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Gert J.J. Biesta, Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future

Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO, 2006

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Notes

  1. Kant, like Biesta, identifies this—“What do you think about it?”—as a fundamental educational question for similar reasons even though his formulation is different. In “An Answer to the Question: ‘what is Enlightenment?’’’, Kant distinguishes between the private and public exercise of reason. Reason, privately exercised, is determined by official roles and responsibilities. Reason, publically exercised, requires judgment as individuals must make free and independent decisions as to what to think. Being called upon to form an opinion and make a judgment can unsettle an individual’s complacency, interrupt his or her ‘thinking’, and call the individual to account for him or herself in way that is potentially transformative.

  2. Biesta extends this criticism to the intersubjective “turn” characterizing twentieth century philosophy because it presents a new, but equally totalizing, theory of the subject.

  3. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans H. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964) cited in Cordner (2002, p. 96).

  4. My analysis of Kant on the difference between treating others as values, as distinct from prices, is informed by J. David Velleman’s exemplary essay “Love as a Moral Emotion” in Self to Self: Selected Essays, pp. 70–110.

References

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  1. Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street, Box 204, New York, NY, 10027-6696, USA

    Megan J. Laverty

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  1. Megan J. Laverty
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Correspondence to Megan J. Laverty.

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Laverty, M.J. Gert J.J. Biesta, Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future . Stud Philos Educ 28, 569–576 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9136-4

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