The Educative Process and the “Social World as Association.” The Aim of Education in a ‘New-pragmatist’ Key

This paper will take its cue from a statement of Dewey: “Education is autonomous and should be free to determine its own ends, its own objectives. [...] educational aims are to be formed as well as executed within the educative process” (LW 5: 38). This vindication of autonomy of education was aired implicitly against the theoreticians of social efficiency, who may be considered in some respects – at the level of the logic presiding over the definition of the aims of education – as, in some way, ancestors of the discourse of human capital (Baldacci, 2014). I will recontextualize this vindication in the contemporary scenarios in three steps: first, I will show how a redescription of Dewey’s position allows us not to remain ensnared in the dichotomy between ontology vs instrumentality in the theorizing of education (Szkudlarek, 2020) or to merely capitulate to the critique of the “educationalization of social problems” (Depaepe & Smeyers, 2008). While meritoriously indicating the perils of the instrumentalization of education (and providing us with tools to avoid them), either alternative risks opening the door to forms of theorizing that leave education as a free-floating phenomenon, remote from its actual historical rootedness. Secondly, I will counter Dewey’s conceptual device in reference to the setting of educational aims against one of the most influential efforts in the contemporary debate to outline the “task of education” (Biesta, 2017) without ceding to the sirens of the discourse of learning: I am referring to Biesta’s (2006, 2010, 2015) endeavour to reclaim a vocabulary of “good education” against the predominant learnification and the “what works” discourse, which are accomplice with the neoliberal understanding of the aim of education and jeopardize the democratic tension in the educational undertaking. While Biesta’s tripartite articulation of education (in terms of qualification, socialization and subjectification) helpfully pinpoints the different dimensions involved in the educative process, the gulf which he has increasingly established between the first two dimensions and the third – the latter being the only one genuinely “educational” and, therefore, a topic for a genuinely educational theorizing – may put educational theory in danger of having no role in re-inflecting the discourse-practice at the qualification-socialization levels. For this reason, in the third and most constructive part, I will suggest re-appropriating and updating the Deweyan position. In particular, I will build upon his specification that “[i]t would be presumptuous if it had been said that educators should determine objectives. But the statement was that the educative process in its integrity and continuity should determine them. Educators have a place in this process, but they are not it, far from it” (LW 5: 38. Emphasis added). I will re-interpret this claim by establishing a dialogue between Dewey and Bruno Latour and re-reading the idea of the educative process in connection with the latter’s notions of the “learning compact”, “social world as association” and “collective in the process of expanding.” I will call this a new-pragmatist view of the aims of education as distinct from both classic pragmatism and neo-pragmatism.