Response to Eduardo M. Duarte’s Review of RadicalEducation and the Common School

Michael Fielding • Peter Moss

Published online: 18 April 2012� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Our thanks to Eduardo Duarte for such a thoughtful and imaginative critical engagement

with our work. The issues he raises and the manner in which he reflects on and extends the

discussions we began in our book validate and exemplify our hope for an agonistic

democratic politics of recognition. Also, as the concluding sentences of the first half of his

essay suggest, he, like us, underscores the need for understanding and celebrating

democracy, not just as an agonistic, but as an embodied, existential encounter.

Perhaps the most challenging part of Eduardo Duarte’s review, both for us and for him,

is a shared aspiration to respond to our metaphorical and literal rallying cry to those writing

in this field to author ‘More poetry, less prose’. As he himself says, ‘How might educa-

tional critics, theorists and philosophers take up a counteroffensive of poetry? What would

more poetry, less prose entail?’

For potential readers, we should first explain that the poetry/prose dichotomy forms just

one part of our response to the question with which we open our final chapter, ‘what is to

be done?’ Far more space is given over to ‘a discussion about possible processes for

transformation’, guided by the work of Erik Olin Wright (on real utopias) and Roberto

Unger (on democratic experimentalism) and the concept of prefigurative practice. Nev-

ertheless the call for more poetry and less prose is important and we applaud the bravery

and the adventure both of Duarte’s proposal and its enactment within the context of his

review.

Our response, however much it falls short of our aspirations, is intended to emulate his

example, not decry it or dismiss it as hopelessly utopian. For we write within the context of

hyper-performativity which, at least in our own country, has been destroying both the

manner and the matter of academic writing and enquiry for at least three decades—and

which is in sore need of the hopefully utopian. We offer three themes, which we should

like to briefly explore here. These are, firstly, the trope of ‘The Box’ which Duarte pursues

with such relish; secondly, his own suggestions about the need for a new ‘portal of

M. Fielding � P. Moss (&)Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, 27 Woburn Square,WC1H 0AA London, UKe-mail: Peter.Moss@ioe.ac.uk

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Stud Philos Educ (2012) 31:501–504DOI 10.1007/s11217-012-9301-z

potentiality’; and, thirdly, some other possibilities that complement rather than displace his

poetic crafting of alternative imaginaries.

Obliterating the Box

In one sense Eduardo Duarte’s destruction of ‘The Box’ is too accomplished. He, rightly,

traces the semantic and existential incarceration, both of contemporary imagination and

practice, through the constraints of a Box that is totalising, regardless of whether we are

inside or outside its visible boundaries. However, the luminous vitality of his persuasive

act of intellectual exposure blinds him to the possible disjunction between form and

content: not everything that appears in a box is an intellectual or spiritual prisoner of its

constraining circumstance.

Whilst ‘The Box enframes educational theory within the prosaic’ it does not exhaust the

gamut of metrical or imaginative possibility. Would, for example, William Blake’s ‘The

Schoolboy’ be rendered prosaic if we had included it in a box in our text? Ironically,

perhaps to our detriment, perhaps not, the gestural articulation of a number of our proposed

alternative possibilities—either as exemplars of other ways of being or as intellectual

schemata tracing the intellectual contours of a quite different possibility—are placed in

boxes. They offer to the reader images of the enactment in practice of the ‘common

school’, a central concept of our radical democratic education.

Pace Shakespeare, the zealotry of Duarte’s omnivorous destruction of The Box comes

close to the demise of ‘vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself, and falls on the other’.

This would, however, be an overstatement. His point is well taken and the importance of

authoring alternative ways of imagining and enacting quite different, more fully demo-

cratic futures remains an important and increasingly urgent undertaking.

New ‘Portals of Potentiality’

Eduardo Duarte is largely right in insisting that the ‘question of form (is) central’, and

whilst we must accept his observation that ‘too little of (our) book appears to be an

experiment in writing theory’, our acceptance can only be partial for at least two reasons.

