Education for Everyday Life: A Sophistical Practice of Teaching
Springer (SpringerBriefs in Education), 2023. 97 s.
Education for everyday life
As director of the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University, Säfström has spent several years working to locate the democratic core of education within a sophistic rather than a Platonic tradition, and this book can be read as the sharpest formulation of that project to date.
The book’s central thesis is polemical: education as a democratic practice is being destroyed from within by an aristocratic logic that Säfström traces back to Plato and forward to the neoliberal regime of governance in our own time. He calls the result empty education — an education reduced to an instrument for shaping the perfect citizen in the image of the idealised, perfect state. Against this he sets a sophistic practice that takes its starting point in everyday life, in itinerant learning, and in a democratic principle of equality borrowed from Rancière.
The book’s strongest contribution is its rereading of the sophists. To invert the standard Platonic narrative and read the sophists as the democratic teachers — those who taught anyone how to live well in a democratic city-state — is rhetorically effective and pedagogically productive. It opens up an understanding of teaching in which the teacher does not administer a truth to be transmitted, but verifies the equality of the student within a shared world. For a folkbildare, this is immediately recognisable: it lies close to Grundtvig’s det levende ord and to the Swedish study-circle tradition.
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