Abstract
As far as Žižek is concerned, our daily lives are intimately tainted and shaped by particular ideas and beliefs which implicate what we see, how we see, and therefore how we relate to each other in educational settings. Within contemporary educational settings, education is being cast in relation to economic utility. This activates particular expectations which generate educational customers and providers: now, in education, the ‘Customer is King’ at many different levels, from school to higher education. For Žižek, these ideas and beliefs have succeeded when we do not notice these particular shapes and forms, or when we do notice them and think they are ‘natural’, or that this is ‘the way education is’. Žižek, however, warns us that the ‘we do not know what we do’ idiom is a faulty one, and does not explain why we can be acutely aware of the troubles in our so called educational paradise, but carry on regardless: we know the limitations of educational audits or student satisfaction surveys, but we spend extraordinary amount of time and effort preparing for them. Žižek’s point here is that ‘we do know, but still’, through our behaviour, carry on. Being critical might appear to be a route to navigate this, but with a true Žižekian twist, can be a direct route for particular ideas and beliefs to take a tighter grip. In this way, such mechanics help to explain another dimension of why it is so challenging to achieve educational transformation on any level, from particular classroom teaching practices, through to the way education operates more broadly within society.
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Wall, T., Perrin, D. (2015). We Know, but Still . In: Slavoj Žižek. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21242-5_5
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