Education Beyond the Program: Exploring the Eventive Possibilities of Education

Abstract Modern education has often been criticized for reducing teaching and schooling to a matter of “program.” Critiques of this programmatic approach to education come from a variety of perspectives with a wide range of underlying reasons. This article presents a perspective that might contribute to the prevailing ways of theorizing about how education could be taken beyond the program: namely, a deconstructionist perspective derived from the work of American philosopher and theologian John D. Caputo. This article begins with a discussion of the relation between the program of education and the “name” of education by posing the question: can a program of education (ever) be worthy of its name? The answer I give, in short, is “no.” Next, I engage with the question of the ontological status of the program and argue that there is, properly or ontologically speaking, nothing beyond the program. The two sections that follow discuss how education could go beyond the program of being and becoming on the one hand, and the program of education itself on the other. Overall, I present and argue for a Caputo‐inspired deconstructionist way to theorize about education that tries to take education beyond the program by exploring its possibilities for the event without being hostile to the inherent program‐ness of education.