eliminating hierarchical barriers and in-

stitutionalized, hidden school coercion or display of power
would transform the perception and the experience of school.
It would also transform compulsory education into participa-
tion in the community of development and learning, develop-
ing supportive surroundings and strengthening pupils’ identi-
ty and inclusion in the community of learning. It would open
new space for different informal modes of education, typical for
different formal and informal groups or collectives. An educa-
tional process would, in a sense, lose its property of institution-
al exclusivity and gain the property of collective, joint action.

5. Formative and informal evaluation, well-represented and

very much developed in interactive teaching, would lead to ac-
tive evaluative consciousness in pupils, and if that is applied in
social life in general, it would lead to critical thinking in terms
of active evaluation of social phenomena and social problems.
Motivating pupils to evaluate every element of the teaching
process and to express their opinion often about different ele-
ments of every class would establish a habit of evaluation and
critical examination of every detail of the social environment.

Critical Remarks and Objections

Pedagogical theory and practice point out that interactive teach-

ing can be ineffective and improper in certain circumstances. For in-
stance, if we consider the development in the primary group, there
are ‘hard’ structured families, in which certain rigid patterns of be-
haviour are imposed with no exception, which can lead to resistance
toward collective work or to various prejudices about the group or
about non-rigid patterns of behaviour (Roeders 2006: 173-175).

Uncertainty and unpredictability of collective work and group

learning, certain “openness” and “fluidity” of non-standard methods,

48
 Interactive Teaching as a Component of Social Emancipation

no matter how important, may be a disturbing factor. In this regard, an

unpredictable dynamics of groups in the classroom can lead to anxiety
or confusion in teacher’s or pupils’ reactions (Roeders 2006: 174-175,
184-185). It is intuitively understood that there are many differences
and nuances in personalities. Besides, some teachers are simply used to
traditional, frontally positioned classroom.

Further, it can be claimed that interactive teaching is not suitable or

convenient for every school subject. Besides, a large number of schools
cannot provide ambient conditions suitable for cooperative work and
even if they can, they are not interested. Certain cases seem to show
that interactive teaching is often practised in elementary schools and
not so much in secondary specialized schools. There are barriers in
established and rigid habits due to ex cathedra teaching which can cause
certain methodical aspects of interactive teaching to appear ridiculous,
from the traditional ex cathedra perspective.

Further, it can be objected that teaching personnel simply can have

different theoretical beliefs and conceptions, that they do not put em-
phasis on the social dimension of learning, that they do not consider
we-perspective crucial or pivotal, that they think individual effort is the
sole essence of learning and, consequently, see no relevance in inter-
active teaching.

Besides, intensifying interactive teaching could be interpreted as

needless caprice or adventurism, due to necessary changes in school
ambient and classroom, which are an integral part of interactive teach-
ing – non-standard interior design, non-standard position of tables and
chairs, different printed materials on the walls (Roeders 2006: 182-183).

In the end, it could be objected that none of the emancipatory po-

tentials listed above are relevant, that they are minor and not worthy
of change in the usual teaching practice.

49
Aleksandar Milanković

Conclusion

What is certain is that every significant change in the classroom

causes numerous changes in the learning process, in reactions and be-
haviour of pupils. Although it is very uncertain to predict if a wide-
spread application of interactive teaching would bear emancipatory
consequences and, in that regard, we are self-critical and restrictive,
at the same time it is certain that the potentials of interactive teach-
ing are not sufficiently exploited nor practically explored in represen-
tative research. Besides, it is certain that the group dynamics in the
classroom, due to its unpredictability and uncertainty, provides the
charm of adventure and journey into something new, unseen, and un-
known; there are many authors who claim that education is not wor-
thy at all if it’s not an adventure, if it’s not uncertain, unpredictable to
a high degree, if it does not lead to true discoveries of the previously
unknown (Whitehead 1967: 91-101; Atkinson 2019: 59-64; 205-226).

With all the ambiguities and possible paradoxes of the concept of

emancipation (Laclau 2007: 1-19) and with possible focusing on oth-
er concepts and conceptions for understanding social changes in the
processes of (questionable) constitution of more humane and more
civilized society, it can be concluded that the question of the eman-
cipatory function of education remains open for further consider-
ations and inquiries. We hold that interactive teaching represents
a very important alternative, with great potential. It can play an im-
portant role in preparing children and adolescents to face different
forms of social conflicts, manipulations, and coercion and to prepare
them to face, understand and overcome all the tragedy of social tur-
moil. It seems that social conflicts and turmoil, regresses of civiliza-
tion and numerous manipulations from the centres of power are in-
evitable elements of social life, but education keeps vitality and poten-
tial to raise people up, above and against identifying, accepting and
anaesthetized conforming with different modes of power and force.

50
 Interactive Teaching as a Component of Social Emancipation

A definition of learning as permanent, or relatively permanent,

change of individual experience and behaviour, implies that educa-
tion really is the domain of individual and social change. But what
is the overall subject of learning in general? We find a very impor-
tant answer in Alfred Whitehead’s thought: it is “Life, in all its man-
ifestations” (Whitehead 1929: 6-7). If we care about emancipation,
or whatever is understood under the word – or however we name
what we want to understand under that word – considering its am-
biguities – we should take both learning and life more seriously in all
their relevance, importance, and preciousness, but not too seriously.

It may be the case that some of the disappointing outcomes in

contemporary education are the result of not taking this process se-
riously enough. To bring the participants of educational process
the sense of relevance, of importance and of value of education-
al enterprise, the sense of joint action and joint engagement, the sense
of joint inter-generational adventure, sometimes very predictable,
sometimes entirely unpredictable, sometimes uncertain, with new
discoveries to reveal, with new inventions to explore – it is very
important, for education not to be reduced to ‘positivistic’ or ‘tech-
no-scientistic’ acquiring of ‘competencies’ for this or that profession.

It is important to be constantly reminded that education means

an active moral orientation and moral development, the development
of social consciousness and promotion of moral values, in spite of de-
structive processes in society, which send and transmit ruinous mes-
sages (Roeders 2006: 147-154). No moral indifference, relativization or
moral quasi-neutrality should be presented in education, primarily due
to psychological and developmental reasons. Interactive teaching could
be a source of axiological culture, endless reservoir of moral and aesthetic
values, for the world of values per se but also for the value and relevance
of the world in which we live, in which every unit of reality bears certain
relevance and certain value (Whitehead 1966: 111). Education provides
navigation in the world of values, it provides us with moral criteria to

51
Aleksandar Milanković

understand and evaluate what is good and what is bad in our world
and to create alternative circumstances. At least, to try to create them.

In the end, coming back to the classroom again, it would be im-

portant to perform different research in schools and classrooms and
analyse empirical material and situations, to understand and prop-
erly evaluate the social effects of interactive teaching and cooper-
ative work with pupils. It would be important to analyse and evalu-
ate the real social impact of pupils’ participative actions and engaged
group activities in changing circumstances and improving condi-
tions of social life both in schools and classrooms and in local com-
munities. It would provide empirical basis, support, and corrob-
oration for our thesis to be elaborated or to be criticized further.

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 Marija Velinov1

Free Yourself from Yourself:

The Ethics of the Self as an
Emancipatory Educational
Practice

When speaking about Foucault’s interpretation of Seneca,

discussions are primarily related to the second and third volume of The
History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990b; Foucault 1986) and the lectures at
the Collège de France published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject (Fou-
cault 2005). It could be said that these books represent a turning point.
Contrary to the original plans that Foucault presented following the
publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he focused on
the analysis of morality, i.e., ethics in Ancient Greece and Greco-Ro-
man culture in the first two centuries CE (Foucault 1990b: 3–13). Fou-
cault reinterprets his previous work and realizes that both the discourse
and the power were modes of engaging in what he called the games of
truth and subjectivation, i.e., specific relations with the truth through
which the subject itself is created (Foucault 1990b; Foucault 1990a).2

In order to grasp the connection between the truth, the subject,

and ethics, it is necessary to explain their role in the first volume of
The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1978), which Foucault considers the
beginning of his ethical work, as well as their role in contemporary

1   Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade: velinovmarija@gmail.com;

marija.velinov@instifdt.bg.ac.rs.
2   Regarding the question of whether this is a turning point in Foucault’s thought or a matte of
continuity of his work which is analyzed from a new angle, see Velinov 2018.

55
Marija Velinov

life, which leads him to considerations to which he committed himself.

Furthermore, we must also present Foucault’s understanding of mo-
rality and ethics, as well as the status and function of ‘Seneca’ in Fou-
cault’s thinking. In the context of these discourses, Seneca is chosen as
a representative of Late Stoicism, but specifically as the representative
who wrote the most and left behind an abundant source from which
Foucault derived his depiction of this period, as the pinnacle of what he
calls the attention to or the care of oneself (Sellars 2006: 12), the height
of the specific ‘culture’ of the self (Foucault 2005: 179).

1. Ethics

Foucault attributes specific meaning to the relationship between

ethics and morality. In his opinion, every morality has three aspects
(Foucault 1990b: 25, 26): the first are moral rules or laws; the second
is the behaviour of those ‘subjected’ to this rule; and finally, the third is
the way that individuals are constituted as ethical subjects of the given
moral code (rules or law), i.e., the way that they conduct themselves
and lead themselves to conform with the set of prescriptions. Fou-
cault’s term ‘ethics’ is linked to the third of these morality aspects — to
the aspect of subjectivation, the aspect of constituting oneself as the
moral subject of the code (O’Leary 2002: 11). This is the relation to
oneself “through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents” (Fou-
cault 1984: 351). In line with this, Foucault defined ethics as the part
of morality that is related to the relation of the self to oneself (Foucault
1984: 321–352; Davidson 2005: 126). Therefore, ethics is not a col-
lection of rules and principles, but a field of our self-constitution as
subjects (O’Leary 2002: 11).

Foucault believes that it is precisely in ethics that changes in mo-

rality through history are demonstrated. Laws remain more or less
unchanged, but the modes of subjectivation change. Ethics is where
changes occurred in the transition from the Greco-Roman to Christian
morality, not in the law, but rather in the relation of the self to itself

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 Free Yourself from Yourself

(Foucault 1984: 355). For example, if we look at Foucault’s detailed

depiction of ‘sexuality’ and the problems surrounding it in the first two
centuries CE, we will see that the rules and codes linked to it are very
similar to subsequent ones. For example, there was a rule according to
which sexual relations should be practiced exclusively within wedlock.
What was different, however, were the reasons why people subjected
themselves to this rule (Foucault 1986). During this period there was
no notion of fidelity in the sense of obligation or living according to
the law, but rather the idea of life without succumbing to one’s pas-
sions, where energy is preserved, where neither the spirit nor the body
should be squandered (which is defined as stultitia), where one com-
mands oneself, but this domination is not permitted to anyone else, etc.
Foucault noted that even the writings that discuss in the greatest detail
the life of spouses do not lay down rules for discerning between what
is allowed and what is prohibited, but rather a way of living, or a style
of relations, is suggested. Therefore, through his research, Foucault
wanted to demonstrate the transformations that occurred ‘under’ the
laws and rules, in relations toward the self and the related practices of
self (Foucault 1985: 356–358). He did not want to write the history of
the moral law, but of the moral subject. Foucault defined the dominant
contemporary idea of the subject as being the subject of desire, i.e.,
the subject whose truth can be discovered in the truth of their desire,
the subject that is prevalent in psychoanalysis and philosophy, but has
also reinforced its place as the dominant understanding of our present
(Foucault 1990b: 6).

1.1. Subject, Truth and Technologies of the Self

Over time, through his work Foucault became aware of the exis-
tence of a type of technique that allows individuals to use their own
means to carry out a certain number of operations on their own body,
soul, on their own thoughts or their own behaviour, with the aim of
transforming themselves. Foucault calls these techniques the technolo-
gies of the self (Foucault 1990b: 31–32; Foucault 1988: 17–18). He turned

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to exploring the techniques of the self, which entail a set of commit-

ments to the truth: finding the truth, the obligation to be enlightened
by the truth, to tell the truth. Foucault considers all this to be of crucial
importance for the development as well as the transformation of the
self (Foucault 1988: 18).3

For example, for Foucault the unique characteristic of modern sex-

uality is precisely its relation to truth-telling. This relation produces a
given relationship to the self, as a specific game of truth that is insti-
tutionalized in the idea of confessing and speaking the truth, which
spreads to legal, medical, educational, familial, and romantic relation-
ships (Foucault 1990b: 27, 28). Expressing or confessing one’s truth
is most commonly linked to the liberation of one’s hidden desire and
true nature. However, Foucault strives to show that speaking the truth
does not liberate, but rather subjugates: “And this discourse of truth
finally takes effect, not in the one who receives it, but in the one from
whom it is wrested” (Foucault 1978: 62).4 Therefore, confessing one’s
(hidden) truth gains certain value and becomes the basic manner of our
self-construction as an individual and the basic form of relationships
with others. In this way, the contemporary western man becomes a
‘desiring man’— the desire that must be revealed, which must be set
free and in line with which we must define ourselves as the subject
of its truth. Precisely this ‘desiring man’ and his relationship with the

3  In one of his reinterpretations of his previous work, Foucault specifically defines games of
truth as the basic thread that has existed from the beginning to the end of his research. Namely,
he links the first phase of his work to the consideration of games of truth in their mutual relations
(for which certain empirical sciences from the 17th and 18th centuries were used as an example),
in the second phase he addresses the relation between games of truth and relations of power
(through the example of punishment practices), while the third phase is linked to researching
games of truth in the relation of the self to oneself and the constituting of the self as a subject
(the phase in which the field of analysis is most closely tied to the history of the “desiring man”)
(Foucault 1990b: 6). Considering that in Foucault’s philosophy the relation of the self to oneself is
defined as ethics, we see that his ethical considerations are best defined in the relation of the truth
to the constitution of the subject.
4   The power that the production of truth provides can be seen in the example of documentarity,
which is most often considered as the proof of the truth of an event. About the analysis of docu-
mentarity as the production, and not the reception of truth, and the power over the reception and
even resistance, that is, the government of others, see Velinov 2020.

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truth is what led Foucault to attempt to problematize its domination,

by exploring other forms of subjectivation, i.e., other forms of rela-
tionships to ourselves or other forms of ethics.

In his lectures and seminars titled The Hermeneutics of the Subject,

Foucault establishes the difference between Late Stoicism and Early
Christianity and indicates precisely this moment as the crucial tran-
sition or point of discontinuity (discontinuity in the way of subjuga-
tion to the rules, but continuity of the rules themselves), as a historical
circumstance that will in time create the ‘desiring man’. On the other
hand, in the preceding period—in the Greco-Roman culture—Foucault
discovers what he would call the art of living.

1.2. Ethics of the Self and Care of the Self

Foucault is interested in the history of the changes and relation-

ships to what was called epimeleia heautou in Greek, or cura sui in Latin,
and translates as the “care of the self”, “attending to oneself”, “being
concerned about oneself”, “the fact of attending or occupation with
oneself”, “nurturing oneself”, etc (Foucault 2005).

It is necessary to bear in mind that this principle represents mul-

tiple things (Foucault 2005: 1–19). It is primarily an attitude toward
oneself as well as toward others and the world. It also represents a cer-
tain form of attention and view. Caring for oneself includes redirecting
one’s gaze from others and the world to oneself and attending to what
we think about and what takes place in our thoughts, i.e., both exercise
and meditation. Finally, epimeleia always also implies a certain number
of actions that a person exercises on the self, by which they change,
reshape, transfigure, or purify, actions through which one cares for
oneself.

Etymology refers to a series of words such as meletan, meletē, meletai,

which are often used with the verb gymnazein, which means to prac-

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Marija Velinov

tice and train. So, much more than a spiritual attitude, this is a form
of activity that is vigilant, continuous, diligent, and regular. It entails
an entire set of practices and exercises such as meditation techniques,
techniques of remembering past moments, techniques of testing the
conscience, etc. (Foucault 2005: 81–105).

Foucault differentiates between four groups of expressions linked

to the practice of caring for oneself and the ‘culture’ of the self (Fou-
cault 2005: 81–105): some indicate acts of cognition and are related
to the attention or gaze directed toward oneself—the reverse gaze to
oneself (Seneca 2007a), exploring oneself; others are related to the
movement of the entire existence that revolves around itself and di-
rects or returns (Seneca 2007a)5 to the self—withdrawing to the self
(Seneca 2007a), secluding one’s self (Seneca 2010b), descending to the
greatest depths of one’s soul, gathering composure, immersing one-
self in the self, settling in the self (Seneca 2007b); then there is a third
group of expressions that are related to special behaviour in regard to
oneself, which is behaviour of a medical type (care for oneself, treat-
ing oneself, etc.), a legal type (making demands, pointing out one’s
rights, separating oneself from debts and obligations, setting oneself
free) (Seneca 1918: 1,4), as well as a religious type (expressing a cult
to oneself, honouring oneself, respecting oneself (Seneca 2007a), be-
ing ashamed before oneself) (Seneca 2010b; Seneca 2007a);6 and fi-
nally, there are expressions that indicate a certain type of permanent
relation to oneself, in the form of overcoming and supremacy (hav-
ing power over oneself) (Seneca 2007a), in the context of experi-
ence (enjoying oneself) (Seneca 2007b), experiencing joy in oneself
(Seneca 2007a Seneca 2007b), being happy in the presence of one-
self, admiring oneself (Seneca 2007a), being satisfied with oneself, etc.

5   One should be like a deity or nature, which direct their activities at the outer world, but re-
turn to themselves from all sides.
6   The link between shame and respect, on the one hand, and the aesthetics of existence, on the
other, is very important. Seneca defines a life worthy of respect and a beautiful life, as the life that
should serve as an example and the one that we should emulate, while defining the life that we
should be ashamed of—as the ugly one.

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The precept ‘to be concerned with oneself’ was even in the case of
the Greeks one of the main rules of conduct and the art (skill) of life.
However, this principle was overshadowed by the Delphic principle
gnothi seauton (know yourself) (Foucault 1988: 19). Foucault believes
that our philosophical tradition has disregarded the basic principle of
concern with oneself and overemphasized the simple technical advice
of the oracle of Delphi.7 In Foucault’s opinion, the relationship be-
tween the need to learn who we are, to learn our true self and the prin-
ciple of concern with oneself, as the basic rule of the art of life or skill
of creating a beautiful life, i.e., aesthetics of existence, was reversed at
the point of transition from Greco-Roman to Christian morality. In
time, this reversal has created practices of confession and admission
that have become part of our everyday life. Knowledge of the self in
Greco-Roman culture represents one of the consequences of concern
with oneself, while in the modern world it constitutes the fundamental
principle (Foucault 1988: 22).

2. Seneca

Foucault believes that the first two centuries CE represent the

golden age of the culture of the self, of the cultivation of oneself, or
of the care of oneself (Foucault 2005). Foucault designates the care of
oneself as one of the central notions of Seneca’s philosophy (Foucault
2005). He reminds us of the beginning of Book 7 of Seneca’s work On
Benefits (Seneca 2009: 297) in which he gives priority to the rules that
guide our behaviour over issues that are related to exercising one’s in-
tellect. Seneca believes that we should turn to matters that are relat-
ed to ourselves and our behaviour, i.e., to a certain number of rules
through which we can guide our actions (Foucault 2005, Seneca 1918:
88). Also, in On the Happy Life (Seneca 2007a) he explicitly suggests that
we should withdraw to the self and pay attention to the self. Finally,
Seneca starts the first letter to Lucilius, with the advice that he should

7  For more on the relation between the principle of care for oneself and knowing oneself in the
context of western thinking, see Foucault 2005: 1–24.

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Marija Velinov

attend to himself (Seneca 1918: 1,1).

2.1. Two Dimensions of the Generalization of the

Care of the Self

Foucault detects a specific generalization of the care of the self in

the 1st and 2nd centuries CE—a generalization that is manifested in two
dimensions (Foucault 2005: 81–106). On the one hand, unlike Plato’s
link between the care of the self and certain key moments of transition
into maturity (Plato 2001), the care of the self later becomes an obliga-
tion that should extend throughout one’s life. It could even be said that
the care of the self is linked more to maturity and old age than to the
transition from adolescence to maturity.

The second difference compared to Plato’s understanding of the

care of the self lies in its educational function. Namely, contrary to
professionally oriented education (which was primarily related to the
skill of governing others), the practice of the self in the Hellenistic and
Roman periods develops a certain educational and critical function of
the care of the self, which is not related to preparations for any given
profession. This is rather a matter of creating an individual so that they
can properly endure all possible accidents, misfortunes, disgrace, and
setbacks that may befall them (Foucault 2005: 81–106). Therefore, this
is a matter of developing a safety mechanism, an armour, a protective
layer separating one from the rest of the world, an assembly that we
encounter most commonly in regard to the idea of being equipped and
armed (Seneca 1918: 24,5, 61,5, 109,8; 133,28). Even though during
this period there was apparently still a connection between the care of
the self and education, it was now primarily linked to freeing oneself of
misapprehensions and bad habits, which means that this link was more
about specific corrections and liberation than traditional education
related to knowledge (Foucault 2005). The practice of the self should
improve, not educate, or only educate (Foucault 2005).

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Considering the fact that the practice of the self took on the role
of improving and correcting, it increasingly veered toward medicine
(Foucault 2005). For example, at the beginning of the work On the Tran-
quillity of the Mind, Serenus addresses Seneca—whom he compares to
a doctor—and asks him for a treatment for his ailment (Seneca 2007b:
112). Also, the idea of treating the soul against passion is the basic idea
of the text On Anger (Seneca 2010b). Finally, the word cura— as part of
the expression cura sui (care of the self)—can be used as care, but also
as treatment, attendance, etc. (Đorđević 2004: 383). The connection
to medicine further leads to the advent of the body as the subject of
care and the further care of oneself is associated with the soul (self,
reason), as well as with the body. Foucault primarily distinguishes this
connection in Seneca’s slightly hypochondriac letters. They are full of
examples of care directed at health, nutrition, discomfort, and distress
(Seneca 1918: 8, 55, 57, 78; Seneca 2010b: book 2, 20,1-3; book 3, 9, 4;
Seneca 2007a: 3).8

The second dimension of generalization of the care of the self is a

particular quantitative expansion of care, which is reflected in the idea
of attending to oneself as a general principle that is directed at every-
one (Seneca 1918: 31,11, 47,15; Seneca 2007b: 116).9 It is no longer
necessary to care for the self solely for the purpose of the possibility of
governing others. It has now become its own goal, in a way.

This general principle should not be understood to be a universal

law that everyone should abide by, but rather as a universal invitation
for everyone to care for themselves. This invitation, however, can be
answered by only a few—only those who have enough strength, deter-
mination, patience, courage, and resilience (Foucault 2005: 107–124;

8   In addition to letters 55, 57, and 78, we should add Letter 8, On Anger, which speaks about
the suppression of anger with lighter food, avoiding amorous delights, and rest, as well as Section
3 of the dialogue On the Happy Life, where Seneca says that a person living a blessed and wise life
attends to their body and its needs.
9   “Each man acquires his character for himself, but accident assigns his duties” Seneca 1918:
47,16.

63
Marija Velinov

Seneca 2007a), as well as those who belong to certain groups, schools,

or — as in Seneca’s case – at least to some social relation (like a friend-
ship).10 Therefore, the other is necessary in order for the practice of
the self to attain the self to which it aspires (Foucault 2005: 125–148).
This need for the other is based, in a way, on the fact that there is some
ignorance (therefore we need a teacher), but ‘ignorance’ is based on
the idea that a person — as mentioned previously — is malformed or
deformed, full of flaws, trapped in dangerous habits or has an ailing
soul, i.e., doesn’t know how to live. In addition to this, it also applies to
the individual not inherently approaching virtue, morality, and righ-
teous acts. To become good is a skill (Seneca 1918: 90,44). Therefore,
the individual should not only aspire to knowledge, but to a new status
of subject that is defined by a complete relationship of oneself to the
self (Foucault 2005: 125–148). And to become constituted as a subject,
the mediation of the other is necessary. The role that the teacher now
plays is not to teach their student something, nor to demonstrate to
them that they don’t know something, but to create their student, in a
way, to help them change in order to constitute themselves as a subject.

2.2. Stultitia

In order to depict the necessity of the presence of a teacher in the

practice of the self, Foucault draws attention to one of the most im-
portant notions of stoic philosophy—the notion of stultitia. This no-
tion, which is sometimes translated as folly (Seneca 1918: 52,2) can at
first glance be perceived as a lack of certain knowledge, however, this
is a particular distress of the soul, indecisiveness (Seneca 2007b: 115),
inconsistency and discontent (Seneca 1918: 52,2), and not ignorance.
At the beginning of the work On the Tranquillity of the Mind, Serenus
does not address Seneca with the desire to gain knowledge from him,

10   See: Foucault 2005. The need for the other stands in particular tension with the individuality
that Seneca demands (See: Seneca 2007a), but it is important to bear in mind that this individu-
ality is defined in its contrast to the crowd that we let make decisions for us, i.e., against the life
in which we follow others, instead of ourselves, and not against friendship. For more on Seneca’s
views on friendship see Seneca 1918: 3.

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but to become very close to the state of being a god: to be unshaken,

tranquil (Seneca 2007b: 115).

On the other hand, stultitia is the state of the one who has not tak-
en the path of philosophy, someone who does not attend to oneself,
who has not started exercising the practice of the self (Foucault 2005:
125–148). This is a person who is susceptible to every wind, open to
the outer world, restless and not satisfied with anything. Seneca notes
that persons in this state can never escape from themselves (Seneca
2007b: 117,118). Therefore, we could say that the goal of the educa-
tional practice described as such is liberation or emancipation from the
self. This is not an idea of being free from the influences of others but
escaping from one’s own nature.

Stultus is without aim and constantly changing their mind (Seneca

1918: 32,2).11 As such the one who “veers from plan to plan” (Seneca
1918: 52,1) does not have and does not want free, absolute will—they
don’t aspire toward that which is eternal. Therefore, the will of the
stultus is not free, it is not an absolute will, they are in a way not capable
of desiring properly (Foucault 2005). For their will to be free, what
they desire must not be determined by an event, idea, or affection. On
the other hand, in order for their will to be absolute, it must be a will
for one and only one thing—they cannot desire multiple contradictory
things at the same time. Finally, their will must not be indolent, full
of interruptions or changes (Foucault 2005). Contrary to the state of
stultitia — in which will is limited, relative, fragmentary, and changing
— is the state whose features are free, absolute, and constant desire.

What object can be the subject of desire—freely, absolutely, and

always? To what object can will be directed without any external lim-
itation and without the desire for something else? The only object that
fulfils these conditions—the only thing that is truly our own—is the self

11  Carelessness and indecision reveal an inner struggle and disagreement with oneself. Com-
pare: Seneca 2007a.

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Marija Velinov

(Foucault 2005; Seneca 2007a). Contrary to this absolute desire direct-

ed toward the self, stultus is the one that does not want oneself, whose
will is not directed towards the self. There is a notable paradox in the
escape from oneself directed precisely at the self. The development or
education of subjectivity, therefore, implies liberation (not of one’s na-
ture but from it) in order to create space for the full reconstitution of
the self.

The abandonment of this state—i.e., the direction of one’s will to-

ward oneself or initiation of the practice of the self, the practice of
caring for oneself—cannot be achieved independently, because being in
the state of stultitia means not wanting to leave it, not wanting to care
for oneself. For this reason, Seneca says that no one is strong enough
on their own to extricate themselves: “he needs a helping hand, and
someone to extricate him.” (Seneca 1918: 52,2) Therefore, establishing
a relationship of the self to oneself is merged with the relationships of
the self to the Other (Foucault 2005: 149–168).

The role of the person that helps us extricate ourselves from the
stultus state and start caring for ourselves is not the (classic) role of a
school teacher, nor the role that the lover assumes in relation to their
loved one, as is the case in Plato. Seneca’s idea of the ‘teacher’ is linked
to the particular idea of ‘counsellor’ that is realized within the relation-
ship that can exist with one who is at the same time a client seeking a
service from a professional philosopher, but also a friend, family mem-
ber or protégé. In any case, this is an intimate relationship that exceeds
mere professional guidance.

2.3. Turning to Oneself and Knowledge

The idea that a person must turn their gaze to themselves, to look at
themselves, to always keep their eyes on themselves (the first category
of expressions related to caring for oneself mentioned previously), of-
ten seems to approach the Delphian principle of ‘know yourself’, which

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held a key position in Plato’s understanding of caring for oneself. How-

ever, is the invitation to turn our gaze to ourselves the same as the in-
vitation to constitute ourselves as the object of contemplation? Should
we observe ourselves in order to discover the truth about ourselves?

Foucault believes that the principle of turning to oneself and ob-

serving oneself differs both from the Platonic idea of knowing oneself
and from examining oneself which belongs to monastic spirituality
(Foucault 2005: 205–228). In his opinion the gaze that we turn to our-
selves is at the same time turned away from other things and precise-
ly this turning away is the key aspect of turning to oneself. We turn
the gaze away from other people and worldly things (Foucault 2005:
205–228; Seneca 1918: 17,5). Turning our gaze away from worldly
things represents a complex and especially significant issue that is at
the centre of Foucault’s examination of the relationship between the
truth and the practice of subjectivity (Foucault 2005: 229). In other
words—which are closer to our topic — what is the relationship be-
tween the knowledge of things and the contemplation of oneself?

A part of the answer to this question could be that Seneca has

a specific measure of usefulness: disregard knowledge and skills
that are useless and inapplicable in genuine struggles in life and re-
tain those that are easily applicable in different circumstances and
that serve to treat the soul and create virtue, i.e., favour skills or
arts of living (Seneca 1918: 88). However, this does not imply re-
jecting knowledge about nature as completely useless.12 In that
case, what comprises this knowledge’s relation to the art of living?

Seneca primarily provides criticism of the vanity of knowledge,

which is reflected in interest primarily directed toward collecting
books rather than toward their content (Seneca 2007b: 127), as well as
in the recommendation not to read too many different books, i.e., not

12  In contrast, stoic thinking links morality, logic and physics into a totality (compare: Sellars
2006: 52–54), where physics is defined as the theoretical basis for ethics, Hadot 2002.

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to dissipate curiosity. One should take only a few books, study them
thoroughly and only keep a certain number of proverbs from them
(Seneca 2007b: 127; Seneca 1918: 2,4-5). This technique of approach-
ing knowledge represents an exercise in contemplation of the truth and is
based on wise proverbs that form the element of philosophical delib-
eration, and not the cultural field which is based on the entire knowl-
edge (Foucault 2005). Seneca himself often practiced this exercise,
most commonly extricating Epicurus’ wise words (Seneca 1918: 2,5).
Furthermore, Letter 88 includes a criticism of liberal skills (sciences
and arts) that deals with the relationship of music, grammar, geome-
try, etc. to philosophy and their influence on a person. He points out
that it is inconsequential to analyse whether, for example, Homer is
older than Hesiod, where Odysseus had travelled, whether Penelope
had recognized him, how to measure our estate, how to bridle a horse,
etc.13 Instead, we should engage in philosophy, as the only true liberal
skill that sets a person free. We should be interested in fostering vir-
tues, because the spirit improves solely through the knowledge of good
and evil. In order to engage in this, we must create space in our soul.

Despite such an attitude toward all sciences that are not philosophy
in the strict sense, Seneca still wrote Natural Questions (Seneca 2010a),
in which he engaged in describing the world — while at the same time
raising the issue of why he would address topics that are so far from us.
It was his intention to describe the world and figure out its causes and
secrets, but he also strived to figure out the purpose of such endeav-
ours. Considering the fact that he was already quite old and that he had
wasted a lot of time, Seneca believed that it was necessary for him to
attend to himself. As his life slipped away, he needed to turn his gaze
to the contemplation of himself. However, when defining the area that
should be disregarded for the sake of working on oneself, he found it
not in nature—but in history. Instead of describing other’s passions, he
needed to overcome and defeat his own. Instead of researching what

13  Even though he admits the positive effects of liberal skills on mitigating anger. Seneca
2010b.

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had been done, he needed to discern what should be done: overcome the
faults, be calm when misfortune strikes, resist pleasure, not seek pass-
ing pleasures, and be prepared for death (Seneca 2010a: book 3,1–5).

Yet, in that case, why does Seneca engage in an extensive descrip-

tion of the world and its secrets? Seemingly paradoxically, the reason
for these explorations is liberation from the slavery to oneself. There-
fore, following the claim that the self is what one should aspire to, what
should always be kept in sight, etc. we return to the idea of liberating
ourselves from ourselves. However, this is not about freeing oneself
from the self as such, but from a specific relationship with oneself,
which is reflected in imposing excessive labour, as well as a specific
relationship of obligation, i.e., a duty to oneself (Seneca 1918: 1,4–5).
A person imposes on themselves certain duties from which they try
to extract certain gains, such as money, fame, reputation, satisfac-
tion, etc.—that is to say they subject themselves to something that is
not themselves, something that is alien to their being (Seneca 1918:
8). Also, Seneca defines gazing at the future (the view of the stultitia,
who must constantly live anew and desire something new) as what
composes the slave’s soul (Seneca 1918: 6). This forms a relationship
to the self that one should rid oneself of, and this liberation is made
possible by the study of nature (Seneca 2010a: book 3,16). In what way?

By freeing ourselves from faults and flaws we elevate ourselves to

the level of divine reason. This ascension is not related to some other
world, but to the elevation to the highest point of this world and turn-
ing one’s gaze to the world and ourselves within it, which will enable
us to discover nature’s hidden depths and secrets. It could be said that
it is a type of recession considering the point where we are, a recession
that will enable us to see and understand the lie and unnaturalness of
everything that previously seemed good to us. Wealth, pleasures, glo-
ry, etc. now acquire their true dimension.14 Raising up to the point of

14  Compare: Seneca 2007a: 28. Here Seneca speaks of the relation between “fleeing” flaws and
rising up; Seneca 2010a book 3,9–15.

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Marija Velinov

view from the roof of the world enables us to dismiss all false values,
but also to assess who we are, to evaluate our existence (Seneca 2010a,
book 3,18). Therefore, describing nature does not only serve to extri-
cate us from the world, but to enable us to consolidate ourselves as to
where we are (Foucault 2005: 229–246). The gaze aimed at nature’s
entire system allows us to accept ourselves as what we are, as a point
in the general system of the universe (Foucault 2005: 229–246, Seneca
2010a: book 3,18).

Self-cognition understood in this manner does not represent

knowledge of a person’s soul, it is not an analysis of the self and its
secrets, which need to be studied and explained, but rather the con-
templation of the self in the world, as a part of the world. In this way,
while gazing at the entire world, we do not lose sight of ourselves at
any moment. The virtue of the soul is based on the inclusion in the
world, in the exploration of the world’s secrets—not the secrets of the
soul (Foucault 2005: 229–246).

Analysing Seneca’s contemplation of the world through which

the subject returns to oneself,15 Foucault points out certain charac-
teristics of such contemplation (Foucault 2005: 278–314). We pri-
marily observe that it is necessary for the subject to move, to with-
draw from the place where it is so that it may reach it; then, the
place that the subject holds allows it to simultaneously see things as
they are, as well as their value in relation to the person; in this cog-
nition we can see ourselves, comprehend ourselves within our re-
ality, and finally, through it, the subject discovers its freedom and
finds a way to exist that is inherent to perfection and happiness.16

In sum, knowledge involving these four conditions (the sub-

ject’s change of position, the evaluation of things on the ba-
sis of their reality within the kosmos, the possibility of the subject

15  On the relation between the idea of returning to oneself and the truth see Seneca 2007a: 5, 8.  
16   Compare: Seneca 2007a.

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seeing himself, and finally the subject’s transfiguration through

the effect of knowledge) constitutes, I believe, what could be
called ‘spiritual knowledge’ which was gradually limited, over-
laid, and finally effaced by a different mode of knowledge which
could be called [...] “intellectual knowledge”. (Foucault 2005: 308)

A characteristic of intellectual knowledge—as opposed to spir-

itual knowledge—is that it establishes the subject as another possi-
ble object of knowledge. However, Foucault wants to point out that
in the moment that we are discussing, the relationship between the
subject and the cognition did not have this form and could not have
had it (Foucault 2005: 315–330). Namely, as we see in this descrip-
tion, the relationship of the subject and the cognition is unrelated
to the possibility of objective cognition (of the subject). Rather, the
knowledge about the world gains a specific spiritual form and a spe-
cific spiritual value for the subject. Therefore, this is a particular spir-
itual modalisation of the subject through the cognition of the world.

