Time, Space, and Education

University of Bergen and Norwegian Teacher Academy, 29.–30. September 2010 Scandic Bergen City Hotel, Håkonsgaten 2, 5015 Bergen

Hovedinnhold

This seminar, which is arranged by the research group Bildung, Art, and Educational Philosophy, is about examining the notions time and space in relation to education. The problems that can arise when the time concept is spatial will be investigated. One major question is how the spatial problem can be solved. Should we (re)turn to time and temporality, or what? The seminar speakers are Gert Biesta, Lars Løvlie and Michael Peters. Herner Sæverot will give an introductory talk.

Gert Biesta is Professor of Education at the Stirling Institute of Education, University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. Biesta is editor-in-chief of the journal Studies in Philosophy and Education. Homepage: www.gertbiesta.com

Lars Løvlie is Professor Emeritus of Education at the Department of Educational Research, University of Oslo, Norway, and Visiting Professor for Education at Örebro University, Sweden. Homepage: http://www.pfi.uio.no/forskning/prosjekt/humanped/forskerside_lasse.html

Michael Peters is Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Peters is the executive editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and editor of two international e-journals, Policy Futures in Education and E-Learning. Homepage: http://www.michaeladrianpeters.com/

Programme:

Wednesday September 29

10.00-10.15 Welcome. Tone Sævi and Herner Sæverot

10.15-11.30 “Time, Space, and Education” by Herner Sæverot

11.30-12.00 Coffee

12.00-13.00 Lunch

13.15-14.30 “Critical Historiographies: Retemporalizing Experience After the Spatial Turn” by

Michael A. Peters

14.30-14.45 Coffee

14.45-15.15 Discussion in small groups

15.15-16.30 Discussion in the whole group

16.30-17.00 Summing up. Tone Sævi and Herner Sæverot

Thursday September 30

09.00-10.15 “Space, Time and Ethics: Making Room for Education” by Gert Biesta

10.15-10.30 Coffee

10.30-11.00 Discussion in small groups

11.00-12.00 Discussion in the whole group

12.00-13.00 Lunch

13.15-14.30 “Did Kant have anything to say about education?” by Lars Løvlie

14.30-14.45 Coffee

14.45-15.15 Discussion in small groups

15.15-16.30 Discussion in the whole group

16.30-17.00 Summing up. Tone Sævi and Herner Sæverot

A prospectus of Sæverot’s introductory talk:

Time, Space, and Education

Herner Sæverot, University of Bergen

In this talk I claim that space has been given priority over ‘real’ time in education (and our society as a whole). This is, perhaps, the major source of our preoccupation with information and measuring, which is stifling education and our society at all levels. One can go further and say that by privileging space over time we have created a world obsessed with quantitative measures at the expense of qualitative experience – and that, of course, leads to the privileging of representation and the sign over life and qualitative experience, or time. Nick Cave has an interesting position as he will not accept any awards for his music: “I have always been of the opinion that my music is unique and individual and exists beyond the realms inhabited by those who would reduce things to mere measuring.” It’s very popular at the moment to write about space, which has been privileged over the centuries to such an extent that the notion of time we generally hold is a spatial version of time. But a spatial time concept creates the cause of a series of problems, that also will bring with it unfortunate consequences for education. In part four of the novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov – who, like Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and James Joyce, was inspired by Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time – claims that a spatial approximation of the world will lead to a reduced understanding of the world and perhaps even be the cause of a direct delusion. Nabokov points to, amongst others, progressive pedagogues, whose time concept is spatial. Thus one gets a determinate and reduced view of the future, which, in the progressive pedagogues’ eyes, can almost be calculated. Not only does one sweep the very notion of time under the carpet, but one will moreover miss the unknown and the unexpected. Emmanuel Levinas, whose concept of time also was influenced by Bergson’s, has a similar understanding when he indicates that a spatial notion of time betrays the Other, whereupon one ends up taking the Other’s otherness, thereby reducing the Other to the Same. This talk investigates the problems that can arise when the time concept is spatial and opens for possibilities for a theory of temporal education. At the end of the talk I try to address this particular question: How may time be fulfilled without closure in a teaching situation? My aim is to say something about temporal education, so as to balance a trend that has gone too much towards space, or, a spatial notion of time.

Outlines of the invited talks:

Critical Historiographies: Retemporalizing Experience After the Spatial Turn

Michael A. Peters, University of Illinois

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of
infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams (Hamlet 2.2.258-60).

