(2021). Adorno on Democratic Pedagogy and the Education of Emotions: Pedagogical Insights for Resisting Right-Wing Extremism. Policy Futures in Education, v19 n7 p809-825 Oct. This paper examines Theodor W. Adorno's notion of democratic pedagogy and the role of emotions in re-educating and democratizing a society, particularly in light of the current political situation in many countries around the world in which right-wing extremism is on the rise. The paper revisits Adorno's educational thought on critical self-reflection, focusing on his views on educating emotions and the tensions between democratic pedagogy and a schooling of the emotions. It is argued that Adorno's contribution to discussions of the role of emotion in education and his suggestions about how to resist and counteract fascism and right-wing extremism are not only illuminating today, but also provide remarkable clarity and force of argumentation in educational efforts to create critical spaces in the classroom in which moral and political learning does not end up a form of sentimental manipulation…. [Direct]
(2021). The First Steps of Distance Learning in Italy: From Radio to Television and E-Learning. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology – TOJET, v20 n4 p132-139 Oct. In the history of distance learning in Italy a crucial time is represented by the pre-history. After the mail-based learning an excursus relative to the second phase of distance learning in Italy corresponds to the development of radio and television and their pedagogical use to defeat the invasive illiteracy. Radio rurale, the first experiment of distance learning promoted by fascism (1920), "Non √® mai troppo tardi" (1960), the first Tv program for adult learning and the birth of Raitre (1979), the first mainstream cultural channel with the "Dipartimento Scuola Educazione," are a milestone that prepares the ground for the birth of the actual e-learning. Afterwards, the transition from Tv-based distance learning to e-learning is embodied by consortium Uninettuno (1990), the first televisual and telematic University in Europe. Even nowadays the radio and tv distance learning experience with its cultural heritage represents a model for the modern e-learning and… [PDF]
(2022). Teaching against Omnipotence: Mussolini's Racial Laws and the Ethics of Memory in Times of Neofascism. Educational Theory, v72 n5 p575-593 Oct. This essay opens on the streets of Rome in 2019 among displays of fascist relics, architecture, and memorial sites. Each display speaks to Italy's violent colonial and fascist history, one that continues to be entangled with and to overdetermine Italy's contemporary restrictive citizenship laws and anti-immigrant policies. Here, Paula M. Salvio turns to a psychoanalytic understanding of omnipotence, and to Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory, in order to pursue the half-spoken history of Italian fascism that is hauntingly absent from Italy's public school curriculum, as well as from sites of public pedagogy such as museums, cinema, memorials, and social media platforms. This absence raises important questions about the ethical obligation education has to teach against omnipotence in conventional classroom settings and sites of public pedagogy. Salvio concludes with a reading of a socially engaged project, the Holocaust Memorial located in the Milan Central Railway… [Direct]
(2021). Photography and Education in Republican Soldier Newspapers in Spain (1936-1939). Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, v57 n5 p588-610. Soldier newspapers on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War constitute a source of around 500 publications, 228 of which are illustrated. This article is the result of a visual and textual analysis of these 228 publications. Our aim was to discover how photography of cultural and educational events was used in this type of press publication to not only inform but also educate soldiers by building visual discourses that were more striking and effective than the texts. After analyzing the images, we concluded that through these publications visual strategies were developed. The images, by themselves, were capable of transmitting to the soldiers the ideas about culture and education that the Republican side wanted to implement during the war. The photographs convey the idea to soldiers that comprehensive training was required not just to defeat fascism but also to start and achieve social revolution itself. Taking into account that around 80% of those in the People's Republican… [Direct]
(2021). Augusto Del Noce: Toward an Education of Limits. Educational Theory, v71 n5 p631-650 Oct. Augusto Del Noce is widely regarded in his home country of Italy as one of the most important political philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Del Noce's work covers a range of topics including modernity, technology, contemporary Catholicism, secularism, eroticism, communism, fascism, and progressivism. Although Del Noce holds a distinguished place within Italian philosophical and intellectual circles, his work has largely remained unknown across most of Europe and in the English-speaking world. As Del Noce's writings have begun to be translated into English in recent years, however, a new and expanded engagement with his work has taken place. While new analyses of Del Noce's thought have slowly appeared in a variety of academic disciplines, no work has yet examined Del Noce's significance for the field of education. In this essay Matthew Carlin rectifies this oversight by examining a wide range of Del Noce's writing, paying particular attention to how his… [Direct]
