Philosophy As Education: A Post-Critical Approach to the Position and Future of an Academic Discipline

In this chapter I deal with the position and the future of the academic discipline Philosophy of Education, as well as with the issue of whether it should be regarded as a subject matter that is important in its own right and whether it should be included in Education Studies programs. This discussion has wider implications than Philosophy of Education only, as my reconstruction of this ongoing dispute shows what the difference is between taking a critical and a post-critical view on higher education. After briefly analyzing the historical and institutional background of the dispute, I first go into the default positions, viz. the critical stance that delegitimizes this subject matter and the conservative stance, which can be seen as a mirror image of the critical perspective. Over and against this, I sketch a more affirmative, post-critical picture, which starts from acknowledging the intrinsic value of this discipline. More specifically, I argue that the meaning of this discipline resides in the opening of a liminal space in which students of education can relate to their own object of study, i.e. what it means to experience educational transformation. For this reason I suggest that Philosophy of Education, in an affirmative key, should be called Philosophy as Education.