Does Education Require Emancipation? A Historical Analysis

Abstract

The conventional framing of the relation of education and emancipation asks what kind of education is in place, possible, or desirable for some specific emancipatory goal. This question draws on a long and important tradition, advocacy for and sometimes even assumption of education as liberatory. In this view, acquisition of knowledge is ipso facto beneficial. The aim of this text is to probe the nature and viability of the emancipatory potential ascribed to knowledge. To that end, the chapter first sketches a model of the emancipatory conception of education, before calling it into question, that is, criticizing the instrumentalization of education for emancipation. The final considerations revolve around the question whether it is not better to emancipate education from the requirement of emancipation as well, rather than educate having a specific, set emancipatory aim in mind at the outset. Put bluntly—and to give the problem a “dialectic” twist—is it not better to conceive of education not through emancipation, but as emancipation itself, thus equating the terms?