Utopian Pedagogy, Friday 21st December, 2008

This meeting was held to coincide with the London Freeschool weekend and so we chose a couple of selections from Mark Cote, Richard Day and Greig de Peuter's Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization. The first reading, by Henry Giroux ('Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times: Critical Pedagogy and the Project of Educated Hope') gives an analysis of neoliberal pedagogy and questions how we might conceive of a utopian project under contemporary conditions. We agreed that he was concerned to analyse the role of the intellectual in fighting for change and that he sees the university as a productive site for challenging the hegemony of instrumental knowledge and careerist social aspirations and that he was warning against the tendency of academics to give in to the competitive and divisive strategies of university managements. Nevetheless, we were split between those of us who saw him as proposing a pragmatic stratagy for cautious utopian thinking in which moves are made towards releasing knowledge from the constraints of a competitive and individualist approach to learning and those who were not convinced that he was offering anything more than a proposal for a new knowledge elite, managerial class or vanguard party.

Because we were joined by new members involved in home schooling and more interested in pre-university education, we were able to consider Giroux's ideas in the context of a re-assessment of the family and the responsibility for educating children without meeting the demands of the national curriculum and other restrictive forms. We agreed that, in offering children the choice of whether to continue outside the system or whether to spend time gaining recognised qualifications, home schooling, in fact, could be understood as part of Giroux's call for a socially relavant and critical pedagogy which 'closes the gap between the university and everyday life'. We discussed the practical difficulties of home schooling and how it seemed to point towards a need for some sort of collective activity because of the demands on individual parents and heard anecdotes about home schooled children and their attitudes towards education. We made connections here with the second reading, Allan Antliff's 'Breaking Free: Anarchist Pedagogy' and the story of the high school student who promoted self managed learning and was suspended and forced to change schools. Antliff's assertion that the anarchist movement can force high profile confrontations with the educational establishment we found inspiring but we were suspicious of the way that he reported the activities of the freeschools in Canada as without conflict and always successful.

With this in mind, we returned to Giroux and the role of desire in utopian thought. We considered Giroux's 'militant utopianism' to be driven by desire and aware that conflict is a necessary part of social change without offering any restrictive prescriptions for what a new pedagogy might look like.