3. Askesis as the Practice of Truth

After depicting cognition of the world as a spiritual knowledge in

its specific relation to the constitution of the subject (as the ultimate
goal of the practice of the self), Foucault addresses the concept of turn-
ing to oneself and turning one’s gaze to oneself in one more way. He
wonders what form of practice or type of activity, by oneself on one-
self, encompasses this turning, i.e., what exercise (askesis) of oneself on
oneself is in question (Foucault 2005: 315), because just as no technique
can be perfected without practice, the skill of living (techne tou biou)
cannot be perfected without askesis (Foucault 1997a). This askesis or
exercise entails creating an armour or a weapon, by means of which
individual prepares for various unforeseen life events that may be-
fall them in the future. This armament, or in Seneca’s words instructio
(building, placing in order) (Đorđević 2004: 759) should be adapted to
what might befall us, precisely at the moment when it befalls us, in the
event that it befalls us (Foucault 2005). Therefore, the askesis in ques-

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Marija Velinov

tion is not self-denial, as it is commonly understood, but the constitu-

tion of the subject through given exercises that prepare them for life.

Askesis has several basic characteristics. Firstly, like (physical) exer-

cise (Seneca 2009: 297) it consists not of learning all the possible moves
and holds but learning the basic moves that we may need often, as well
as practicing the moves with which we have the most problems. Be-
ing strong is not what is important, but rather not to be weaker than
what may happen (Foucault 2005). Also, it consists of speeches (logoi,
decretal) (Seneca 1918: 95,1) that represent truthful attitudes as well as
acceptable principles of conduct (Foucault 2005). These are sentences
that have been etched into the spirit and urge action. These material
elements of reasonable speech are permanently inscribed in the subject
and their actions (Seneca 1918: 50,8). They are at the same time the
citadel that we retreat to and the weapons with which we defend our-
selves. In a way, they are always ‘at hand’. As we have mentioned be-
fore, Foucault calls this preparation exercising contemplation of the truth.

The askesis is what enables truth-telling—truth-telling addressed to

the subject and also truth-telling that the subject addresses to him-
self—to be constituted as the subject’s way of being. The askesis makes
truth-telling a mode of being of the subject. (Foucault 2005: 327)

Askesis is the practice of truth, it is a way for the individual to con-

nect to the truth, because – as Seneca says – blessed is the one who
wants nothing more and fears nothing, but not the one who stands beyond
the truth (Seneca 2007a).

It could be said that

[...] on the one hand ascesis is what makes possible the acquisi-
tion of the true discourses we need in every circumstance, event,
and episode of life in order to establish an adequate, full, and per-
fect relationship to ourselves. On the other hand, and at the same
time, ascesis is what enables us to become the subject of these true

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discourses, to become the subject who tells the truth and who is
transfigured by this enunciation of the truth, by this enunciation it-
self, precisely by the fact of telling the truth. (Foucault 2005: 332)

Accordingly, Foucault defines the purpose and aim of philosoph-

ical askesis as the subjectivation through the discourse of truth (Foucault
2005: 333). Therefore, philosophical askesis — askesis of the practice
of the self —

[...] involves rejoining oneself as the end and object of a technique

of life, an art of living. It involves coming together with oneself,
the essential moment of which is not the objectification of the self
in a true discourse, but the subjectivation of a true discourse in
a practice and exercise of oneself on oneself. (Foucault 2005: 333)

Foucault finds the idea of subjectivation of the discourse of truth in

Seneca’s work, related to knowledge, reading, writing, etc. He says that
we should assimilate, make our own (facere suum) (Seneca 1918: 119,7)
the things we know, the discourses we hear, the discourses that we rec-
ognize to be true, or which have been passed on to us as true through
philosophical tradition. Therefore, the essence of philosophical askesis
is making the truth our own and becoming the subject of enunciation
of the discourse of truth. Instead of enunciating one’s own, it is a mat-
ter of assimilating ‘another’s’ or a previously enunciated truth. There-
fore, precisely opposite to the customary ideas of emancipation and
freedom—we reject ourselves and give in to the influence of others.

3.1. Listening, Reading, Writing

The first step—but also the permanent basis of askesis as the sub-
jectivation of the discourse of truth—are all the techniques and all the
activities that are related to the skills of proper listening, reading, and
writing (Foucault 2005: 331–354). First of all, in order to be able to
receive the discourse of truth, our listening must be proper. In order
to illustrate this, Foucault illustrates Seneca’s discussion of hearing

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through the ambiguity of its passivity (Seneca 1918: 108; Foucault

2005: 331–354). Namely, on the one hand, it is a great advantage that
our ear does not require will in order to listen, because that means
that even when we are not focused or don’t understand the lecture,
something will always stay in our head. Considering the fact that the
logos, which enters through the sense of hearing, acts on the soul —
whether it is willing or not — even simply being present at a lecture
on philosophy will benefit us. However, if we do not pay attention
to what is being conveyed in the philosophical discourse, i.e., if we
direct our attention to an unsuitable object or goal, we can be left with-
out any benefit. This is why it is necessary for us to master the skill
of the appropriate method of listening. This skill may contain a vow
of silence, like the one in Pythagoras’ school,17 but also a criticism of
inappropriate behaviour during lectures. Inappropriate gestures and
squirming represent the physical version of stultitia, as the constant
restlessness of the spirit and attention, the soul that leaps from top-
ic to topic, whose attention is constantly wandering, and which is al-
ways restless. On the other hand, philosophy should enjoy only silent
adoration (Seneca 1918: 52,13). “In sum, good philosophical listening
involves a necessary work of attention, of a double and forked atten-
tion.” (Foucault 2055: 351). Furthermore, the aim of actively and cor-
rectly directed listening is for us to attain the rules of action bit-by-
bit, i.e., the general rules of living, based on a single sentence, claim
or statement that we actively contemplate and which we completely
transform, which will allow us to etch that statement into memory.18

A similar formula is transmitted further — to the rules related to

reading. Namely, one should not bury oneself in a vast quantity of dif-
ferent works (like the stultus, i.e., the one whose attention cannot be
occupied for very long by anything). Rather one should select not only
a small number of authors and a small number of their works, but also
only a certain number of their sentences that we consider useful (like

17 Compare: Seneca 1918: 52,10.  

18  Compare: Seneca 1918: 108.

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an athlete learning basic holds that they will most likely need) (Seneca
1918: 2,4–5). These sentences should be assimilated, and one should
become their speaking subject (Foucault 2005). For example, Seneca
recorded quotations by certain authors and sent them to his correspon-
dent, with the advice that they should meditate on the given statement
(Seneca 1918: 2,5, 3,6, 4,10, 7,11, 8,7–8). Therefore

[...] the object or end of philosophical reading is not to learn an au-

thor’s work, and its function is not even to go more deeply into the
work’s doctrine. Reading basically involves—at any rate, its princi-
pal objective is—providing an opportunity for meditation. (Foucault
2005: 356)

We listen and read for the purpose of meditation.

The Latin word meditation (translated from the Greek word

melete) also represents a type of exercise—exercising in thought (Fou-
cault 2005: 356). Meditation is the exercising of making thoughts one’s
own, in the sense that when encountering a text, we should not en-
gage in its meaning, its analysis, but rather just its assimilation. The
goal of meditation is to convince ourselves that the thought is cor-
rect and to etch it — as truthful — in our memory, so that we may
repeat it when the opportunity arises. Therefore, we transform it into
the principle of action which we always have before us or at hand.

It is an appropriation that consists in ensuring that, from this true

thing, we become the subject who thinks the truth, and, from this
subject who thinks the truth, we become a subject who acts properly.
(Foucault 2005: 357)

We are not interested in what the author wanted to say, but rather
we are interested in creating a “collection” of sentences, through read-
ing, which would then become part of ourselves. They become our
rules, our principles of conduct.

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Therefore, this is a matter of assimilating and reproducing knowl-

edge that resembles school education. This is not a matter of interac-
tion or dialogue, or contemplation or criticism, but of memorizing and
reproducing.

Reading is further extended, reinforced, and reactivated through

writing, which is also an element of meditation. As Seneca advis-
es (Seneca 1918: 84,2), we should not only read nor only write, but
use writing to give form to what reading has collected. Reading col-
lects discourses that writing shapes. Thus writing, through collect-
ing thoughts that have been read as well as one’s own thoughts while
reading, represents a mental exercise that stands opposite to the great
lack of stultus, which endless reading can support (Foucault 1997a).
Therefore, through reading, writing (and going back to what has
been written) we assimilate the discourse of truth that we have found
as our own. During this period, writing — as an assimilation of dis-
course — developed in two forms: notebooks and correspondence.

Namely, the thinkers of the time created notebooks (Greek

hupomnēmata19), which represented a type of guide to conduct, where
they wrote down quotations, fragments from books, as well as exam-
ples that they had witnessed or thinking that they had heard (Foucault
1997a). As such, they represented material for future meditations, as
well as systematic collections where they accumulated arguments and
means by which to struggle against weakness or to overcome difficult
circumstances in life. However, they were not only reminders that
were to be consulted on occasion, but rather material and a frame-
work for exercises that should be frequently performed: reading, med-
itation, conversation with oneself and with others. That way, they
become embedded in our soul and become part of ourselves or pre-
cisely us. One should bear in mind that these are not personal jour-
nals where they described private states of the soul, they are not “a
narrative of the self,” in them, they did not write the truth of the self.

19  Accounting books, public registers, individual notebooks. Foucault 1997a.

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The movement they seek to bring about is the reverse of that: the
intent is not to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor
to say the unsaid, but on the contrary to capture the already-said, to
collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that
is nothing less than the shaping of the self. (Foucault 1997a: 210–211)

The objective of the notebooks was to make the already spoken

discourse a means of establishing a link between the self and oneself
(Foucault 1997a: 211). By transforming — through writing — things
that had been seen and heard “into tissue and blood,” the writer de-
velops their own identity (Foucault 1997a).20 This is a collection of
practices through which the truth is acquired, assimilated, and trans-
formed into a permanent principle of action. That way notebooks
— having fixed the acquired elements and developed part of the past
that a person can go back to, which it can withdraw to — represent-
ed a resistance to the dispersal characteristic of the stultitia (Foucault
1997a). Therefore, notebooks were a safe place where writers kept all
the thoughts that in some way constituted them, and which they could
then subsequently also share with others through correspondence.

Correspondence, through which we share discourses of truth

with others, represents an interesting cultural phenomenon of Sen-
eca’s time. This was an individual practice between two people, and
accordingly had a free and flexible form that was adapted to every cor-
respondent (Foucault 2005: 395–412). This correspondence could be
called a spiritual correspondence between two subjects, in which they
would exchange news of themselves, their soul and the progress that
they have been making and provide advice to one another.21 Within

20  On this trail, one of the basic criticisms of Foucault’s interpretation of Seneca, which stems
from Hadot’s analysis, is that when Seneca differentiates between pleasure and happiness (Seneca
1918: 23), he does not associate happiness with the self, but rather with the best part of oneself,
which Hadot defines as reason (Hadot 1995: 207). Accordingly, it is his belief that writing cannot
be linked to the creation of identity, but to the liberation from individuality and turning to the
universal (reason) (Hadot 1995: 209).
21  Even though a correspondence starts between a person seeking advice and another provid-
ing advice, it cannot remain unidirectional for long. Compare Seneca 1918: 34,2, 35, 109,2.

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the correspondence, the adviser uses their notebooks to help the other,
but at the same time helping themselves, primarily by going back to
what they had written, but also by acting upon themselves through the
act of writing the letter, as well as on the person receiving it — through
the act of reading. The reason for this is that writing — as Seneca notes
— also includes reading what has been written, therefore becoming
reactualized (Seneca 1918: 84,9–10). Seneca’s letters therefore primar-
ily serve to guide the other, but through them Seneca also exercises
himself (Seneca 1918: 7,8). In addition to this, writing letters helps the
one writing them to also practice their weapons. “A commander nev-
er puts such trust in peace that he fails to prepare for a war” (Seneca
2007a: 108). The thinking that we give others also prepares ourselves
for similar circumstances (Foucault 1997a). In this way reading, writ-
ing, writings notes for ourselves, correspondence, and even going back
to old letters comprise a very important action of caring for oneself and
others, and transforming the truth into ethos.22

Conclusion

Through the analysis of the notions and practices of stoic philoso-

phy—such as stultitia and askesis, and their relationship with the truth
or speaking the truth, and the specific relation to listening, reading, and
writing — we can observe that this is not a classic educational practice.
However, this is a practice of educating the ethical subject that is freed of
the inner and turned to the outer truth. It relies on cognition of the world
(i.e. on natural sciences, which at the time were encompassed under the
name physics), which defines us in relation to the world, but at the same
time moves us from the place where we started. By leaving the state of
stultitia, we become independent, autonomous, and prepared for life.

Ethics is therefore the conscious practice of freedom that in Antiq-

uity relied on the fundamental imperative: the care of oneself.23 Fou-

22   On the etho-poetical function of writing see Foucault 1997a.

23  Compare: Foucault 1997b: 285.

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cault was especially drawn to the vision of the ‘culture’ of the self in the
Greco-Roman world as a decision, a choice that was not imposed.24
Therefore, he proposed a new ethics where the games of truth would
exist without or with minimal domination.25 Foucault, by his own
self-understanding, was guided in this research by the fact that “our
etho-poetic practices have become oriented to discovering our true or
essential nature” (Rajchman 1986: 170) and that an analysis of ethics
should now guide us to the separation of our ethics and self-forming
practices from the obligation to tell the truth about our nature. Fou-
cault’s philosophy would therefore offer us a choice of way of life and
experiences outside of the previous knowledge or truth of oneself,
and in this sense, we can claim that it sets us free or emancipates us.
However, such an emancipation does not imply freedom of the influ-
ence of the other. It is clear that the other is included in such a form
of education—not only as a necessary teacher, but also as a basis for
developing the subject. Namely, this is precisely a matter of acquisi-
tion and assimilation of other’s thinking, through which the subject
is created, while escaping oneself in a way. Taking this into account,
how does the subject become emancipated? It becomes free of oneself,
of one’s truth, of its speaking. The person turns to themselves in or-
der to become free of themselves, in order to become independent of
themselves, in order to become emancipated of themselves. With the
help of the idea of freedom, Foucault’s descriptions of development
and education of the self in a certain way become linked — precise-
ly and only seemingly paradoxically — to the overcoming of the self.

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24  Compare: Seneca 2007a.

25   Compare: Foucault 1997b: 298, 299. 

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Seneca, Lucius (2007b) “On the Tranquillity of the Mind”, in: Tobias
Reinhardt (ed.), Seneca, Dialogues and Essays. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, pp. 112-139.
Velinov, Marija (2020), „Etika reprezentacije grozote: istina između
viđenja i mišljenja” [“Ethics of Atrocity Representation: the Truth
Between Seeing and Thinking”], Kritika 1(1): 75–88.
Velinov, Marija (2018), “Integrated Foucault: Another Look at
Discourse and Power”. Philosophy and Society 29(4): 533–544.

81
 EMANCIPATION FOR AND
FROM THE SOCIETY

Milica Smajević Roljić1

An Interpretation of the
Educational Process from
the Perspective of Kant’s
Philosophy of History and
Legal-Political Theory

Introduction: Kant as an Educator and Philosopher

in the Eighteenth Century

“The final destiny of the human race is moral perfection. . . . How,

then, are we to seek this perfection, and from where is it to be hoped
for? From nowhere else but education” (CL, AA 27: 470-471)

Kant was one of the few philosophers who wrote about edu-
cation and also had a diverse teaching experience. In his long and rich
teaching career, we can distinguish three major periods. First, during
the 1750s, he worked as a home teacher in two families near Königs-
berg (Beck 1978:188). Although we do not have much knowledge

1  Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade: smajevicmilica@yahoo.com.

83
Milica Smajević Roljić

about this period, based on the fact that Kant maintained close social
relations with these families long after he stopped teaching their chil-
dren, we conclude that they were satisfied with his educational skills.

Second, in 1776, Kant became one of the greatest support-

ers of Basedow’s experimental school in Dessau, the Philan-
thropin (Louden 2016: 393). Being deeply influenced by Rousseau,
Basedow wanted to incorporate his ideas into the curriculum of the
new school he founded. Some of the main goals of the school were
to practice critical thinking and learn foreign languages through
conversation and play, to separate moral education from reli-
gion, and to develop mechanical skills (Beck 1978: 189). In 1776,
Basedow published an account of his school, which was designed for
parents who planned to enrol their children in the Philanthropin.

Kant wrote a review of Basedow’s account and openly showed

enthusiasm for this new educational system. In Essays Regarding the
Philanthropinum, Kant wrote:

To each commonwealth, to each single citizen, it is infinitely impor-

tant to get to know an institute in which an entirely new order of hu-
man affairs commences, and which, if it is spread quickly, must bring
about such a great and such a far-sighted reform in private life as well
as in civil affairs, as one by a casual glance could not easily imagine.
(EP, AA 2: 448)

Although Kant argued that a radical reform of the existing ed-

ucation system was necessary and raised money for the work of
Basedow’s school, it turned out that his efforts were largely in vain.
After several attempts to maintain the school, it was finally closed
in 1794, and Kant pointed out that people are wrong when they
think that experiments and innovations in education are unneces-
sary; their greatest significance is reflected in the fact that the results
of experiments are often different than expected (Päd, AA 09:451).

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 Educational Process from the Perspective of Kant

Third, Kant worked as a university professor for forty-three years

and gave lectures in various fields such as metaphysics, natural the-
ology, logic, ethics, and anthropology. His lectures were very popu-
lar and well attended, and even students from other countries used
to come to listen to them. It is well known that Kant did not take a
leave of absence from work, nor did he travel or leave his country.
His commitment to his university career and students was complete.

It should be recalled that Kant was born at a time when the pursuit
of educational reform was already present, not only in philosophy but
also in other disciplines. Locke’s book Some Thoughts Concerning Edu-
cation, Rousseau’s Emile and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
represent some of the most important attempts of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries to rethink both education and its role in society. It
was considered that one of the main goals of education should be “the
production of a moral and civic-minded citizenry” (Munzel 1999: 248),
and many of Kant’s claims about education confirm that he shared this
vision with his predecessors and contemporaries.

Based on all the above, it could be expected that Kant left behind
extensive writings dedicated to the topic of education, but that is un-
fortunately not the case. Although he considered education to be “the
greatest and most difficult problem that can be given to the human
being” (Päd, AA 09: 446), Kant left behind relatively little written testi-
mony on the subject, which is why his works on education (Lectures on
Pedagogy, Essays Regarding the Philanthropinum and the “Doctrine of the
Methods of Ethics” in his Metaphysics of Morals) are best interpreted if
placed in the broader context of his philosophy. Even in the secondary
literature, Kant’s understanding of education is given far less space and
attention than other aspects of his philosophy.

Kant’s understanding of education is most often interpreted from

the perspective of his ethics, where the importance of the moral devel-
opment and cultivation of each individual is particularly emphasized

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Milica Smajević Roljić

(Roth and Surprenant 2012: ix). The topic of this article, however, will
be somewhat different. Instead of the usual analysis of one’s duties to
oneself and emphasizing the importance of developing one’s own tal-
ents for the purpose of personal growth and education, attention will
be paid to examining the phenomenon of education from the perspec-
tive of Kant’s philosophy of history and legal-political theory. We will
see that this perspective is very important, because it shows us that the
goals of education coincide to a large extent with the goals of the his-
torical-political process. Therefore, the first chapter of this paper will
be dedicated to Kant’s understanding of the philosophy of history and
its relation to the theory of education. We will see that the historical
and educational process takes place simultaneously and that they strive
for the same goal – the establishment of a cosmopolitan community of
moral and educated citizens. The second chapter will provide a brief
analysis of Kant’s legal-political theory, and then point out its connec-
tion with historical and educational processes. We will show that the
development in the sphere of education of individuals can never be
complete if, at the same time, we do not work on the development
of the social system in which individuals live. In the third chapter, at-
tention will be paid to the relationship between the Enlightenment
and education. The eighteenth century was the age of Enlightenment
ideas, and education was certainly one of the main ideals to be pursued.

Kant’s Philosophy of History as a Basis for Understanding

His Philosophy of Education

In the eighteenth century, it was considered that there was a close

connection between the philosophy of education and the philosophy
of history (Beck 1978: 191). This can be noticed in both Rousseau’s
and Kant’s works. As we read Kant, we realize that his philosophy of
history is a more important starting point for understanding his theory
of education than, for example, his anthropology or epistemology. In
his Lectures on Pedagogy, Kant asks: “Should we in the education of the
individual imitate the course followed by the education of the human

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 Educational Process from the Perspective of Kant

race through its successive generations?” (Päd, AA 09: 459). Although

Kant did not offer an explicit answer to this question, it is clear that the
historical process is the key to understanding his theory of education.
If we take even a brief look at Kant’s writings on the philosophy of
history and compare them with Kant’s texts on education, we imme-
diately realize that the interpretation of his theory of education cannot
be complete without taking into account the historical perspective.

In his famous article “Idea for a Universal History with a Cos-

mopolitan Aim”, Kant reveals to us that, in his opinion, the main goal
of the historical process is the establishment of a cosmopolitan commu-
nity of all people that would allow free expression of freedom of every
individual, together with the freedom of all other individuals, and all in
accordance with the general law (IaG, AA 08: 23). Kant makes a very
similar statement when he talks about his understanding of education
in the Lectures on Pedagogy, where he points out that “children should
be educated not only with regard to the present but rather for a better
condition of the human species that might be possible in the future”
(Päd, AA 09: 447). The idea of a better future in which people would live
in a free cosmopolitan community was omnipresent in Kant’s works.

Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim”

consists of nine propositions, and we will quote and briefly analyse
only the first three because they are directly related to Kant’s theory of
education.

When he claims in the first proposition that “all natural pre-

dispositions of a creature are determined sometime to develop them-
selves completely and purposively” (IaG, AA 08: 18), Kant unequiv-
ocally incorporates the teleological principle into his view of the
philosophy of history. He adds that an arrangement that would
not progress towards the realization of its purpose would be con-
trary to the natural principle of purposefulness. This would im-
ply that complete lawlessness and desolate chance reign in nature.

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Milica Smajević Roljić

In the second proposition, Kant says that “in the human being, those
predispositions whose goal is the use of his reason were to develop complete-
ly only in the species, but not in the individual” (IaG, AA 08: 19). With
this statement, he emphasizes that man is fallible being who should
live for many centuries in order to achieve its purpose. Since nature
has determined that human life span lasts much shorter, only a few
decades, it is necessary for a large number of generations to pass on
their knowledge to each other, in order to achieve the natural pur-
pose of the human species. Kant believed that an individual could
make progress only as a member of the human race, through numer-
ous trials and errors, which are inherent in man as a sensible being.

The teleological principle and the idea of the possibility of the full
development of human abilities only in species are explicitly present
in Kant’s Lectures on Pedagogy. Kant points out that education “will get
better and better and each generation will move one step closer to the
perfection of humanity; for behind education lies the great secret of the
perfection of human nature“ (Päd, AA 09: 444). He argues that progress
in education and the development of man’s natural disposition can only
be achieved through a number of generations that educate one anoth-
er. We can never say that one individual has succeeded in achieving the
ideal of education, because only the human race as a whole can strive
to accomplish this task. Each generation should use the knowledge of
their ancestors and move on to new achievements and knowledge.

Although man as an individual cannot fully develop independent-

ly, but only within the human species, Kant in the third proposition
claims that:

[...] nature has willed that the human being should produce every-
thing that goes beyond the mechanical arrangement of his animal
existence entirely out of himself, and participate in no other hap-
piness or perfection than that which he has procured for him-
self free from instinct through his own reason. (IaG, AA 08: 20)

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 Educational Process from the Perspective of Kant

Each individual possesses reason and free will, which makes

them capable of working on their own improvement and devel-
opment of talents. Although previous generations need to pass on
their knowledge to young people, when it comes to the develop-
ment of reason, every human being must work independently to ful-
fil this task. Kant presents the same idea in his Lectures on Pedagogy
where he claims that although a young man needs an educator to
guide him, he primarily needs reason in order to develop his abili-
ties and learn to act morally. Therefore, while educators can teach
any mentally healthy person to read, write, and think critically, suc-
cess in moral education depends on the individuals themselves, not
on the efforts of their tutors. Education, then, can be both physical
and moral, and “the idea of education which develops all the human
being’s natural predispositions is indeed truthful” (Päd, AA 09: 445).

A brief analysis and comparison of the first three propositions of

“Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” with parts
from the Lectures on Pedagogy showed us that the goals of the histor-
ical process largely coincide with the goals of education. However,
it is interesting and useful for our current purpose to notice anoth-
er important thing. Namely, Kant divided the history of the world
into phases that largely coincide with the phases of an individual’s
education. The earliest phase of the historical process is the so-called
natural state, which characterizes life in accordance with instincts
and the absence of established laws, rights, and freedoms of individ-
uals.2 In order to achieve their goals, people do not use reason, but
physical strength, force, and instincts. This phase of the history of
the human race corresponds to the earliest phase of a child’s educa-
tion, which Kant calls nurture, and which refers primarily to feed-

2   It is important to understand that for Kant, the natural state is a hypothetical idea that helps
us see the importance of the existence of basic human rights, but also the social institutions that
protect them. By describing the natural state, Kant does not offer us an empirical account of the
life of our ancestors in society before the creation of the state and institutionalized rights, but
tries to emphasize that some values and some rights are universal and independent of the social
systems we live in. However, in order to protect and ensure these rights, it is necessary to form
a civil society.

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Milica Smajević Roljić

ing and nurturing a child. At this stage, the child is a human being
who belongs completely to nature and relies only on its instincts.
When it is hungry or sleepy, it cries, and when it is happy, it laughs.

In the second phase of the history of mankind, people have left

the raw natural state, but they live in societies that have not yet
reached their highest potential. Although there are established laws,
as well as the rights and duties of all citizens, these regulations are
not always respected because the human race has not yet reached the
level of morality. This period in the history of the human race cor-
responds to the period of children’s education which Kant calls dis-
cipline, and which refers to the school years. At this stage, the child
is no longer guided only by instincts, but also by its educator or pro-
fessor at school. The child learns how to read, write, be obedient, do
homework and organize its time. Although the schoolboy has not yet
reached complete independence, he is no longer at the stage when
he is guided only by nature. His mind and body are in the phase of
discipline. At this stage, however, an important problem arises.

One of the biggest problems of education is how one can unite

submission under lawful constraint with the capacity to use
one’s freedom. For constraint is necessary. How do I cultivate
freedom under constraint? I shall accustom my pupil to toler-
ate a constraint of his freedom, and I shall at the same time lead
him to make good use of his freedom. Without this everything
is a mere mechanism, and the pupil who is released from edu-
cation does not know how to use his freedom. (Päd, AA 09: 453)

In other words, the following question arises: How to unite obe-

dience to the imposed restrictions with the child’s ability to use its
freedom? Kant offers two answers to this question. First, he argues
that “from earliest childhood the child must be allowed to be free in all
matters (except in those where it might injure himself, as, for example,
when it grabs an open knife), although not in such a manner that it is
in the way of other’s freedom” (Päd, AA 09: 454). Second, “one must

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prove to it that restraint is put on it in order that it be led to the use of

its own freedom, that it is cultivated so that it may one day be free, that
is, so that it need not depend on the care of others” (Päd, AA 09: 454).

Hence, in the second phase, both the child and the human race left
behind a natural state, but they have not yet reached the level of morality.

The third stage of the history of the human race is the stage of
genuine morality. This phase is the most difficult to explain because
no experience or history can help us in accomplishing that task. A cos-
mopolitan society, a federation of states, perpetual peace and freedom
of each individual should be realized in the future, and then the hu-
man race will achieve genuine morality. This is the final goal of the
historical process. This stage in the history of mankind corresponds
to the stage of children’s education which Kant calls cultivation. Un-
like Rousseau, Kant believes that man is not moral by nature (Anth,
AA 07: 324) and “morality is not one of the natural dispositions of
the child that can be brought to actualization by training” (Beck 1978:
200). Therefore, an educator cannot make a child moral; he can only
teach it discipline and basic skills. Every man has the task of devel-
oping their morality by following the principles of their reason. Nei-
ther the progress of the human race nor the development of moral-
ity in the individual can be fully explained, because both humanity
and the individual will realize their full potential only in the future.

For Kant, the history of mankind has an evolutionary course. It is

a history of the slow but inevitable development of human rationality
(Vuković 2016: 154). Kant’s view of the historical process can also be
defined as progress from nature to culture. Kant confirms this when
he says in his article “On the Common Saying: That May be Correct
in Theory, but it is of No Use in Practice” that the “human race is con-
stantly advancing with respect to culture (and its natural end)” (TP, AA
08: 309). The goal of the historical process is the supremacy of morality
over nature and the formation of a cosmopolitan community of all the

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Milica Smajević Roljić

people of our planet. Similarly, the goal of education is the supremacy

of morality, rationality, and rational principles over blind instincts and
passions. Education is a means by which individuals, and then entire
societies, can be enlightened and emancipated from their own intellec-
tual immaturity. The relationship between education and the Enlight-
enment will be the topic of the last chapter of this article. However,
before we turn to this topic, in the next section we will focus on Kant’s
legal-political theory and its relationship with the theory of education.

Kant’s Legal-Political Theory - The Ideal of Education

Cannot be Achieved in a Lawless State

The examination conducted in the previous chapter shows us that

the ultimate goal of Kant’s philosophy of history largely coincides with
the goal of his theory of education. The chapter before us will show
that Kant set the same goal before his legal-political philosophy, es-
pecially emphasizing the importance of establishing a republican sys-
tem in the state, the only one that can lead to the establishment of a
federation of states, and then to a cosmopolitan community made up
of all the inhabitants of our planet. Although he admits that the as-
sumption of the inevitable progress of mankind may resemble a story
from a novel (MAM, AA 08: 109), Kant believes that it is support-
ed by the past experience of the human race and helps us to estab-
lish certain regularities in the confused sequence of historical events.

Kant divided public right into state, international and cosmopoli-

tan right, and he paid the most attention to the former. He be-
lieved that the republican system, which is based on the prin-
ciples of freedom, equality, and dependence of all citizens on
the same set of laws (ZeF, AA 08: 350), is the most suitable of
all systems, because it can establish institutions that would pro-
tect the rights of all individuals. Every republican state contains:

[...] three authorities within it, that is, the general united will consists
of three persons (trias politica): the sovereign authority (sovereignty)

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 Educational Process from the Perspective of Kant

in the person of the legislator; the executive authority in the person of

the ruler (in conformity to law); and the juridical authority (to award
to each what is his in accordance with the law) in the person of the
judge (potestas legislatorial, rectoria et iudiciaria). (MS, AA 06: 313)

Legislative power rests on the people and their united will and
derives its legitimacy from the fact that laws apply only to individu-
als who have chosen them of their own free will. If a few people are
allowed to prescribe laws in the st ate, it is always possible that in-
justice will be done, because that group of individuals will want a
more favourable position for themselves, as is the case in the natural
state. If the holders of legislative power are all citizens of the state,
through their united will, then there is no fear that the laws will be
unfair because no one does injustice when deciding on themselves.

These three types of authorities must be strictly separated from

each other and one of them must not be allowed to interfere in or in-
fluence the affairs of the other. The legislator in the state cannot be at
the same time the one to whom the executive power belongs, nor the
one who judges in court disputes, because, in that case, due to con-
flict of interests, no form of government could perform its function
impartially and under prescribed laws. Through these three types of
authorities, the state achieves its autonomy. It becomes an independent
and autonomous political entity, whose citizens obey only those laws
that they have prescribed for themselves by the united will of all. The
goal of such a constituted state is to eliminate the possibility of doing
injustice and to enable the expression of freedom guaranteed by law.

Although he pays far more attention to state right than to interna-

tional and cosmopolitan right, Kant points out that there is an inter-
dependence between these three types of public right and that all three
are necessary to ensure freedom, equality, peace, and a cosmopolitan
community. None of the goals set before public right can be achieved
until the state, as an individual, forms an alliance with other states and
reaches an agreement with them on peace and mutual non-aggression.

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Milica Smajević Roljić

However, if a republican system based on the principles of freedom

and equality is to be achieved, Kant believes that this is possible only
through a long historical process. We cannot expect that the full de-
velopment of society will be achieved in one generation. Humans are
rational individuals, and the development of their reason takes place
gradually through the historical process of progress. With this line of
argumentation, Kant makes a close connection between his legal-po-
litical philosophy and his philosophy of history. As we read Kant, it is
difficult not to notice that most of his texts dealing with the philosophy
of history, simultaneously deal with his legal-political theory.3 The ba-
sic postulates of state, international and cosmopolitan right are placed
at the core of Kant’s philosophy of history. Standing on legal-polit-
ical ground allows us to decipher the direction of history, which, in
Kant’s opinion, is defined by the same principles that determine the
formation of the republican system, and then the federation of states.

Why was this brief account of Kant’s legal-political theory rel-

evant to us in the context of examining his theory of education?
Why did we draw a parallel between the philosophy of history and
legal-political philosophy? The answer to both questions lies in the
fact that, in Kant’s view, the historical, political, and educational pro-
cesses take place simultaneously. The development of human skills,
the process of education, the formation of the republican system in
society, the transition from the natural state to the social state, the
pursuit of cosmopolitan community of all people – all these process-
es take place in parallel and affect each other. Although it is impos-
sible to determine which of these processes precedes one another, it
is clear that they all last for centuries and that many generations pass
on their knowledge and skills to each other. We cannot expect to
have educated and moral individuals in a society in which the estab-
lished laws and rights of all citizens are not respected. This leads us to

3  This refers to: “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim”, “Conjectural Begin-
ning of Human History”, “On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory, but it is of
No Use in Practice”, “The Conflict of the Faculties”.

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 Educational Process from the Perspective of Kant

the conclusion that work on the education of future generations in-

cludes work on the development of the entire socio-political system.

Age of Enlightenment - Education as a Process of

Emancipation from One’s Own Immaturity

Although Kant lived in eighteenth-century Europe, which was the

centre of the republican and revolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment,
it is important to point out that Prussia, the country in which he spent
his entire life, was an absolutist monarchy. Despite the fact that Kant
did not live in a state where the proclamation of new slogans and atti-
tudes was common, he openly advocated the ideals of the Enlighten-
ment and believed that these were at the same time in the main interest
of mankind (Smajević 2020: 212). The freedom of the individual, the
recognition of the rights and dignity of every human being, the neces-
sity of freedom for personal progress through education, the formation
of a strong state that allows intellectual freedom to its citizens, inter-
national cooperation, and peace – all these are the goals of the Enlight-
enment to which Kant himself aspired (Beck 1969:437). The goal of
the Enlightenment was to create educated and moral people who use
their own reason. As Louden (Robert Louden) and many others have
noted, “the Age of Enlightenment was also an age of pedagogy; indeed,
the very term ‘Enlightenment’ implies a process of education” (Louden
2016: 394).

At the beginning of his short article “An Answer to the Ques-

tion: What is Enlightenment?” Kant says that one of the main culprits
for the absence of enlightenment is man himself, who, as a physical-
ly mature being, is responsible for his own passivity, disinterest, and
inertia (BdF, AA 08:35). Although each individual possesses reason
and the ability to use it for the purpose of their own education and
progress, Kant points out that most people, due to laziness, rely ex-
clusively on the opinions and attitudes of social authorities and do not
think for themselves. Kant asks all adult human beings to renounce

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Milica Smajević Roljić

the passive-observational role and, using their own reason, to form

their own personal attitudes. The process of advancing towards en-
lightenment depends primarily on the individual who is responsi-
ble for working on their own growth, education, and emancipation.

