ABSTRACT
From both the left and the right wings of educational theory and advocacy, there are calls for humanizing education. Indeed, the United Nations has argued that education should be seen as a human right. Drawing on scholars such as Donna Haraway, posthumanists have started to question the primacy of the human in these formulations. At stake here is the exclusive privileging of the human animal over and above nonhuman animals. While agreeing in large part with the posthumanist worry, this chapter offers a criticism of both humanism and posthumanism in educational philosophy. The problem is that both humanism and posthumanism are connected with the practice of learning, and thus deeply invested in the production of cycles of measurement and debt through which progress or regress can be measured. While the former measures successful breaks with the nonhuman animal as the principle achievement of early childhood education, the later measures the effort necessary to overcome the exclusivity of the human. As an alternative, the chapter proposes an inhuman, studious education that (a) suspends any notion of development toward or away from an end and (b) recognizes an immeasurable space that separates and conjoins human animals and nonhuman animals in the present moment. Drawing on a host of theorists, such as Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, and the literary works of Kafka, the chapter ends with a call for a weak practice of inhuman study that is open to all animals (human or otherwise).
