ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the contrast at the heart of this book: between pupil management and the political agency of the pupil at a theoretical level, but on the basis of the above analyses of concrete classroom practices and situations. It takes its cue from Malabou’s flexibility/explosion choice and interprets it as a dilemma between two of Arendt’s conceptions of action: of the political citizen who shapes the world in which we live and think; and of the subject, who attends to the necessities of life and survival. Both are vital to good education. Mistaking the one for the other could result in smothering the pupil’s rights to self-determination, or ignoring their needs for pedagogical care, to which they have rights and reasonable expectations. The necessity for both lies at the heart of current debates concerning Arendt’s philosophy of education: does she understand school as a political sphere or not? The choice is elucidated as (not two different phenomena but) two ways of seeing the same phenomenon, and an example is given in the various uses of the value of “amor fati”. This distinction is folded back onto the previous chapters (particularly Chapter 1) and used to clarify some of the questions raised there. This chapter ends with the understanding of art as shunting our perception away from obvious interpretations offered to us by our institutions and into different conceptualisations that allow new trajectories of pedagogical action.
