ABSTRACT
Sociologically framed critical scholarly discourse does not enjoy huge popularity nowadays. For it creates obstacles to flat and merry thinking that has dominated public discourse regarding education, a form of discourse that increasingly deprives words of socio-historical depth and distrusts our right to envision potentialities, to understand, and to create dissent. Contemporary versions of reactionary, authoritarian, and populist neoliberalism seem to lead the way (on the issue and the appropriateness of using such ‘oxymoronic formulations’ regarding characterisations of neoliberalism, see Peck and Theodore 2019, p. 256). For example, one of the first moves of the newly appointed Greek Minister of Education was to declare that history in education should ‘no longer be social’, but should focus ‘on the development of a national consciousness instead’. 1 Sociologically framed critical thinking questions certainties, is not easy to digest, and might at times sound a bit melancholic. It is under siege for it problematises easy solutions, naturalisation of domination and control, a-social and a-political views of education and knowledge as mere instruments for ‘growth’. It exposes and frames critically the thorny market-based invasion of ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ to both formal and informal learning settings, a trend that purports ‘to give prominence to the talented young individuals’ 2 ‘ready to conquer the 21st century skills’. 3 Such formulations conceal the economic, racial, and gender injustices that lie underneath them; they conceal, ‘the politics of stranger making; how some and not others become strangers; how emotions of fear and hatred stick to certain bodies; how some bodies become understood as the rightful occupants of certain spaces’ (Ahmed 2012, p. 2). Karen Ahmed’s words bring to mind a little phrase from Richard Powers’ The Time Of Our Singing (2003, p. 344), where Joseph, a young musician and black American Jew talks of the beginning of his relationship with Malalai, ‘the darkest child in school’: ‘The whole school wanted us paired: two troubling ethnics, safely canceling each other out’.
