The Future of Education

An expanding field of research in educational sciences are analyses of the relationship between feelings and education. According to an important strand within this field, the new discourses regarding emotions that have emerged in educational policies the last, roughly, twenty years, are concomitant with new societal – in particular economic – demands; it is argued that the emotionally loaded discourses are manifestations of new techniques of governmentality – a form of emotional management. In reaction to these tendencies, variously described as “postmodern relativism” and/or a “neoliberalisation” of education, some researchers, e.g. Frank Furedi, have advocated a “return” to a more formal, strictly knowledge-oriented, approach in education: a return to a rationally grounded education serving to transmit knowledge. In contrast to these narratives, I will argue that in order to better understand the new forms of articulating emotional dimensions in educational policies in late modernity, it is more fruitful to conceive of it as a shift from one form of emotional logic – a more public-oriented logic – to a more private-oriented emotional logic. Emotions and education are inseparable, but the ways in which they have been articulated, how education has been emotionally loaded so to speak, has undergone important changes, and the aspect that I will explore in paper is how it can be related to the political categories public and private. In order to illustrate my point, I will mobilise Richard Sennett’s reflections in ‘The Fall of Public Man’ as well as Hannah Arendt’s reflections on authority and the educational sphere as an “in-between” public and private sphere. To conclude, I will indicate how I believe that this approach can fructify in particular the currently very influential Foucault-inspired paradigm as well as those criticising contemporary educational systems for its acclaimed “laxity” and “postmodern fuzziness”.

Keywords: Education, Emotional Logic, Public Sphere, Private Sphere, Authority;