A Thinking Education

Abstract

In this revised keynote address, given at the Graduate Students's Research Forum in Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, the author explores what might constitute a thinking education through contrasting such with identified impediments to thinking in the public place of schooling. To do so the author draws off key distinctions in the works of Hannah Arendt (e.g., between labour, work, and action) and Gert Biesta (e.g., between schooling aims for qualification, socialization, and what might be educational) along with the support of insights about thinking from Alain Badiou. While thinking, like love, may be untimely, they are truly educational as they invite us to re-cognize our relations to others in ways that encourage us to become more than that we have been socialized to believe.