ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes the identity politics and a politics of the self and explores their educational implications. Derrida suggests that Plato's primary project was the grounding of culture upon the construction of rigid boundaries between the world of logos and mythos. He goes as far as to claim that Western history "has been produced in its entirety and difference between mythos and logos, blindly sinking down into that difference as the natural obviousness of its own element". Progressive identity politics encourages the growth of an identity politics on the right in another way. One thing that both identity politics and a politics of the self have in common is a new understanding of education as the ongoing process of "becoming somebody," to use Wexler's term. This represents a radical challenge to traditional but still powerful notions of education as the transmission of knowledge to passive students, conceptualized as empty vessels waiting to be filled with "official knowledge".
