ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the reader to the main problem being addressed in Inoperative Learning: Can we think of education beyond taken-for-granted notions of learning, outcomes, assessments, and psychological development? In other words, what would education look like if we suspended and rendered inoperative our most basic and fundamental concepts that define the current, learning-oriented and assessment-focused environment? A key starting point to investigate this question is the peculiar work of Franz Kafka, which presents a number of paradoxical images of learners who do not learn and teachers who do not teach. By engaging with Kafka’s work, Tyson E. Lewis proposes a radically weak philosophy of education that does not provide sage advice, solve logistical problems, improve learning outcomes, or project revolutionary solutions. What remains when educational philosophy ceases to do its “homework” and thus give “lessons ”is nothing more than a confrontation with the underlying potentiality of education released from ends. Instead of putting this potentiality to work, a weak philosophy of education explores how an experience of potentiality as such is the heart of education. Each subsequent chapter in Inoperative Learning takes up the theme of potentiality and releases it from specific ends defined in advance by the logic of learning and assessment.
