Education for education’s sake? Notes on post-critical pedagogy by example of the compensatory task of education in Sweden

Since the recent call for a turn towards a “post-critical educational philosophy,” several philosophers of education have aimed at reaffirming the value of education for education’s sake. Rather than wanting to imply that education is apolitical, this shift is defended as itself a necessary political move in the context of contemporary educational research and theory. We agree that there is a problematic tendency of instrumentalizing education for political and economic gain. However, we argue that a more fine-grained and nuanced analysis is necessary in order to be able to distinguish between different political takes on education. We argue that not all ways in which education is described, analyzed or conceived of in political terms are equally problematic cases of instrumentalization and that there lies an immense danger in such over-generalization. Exploring the contemporary historical case from Sweden regarding the shifts in the understanding of the compensatory task of schooling, sheds light on the relevance we see in a contemporary philosophical discussion of the aims of education in terms of both aims goals and distribution goals. While we agree that education and acute political issues need to be kept at a reasonable distance from each other, we believe that some of the arguments formulated in the call for post-critical pedagogy need to be reworked in order to avoid that it turns into a naïve gesture of strengthening tendencies of the status quo which cover over current injustices and contribute to increasing social inequality. We cannot lose sight of the difficulty of ensuring and safeguarding the conditions of possibility of education to be for education’s sake. In a spin on Bernstein’s famous quote, we suggest that while education cannot compensate for society, we need society to compensate so that education can be for education’s sake. For this, we need an educational philosophy which can adequately and critically articulate and describe societal and political questions as they pertain to education.