A potential ambiguity arises here: namely, it may seem that the

claim that every human being should work on their own emancipation
and should renounce authority is not in line with the view that we
need teachers, educators, and new experimental schools. Kant advo-
cated this second view when he supported Basedow’s school and the
necessity of educational reform. However, we can solve this poten-
tial problem if we remind ourselves that Kant claimed that a person
needs educators in order to master skills such as reading, writing, dis-
cipline, critical thinking, and foreign languages. Kant, of course, also
wrote about practical or moral education and defined it as “education
by which the human being is to be formed so that he can live as a freely
acting being” (Päd, AA 09: 455). However, Kant claimed that “human
being is by nature not a moral being at all; he only becomes one when
his reason raises itself to the concepts of duty and of law” (Päd, AA
09: 492). Morality is not a natural disposition and therefore educators
cannot make a child moral through teaching, exercise, and training.
They can give the child examples of morally virtuous and morally bad
actions and ask it how it would act in a certain given situation. They
can present options to it and make it think about what is morally right
to do. Some children will know which behaviour is right and will act
accordingly; some others will also know what is right but will not act
accordingly, while others will think that it is better to act according to
prudence than according to morality. This shows us that true morality
does not depend on the educator’s efforts, but on the extent to which
the individual follows the principles of their reason. Since humans are
not perfect and sinless beings, we cannot expect them to always act in
accordance with moral principles. What we can expect and what we
can hope for is that each individual tries to understand rational prin-
ciples and to apply them more often when acting. Therefore, we can

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conclude that every society needs educators who will pass on the skills
and knowledge they have acquired to future generations, and that af-
ter acquiring basic skills, each individual is responsible for working on
their own emancipation and moral progress. There is no contradiction
between the need for educators and the use of one’s own reason for the
purpose of enlightenment and further moral education.

It would, however, be wrong to conclude that all responsi-

bility for emancipation from the state of immaturity is placed on
man as an individual who should aspire to be independent and au-
tonomous. In the continuation of his short article, Kant emphasizes
the importance of the social context, which has a unique role in the
aspiration of the individual towards progress and the state of Enlight-
enment. If a state system does not respect the human right to free-
dom and equality with other citizens, then such a society does not
allow an individual to work on their development and education.

Kant condemns the revolution as a potential solution to this problem

and believes that it is not a legitimate means to achieve Enlightenment,
because rebellion can lead to a change of government, but not to a rad-
ical change in the way of thinking in society. This second goal can be
achieved only through a gradual reform of society which, in order to
be justified, should be initiated and implemented by none other than
the legislator himself. The sovereign must be instructed in the existing
social problems, because only in that way can the constitution be im-
proved in accordance with the ideal of the law” (Smajević 2020: 206).

Therefore, the Enlightenment aspiration for each individual to use

their own reason in making decisions and to work on personal growth,
emancipation and education is inseparable from the aspiration for the
social system as a whole to be just and cosmopolitan. The work of en-
lightening individuals must at the same time be the work of enlighten-
ing the whole society.

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Milica Smajević Roljić

Concluding Remarks

In this article, we have tried to emphasize the teleological di-

mension of Kant’s theory of education and its great significance.
“The human species has a Bestimmung (translated variously as ‘des-
tiny’, ‘vocation’ and ‘determination’), and education is a necessary
means towards the achievement of this fundamental goal” (Louden
2016: 405). In order to achieve proper development of all fundamen-
tal human capacities, it is necessary for a person to be in a constant
process of education and to develop their predispositions and tal-
ents. Humans require education in order to effectively exercise their
freedom and autonomy. Expressed in Kant’s words: “the human be-
ing can only become human through education” (Päd, AA 09: 443).

The aim of this article was to show that a correct and comprehen-
sive understanding of Kant’s conception of education requires a his-
torical and political perspective that emphasizes the fact that human
progress and development in all fields is always a long, multi-gener-
ational process. The education of the human race takes place in par-
allel with the progress of the human race on the historical and polit-
ical level, and thus the process of education is inextricably linked to
the socio-political development. The course of the historical-political
movement, which at the same time represents the course of education
of the human species, can be roughly defined as the progression from
nature to culture. While the natural state is imbued with lawlessness
and wild freedom, civic order is a huge step towards culture, education,
legalized freedom, and the creation of a cosmopolitan community.

At the very end of this paper, we must not forget to ask one im-
portant question: Can Kant’s understanding of education be useful
to us today and how? We believe that the answer to this question is
positive and that we can draw several important lessons from Kant’s
theory of education. First, we must understand that education is not
an isolated phenomenon. If we want to work on the development of
education today, in the 21st century, it is necessary to take into account

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 Educational Process from the Perspective of Kant

the broader picture of the society in which we live. If, for example,
laws within the state system are often violated, then in parallel with the
work on education, an effort must be made to improve the implemen-
tation of legal regulations in society. Progress in the field of education
cannot be achieved separately from the progress of other domains of
society. Second, educators can educate the individual only to a certain
extent. They can teach them the basic skills necessary for a functional
life, they can show them numerous examples of moral conduct, but
true moral agency depends on the individuals themselves and the ex-
tent to which they follow the principles of their reason. Therefore, the
full potential of education can only be realized by investing efforts to
improve the social system in which we live and by working on personal
progress and emancipation.

Although there is a lot of public talk about education, peace and

freedom of expression, the efforts made to achieve these goals seem in-
sufficient or perhaps even wrong. While there are a few countries that
are very close to realizing these ideals, such as Norway and Denmark,
most other countries in the world, especially non-European ones, face a
number of problems and challenges. Extreme poverty, inaccessibility of
primary education, cruel treatment of members of some social groups
- all these are indicators that even in the twenty-first century, the basic
needs and rights of all people on the planet have not been met (Smajević
2020: 213). Each individual should work on their own education and
talent development. However, it should be emphasized that a person
who struggles every day to achieve basic needs such as drinking water,
food, a roof over his head and primary education, cannot be blamed for
general ignorance. The biggest task is set before free and educated indi-
viduals who should make efforts to change social systems and point out
the importance of education. Therefore, the main advice of this paper
is that each individual should work on their own education and on im-
proving the system in which they live, while the greatest responsibility
lies with people who have already reached a certain level of education
and who should be the initiators of positive changes in the future.

99
References:

Beck, Lewis White (1978), Essays on Kant and Hume. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press.
Beck, Lewis White (1969), Early German Philosophy. Kant and His
Predecessors. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
Kant, Immanuel, Gesammelte Schriften, Akademieausgabe, Bd. I-XXIX,
Berlin, 2013.
Louden, Robert (2016), “Total Transformation: Why Kant Did Not
Give up on Education”. Kantian Review 21 (3): 393-413.
Munzel, Felicitas (1999), “Menschenfreundschaft: Friendship and Peda-
gogy in Kant”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (2): 247-259.
Roth, Klas and Chris Surprenant (2012), “The Highest Good – the Moral
Endeavor of Education”, in: Kant and Education Interpretations and Com-
mentary. New York. London: Taylor and Francis Group, pp. ix-xxiv.
Smajević, Milica (2020), “Prosvećenost u Kantovoj misli – metodološke
pretpostavke i aktuelnost u savremenoj filozofiji”, in: Jasmina Šaranac
Stamenković, Ljiljana Skrobić, Mirjana Ilić and Milena Kaličanin (eds.),
Novi pravci istraživanja u društvenim i humanističkim naukama.
Niš: Izdavački centar Univerziteta u Nišu, Filozofski fakultet, pp. 205-
215.
Vuković, Ivan (2016), Platon i Kant: Saveti za dobar život.
Sremski Karlovci. Novi Sad: Izdavačka knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića.

100
 Olga Nikolić1

Emancipatory and
Ideological Functions
of Education

The paper examines two conflicting societal functions of edu-

cation: on the one hand, education can work to reproduce the existing
power relations, indoctrinate students, and assimilate them into the
existing social order, but on the other hand, it can also contribute to
the emancipation of students and the society as a whole. By contrast-
ing the emancipatory function with the ideological one, I aim to clar-
ify the meaning of individual and social emancipation drawing on the
Enlightenment tradition, locate the main ideological forces opposing
emancipation in the field of education today, as well as suggest some
ways in which they can be resisted.

First, I will explore the core emancipatory educational ideas of

the Enlightenment based on three key texts: Rousseau’s Emile, Kant’s
“What is Enlightenment?” and Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Next, I will examine the ideological function of education, in par-
ticular of neoliberal education, in order to discern the main ways in
which contemporary ideology works through education. Based on
insights gained, I will suggest several main lines of resistance, capa-
ble of strengthening the emancipatory function of education and
countering the ideological one in contemporary neoliberal societies.

1  Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade: olganikolic111@gmail.com;

olga.nikolic@instifdt.bg.ac.rs.

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Olga Nikolić

In the concluding discussion, I will respond to the critics arguing that

the Enlightenment ideal had itself become ideological and had instru-
mentalized education (Biesta 2008; Osberg & Biesta 2020), which will
lead me to make the conceptual distinction between ideology and ideal.
It should be noted right from the start that the relations between ide-
ology and emancipation cannot be simplistically reduced to mere op-
position. What we call ideology today often used to be emancipatory
in the past, and vice versa, and many times we could argue that one and
the same constellation of educational beliefs and practices is in some
ways ideological and in some ways emancipatory at the same time.2
Nevertheless, as I will maintain, there is still a clear distinction to be
made between ideological and emancipatory functions of education.
In order to determine more closely the meaning of emancipato-
ry education, in the following section I will focus on the emanci-
patory educational ideal of the Enlightenment, as articulated by
Rousseau, Kant and Freire. These authors provided some of the
most remarkable philosophical visions of emancipatory education.

Emancipatory Ideal of the Enlightenment in Rousseau,

Kant and Freire

In the Age of Enlightenment, education was recognized as the way

to accomplish the progress of the entire humanity guided by reason, and
the word ‘emancipation’ gained new meaning in line with this ideal.3

In Rousseau’s work, the main purpose of education is nega-

tive: to keep his student, Emile, away from the corrupting effects
of society, in order for him to be able to enter society as a free man.

2  The history of European universities is a good example of this ambivalence, insofar as uni-
versities served both as places of critique and the production of new knowledge, as well as of
the reproduction of the dominant worldview. For an excellent overview of the early history of
universities and the many intertwined social and political interests that shaped it see Rüegg 1992.
3 Its earlier meaning was tied to the Roman law and the legal emancipation of children and wife
from pater familias. In the XVI century the concept started to be used in the context of religious
toleration and by the end of the XIX century it gained traction in the variaty of contexts, including
liberation from slavery, emancipation of women and the working class.

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 Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Education

The main emancipatory message of Emile is that children should be

raised to be free, which they by nature already are, their freedom be-
ing taken away from them in the course of misplaced education de-
livered in a society of false social values and corrupt institutions.

Rousseau contrasts freedom with dependency and tightly links it

to self-sufficiency. He sees original enslavement as coming from hu-
man beings becoming too dependent on each other, losing their nat-
ural freedom in the process.4 Thus Rousseau’s main educational aim
is to preserve natural freedom as much as possible, enabling Emile to
live his life as he freely chooses, for which harmonious and full de-
velopment of both the physical strength and intellectual and emo-
tional capacities is required.5 The fundamental maxim of Rousseau’s
education is thus: “The truly free man wants only what he can do
and does what he pleases”(E: 84). For this, his Emile needs an autono-
mous use of reason, free from prejudice, and passions free from vice.6

Rousseau stresses the extreme importance of developing children’s’

character to become neither tyrannical nor slavish (E: 85). Already in
early childhood, children become aware of dominion and submission.7
Rousseau advises parents and governors to be attentive to the inten-
tion behind children‘s cries, immediately aiding them if the cause of
their cries is a natural need, but ignoring them if they cry in order to

4  “Civil man is born, lives and dies in slavery.” Rousseau 1979: 4; see also 233. This work will be
cited as E for all subsequent references.
5   “Prepare from afar the reign of his freedom, and the use of his forces, by leaving natural habit
to his body, by putting him in the condition always to be master of himself and in all things to do
his will, as soon as he has one.” E: 63; cf. 68, 84-85, 119, 184-185. Yet, Rousseau also admits that
dependency is the necessary condition of social life that cannot be reversed back to the state of
nature. See E: 193, 221.
6   “It suffices that, closed in a social whirlpool, he not let himself get carried away by either the
passions or the opinions of men, that he sees with his eyes, that he feels with his heart, that no
authority govern him beyond that of his own reason.” E: 255; see also 168, 171, 176, 187, 207,
213-215, 239, 267.
7   “(…) he must give orders or receive them. Thus his first ideas are those of dominion and servi-
tude.” E: 48. “The first tears of children are prayers. If one is not careful, they soon become orders.
Children begin by getting themsleves assisted, they end by getting themsleves served.” E: 66.

103
Olga Nikolić

submit other’s will to theirs. On the other hand, children should not be
taught to obey commands: whatever they must do, they should recog-
nize as flowing from the natural necessity (E: 89-91). It is in this way
that children grow up in freedom and learn to treat others as equals.

In Emile, Rousseau outlines the road to individual emancipation

guided by the natural course of human development. Society is mainly
regarded as an obstacle to natural education and consequently to free-
dom. In fact, Rousseau directly contrasts the education of man for him/
herself (natural education) with education for others (for citizenship).8
Nevertheless, he occasionally hints at the possibility of reconciliation of
individual and social emancipation,9 ultimately to be found in the free
and complete surrender of individuals to the general will, whose pur-
pose, in turn, is to preserve and protect individual freedom by laws.10

Before reaching full maturity, Emile must travel in order to learn

about the various existing governments, as well as about the ideally
just social order and the rights that are the basis of its justice, the ones
expounded in Rousseau’s Social Contract. On travel, he will not only test
his virtue and fidelity, but also learn about his civic duties, which he is
to fulfill with a view of the ideal of society as a free association of men,
and the laws appropriate to it (E: 459-460). Emile becomes a member
of society as a free man by resisting its injustices in the name of the
ideal of justice, but also by respecting his civic duties. On the one hand,
even the actual imperfect governments ought to be respected insofar
as they provide security and protect individual rights. On the other
hand, their own imperfection enables Emile to conceptualize the ideal

8  “(…) one must choose between making a man and a citizen, for one cannot make both at the
same time.” E: 39; see also 40. Rousseau sees Spartan education as the ideal of citizen education.
9   “In the republic, all of the advantages of the natural state would be united with those of the
civil state, and freedom which keeps men exempt from vices would be joined to morality which
raises him to virtue.” E: 85; see also 41, 193, 253.
10 ‘‘To find a form of association that may defend and protect with the whole force of the com-
munity the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, joining together
with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain as free as before. Such is the fundamen-
tal problem of which the social contract provides the solution.” E: 164.

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 Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Education

and virtuously strive for it, by sacrificing his individual interest to the
common interest. Thus Emile, educated solely for his own freedom,
ultimately serves his county as well, by living an exemplary life of vir-
tue (E: 473-474).

We see the reverberations of the same main ideas in Kant’s in-

sistence that men should neither be slaves of other’s will or of out-
side passions, but subjects that freely submit to their own will. Men,
free by nature, are in the state of subjugation when instead of using
their own reason, they allow themselves to be guided in their opinions
and actions by the self-proclaimed tutors. Individual emancipation for
Kant is tied to the emancipation of humanity that can be achieved only
gradually, under the condition that free public use of reason is allowed
(Kant 2004: 6).11 Everyone should be allowed to freely criticize and
take a stand on public matters, especially regarding the issues of state
policies and religious postulates. In this way, enlightened individuals,
those who have already freed themselves from “self-imposed nonage”
will spread the same spirit of freedom and rationality to others. Kant’s
vision of the progress of humanity should ultimately lead to univer-
sal enlightenment. Freedom of thought prepares the ground for civic
freedom:

And this free thought gradually reacts back on the modes of thought
of the people, and men become more and more capable of acting
in freedom. At last free thought acts even on the fundamentals of
government and the state finds it agreeable to treat man,who is now
more than a machine, in accord with his dignity. (Kant 2004: 10)

Both for Kant and for Rousseau, emancipation has its individual and
its social aspect. It is an achievement of an individual striving towards
freedom and virtue, but this is truly possible only in a society based on
the principles of reason, freedom and equality. Individual emancipa-
tion is necessary for the liberation of the entire society and vice versa.

11  See also Smajević Roljić 2021 [this volume].

105
Olga Nikolić

With Paolo Freire, the founder of critical pedagogy, we find pre-

served these basic ideas of the Enlightenment. The key novelty of
Freire’s pedagogy is struggle: the society of equality must be fought
for; it will not come of itself. Emancipation takes place in the process
of this struggle. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he focuses on the role
of education in the struggle for emancipation, understood at the same
time as the struggle for a more humane society, and against the soci-
ety of domination in which both the oppressor and the oppressed are
dehumanized. Thus, Freire also repeats Rousseau’s idea that human
beings should overcome the roles of masters and slaves, the oppressors
and the oppressed, in order to achieve true freedom. The tendency,
overwhelming even today, to understand the process of education as a
transmission of content from teachers to students who are expected to
merely adopt and reproduce it, is what Freire calls “the banking model
of education” in which knowledge becomes petrified, lifeless and iso-
lated from the world. The result is passivisation and dehumanization:

[…] it is the people themselves who are filed away through the
lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best)
misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the prax-
is, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only
through invention and re-invention, through the restless, im-
patient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in
the world, with the world, and with each other. (Freire 2000: 72)

The knowledge that students gain in the banking model is meant

to make them obedient clerks in the existent system: it insists on
inessential contents and doesn’t question existent norms. According
to Freire’s Marxist critique of education, the explanation for this lies
in relations of power: dominant social groups adjust social order to
their own interests and needs, representing them at the same time as
universal and natural. In such an order the oppressed should be taught
obedience, they should learn knowledge and skills that have value for
the oppressors. Thus, the immediate interest of the privileged in the
existing hierarchical order is not to entice free questioning and crit-

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 Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Education

ical thinking, especially not among the oppressed. Furthermore, the

dominant ideology is so woven into the everyday way of thinking that
even well-meaning teachers often unconsciously fall into the patterns
of teaching which contribute to the reproduction of the oppression:

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of

students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by edu-
cators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.
(Freire 2000: 78)

The central task of Freire’s emancipatory pedagogy is transfor-

mative action directed at freedom and equality for the oppressed,
and in this way for the entire humanity. Instead of teaching stu-
dents to adapt to the unjust world, the main task of education
should be to entice students to fight for a more just world. Educa-
tion should liberate students from an ideological consciousness in
which the existing social relations are (falsely) represented as nec-
essary and show them that human beings can change and create the
world. In giving up that freedom and that potential, man willing-
ly accepts unfreedom, and remains a „well-fed cog in the machine“.

Freire’s emancipatory ideal demands also the change of relation be-

tween teacher and students, in the direction of more egalitarian, dialog-
ical and problem-posing education, similar to what we find in Socartes:

Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-

the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student
with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-
who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the
students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become
jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. (Freire 2000: 80)

The three authors certainly have their share of differences, but

for the present paper what brings them together matters more. Two
main emancipatory messages shared by Rousseau, Kant and Freire, at

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Olga Nikolić

the core of the educational ideal of the Enlightenment, are that hu-
man beings should become autonomous in using their own reason,
and that they should be neither masters nor slaves to each other.

Ideological Function of Education

Ideology is a concept notoriously difficult to define. Descriptive

(neutral) concept of ideology and normative (negative or positive)
concepts are commonly distinguished (Geuss 1981). In its neutral
sense ideology is any web of meanings, beliefs and values shared by
a group of people (e.g. a movement, a class, a nation) that enables
them to make sense of the social world and shapes their social prac-
tices.

In the negative sense, that I use in this paper, ideology is such a

web of meanings, but that is in some way illusory, false and distort-
ed under the influence of unequal power relations in society. Thus,
ideology is not merely a false representation of social reality, but a
web of meanings and corresponding practices serving to maintain
and justify domination, i.e. the master and slave relations. Geuss dis-
tinguishes three moments in the negative concept of ideology: the
falsity of belief, the genesis under the influence of power, and the
function of masking, or normalizing and naturalizing unjust and
unequal relations of power (Geuss 1981: 12-22). I believe the third
moment is the most decisive in attributing an ideological function
to a social phenomenon. The ultimate value underlying this critical
view of ideology is that human beings are equals, i.e. that their lives
and freedom should be equally respected, and that they should treat
each other as such. Accordingly, any view that attempts to justify the
opposite of this principle should be considered false and ideological.
False, because there simply is no good argument to elevate some hu-
man lives above others, as a matter of principle, and ideological, be-
cause such social systems justify the rule of some human beings over

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 Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Education

others on these questionable grounds.12

I believe that it is possible to preserve the critical edge of the term

“ideology”, by stressing inherent falsities, distortions and misconcep-
tions of the ideological discourse and consciousness, as long as we ac-
cept that it is possible to distinguish between systems of beliefs that are
more or less rationally and morally justified. Thus, I use the term “ide-
ology” to designate any web of meanings, beliefs and values, along with
the corresponding practices, serving to legitimate systematic domina-
tion of some over others in a society. The underlying assumption of
this approach is that no domination is justified and that it should be
replaced by equality, as the only way of securing freedom for all, at
least in principle. It follows from delimiting the concept of ideology
in this way that our personal evaluatively colored beliefs and opinions
are not always necessarily ideological. Our individual perspective may
only partly (to a greater or a lesser extent) overlap with one or more
ideologies, but we are not inescapably trapped by this or that ideology.
Moreover, not all arguments in favour of an established social order
are necessarily ideological. Namely, in so far as reasons are given in
favour of an existing social order that serves to promote freedom and
equality against domination, these are not ideological, but they can be-
come such if they lose touch with reality and become mere phrases.
On the other hand, even egalitarian social movements can fall prey to
ideological consciousness through a dogmatic, uncritical acceptance of
group values.13

Nazi Germany gives the clearest example of ideology in its most

toxic form. As other aspects of life, education too was here put under

12  Admittedly, moral dilemmas can occur that complicate the application of the principle of
equality in some circumstances (e.g. whether to provide urgent medical help to a child or to an
elderly patient). However, when it comes to evaluating political systems, there is simply no good
argument in favour of the systematic assigning of unequal value to human lives, e.g. through dis-
criminatory laws, especially when the discrimination is based on unchosen characteristics (race,
gender, ethnicity, etc).
13 For an overview of the main ideological strategies see Eagleton 1991: 33-62.

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Olga Nikolić

strict control in order to ensure that it is in complete service to the state

ideology. Students were indoctrinated from the earliest age in line with
the completely distorted worldview of the Nazis. Teachers had to at-
tend the Nazi teacher training camps, textbooks and curriculums were
modified in line with false doctrines, children’s free time was organized
around participation in the Nazi youth camps. They were constant-
ly deliberately exposed to the ideology, brainwashed into accepting
racial prejudice both via the content that was taught in schools, as well
as by the constant pressure to conform and the fear of punishment.14

In stark contrast to this, contemporary educational institutions

readily advocate equality of opportunity for all human beings, the
importance of universal education based on scientific worldview and
openly call for developing critical thinking, creativity and individual-
ity. This is exactly the reason why it is much more difficult to grasp
the ideological effects of contemporary ideology of neoliberalism in the
field of present-day education, which are indeed strong but skillfully
obfuscated by the emancipatory discourse.

Neoliberalism reveals its ideological character when the values

nominally defended by it are compared to the reality of the system that
it justifies. Much has been written on the neoliberal capitalist forms
of domination and subjection. We can point out overwork and lack
of free time, precarious living conditions, lack of social security and
health care for the lower social classes, exploitation of the periph-
eries of global capitalism as sources of cheap labour and spaces for
outsourcing polluting industries, as well as the crisis of democra-
cy due to the concentration of power in the hands of corrupt polit-
ical and social elites, who are simply not held accountable.15 Ne-
oliberalism has an array of strategies at disposal for representing

14  See Pine 2010.

15  “For Hayek and the neoliberals, the Führer was replaced by the figure of the entrepreneur,
the embodiment of the will-to-power for the community, who must be permitted to act without
being brought to rational account.” Mirowski 2009: 444.

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 Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Education

grave social inequalities as in some way justified, reasonable and/

or necessary, of opening space for further exploitation and abuse
of poor by the rich, and for closing off possibilities for overcom-
ing capitalist modes of production, distribution and exchange.16

The ideological core of neoliberalism is the generalization of mar-

ket relations and meanings appropriate to them to other forms of life
as described already by Foucault:

First, the generalization of the economic form of the market be-

yond monetary exchanges functions in American neo-liberalism
as a principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of
social relationships and individual behavior. This means that anal-
ysis in terms of the market economy or, in other words, of sup-
ply and demand, can function as a schema which is applicable to
non-economic domains. And, thanks to this analytical schema or
grid of intelligibility, it will be possible to reveal in non-econom-
ic processes, relations, and behavior a number of intelligible re-
lations which otherwise would not have appeared as such— a sort
of economic analysis of the non-economic. (Foucault 2008: 243)

As noted also by Mirowski, in neoliberalism the sense of all other

aspects of society is determined in relation to the market, and evaluated
with respect to how it contributes to the market: citizens are primarily
participants in the market and “customers of state services” (Mirowski
2009: 437), freedom is primarily the freedom of the market,17 the main
purpose of the state is to preserve the free market, personality traits
and behaviours are held in high regard that enable one to succeed in
the market, etc.

16   For a more detailed critique of the basic theoretical assumptions of neoliberalism see Nikolić
& Cvejić 2017.
17   “Freedom is not the realization of any political, human, or cultural telos, but rather is the pos-
iting of autonomous self-governed individuals, all coming naturally equipped with a neoclassical
version of rationality and motives of ineffable self-interest, striving to improve their lot in life by
engaging in market exchange. Education is consequently a consumer good, not a life-transforming
experience.” (Mirowski 2009: 437)

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Olga Nikolić

Another contradiction worth noting is that the system that sup-

posedly defends freedom can easily be implemented in the authoritari-
an governments as well, and is often threatened by democratic process-
es (Mirowski 2009: 436, 442-446). Also, the system that is supposedly
free from being rigged, according to its theoretical defenders, can in
fact increasingly be rigged by the rich elites.

What makes neoliberalism an ideology is not simply a collection of

its claims, but the justification of these in terms of natural inequality of
human beings as a driver of progress. It is this pseudo-evolutionary as-
sumption that establishes the link between the meaning of free market,
the nature of human beings, and the values that humanity should strive
for that as a constellation of meanings gains ideological character. This
justification of free market becomes naturalized and simply assumed in
the process of dissemination, becoming increasingly adopted by indi-
viduals, materialized and further solidified in repeated practice. Inso-
far as contemporary schools foster the uncritical acceptance of these
ideological suppositions, education too serves the ideological function.

When the above doctrine of the free market is applied to educa-

tion, this produces a number of interconnected ideological effects, that
can be classified into four categories:

1. Economization of education: the main purpose of education is

defined through its contribution to economic development, which
in its turn is unquestionably envisaged within the existing neolib-
eral capitalist framework. Responsiveness of education to contem-
porary needs for skilled labour becomes the crucial part of national
and international educational strategies, and businesses become
important stakeholders in deciding educational policies. The mes-
sage to the students is that finding a well-payed job is the main pur-
pose of their education. Although neoliberal educational policies
often nominally preserve the old ideal of education for the sake of
development of free and autonomous individuals, it is de facto re-

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 Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Education

placed by a more urgent purpose: providing skills and qualifications

for jobs and further education (that also ultimately leads to jobs).
As freedom is ideologically reduced to market freedom, the au-
tonomous subject of the Enlightenment is replaced by the figure of
“an enterprising and competitive entrepreneur” (Olssen 1996: 340).

2. Marketization of education: education is seen as a market

good, or rather a service provided by educational institutions to
parents and students as customers and users. This is especial-
ly the case with private schools, but public educational systems
adopt elements of this as well (Biesta 2004). Setting the rela-
tions of main agents in education in this way leads to a number
of practices aimed at attracting customers, adapting education
to their needs, and adopting management, evaluation and stan-
dardization practices taken over from business environments.
All this amounts to the further corporatization of education.

3. Corporatization of education: inner organization of schools ac-

cording to the model of corporate management, including constant
measuring, bureaucratization, and other practices aimed at effi-
ciency, accountability and attracting finances. These become the
main determinants of what and how is to be learned, leading to the
stifling of freedom and spontaneity in teaching and learning. Apple
and Biesta show how these managerial practices serve more as a
mechanism of “governing by numbers” than they actually improve
teaching and learning processes (Apple 2004: 99-115; Biesta 2004).

4. Neoliberal subjectivities: participation of students in this kind

of schooling has a number of effects on the formation of their
subjectivity. Foucault was the first to note that in the process in
which neoliberal forms of governmentality interpret us as human
capital, a new form of self-relation emerges: we are urged to be-
come “entrepreneurs of the self” (Foucault 2008). Imperatives of
individual responsibility are enforced throughout the entire edu-

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Olga Nikolić

cational process. Students are forced to compete in the standard-

ized tests, ranked according to test results on which their options
for further education and employment depend. Permanent learn-
ing is encouraged because the market needs a workforce capable
of constant adaptation, and creativity is desirable insofar as it can
be channeled towards technological and product innovations.18
General effects of neoliberal ideology on education are such that
students are drilled to fit into the existing system of inequality,
filtered according to how well they fit their predetermined roles,
based on the pregiven and unquestionable standards aligned with
economic interests and imposed with an air of scientific objec-
tivity. (Apple 2004) In schools driven by fulfilling the tasks set
forth by management, student’s educational experiences are im-
poverished, and there is neither time nor purpose to be found
in questioning and imagining alternatives to the existing system.

In a totalizing ideological move, the original assumption that the

value of education is to be measured against its contribution to the
economy leads to the adoption of further standards that distinguish
what is to be learned from what is not, increasingly reducing education
to training for future employment and shaping personalities capable
of navigating the neoliberal labour market, which ultimately amounts
to perpetuating inequalities and injustices that underlie contemporary
capitalism.

In other words, oppression in education does not merely function

to preserve privilege; education as it in fact exists oppresses students
because its central sense and purpose is domination and subjection—
the subjection of bodies and minds to the tyranny of the actual.”
(De Lissovoy 2015: 77)

However, we should also note that contemporary neoliberal ed-

18  For a detailed analysis of contemporary “govermentalization of learning” see Simons &
Masschelein 2008. For an analysis of most of the above-mentioned neoliberal effects on educa-
tion through the concrete example of OECD’s rethoric on PISA see D’Agnese 2021.

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 Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Education

ucation has many diverse effects that counteract the general trend of
economization. School often still is the space for free exploration, dis-
covering and experimenting, although this has been mostly left to the
initiative of individual teachers who care about motivating students
for something more than passing the test. Possibilities for escaping
the ideological effects of education are many. I will point out several
emancipatory tendencies that could create potential lines of resistance
to the contemporary dominant ideology, that draw inspiration from
the educational ideal of the Enlightenment. Clearly, questioning, prob-
lematizing, autonomous and critical thinking still turn out to be the
main barriers to the effects of ideology, both in terms of individual
emancipation and in terms of opening possibilities for changing exist-
ing relations of power in society.

Critical thinking can be understood in two main senses: logical and

socio-critical. Logical sense involves educating thinking to be guided
by reasons, to autonomously assess evidence, to be able to formulate
valid and recognize invalid arguments. Socio-critical sense involves
disclosing unreflected social prejudices that are considered as self-ev-
ident, social injustices and relations of power that are represented as
necessary and unchangeable. Enhancing critical thinking in both of
these senses is the first emancipatory trend which can empower stu-
dents to use their own reason. In addition, as pointed out by Freire,
critical thinking must go hand in hand with the development of the
capacity for action. This trend is opposed to the contemporary apo-
liticalness of education: even when politics is an explicit topic in class,
political action, possible role and responsibility of students in recre-
ating and changing the social world, are usually not in the focus. To
encourage students to change the world and to warn them against pos-
sible ideological and demagogical manipulations in the political sphere,
to enable them to defend their own and common political interests
and rights if these are under attack, is in today’s context one possible
line of defense of freedom. Students should be aware that they are also
political subjects that have the right to demand and organize for social

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Olga Nikolić

change. Emancipatory education today would be the one that shows

students how they can get involved in the transformation of the world
together with others in the spirit of freedom and equality.

Another important dimension of this is the nurturing of equality

and solidarity among students and between students and teachers, as
a way of resisting the trend of competitiveness and hierarchization.
Education should not give up on the important ethical message of the
Enlightenment that people should be neither masters nor slaves to
each other.

Finally, empowering students to think critically in the neoliber-

al world means encouraging them to have interests beyond techni-
cal skills needed for profession, which would certainly make them
useful, but not necessarily autonomous members of society. Engag-
ing in non-useful subjects, such as arts and humanities, is another
way to emancipate oneself from the dictatorship of the market. That
doesn’t mean that education should completely neglect profession-
al skills, but it does mean not giving up on another, more significant
goal of education: not to produce good workers for the capitalist
market, but to teach people how to be free: how to think, form val-
ues and act autonomously, with others as equal, free human beings.

Implications and Conclusion: The Difference Between

Ideal and Ideology

The critical question that we should ask ourselves in conclusion

is: are we merely creating a new ideology while insisting on education
for freedom and equality? Is every attempt to normatively define what
education should be necessarily a seed of a new ideology, instrumen-
talizing education and limiting free possibilities of educational becom-
ing, especially the one drawing inspiration from the Enlightenment?

According to Biesta, Kant’s assumption „of a fundamental differ-

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 Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Education

ence between immature and mature beings“ (Biesta 2008: 170), cou-
pled with the Marxist critique of ideology, ultimately leads to the con-
clusion that those who are not yet emancipated need emancipators
to show them how to free themselves. They cannot do it themselves
due to their condition of immaturity, being trapped by their own
ideological consciousness. Thus, the inner logic of the Enlightenment
presupposes an unequal relation of power between the emancipators
and those who should become emancipated. (Biesta 2008: 170-172)

In another important critique, Osberg and Biesta add that the En-
lightenment ideal of attaining universally valid knowledge necessari-
ly creates inequality between those rational subjects who possess this
knowledge, and students who are to be molded in accordance with the
insights of the enlightened teachers, amounting to the instrumental-
ization of education, i.e. submitting aims of education to interests that
are external to it:

[…] early forms of liberal education can be understood as the perpetu-

ation of ideal forms of knowledge (e.g. universal truth), selfhood (e.g.
rational autonomy) and culture (e.g. liberal political order) through
well intentioned manipulations of the student’s psyche by the teacher
or curriculum (which presents and/ or represents the ideal knowl-
edge that must be acquired) to achieve the desired psycho-social and/
or socio-political end (liberal rationalism/humanism). (Osberg &
Biesta 2020: 9)

However, history has shown that the attainment of universal

knowledge on which all rational subjects could agree and build a so-
ciety around is impossible, especially when applied to the world of
values. Rather than to equality, the Enlightenment contributed to the
hegemony of the Europocentric/Western worldview as the only valid
and rational one, thus ending up as one more ideology among others.

I don’t agree with the claim that the distinction between matu-
rity and immaturity leads to an insurmountable inequality between

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Olga Nikolić

those who are mature and those who are not and to the inevita-
ble conclusion that the immature ones cannot overcome this state
on their own (Biesta 2008). Rousseau’s Emile is indeed in need of
a teacher, but Kant allows that there are those who can overcome
the state of immaturity on their own (although they are few)19, and
Freire stresses equality between teachers and students. Thus, the
Enlightenment ideal may be articulated in ways that allow for the
possibility of transcending the state of immaturity and ideologi-
cal consciousness by one’s own powers, or together with equals.
However, we should admit that in so far as the enlightened ones
are understood as being in possession of the ultimate truth, this
does stray towards ideology. This claim should therefore be criti-
cized: we are all in the position of constantly overcoming our im-
maturities and ideological presuppositions, nobody is completely
immune. We should always be wary that we might be mistaken, that
we can learn from others, changing our perspective in the process.20

Secondly, although history has shown that ideas of the Enlight-

enment can be abused, as all ideas can, going back to the original texts
shows that the moment of equality as the core of this ideal is con-
tinually stressed, which I believe can still be a source of inspiration
for articulating educational practices opposed to the contemporary
world of domination.

Thus, I also believe that by proposing equality and freedom

as the ideal to be strived for, we do not necessarily end up in an-
other ideology. But here it all depends on the distinction between
ideology and ideal. In conclusion, I will propose a distinction be-
tween ideology and social ideal that I believe to be in line with

19  “Dogmas and formulas, these mechanical tools designed for reasonable use--or rather abuse-
-of his natural gifts, are the fetters of an everlasting nonage. The man who casts them off would
make an uncertain leap over the narrowest ditch, because he is not used to such free movement.
That is why there are only a few men who walk firmly, and who have emerged from nonage by
cultivating their own minds.” Kant 2004: 5-6.
20 On the concept of perspective see Nikolić & Cvejić 2020.