Kantian culture was based on the categories of time and space inherited from the best science at the time (e.g., Newtonian physics) that treated them as aspects of our cognitive schema, shaping the very sense impressions we receive from the world and making them intelligible. Before Kant space and time were treated separately although often interdependently. At the beginning of the twentieth century Einstein’s ‘space-time’ that was expressed elegantly in Minowski’s equations treating these categories as one concept in his general theory of relativity published in 1907. The awareness of space developed quickly in topology, a form of spatial mathematics that culminated in the Bourbaki group whose work greatly influenced the revolution in structuralist poetics and linguistics, beginning with Jacobson. The structuralist revolution and its confrontation with phenomenology (and existentialism) is perhaps best epitomised in the quarrel between Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebrve over the nature of experience and its lived spatial nature. Foucault was later to retemporalize his epistemes by adopting Nietzsche’s ‘genealogy’, a move that encourage him and others to articulate a new form of historicism that imperilled essences and other universalist forms of thinking. By historicizing Heidegger Foucault moved toward what Hacking calls ‘historical ontologies’. This talk argues that in order to understand the spatial turns of the twentieth century in mathematics, philosophy, and history we need to develop critical historiographies that simultaneously view and problematize these turns. In this way we can come to recognize the ‘persistence of narrative’ as a lasting and significant achievement of the linguistic turn and as the basis for our systematic reflection on the spatial turn.

Space, Time and Ethics: Making Room for Education

Gert Biesta, The Stirling Institute of Education

Though it may seem that in my work I have strongly endorsed a ‘spatial turn,’ for example by asking the question, in my book Beyond Learning (Biesta 2006), where the subject comes ‘into presence,’ my answer to this question has been to move away from abstract, social and even relational notions of space towards questions of ethics and responsibility. This has culminated in the idea of a ‘pedagogy of interruption’ (Biesta 2006; 2010). In more recent work I have strongly challenged the idea that education is about creating spaces for learning, particularly in discussions with architects, and have argued that school architecture should actually focus on the question how to make room for education, again understood in ethical and political rather than simply spatial terms. While I am, therefore, highly critical about the prominence of notions of space in current educational discourse, this does not necessarily mean that we need to turn or even return to time and temporality. My most recent work actually tries to problematise the ways in which time and temporality have structured modern educational thinking and practice. Such views have deeply influenced ideas about learning (understood as a temporal change or a change over time) and also have influenced our ideas about the child as an ‘object’ of education. One of the problems here has to do with the implied colonisation of the future, i.e., the idea that educationally (but also politically) ‘solutions’ are always located in the future not the present. This raises the question if it is possible to think about education and learning in a non-temporal way. I am currently developing the implications of thinking about education in terms of the difference between what is and what is not, rather than as the difference between what is and what is not yet. In my presentation I will discuss the issues mentioned above, arguing that to overcome problematic notions of space and spatiality does not automatically bring us (back) to time.

Suggested preparatory reading:

Biesta, G.J.J. (2006). Beyond learning. Democratic education for a human future. Boulder, Co:

Paradigm Publishers.

Biesta, G.J.J. (2010). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy.

Boulder, Co: Paradigm Publishers.

Did Kant Have Anything to Say about Education?

Lars Løvlie, University of Oslo

The immediate answer to the question above is: Yes! His Anthropology (1797) and Lectures on education (1803), both strikingly liberal in their outlook and the Lectures well tempered in their practical advice, offered a blueprint for an enlightened bourgeois education wedded to humanity and freedom. Kant’s Lectures for students at the University of Königsberg in the 1770ies and 80ies was part of a veritable groundswell of radical thinking and practice in education, inspired by Rousseau and getting its specific German character in the work of philantropists like Bernard Basedow and Joachim Campe, and of intellectuals like Wilhelm von Humboldt (in his The Limits of State Action). Yet, what Kant had to say about education did not reach beyond what his contemporaries already were up to and seemed to me to be only of historical interest. What could change that verdict? The answer is: the fact that he explicitly introduced the moral stance and its corollary, the pedagogical paradox, which says that you cannot force people to be free. The moral stance is based on the utter independence of the individual in moral choice, its total freedom and responsibility in moral matters. What use is it for the paradox for education, since it has no method attached but tends to stop the teacher in her step? The answer is: the moral stance presents ideals to be realised, and ideals may appear as aims of education (cf. Paragraph 1 in the Norwegian Education Act). These aims could, or should also act as limits on teacher’s actions, a hands-off warning, a sign of no trespass on other people’s moral autonomy, a different kind of “negative education” (Rousseau). The burden here is squarely on the teacher and her self-reflection: on what she owes herself as a professional, that is, on her reflective judgement on, on what is a human being, what human dignity is, and what freedom is. Then the great obstacle! Kant drew a strict line between the transcendental groundlaying of morals as pure philosophy, and the empirical world of the “anthropology” that has actual human life as its object. It seems that the gains of the first point spell a total loss of the second; there is no bridge between lofty ideals and everyday practice, so there is nothing for educators to glean from this abstract idea of humanity. Then the relief: first, it is the work of the idea of freedom or autonomy that makes the paradox possible in the first place. Without ideals practice seems to deflate into traditional learning processes and their management. Second, when Kant goes practical, and he does so in several places, he comes up with interesting suggestions as to how we could go about teaching values. The pedagogical paradox incites a critique of the limits of teacher action, and shows how non-intervention can partake in education without invoking child-centred pedagogy (because the focus is on the teacher and her reflection on the idea of humanity, that is, on self-knowledge rather than on knowledge about the child). The pedagogical paradox is with us moderns here to stay; it cannot be spirited away, even if contributes, in specific cases, to educational problem-solving.