David Blacker

This dissertation seeks to establish general criteria for what counts as educative in educational technology. There has been much ink spilled over how technology might be used in schools and other learning environments, whether there is enough or too little of it, whether it is equitably distributed, and what it might promise us in the future. But ironically, the amount of scholarship concerning technology in these senses seems almost inversely proportional to the amount of serious thinking regarding how technology and education might, or should be, related to one another in any deeper sense. There have been attempts in educational theory that verge upon this sort of enterprise, a prerequisite for any normative account of how technology ought to be used in education, but these attempts have been inadequate. This is due largely to the fact that the "critical" literature, such as it exists, has been trapped within the parameters of an overly simplistic ontology of technology itself. ;This dissertation attempts to advance this nascent conversation by reviewing the relevant recent literature, and developing a more sophisticated view of technology than one typically finds there. This is accomplished by incorporating and expanding upon the strengths and discarding the weaknesses of existing theories, thereby building a new theory which, it is to be hoped, both rings truer and is also more serviceable to say, what it does, namely, a way of disclosing that both reveals and conceals worlds of involvement, it becomes clearer that the question concerning technology in education devolves into an inquiry into the nature and grand aims of education itself. The dissertation seeks to chart how the latter inquiry is necessitated by the former, and how a truly rich conception of education in contemporary life challenges us despite formidable obstacles to continue raising "the big questions," even as we race to become ever more technically proficient.

Teachers often speak of "living on" through their students, and students sometimes speak of a former teacher or teachings "living on" in them. What might teachers and learners mean when they say such things? Dying to Teach, by David J. Blacker, offers an answer to this question: The event of education provides a pathway to a kind of immortality that gives meaning and sustenance to teaching as a whole. From the Western tradition's very first theorizing about education (e.g., Plato and the Sophists) to contemporary postmodernism (e.g., Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida), this book offers both an intellectual history and a sustained argument for the inescapability of education's immortality agenda.

This paper develops a liberal contextualist account of schooling that balances institutional autonomy with public accountability under conditions of reasonable pluralism. First a conceptual obstacle is discussed: the tendency to conceive educational autonomy according to the false dilemma of instrumentalism versus non-instrumentalism. Then an alternative is advanced—the contextualist picture—that places education's institutional autonomy in its proper light. The conclusion raises and then responds to important objections to the contextualist picture.