Decelerating Education

Four Pedagogical Exercises

Abstract

Current educative practices have given rise to the predominant pressure to increase production and speed in academic work and education in general. Educators need to ask whether conceiving of education in such terms is what we really want our children and youth to experience. In this paper, we aim to interrogate the question of how a deceleration of education is possible, and why this would be desirable for students and teachers. We do this in a circuitous way, by exploring four exercises in pedagogical deceleration. These exercises are inspired by philological, didactical, pedagogical, and phenomenological practices.