Kinopedagogy as Non-Conservative Education and Time as the Abode of Humans

In this paper, the endeavour to understand how to think of education ‘after progress’, viz. in an age in which progress has become problematic, is undertaken by focusing on the theme of time. Dovetailing Mollenhauer’s reflections about the rise of the Bildungszeit at the dawn of modernity with Popkewitz’s analyses of “cosmopolitan time” presiding over the pedagogical reform throughout the 19th century to the present, I will, first, explore this temporal configuration of modern schooling (which goes hand in hand with a specific understanding of the child). Against this backdrop, I will, secondly, advance an interpretive hypothesis, that of substituting what will be called the child-as-migrant for the “cosmopolitan child,” by appropriating, in an educational key, some insights of Nail’s “migrant cosmopolitanism.” Thereby, I will suggest an alternative view of “progressivity,” construed not along the modern-developmentalist lines but as a form of non-conservativeness, linked with a recognition of the ekstatikon (=destabilizing) character of time. This will require a revisitation of some Aristotelian intuitions about time as the rhythm of movement, reinterpreted as the affective notice of that ek-statikon without which there is no potential for the new. Accordingly, ‘progressive’ education (in the different acceptation here investigated) is the care to allow all of us as ‘migrants’ to live actively in the abode of our ek-static and unpredictable condition and, therefore, to be vulnerable to the new, without merely remaining in a taken for granted ethos, cosmopolitan, inclusive and progress-oriented though it may be.