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 Emancipatory and Ideological Functions of Education

Biesta’s and Osberg’s emergentist proposal (Osberg and Biesta 2020).21

I suggest that we should take note of the fact that historically, what
started as an ideal often became an ideology: unreflected, enforced,
serving to justify the existing social order, rather than to question it
and possibly change it. Nevertheless, ideals keep their potential to be-
come yet again reflected on, enlivened, given a renewed emancipatory
meaning.

What distinguishes social ideal and ideology is their content, their

form and their function in society.

With respect to the content, social ideals have general well-being

in mind. This clearly distinguishes ideals from ideologies as being tied
to particular interests of a class, nation, race, or another type of group
in establishing its dominance over another group.22
Regarding the social function, unlike ideology, ideals serve precisely
not to preserve the existing order, rather, they are strivings towards a
different future.

Finally, regarding the form, there is an openness and a possibil-

ity of questioning, inherent to ideals, which ideologies lack. An ide-
al should not be understood as a goal unquestionably set in advance,
but as a vision motivating us to strive towards realizing it in a pro-
cess of constant questioning of ways in which it should or could be
truly realized.

21   Biesta and Osberg suggest that we should “understand education as an emergent entity that
does not simply serve a purpose, but also brings with it the purpose it serves. (…) education has its
own unique aesthetic qualities, like art or music, which have the power to elicit emotion and are
thus affective (…).” Osberg & Biesta 2020: 2. See also: Osberg & Biesta 2020: 3-5, 7-8.
22  This is also why neoliberalism has never been an ideal. Although the economists of the Austri-
an School and the thought collective gathered around the Mont Pèlerin Society, aimed to perfect the
entire humanity, and probably believed that they are making the word a better place, their theoret-
ical presuppositions dogmatically cemented and justified the distinction between elite and masses,
defending inequality as a natural state of humanity. Thus, their endeavours were ideological from
the very beginning.   

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Olga Nikolić

Ideals involve a different kind of meaning-giving than ideologies:

an ideal is a vision towards which one may strive, actively trying to
explore, construct and rethink it in the process of moving towards its
fulfillment, without turning it into a dogma. Only in so far as we ap-
proach it in this way does it remain a living ideal.

References:

Apple, Michael (2004), Ideology and Curriculum (Third Edition). New

York & London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Biesta, Gert (2008), “Toward a New ‘Logic’ of Emancipation: Foucault
and Rancière”. Philosophy of Education: 169-177.
Biesta, Gert (2004), “Education, Accountability and the Ethical Demand:
Can the Democratic Potential of Accountability Be Regained?”.
Educational Theory 54 (3): 233–250.
D’Agnese, Vasco (2021), “Playing on Two Tables. Advertising and
Science in OECD’s Educational Rethoric”, in: Mitja Sardoč (ed.), The
Impacts of Neoliberal Discourse and Language on Education. New York and
London: Routledge, pp. 25–47.
De Lissovoy, Noah (2015), Education and Emancipation in the Neoliberal
Era: Being, Teaching and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Eagleton, Terry (1991), Ideology: An Introduction. London & New York:
Verso.
Foucault, Michel (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1978– 1979. New York: Picador.
Freire, Paolo (2000 [1970]), Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30 th Anniversary
Edition. New York & London: Continuum.
Geuss, Raymond (1981), The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the
Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel (2004 [1784]), “Was ist Aufklärung?”. UTOPIE kreativ
159: 5–10. English translation by Mary C. Smith.
Available at: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.

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html#note1 (accessed 10 September, 2021).

Mirowski, Philip (2009), “Postface: Defining Neoliberalism”, in: Philip
Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The
Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge MA & London:
Harvard University Press, pp. 417–455.
Nikolić, Olga, Cvejić Igor (2020), „Konstituisanje zajedničke perspek-
tive: angažovani akti i logika poziva”, Kritika: časopis za filozofiju i teoriju
društva 1(1): 7–28.
Nikolić, Olga & Igor Cvejić (2017), “Social Justice and the Formal Princi-
ple of Freedom”. Philosophy and Society, 27 (2): 270–284.
Olssen, Mark (1996), “In Defense of the Welfare State and of Publicly
Provided Education: A New Zealand Perspective”. Journal of Education
Policy 11 (3): 337–362.
Osberg, Deborah & Gert Biesta (2020), “Beyond Curriculum: Ground-
work for a Non-Instrumental Theory of Education”. Educational Philoso-
phy and Theory 53 (1): 1–14.
Pine, Lisa (2010), Education in Nazi Germany. Oxford & New York: Berg.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1979 [1762]), Emile, or On Education. New York:
Basic Books.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2002 [1762]), The Social Contract, in:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The First and Second Dis-
courses. Susan Dunn (ed.), New Haven & London: Yale University Press,
pp. 149–254.
Rüegg, Walter (1992), “Chapter 1: Themes”, in: Hilde De Ridder-
-Symoens (ed.), A History of the University in Europe, Vol. 1: Universities in
the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–34.
Simons Maarten and Masschelein Jan (2008), “The Governmentalization
of Learning and The Assemblage of a Learning Apparatus”. Educational
Theory 58 (4): 391–415.
Smajević Roljić, Milica (2021), “An Interpretation of the Education-
al Process from the Perspective of Kant’s Philosophy of History and
Legal-Political Theory”, in: Igor Cvejić, Predrag Krstić, Nataša Lackov-
ić, andf Olga Nikolić (eds.), Liberating Education: What From, What For?
Beograd: IFDT. [This volume]

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 Andrija Šoć1

Deliberative Education and

Quality of Deliberation:
Toward a Critical Dialogue
and Resolving Deep
Disagreements

1. Introduction

In this paper, I discuss the foundations on which an effective
programme of deliberative education can be built in order to help re-
duce political polarization and provide citizen emancipation. First, I
will examine the key concept of quality of deliberation, based on the
key features of deliberative democracy. Briefly, these are: freedom of
participation, equality of participants in a deliberative environment
and critical examination of opinions held by each of the participants.
Rather than talking about it from a purely theoretical standpoint, I
will discuss recent promising research on deliberation within deeply
divided societies and explore why the evidence of positive deliberative
transformative moments (DTMs) points toward a substantial reason
for optimism. However, in exploring the benefits of current research, I
will try to show that deliberative performance is, while promising, still
far from satisfactory.

Namely, various problems that are usually posed as detrimental

to deliberation – group polarization, exclusion of those unwilling or

1  Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade: andrija.soc@f.bg.ac.rs.

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Andrija Šoć

unable to rationally argue for their views, moderator bias, unbridge-

able deep divisions, etc. – do become dangerous if we are willing to
leave things as they are. In order to propel deliberation forward and
make deliberative mechanisms truly efficacious, I will argue that we
need a model of deliberative education that takes realities of the actu-
al, not idealized, political discourse into account. Furthermore, such a
model should also outline a mechanism for assessing and prescribing
a cogent way to make deliberative events reflective of the key demo-
cratic values such as freedom, equality, tolerance, respect, and others.
To do that, I will use two complementary elements. The first one is
the index devised for determining the quality of deliberation, the DQI
(Steenbergen et al 2003).2 The second are the conversational maxims
formulated by Grice (Grice 1989). Even though they explicitly state the
conditions for genuinely productive conversations, they have
thus far been rarely applied in political discourse. However, as I
will try to show, in combination with the descriptive DQI, they
genuinely provide a sound normative element that can lead us
to formulate viable and comprehensive models of deliberation.

In the second part of the paper, I move on to discuss how such

positive DTMs can be made more frequent, how deliberation could
increase in quality, and why that will help restore public trust and re-
duce polarization. Rather than adopting any of the unfounded top-
down approaches, I will claim that a bottom-up strategy of introducing
deliberation through education in schools is the approach that could
be successful in the future. Efficient deliberation must go beyond its
commonly stated goal – a better understanding of how potential vot-
ers behave during their participation in deliberative processes. Our
focus, I will claim, needs to be predominantly on the future voters.

Thus, in the third part of the paper, I try to show that deliberation
will be most effective if it is first taught in schools, where students
would learn how to participate in such events and learn the impor-

2  See also Steiner 2012; Steiner et al. 2017.

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 Deliberative Education and Quality of Deliberation

tance of listening to others and understanding their own views. Ac-

complishing that, they will be educated in a way that will make them
much better equipped to approach the voting ballot with a clear idea
of their preference ordering. Even though precise, detailed, and ex-
tensive research still has to be conducted, we can safely claim that
deliberative education and subsequent deliberative practice will
raise awareness for participation in various voting opportunities.

Throughout the paper, I will try to show that the main bene-
fit of deliberative education consists of adopting the following el-
ements: 1) improving interest in social, political, economic, and
cultural issues of one’s society, 2) reinforcing argumentative think-
ing and critical examination of the content provided in these ar-
eas, 3) practicing one’s preference ordering and impartial discus-
sion with peers and teachers, 4) increasing openness to hearing
dissenting views. This is the way in which one can improve eman-
cipation by effectively adopting Kant’s advice to ‘dare to think’, but
also expanding it with ‘dare to be disproved by good arguments’.

2. Quality of Deliberation

If we want to understand how and why political disagreement

persists and, ideally, how we might make it less prominent, we need
to pay attention to how things look ‘on the ground’, i.e. in different
deliberative events. To that end, I explore the implications of delib-
erative events organized recently in countries such as Colombia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Belgium. The qualitative research
method used in analysing these events shows us several very im-
portant aspects of deliberation. First, it features deep disagreements
between the sides that are very polarized, which reflects the current
state of affairs in politics and shows how mechanisms of deliberative
democracy can be applied in order to produce what Steiner calls ‘pos-
itive transformative moments’ (Steiner 2017), when discussion, as
viewed through the lens of DQI, becomes more inclusive and more

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Andrija Šoć

productive. Second, it offers a detailed analysis of how concrete dis-

cussions proceed under a wide range of realistic circumstances and
shows piecemeal the ways in which deliberative discussion can pro-
ceed, stall, turn more polarized or, crucially, become genuinely fruitful.

The qualitative research of deliberative processes also attempts

to show under which conditions societal disagreements can sub-
side. However, answering the question of how a deliberative event
should be organized is not straightforward, but context-specific.
Steiner et al. note that this is because simulating real-world conver-
sation among citizens that live in a democratic society as equals pro-
vides a more accurate picture about how such a process functions when
widely applied (Steiner 2017: 1-10). It is at this point that we arrive
at the key demand that is at the root of the deliberative process itself
– the demand for equality. Because the crux of the issue is how ex-
actly a deliberative process needs to be organized in order to have a
productive outcome, we have to pay close attention to whether, and
to what degree, deliberators participate in the discussion as equals.

To assess this, Steiner et al. developed the DQI – discourse quality

index, which measures several aspects of a discussion (Steiner 2012:
11-18). Among its parameters, the most important ones in this context
are those that check for the level of participation (how often a partici-
pant speaks), whether there are interruptions, and the degree of open-
ness toward other opinions. Following this measurement, one can ex-
amine every individual utterance (or a speech act, as Steiner calls it)
and see how it contributes to the overall index. A measurement outline
can be represented in the following table. For spatial convenience, the
different factors were shortened. From left to right, the DQI measures
the number of times a speaker was interrupted (Int.), the amount of
protestations exhibited against the current speaker (Prot.), the length of
a speech act (Lgt.), the responses the speaker offered to others, including
the interruptions and protestations (Resp.), if the speaker listened care-
fully to others (List.), arguments that were offered to support the view

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 Deliberative Education and Quality of Deliberation

of a speaker (Arg.), whether the content was relevant (Cont.), whether

speakers changed their opinions in the course of the event (Chang.) and
whether they told personal stories to support their views (Stor.). The
rows from 1-5 represent the number of speakers (it can be up to 40, or
sometimes even more) and each blank field in the table is then filled with
the characteristics that accurately describe each individual speech act.

DQI Int. Prot. Lgt. Resp. List. Arg. Cont. Chang. Stor.
1
2
3
4
5

The result is a comprehensive picture of the quality of deliberation.

This is especially important since one of the advantages that deliber-
ative democracy purports to have over procedural democracy is the
opportunity to change one’s preferences in light of rational arguments
or compelling viewpoints.3 Thus, rather than looking solely at the end
result of the discussion, seen in terms of what percentage of people
mutually agree on some particular topic, by using DQI, Steiner et al.
break down a deliberative process into its elementary components.
One of the examples cited by Steiner concerns discussions that were
organized in different countries between parties that have traditionally
been engaged in violent conflicts, such as Colombia, Brazil, or Bosnia
(Steiner 2012).

The following figures represent the measurement of the level and

quality of participation in discussions that revolved around questions
about the future of Colombia and Bosnia. Participants were divided in
two groups. In Colombia, the members of the two groups were former
combatants, ex-paramilitaries and ex-guerilla. In Bosnia (in Srebreni-

3  Cohen 2009. For an alternative view, see Hardin 2009: 231-246. See Fuerstein 2013.

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Andrija Šoć

ca, to be exact), the members were Serbs and Bosniaks, the two ethnic-
ities that were embroiled in a fairly recent civil war. The conversation
was held without a moderator. The research was qualitative, in that it
primarily measured how the discussion was flowing, how participants
were treating one another, how they approached the discussion, etc
(Ibid.). The left-hand side of the column represents the measurement
of how many participants spoke, and to what degree they did so; the
right-hand side of the column measures how the participants spoke
about the topic at hand – the recommendations for a more prosperous
future of the two countries.4

Colombia:
Did not speak up at all: 34% No justification at all: 36%
Spoke up once or twice: 30% Justification with an illustration: 34%
Spoke up 3–10 times: 28% Reason given, but no connection with opinion: 17%
Spoke up 11–20 times: 7% Reason given, connection with opinion: 10%
Spoke up 21–30 times: 1% More than one reason, connections with opinion: 3%
Total participants: 100% Total speech acts with opinion: 100%

Bosnia:
Did not speak up at all: 18% No justification at all: 79%
Spoke up once or twice: 7% Justification with an illustration: 12%
Spoke up 3–10 times: 18% Reason given, but no connection with opinion: 3%
Spoke up 11–20 times: 23% Reason given, connection with opinion: 6%
Spoke up 21–30 times: 15% More than one reason, connections with opinion: 3%
Spoke up 31–40 times: 10% Total speech acts with opinion: 100%
Spoke up 41–50 times: 7%
Spoke up 51 times or more: 2%
Total participants: 100%

4 Ibid.: 46-47, 75, 80. I discuss how some of the following data can help us contextualize delib-
erative democracy within the debate between political moralists and political realists. Here, the
goal of presenting some of the same data is different in that it is more specifically tied not to the
theoretical, but to the practical implications of adopting a deliberative approach to political issues.
For the former approach, see esp. Šoć 2016: 931-934. See also: Šoć 2019.

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 Deliberative Education and Quality of Deliberation

As we can see from the data above, the quality of deliberation was
low in both places. A significant number of participants did not speak at
all. Of those who did, a large percentage either didn’t speak in connec-
tion to given topics or didn’t try to justify their views in any way. The
figures were, perhaps predictably, much more promising in the case of
Belgium or at Europolis, but are still not ideal (Steiner 2012: 48, 81).

Belgium:
Did not speak up at all: 0% No justification at all: 18%
Spoke up once or twice: 2% Justification with an illustration: 27%
Spoke up 3–10 times: 24% Reason given, but no connection with opinion: 12%
Spoke up 11–20 times: 35% Reason given, connection with opinion: 38%
Spoke up 21–30 times: 28% More than one reason, connections with opinion: 5%
Spoke up 31–40 times: 6% Total speech acts with opinion: 100%
Spoke up 41 or more: 5%
Total participants: 100%

Now, being essentially pragmatic, deliberative democracy must ex-

amine its empirical implications on concrete cases like these if it is to
be effectively implemented. Even though it might seem that the results
above run counter to my main proposal and seemingly vindicate politi-
cal realists – reality, in a way, shows us just how far we are from our ide-
alized epistemic goals – one would be wrong in thinking this. Rather,
these results point squarely towards the way in which one can further
explore and perfect deliberative processes in order to achieve a better
level and quality of participation. Further explorations of these discus-
sions, undertaken by Steiner et al, actually yield a very promising result.
In their 2017 book, they explore ‘deliberative transformative moments’
(DTM), conceived as instances in which discussion is transformed from
low-quality to high-quality, and vice versa. What does that mean exactly?

Naturally, a discussion will be of high quality if all speakers have

common interests in mind, support their opinions with stories and

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Andrija Šoć

arguments, if they respond rationally and constructively to opposing

views, if they respect their collocutors, if they actively participate in
the discussion and if the discussion is constantly flowing toward find-
ing a common ground. This is perhaps an idealized scenario since a
deliberative discussion rarely satisfies these conditions throughout its
duration. Still, it serves an important heuristic function. Namely, even
if this or that discussion does not satisfy all, or any, of these conditions,
we still know what it is that we must strive toward. Furthermore,
the discussions examined so far also show us how to accomplish this.
Here is where the role of DTMs becomes constructive and fruitful.

First, exploring DTMs allows us to understand which aspects of

any given discussion need to be emphasized, what sort of behaviour
is detrimental to purposeful and effective deliberation and what type
of argument employed by a participant can further or hinder delib-
erative and overall democratic progress within societies. Second,
DTMs help us recognize pitfalls of deliberative processes, as well as
their fragility. One example of this is the situation when a discus-
sion is transformed from high-level to low-level (a negative DTM).
For instance, a participant – a former member of Colombian gueril-
la “did not give any useful information about these questions, nei-
ther on the process of reintegration in general. His story lacked
specifics and was not related in any intelligible way to the peace process”
(Steiner 2017: 56). Let us compare this to an instance of a speech act
that helps positively transform the discussion. The positive DTM was
brought about because a participant, Ernesto, could, as Steiner et al.
observe, “show to the other participants that there are huge social
and economic inequalities in Colombian society” (Steiner 2017: 43).

The two instances of DTMs, one positive and one negative, do

not exhaust the list of possible reasons for such moments occurring.
As Steiner et al. further report, playing a role of a deliberative leader (a
person who only contributes to positive DTMs), a deliberative spoiler
(someone who contributes only to negative DTMs), putting forward
well-constructed rational arguments or yelling off-hand insulting re-

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marks, also shifts deliberation from one level to the other. Sometimes
even being silent can have a detrimental effect on a discussion (Steiner
2017: ch. 5–7).

Everything we have mentioned so far helps us understand how de-

liberative processes work. The upshot of the discussion about DTMs
is that, for deliberation to be effective, participants need to address
common issues and find common ground – something that all of them
share, be it values, concerns, fears, etc. The fact that it can be effective,
even sporadically, and even in the context of discussions between for-
mer members of groups that used to be at war with each other, rep-
resents an encouraging signal. Deeply divided societies are especially
in need of good quality deliberation, even if enabling it is much harder
than in developed democracies (Steiner 2017: ch. 1) or at institutions
where participants can claim to be expert deliberators, such as Western
European parliaments (Steiner et al., 2005). To find even a limited suc-
cess without moderation, without prior deliberative education or ex-
perience, while conversing in the shadows of recently ended conflicts,
should be a signal that an even greater success is not only a theoretical
possibility, but a prospect for which we have every reason to strive.

So far, we have sketched potential advantages of deliberative

democracy and outlined a type of approach to deliberation that in-
volves breaking down deliberative processes into different compo-
nents and exploring under which conditions such processes gain or
lose in quality. Regardless of the presence of negative DTMs, which
is to be expected at this stage, the frequency of positive DTMs in
the context of low-quality deliberation does point to a road toward
overcoming deep divisions. Now, someone might immediately point
to several worrisome indicators. One is the set of data I already
quoted. It unequivocally suggests that deliberation was of very low
quality because many participants did not speak and of those who
did, only a few used rational arguments in support of their views.
The second potential problem is tied to the first. Here is the differ-
ence in opinion before and after deliberative events in Colombia:

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Andrija Šoć

Before experiment After experiment

(Former enemy) increases violence

Ex-guerrillas agree 55% 69%

Ex-paramilitaries agree 75% 78%

(Former enemy) helps to make
Colombia stronger country
Ex-guerrillas disagree 40% 44%
Ex-paramilitaries disagree 66% 73%

As we can see, the outcome of the research was that both groups,
though to a slightly different degree, viewed the other side more
unfavourably than before the discussions took place. As Steiner notes,
it is quite possible that many participants who did not deliberate, ei-
ther at all, or not constructively enough, influenced the result (Steiner
2012: 174). These two facts would seem to counter the proposed value
of deliberation. However, we would be wrong in thinking that. What
these results show is: 1) that we are at a very early stage of conducting
successful deliberative events and 2) that it is exceedingly difficult to
achieve constructive results in deeply divided societies. Neither should
be overly surprising. On the other hand, what does call for mild, yet
firm optimism is the fact that even in the atmosphere of a lengthy and
bloody conflict, former Colombian combatants did manage to achieve
good quality deliberation throughout the process, and even transform
the discussion from low-quality to high-quality without any modera-
tion. The same was observed in both Brazil and Bosnia, the two equally
deeply divided societies. Thus, even if discussions as such do not yield
a better outcome when it comes to trusting the other side in the pro-
cess, positive DTMs clearly suggest that at least within the discussion
and among those who actively and constructively participated, better
trust was firmly established. Moreover, when compared to the large
part of deliberators who didn’t actively partake, only a slight increase

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 Deliberative Education and Quality of Deliberation

in unfavourable views toward the other side should present even more
of a reason for optimism. Looking at all the data in conjunction, we
can extrapolate that with the increase in the quality of deliberation,
and with more participants actively contributing to the discussion, the
numbers could actually dramatically swing toward the two sides hav-
ing a much more favourable view of each other. A question that im-
mediately needs to be asked is how exactly something like that can be
accomplished. Fortunately, here again we have a reason for being op-
timistic. The answer, Steiner suggests, lies in education (Steiner 2017:
255-263). In the next section, I will try to further elucidate this point.

3. Deliberation and Conversational Implicatures

In the previous part of the paper, I have discussed the DQI as a

measurement of the quality of deliberative discussions. However, this
measurement doesn’t provide us with more than a way to reflect on
existing deliberative events. Regardless of its usefulness,5 it cannot
help us reach normative prescriptions that could help us determine
how deliberative events can become more successful, which is crucial
for determining the right way to set up a comprehensive programme
of deliberative education. Nevertheless, it does show us the way to-
wards the solution. The crucial element of both the DQI and the DTM
is its basic measurement unit – utterance. Namely, the insistence on
utterance, or a singular speech act, in the analysis of deliberative qual-
ity, helps us understand that, when the problem arises in the discus-
sion, it is tied to the way in which the conversation between multiple
interested parties becomes productive or otherwise breaks down. In
order to try and establish an effective way of promoting the former
and minimizing the latter through education, I want to show that
we could do it through the normative application of a theory that is
widely known, but heretofore little used in analysing political dis-

5  While the DQI is one of the most commonly used multifaceted quality indices, it is not the
only one. See, Niemeyer and Dryzek 2007; Shaffer and Friberg-Fernros 2017; Wyss, Beste and
Bächtiger 2015.

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Andrija Šoć

course – Grice’s theory of conversational implicatures (Grice 1989).

For Grice, conversational implicatures are “essentially connected

with certain general features of discourse” (Grice 1989: 26). The term
itself refers to the meaning of an uttered sentence that is not explicitly
stated but is more or less clearly implicated.6 One of Grice’s examples
is the following:

A is standing by an obviously immobilized car and is approached by

B; the following exchange takes place:
A: I am out of petrol.
B: There is a garage round the corner. (Grice 1989: 32)

The conversational implicature of B’s utterance, if it is to conform

to what Grice calls the conversational maxims (which we will shortly
specify), is that the garage that B refers to sells petrol and is open at the
time of speaking.7 What is crucial for Grice is that these implicatures
are tied to some general features of our conversations. He characterizes
the said general features of discourse in the following manner:

[Our talk exchanges] are characteristically, to some degree at least,

cooperative efforts; each participant recognizes in them, to some ex-
tent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually
accepted direction. This purpose of direction may be fixed from the
start (e.g., by an initial proposal of a question for discussion), or it
may evolve during the exchange. (Grice 1989: 32)

Grice’s view certainly applies to a wide variety of different types of

6  Grice introduces the terms ‘implicate’ and ‘implicature’ as ‘terms of art’ in order to convey
what was said, where ‘say’ again has a specific meaning. In Grice’s words: “In the sense in which I
am using the word say, I intend what someone has said to be closely related to the conventional
meaning of the words (the sentence) he has uttered.” (Grice 1989: 26-27)
7  Aside from this illustration of implicatures, they also have additional features, such as can-
celability (i.e. B can reject that he meant that the garage was open and sold petrol, and that the
only content he meant to utter was the information that a garage was around the corner). Howev-
er, this, and some other nuances regarding implicatures are not pertinent in the present context.

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 Deliberative Education and Quality of Deliberation

discussions, from everyday conversations about the weather, to more

complex exchanges. However, the way he describes features of conver-
sation makes it particularly applicable to the case of deliberation for
several reasons. First, deliberation, more than ordinary conversation,
explicitly states the common purpose of the discussion. As we have
seen, the very point of deliberation is discussing a particular issue or a
set of issues. Second, while deliberation does have a fixed starting point
(say, the economic future of former combatants in Colombia, the terms
of Britain’s exit from the EU, etc.), Steiner et al. have shown the ways
in which it can unfold unpredictably. While that unpredictability can
sometimes yield positive DTMs, it is also at least as likely to generate
negative DTMs and make a deliberative event less fruitful than it could
have been. Third, one of the key characteristics of implicatures is that,
as Grice puts it, they must be capable of being worked out:

To work out that a particular conversational implicature is present,

the hearer will rely on the following data: (1) the conventional mean-
ing of the words used, together with the identity of any references
that may be involved; (2) the Cooperative Principle and its maxims;
(3) the context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance; (4) other
items of background knowledge; and (5) the fact (or supposed fact)
that all relevant items falling under the previous headings are avail-
able to both participants and both participants know or assume this
to be the case. (Grice 1989: 31)

All five types of data are pertinent for conversation in general and
deliberative conversation specifically. In order to start bridging deep
divides, other speakers must work out anything implicated by a single
speaker. Clearly, Grice’s view captures the details of all the key factors
that are perhaps even more relevant in deliberative contexts than in
many ‘ordinary’ contexts. Aside from the features that ordinary con-
versation has in common with deliberation, there are further reasons
for applying a Gricean theory. To grasp them more easily, we first
have to examine an important aspect of Grice’s view – his coopera-
tive principle. We said that Grice emphasizes the cooperative nature of

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Andrija Šoć

discourse. Grice’s ‘cooperative principle’ is the general principle that,

according to him, everyone is expected to follow in a conversation:

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the

stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the
talk exchange in which you are engaged. (Grice 1989: 26)

In one sense, for everyday contexts, such a principle seems read-

ily applicable. Every time two (or more) people start talking, they
cooperate in a way that makes the unfolding of the conversation
much easier. For instance, if I want to exchange a few words with
my neighbour about the weather, we cooperate in so far as we both
want the conversation to be fairly brief (since we are almost certainly
not meteorologists), but also to convey our general sense of amica-
bility. To accomplish that, we of course have to work together and
join our conversational forces in fulfilling our purpose in that context.

However, over the years, the CI theory was criticized on various

fronts. That might put our efforts to successfully apply it to delibera-
tive contexts in doubt. After all, if the theory doesn’t hold, how could
it represent an effective tool for making deliberative mechanisms more
efficacious? This is especially pertinent since one of the main criticisms
is that Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP) works only in idealized cir-
cumstances, whereas in reality, as described by social psychology, evo-
lutionary biology or game theory, people are not always ready to truly
cooperate through conversation.8 Even though such a charge seems to
render the CP inapplicable, to defend its use in deliberative contexts we
needn’t try to save it, or other aspects of Grice’s view, in their entirety.
Rather, the more relevant observation would be that even if Pinker
and Davis are correct in that the CP doesn’t hold in a wide range of
contexts (and here we set aside answering the question of whether they
are), it still doesn’t mean that the CP cannot be applied specifically to

8  See Pinker 1997. For criticisms that pertain to other aspects of Grice’s view, see, for instance,
Davies 1989; Davies 2013.

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 Deliberative Education and Quality of Deliberation

deliberation. In fact, everything we said so far tells us that delibera-

tive contexts are perfectly suited for this, since they share common key
features with those conversational contexts that Grice initially sought
to describe. In addition, even if deliberative contexts don’t always fea-
ture cooperative participants, combining the Gricean approach with
the DQI can help us pinpoint the problem and then try to resolve it
through the interventions of a moderator, or deliberative training. In-
deed, Steiner et al. showed how the DQI can track the performance
of uncooperative participants (recall their concept of a deliberative
spoiler – a person who almost exclusively contributes with negative
DTMs). In that sense, even some of the seemingly more idealized as-
sumptions of the CP can be firmly grounded by the DQI and the very
structure of deliberative events that are intended from the start to be a
fully cooperative endeavour.

Thus far, we have mentioned two reasons for applying the CP to

deliberation. The first reason lies, as we have seen, in framing the con-
versation in a particularly suitable way for exploring it the way Grice
formulates his theory. The second reason is, however, even more im-
portant, as it directly addresses one of the potential weak spots of every
deliberative event – its suboptimal efficacy and the attempt to increase
the amount of positive DTMs. In addition to these, there is a third
reason for applying the CI, and it is arguably the strongest. Namely, the
CP is especially relevant in political contexts, specifically in cases of de-
liberation. The stakes for participants in deliberative events are always
higher than in an ordinary conversation. Revealing our preferences,
generating reasons for them, or otherwise revealing personal history
to further the conversation requires us to commit to what we say more
tightly than in ordinary contexts. To see this more clearly, let’s exam-
ine the specifics of Grice’s views. His CP is supplemented with four
maxims (Grice 1989: 26-27):

Maxim of Quality. Make your contribution true; so do not convey

what you believe false or unjustified.
Maxim of Quantity. Be as informative as required.

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Andrija Šoć

Maxim of Relation. Be relevant.

Maxim of Manner. Be perspicuous; so avoid obscurity and ambiguity,
and strive for brevity and order.

These maxims provide a way to connect the CP to previous-

ly described deliberative situations. We have seen in the previous
section that conveying what you believe to be false can lead read-
ily to negative DTMs and can have a detrimental effect on deliber-
ation, and this is fully captured by the first maxim. In addition, the
maxim of relation fully captures one element of the conversation
– the relevance of an utterance to the overall purpose of the conver-
sation – that, if absent, almost always leads to negative DTMs or at
least prevents the conversation from becoming fruitful. The same is
the case with the second and fourth maxims, the absence of which
stops other participants from fully benefiting from the discussion.

Now, if we remember the aspects of a conversation that are cap-

tured by the DQI, it might seem that there is some overlap, whether
implicit or explicit. Let us recall that the DQI tracks the level of par-
ticipation (how often a participant speaks), whether there are inter-
ruptions, and the degree of openness toward other opinions, whether
participants provided reasons for their views, etc. Even though giving
reasons for an opinion falls under the purview of the CP, or the sec-
ond and fourth maxims, and all of these are implicitly connected with
the CP, the key reason why we need a two-dimensional approach is
the very way in which the DQI is constructed. Namely, it can only tell
us what happened post hoc. Since deliberative events have shown their
promise, we have seen that low participation percentages, as well as a
fairly low amount of positive DTMs, require us to find a way to im-
prove the terms of deliberation through education. On that point, the
DQI is silent. It is neither an effective tool for devising a programme
for deliberative education, nor was it meant to be. However, the CP
and the four maxims are readily available to supplement the descrip-
tive efficiency and comprehensiveness of the DQI. First, they are al-
ready prescriptive in kind. We can use them to elegantly formulate

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 Deliberative Education and Quality of Deliberation

normative propositions that would anchor an educational program.

For instance, the normative version of the cooperative principle (CPn)
would state that:

(CPn): All participants in a deliberative event ought to make their conver-

sational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by
the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which they are
engaged.

Similarly, all maxims could simply be expanded with the phrase

‘all participants in a deliberative event ought to…’. One might now
wonder whether we need the DQI at all if Grice’s CP and maxims do
all the work. The empirical results show us that the DQI is an indis-
pensable tool for describing the conversation and diagnosing the prob-
lem in the first place. Without the DQI, the normative reformulation
of the CP and the maxims might seem unnecessary or trivial, and in
a sense, it would be. However, its usefulness stems from the way in
which we can first see where the problem lies by analysing individual
utterances using the DQI. Without it, our use of the maxims could
tell us that participant A wasn’t sufficiently informative, or that they
offered too much information. But the DQI tells us at which point it
happened, what kinds of utterances preceded it, what were the reac-
tions of other participants to A’s earlier utterances and how they re-
sponded both verbally and non-verbally to A’s most recent utterance.
The DQI tracks all these elements piecemeal, which means that it
serves as a kind of microscope under which we can observe all of the
moving parts of a deliberative event that generally goes unnoticed,
such as reactions from each participant, change in their stance to-
ward a fellow participant in light of their reasons, personal stories, etc.

All of these variables are something that the CP and the maxims
weren’t designed to account for. However, together the descriptive na-
ture of the DQI and the normative reformulation of Grice’s CP and
the maxims help us form a two-dimensional matrix. The descriptive
dimension tracks deliberative performance against the normative

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Andrija Šoć

requirements, while normative requirements serve as a guide in un-

derstanding how to make particular utterances more effective. Slight-
ly altering Grice’s terminology, we can say that the DQI can use the
CPn and normatively reformulated maxims to track what particular
deliberational implicatures conformed to or violated the normative
conversational requirements. These two approaches – the norma-
tive and the descriptive – can then function as tools to see to what
degree conforming to the CPn raises positive DTMs and lowers nega-
tive DTMs. With such a tool, we can have a way to make multifaceted
political reality more intelligible and devise a focused programme of
deliberative education that would work toward constantly increas-
ing positive DTMs, all the while fully embracing the realm of facts.
As we can see from the first conversational maxim (or, in our con-
text, normative deliberational maxim), insisting on truth is what will
help us bring opposing sides together, if we insist on looking at delib-
eration through nuanced and detailed lens of the DQI and the CPn.

4. Conclusion

In conclusion, I will try to sketch several reasons why the upshot

of deliberative events organized by Steiner et al. should be viewed
through a positive lens. First, even deliberative events organized in
poor and war-torn countries with little history of political deliberation
show us that disputed sides can be brought closer together. Moreover,
with the aid of the normative tool reflected in the CPn and the maxims,
we can trace a clear path toward improving the situation in places as
diverse as Colombia, Brazil, Bosnia, and many others. Using a two-di-
mensional matrix, consisting of the descriptive DQI and the normative
CP, to track and improve deliberation ought to show a realistic path to
deliberative progress. The accumulation of positive DTMs might bring
us closer to a consensus, or at least make it likely that participants will
more easily accept opposing and (in case of subsequent voting) major-
ity preferences.

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 Deliberative Education and Quality of Deliberation

Second, the very occurrence of positive DTMs, even in an unmod-

erated setting, gives us a reason for optimism. While both sides en-
tered the discussion with beliefs they held as true, they did manage to
make some concessions without giving away that assumption. With
the application of an educational program anchored by the Gricean de-
liberational maxims and the CPn, we can reasonably expect an even
greater percentage of positive DTMs.

Third, as Helene Landemore notes:

[I]t would be more useful for democratic theorists to acknowledge

explicitly the complexity of the object and unite in a constructive
attempt at clarifying the relation between the various properties of
democracy, whether intrinsic and instrumental (or procedural and
epistemic).9

Clearly, the empirical, bottom-up approach to deliberation ac-

complishes exactly this in several ways. Although political issues are
multifaceted and highly diverse in nature, by exploring delibera-
tive performances in such different countries as Brazil, which has a
history of class-based problems, Colombia, which just got out of a
decades-long civil war, or Belgium, Britain, and Switzerland, where
there is a strong democratic background but where deep divisions on
the questions of immigration, EU membership, and others are also
arising, we can fully embrace the recognized complexity. Because our
two-dimensional approach offers a concrete way to build towards im-
proved performances, and because the DQI tracks those performances
utterance-by-utterance, we can fully hope to see improvements in de-
liberative efficaciousness, insisting that there are political truths that are
worth pursuing, but only while we remain open to having our minds
changed or allowing better reasons for our views to crystalize during
deliberative events. These are the goals around which a curriculum for
deliberative education should be based and toward which it should aim.

