Un-contemporary Mastery. The ordinary teacher as philosopher

Zusammenfassung

The feature films of the Belgian directors the Dardenne brothers are one of the most lauded bodies of work in contemporary world cinema (They have twice won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival). Their films can be seen as educational cinema in a number of ways. On one hand, they investigate in an intriguing way the contemporary reality of education and, more particularly, the actual relationship between adolescents and adults. Their films can be seen as empirical philosophical studies that ask questions of essential educational situations and matters: What does it mean to be a child, an adult, a father, a son, a mother, a daughter, a teacher, a schoolmaster, a pupil? What does it mean, not in general, but in the concrete (and sometimes extreme) situations and conditions that society presents today? (See Masschelein 2011, in press).