Education Studies and the Work of Education Criticism

This paper distinguishes the activity of educational criticism which works in service of education as indicated by the suffix -al, from education criticism which does not. The latter approach is prepared to doubt the mission of education as it is manifested in education institutions and in the broader cultural formation and maintenance of educated subjectivities. An education criticism does not assume that education institutions should be improved or that the production and maintenance of adult educated subjectivity is necessarily good or desirable. As such, it is prepared to risk the environment which makes its criticism possible, drawing from the arts and literature in which artists and writers have set out to perturb and question the epistemic and ethical attachments of their audiences.