9  Landemore 2017: 290; See also, Landemore and Page: 2015.

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Andrija Šoć

Now, to state this also means that epistemology can become an

equal partner in forming such an educational basis. Thus, a wide range
of options is open for exploring. If we are going to further elaborate
on how a variety of mechanisms can be effectively applied to elucidate
the nuanced nature of deliberation to students, we can explore whether
democratic systems have their heir in epistocratic models proposed by
Estlund or Brennan.10 In doing that, we would bring to the forefront
of a deliberative programme the issues of agent reliability, strength of
justification and the need for a careful method of attaining true beliefs.
It is also clear that we can wonder which aspect of epistemology can
be the best fit with political philosophy and how the relationship be-
tween epistemology, politics and education can be beneficial for all of
these domains. If what we have said so far is indeed tenable, and if the
Gricean view of our conversational practices holds and has application
in politics, as I tried to show, then some form of epistemic contextual-
ism seems to be a natural fit, as I mentioned earlier. Virtue epistemolo-
gy is also among promising options and, specifically, reliabilism. After
all, emphasizing the role and epistemic virtues of subjects involved in
deliberation should help both political theorists and deliberating par-
ticipants themselves understand the strength of their own positions,
as well as the strength of the opposing ones. It can also help us further
explain via our two-dimensional scheme how a successful deliberation
can proceed and on what grounds it can be further improved. To do
that, we would need to explore proposals such as those from Zagzebski11
which lies beyond the scope of this paper. However, suffice it to say for
now that, if correct, we have seen a clear path towards a fruitful coop-
eration between politics, epistemology, and education, increasing the
prospects of formulating a complex and comprehensive view of effica-
cious deliberative mechanisms, making deep disagreements less deep
and more readily resolvable. If we can extrapolate from the aforemen-
tioned data obtained from the empirical research, the students eager
to participate in society as active citizens can be effectively taught how

10  See Estlund 1998; Brennan 2016. For a recent criticism, see Ahlstrom-Vij 2019.
11  See, for example, DeRose 1995; Sosa 2003; Zagzebski 1996.

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 Deliberative Education and Quality of Deliberation

to engage in difficult discussions with their peers and learn to accept

differing viewpoints or, when the strength of supporting justification
is sufficiently expressed, change their views. Thus, to recall Kant’s
famous phrase from the essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is
Enlightenment?” (Kant 1999), they will ‘dare to think’, while also be-
ing ready to be proven wrong by the strength of a better argument.

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 Aleksandar Ostojić1

Knowledge Versus
Production: Michel Serres
and Idiosyncratic Roads of
Education

There are numerous reasons why Michel Serres’s philoso-

phy can be interesting and significant when it comes to knowledge
and education. First of all, the style and the way in which Serres ap-
proaches problems is opposed to the usual academic, but also sys-
tematic, educational, most common usage. In addition, one of
Serres’s main projects, that is – endeavours, was “opening the bound-
aries” between various forms of knowledge, such as science, philos-
ophy, literature, mythology.2 The claim that there are “passages” or
“bridges” between fields of knowledge and that the boundaries that
currently exist are artificially formed can be directly linked to to-
day’s education system and the division of subjects or disciplines.

Based on Serres’s ideas, the first part of this paper will re-examine
the notions of education and its dominant conditions. Two problems
deserve special attention: 1) Separation of school subjects as well as
knowledge in general, and 2) favouring technical, engineering, and sci-
entific knowledge as a consequence of the methodocentric approach,
which is paradoxically transferred to the very idea of education in gen-

1  Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade: ostojic.alexandar@gmail.com.

2  Serres, like Husserl, first graduated in mathematics (focusing his work on the mathematical
dimension of quantum mechanics, as well as on information theories) before enrolling in philos-
ophy studies.

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Aleksandar Ostojić

eral. If we look at education through Humboldt’s idea of Bildung, at

least in the domain in which knowledge is a “purpose in itself” and
education is a way of internal shaping, then the narrow specialization,
the problem to which the first point refers, is completely opposite to
such a concept (Cvejić & Krstić 2020: 16–17). In addition, goals such as
efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity, which, among other things,
were imposed on education through the aforementioned bifurcation,
and whose nature is primarily economic, are opposed to the original
meaning of emancipation. The second point is probably more impor-
tant than the first, not only because the existence of a narrowly under-
stood dominant methodological framework is the cause of the afore-
mentioned problem of knowledge separation, but also because within
Serre’s conception of knowledge such an approach leads to teaching
as an instruction, whose goal is solely the reproduction of the existing
state, that is the reproduction of what is the dominant understanding
of knowledge — something he sees as the complete opposite of what
teaching is supposed to represent. For Serres, instruction should in-
stead lead to discovery, and not suppress its possibilities by reproducing
asymmetric power relations between the instructor and the instructed.

The problems emphasized by Serres do not remain on an abstract

level. They are extremely visible within the dominant global educa-
tional policy. Such an educational approach is embodied in a clearly
defined position of knowledge and the goal that a student should fulfil,
as well as in a one-way ‘transfer’ of knowledge, based on the reproduc-
tion of served content. Such reductive ‘knowledge’ is then quantified
through testing that strengthens the hierarchy within the education
system and which is guided solely by the task of adapting ‘knowledge
subjects’ to market needs. To show that Serres’s ideas are not just an
interesting postmodernist (or poststructuralist) narrative that does not
communicate with empiricism and is therefore inapplicable - which is
a frequent critique of Serres and like-minded thinkers – in the second
part, the paper will show, on direct critiques of the neo-liberal edu-
cational model, such as those of Michael Apple, how Serres’s thought

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perfectly emphasizes the basic problems of the educational process,

while opening the possibility for Serres’s theoretical approach to be
applied in practice.

Opposite to the Dominant Current – Against the

Hierarchization of Knowledge

Serres will emphasize more than once how the scientific revolu-
tions of his time3 influenced his understanding of philosophy but, more
importantly, also freed his thought from “ordinary social milieus and
dominant intellectual currents.” (Serres & Latour 1995: 13) The devel-
opment of thought outside the canon has resulted in an effort to over-
come the traditional dualism of the natural sciences and humanities.
Serres’s aspiration for such a synthesis, far from being just a need for
originality, had a strong foundation.

Searching for a point of separation, Serres finds that the Enlight-

enment period was crucial: it characterized as irrational any reason
that was not formed by science. Locating this ‘epistemological rupture’
within the 18th century, Serres points out that science sought to estab-
lish rule over the totality of reason, or we could add reasonability. In
this regard, we highlight the following:

I maintain that there is as much reason in the works of Montaigne

or Verlaine as there is in physics or biochemistry and, reciprocally,
that often there is as much unreason scattered through the sciences
as there is in certain dreams. Reason is statistically distributed ev-
erywhere; no one can claim exclusive rights to it. (Serres 1995: 50)

For Serres knowledge is everywhere and it develops precisely on

its folds, edges, and borders. Pretensions of the ‘age of reason’ to the
universality of scientific knowledge introduce a false hierarchy with-

3  Serres emphasizes three moments here: one is the transition from classical to quantum me-
chanics, the other is Brullion’s book Science and the Theory of Information, and as the third moment
he singles out the work of Jacques Monod Chance and Necessity (Serres & Latour 1995: 12-13).

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Aleksandar Ostojić

in knowledge, thanks to the boundaries that are “artificially inserted”

(Serres 1982: xi). Crossing points of different expressions of knowl-
edge, i.e. edges and folds, cease to be places where knowledge develops,
thus becoming an irrelevant periphery, inhabited by those who do not
have adequate scientific knowledge. The classification of knowledge is
not nearly as simple as it seems, and the passages between disciplines,
although not easily discernible, still exist, Serres claims: “The passage
is rare and narrow [...] From the sciences of man to the exact sciences,
or inversely, the path does not cross a homogeneous and empty space”,
but rather “follows a path that is difficult to measure” (Serres 1980: 18).
Serres’s effort is not based on a desire to establish a certain, specific way
in which knowledge is connected, which would therefore represent a
new dominant position of learning. Instead, he realizes that translating
knowledge opens up new possibilities for research, new ways and means
of perceiving the world, or ways that encourage or lead to discovery.

To put it differently, an interest that implies parallel development

of scientific, literary, and philosophical trends, as well as metaphors
such as “criticism is generalized physics”, are opposed to the idea of two
separate cultures - scientific and humanistic - between which no com-
munication is possible. René Girard will also notice this, adding that:
“regardless of whether knowledge is written in philosophical, scientific
or literary vocabulary, it still articulates a common set of problems that
transcends academic disciplines and artificial boundaries.” (as cited in:
Harari & Bell 1982: xi)

These ideas are directly related to the problems of education, and prob-
ably the biggest problem that Serres points out, which is the motive
for his endeavour, is the problem of discovery. The established hier-
archy of knowledge, by its nature, reduces the possibilities of discov-
ery, and education based on such a hierarchy narrows the possibili-
ties of examining, thinking, and forming different views of the world
(Ostojić, Nešić, Jozić 2019: 69). Such claims need to be argued for, and
therefore, although we will return to education soon, it is necessary to

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examine another segment on which this hierarchy rests: methodocen-

trism. Namely, just at the time when Serres diagnosed the epistemolog-
ical rift, there was a strong tendency in the Western world to arrange
life and reality through ‘certainty of facts’. The possibility of predicting
the future, the universalization of mathematical and the necessity of de-
ductive thinking, the preference or favouring of consistency over con-
tingency, the belief that the observed phenomenon is isolated, all this
undoubtedly led to the standardization of opinion, but also to a form
of anthropocentrism that leaves everything non-human (based on its
own judgment) beyond any discourse (Weaver & Snaza 2017: 1056).

Prigogine and Stengers will detect this approach calling it the

“Laplacian dream” – they characterize it as Laplacian science – Stengers
analyses the point that will precede the division of science into nor-
mative and descriptive, giving the former a greater objective value
based on ‘facts’, as follows: “For this Laplacian science, a description
is objective to the extent to which the observer is excluded and the
description itself is made from a point lying de jure outside the world.”
(Prigogine & Stengers 1984: 52) The experimental method will thus,
for the sake of accuracy of measuring and determining specific as-
pects of a phenomenon, result in a reduction of the complexity of the
natural world. Moreover, this separation of the observer and the ob-
served will lead directly to methodocentrism: the belief that particular
methods, formed before encountering the phenomenon, guarantee
the validity of intellectual inquiry. In this regard, Stengers acknowl-
edges that methodocentrism emerges as an effort to minimize the
“risk” of intellectual investigation, but states that such a way of avoid-
ing risk or error undoubtedly leads to “bad science” (Stengers 1997).

Serres’s metaphor of the “third man” perfectly exposes the stated

problems. The figure of the third man is simultaneously included and
excluded from dialogue, from discourse, it represents the border of un-
derstanding, it presupposes misunderstanding between the self and the
other, between us and the world. But the Third is being brought under

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the language by one constant process, as Serres explains. It is through

language that the Third becomes the totality of the social collective that
surrounds us: he is one and each and all and they. The use of language,
Serres skilfully points out here, is only an indication of a far more com-
prehensive process of transformation of the third:

Metaphysically, the Third and its law found physics, while link-
ing it to proof, by giving nature its general objectivity, as well
as by making natural phenomena function outside the intention
of those concerned with, and within the purview of, discourse.
. . Thus the third person provides a foundation for the whole of
the external real, for objectivity in its totality, unique and univer-
sal, outside any first- or second-person subject. (Serres 1997: 48)

Attaining what is supposed to be the goal of any communication

also means ending it. Turning the third, not into the bearer of the mes-
sage, into Hermes, into an unexplored way in which self and otherness
are connected and intertwined, but into a confirmation of a predefined
relationship, means that communication with knowledge is over,
because it is too clear how things stand or how they ‘should’ stand.

Today, it is becoming increasingly clear - many like Serres rightly

note this - that research must not rely on prefabricated methods that
fictitiously guarantee the certainty or validity of scientific research.
Rather, it is necessary to find a way to listen to the world in different ways.
Contrary to the idea of Laplacian science, Serres offers an alternative
vision of research that is not based on the separation of the observer
and the observed, but quite the opposite, on their diverse intertwining:

In a different way more difficult, subtle, and complete, the life and
earth sciences, henceforth put in the center of cognition, take over.
They practice a more sharing, open, connected way of knowing, in
which he who knows participates in the things he knows, is reborn
from them, tries to speak their language, listens to their voices, re-
spects their habitat … is enchanted by their narratives, limits finally,
through them and for them, his power and his politics. (Serres 2012: 33)

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To understand the alternative offered by Serres, let us dwell a little

longer on methodocentrism. In an attempt to define it more closely,
we could say that it represents the belief that the pre-established meth-
od that was chosen to conduct research determines the legitimacy or
truthfulness of the research. To avoid confusion, Serres’s critique of
methodocentrism does not mean opposing the method within particu-
lar studies if they approach problems in an established way. The point
is that the belief that methods must be chosen from an existing set of
‘legitimate’ methods before encountering the subject of research not
only leads to bad science, as Weaver and Snaza point out, “but is deep-
ly connected to anthropocentric and colonialist politics.” (Weaver &
Snaza 2016: 1057) Such insights come from the very field of science
itself. Physicist Karen Barad will say that there is always an “appara-
tus entangled with the phenomenon” (Barad 2007) – overlooking
this fact closes us in the ‘objective’, previously established boundaries
of knowledge, which significantly reduce the possibility of discovery.

The real problem for Serres is not the existence of methodocentrism,

but its institutionalization, its dominance in the educational process, the
dominance that shapes new minds. The school or academic mind is disci-
plined to think in a certain way, and the apparent or false objectivity of the
dominant method is transferred to the categorization and hierarchization
of knowledge, determining the value of an approach or the “necessary set
of knowledge” that guarantees that the dominant method is followed,
and establishes criteria on the basis of which researchers, students, and
even children are quantified.4 This indoctrination is fundamentally re-
productive in nature. In it, minds are disciplined to follow established
paths, ask questions in a certain way, and ultimately produce, or rather
exclusively reproduce, the meanings that the ruling paradigm imposes,
meanings imposed within, but also outside of the governing curricu-
lum. It can be noticed that this is certainly an ideological reproduction,

4  One of the most well-known examples is Baby PISA by OECD (Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development), again setting a dangerous relation between the economy and
the education of children. A good critical reflection on this subject as a sort of introduction can be
found in Pence 2016 and Purešević 2020.

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Aleksandar Ostojić

of which we will talk more in the second part of this paper, when we fo-
cus on the works of Michael Apple and Martha Nussbaum. Let’s stay for
now on Serres and the problem of industrial reproduction of meaning.

The above-mentioned process will lead Stengers to notice how

such training creates a “disconnect between the singular forms of
inspiration and meaning generation” (what she calls the “necessari-
ly fictional quality of all true science”) and the “objective form of its
presentation, which rhetorically hides the work of the sciences in ‘the
expression of a unanimous and impersonal consensus” (Stengers 2007:
113). The main goal of these processes is precisely the introduction of
hierarchy; their motivation is always political in nature, it is always a
game of power. Firmly set rules, norms, and comfort - which abol-
ish creativity and imagination, rejecting the need for discovery – are,
therefore, for Serres, nothing more than forms of intellectual terrorism:

I have passed enough of my life on warships and in lecture halls

to testify before youth, which already knows, that there is no dif-
ference between the purely animal or hierarchical customs of the
playground, military tactics, and academic conduct: the same terror
reigns in the covered playground, in front of torpedo launchers, and
on campus, this fear that can pass for the fundamental passion of in-
tellectual workers, in the majestic shape of absolute knowledge, this
phantom standing behind those who write at their table. I sense it
and divine it, stinking, slimy, bestial, returning as regularly as the bell
rang, opening and closing colloquia where eloquence vociferates in
order to terrify speakers all around. (Serres 1997: 134)

The presumed finality, correctness, and truthfulness of a certain

type of knowledge has another consequence. Namely, such a belief
propagates stations or ‘points’ of knowledge that need to be reached.
This again assumes that students, starting from the specific point A,
which symbolizes the point of ignorance, should reach the specific and
clearly defined point B which represents the point of knowledge. The
problems are various: these points are always being set by the ‘ruling

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paradigm’ that determines them, which is outside the sphere of knowl-

edge, that is, these positions are determined by economic parameters
and market needs, which we will talk about later. Furthermore, this
setting allows to set precisely defined positions of teachers and stu-
dents within the educational curriculum, an asymmetric relationship
in which the teacher and the student are not together within the pro-
cess of education and cognition as internal shaping, nor in a relation-
ship that mutually stimulates the discovery of the new. Education that
does not lead to the discovery of the new is precisely the problem that
Serres is most focused on.

Education as an Exodus – Roads of Discovery

Every learning implies a journey, a journey that brings a novelty.

This is a necessary process of emancipation, which means liberation
from influence, emergence from non-independence - like the one of
the child. The same conclusion is related to learning and initiation of
thought. The initial ideas are just a repetition of the old, “Young: old
parrot” (Serres 1997: 8), as Serres would say. In that sense, in search for
a new thought, education inevitably brings with it a kind of wandering,
traveling, leaving the mother’s womb, going into the unknown. “The
voyage of children, that is the naked meaning of the Greek word peda-
gogy.” (Serres 1997: 8)

Although according to Serres’s understanding of education, a

teacher is present as an escort or as a companion, he is not there to
lead along a certain path because such a journey would not be wan-
dering. The teacher is only there to guide you to a certain point:
pedagogos in the original means the ‘hand-leader of the child’, most
often it was a slave who was in charge of accompanying the child to
school in ancient Greece. The child is not the master of the slave, but
neither does the slave have authority over the child, they keep each
other company on the part of the road they cross together, develop-
ing a friendship based on temporary equality (equal position). That

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part of the road is known to the slave, but the child gets acquainted
with that path again, in his own way: the slave is only an escort to
the point where wandering begins. Wandering here should be under-
stood in a specific sense, not as a loss, but as a search for the unknown.5

In other words, the goal of learning and the education itself should
be the discovery of new knowledge. Such knowledge implies an adventure,
which is more an exodus than an established method. Becoming your-
self and being original cannot happen within the universal curriculum
- in addition to imposing a certain type of discipline, any generalization
of the rules, which every narrow curriculum necessarily carries with it,
leads to stereotypes. The nature of stereotypes is extremely dangerous
for education, and the entire curriculum represents one big stereotype,
which tends to remain so. Stereotypes are fatal for at least two reasons.
They allow lazy minds to stay that way because they offer ready-made,
extremely simplified representations of very complex things, and pre-
cisely because of that, they are most often inaccurate. The level of gen-
eralization that comes with methodocentric approaches, but also from
the educational system through the curriculum, prevents not only criti-
cal thinking but, according to Serres, also thinking itself. Reproduction
of content appears as the only request, which confirms the consistent
following of the given path, the only one characterized as correct. Even
though the philosophy of science has pointed to the instability of facts,
the possibility of scientific revolutions, significant roles of imagination
in the process of scientific discovery, strict methodological, and edu-
cational approaches to a large extent tend to remain inert. By recog-
nizing this problem, Serres points to a completely different approach,
which enables children and everyone who learns to regain or estab-
lish imaginative and creative approaches to learning. This is exactly
the meaning of teaching. The instruction is there to initiate the voyage:

The goal of instruction is the end of instruction, that is to say, invention.

5  In this sense, the etymological connection of the English wonder and wander should be borne
in mind. The terms cannot be adequately translated. Besides delving into unknown lands physi-
cally, it also means movement – wandering of thoughts, wondering, questioning.

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 Knowledge Versus Production

Invention is the only true intellectual act, the only act of intelligence.
The rest? Copying, cheating, reproduction, laziness, convention, bat-
tle, sleep. Only discovery awakens. Only invention proves that one tru-
ly thinks what one thinks, whatever that may be. (Serres 1997: 92-93)

From this observation, Serres’s critique develops in at least two di-

rections. As we have already indicated, one direction is the problem of
(im)possibility of scientific discovery, that is, discovery in general. The
impossibility of including the conditions under which the discovery
occurs calls into question the model that imposes a positivist scientific
ideal. This is especially problematic if we have in mind the relation
between imagination and scientific discovery (Ostojić 2019: 916). Be-
sides, this ideal unjustifiably implies that there is a real or the most
appropriate approach to ‘objective reality’ and reason, and that knowl-
edge, like a body instrumentalized for a specific purpose by a series
of repetitions, should reach that ideal of objectivity or ‘pure science’.
The assumption that ‘pure science’, as a way of relating to knowledge,
is independent of ontological or ethical issues and that it is immune
to the cultural and social influences within which it takes place (and
which it even forms) has been seriously shaken by numerous studies
in the philosophy of science (Kuhn, Feyerabend, Bohr, Heisenberg), as
well as in sociological, philosophical or psychological approaches that,
starting with Husserl, questioned the process of subjectification, i.e. the
problem of how the subject is constituted in intertwinement with the
world (Foucault, Latour, Strauss, Theo).

The other direction of Serres’s criticism refers to the conse-

quences that such an approach has on education. A university or a
school is certainly not a place where creative, independent, and as-
sociative thinking is encouraged. Students must follow, repeat, and
quote the given canon. Their success is to an almost absurd to an al-
most absurd degree determined by the number of repetitions of infor-
mation. The task of faithfully repeating the given information before
thinking about it is present from the very beginning of schooling until

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its completion (despite the fact that6 studies speak of the shortcomings
of such an approach). When Serres says: “Transcribe a single model
and you are called a plagiarist, but if you copy one hundred, you are
soon awarded a Ph.D.” (Serres 1997: 38) it may sound like a satirical
depiction of the academy by David Lodge, but that does not make it
any less true. Overthrowing the repetition of “finished and shaped” as
the dominant model of education is in line with the task of abolishing
final forms of knowledge. If understood in this way, Serres’s urge for
discovery, or the end of instruction can be related to Rancière’s vi-
sion in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Revealing the nature of instruction,
the goal, and the conditions under which it survives, Rancière writes:

Explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand. On

the contrary, that very incapacity provides the structuring fiction of
the explicative conception of the world. It is the explicator who needs
the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes
the incapable as such. To explain something to someone is first of all
to show him he cannot understand it by himself. Before being the act
of the pedagogue, explication is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of
a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds
and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and
the stupid. The explicator’s special trick consists of this double inau-
gural gesture. On the one hand, he decrees the absolute beginning:
it is only now that the act of learning will begin. On the other, hav-
ing thrown a veil of ignorance over everything that is to be learned,
he appoints himself to the task of lifting it. (Rancière 1991: 6-7)

The classically understood explanation, which is present in class-

rooms, but also outside, and which Rancière is talking about, requires
a predetermined terrain and predefined positions. In order for the ex-
planation to fulfil its claim to ‘lead’ to the position of knowledge, it
needs the position of ignorance, against which the imposed ‘knowl-
edge’ would gain its legitimacy. This assumption of the initial and fi-
nal position as a defined path that the ‘ignorant’ should cross is the

6  Naming just one out of many: Ammermueller 2004.

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same established, limited path that for Serres it is necessary to avoid.

And yet, it seems that this idea of ‘openness’ of education, or learn-

ing process, is more of an unattainable ideal: the (im)possibility of im-
plementation and the (in)effectiveness of such an approach are con-
stantly emphasized. A common objection is that, although such a form
of open dialogue within which knowledge is shaped is in part possible
within the humanities, it is unacceptable within the natural sciences.
How to teach Euclidean geometry openly, that is, without assuming
the final position of knowledge, which the one being taught should
reach? If we teach someone to make a car, the demands of Serres or
Rancière seem not only unfeasible but also unacceptable. Nevertheless,
the demand for innovation does not seek to challenge a certain type of
functionality of a given form of knowledge, but to question its final de-
termination and necessity, stimulating the one who learns to move in
different, unknown paths - that is, to think. The objection must there-
fore be rejected because numerous models will show that knowledge
that aspires to absolute universality inevitably makes a mistake, and
in such cases, the relationship between the one who thinks he knows
and the one who does not know is changed very quickly. Such is the
case, let us not forget, with Euclidean geometry, as Bernard Riemann
showed in 1859.

To remain open for becoming different, to discover; otherwise ed-

ucation subordinated to reproduction, which imposes the unification
of thought, an endless cycle of repetition, leads to decadence, totali-
tarianism, a society in which knowledge ceases to move, or in Serres’s
words:

When all the people of the world finally speak the same language
and commune in the same message or the same norm of reason, we
will descend, idiot imbeciles, lower than rats, more stupidly than liz-
ards. The same maniacal language and science, the same repetitions
of the same in all latitudes—an earth covered with screeching parrots.
(Serres 1997: 124)

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Educational Reproduction of Productional Order

Expressed views can certainly be placed in a postmodernist or

poststructuralist narrative. However, if such a categorization aims to
discredit the mentioned ideas, judging by their ‘functionality’, it is just
a cheap trick, behind which stands the tendency of the dominant order
to remain dominant, as we will show.

Precise positioning and identification of such an order, as well as

the tools it uses, can be found within the numerous works of authors
dealing with the sociology of knowledge or education. Even the first
look at such studies shows us that the micro-plan is inseparable from
the macro-plan, and the educational system is seen as a producer of so-
cial order in the field of social mobility. Selective tradition, selection of
meanings, their exclusion, creation, reinterpretation, but also the very
way in which meanings are transmitted, are the basic forces aimed at
maintaining the existing structure, and they can be recognized only
when the process of determining and transmitting knowledge (today
educational process) is reflected on regarding its cultural, economic,
and political position. As Young notes:

Those in positions of power will attempt to define what is taken as

knowledge, how accessible to different groups any knowledge is, and
what are accepted relationships between different knowledge areas
and between those who have access to them and make them avail-
able. (Young 1971: 8)

Examining all aspects of knowledge and education through the

prisms of hegemony and ideology is an inconceivable task, which has
already been approached by numerous historians of education such as
Feinberg, Karier, Kaestle, Katz, Bourdieu, or in a different way by Fou-
cault. Nevertheless, all these forms of dominant structures in modern
times pour over into one predominant form that was hinted at in the
introduction - the needs of the market, all under the slogan of a specif-
ically narrow understanding of economic interest that puts profit first.

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The basic feature that accompanies the functioning of the ruling

structure of education, which is general problem almost everywhere
present, is exactly what Serres called the artificial hierarchy introduced
into knowledge - the division into ‘high’ and ‘low’ status knowledge.
Now, decades of uneven investment in various disciplines have led to
segregation and stratification within the field of knowledge, where the
highest position is occupied by technical and ‘strictly scientific’ knowl-
edge present in the natural sciences. The motives for giving the highest
status to technical knowledge and their connection with the education-
al process are validly analysed by Michael Apple in the well-known
critical study Ideology and Curriculum. The ‘benefits’ of maximizing the
production of scientific and technical knowledge are easily visible and
are reflected in the following: it is (seemingly) non-controversial, it has
a stable structure, a (supposedly) identifiable content, and most impor-
tant of all, it is testable (Apple 2019: 37). Thus, giving the highest value
to technical knowledge is directly related to the basic function of the
educational process, and that is not the education of an individual - but,
as Apple states - selection. Indeed, the classification and stratification of
individuals carried out according to ‘academic criteria’ is incomparably
easier when it comes to technical knowledge. Nevertheless, it is not
just a matter of selecting according to one technical criterion, but also
for one goal or purpose - those individuals are selected that will con-
tribute to the production of the required form of knowledge. Within this
process, cultural content and everything that is defined as high-status
knowledge is used exclusively to perform economic classification and
to provide a single resource of interest that is nothing but - economical.

As a number of economists have recently noted, the most econom-

ically important ‘latent’ function of school life is the selection and gen-
eration of personality attributes and normative meanings that enable
one to have a supposed chance at economic rewards (Apple 2019: 41).

First, there is the reification of knowledge, and then the knowledge

as a resource is exclusively used for the purpose of accessing economic

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resources. This is a radical change of perspective (or reversal) that pre-

viously implied that knowledge is the main goal, and not just a means.
Such a turn violates the very concepts of knowledge and education,
which will be explicitly pointed out by Harry Braverman (Braverman
1975) and Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum 2010). At the same time, the
problem is the narrow understanding of that economic interest or
profit, which now obviously and openly rejects critical thinking along
with other fruits of humanistic disciplines, as an unimportant and un-
necessary appendix, at least when it comes to satisfying the primary
interest:

A flourishing economy requires the same skills that support citi-

zenship, and thus the proponents of what I shall call ‘education for
profit’, or (to put it more comprehensively) ‘education for economic
growth’, have adopted an impoverished conception of what is re-
quired to meet their own goal. (Nussbaum 2010: 10)

Having in mind what has been said, the conclusion that Serres points
out justifiably imposes itself: any attempt to make a substantial change
in the relationship between the status of knowledge - Serres’s idea
of ‘equalizing’ the rationality (meaningfulness) of different regions -
would meet, or rather meets strong resistance. The idea of intellectu-
al terrorism, which abolishes creativity and imagination, and which
Serres talks about, is not a postmodernist phrase but a basic modus
operandi that is imposed through the educational system by the domi-
nant structure. At the same time, this order does not allow ‘knowledge’
to be viewed or valued in any other way, declaring any different ap-
proach as illegitimate (Young 1971: 34).

However, the question is, how is this delegitimization of different

approaches performed? How is the notion of knowledge manipulated,
and how does discrimination against different regions have its legiti-
macy that (seemingly) cannot be questioned?

The answers to these questions should be sought first in the values

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 Knowledge Versus Production

assigned to scientific knowledge and then in the use of these values

through the so-called ‘language of science’. More precisely, not only has
it become a generally accepted view that scientific criteria of evaluation
produce, or guarantee ‘knowledge’ over ‘subjective’ considerations of-
fered by other approaches, but through the ‘neutral’ language of science
all structural problems are redefined as differences in intelligence or
ability, differences in possession or non-possession of expertise, thus
shifting the focus from the economic and social causes that govern the
dominant order (Apple 2019: 38).

Placing the figure of the Third as Hermes, as a difference that, in an

infinite process of translation, over and over again releases the excess
of meaning that occurs in communication between us and the world –
pointing the way of an infinite learning process, and showing its trans-
formation into a guarantor, or foundation of all objectivity (in which
our relation with the totality of the world is reduced to a two-dimen-
sional one), Serres undoubtedly points to the problem of the ‘sublime’
language of science. Science, which has the role of providing unques-
tionably correct principles, about which, because they are unquestion-
able, there must be a consensus.

The language in which science and technology carry the logical

imperative (as well as an ideological commitment) is ideal for creating
a new set of ‘meanings’, making literally a new version of the ‘sacred’
(Apple 2019: 80). Such language, according to Huebner, is

[...] the language of legitimacy, and serves to establish a person’s claim

that he or she knows what he or she is doing, or that he has the right,
responsibility, authority and legitimacy to do it. (Huebner 1975: 255)

Regardless of the warnings and objections, which did not come

from outside, but from the very scientific field itself, such as those
raised by Stengers and Prigogine (Prigogine & Stengers 1997), among
others, which indicate the ‘end’ of certainty, the instability of ‘facts’ and
the danger of ‘objectivity’ of explanations that claim absolute validity,

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Aleksandar Ostojić

science and technology created a field of values within which different

‘schools of thought’ are not allowed. That is, even if they are, ‘objective’
criteria will stand out to judge who is right and who is wrong. Such
an established consensus, which is closely related to the value system
of a higher economic order (Apple 2019: 79), is what is transmitted to
students, to those who study within the education system - who are
treated as ‘ignorant’ by that system.

Of course, the problem is not what is transmitted but what is not,

and the rhetoric of science and its veil of neutrality indeed hide more
than they communicate. All disagreements about methodology, goals,
and other elements that make up the science paradigm or the scien-
tific activity paradigm are left aside. In our schools, scientific work is
tacitly always linked with accepted standards of validity and is seen
and thought of as always subjected to empirical verifications with
no outside influences, either personal or political. (Apple 2019: 91)

An even bigger problem within this narrative, which directly con-

cerns Serres’s views on the possibility of discovery, new thought, and
the suppression of the same, is that such transfer of knowledge ignores
the insight that disagreement and controversy have always been an
essential fertile ground for the development of science. Science, like
any opinion, develops (and has developed) precisely on its folds, edges,
borders - in the encounter with the Other and the Different. Disagree-
ment and re-examination indicate potential problems, stimulating dis-
covery, and that is usually not what students, and society in general,
are familiar with.

Ideology is circular - the stability of the existing economic (and

political) structure is based on the consensus of technical and posi-
tivist knowledge, encompassing and subordinating the formal and
informal curriculum, as well as cultural capital. Power and knowl-
edge are thus again intimately and subtly connected through the
roots of our common sense, through hegemony, Apple will con-

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 Knowledge Versus Production

clude (Apple 2019: 104). And so, we return again to Serres’s meta-
phor of the “screeching parrots”: “When all the people of the world
finally speak the same language and communicate the same mes-
sage or the same norm of reason, we will descend, idiot imbeciles…”

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vanja: tri teorije. Beograd: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju; Novi
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versity Press.
Harari, Josue V. &; F. David Bell (1982), “Introduction: Journal a
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Serres, Michel (1995), Genesis. Trans. by G. James & J. Nielson. Ann
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Glaser & W. Paulson. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Serres, Michel (2012), Biogea. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal.
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Collier-Macmillan, pp. 19-46.

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 Sanja Petkovska1

Decolonial Emancipation
on the Postsocialist
Peripheries and the Future
of Critical Pedagogy

Introduction

The second half of the twentieth century has been named,

defined, and characterized in many different ways in an attempt to de-
note its complexity since it signified a very turbulent, one of the most
peculiar historical periods known. Without a doubt, one of the most
important occurrences during the century behind us, at least when
talking about critical educational theory and practice, was the rise
and fall of ideas and concepts of social and progressive pedagogy. His-
torically, these ideas emerged mainly along with the foundation and
engagements of global social movements at the peak of their power
in the 1970s and shared the destiny of their consequent exhaustion
and withdrawal from the forefront of the social and political scene
later on. A prominent contemporary political sociologist Vukašin
Pavlović claimed in his valuable thematic edited volume on global so-
cial movements that their fast rise and consequent withdrawal from
the historical scene represented one of the most prominent features of
the epoch, making modern social and political life without acknowl-
edging their existence, ideas, and activities hard to imagine (Pavlov-
ić 1987). The insistence and expectation that the power of education

1  Centre for Advanced Study (CAS), Sofia: petkovska.sa@gmail.com.

167
Sanja Petkovska

should influence social and political occurrences inspired by political

ideas and actions of global social movements had reached its peak by
the 1980s and was followed by the subsequent weakening of the sig-
nificance and influential potential of the concepts and principles of
social progressive thought in general. Consequently, the relevance
and potential of progressive and emancipatory ideas to influence ed-
ucational theory and practice of the time dramatically decreased.

The emancipatory education as an overall pedagogical approach

achieved one of its most influential clarifications and massive pop-
ularization among educational scholars after the publication of the
Pedagogy of the Oppressed written by Paulo Freire, which came out in
Portuguese in 1968 and in English two years later, in 1970. Freire wrote
this book during his political exile, and it was a summary of his edu-
cational stances which came out as a consequence of his involvement
in the massive and highly successful Brazilian adult literacy campaigns.
This book became an educational bestseller worldwide and provided
the clearest, most vivid reasons for the adoption of an emancipatory
educational approach by influencing other educational theorists, prac-
titioners, researchers, and policymakers, and other actors on the global
level. Not only did it signify the most authentic example of an educa-
tion program grounded in progressive and emancipatory ideas, but it
became close to a global, best-known ‘manifest’ of them. The most im-
portant principles of progressively and emancipatory grounded educa-
tion are learning based on lived experience and the relation between
teacher and learner based on equality, empathy, and solidarity. This
relation between instructor and student based on empathy and equality
is symbolically crucial for the contemporary critical emancipatory ped-
agogy since the two of them are considered to be partners in the educa-
tional process, unlike in the traditional forms of instruction implying
subjugation and prolonged intellectual dependence of minors since the
teacher is superior and learner inferior by default (Featherstone 2020).

The epistemological origin of the term ‘emancipation’ as popular-

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 Decolonial Emancipation on the Postsocialist Peripheries

ized within the Enlightenment movement implied advanced learning

capability based on the full engagement of the faculties of subjects play-
ing an active role of historical agents, skilful and capable of critical, in-
dependent judgment, freed from socially, politically, and economically
enforced authorities to further contribute to the overall advancement
and development of a collective (Radford 2012: 102, 109). The massive
literacy campaigns were quite popular globally in developing regions
after WWII and aimed at the poorest and marginalized rural people
to be reached at the peripheries and skilled in basic literacy, but were
particularly successful and well organized in Latin America. The un-
questionable and undisputable relevance of this book is obvious since it
is considered to be a ‘classic’ of critical educational approaches occupied
mostly with the problem of inequality (Freire and Macedo 2000: 11).
Unfortunately, nowadays this entire history of critical and emancipa-
tory pedagogy is mostly revived only at thematic commemoration con-
ferences, while poverty and (especially digital and technological) illit-
eracy of marginal populations of the world’s peripheries has become a
topic and problem whose wider importance has mostly been neglected.

