Abstract

LAVERTY, Megan  and  GREGORY, Maughn. Pragmatism and the unlearning of learnification. child.philo [online]. 2017, vol.13, n.28, pp.521-536. ISSN 1984-5987.  https://doi.org/10.12957/childphilo.2017.29925.

Biesta thinks that teaching is imperiled by the contemporary emphasis on student learning and the constructivist epistemology behind it - a phenomenon he refers to as "learnification." For him, learning transforms the world into an object of understanding and adaption, positioning the self at its center. Biesta criticizes P4/wC for falling in line with such learnification, for helping students to learn the critical thinking skills requisite to adapt themselves to global capitalism without critiquing it. Biesta uses pragmatism in general, and John Dewey's work on education in particular, to characterize and explain learnification, which makes his criticisms of P4/wC all the more pointed, given the influence of Dewey on that movement. In this paper we challenge Biesta's use pragmatism as representative of learnification. We show that pragmatism offers important insights and practices that not only make learning richer than intelligent adaptation, but blurs the distinctions between adaptation and reconstruction, and between learning and ethical relationality. We argue that pragmatism neither devalues teaching nor restricts learning to the individual's mind. It promotes inquiry as a socially embedded, experimental, and indeterminate process of self/world reconstruction. We show connections between Biesta's Levinas-inspired focus on interruption, suspension, and sustenance, and the pragmatist emphasis on doubt, interest, and community of inquiry. For pragmatism, to learn is essentially to self-correct one's understanding, desire and/or behavior, but only as a result of being challenged and helped by others. Moreover, the experience of being changed by participation in a community is never merely hermeneutic or intellectual, but also always ethical, or even spiritual. We conclude, contrary to Biesta, that the pragmatism of Charles Peirce, Dewey, Richard Rorty, Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp and Philip Cam conceives of constructivist education as a site for radical inter-subjective, inter-generational address and response, and for the radical questioning and subversion of personal, societal and cultural ways of life.

Keywords : Biesta; Pragmatism; Instrumentalism; Teaching; Philosophy for/with children.

        · abstract in Portuguese | Spanish     · text in English     · English ( pdf )