Abstract
To take a Žižekian gaze at education, we are invited to try on a pair of ‘critico-ideological’ glasses which help us to look awry at our educational life, and notice the taken-for-granted things around us. Though these glasses are not available in all good opticians, they are valuable in helping us see that things are not what they seem, and as we will see later, there are troubling consequences for all involved. Žižek urges us to use these glasses to examine the hidden forces at play in educational contexts, specifically, how we draw from the Symbolic realm, that is, how we try to represent or capture things in our educational realities. This gives us useful insights into how we are making sense of education, but also how we activate particular coordinates of how we think we should act in practice. When we try on these glasses and gaze at education, we do not need to look far to see how contemporary education across all sectors is understood in terms of economic utility, and as such, how this shapes how people relate and engage. Žižek warns, however, that “when one looks for too long at reality through critico-ideological glasses, one gets a strong headache” (Žižek 2013): we might not like what we see as it might have devastating effects on how we see the world and on how we see ourselves. The paradox is that this headache is simultaneously the source of creating new ways forward, as we will soon see.
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Wall, T., Perrin, D. (2015). Which Education?. In: Slavoj Žižek. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21242-5_3
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