The international voices of resistance striving for political libera-

tion and improvements of the human condition in the form of social
movements culminated on the global level in the worldwide protests
of 1968. Challenges imposed by the new social movements on struc-
tural and intersectional social and political inequalities caused by racial,
ethnic, class, gender, and other identity differences, combined with the
persistent international problems of armed conflicts, ecological prob-
lems, nuclear weapons, and related issues, however, remained vivid and
actual, further elaborated and continuously re-evoked in the context of
the debates on decolonization and decoloniality. The issues of perpet-
ual oppression and inequality within general social relations, reflected
in classroom relations and the knowledge production system based on
dominance and hierarchy, are repeatedly unzipped whenever social,
cultural, and other differences escalate and produce concrete tensions.
At the beginning of the 21st century, after the explanatory framework

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Sanja Petkovska

of globalization became mainstream both in the media and in the

academy, it became obvious that emancipation could not be ripped off
of its international and more broadly speaking geopolitical significance
as long as the strong reasons for reviving and memorizing it still existed.

These are, in a nutshell, the politically unbalanced social and inter-

cultural positions and relations on both the micro and macro level of
the global knowledge production system. Before gaining its huge wider
popularity in the context of deliberations on external problems in ed-
ucational theory and practice, decolonization mainly referred to con-
crete political and historical struggles of former colonies and colonized
peoples for establishing a self-imposed regime and proclaiming nation-
al self-determination after the overthrow of colonial rule. Lately, the
meaning of decolonization was enlarged and altered, adding to the rec-
ognized political system other layers of independence in social, cultur-
al, and other domains. After providing some further conceptual clarifi-
cations related to the two crucial notions for the argument presented,
decolonization and emancipation, the discussion will be continued by
listing the reasons why the overall critical educational paradigm still
matters so much, and not only for the archive of the history of pedagog-
ic ideas. Finally, the discussion will be closed by illustrating this claim
with the two successful attempts of its contemporary implementation.

The Nexus Between Decolonization, Emancipation and

Education

It could hardly be contested that the concept of emancipation plays

a central role in the global modern pedagogical and educational imagi-
nary (Bingham and Biesta 2010: 25). On the other hand, the education
system is the main terrain of implementing and testing any kind of
educational philosophy, policy/politics, program, or reform. Among
other things, it remained a key mechanism for the processes of cultural
decolonization, mirroring the political struggle for self-determination
and national liberation of the former colonies and other territories put

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 Decolonial Emancipation on the Postsocialist Peripheries

under a colonial rule (Freire and Macedo 2000: 29). Standing for it-
self, “decolonization is most easily appreciated and measured as a se-
ries of political acts, occasionally peaceful, often confrontational, and
frequently militant, by which territories and countries dominated by
Europeans gained their independence” (Betts 2004: 101). The modern
paradigm advocated not only for self-governed national states but also
for individuals equipped with self-consciousness, awareness, and ca-
pacity for critical reasoning needed to practice rights and understand
legislative procedures; thus, those skills have appeared naturally quite
important for newborn independent sovereign states and the popula-
tions inhabiting them. A massive public opportunity for education was
the means to train the masses of people for modern governing forma-
tions and the most important invention of modern times. Inequality,
on the opposite side, was the main enemy of massive schooling and all
those differences coming from coloniality were insurmountable. Colo-
niality was at the heart of the modernity-making project as its constitu-
tional negative aspect, representing its “dark side” (Mignolo 2000: 20).

Additionally, we should bear in mind that emancipation originally

referred to the situation of “giving away ownership” or “relinquishing
one’s authority over someone” mainly associated with slaves, peasants,
poor, and lower-class parts of the population whose basic rights were
broadly refuted and easily alienated (Bingham and Biesta 2010: 27).
Emancipation as a historical process designating liberation from the
colonial rule took place for most of the colonized territories between
1945 and 1975 (Rothermund 2000: 43). Its usage was from the earli-
est points of reference associated with intellectual maturity, education,
pedagogy, instruction, learning, teaching, and similar. A gradual dis-
mantlement of colonial rule in the former colonies initiated the process
of decolonization and the awakening of social movements who were
the main supporters of these processes, considered as crucial for the
overall emancipation of humanity. The postcolonial scholarship, in the
centre of which was the development of self-understanding of the sub-
jugated, indigenous people coming from decolonized countries, with

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Sanja Petkovska

Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the most prominent

figures, was a crucial element for both educational emancipation and
decolonization.

All the dramatic happenings that surrounded the struggle of decol-

onized people, both at home and abroad, caused a serious crisis within
educational systems on the global level. The phenomenon of educa-
tional crisis refers to several interconnected problems that hit public
schooling during the 1980s, to be generally described and understood as
an overall disappointment with the emancipatory power of education,
especially regarding its potential to assist diminishment of the social,
racial, and gender inequalities and increase democratization (Coombs
1968; Zakin 2017). As Bourdieu successfully demonstrated along this
line of problematization of standardized public schooling, bringing
together students from different social backgrounds within educa-
tional systems, this practice is dominantly reproducing social and class
stratification rather than dismantling it, while seriously undermining
the emancipatory hopes invested in it (Bingham and Biesta 2010: 14).
This institutional crisis historically accompanied a more general crisis
of progressive thought that had evolved around the postmodern and
poststructuralist authors and dominated the academic, intellectual, and
political scene by the end of the twentieth century. Most of the post-
colonial scholarship emerged out of the application of French critical
theory and philosophy to theorizing about intellectual decolonial eman-
cipation, and at some point, authors even concluded that “postcolonial
studies are ideologically colonized” by postmodernism and that they
needed to be “epistemologically decolonized” (Acheraïou 2011: 185).

Decolonization as a term was invented by a German econom-

ic scholar Moritz Julius Bonn (1873–1965) in 1930 but as we use the
term today, it mostly designates “decolonization of mind”, or in other
words, gaining the symbolic, epistemological, and cognitive indepen-
dence from not only concrete but also symbolical colonial subjugation
(Rothermund 2000: 1). Since the newly established former colonial

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 Decolonial Emancipation on the Postsocialist Peripheries

states continued to operate under the framework set by colonial and

imperial powers, the regimes they formed were characterized as “in-
complete parliamentary democracies”, while this state of their pro-
longed actual dependence has been designated as neo-colonialism
(Rothermund 2000: 245, 251). Education systems and policies in for-
mer colonies remained based on mimicking the colonial education-
al forms and functioned mainly as reserved training pools for elites
and native informants, offering small chances for true emancipation
of pupils. The fact that postcolonial emerging countries were run-
ning their states on developmental aids and became increasingly in-
debted within the restrained independent economies furthermore
meant that they were capable to provide formal education to local
populations only with the help of former colonial power anyhow.
All of this caused later persistent opposition of intellectuals in con-
stant search for a language adequate for expressing and stating their
voice and position, determined to create an alternative to the in-
herited colonial modernist epistemology and the developmental
paradigm they were previously forcefully subjected to. Neo-colonial
forms of ruling were supposed to remodel imperial rule into endur-
ing partnership with colonial powers, while education, which initial-
ly had been mainly maintained by the colonizers, now had a role to
reproduce the colonial mindset rather than to facilitate fully emanci-
pated intellectual independence (Rothermund 2000: 245-248, 251).

Later on, even the postcolonial scholarship grounded in postmod-

ernism and poststructuralism caused only further growing dissatis-
faction of the public with its achievements, writings, and acting. In a
reaction to this, a few authors from Latin America and former social-
ist countries emerged with an attempt of reviving critical scholarship
within a new intellectual current named decolonial thinking or a “de-
colonial option”. Soon numerous authors started following suit, and
once again, started to be criticized as ineffective, merely descriptive,
too vague, and not of much use for accomplishing refined analytical
scholarship and securing practical results. Within the approach advo-

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Sanja Petkovska

cated for in this paper “decolonization is not a metaphor”, i.e. it is not

a pure umbrella term under which we can put whatever is convenient
while overestimating its explanatory potential, as a critique of it has
stated (Tuck and Yang 2012). Furthermore, the existing tendency of
turning the notion of decolonization into a mere metaphor for superfi-
cial relational, cultural, and language improvements should be opposed
and prevented, since decolonization is a real struggle for the land and
life of indigenous people (Tuck and Yang 2012: 1). Decolonization is
also increasingly shifting on the global level into an unofficial symboli-
cal struggle for self-definition and positioning of marginalized nations
and groups of people claiming additional political rights worldwide.

The decolonial option started as an open intervention into the

existing body of postcolonial critical scholarship presented prob-
ably in the most representative way in the book Learning to Unlearn:
Thinking Decoloniality written by two prominent contemporary de-
colonial thinkers: Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo. Al-
though it could be noted that the approach to decolonization that
they have collaboratively developed has many conceptual fallacies,
their definition of decoloniality requires short recapitulation. The
most important conceptual innovation Tlostanova and Mignolo in-
spired within the existing body of decolonial scholarship remains
an attribution of a decolonial impulse to the area of former socialist
countries in search for equality with the Western academic centres.

The praxis of decolonization of knowledge in this context signi-

fies the repeated efforts invested to empower the voices of “the colo-
nial subalterns” - in other words of those whose languages, religions,
social organization, and economic production have been denied and
suppressed jointly by the colonial and imperial power centres. The
entire conceptual apparatus developed by Tlostanova and Migno-
lo epistemologically operates through several core terms. The main
notion of theirs is ‘learning to unlearn’, which denotes a continual
reflection on the facts we have learnt and memorized, and their per-

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 Decolonial Emancipation on the Postsocialist Peripheries

petual critical reconsideration from time to time. In the field of edu-

cational science, this is much better known as the approach of con-
tinuous or permanent learning. The first stage implies de-learning
of all the adopted modern creeds and putting them in a postsocialist
context, and a subsequent phase of re-learning implies that things
learned through comprehension on a higher level, i.e. while achieving
a more powerful stage of positional self-consciousness, prevents them
from remaining stuck into the oppressive colonial matrix of power.
Among the rest of the notions important to mention are the exter-
nal and internal imperial differences, external and internal colonial
differences, border thinking, border consciousness, global colonial-
ity, pluriversality, zero-point epistemology, and the colonial wound.

The learning to unlearn strategy is starting from a motivation im-

pulse named the ‘colonial wound’ coming from the feeling of subjective
refusal to accept subjugation and exclusion accumulated while living
under the externally imposed imperial rule and domination. However,
both Tlostanova and Mignolo avoid explaining this wound by identity
markers such as class origin, poor social conditions for development or
some kind of disability, and mostly think it is a consequence of being
put and understood as inferior from the point of view of the more
advanced nations. Furthermore, they both avoid thematizing the eco-
nomic aspects of oppression, mostly rejecting the communist alterna-
tive in the same way they oppose modernity and postmodernity. The
main argument of both Tlostanova and Mignolo is that in principle,
normatively speaking, there is a potential of epistemic equity among
the peripheral spaces with the central power positions which is the de-
velopmental ideal that postsocialist places should aim at. ‘Border think-
ing’ is a peripheral epistemic response of detachment from the Western
epistemology, but it is still founded on it, despite this being in the man-
ner of opposing it. ‘Global coloniality’ is a state in which many periph-
eral structures of knowledge production have found themselves after
most of the former colonies have gained independence; they simply
remained dependent on all-important developmental processes. The

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Sanja Petkovska

colonial matrix of power is divided by internal and external imperial and

colonial differences: while the ‘internal colonial difference’ is referring
to the European internal others such as Romani and Jews, the ‘internal
imperial difference’ refers to conflicting history relations among the
Western capitalist empires themselves. On the other side, ‘the external
imperial difference’ is the difference between the entire former USSR
space and the Western empires, while ‘the external colonial difference’
in Europe is the relation to Indians and Africans and other peoples com-
ing from the places ruled by Europeans at certain points of history, still
bearing the cultural mark of this (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012: 2-3).

The final goal of ‘learning to unlearn’ through constant re-learning

and de-learning is to achieve a ‘border consciousness’ and ‘pluriver-
sality’ instead of accepting the epistemological dominance of Western
modernity and ‘zero-point epistemology’. The zero-point epistemol-
ogy is referring to an open and active negation of all the other per-
spectives by the hegemonic system of knowledge and those advocating
it. The thought pursued by Tlostanova and Mignolo became recent-
ly quite influential mainly because it opened the floor to discuss the
position of the former socialist knowledge system within the global
academic structures of power, later followed by many other influen-
tial attempts to employ the concept of decolonization in the context of
emancipation of the former socialist knowledge production and trans-
mission systems and actors. With the purpose to provide additional in-
sights, two such attempts will be summarized, distinct because they do
not have the ambition to form an independent epistemological system
from which the modern Western epistemological core has been extinct.

Research Methodologies for Studying Decolonial

Emancipation: From Hermeneutics to Geo-Comparative
Politics

The general problem with decolonization is duality in the core of

this notion: it represents at the same time a theoretical and a meth-

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 Decolonial Emancipation on the Postsocialist Peripheries

odological notion, therefore these aspects are often mixed in usage

and are hard to separate. A definition of decolonization often appears
tautological, leading to sometimes confusing, contradictory, and con-
flicting applications across different branches of research in social
sciences and humanities. In combination with emancipation, on the
other hand, decolonization could simply be defined as a complex at-
tempt of finding a scholarly way for improving the damage coming as
a result of all kinds of subjugations, marginalizations and all the other
inequalities certain groups are facing.

These debates on decolonization mostly remained limited to the

circles of critical social science and critical pedagogy and never became
central, thus the impression remained that a scientific base of decolo-
nial emancipation in educational theory and educational research is at
the same time saturated and unfinished. Speaking of educational sys-
tems’ learning outcomes that could be observable and measurable, we
see that trying to capture and purposely balance the socially and cultur-
ally grounded inequalities in education cannot produce solutions that
can simultaneously bring standardized individual and visible collective
improvements. Rather, this duality between subjective and collective
level seems to bring these two dimensions into perpetual tension: the
hierarchical organization of society and social relations remaining
strong on the one hand, versus inequalities attributed to the differ-
ences caused by identity issues and national, gender, ethical, class, and
other social predispositions with incurable consequences (Gross 2010:
9). Most of the social and political phenomena related to the concepts
of decolonization and emancipation are inseparable from the attempt
to find solutions for the problem of reducing inequality with the help
of education and learning. Two indicative and valuable examples will
be provided: firstly, the basics of Chela Sandoval’s critical and emanci-
patory decolonial pedagogy, and secondly, the summary of the opus of
a contemporary comparative and global education scholar Iveta Silova.

The best advancements of the decolonial emancipation within educa-

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Sanja Petkovska

tion after Freire mostly occurred a few decades ago, outside of the ed-
ucational theory and pedagogy strictly speaking, within the third wave
of gender and women’s studies. Postcolonial and third world femi-
nism research, despite having had a notable reception in the context
of former socialist states, was not of much practical use for teaching
and learning problems. Although preserving emancipatory discourse
and terminology while moving forward to relatively well-refined cur-
rent postcolonial theory is the biggest value of emancipatory deco-
lonial ideas born in this framework, it is outdated in terms of giving
too much space to hermeneutical tradition and avoiding dealing with
the challenge of social structures. Chela Sandoval in her famous book
Methodology of the Oppressed (2000) where even the title is a rephras-
ing of Freire, is a great example of why even later on both emancipa-
tory and decolonial pedagogy had to be pushed forwards. This book
is anything but just one more attempt in line, it is considered as a
greatly influential international attempt of pursuing decolonization
by theoretical means. As Sandoval openly states, her basic assumption
was to understand the “decolonial impulses as transformative effects
of oppressed speech upon dominant forms of perception” (Sando-
val 2000: 67). Her main level and aspects of targeting inequality was
solely and explicitly only the symbolic domain of language. Sandoval
took postmodern continental philosophy as her overall approach but
avoided dealing with too much critical examination on how her the-
ory might be practised in schools, by pedagogues, teachers, or even
university professors. Her focus was on the inner consciousness of
the individual subjects themselves, and the procedure of emancipa-
tion is understood by her to happen entirely intersubjectively, result-
ing in the achievement she named as the ‘oppositional consciousness’.

Through the alternative apparatuses of analysis and decoding

which came out of epistemological and theoretical underpinnings of
postmodern globalism, it is assumed that access to a different con-
sciousness will solve and improve social relations in real educational
situations. These concrete steps did not also include the precise ac-

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 Decolonial Emancipation on the Postsocialist Peripheries

companying teaching method, and we could assume it could even take

the form of reflexive and meditative training that does not take the
shape of a collective and systematic education program and curricu-
lum. Despite being widely popular and well known, this conceptual-
ization of emancipatory decolonization is mainly descriptive and had
little chance to significantly influence educational science and practice,
because it is not easy to realize how to transfer the skill described as
intersubjective quality to anyone else. Since its importance lies mainly
in the field of gender studies or critical gender pedagogy, it did not
affect much of the most prominent and famous critical education
scholars facing the practical problems of education in the global era.

On the other hand, from a slightly different disciplinary back-

ground than humanities, is a complex outline of how to conceptualize
theoretical and empirical research according to the principles of deco-
lonial emancipation which is coming from a disciplinarily considerably
different context if compared to the previous example. Professor of
global and comparative higher education Iveta Silova originally comes
from the former socialist spaces but has spent a considerable amount of
time working for prominent American universities. Silova contributed
a much more systematic and analytical methodology of implementing
the decolonial approach in comparative and global education. In sever-
al of her highly influential books, she is developing a comparative edu-
cational approach for geopolitical topics that is based on the decolonial
principles, since mostly she is focused on the postsocialist difference
within a map of global education systems.

In comparison to Chela Sandoval, Silova does not insist on the

transformative potential of decolonial emancipatory education and
learning on the level of individual processes of positional self-con-
sciousness, but rather is directly heading to the geopolitical level of
structural dependence determining the overall position of the knowl-
edge production and distribution systems in postsocialist types of gov-
erning infrastructures. The intention is to provide an additional exam-

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Sanja Petkovska

ple of how decolonial emancipation might work in applied research

based on advanced social and educational theory. It should be men-
tioned that one of the earliest and most important writings of Silova
are the articles about rediscovering the postsocialist area in a compar-
ative perspective in which she is counterpoising education in the post-
socialist regions and in the former non-aligned regions to establish a
joint research framework for marginalized and peripheral educational
systems (Silova 2010: 2). Therefore, her overall goal is the decolonial
emancipation of former socialist spaces by their advancement beyond
their status of the periphery of the academic occurrences and beyond
their marginalization in international knowledge relations.

Two important books by Silova are worth mentioning as an il-

lustration of a well-structured and well-supported implementation
of the idea of decolonial emancipation in the field of global compar-
ative education. The first of the books to be shortly summarized is
Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies: Memories of Every-
day Life (2018). This book was co-edited with other internationally
prominent scholars who were raised in various former socialist coun-
tries such as Latvia, Hungary, Russia, and other South-Eastern Euro-
pean and Euro-Asian countries. The contributions are based on the au-
toethnographies of the schooling experiences of the scholars, in other
words, the reflections and memory narratives prepared by the authors
which also put them in a comparative perspective among themselves.
Most of these scholars associated with different disciplinary domains,
after being raised and initially educated in some of the former social-
ist countries, moved to pursue prominent academic careers at globally
leading universities. The main goal of these autobiographies was to
provide a sufficient understanding of how it could be possible to decol-
onize your own experience of being subjected to an inferior position.
The authors tried to avoid any kind of universalization of the experi-
ences of childhood and schooling in former socialist countries (Silova,
Piattoeva, and Millei 2018: 4-6). The autoethnographic method was
chosen because it is a “powerful counter-hegemonic practice” since “the

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 Decolonial Emancipation on the Postsocialist Peripheries

subjects of knowing become knowing subjects who are now autho-

rized to speak on their behalf”, on the opposite side of master narra-
tives blind for any “politics of difference” (Young and Allen 2011: 7).

Another book prepared by Silova and colleagues Reimagining

Utopias (Kovalchuk, Silova, Sobe and Korzh 2017) is even more im-
portant as it focuses explicitly on research dilemmas surrounding nu-
merous attempts to understand educational change in the former so-
cialist world and pursue relevant empirical research on it. As it has
been stated in the book, some of the advanced research can easily fail to
capture the essence of post-socialist experiences and realities situated
within a complicated social and political context (Kovalchuk, Silova,
Sobe and Korzh 2017: 2). From the perspective of junior researchers
interested in former socialist spaces, it is essential to be intensively en-
gaged in the fieldwork and to demonstrate the capacity for reflexivi-
ty. Another expectation from qualitative fieldwork researchers in the
postsocialist context is the strategic use of one’s multiple identities in
all kinds of negotiations (Kovalchuk, Silova, Sobe and Korzh 2017: 7).

Therefore, to remain critical, educational research in the postso-

cialist context shall continue to refer to social sciences and humanities,
critically grounded pedagogy, and the potential for decolonial eman-
cipation to enlarge and improve the possibilities of its application in
different contexts. Educational theory and policy are always related to
the contexts and not easily transferable from society to society, nor
from culture to culture. What might seem impossible or contradictory
in some instances is a defining point for educational research, since us-
ing reflexivity as an analytical tool and research technique comes with
a great risk if not counterpoised on the other side with the structural,
system, institutional or policy analyses, or some other supplementing
methodologies.

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Sanja Petkovska

Conclusions

Starting from the initial argument that education on the postso-

cialist peripheries should necessarily be both emancipatory and deco-
lonial, through the definition of what decolonization means and how
it could be pursued and developed in educational theory and practice,
including the related disciplines, at the concluding segment it should be
highlighted that the importance of emancipatory decolonization is to
be understood in the context of geopolitical positioning. The main aim
of emancipation and decolonization is epistemic equity to be achieved
through detachment from the colonial matrix of power and less mis-
balanced knowledge production and distribution systems. Freire’s
method was a tool that helped to reflect on what it means to be put in
the inferior position in the relationship of knowledge transfer (Freire
and Macedo 2000: 11). The real question is what decolonial method
has added to the approach of critical pedagogy, in terms of the differ-
ence between what emancipation signified before the global education
crisis and what it means now.

The future of decolonial options within emancipatory progressive

education is especially important concerning the weakening geopo-
litical position of former socialist countries and the identity crisis of
many of them which could be prevented. Employing decolonial eman-
cipation to strengthen the knowledge production and distribution of
postsocialist countries might be the most important future task on the
European peripheries. Decolonial emancipation should instruct post-
socialist subjects to position themselves within geopolitical structures
of power and raise their voice and capacities to improve their ability to
stand for themselves and create their unique bodies and structures of
knowledge.

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References:

Acheraïou, Amar (2011), “Decolonizing Postcolonial Discourse”, in: A.

Acheraïou (ed.), Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization.
London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 185–97.
Betts, Raymond (2004), Decolonization. New York: Routledge.
Coombs, Philip H. (1968), The World Educational Crisis: A Systems
Analysis. Oxford University Press.
De Sousa Santos, Boaventura (2014), Epistemologies of the South: Justice
Against Epistemicide. New York: Routledge.
Featherstone, Liza (2020), “Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at
Fifty”. JSTOR Daily.
Available at: https://daily.jstor.org/paulo-freires-pedagogy-of-the-op-
pressed-at-fifty/ (accessed: 04.04.2021).
Freire, Paulo and Donaldo Macedo (2010), Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th
Anniversary Edition, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Gross, Stefan. (2010), “Inequality and Emancipation: An Educational
Approach”. Journal of Education and Research 2: 9–16.
Young, Iris Marion and Danielle S. Allen (2011), Justice and the Politics of
Difference. Revised edition, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Kovalchuk, Serhiy, Iveta Silova, Noah W. Sobe and Alla Korzh (2017),
Reimagining Utopias. Brill Sense.
Mignolo, Walter D. (2011), The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global
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Istraživačko-izdavački centar SSO Srbije.
Radford, Luis (2012), “Education and the Illusions of Emancipation”.
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Sandoval, Chela (2000), Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis, MN:
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and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies: Memories of Everyday Life. London:
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Publications, pp. 186-204.
Tlostanova, Madina V. and Walter D. Mignolo (2012), Learning to
Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. Columbus:
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Tuck, Eve, and Wayne K. Yang (2012), “Decolonization Is Not a
Metaphor”. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1-40.
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Politics of Education”. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31 (1): 119–34

184
 EDUCATIONAL TOOLS
OF EMANCIPATION

Mikhail Bukhtoyarov1
Anna Bukhtoyarova2

Educational Technology:
From Educational
Anarchism to Educational
Totalitarianism

Границы ключ переломлен пополам...

The key to the border is broken in half...
Yegor Letov, 1988
(Soviet /Russian punk rock poet)

Introduction

Educational Technology, EdTech, is a rapidly growing field

that integrates theoretical and applied aspects of techno-social ap-
proach to education. In the recent decade, it has become one of the
major trends of the world education market, educational culture and

1  Philosophy Department, Siberian Federal University: mbukhtoyarov@sfu-kras.ru;

mikebukhtoyarov@gmail.com.
2  Institute of Continuing Education, Siberian Federal University: abukhtoyarova@sfu-kras.ru;
annabukhtoyarova@gmail.com.

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M. Bukhtoyarov, A. Bukhtoyarova

politics, the response to the digital revolution and societal change. The
development of EdTech has accelerated even more as a result of face-
to-face instruction limitations caused by the COVID-19 pandemics.

As educational technology is advancing and extending throughout

various contexts of human learning, there is a growing demand for
conceptualization and critical analysis of EdTech through the lens of
philosophy, and especially political philosophy, educational philoso-
phy, as well as ethics.

Employing technology for education is not a new phenomenon but

its comprehension has been evolving for the previous half a century. In
1977 the Association for Educational Communications and Technolo-
gy defined EdTech as “a complex, integrated process involving people,
procedures, ideas, devices and organization for analysing problems and
devising, implementing, evaluating and managing solutions to those
problems involved in all aspects of human learning” (Association for
Educational Communications and Technology 1977). Thirty years
later their definition became even broader and currently states that:

Educational technology is the study and ethical practice of facilitating

learning and improving performance by creating, using and manag-
ing appropriate technological processes and resources. (Association
for Educational Communications and Technology 2008).

Apparently, one of the major changes in the definition is the em-

phasis on ethical implementation of processes and resources that re-
quires evaluation of their improving potential. This evolution of the
concept reflects the growing recognition of the intrinsic ideologies that
“are mobilized to shape ethics and justify internal policies and interac-
tions” (Haase 2017: 630) within educational context.

Ideology that is generally perceived as a “framework of ideas which

a community uses to define values and to make them explicit” (Lorge
1982: 86) has its particular meaning within the EdTech domain. It of-

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ten assumes “inclusive ideologies embedded in the design, development

and use of technology” (Amory 2007: 657). The intrinsically ideological
nature of EdTech is reflected in specific features that are often defined
by the architecture and design of the instructional tools or by the in-
formation ecosystem. In many cases EdTech establishes rules that can
have higher impact than the interests or choices of the learning com-
munities or individual learners, teachers and other consumers or users
of the technology.

The concept of EdTech now engages multiple disciplines such as

psychology, neuroscience, pedagogy, social science, computer science,
cybernetics, legal studies, management, and others that are shaping “an
inherently interdisciplinary enterprise” (Spector 2015: 11). Educational
technology practices involve various interested parties that influence
the ways EdTech is developed, implemented, and becomes obsolete.
However, the critical analysis of the socio-political role of particular
educational technologies is not common.

Educational Institutions, Technology and Data

One of the hidden but most significant aspects of EdTech is the ma-
jor change it brings to the traditional roles of stakeholders in education
because of “the underlying challenges and issues faced by the differ-
ent user groups involved in the technology implementation processes”
(Chew 2018: 176). EdTech also introduces new types of stakeholders,
previously unrelated to education, such as IT services, digital content
providers, software companies, hardware manufacturers and vendors,
governmental policy regulators, information security agencies, and oth-
er entities influencing digital ecosystems in terms of both infrastructure
maintenance and process management. Corporate education and human
resource management also become equipped with technology and ac-
tively develop new forms of training and assessment for the employees.

The role of educational institutions is undergoing deep transfor-

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M. Bukhtoyarov, A. Bukhtoyarova

mation because of the various forms of distance learning and blended

instruction throughout the curricula. Their core process is becoming
sociotechnical and dependent on particular IT solutions. In addition
to establishing and supporting the traditional brick-and-mortar instruc-
tional environment, designing, implementing, and administering the
curricula, the majority of educational institutions are now responsi-
ble for the digital infrastructure with growing amounts of education-
al data and personal data which fall under strict regulations. Schools,
universities, and other educational institutions are supposed to “pre-
pare, license, and provide professional support for teachers, tutors,
coaches, and mentors who were trained to orchestrate their coor-
dinated activities through the use of a sophisticated technology in-
frastructure” (Dede 2011: 4). Educators and educational administrators
become users who have access to various levels and functions of a tech-
nical system, and it transforms the roles they play in the organization.

The majority of users of an EdTech system are learners who

constantly generate data. Educational data collection and analysis
or learning analytics (LA) engage processing “data about learner and
teacher activities, identifying patterns of behaviour and providing
actionable information to improve learning and learning-related ac-
tivities” (Maseleno et al. 2018: 1124). Therefore, anonymized ser-
vices or services that do not track user activities are extremely rare
in the EdTech domain where monitoring a personalized learning
path is an important factor for the efficiency of educational process.

For example, learning management systems (LMSs) or platforms, a

widespread class of EdTech entities, are based on the hierarchy of access
to different parts and functions of the system (courses, content, admin-
istrative tools), and to the data generated by users. LMS platforms al-
low users with higher administrative rights to transform excessive data
from the LMS log “into educationally relevant information” (Whit-
mer, Fernandes & Allen 2012). The processed data are employed by
technicians, managers, and increasingly artificial intelligence for mak-

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ing informed decisions at both individual and organizational levels.

The issue is that the learner is usually placed at the lowest level in
the hierarchy of access to data and metadata within this environment.
Digital learner’s degree of freedom is determined by the designer of the
platform and the permissions granted by the upper levels of the users
with more privileges (course instructors, content designers, techni-
cal administrators). Moreover, the architecture and design of the vast
majority of EdTech systems often intend to limit the learner’s choices
in order to lead him/her alongside a particular path with a number
of possible variations based on the previous results. This approach is
reflected in the design of contemporary EdTech systems and, as we
argue, in the intrinsic ideology of the entire digital learning ecosystem.

Contemporary solutions in educational technology “involve evalu-

ating students’ likely learning profiles on applications that use big data
to categorize individual learning styles and then direct appropriate
learning activities to those students” (Regan 2019: 168). Continuous
data collection and analysis serve as a mechanism for providing inter-
active and adaptive content, as well as for further development of the
system itself. The more data collected from an individual learner, the
better individualization can be achieved. Even the data generated from
non-learning activities and non-educational data (biometric, social,
psychological) can be utilized. But that raises “a range of ethical ques-
tions such as levels of visibility, aggregation, and surveillance” (Slade
2013: 1514). The data and metadata collected during the educational
process become the basis for data-driven management in organizations
or even on a larger scale when it comes to the regional or national sys-
tems of education.

EdTech implementation brings a new perspective on another type

of stakeholder, making members of households partially responsible
for the technical infrastructure of education. Technology-supported
learning and teaching occur beyond the classroom regardless of their

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M. Bukhtoyarov, A. Bukhtoyarova

time and place. The data collected via the educational software or ser-
vices (IPs, technical characteristics of devices and software, file meta-
data, etc.) can become an additional source of security issues or raise
ethical concerns.

Educators traditionally have a wider range of choices for de-

cision-making than learners do. Within EdTech systems they are
granted a higher level of access and administrative rights accordingly.
Technology-mediated teacher-learner interaction varies from direct
classroom-like experiences through web conferencing or webinars to
automated ‘teacherless learning’ such as intelligent tutoring systems
(ITSs) guiding “learners through each step of a problem solution by
creating hints and feedback” (Kulik 2016: 43). In either case, educators
shape the learning experience by providing the context and the con-
tent, but they are limited in their choices by the existing EdTech tools.

Administrators of educational institutions have the highest level of

access to the data and the largest number of options for decision-mak-
ing. But with the introduction of EdTech, their decisions are increas-
ingly restricted by the intrinsic policies of the platforms and applica-
tions inherent in them by design. So, the administrators are obligated
to balance between the internal institutional regulations and external
EdTech protocols. Their decision-making becomes even more chal-
lenging when there is a contradiction between them. For example,
many EdTech services may originate from educational and regulatory
environments different from the institutional policies the administra-
tors are required to comply with. This becomes especially critical for
learning analytics data administration.

Considering that EdTech is the industry producing “commer-

cially available digital technologies used by teachers and learners”
(Mirrlees 2019: 2), educational technology developers and service pro-
viders represent a new type of stakeholders involved in the learning
process. This group of stakeholders has significant control over the

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 Educational Technology

design and functioning of the EdTech systems. In most cases, they

also have access to the user data or metadata collection and analysis.
When educational institutions rely on cloud solutions (SaaS, PaaS
technologies) they become a part of larger network infrastructure
of commercial or governmental companies and sources of the data.
There is an ongoing public discussion on the issue that “promising
cost savings and productivity efficiency, EdTech companies offer ed-
ucators big data analysis by collecting and providing access to student
information” (Rhoades 2020: 446) without proper ethical constraints.

EdTech developers often announce a particular educational philos-

ophy or learning theory (e.g. behaviourist, cognitivist, constructivist)
behind their product, especially when it comes to positioning on the
educational market. They can utilize popular concepts in order to con-
struct a desirable image for the target audience and tie the technology
to social values. For instance, open-source software and openly licensed
resources are often described as bringing freedom and equal access to
their users, and thus democratizing education. Companies that develop
and distribute tools for corporate training and assessment often em-
phasize the ideas of control, tracking, efficiency (including cost efficiency
and speed), and security. Large-scale governmental projects can be pro-
moted with the concepts of unification, standardization, and quality as-
surance, as well as innovation, development. International initiatives come
with the ideas of collaboration and connectedness (Horvath et al. 2015).

Hence, we argue that the EdTech systems and solutions can be

considered and classified according to the ideology they bring to the
learning process.

Educational Ideologies and Technology

Ideologies have been studied from various perspectives for more

than two hundred years. Though there are numerous definitions of
this term, ideology generally represents “a set of beliefs which (i) per-

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M. Bukhtoyarov, A. Bukhtoyarova

tains to abstract features of social life and (ii) is used for explaining and
justifying means and ends of the collective action by (iii) some group of
people” (Konarzewski 1998: 260).

Educational ideology can be broadly seen as “a set of assumptions

regarding education” (Fiala 2007: 19). More specifically Le Van Canh
defines educational ideology as a “shared body of principles and be-
liefs concerning the nature of knowledge, the nature of teaching and
learning — including cultural assumptions about the roles of teachers
and learners — and the purpose of education” (Van Canh 2004). He
also stresses that the means and models of teaching rely on the ways
these ideologies are implemented in a particular educational setting.

Lisa Murphy, Emmanuel Mufi and Derek Kassem define education-

al ideology as “a broad set of beliefs and opinions about the purpose
and function of education and its formal arrangements, and/or about
how they ought to be, held by the individual and by groups of individ-
uals” (Murphy, Mufti & Kassem 2009: 28). They claim that educational
ideologies can often be contradictory and complicated to categorize
(Murphy, Mufti & Kassem 2009: 26).

All these definitions include collective assumptions, beliefs, and im-

ply a shared view on how learning and teaching occur. We define ed-
ucational ideology as a complex conceptual system that regulates epis-
temic, ethical, and political aspects of education through conventional
social practices.

Educational ideology can be considered from both theoretical and

applied perspectives. As a theoretical concept, it is “classified according
to philosophical criteria” (Konarzewski 1998: 261) corresponding to
particular intellectual tradition. The applied approach implies “accep-
tance of the structural solution” reflected in the “adjustment between
education and economy” (Heintz 1965: 26). We presume that educa-
tional ideology is the basis for the ethical framework justifying choices

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 Educational Technology

for policy-making in the educational context.

