Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction: Do We Have Good Reasons to Commemorate Rousseau in 2012?

2012; Springer Nature; Volume: 31; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s11217-012-9315-6

1573-191X

Daniel Tröhler,

Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education

In fact, 50 years ago, in 1962, it would have been easier to justify a special issue on Rousseau in an educational journal than it is today.The OECD was hardly a year old, cognitive psychology was still in the hands of a few military psychologists, the problems of comparative statistics was not even detected let alone solved, and the school was still a school and not a system.It was only in these years around 1962 that some political stakeholders in world peace began to educationalize the Cold War by fostering sciences, mathematics, and secondary education in general and by starting an educational crusade, whose major instrument was developed only after the end of the Cold War, namely, PISA and other comparable large-scale tests.The world was different in 1962 not only in terms of education policy but also in educational thinking.Giorgio Agamben had not even started his law studies in Rome, Michel Foucault was offered a rather insignificant job in Clermont-Ferrand was completely unknown in those days, and Pierre Bourdieu taught some sociology at the small University of Lille.Deconstruction of modernity was a foreign word and became popular only towards the end and after the end of the Cold War, and it was only then that the history of ideas was interpreted as grand narrative.Whereas the stakeholders in world peace tried to defend the values of the West and to trim education and schooling to its core virtues-rationality and efficiency, the deconstructivists declared that no such a thing as the West and its virtues existed, and if they existed, they existed only as constructions resulting from power conditions and deserved to be deconstructed.Some more data on 1962: John F. Kennedy was still in office; the Rolling Stones were founded; the Beatles recorded Love Me Do, Elvis Presley dominated the charts in many countries with Can't Help Falling in Love, Return to Sender, and Good Luck Charm;