Rethinking Education and Emancipation

Abstract

In an inhuman world, the problem of education is the problem of articulating a human voice against the machineries of violence visited persistently upon persons— a voice against the truth of power, the dead and finished truth of what is decided, the truth of the inert and incontrovertible. The problem of education is the problem of unwinding the human body and soul from this intricate clockwork of not merely the correct and commendable but also the apparently self-evident and inevitable. It is the problem of rescuing being from what is, a what is that has conquered every other possibility to give itself the status of fact and truth. This what is is not just an apparatus of painful training; it is a machine of assimilation and destruction. The prior chapters have described the outlines of this system. The experiences that theorists have identified variously as exploitation, marginalization, and normalization should not be fought over as to their priority, since they all participate in the same process. They represent the various modes of an assault on the human by power and the reality that power has assembled for itself.¹ The exposure of and challenge to this violence is the real problem of education.