One of the most well-grounded taxonomies of educational ide-

ologies was introduced by William F. O’Neil (O’Neil 1981), who di-
vided them into conservative (fundamentalism, intellectualism, con-
servatism) and liberal (liberalism, libertarianism, anarchism). Though
O’Neill did not attribute particular forms of instruction to the ideologies
and even warned against such classification (O’Neil 1981: XVII), we can
find alternatives to this approach. Ziv Lamm writes in 1986: “On the
pedagogical level, decisions about the methods of educational activity
(such as authoritarianism versus permissiveness, separate versus co-ed-
ucation of the sexes, etc.) are all ideological - dependent” (Lamm 1986).

The borderlines between ideological and non-ideological are often

hard to draw because educational practices are difficult to separate
from other social practices implying formal and non-formal learning.
Similarly, it may be unclear when political ideology becomes educa-
tional ideology and vice versa. Education has significant potential for
disseminating ideological values and political practices in the class-
room and beyond, even when it claims to be apolitical. Therefore, it is
often recognized as a high priority of national, regional, and local reg-
ulations. However, some instructional practices may intrinsically bear
educational philosophies and ethics that are opposite to the officially
declared principles.

When it comes to educational technology, its relation to the ideolo-

gy can be recognized as inherent. As George Siemens, one of the found-
ers of the connectivist learning theory said in 2016 when EdTech was
already a major trend: “Our technology is our ideology” (McNeal 2016).
On a very broad scale, educational technologies can become incarnated
as ideological tools continuously shaping learning, teaching and man-
agement of the educational process within an organization (e.g. school,
university), industry (corporate training and professional certification)
or the educational system of a region, country, or even internationally.

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M. Bukhtoyarov, A. Bukhtoyarova

In 2006 Kiraz and Ozdemir conducted research based on O’Neil’s

taxonomy to figure out the degree of acceptance of technology in
education in relation to the educational ideology. The proposed
classification ranges from the least accepting among those who fall
into the category of educational fundamentalism, liberalism, and
educational anarchism to the most accepting among those of in-
tellectualism, conservatism, and libertarianism (Kiraz & Ozdemir
2006: 154). This drives us to the dichotomy: technopositivist ed-
ucational ideologies versus technoscepticism (Njenga 2010) as an
important ground for the classification of educational ideologies.

Therefore, the development of technically empowered educational

practices raises the issue of educational ideology to a new level. When
we are moving towards the learning society by employing the inter-
nationally recognized paradigm of lifelong learning (Edwards 1997:
183-185) the voice of educational ideologies introduced and dissem-
inated through EdTech becomes ubiquitous, influencing other as-
pects of life. That is why presumably it is necessary to define which
technical solutions tend to represent particular educational ideologies.

Our hypothesis states that while an educational technolo-

gy can appear, be developed and promoted inside the liberal part
of the spectrum of educational ideologies, serving their needs
both on conceptual and on applied levels, the same technology
has a very strong tendency to move towards a less liberal ideolo-
gy when implemented throughout the educational system. In or-
der to analyse educational technologies in terms of their relations to
educational ideologies, we intend to employ a dichotomy of the ex-
tremes from educational anarchism to educational totalitarianism.

EdTech and Educational Anarchism

The philosophical literature on educational anarchism is quite rich:

from Leo Tolstoy’s liberal education (Tolstoy 1989) and Ivan Illich’s

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Deschooling Society with his claim that “we must disestablish school”
(Illich 1971: 1) to contemporary educational blogs and channels cel-
ebrating the diversity of learning theories, educational practices, and
technologies. It was not our goal to provide an extensive literature re-
view on the topic, but even a brief plunge into the texts representing
the phenomenon gives the impression of a highly fragmented anar-
chist theoretical agenda as well as countless cases that range from dein-
stitutionalization of learning to designing and creating open and free
instructional practices, individualized curricula and instructional meth-
ods inside the existing traditional and hierarchical educational settings.

The meaning of educational anarchism can be very broad, such as

“a ‘just do it’ approach to education” (Beaulier 2010: 29). However, it
can also be shaped conceptually with clear and narrow characteristics.
According to Eugene Matusov, contemporary educational anarchism
is based on several overriding principles such as dialogue, self-orga-
nization, students’ right to control their learning, critical approach to
ideas (including education), respect for non-cooperation and student
agency (Matusov 2015).

With regard to EdTech, the anarchist educational ideology is

closely related to the concepts of edupunk (Miller 2018: 4) and con-
nectivist learning (Connectivism pedagogy 2017) and rooted in epis-
temological anarchism. Formal education rarely relies on these
concepts at the institutional level and in policy-making. Howev-
er, educators who design and test frontier practices, conduct ex-
periments, implement elements of this ideology often without get-
ting into deep philosophical analysis and conceptual evaluation.
EdTech start-ups producing learner-centred technologies, the range
of informal and non-formal educational initiatives and communi-
ties, and the growing domain of edutainment content rely on this ap-
proach, for example, some EdTech start-ups aimed at peer learning.

Signs of educational anarchism in EdTech can be traced in the

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M. Bukhtoyarov, A. Bukhtoyarova

practices and tools which empower the learner and protect the learn-
er’s control over the content and learning activities, as well as over the
definition of one’s educational goals. It maximizes the learner’s agency.
The technology serves merely as a means that facilitates implementing
the learner’s free will.

What EdTech solutions move learning toward the educational

anarchist ideological domain? Building personal learning networks,
participating in self-organized cross-platform communities of learn-
ers and teachers, involvement in the practices of creating and utili-
zation of open knowledge bases and other crowdsourced educational
resources, wiki-based and torrent-based content sharing, DIY ap-
proach, open and free (non-proprietary) solutions, peer assessment
and self-assessment, flexibility or lack of standardization represent the
‘anarchist’ domain of EdTech.

The ability to freely and openly access educational resources, in-

cluding the content, the individuals and groups, technologies, and ac-
quire knowledge and skills via a variety of practices, and having control
over one’s own individual learning path justifies this type of learning.
But this significant individual agency comes with the limitations of the
anarchist ideology. Modern EdTech is influenced by the trend of mar-
ketization and the demand for organizational functions of educational
technologies. Anarchist educational ideology is hardly acceptable for
complex hierarchical structures such as national educational systems
or large corporate bodies.

The biggest obstacles to anarchist learning are the decline of net-

work neutrality, segmentation of the internet, lack of platform inde-
pendence, and domination of server-centric architecture of EdTech
solutions. This causes the learner to lose control over personal data and
limits the ability of non-participation and anonymity. The trends in
EdTech starting with the second decade of the 21st century are leading
the technology away from educational anarchism.

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EdTech and Educational Totalitarianism

Educational totalitarianism is supposed to be an extreme oppo-

sition to educational anarchism. Although O’Neill does not use the
term educational totalitarianism to distinguish a separate educational
ideology in his taxonomy, he mentions totalitarianism as the form of
“absolute state control over virtually all significant forms of individ-
ual behavior” (O’Neill 1981: 131). We suggest adding the concept of
educational totalitarianism to the classification regarding the types of
educational technology used as the means of such control. The rea-
son for the addition of such an extreme form of educational ideology
to the existing classification is the growing power and dominance of
technology that has the potential to transform educational institu-
tions on the conservative side of the ideological spectrum into the dys-
topian techno-social systems of behaviour modification and control.

O’Neill uses the term fundamentalism to characterize the opposi-

tion to educational anarchism (O’Neill 1981). However, any other
ideology can be viewed as anti-anarchist to a certain extent because
all of them project the interests of stakeholders with their political
powers and support limitations of learner’s choices. That is why we
argue that there is a need for introducing educational totalitarianism
that would be the extreme point of the ideological spectrum oppo-
site to educational anarchism. This concept emphasizes the highest
level of power to limit learner’s agency, monitor and influence the
educational path and control multiple aspects of learning behaviour
and communication throughout the educational process and beyond.

To our knowledge, there is no commonly shared definition of ed-

ucational totalitarianism in the research literature. But there is a con-
cept of totalitarian education introduced by Thomas Woody in 1940. He
specifies common principles for the totalitarian education including
aristocracy, or timocracy (vs “natural right”); anti-pluralism; anti-ra-
tionalism; collectivism; activism (Woody 1940: 44-50). We consider

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M. Bukhtoyarov, A. Bukhtoyarova

these principles applicable to the ideology of educational totalitarianism.

There is a strong opinion in the philosophical literature that the

concept of totalitarianism is closely related to technology. For in-
stance, Herbert Marcuse states that “technology serves to institute
new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and
social cohesion” to the point where there is no more neutrality of
technology and a “society is a system of domination which operates
already in the concept and construction of techniques” (Marcuse 2013).

The critical approach has already indicated the tendency of tech-

nology to dominate the reproduction of social relations, with educa-
tion being the most ubiquitous and systemic institutionalized form.
James M. Van Der Laan wrote in “Education, Technology and Total-
itarianism” that “technology has always equated with the exercise of
power, specifically power over the natural world as well as power over
human beings” (Van Der Laan 1997: 237).

We argue that the major factor that characterizes education-

al totalitarianism is the amount of control over learners and subse-
quently over other types of stakeholders leading to the limitation of
their choices and resulting in extreme forms of objectivation. The
more choices and behaviours are defined by the architecture of the
systems, the closer this practice is to educational totalitarianism.

Signs of educational totalitarianism in EdTech are becoming visi-

ble when teacher’s functions are shifted to the authoritative classroom
management model and reinforced with the help of classroom man-
agement software or even hardware for proctoring. Such technologies
can automate control of environments and groups of learners, provide
the tools for reinforcement and punishment, and turn the classroom
and other educational settings into an educational version of Jeremy
Bentham’s panopticon. With distance and blended educational solu-
tions, the visibility of the authoritarian model can be less obvious, but

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 Educational Technology

in the long run, they provide an even more advanced behaviour modi-
fication expanding the controlled learning environment.

More advanced and systemic forms of educational totalitarianism

evolve on the level of organizational and state EdTech solutions when
technology leaves the purely educational domain and becomes the
means of administrative control. Such technology grants specific priv-
ileges to those who are not directly involved in learning and teaching,
giving them the advantage of silent and anonymous (from the lower
levels in the hierarchy point of view) monitoring and decision making.

Some elements of control that have the potential to become exces-

sive can be found in state or corporate educational and EdTech stan-
dards, as well as in state or corporate educational institutions which
transform their routines so that they meet the holistic vision of the
digital environment: platform-based and platform-dependent content,
proprietary software, hardware and protocols, strict security policies,
tracking user activities, and hierarchical access to educational and per-
sonal data.

One more sign is either tracking or limitation of informal com-

munications and uncontrolled social interactions in the educational
environment.

The most extreme forms evolve with the utilization of imposed

technologies. They are characterized by depriving the learners of con-
trol over their own data and assigning the learners a low position in the
hierarchy of the EdTech system, while granting access to other more
privileged groups of users, most of whom are not directly involved in
educational interaction and communication. Such technologies as user
tracking and excessive data collection (especially over prolonged time
periods and involving biometric data), user behaviour analysis and
prediction, user retention, various forms of proctoring, can be easi-
ly utilized for the purpose of social ranking within an organization,

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M. Bukhtoyarov, A. Bukhtoyarova

community, or state.

This risk is increasing with the introduction of lifelong learning

based on assessment systems. Gerhart Fisher argues that “lifelong
learning is more than adult education and/or training — it is a mind-
set and a habit for people to acquire” (Fisher 2000: 3). This specific
mindset may be quite open to EdTech’s presence throughout one’s life-
time. If the involvement in EdTech practices starts at an early age, it
promotes the learner’s tolerance to continuous personal data collection
and processing as a regular part of life.

Although lifelong learning can be applied within any educa-

tional ideology it may tend to favour continuous monitoring, insis-
tent content suggestions and learner’s choice limitations based on
previous data analysis. To become an effective tool for human re-
source management, lifelong learning relies on the thorough track-
ing of the learner’s path throughout the years. We argue that these
features may reinforce the trend of educational totalitarianism.

The presence of these elements does not necessarily make ed-

ucation totalitarian, but they may increase the chances of moving in
the direction of educational totalitarianism with every new iteration
of the system. When combined they can create a dystopian picture
of inhumane training by means of the machine, where learners are
exploited and controlled for the good of the sociotechnical system.

In our opinion, the major factors defining whether a technology

shifts from a more liberal to a more oppressive one is its mandatory
use, the control over the collected data and metadata by the more pow-
erful stakeholders, as well as the policies and technical capabilities of
the data lifecycle. These factors become crucial when applied to large
audiences and become a long-term systemic process. The most extreme
danger of totalitarization derives from the combination of mandatory
lifelong learning and a forced, uncontested technopositivist approach.

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Conclusion

Educational technology of the 2020s reflects the continuum of ed-

ucational ideologies ranging from educational anarchism to the most
extreme educational totalitarianism. EdTech is bringing new mecha-
nisms of learners’ involvement and control. Educational ideologies be-
hind the architecture of EdTech applications, services, and platforms,
as well as the corresponding policies, need to be continuously ques-
tioned. All types of stakeholders related to EdTech should be aware
of the necessity of keeping the balance of benefits and risks, and espe-
cially of the ultimate risk of transformation into the totalitarian sys-
tem where individuals are divided into categories on the ground of
evaluation of their previous learning experiences with less room for
unrecorded trial and error.

Access to the educational data can be justified by the benefits for

learning experience and in many cases it is essential for the efficient
functioning and development of EdTech. However, when technology
is becoming increasingly advanced and ubiquitous, comprising uncon-
ventional aspects, EdTech leaves the purely educational domain and
becomes a universal yet ambivalent social and political instrument.

Educational ideologies can be applied as a framework for eval-

uation of EdTech tools and systems in order to explore and prevent
unethical practices. We suggest that EdTech should be continuously
assessed and reviewed with respect to its benefits and risks for differ-
ent types of stakeholders. We also argue that it is necessary to broaden
the public discussion and critical analysis of educational technologies
in relation to their scale and potential for socio-political influence.

... и все идет по плану.

... and everything is going according to the plan.
Yegor Letov, 1988
(Soviet /Russian punk rock poet)

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M. Bukhtoyarov, A. Bukhtoyarova

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Social Turn and Operative

Realism: Two Emancipatory
Methods of Contemporary
Art Practices

Introduction

Art practices of the 20th and 21st century are characterised by

a high degree of emancipation. Conceptual actions had ‘liberated’ art
from institutional frames making it present in far more places than just
in art galleries, mail-art enabled the international art scene at the time
of embargo in Serbia during the first half of the 1990s, while bio-art
practitioners combine scientific and artistic knowledge in a transdisci-
plinary manner. These are only a few of the numerous directions that
art takes in order to connect people and engage them in new societal
relations. As a result, contemporary art gains educational character
which impacts how visitors/participants relate to each other and to the
chosen topics. Applying the critical-analytical method, case study and
content analysis, this paper focuses on two methods that contemporary
artists use in their practices in order to address the social reality that
surrounds them.

The first method is the social turn which Claire Bishop used in
2006 to refer to practices that artists carry out with various commu-
nities. We relate such practices in this paper to the sociological re-
search method that is based on observation with participation. The

1  Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Arts, Belgrade: jankovsonja@gmail.com.

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Sonja Jankov

other artistic method discussed in the paper is what Nicolas Bourriaud

defines as operative realism, that is, works of art that were created us-
ing procedures from other disciplines, so that the distinction between
utilitarian and artistic functions of art installations is lost, placing a
visitor within a trans-disciplinary and multi-discursive environment.
Although all examples of community-engaged practices and operative
realism can be said to have an educational aspect as they reveal cer-
tain layers of reality, the paper turns to two installations by contem-
porary female artists Teresa Margolles and Vahida Ramujkić,2 notic-
ing that each artist employs both the social turn and operative realism in
their works, directly engaging in that way as many people as possible.

Teresa Margolles focuses on victims that have been killed as ‘col-

lateral damage’ of organized crime or are listed as ‘missing’, on their
families that live with the absence of their loved ones, and on peo-
ple who are outside of borders of social care, such as sex workers.
Although working in various media from photography, via sculp-
ture to installations and performative actions, the main material she
uses are physical, material traces of violent deaths, in particular the
residues of victims’ blood left over at the crime scenes which she col-
lects using forensic technology and moves afterwards into the dis-
course of art. Having a years-long experience of working as a state
forensic pathologist, Margolles encountered a number of unidentified
bodies of people that were killed in conflicts caused by organized crime
or near the Mexican-USA border. Working closely with the families
of claimed victims, Margolles draws attention of the wider public to
the fact that the final number of victims is not even known. In this pa-
per, we focus more closely on her installation What Else Could We Talk
About? (¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar?) which represented Mexico at
the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2009).

Vahida Ramujkić is a visual artist and activist who is especially

devoted to creating methodologies for collaborative learning and

2  For the more detailed biographies of the artists, please go to the end of the text.

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 Social Turn and Operative Realism

working. She usually works from within collectives or in collaboration

with participants who take part in practices that result in joint solu-
tions. She describes her work as environmental or contextual, as “it
creates conditions or situations to inspire new creative moments and
transformations at the personal and social level” (Ramujkić: internet
a). Concerned with the social function of art and aiming at establish-
ing greater social equality, Ramujkić has been working through open
workshops, often with refugees. In this paper, we will focus on one of
her long-term projects, Disputed Histories (since 2006) which brought
her the October Salon first prize in 2011 and was presented as an in-
stallation that employs operative realism in the Museum of Yugoslavia,
within the exhibition The Nineties: A Glossary of Migrations (Devedesete:
rečnik migracija) in 2019.

Both selected installations by Margolles and Ramujkić are exam-

ples of the social turn in art practices, but they also employ operative
realism. For that reason, they demonstrate how contemporary art
gains an engaging aspect, not only by including different communities
in artistic practice, but also by leaving them open for new visitors to
join and thus gain knowledge about the themes they address, or even
act upon them. Before we turn to a more in-depth analysis of both
installations, we will present some recent thoughts on the education-
al capacities of contemporary art practices and arts-based research.

Art as Means of Knowledge Production

Contemporary art practices and arts-based research practices have

been in the focus of recent theoretical and empirical research that takes
into account their capacity to address various social issues. Artistic
practices can thematize, narrate and reflect upon various aspects of
social realities, but they also have the capacity to engage viewers in ac-
tivities that enable them to gain new perspectives on (un)know social
problems. A lot of social issues – such as discrimination – represent
complex systems that require to be addressed from political, economic,

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Sonja Jankov

cultural, legislative, ethical, medical, and other perspectives.

According to Newell, such complex systems are different from any

other systems and are characterized by self-organizing and self-inte-
grating or self-synthesizing. Their overall behaviours are changed by
“unique behaviours at each location within the system” (Newell 2001:
9), which is to say, by minimal changes in any part of the system. For
that reason, they require an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary
approach, as they are too complex to be judged or solved through a
single discipline. Such approaches become methods of producing
new knowledge and they can also include artistic practices that can
make issues more relatable to a wider audience. Both artistic practic-
es and inter- and transdisciplinary approaches beyond them are ap-
plied as methodological means “to tackle problems in the ‘real world’”
(Wilthagen et al 2018: 13), as a “thematic approach to addressing an issue
that is beyond disciplinary boundaries” (Burgess and De Rosa 2009: 23).

Danielle Boutet approaches art as a mode of knowing, adding it to

other, more established methodologies such as the scientific mode
of enquiry, hermeneutic, speculative, and rational way of knowing,
quantitative and qualitative methodologies (Boutet 2012: 107). Art
is a creative mode of knowing that “does not interpret or analyse per-
sonal experience that has happened or content that is present in the
mind; it creates or sets conditions for such content to emerge from
an experience” (Boutet 2012: 112). The most important question, ac-
cording to Boutet, is “what one can know through art” (Boutet 2012:
113). Graeme Sullivan has a similar understanding of art, arguing for
the use of artistic form and arts-based research as the basis for edu-
cational inquiry. Through seeing and sensing, arts-based research
creates “new opportunities to see beyond what is known,” it creates
“forms from which critical options can be more clearly assessed and
addressed” (Sullivan 2006: 32) and, furthermore, it helps us relate to
and act on gained knowledge (Sullivan 2006: 22). For Sullivan, “art
practice, in its most elemental form, is an educational act, for the in-

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 Social Turn and Operative Realism

tent is to provoke dialogue and to initiate change” (Sullivan 2006: 33).

William Condee goes a step further and defines critical interdisci-

plinarity in the arts and humanities. Critical interdisciplinarity “draws on
the previously established scholarship of critical theory by integrating
approaches from the social sciences to expose tacit systems of dom-
ination and to promote greater equity” in such a way that it “trans-
gresses disciplinary norms, undermines hegemonic structures, disrupts
accepted organization of knowledge, and interrogates the purpose of
these structures” (Condee 2016: 20). According to Beatriz da Costa and
Kavita Philip, a collaboration of artists, activists, theoreticians, engi-
neers, and scientists is the only way to create a “community [a]s a po-
tentially resistant formation in the heart of postmodern transnational
technospheres” (da Costa & Philip 2008: xviii). Such interdisciplinary
communities, including artists, are not only capable of critically ap-
proaching complex issues from new angles, but they also have a good
standpoint for approaching them internationally during longer peri-
ods of time and thus good chances of contributing to their solution.

So far, we saw that contemporary art practices can be part of in-

terdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. They enable seeing
beyond what is known, they enable approaching the “real world”
problems and complex issues that cannot be addressed by a sin-
gle discipline. They are a specific mode of knowing, but also a specif-
ic method of producing and transmitting knowledge. Furthermore,
they make us engage and act upon themes that maybe we would not
encounter in another way. As such, art practices are educational. But
there remains the question of the way in which art practices are ed-
ucational. What are the methods and strategies that artists employ?
How art creates conditions for new knowledge and/or actions to hap-
pen? As Graeme Sullivan pointed out in his recent study, art is edu-
cational precisely because it creates a dialogue. Art historians Claire
Bishop and Nicolas Bourriaud had also come to a similar conclusion,
defining two directions in contemporary art – the social turn and

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Sonja Jankov

the employment of operative realism, both of which create dialogues.

Relational Aspects of Operative Realism

and the Social Turn

Nicolas Bourriaud has a long practice of curatorial work with art

since the 1990s, having thus known it from the practical, synchron-
ic perspective while organising and/or producing art events. He
defines contemporary art as an encounter, as an opening to unlimit-
ed public discussion, initiated by an artist. For that reason, works
of contemporary art often take the form of gatherings (round ta-
bles, socializing, forming a community, providing services) which
do not result in material objects but in a new “relationship with the
world” (Bourriaud 2002: 48), Contemporary art is, therefore, a state of
encounter, a creation of special forms of sociability that enable eman-
cipation, while “the aura of contemporary art is a free association”
(Bourriaud 2002: 61). According to Bourriaud, the cultural and po-
litical programme of contemporary artworks is “learning to inhabit
the world in a better way, […] to actually be ways of living and mod-
els of action within the existing real” (Bourriaud 2002: 13). One of
the ways in which contemporary art achieves this is operative realism.

Bourriaud introduced the term operative realism in 1992 to de-

scribe artists’ work within the framework of the actual production
of goods and services. This method is related to the occupation of a
gallery by temporarily changing its function into a non-artistic one
(e.g. turning it into a supermarket, fitness centre) or by introducing
non-artistic discourses and contents into the gallery (strippers, beg-
gars, rats, chicken). As the artist applies procedures from other dis-
ciplines, visitors find themselves in a multi-discursive environment
that enables a new form of sociability, “a complex form that combines
a formal structure, objects made available to visitors, and the fleet-
ing image issuing from collective behaviour” (Bourriaud 2002: 83).

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 Social Turn and Operative Realism

Operative realism copies reality through mimicry, however, it goes

beyond providing a pure representation/image of reality. It provides
the possibility of using reality, and the social practice thus becomes
ready-made, while realism as a procedure becomes an operational
method. In this way, the works that use operative realism expose hidden
mechanisms of reality and create “a new social interstice within which
these experiments and these new ‘life possibilities’ appear to be possi-
ble” (Bourriaud 2002: 45). Moreover, works that copy reality through
operative realism allow it to be viewed differently, and artists often make
interventions within the copy of reality, instructing viewers in this
way that it is a reality that needs to be changed.

Paul Ardenne has a similar reflection, emphasizing that “reality,

as a set of facts, by its way of being and representation, is not a space
known from every angle, but it is a complex set, partially unexplored:
a set that has yet to be explored, visited and returned to it again, con-
stantly confronting the context, seemingly familiar, but only seeming-
ly” (Arden 2007: 49). Therefore, social reality is a construct that needs
to be deconstructed, and, in this process, artists play a major role that
is both activistic and critical because artists revalue the notion of ‘soci-
ety’ by creating new contacts between audiences through their works
(Arden 2007:20).

Social reality is in the focus of numerous relational practices that

combine artistic and social work, which are roughly classified under
some of the terms such as socially engaged art, community-based art,
experimental communities, dialogic art, participatory, interventionist,
research-based, or collaborative art. For Claire Bishop, such practices
testify to the social turn of artistic practices, for no matter how unpleas-
ant, exploitative, or confusing they may seem to us, they indicate that
the purpose of art is to confront us with the dark and painfully complex
aspects of our society and the ways to solve them (Bishop 2006). The
goal of these practices is not well-intentioned moralizing, nor is their
value in educating us and pointing out the truth about the social situ-

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Sonja Jankov

ation, but in actually starting its solution, educating us on how to start

solving social problems. As examples of such practices, Bishop lists ac-
tions in which artists trained the residents of certain settlements to
make a radio show, constructed a floating abortion clinic, turned aban-
doned department stores into cultural centres, and so on. They also
include any work that artists carry out together with minority groups
such as migrants, prisoners, victims of violence, ethnic minorities, etc.

Socio-artistic practices that are realized in communities have sim-

ilarities with the method of observation with participation, which
is mostly used in sociology, anthropology, and ethnology. With-
in this research process, the researcher stays with the community s/
he observes and takes part in their activities. Like the researcher, the
artist takes a naturalistic approach, staying in the social environment
in which certain phenomena occur, that is, s/he goes to the square, to
the factory, to the strike, to the hospital, etc. and in the given reality
s/he creates a work of art in interaction with the people encountered
at that place. Such socio-artistic practices and research are contex-
tual, that is, they relate to the specific context and specific commu-
nity, and take into account the whole process, not only the results.

Danijela Petrović points out that inductive research in the end gives
an overview of the obtained results together with the interviewed re-
spondents in order to determine the credibility of the interpretation
of the data. Such research “emphasizes understanding and reflexivity”
(Petrović 2008: 4), enables a democratic process, leads to social partici-
pation and pluralism, and enables “the development of new ways of see-
ing and interpreting reality” (Ibid.: 6). This is exactly the similarity that
an artist who works within a community shares with a researcher, and
that sociological research shares with artistic practice in a community.

Operative realism and the social turn may seem very different, even
contradictory, since the first takes place within an artistic institution,
depriving it temporarily of the artistic discourse, while the other takes

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place away from cultural institutions, within marginalised communities.

However, these two approaches have different audience/participants
as targeted users and can thus have a complementary effect on each
other. What is achieved through work with communities can be pre-
sented in artistic institutions for the purpose of engaging more audi-
ence and connecting them with the addressed themes. We find such
a combined approach in works by Teresa Margolles and Vahida Ra-
mujkić who start from deep engagement with communities and later
involve wider audience by applying operative realism.

The Social Turn and Operative Realism as Educational

Methods in Art Practices of Teresa Margolles and
Vahida Ramujkić

The installation What Else Could We Talk About? by Teresa

Margolles, created for the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), is composed
of several segments within the pavilion (Table, Flag, Cleaning, Narco-
messages, Score Settling, Sounds of Death, Recovered Blood) and several ac-
tions in public spaces across Venice (Embassy, Jewels Promenade, Cards
to Cut Up Cocaine, Embroidery, Public Intervention With a Flag, Submerged
Flag, Floating Flag, Drained, Dragged Flag). All of these elements narrate,
by means of artistic and forensic practices, about thousands of people
killed in crossfires in the streets of Mexico (over 5000 in 2008 alone),
hundreds of which are children, often murdered in car-to-car drive-by
shootings. Like in many of her previous works, Margolles used blood
residues from crime scenes, as well as objects that came in contact
with the bodies of the murdered, such as pieces of glass, cloth that is
put on the puddle of blood in the mud that is left behind the body.

When entering the Mexican pavilion, one steps into several rooms
that are seemingly completely empty. Two to three people take turns
mopping the floors of these rooms every day, which constitutes the
Cleaning segment of the installation. By introducing an activity from
everyday life into artistic discourse, Margolles applies operative realism

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Sonja Jankov

and places Mexican citizens in the stereotypical role of cheap working

force as they are usually seen by more developed countries. Howev-
er, Margolles does not stop there. The water that is used for mopping
contains the blood of murdered victims, and the people who are clean-
ing the floors are exactly the people who lost their family members in
the crossfires of organised crime. As blood residues remain on surfaces
for six months, everyone who enters those seemingly empty rooms
of the Mexican pavilion literally walks on the blood of the murdered,
most often women and children. By moving the blood of the victims
from the crime scenes in the northern cities of Mexico to the pavilion
in Venice, Margolles dislocates social reality. Each time visitors enter
these rooms, the operative aspect of her realism takes place, and in this
overlap of reality and artistic discourse a new dialogue is initiated.

The works of Teresa Margolles “produce meanings by function-

ing on the metonymic plane” (Banwell 2000: 46), since metonymy not
only uses a part in order to represent the whole, but it also provides
understanding. In the case of the installation What Else Could We Talk
About?, it is not only the blood residue that functions as a metonym,
representing the victims, but also the remaining family members who
stand in place of a family that will never be whole again. Their presence
creates an option of opening a dialogue, about the trauma or anything
else. The very title of the installation – What Else Could We Talk About?
– on the one hand points to the fact that after the tragic loss of fami-
ly members there is nothing left to speak about, since everything else
seems trivial, but, on the other hand, the title becomes an invitation to
converse about a theme that is very actual and unresolved. Margolles
emphasises that:

[...] this is not a strictly Mexican story, but rather is also evidence of
social fluidities, cultural cataclysms and political dramas involved in
globalization. The idea was to build a pavilion that would be a space
of friction. (Margolles 2009: 83)

The possibility for visitors to connect to the relatives of the mur-

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 Social Turn and Operative Realism

dered ones, gives the whole installation relational and political charac-
ter. Another participatory action that enabled the connection between
the relatives of the murdered victims and the visitors of the Biennale
was Embroidery that took place at various locations in Venice during
the Biennale. Using a cloth soaked in blood and mud from crime scenes
as an embroidery hoop, participants were using a golden thread to sew
messages used by organized crime during the act of execution. This
joint, participatory action formed a new sociability, which, according
to Bourriaud, is precisely the subject of relational aesthetics, that is, the
‘artwork’ of contemporary art.

Vahida Ramujkić’s long-term project Disputed Histories is also car-

ried out in participatory modes, through public lectures, workshops,
and discussions, followed by published booklets3 and a growing li-
brary. The library consists of the main source material for the pro-
ject which are history textbooks for primary and secondary schools
across former Yugoslavia and its succeeding republics, published
during the XX and XXI centuries. The project has been taking place
since 2006 and its library so far contains over 300 different text-
books, which enable insight into different new narratives in place of
once Yugoslav, joint and unified history of Serbians, Bosnians, Cro-
ats, Slovenians, Macedonians, Montenegrins and Albano-Kosovars.

The project puts a special focus on the revision and creation of

multiple new historical narratives during the 1990s that would make
credible the fundamentally altered social relationships between the re-
publics that used to be parts of the same federation. These revisions

3  During the project, eight booklets have been published that contain comparative research of
textbooks carried out by the artist and participants of workshops, including Our Newest Hysteria
– research on the last 50 years of history as it is explained in textbooks from Republika Srpska,
Bosnian Federation, Croatia and Serbia; Migrations and Expulsions – a comparative analysis of
data about displacement of population during the 1990s war in Yugoslavia, based on the history
textbooks of former Yugoslav states and Germany; Private Histories – a collection of participants’
drawings and explanations of their personal histories; Istina / Everteta – a comparative analysis of
Kosovar and Serbian history textbooks; Prefaces and Contents in the Romanian history textbooks
through time (Ramujkić: internet b).

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Sonja Jankov

created a new socio-political subject, “an (image of a) reality accord-

ing to which regressing to capitalist social relations was inevitable, and
the continuation of socialist ones unimaginable” (Ramujkić 2019: 254).
In order to present these differences, Ramujkić applied comparative
analysis to the textbooks and organized many workshops which en-
abled participants of all ages and backgrounds to discuss this theme.

The workshops would begin by instructing participants to

schematically draw their personal histories, including the most im-
portant moments of their lives. It would continue with analysis during
which participants would realize that they remembered most of their
history in relation to national history and striking events that hap-
pened (the Olympics, war, embargo, hyperinflation, etc.). The work-
shop would then show how people remembered the events they lived
through differently from how history interprets them and that every-
one can contribute to history with their own experiences. It becomes
evident that “anyone, as a subject of history (historical events), is el-
igible to discuss and give a critical perspective on the official repre-
sentations of history” (Ramujkić: internet b). Workshop in this way
emphasises the importance of an individual and her/his personal his-
tory for the history as such, concluding that all of us, “actively or pas-
sively, contribute to the events happening on a larger scale, as well
as to the creation or recreation of certain official narratives” (Ibid.).
Throughout the workshops, sociability and participation are based
on reciprocity, and participants are on the same level with the artist
who thus, as in sociological research, becomes “a person who facili-
tates democratic agreement and the evolution of critical awareness
among participants. In that way, participation gained a new meaning
and became closely connected with emancipation” (Petrović 2008: 14).

The workshops took place in cities of former Yugoslavia, but also

in Germany and Romania. They were usually carried out in installa-
tion sets that resembled a primary-school classroom very much. In
fact, within the exhibition The Nineties: A Glossary of Migrations (Mu-

216
 Social Turn and Operative Realism

seum of Yugoslavia 2019), Ramujkić literally appropriates a classroom,

transferring it from a school setting into the museum. Functioning at
the border of utilitarian and artistic ambient, the classroom contained
regular furniture, a blackboard, and other objects which make for a
convincing classroom. Ramujkić adds to them teaching props that
narrate about the revisions of history and not about the actual syllabi.
Thus, in the classroom, one can find a puzzle-map of Yugoslavia and
its republics, while above the blackboard there is no longer the portrait
of former Yugoslav president Josip Broz, but a faceless portrait which
indicates the empty place which was filled with different role models
in different schools across former Yugoslavia. Ramujkić thus applied
operative realism when creating the classrooms within various cultur-
al institutions where the project was presented, but the educational
method applied in those workshops and installations is much differ-
ent to syllabi of elementary and higher education across territories of
former Yugoslavia. This is precisely how operative realism creates new
forms of sociability within known settings.

Ramujkić interdisciplinarily intersected the rhetoric and discourse

of educational space with cultural system in order to problematize
broader social topics. In this way, Disputed Histories is similar to crit-
ical interdisciplinarity that exposes tacit systems of domination, un-
dermines hegemonic structures, disrupts organization of knowledge
and promotes greater equity, as discussed by William Condee. It is also
similar to emancipatory sociological research which “aims to develop
participants’ awareness and understanding of illegitimate structural
and interpersonal barriers, which prevent them from fully express-
ing their autonomy and freedom” (Petrović 2008: 25). Contemporary
art practice thus becomes critical, educational, and emancipatory,
using methods from other disciplines and even settings from other,
non-artistic discourses which enable the creation of new forms of
sociability.

217
Sonja Jankov

Conclusion

Based on the given examples, we can conclude that the social turn
and operative realism are creative methods used by artists in order to
initiate new forms of sociability that emancipate participants, by en-
abling them to critically address problematic aspects of social reality.

Operative realism seemingly deprives art of any power to speak

about social themes by its own means. However, being an experiment,
an artistic copy of reality, it actually gives art the power to emanci-
pate all participants whose presence becomes a part of artistic inter-
vention. In this way, it brings them closer to the (un)known social
reality or engages them in an attempt to solve problems within it.
Thus, the participants in the workshops organized by Vahida Ramu-
jkić realize that history is just one of many constructs in which trau-
matic events are rewritten and interpreted differently, created, or
completely erased. Realizing that there are several different versions
of history, the participants learn that they do not have to orient their
personal histories or futures by the striking events in the history of
their country. Moreover, each of their own personal histories be-
comes more valid, truthful, and more relevant than any official version
of history, both to themselves and to the individuals close to them.

