Like democracy which is, as Jacques Derrida famously claimed, always a democracy to come, also pedagogy, and the “province of pedagogy” in particular, shows that teaching (also at the university level) is a pedagogy to come. Thus, a pedagogue is one for whom nothing at school, at the university, in a society, in class is “given” as ready made with a condition, if not an obligation, that it must be simply transmitted on to other minds. Utopia is a power not to proliferate the real as it is but to reinvent it. Hence there is no embarrassment of utopia but, rather, utopia helps us to overcome the embarrassment of the real which in many respects has become morally intolerable. We will try to think on the strength of the argument that the most important asset of pedagogy is to demonstrate that one cannot and should not act merely by applying already enforced rules and norms, and that, in consequence, civic education is a meditation on and experimentation in individual responsibility. To think along this path implies a necessary reflection on the relationship between the political power and universities which are more and more aggressively pushed through budgetary balances to see themselves as a domain of end-oriented, applied sciences. We would like to postulate a vision of the university founded not only upon the idea of universitas but also societas, a place which refuses to be an institution where knowledge is transmitted as a repertory of means for future careers but which, equally importantly, is a laboratory of the human connection and binding in the spirit of solidarity.
Province of pedagogy is also a pedagogy of the province: both describe what we shall point out – that intellectual labour belongs to the domain of what is provincial, to what is related to the province, never to a center. The province locates us where all who want to teach and study should be: the outskirts, peripheries, margins, and borders from where one can better see what is beyond the horizon, what is to come. Province (of pedagogy) names a place where alternative visions of the world may provide the grist for shaping powerful forces which may change the real. Thinking of citizens of the future world we would like to see them not only equipped with professional skills that universities would provide them with, but, first of all, we would like to think of them as of people who would be joyfully willing to critically reflect and will have have freedom to do so.
Tadeusz Sławek - Apocalypse and Metamorphosis. Civic Education and Utopia
Sept. 28, 2011, 4:08 p.m.
The essay stems from a conviction that pedagogy needs to be guided by a certain utopia. By this concept we do not, however, mean a mere visionary denial of reality, a postponement of action through a description of the ideal; utopia does not lead us outside the world we know, but, just the opposite, it offers prospects of a transformation of the real.