ABSTRACT
In line with the main theme of this book, which invites one to rethink the connection between education and justice, this chapter seeks to critique the forces in education that keep uncritically advocating dialogue as the most viable means of individual empowerment. To show the limits of this position, I argue that dialogic exchange is not always beneficial because the authority of “truth” in dialogue/dialectics may control the processes of deliberation and communication involved in teaching and learning. For this purpose, this chapter has three sections. In the first section, I consider the following list of thinkers and pedagogues – Socrates, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, and (more recently) Seyla Benhabib – for two purposes: firstly, to cover, with broad strokes, a number of aspects regarding their conceptions of the nature and effect of exchange of information on societies and individuals; and, secondly, to explain how this philosophical/pedagogical conceptual background has influenced the positions of the philosophy of education on dialogue and dialectics. In the second section, I discuss the issue of justice in dialogic education by focusing on how an absolute sense of “truth” can silence others by controlling their deliberative and communicative processes. In the third and final section of the chapter, I broach the issue of how the spectral quality of the silence of dropouts can motivate education to seek more hospitable paths in its pedagogical methods, ones which in a roundabout way keep sustaining the connection between education, dialogue, and justice.