Using operative realism, Margolles creates the situation in which a

visitor, entering the gallery, begins to walk on the blood of the ‘collat-
eral’ victims of crossfire, that is, s/he begins to walk down the streets
of Mexico because the gallery floor is covered with blood as much as
street sidewalks. Although she didn’t really move a piece of the side-
walk from Mexico and brought it to Venice, Margolles used mimicry
to bring visitors of the Biennale in the same situation in which Mexi-
can citizens are, being affected by numberless crimes and unable to act
upon them. It is precisely here that the visitors come to know that their
arrival connects them with the relatives of the victims, through empa-
thy and understanding. This kind of association is also the aura of con-

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 Social Turn and Operative Realism

temporary art, as Bourriaud defined it. This connection is a new form

of sociability that opens conversations about trauma, about life without
loved ones, either killed or missing, about the ongoing social problem.

Using operative realism as a complementary method to socially

engaged practices, contemporary artists manage to shift social reali-
ty from its original context to the global level, pointing out that the
problems that exist are not relevant for a few individuals only, but for
the whole of humanity. This process also enables recognizing that the
problems that exist in one community exist in other communities as
well and that connections create new views on existing problems, but
also new ways of approaching them.

References:

Arden, Pol (2007), Kontekstualna umetnost: umetničko stvaranje u gradskoj

sredini, u situaciji, intervencija, učestvovanje. Novi Sad: Kiša, Muzej
savremene umetnosti Vojvodine (Paul Ardenne, 2002, Un art contextuel:
création artistique en milieu urbain, en situation, d’intervention, de participa-
tion. Paris: Flammarion).
Banwell, Julia (2000), “Agency and Otherness in Teresa Margolles’
Aesthetic of Death”. Other Modernities 4: 45–54.
Bishop, Claire (2006), “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discon-
tents”, Artforum, February. Available at: https://www.artforum.com/
print/200602/the-social-turn-collaboration-and-its-discontents-10274
(accessed 6 March, 2021).
Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002), Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du reel.
Boutet, Danielle (2013), “Vision and Experience: The Contribution of
Art to Transdisciplinary Knowledge”. Transdisciplinary Journal of Engi-
neering & Science 4: 105–115.
Burgess, Marilyn and Maria De Rosa (2009), “Multidisciplinary Arts:
Approaches to Funding”, D’Art Topics in Arts Policy 38.

219
Sonja Jankov

Available at: www.ifacca.org/topic/multidisciplinary-arts (accessed 6

March, 2021).
Condee, William (2016), “The Interdisciplinary Turn in the Arts and
Humanities”, Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies 34: 12–29.
“Conversation between Taiyana Pimentel, Teresa Margolles and
Cuauhtémoc Medina” (2009), in: Medina, Cuauhtémoc (ed.), Teresa
Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? México D.F.: Instituto Nacion-
al de Bellas Artes, Barcelona; RM Verlag, pp. 83–99.
Da Costa, Beatriz and Kavita Philip (eds.) (2008), „Introduction”,
in: Tactical Biopolitics – Art, Activism, and Technoscience. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp. xvii–xxii.
Newell, William (2001), “A Theory of Interdisciplinary Studies”. Issues in
Integrative Studies 19: 1–25.
Petrović, Danijela (2008), „Akciono istraživanje – neka teorijska i
praktična pitanja“, in: Dušan Stojnov (ed.), Metateorijske osnove kvalita-
tivnih istraživanja. Beograd: Zepter Bookworld, pp. 237–275.
Ramujkić, Vahida (2019), “Yugoslavism”, in: Ana Panić and Simona
Ognjanović (eds.), Devedesete: Rečnik migracija / The Nineties: A Glossary
of Migrations (published to accompany the exhibition under the same
title: December 5th, 2019 - March 1st, 2020). Beograd: Muzej Jugoslavije,
pp. 253–255.
Ramujkić, Vahida (internet a), “Short bios for all different purposes”.
Available at: http://www.irational.org/cgi-bin/vahida/bios/index.pl
(accessed 8 March, 2021).
Ramujkić, Vahida (internet b), “Disputed Histories / Istorije u raspravi”.
Available at: http://www.irational.org/vahida/history/ (accessed 8
March, 2021).
Sullivan, Graeme (2006), “Research Acts in Art Practice”. Studies in Art
Education – A Journal of Issues and Research 48 (1): 19–35.
Wilthagen, Ton, Emile Aarts and Peggy Valcke (2018), A Time for
Interdisciplinarity. Tilburg: Tilburg University.

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Biographical Appendix:

Teresa Margolles (b. 1963, Mexico) holds diplomas in forensic medicine

and science of communication from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de
Mexico, Mexico City, and has studied art at the Direccion de Fomento a la
Cultura Regional del Estado de Sinaloa, Culiacan, Mexico. While work-
ing as a forensic pathologist for the state of Mexico during the 1990s, she
founded an artists’ collective SEMEFO (an anagram for the Mexican coro-
ner’s office), whose members were also Arturo Angulo and Carlos Lopez.
In the late 1990s, Margolles oriented her art practice independently of the
collective. Her solo exhibitions took place in Kunsthalle Krems, Austria;
Musée d’art de la Province de Hainaut, Charleroi, Belgium; Museo de la
Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile; Museo de Arte Moder-
no de Bogotá, Colombia; Francuski Paviljon, Zagreb, Croatia; Witte de
With, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Mi-
lan, Italy; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Canada; Museo de
la Ciudad de Querétaro, Mexico; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase,
New York; Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Recife, Brazil; Centro de Arte Dos
de Mayo, Madrid, Spain; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo
(MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Ger-
many; Museion, Bolzano, Italy. She received numerous awards for her
work, including the Artes Mundi Prize and the Prince Claus Award for
Culture and Development in 2012, as well as the special jury mention
for her work at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Her works are includ-
ed in permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Kunsthaus Zürich,
Switzerland; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; Museum für Mod-
erne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Neue Na-
tionalgalerie, Berlin.

Vahida Ramujkić (b. 1973, Belgrade) graduated from the Faculty of

Fine Arts in Belgrade and has been living and working in Barcelona from
1998 to 2007, where she was one of the founders of the rotorrr.org col-
lective (Barcelona 2001-2007) that worked on the border of art, activism,
and social studies. Apart from Rotor, she has been working within other
collectives such as Irational.org, transnationally, since 2012, ReEX, since
2015, Minipogon, since 2017, NoToRehabilitation, Savez antifašista Sr-

221
bije, 2015/16, Kuhinja bez imena, Belgrade, since 2017. She develops her
work through long-term research projects, such as Disputed Histories,
Documentary Embroidery, Microcultures, etc. Her work has been main-
ly presented in art and cultural contexts nationally and internationally,
such as exhibitions, seminaries, festivals, etc., but also in different kinds
of academic and non-academic contexts, seminaries, conferences, etc. She
published several books (Schengen with Ease; Cairo Integration Diary; Storm,
Return Home and Other Terrible Stories for Children).

222
 Aleksandar Pavlović1
Aleksandra Ilić Rajković2

Neo-National Romanticism
in Serbian Education:
Comparing Romantic-
-National and Recent
Serbian History Textbooks

In this paper, we argue that, paradoxically, there are striking

similarities between the Serbian education and textbooks today and
those from the times of Romantic nationalism in the late 19th cen-
tury. Firstly, we will outline the Romantic-national concept of edu-
cation as it has been in use in Serbia in the late 19th century. As we
show, in the pre-WWI Serbian textbooks, pupils were taught that
language is the basic and obvious proof of common origin and past,
that the nation is a natural form of grouping of people, and that all
those speaking the same language wish to – and should – live in
their national state. We will illustrate this point by taking into con-
sideration the History Reader for elementary schools written by Mi-
hailo Јоvić, which was one of the most lasting textbooks in the Ser-
bian educational history overall, used from 1882 all the way to 1944;
for illustration purposes, we particularly focus on the depiction of Al-
banians and the Serbian-Albanian history in Jović’s textbook.

In the second part of the paper, we compare these Romantic-na-

1  Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade: pavlaleks@gmail.com,

aleksandar.pavlovic@instifdt.bg.ac.rs.
2  Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade: avilic@f.bg.ac.rs.

223
A. Pavlović, A. Ilić Rajković

tional ideas of education with the current Serbian history readers for
primary and secondary school. In particular, we will examine the de-
piction of the 1999 NATO bombing and the 1998-1999 Serbian-Al-
banian conflict in Serbian history textbooks. As we argue, Serbian
textbooks and, by extension, educational system, still promote a kind
of neo-romantic notion of fixed national identity, patriotic educa-
tion, and lack critical tones and re-examination of history and the
past. Lastly, we will close our paper by emphasizing some recent ex-
amples of bridging this issue and offering a more critical, nuanced,
and multifaceted view of Serbian and regional history in textbooks.

Patriotic Education

Education of students in the spirit of nationalism has a long histo-

ry. The idea of nation as formative for a community and as the high-
est achievement in the evolution of mankind was firmly established
in the nineteenth century, and scholars have for long observed that
the education of the time had the function of national coherence and
organization (Dewey 1916). While the Romantic-nationalist ideas af-
fected the Serbs gradually from the early 19th century onwards, these
ideas started being properly implemented in educational policy only
after the full national independence was secured at the Berlin Congress
of 1878. The reform of the educational system that followed in 1882
saw the introduction of mandatory education and was an integral part
of that process. Given that, according to contemporary Serbian ped-
agogues, education in the age of nations should likewise be national,
school has become one of the key factors of this form of education,
as elsewhere in Europe at the time (Lowe 1999). A testimony that
these ideas inspired the reformers of the school system can be found
in the words of Stojan Novaković, the leading figure of the modern-
ization and reformation of Serbian education. In line with his views
expressed during the debate over the gymnasium curriculum in 1881,
Novaković emphasized in his opening speech to the Main Education
Council that “education is the crucial factor in the unification of Serb-

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 Neo-National Romanticism in Serbian Education

dom” (Glavni prosvetni savet 1880: 533). Reports from discussions

and debates regarding curriculums and school programmes exem-
plify that Serbian teachers and their associations held similar views.

In the period prior to World War I, Serbian pupils were thus typ-
ically taught that language is the fundamental and obvious evidence
of common origin and past, that nation is a natural way of grouping
people, and that all those who speak the same language wish to and
should live together in their national state. Hence, the primary task of
Serbs is to fulfil their centennial legacy of liberating and uniting all of
Serbdom. The development of this idea of united Serbian statehood
and successes and failures in its fulfilment have been presented chiefly
through history textbooks (Ilić 2010).

The most representative textbook of the time, Mihailo Jović’s

Serbian History (Српска историја) amply illustrates this general frame-
work by its depiction of the national history as the constant struggle
for national liberation and unification and its emphasis on heroism and
bravery. Jović thus already in the “Foreword” advised the pupils to “al-
ways be heroes like Obilić and the highwaymen Veljko” (Jović 1882:
V), which corresponded perfectly with the methodical instructions of
the Ministry of Education that expected from the Serbian history edu-
cation to inspire “love for our nation and feelings that would strength-
en the will for heroic moral actions” (Ministarstvo prosvete i crkvenih
dela 1895: 863).3

In an interview for the newspaper Vreme in 1934, Jović himself

embraced such perspective and claimed that his textbook was very
successful in that respect: “All those generations that partake in recent
wars learned the history of their nation from this little book of mine”
(D.M. 1934: 5). His contemporary colleague Milenko Vukićević, him-
self a history textbook author and a Ministry of Education supervisor,
wrote that “the greatest success has been achieved where children used

3  All of the quotes from Serbian sources are translated into English by the authors.

225
A. Pavlović, A. Ilić Rajković

this book” (Vukićević 1898: 336).

Messages arising from the content of Jović’s texts get their full
meaning only when perceived in the context of Serbian education in
which national education occupied a prominent position. Regardless
of whether they ended their schooling on the elementary or the sec-
ondary level, pupils acquired several messages as its integral part: that
most Serbs live outside of the Serbian state borders, that the country
that will gather them all is the great national goal, that national state
is a natural right of every nation for which it can and should fight. In
accordance with such a view, young generations were expected to fight
for the liberation of the subjected parts of Serbdom and the unification
in a joint state.

Written in 1882 during the aforementioned educational reform,

Jović’s textbook served as the absolutely dominant history schoolbook
prior to the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
after the Great War, and had dozens of editions. Throughout this pe-
riod, the author repeatedly adjusted and revised his Serbian History in
accordance with official curriculums and programmes. We will focus
henceforth on the perceptions of Albanians in the various editions of
this textbook in order to exemplify the evolution of negative percep-
tions during this period (for a parallel presentation of references re-
lating to the Albanians in different editions please consult Chart 1; for
a more detailed textbook analysis, see: Pavlović & Ilić Rajković 2017:
225-236).

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 Neo-National Romanticism in Serbian Education

The perceptions of the Albanians in the textbooks of Mihailo Jović

Edition from 1894

Edition from 1882 Edition from 1886 and later
“[Serbian Patriarch] Arsenije “One massive migra- “Arsenije did not
Čarnojević did not do good tion of Serbs took do good to the
to the Serbs by leading this place in 1690. Arsenije Serbs, for those
migration. Those Serbs that Čarnojević, Serbian Pa- that he took now-
he took suffered a lot from triarch, summoned the adays obey the
the Austrians and still do, be- Serbs from Old Serbia Hungarians and
cause the Austrian Emperor and fled with them Germans, while
rules over them. Yet, it was to Banat and Bač- those that re-
even worse for those who ka. These migrations mained are scat-
stayed here in Serbia. The were bad for the Serbs, tered, left on their
Turks settled the Arnauts for the Serbs spread own and weak-
on these empty estates, and around faraway lands, ened; thus neither
hence nowadays a few Serbs and the Turks settled can we become
remained in Serbia south of the Arnauts in their strong, because
us (around Prizren and Peć) place, who did greater we are small in
but all of them are Albanians, evils to the Serbs than numbers, nor can
even though they were not even the Turks them- those in Bačka and
there before.” (p. 187). selves.” (p. 91) Banat.” (p. 74).

Chart 1 – References to the Albanians in different editions of Jović’s textbook

Present Day Serbian Textbooks

Moving to the contemporary Serbian educational system and

history textbooks, the present-day goals, as declared and prescribed
by the Serbian Ministry of Education and other relevant bodies (In-
stitute for the Improvement of Education and Pedagogy – ZUOV)
– are very different from those promoted in the late 19th century:

The goal of teaching history is acquiring humanistic education and

developing historical consciousness; understanding historical space

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A. Pavlović, A. Ilić Rajković

and time, historical events, manifestations and processes and the role
of distinguished persons; developing individual and national identity,
acquiring and expanding knowledge, developing skills and forming
attitudes necessary to understand the contemporary world (in the na-
tional, regional, European and global context); improving functional
skills and competencies necessary for living in contemporary society
(investigative skills, critical and creative thinking, ability to express
and give reasons for personal attitudes, understanding multicultural-
ity, advancing tolerance and culture of dialogue based on arguments).
/
Cilj nastave istorije je sticanje humanističkog obrazovanja i razvijanje
istorijske svesti; razumevanje istorijskog prostora i vremena, istori-
jskih događaja, pojava i procesa i uloge istaknutih ličnosti; razvijanje
individualnog i nacionalnog identiteta; sticanje i proširivanje znanja,
razvijanje veština i formiranje stavova neophodnih za razumevanje
savremenog sveta (u nacionalnom, regionalnom, evropskom i global-
nom okviru); unapređivanje funkcionalnih veština i kompetencija
neophodnih za život u savremenom društvu (istraživačkih veština,
kritičkog i kreativnog mišljenja, sposobnosti izražavanja i obrazlaga-
nja sopstvenih stavova, razumevanja multikulturalnosti, razvijanje
tolerancije i kulture argumentovanog dijaloga). (Šuica & Krstić 2005: 6)

History teaching should contribute to the understanding of histori-

cal space and time, historical events, manifestations and processes, as
well as to the development of national and European identity and the
spirit of tolerance among the pupils.
/
Nastava istorije treba da doprinese razumevanju istorijskog prosto-
ra i vremena, istorijskih događaja, pojava i procesa, kao i razvijanju
nacionalnog i evropskog identiteta i duha tolerancije kod učenika.
(Svilar & Dujković 2013: 7)

However, once we move to the actual content, the picture tends to

change significantly, especially when describing recent events of Ser-
bian history such as the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the 1990s wars.
To illustrate this point, we are quoting relevant passages about the in-
terpretation of the Serbian-Albanian conflict in Kosovo from 1998-

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 Neo-National Romanticism in Serbian Education

1999 and the subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in Spring

1999.

Since 2003, Serbia gradually lifted the state monopoly on text-

books, thus enabling private publishers to publish textbooks. For
the purpose of our analysis, we scrutinized arguably the most pop-
ular history textbook in Serbia in the last decade or so, written for
Grade 8 of elementary school by Đorđe Đurić and Momčilo Pavlov-
ić in 2010 (Đurić & Pavlović 2010) and published by the state-owned
Zavod za udžbenike (Institute for Textbooks), and then compared it
to the history textbooks of competing publishers Klett and Freska.

When Đurić and Pavlović describe the reasons for the Serbian-Al-
banian conflict and the subsequent NATO bombing, one does not see
any of the declared goals of critical approach, multiculturalism, Euro-
pean and global identity, tolerance, understanding broader historical
trends, etc:

Daily armed actions by Albanian terrorist groups, called Kosovo

Liberation Army, brigandry, and conflicts with the forces of law
and order, in which many civilians were killed, extremely deterio-
rated the situation in Kosovo. Ultimately, the Western countries,
especially the USA, got involved, providing open support to the
Albanians. After the failed negotiations in Rambouillet and Par-
is in February 1999 and the rejection from the Serbian side to sign
the ultimatum on withdrawing army and police from Kosovo, the
NATO aggression lasting from March 24 to June 10, 1999, followed.
/
Svakodnevne oružane akcije albanskih terorističkih grupa, pod na-
zivom Oslobodilačka vojska Kosova, razbojništava i sukobi sa sna-
gama reda, u kojima je stradalo sve više civila, izuzetno su zaoštrili
stanje na Kosovu. Konačno su se i zapadne države, posebno SAD,
umešale, dajući otvorenu podršku Albancima. Posle neuspelih
pregovora u Rambujeu i Parizu i odbijanja srpske strane da potpiše
ultimativne zahteve o povlačenju vojske i policije sa Kosova februara
1999. usledila je agresija NATO-a koja je trajala od 24. marta do 10.

229
A. Pavlović, A. Ilić Rajković

juna 1999. godine. (Đurić & Pavlović 2010: 186)

Largely similar interpretation of events is offered by other Serbian

history textbooks as well. For instance, literally the same wording is
found in the textbook by Nikolić et all (2005, 283) by the same publish-
er, even though it has been written for the year 3 or 4 of high school
and one would therefore expect that older students would benefit from
a more elaborate, complex, and nuanced interpretation of these events.

History textbooks of two other major competitors do not differ

significantly in their presentation of these events. History 8 by Rado-
jević, published by Klett, thus describes the crisis in Kosovo and the
subsequent NATO bombing as follows:

The provocations of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) spilled into

armed conflicts in which the international community got involved.
Equally as in previous wars, the ‘international community’ led by the
USA, provided full political and military support to the Albanian
terrorists. In addition to police, military forces also took part in the
conflicts in Kosovo and Metohija. After the failed negotiations in
Rambouillet and Paris and the refusal of the Serbian side to succumb
to an ultimatum that stipulated the withdrawal from Kosovo and
Metohija and a free travel of NATO forces through Serbian territory,
the NATO aggression followed suit.
/
Provokacije terorističke Oslobodilačke Vojske Kosova (OVK) pre-
točene su u oružane sukobe u koje se uključila i međunarodna za-
jednica, Podjednako, kao i u prethodnim ratovima “međunarodna
zajednica” koju su predvodile SAD, pružila je punu političku i vo-
jnu podršku albanskim teroristima. U sukobima na Kosovu i Meto-
hiji pored policije učestvovale su i vojne jedinice. Posle neuspelih
pregovora u Rambujeu i Parizu i odbijanja srpske strane da pristine
na ultimatum koji je predviđao povlačenje sa Kosova i Metohije i
slobodan prolaz NATO preko teritorije Srbije, otpočela je agresija
NATO pakta. (Radojević 2014: 290)

230
 Neo-National Romanticism in Serbian Education

Again, the same wording is found in the textbook by Ljušić and

Dimić for Level 8 of the elementary school of the same publisher (Ljušić
& Dimić 2009: 240). Ljušić and Dimić also published their textbook for
Years 3 / 4 of high school, with a typically brief and dry interpretation
of the events:

The Albanians demanded secession from Serbia and, with that goal in
mind, formed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which constantly
attacked army and police forces between 1996 and 1998. During the
attacks, it enjoyed the support of the United States of America and
several members of the European Union. In the negotiations between
the Serbian and the Albanian side in the Rambouillet castle near Paris,
which ended in March 1999, Serbia received an ultimatum demand-
ing that she accepts an agreement by which the NATO alliance would
hold the territory of Kosovo and Metohija. The refusal of this ultima-
tum led to the beginning of air strikes of the NATO alliance members.
/
Zahtevajući izdvajanje iz Srbije, Albanci su formirali Oslobodilačku
vojsku Kosova (OVK), koja je tokom 1996-1998. godine neprestano
napadala vojne i policijske snage. Prilikom napada imala je političku
podršku Sjedinjenih Američkih Država i više članica Evropske unije.
Na pregovorima između srpske i albanske strane u dvorcu Rambuje,
u okolini Pariza, završenim u martu 1999. godine, Srbiji je dat ultima-
tum sa zahtevom da prihvati sporazum kojim bi NATO savez zaposeo
teritoriju Kosova i Metohije. Odbijanje ulitmatuma dovelo je do po-
četka vazdušnog napada članica NATO-a. (Ljušić & Dimić 2013: 291)

One-sidedness and the lack of critical approach in the representa-

tion of these events by Serbian textbooks is perhaps the most evident
when compared to the ways these events have been portrayed in the
textbooks of Albanians in Kosovo. Thus, human rights abuses by the
Serbian regime against Kosovar Albanians during the 1990s are pre-
sented in the Kosovo textbooks as massacres by the Serbian regime
across Kosovo, which “[...] inspired the emergence of the UÇK to pro-
tect the people of Kosovo” (Rexhepi & Demaj 2009: 104). The Serbian
textbooks do not give any evidence of these abuses, and they present

231
A. Pavlović, A. Ilić Rajković

the deterioration of the situation in Kosovo as a consequence of the

“robbery and confrontations of Albanian terrorist groups, declared as
the Kosovo Liberation Army, with associated forces, who impacted
ever more on civilians” (Đurić & Pavlović 2010: 251) but they do not
provide data on the ethnicity of these civilians.

Secondly, as Shkelzen Gashi clearly showed: the textbooks of two

countries present only the crimes of the ‘other side’ (Gashi 2019: 98-
107). For example, the Serbian textbooks do not mention a single Al-
banian killed by the Serbian/Yugoslav forces during the armed conflict
in Kosovo, while in the textbooks of Kosovo there is no mention of a
single Serb killed by the UÇK and NATO forces during and after the
armed conflict. The textbooks of Kosovo and Serbia also exaggerate
the crimes of the ‘other side’ and create room for misunderstanding
(Ibid.: 99-101).

The Serbian textbooks refer to a letter of the Federal Republic of

Yugoslavia (FRY), sent to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)
in February 2000, which said that since the entry of NATO forces in
Kosovo “…899 had been killed and 834 had been kidnapped” (Đurić &
Pavlović 2010: 255) but they do not give the ethnicity of these people
and the fate of those kidnapped. The Humanitarian Law Center (HLC),
whose headquarters are in Belgrade, notes that 1,123 Serbian civilians
were killed in the period between January 1998 and December 1999,
of whom 786 were killed following the entry of NATO forces (12 June
1999 – December 1999) (Kandić 2001: 3).

On the other hand, the Kosovo textbooks say that during the armed
conflict in Kosovo, only in the period between January and December
1998 “[...] more than 2,000 Albanians were killed, not counting here a
very large number of missing persons.” (Bajraktari, Rexhepi & Demaj
2010: 206, quoted in Gashi 2019: 99). However, also for this period, the
Humanitarian Law Center’s multi-volume Kosovo Memory Book 1998-
2000 registers 1660 Albanians killed, including 678 UÇK soldiers, and

232
 Neo-National Romanticism in Serbian Education

296 Serbs, including 167 members of the Yugoslav Army and the Min-
istry for Internal Affairs (Mišina, Tompson Popović & Kandić 2011:
457). According to the Kosovo textbooks, in the period of the NATO
bombings (from 24 March to 10 June 1999) “[…] the Serbian army
killed approximately 15,000 Albanians.” (Bajraktari, Rexhepi & Demaj
2010: 207 and Bicaj & Ahmeti 2005: 202, quoted in: Gashi 2019: 99).
The Kosovo Memory Book 1998 – 2000 gives the numbers of Albanian
civilians killed in the period between January 1998 and December
2000, including the 78-day NATO bombing, as 7,864 in total. There-
fore, the number of those killed is doubled in the Kosovo textbooks,
but the sources of the data are not given.

During the 78 days of the NATO bombing of the FRY, according

to the Serbian textbooks, “(...) between 1,200 and 2,500 civilians were
killed” (Đurić & Pavlović 2010: 251). However, in the table given by
these textbooks for the suffering of civilians from the NATO bombard-
ment, data are provided for only 347 civilians killed. In this table, Al-
banian ethnicity is mentioned only for the 70 civilians killed by NATO
forces near Gjakova, while for the 50 civilians killed in the village of
Luzhan near Podujevo, the 20 near Peja and 87 in the village of Korisha
near Prizren, there is no mention of their Albanian ethnicity. Likewise,
there is no mention in the table of the attack of NATO forces on the
Dubrava Prison where, according to the HLC, 112 Albanian prisoners
were killed. It may be that this attack is not included in the table because
only 29 of the prisoners in Dubrava Prison were killed by the NATO
bombs on the 19 and 20 May 1999 while the others, again according
to HLC, were executed by Serbian forces on the 21 and 23 May 1999.

On civilian casualties by NATO, the report of Human Rights

Watch, based on field research, says that during the bombing of the
territory of the FRY, NATO killed a minimum of 489 and a maximum
of 528 innocent civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, the ma-
jority of these innocent civilians were killed in the territory of Kosovo,
giving numbers of between 279 and 318 people (Gashi 2019: 101). The

233
A. Pavlović, A. Ilić Rajković

number of civilians killed by NATO is therefore at least doubled in the

Serbian textbooks while not being recorded at all in the textbooks of
Kosovo.

Overall, Marijana Toma argues that Serbian history textbooks

offer selective, insufficient, or cursory interpretation of the facts, or
avoid attributing any responsibility to the representatives of the Serbi-
an people (Toma 2015: 112), and concludes:

What is evident in almost all the textbooks […] is the lack of objectiv-
ity in presenting the events related to the wars in the former Yugosla-
via, particularly in the presentation of the war crimes that were com-
mitted and of the victims who suffered those crimes. The partiality
and bias are primarily reflected in the selective choice of data, and the
obvious omission or neglect of the facts and events in which the role
of the Serbian people and Serbia as a state could be shown in a nega-
tive context - including, first and foremost, the facts about the suffer-
ings of the members of other ethnic groups, and an evident effort to
portray the Serbs as the only/the greatest victims among the peoples
of the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s wars. (Toma 2015: 100)

234
 Neo-National Romanticism in Serbian Education

Kosovo-Albanian
Serbian Textbook Alternative/
Textbook
Event (Đurić and Pavlović Non-govern-
(Rexhepi and
2010) ment Sources
Demaj, 2009)

“Daily armed actions Massacres by the

by Albanian terror- Serbian regime
ist groups, called across Kosovo,
Kosovo Liberation which “[...] in-
Army, brigandry spired the emer-
Emergence
and conflicts with gence of the UÇK
of the Koso-
the forces of law to protect the peo-
vo Libera-
and order, in which ple of Kosovo.”
tion Army
many civilians were
killed, extremely de-
teriorated the situa-
tion in Kosovo.”

No mention of a No mention of a
single Albanian single Serb killed
killed by Serbian/ by the UÇK and
Other
Yugoslav forces NATO forces
nationalities’
during the armed during and after
casualties
conflict in Kosovo. the armed con-
flict in Kosovo.

No figure given “[...] more than HLC - 1660 Al-

2,000 Albanians banians killed,
were killed, not including 678
counting here a UÇK soldiers,
In 1998. very large number and 296 Serbs,
of missing per- including 167
sons.” Yugoslav army
and police
members

235
A. Pavlović, A. Ilić Rajković

No figure given In the period of 1998–2000,

the NATO bomb- including the
ings “[...] the Ser- 78-day NATO
Albanian bian army killed bombing, 7,864
casualties approximately Albanians in
15,000 Albanians.” total.

“(...) between 1,200 No mention at all Human Rights

and 2,500 civilians Watch – 489-
were killed” (only 528, out of
NATO 70 mentioned as Al- which 279-
civilian casu- banians) 318 in Kosovo
alties (mostly Alba-
nians)

“899 had been killed No mention at all The Human-

and 834 had been itarian Law
kidnapped” (no eth- Center (HLC) -
nicity mentioned) 786 were killed
following the
After NATO entry of NATO
arrived forces (12 June
1999 – Decem-
ber 1999) (of
various ethnic-
ities).

236
 Neo-National Romanticism in Serbian Education

Conclusion

To sum up, our analysis illustrates that, once we move from the
proclaimed goals of current Serbian education, the depiction of recent
traumatic historical events in the Serbian history textbooks actually
corresponds more to the early Romantic-national ideas than the con-
temporary ones about nourishing critical approach, various perspec-
tives and other sides’ views, and promoting more inclusive and toler-
ant identity(ies). After conducting a comprehensive analysis of Serbian
textbooks, several Serbian and international scholars concluded that
these examples are not simply isolated cases but actually a dominant
perspective:

Since relations with other neighbouring nations have been present-

ed in a similarly brutal manner, it could be said that history text-
books develop a paranoid model of historical consciousness that
can provide a solid foundation for hatred and contempt towards
neighbouring nations, which leaves constantly open the possi-
bilities for further misunderstandings, conflicts and revanchism.
By constructing such dimensions of historical consciousness ed-
ucation acquires significant mobilizing function with a delayed
effect, as the capital of hatred and model of behaviour enforced in
the earliest years is being passed to a future time, thereby reducing
the possibility of rational confrontation with the past and present.
/
Budući da su na slično brutalan način predstavljeni odnosi i sa dru-
gima susednim narodima, može se reći da udžbenici istorije razvi-
jaju jedan paranoidan model istorijske svesti koji može dati solidnu
osnovu za mržnju i prezir prema susednim narodima, čime mogućno-
sti za dalje nesporazume, sukobe i revanše ostaju trajno otvoreni.
Konstruisanjem takvih dimenzija istorijske svesti obrazovanje dobija
značajnu mobilizatorsku funkciju sa odloženim dejstvom, jer se kapi-
tal mržnje i model ponašanja nametnuti u najranijim godinama života
prenose i na neko buduće vreme, čime se smanjuje mogućnost racio-
nalnog suočavanja sa prošlošću i sadašnjošću. (Stojanović 2007: 59)

237
A. Pavlović, A. Ilić Rajković

Thus, it appears that we are still far from emancipating our pupils
and educational system from the neo-romantic idea about nation and
national identity. One way to go has been set by an ambitious long-
term Joint History project of the Center for Democracy and Recon-
ciliation in Southeast Europe from Thessaloniki, which gathered his-
torians from all countries in the region. The project lasted since 1998,
for nearly two decades. The participants sought answers to questions
such as: how much do we know, and how much do we learn about
the Balkan past? The solution has been found in the new approach to
teaching history – multiperspective. The aim of that method is not to
offer one ‘truth’, acceptable for all, about what happened in the past,
but to offer information about how different representatives of their
and neighbouring nations perceived their joint past (Stojanović 2005:
8). Following those methodological principles, the project produced
six volumes, intended as the supplementary teaching material, of his-
torical sources on the Ottoman Empire (Berktaj & Murgesku 2005),
nations and emergence of national states (Murgesku, 2005), the Balkan
Wars (Kolev & Kuluri 2005) and World War II (Erdelja 2005), The
Cold War (Kuluri & Repe 2018a) and the 1990-2008 period (Kuluri &
Repe 2018b).

238
 Neo-National Romanticism in Serbian Education

v30. The settling of the Turkish-Bulgarian conflict, Romanian cartoon 1913 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

IIIb. Life at the Front. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
III–8. From Mt. Starac to Bitolj: The diary of a conscript in the Danubian Medical Column (the Battle of
Kumanovo), revealing the situation in the Serbian army . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
III-9. The suffering of horses, described by a Turkish lieutenant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
v31. The transportation of wounded soldiers from Thessaloniki Port . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
III-10. The situation of the Bulgarian army in Thrace, described by a Frenchman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
III-11. A Croatian doctor expresses his thoughts after a visit to the battlefield near the river Maritza . . . . 74
v32. Czech physician, Dr. Jan Levit, in the Circle of Serbian Sisters’ hospital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
III-12. Izzet-Fuad Pasha describing the Turkish soldiers’ lack of bread . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
III-13. Excerpt from the memoirs of a Romanian soldier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
v33. Greek camp outside Xanthi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
III-14. Excerpt from the diary of Vassilios Sourrapas, a Greek volunteer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
III-15. The morale in the Bulgarian army, analysed by the Bulgarian Chief of Staff, years after the war . . . 77
III-16. From the memoirs of a Romanian officer about crossing the special pontoon military bridge
across the Danube at Corabia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
III-17. The meeting of Turkish and Montenegrin soldiers in Scutari after the city had surrendered . . . . . 78

IIIc. The Parallel War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

III–18. Letter from Ippokratis Papavassiliou to his wife, Alexandra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
v34. The ruins of Serres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
III–19. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace comments upon the ‘parallel’ losses from the
burning of villages and the exodus of people . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
III-20. The flight of the Muslims, October 1912 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
III–21. The Bulgarian Exarchate trying to convert Bulgarian-speaking Muslims to Christianity . . . . . . . . . 80
v35. A Bulgarian Red Cross convoy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
III–22. Official disapproval of violent practices by the Bulgarian General HQ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
III-23. The destruction caused by the war in the villages near Shkodra and peoples’ agony in trying to
find a ‘valid’ reason for their misery – An account by Mary Edith Durham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
v36. Poor, hungry people who invaded the garden of the Italian Consulate, Scutari . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
v37. Bread distribution by the Bulgarians to the starving people of Adrianople . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

IIId. Behind the Front . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

III-24. Description of Belgrade by a Croatian newspaper correspondent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
III-25. Description of Istanbul by a French journalist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
A. In November 1912 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
B. In March 1913 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
v38. Aid distribution to the families of the soldiers mobilised in the Romanian-Bulgarian war, 1913 . . . 85
III-26. The situation in Scutari during its siege described by an Italian journalist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
v39. In Cetinje – women, children and wounded soldiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
III-27. ‘The Serbian woman’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
III-28. An upper-class Greek woman offers her services as a nurse and records her experience . . . . . . . . 87

Illustration of the content from Balkanski ratovi: istorijska čitanka 3

(Kolev & Kuluri 2005: 8)

Typically, as illustrated above, these sources provide the view

of the same events from various sides, including military reports,
private letters from the front, newspaper articles and internation-
al reports and sources. Therefore, these collections of historical

239
A. Pavlović, A. Ilić Rajković

sources can assist teachers to apply more easily contemporary meth-

ods of teaching history; likewise, they help the students to acquire a
more comprehensive grasp of their and their neighbours’ past through
active learning, and thereby to contribute overall to more realistic,
nuanced, and reconciliatory perceptions of their present problems.
As we argued, putting sources such as these in use in Serbian schools
and the educational system would be a step forward towards a desired
critical and humanistic way of teaching and understanding history.

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Berktaj, Halil & Bogdan Murgesku (eds.) (2005), Osmansko carstvo:

istorijska čitanka 1. Beograd: Prosvetni pregled/CDRSEE.
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0be.pdf (accessed March 30, 2021)
Dewey, John (1916), Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the
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D.M. (1934), “Dečji pesnik Mihailo Jović, u čijoj se kući nije pevalo, nije
smejalo, nije čak ni glasno govorilo, od rata“, Vreme, 18.12.
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