Toward a Brutalist Turn in Education

As a kind of 'raw materialism', we argue that brutalism constitutes a useful analytic or figure with which to delink thinking from under the orthodoxies of educational thinking in the Global North. Our intention in this essay is not to offer yet another concept, critique, solution to, or survey of things gone wrong in the history of education and schooling. We propose that if a 'brutalist turn' is possible in education, it might be thought along two lines of import. The first might pertain to the ways in which infrastructure both orders and informs upon the character of pedagogical life. A second aspect of the brutalist turn might involve a different approach to educational analysis that adopts from the experimental mode of brutalism a host of new strategies for educational thought and practice. While not comprehensive, such strategies might harness the ideas of exposure, desubjectification, and molecular revolution as a fulcrum for relaunching education from under its contemporary lethargy.