Rorty and Post-critical Pedagogy: Attempts at Dialogue

In my paper I will take my cue from a comparison between Rorty’s conceptual device and the recent proposal of a post-critical pedagogy. There are at least two reasons for this move: on the one hand, the pragmatist tradition is not among the theoretical vocabularies that the authors of the Manifesto for a Post-critical Pedagogy (Hodgson, Vlieghe, & Zamojski, 2017) marshal and, as a consequence, an engagement with Rorty could represent a contribution to the development of that view; on the other, while Rorty addressed educational matters in a fairly sporadic and sometimes seemingly reluctant way, passing through the reflections of the authors of the Manifesto could help us to unearth the educational potential of some important aspects of the Rortyan stance. In particular, I am thinking of three themes: a) the attitude towards poststructuralist and postmodern thought (suspended, so to speak, between the recognition of their positive outcomes and the suspicion about their possible excesses); b) the idea of a “pedagogical hermeneutics” (the ambivalent attitude that Rorty had with the notion of hermeneutics is well-known and I would like to explore whether the post-critical inflection of it could represent a way of overcoming some misgivings that Rorty came to nurture); and c) the emphasis upon education as “predicated on hope” (Ibid., 2017, 17). I will grant a special attention to this last theme. Indeed, Rorty’s version of pragmatism is captured by the title of a series of lectures held in the 1990s, “hope in place of knowledge”. As he argued, “my candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people, and in particular to work together so as to improve the future” (Rorty, 1999, xiii-xiv). My investigation will develop along two lines: first, while sharing a similar stress upon hope, in what sense is Rorty’s understanding of hope convergent upon that of the post-critical pedagogy? And in what sense is it divergent? And do the divergences point to ultimately unbridgeable views of education or can they be re-comprehended in a broader common horizon? Secondly, by appealing to hope as the key concept of pragmatism Rorty seems to want to take leave of the centrality of inquiry, a pivotal notion in educational pragmatism: can we reconstruct his ideas, instead, in terms of a hope-oriented view of inquiry? Can we, thus, imagine a Rortyan/post-critical version of inquiry-based pedagogy?