Bringing
Walter Benjamin into dialogue with the urgent issues facing educational
institutions today, this is the first comprehensive exploration of his philosophy
of education and pedagogy.
In
recent years, problems concerning the practice of education have become
central to the critical discourse in the humanities: from debates regarding
“deplatforming” and the redefinition of free speech on campus to the
digitization of learning and the ethics of mentorship. But where do
we go from here? This volume argues that Walter Benjamin’s writing offers
critical tools to rethink the purposes of
education and the institutional forms it
should assume.
Reaching
from his earliest writings during his involvement with the antebellum German
Youth Movement to his late essays on history, theatre, and new media, the
authors here explore how Benjamin argued against education as an
institutional task subject to a
scientific discipline. They show instead how he took his cue from language as a medium of subtle
understanding to critically analyze the forms of violence inherent in the concept and history of education. For Benjamin, education was the lever to political
reform. For him, the experience of youth should always be at the centre of considerations.
Written
by leading international scholars, Walter
Benjamin and Education both contextualizes Benjamin’s pedagogy in the trajectory
of his own thought and also offers an astute analysis of the value and relevance
of his student-focused ideas to the institutional and political challenges of
today.
"List of Abbreviations Preface: Pedagogy and Experience in Walter Benjamin, Michael Jennings (Princeton University, USA) Editors' Introduction, Dennis Johannßen (Lafayette College, USA) and Dominik Zechner (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA) Chronicle of Benjamin's School and Student Years, Dennis Johannßen (Lafayette College, USA) and Dominik Zechner (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA) Part I: Genealogies of Learning 1. Infans, Clemens-Carl Härle (University of Siena, Italy) 2. Learning from Experience: Elements of Self-Criticism in Benjamin's Works, Charles Gelman (New York University, USA) 3. Leitmotif Siegfried, Laurence A. Rickels (Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Germany) 4. The Child in Benjamin: An Enduring Lesson, Henry Sussman (Yale University, USA) Part II: Languages of Youth 5. Conversational Pedagogy in Benjamin and Nietzsche, Natasha Hay (University of Toronto, Canada) 6. Speaking Silence: Historical Subjectivity in Nietzsche and Benjamin, Ian Fleishman (University of Pennsylvania, USA) 7. Silence, Medium, Transmission: Benjamin’s Metaphysics of Language and Youth, Adi Nester (University of Colorado Boulder, USA) 8. ""In Voice Land"": Benjamin on Air, Ilit Ferber (Tel-Aviv University, Israel) Part III: Envisioning Pedagogical Futures 9. Unfulfilled Historical Time and the Self-Pedagogy of Critique, Gerhard Richter (Brown University, USA) 10. Against the Law: Youth and the Critical Pedagogy of Eternal Rebellion, Michael Powers (Macalester College, USA) 11. Improvision, Thomas Schestag (Brown University, USA) 12. Walter Benjamin and the Anthropocene, Nitzan Lebovic (Lehigh University, USA) List of Contributors Index"
Dennis Johannßen is is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College, USA. His work has appeared in MLN, The German Quarterly, Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, and Anthropology and Materialism. Dominik Zechner is Assistant Professor of German at the Department for German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and a Post-doctoral Research Associate at Brown University, USA.
Reviews for Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy
Recent scholarship on Benjamin has found new urgency in his writings on childhood, education, and pedagogy. The current collection of essays is a significant contribution to this growing body of literature. Anyone who reads Forces of Education will undoubtably recognize Benjamin himself as an angel of history, gazing upon the ruins of our educational institutions while nevertheless remaining in flight, propelled by the idea of education’s potential redemption. * Tyson E. Lewis, Professor of Art Education, University of North Texas, USA *
