the politics of skholé: rethinking the political character of scholastic education with jacques rancière

In this article, our goal is to delve into the political character of scholastic education through a pedagogical-philosophical discussion. We seek to rethink the notions of politics and skholé, and to take distance from more common approaches to politics in relation to scholastic education: not only by avoiding, on one hand, the reduction of politics to a matter of power dynamics, or to an arena for discussing and solving societal problems, or a matter of governmentality; but also by avoiding the reduction of scholastic education to an instrument of these. We believe that a meticulous reading of the political work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière offers a way to articulate the relationship between politics and scholastic education without falling into these reductions. We suggest that through this Rancièrian approach, it becomes possible to explore the transformative and emancipatory aspect of scholastic education without denying its political character, and without reducing it to a mere instrument for governmental policy. Therefore, after reviewing what we believe to be some key notions of Rancière’s notion of politics, we propose to discuss the political character of scholastic education by addressing two crucial pedagogical aspects: the formalization of scholè (meaning the way in which scholè takes form), and the scholastic formation (the kind of formation enabled throughout scholastic education). Our aim is to contribute to pedagogical debates on scholastic education by enabling a dialogue with a reading of Rancière's work that goes beyond The Ignorant Schoolmaster.