Abstract
Today, some contemporaries are tempted to understand and express freedom as if it exists outside of institutions. Then education has failed in its mediation of the institutional bonding between participants in a democracy and between generations. This chapter discusses the grounding of teaching as an act mediating mutual responsibility in society. Thus, teaching opens a space for the student to become a free individual with knowledge who supports the living in a sustainable society respecting freedom and obligation.
The mediation of freedom and institution is expressed through the reflexivity of teaching. This reflexivity of teaching is expressed through a teacher’s judgements of what is good or bad, permitted or forbidden. Through her mediation of these judgements the teacher “… institute the social bond and the modes of identity attached to it” (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 137). This is how the mediation of teaching affects the social groups of students in school through the teaching of knowledge of society. We argue that teaching must enact democracy as an institution giving and securing human rights and an obligation toward the representation of this democracy. Teaching must then represent a knowledge that is sustainable over time for all students.
Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to loseNothin’, don’t mean nothin’ hon’ if it ain’t free, no noAnd, feelin’ good was easy, Lord, when he sang the bluesYou know, feelin’ good was good enough for meGood enough for me and my Bobby
McGee (Kris Kristofferson).
By ‘institutions’ we are to understand here the structure of living together as this belongs to a historical community – peoples, nation, region and so forth – a structure irreducible to interpersonal relations and bound up with these in a remarkable sense which the notion of distribution will permit us later to clarify. What fundamentally characterizes the idea of institutions is the bond of common mores and not that of constraining rules (Ricoeur, 1994, p. 194).
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Notes
- 1.
It is with some hesitation we use the concept of enlightenment here, having reflected on the dialectics of enlightenment from the perspective of Horkheimer and Adorno (2002).
- 2.
In The Interpretation of cultures, 1973.
- 3.
Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society, Berkley: University of California Press. Chapter 3 cited from Ricoeur, 1991, p. 315.
- 4.
First published in French as Du texte àl’action: Essais d’herméneutique, II.
- 5.
Le Juste, Edition Esprit translated by David Pellauer, Ricoeur, P. (2000). The Just. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press .
- 6.
The art of memory, a number of loosely associated mnemonic principles and techniques used to organize memory impressions.
- 7.
It is timely to mention that in the book of methods for national tests in Norway, the directorate (U.Dir) write that in these national tests communication is too elusive, even though it is defined as a basic skill in all subjects in the National Curriculum, and therefore cannot be part of testing at national level (tests based on the IRT theory, same as PISA), besides, they write, when being tested children are not allowed to talk to each other. https://www.udir.no/globalassets/filer/vurdering/nasjonaleprover/metodegrunnlag-for-nasjonale-prover.pdf
- 8.
Institutional forms of association mean to understand oneself as participating and belonging to political bodies, where one does not stand out by being recognised through interpersonal relations, but where one is a representative in a collective.
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Hoveid, H., Hoveid, M.H. (2019). Education – An Institutionalisation of Teaching. In: Making Education Educational. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27076-6_7
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