The first is that the truth it expresses needs substantial qualification: if we do not push

the artistic and intellectual boundaries of theory writing sufficiently far, it is emphatically

not the case that we forgo the attempt to ‘write education theory outside the Box’. The

range of literature we cite, the ‘tales of hope’ that we tell, the manner of our expression, the

existential and political impetus of our thinking, take us outside the Box of neo-liberal

presumption and open up multiple possibilities.

Secondly, the manner and the matter of our writing assume a judgement about read-

ership, about the range of participants we hoped to involve and the kind of dialogue we

hoped to engender. In contesting education, we need both to sustain the already converted

whilst trying to make new converts from the mainstream, or at least sow some seeds of

doubt. Should we, and can we, address different audiences with different mixtures of

poetry and prose? Or do we simply end up by failing to please either, being too poetic for

some and too prosaic for others? In short, to whom should we be speaking and in what

voice? Whilst we may well have got our answers wrong, or less right than we would have

wanted, a judgment inevitably has to be made about what is most likely to further the kinds

of possibilities one is advocating. To pick up on a phrase from Eric Olin Wright’s

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discussion of ‘real utopias’, that we find helpful and use extensively in our book, maybe

one could usefully explore the possibility of poetic ‘way-stations’ that have enough of

future possibility in their articulation and their visionary energy to develop a form of

discourse that bridges the two worlds—of the converted and still to be converted—and has

its own aesthetic and political integrity as a transitional gesture.

Certainly, we would entirely agree with Duarte’s invitation to those working in the field

of education to support the development of ‘a democratic form of writing theory that is

poetically prosaic, or prosaically poetic.’ Such a form would not only confront the ugliness,

mendacity and arrogance of prosaically impoverished neo-liberal discourse. It would also

confront those brutally unpoetic strands of critical theory that, far from being agents of

liberation, ironically confirm the status quo through a self-referential torpor of incom-

prehension and resultant inaction by the very people who are well placed to enact and

extend a counter-resistance in day-to-day schooling.

Parallel Possibilities

It is arguable that we should pursue alternative forms of writing and being in the world

on more than one front and in more than one way. Whilst some may wish to explore

Eduardo Duarte’s ‘new portals of potentiality’, others may wish to reacquaint themselves

with older forms that have fallen foul of the neo-liberal leviathan in all its different

guises. We are struck, for example, by the potential of the essay as a literary and

political genre and thus by the subversive beauty of such writers as John Berger in TheShape of a Pocket, Raimond Gaita in A Common Humanity and Michael Ignatieff in TheNeeds of Strangers. We are struck by the way in which so much academic writing has,

largely but not solely through the demands of performativity, become prey to omnivo-

rous referencing and citation almost as a substitute for argument and a surrogate for

original thinking.

Perhaps, too, we need to look beyond writing to other forms of expression, to make

visible other ways of being in the world by finding ‘new ways of communicating our

theory’. The ‘hundred languages of childhood’ is regarded as more than a trope in the early

childhood education in Reggio Emilia, which figures much in our book as an example of

sustained and municipal democratic experimentalism. It is both a theory arising from a

political debate about the privileging of just two languages, reading and writing, and the

name given to an exhibition of pedagogical projects from the city’s schools (Vecchi 2010).

This ‘exhibition of the possible’ (the words are those of Loris Malaguzzi, Reggio’s great

pedagogical thinker and practitioner) has travelled the world now for 30 years, reaching a

far wider audience and communicating theories far more vividly than any amount of

writing—poetic or prosaic.

We need both: Duarte’s ‘democratic form of writing theory that is poetically prosaic, or

prosaically poetic’; and Reggio’s exploration of other languages to exhibit the possible.

The urgency of such a double task is growing rather than diminishing. As John Berger in

his essay reminds us,

The culture in which we live is perhaps the most claustrophobic that has ever existed;

in the culture of globalisation … there is no glimpse of an elsewhere, of an otherwise.

… The first step towards building an alternative world has to be a refusal of the world

picture implanted in our minds … Another space is vitally necessary (Berger 2002,

p. 214)

Radical Education and the Common School 503

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References

Berger, J. (2002). The shape of a pocket. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.Vecchi, V. (2010). Art and creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the role and potential of ateliers in early

childhood education. London: Routledge.

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