Beyond learning, back to the care of the soul? Socrates, Patočka and the ‘worldward’ movement of education

Against the backdrop of some critiques of the language of learning in educational theory and certain attempts to devise alternative vocabularies, I will explore the Socratic notion of the care of the soul as the matrix of our philosophical and educational tradition and as a permanent resource for articulating a discourse about education in contemporary scenarios. The paper is structured in three parts: in the first, I will present some of Masschelein’s and Biesta’s arguments against learning; in the second, I will draw upon some tenets of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka to investigate the epoch-making innovation represented by Socrates, which I will read in a ‘pedagogical’ key; in the conclusions, I will hint at how we should appropriate the Socratic gesture without any backward-looking stance.