Michael Peters

University education is full of promise. Indeed universities have the capacity to create and shape, through staff and students, all kinds of enthralling ‘worlds’ and ‘new possibilities of life’. Yet students are encouraged increasingly to view universities as simply a means to an end, where neoliberal education delivers flexible skills to directly serve a certain type of capitalism. Additionally, the universal challenge of technological unemployment, alongside numerous other social issues, has become educationalised and portrayed in HE policy, as an issue to be solved by universities. The idea that more education can resolve the problem of technological unemployment is a political construction which has largely failed to deliver its promise. In this article, we look at educationalisation in hand with technologisation and we draw on a Critical Discourse Analysis of HE policies, to demonstrate the problems arising from taken for granted visions of neoliberal social development related to education,...

In a range of path-breaking publications that shaped his engagement with educational theory Paul Smeyers sympathetically investigated the claims and ‘atmosphere’ of postmodernism. In this chapter I investigate the backlash against postmodernism that holds it responsible for ‘post-truth politics,’ and of promoting a cynical attitude to truth and facts. I argue for an intellectual history of truth in which it is contested, not only in Continental tradition and in what some have called postmodernism, but also in the analytic tradition. I explore these issues through a reading of Wittgenstein’s place and role in the history of analytic philosophy and by investigating how he moves away from a notion of truth grounded in a form foundationalism in the Tractatus to embrace a form of anti-foundationalism in the Investigations and On Certainty.

Three prominent Wittgenstein scholars introduce the broad educational significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work to a wider audience of educational researchers and practitioners through provocative, innovative, and playful readings of his work. They vividly demonstrate the influence of his thinking and its centrality to understanding our contemporary condition. Wittgenstein fundamentally shaped contemporary theories of language, representation, cognition, and learning. The book also traces the “pedagogical turn” of his thinking during the period from 1920 to 1926. What is most radical about Wittgenstein’s later work is that it suggests learning and initiation into practices are fundamental to understanding his philosophy. The book not only provides a new and fresh interpretation of Wittgenstein’s thought but also explores a new way of thinking about education as a way of revealing the educational dimension of philosophical problems.