The Problem of Educational Power
This past March, I gave a general session at the annual meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society (PES). This small but cool conference is the event of the year for my academic discipline, and it was the first conference I ever presented at nearly 15 years ago. So it was a great honor to give a general session where the whole conference attended to hear me speak.
The paper I gave was called “The Problem of Educational Power,” and is sort of a turning point in my work. It tries to combine a literary style with Marxist political-economy wonk and finance policy.
In it, I articulate the tension between the purpose of education (preparing students for the future) and the infrastructural power that runs education (carbon emitted by school buildings that ruins the future). I draw from Soren Mau’s Mute Compulsion to think about the economic power of education in a time of crisis and bunch of other tendencies.
The article will be published later this year, but this week I’m sending along a pre-print. I’m pretty proud of it!