A year ago, Morten Timmermann Korsgaard was a visiting researcher here at the Faculty of Humanities and Education, attached to Udforsk. Dr Korsgaard works in philosophy of education, using for instance Hannah Arendt to assess our understanding of education and Bildung.
While at Udforsk, Korsgaard was finishing his new book, Retuning Education: Bildung and Exemplarity Beyond the Logic of Progress, and we organised a seminar where local and international colleagues debated the book. Now out, it has been well received for its rethinking of modern education and critique of the frameworks within which our current societies build education.
Ambitious, Korsgaard sets out to challenge the very concepts we use when discussing the purpose of education in modern society:
“This book responds to the need for new ways of defining the aims and forms of education, in an age that has seen the ideals of progress and growth lead the planet and its inhabitants to the brink of extinction.”
Pointing towards a pedagogy of exemplarity, he builds an approach to education that moves away from the progress-oriented and accumulative language that dominates much policy today.
The book is an excellent companion both to reassess one’s own teaching, and to think about education’s role and purpose. It might draw a somewhat simplistic picture of its antagonists, for the sake of the argument, but it succeeds in communicating a clear message, poking at accepted truths like the value of backward design and teaching towards competences.