Teaching the Event: Deconstruction, Hauntology, and the Scene of Pedagogy

Abstract

Education is an event. More precisely, it is haunted by the event. All the aporias of education, all its desires and frustrations, everything we love about education and everything that drives us mad, has its ground without ground not in an ontology or a methodology or a psychology of education but a hauntology. Only as a hauntology is the philosophy of education possible. That will be my hypothesis today. 1 Allow me to begin with a scene you will all find familiar. When our children were still attending the public schools in our township, I stood for election for the school board. We were trying to elect the first Democrat in the history of the township school board and my appointed task was to run to the left of the person we were really trying to elect and make her appear moderate. Needless to say I relished the task. My only hesitation was the fear that I would be collateral damage, that is, that we would succeed so well that I too would be elected and then I would have to attend all the school board meetings. In that case my first official act would have been to demand a recount. The issue was, of course — what else? — school taxes. What would have been very funny about the campaign, were it not also so serious, was that we had only one real issue with which to appeal to our Republican friends — not the welfare of the children, not fairness to the teachers, not the well-being of the country, not the future. The only thing that appealed to them was property values. The local realtors made generous use of the well-known quality of the township schools in advertising, which drove up property values, and if the voters wrecked the schools, they would destroy their own property values. You get what you pay for. They heard that argument and we were able to elect our moderate candidate. The other thing that struck me during the campaign was the threat that the teachers had put on the table to spook the township, that if these issues were not fairly resolved, they would " work the contract. " As you well know, that means they would do everything agreed to in the contract but not a thing more, not a thing that the contract did not spell out — not a single extra moment after the dismissal bell, not a single extra phone call to a parent, not a single extra session with a student, not a single extra effort in any regard on any matter that could not be legally demanded of them. Just the contract. Of course, this was a specter, a nightmare, a monster; because everyone knows that it is precisely this something extra that makes the difference, that makes the schools run. The teachers must make the contract work. If they work the contract, the contract will not work.