(2021). Education at the End of History: A Response to Francis Fukuyama. Educational Philosophy and Theory, v53 n2 p160-170. By 1989, fascism had long been defeated in Europe, and reforms in the Soviet Union appeared to signify the collapse of communist ideology, prompting Francis Fukuyama to famously declare the 'end of history'. Since then, neoliberalism has been rolled out globally. This paper argues that, with regard to higher education, Fukuyama's claim that the pursuit of knowledge will be replaced by the 'satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands' is prescient. What, then, prompted Fukuyama to qualify his predictions in 2018? Citing both the turmoil of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, Fukuyama blames identity politics for the breakdown of consensus over what the nation is, or should be, and suggests that the promotion of creedal identity might rescue Western democracy from populism. This paper disagrees: using the examples of Brexit and the promotion of Fundamental British Values in schools, it argues that creedal identity has become another expression of populism. Rejecting the claim… [Direct]
(2024). Thinking and Teaching beyond the Terror of Capitalist Reason. Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, v46 n1 p208-222. The contemporary landscape of dread in living and teaching demands a creative and experimental form of investigation that can trace the affective contours of the present and uncover the obscure openings for an oppositional imagination. In a series of interlinked excurses, this essay articulates a poetic probing of the nexus of slow fascism and capitalist realism in the contemporary United States, as this is lived in the waking dreams of pedagogy and imaginative praxis. Looking beyond familiar analyses, this project exposes the terror of loss that motivates the punishments visited upon school and society by elites and points to the spectral presence of justice, which lives with us as persistent horizon even as it is persistently refused by power. Interleaved with these unravelings of the texture of experience as domination, this project gestures toward a thinking and teaching that is wise to capitalism's recurrent fantasies. This pedagogy inverts the certainties that organize our… [Direct]
(2022). Education after Empire: A Biopolitical Analytics of Capital, Nation, and Identity. Educational Philosophy and Theory, v54 n7 p882-891. As it emerged in the late twentieth century, Empire promised a new era of global cooperation and stability through a seamless integration of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy. Premised as an end to history itself, all that was left to accomplish was to tinker at the margins, stimulate corporate enterprise, embrace financialization and technological innovation, and encourage liberal rights and inclusion. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the narrative fictions sustaining Empire have broadly collapsed at the level of symbolic identification and belief. Empire has entered into a period of global emergency and mutation. Engaging with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's work, this paper considers what might emerge when we read education into the circuitry of Empire's decay. First, we locate Empire within foundational tensions in modernity, using Kantian philosophy and colonialism as examples, to foreground the idea of education as immanent to historical… [Direct]
(2024). "Anti-Oedipus" Confronts a Familiar People: On the Plasticity of the Celibate Machine. Educational Philosophy and Theory, v56 n3 p206-217. In "Anti-Oedipus," Deleuze and Guattari saw the difficulty of disentangling the question of Spinoza and, later, of Reich from the very limit of a system of representation by which they mean Oedipus. As "A Thousand Plateaus" would emphasize later, this limit brings out the question of the desire for democracy ('democracies are majorities'). It desires Oedipus. In "What Is Philosophy?", the limit question (Oedipus) gave way to the concept of a people to come. Fifty years since its publication, "Anti-Oedipus" remains a relevant text (apropos of its 'strategic adversary' identified by Foucault) against the background of the social pathology of neofascism, populist politics, and the rise of the alt-right and neoconservative movements in recent years. The paper tries to locate this inflexion point where the desire for democracy modulates into the bi-univocal plasticity of Oedipal desire whose dangers people already seem to know. They have unmasked… [Direct]
(2016). Reflections on Outdoor Education and English "Indigenous Organic Fascism" in the 1930s. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, v16 n2 p105-116. The 1930s in England saw the emergence of what has been called an "Indigenous Organic Fascism". This ideology was based on deeply articulated concerns for both the natural environment and a perceived threat to a cultural and spiritual connection to the land. This article reviews these perspectives and explores the ideas of English Fascism for a rural and thereby cultural revival. The article reviews how such environmental concerns became practically expressed in a range of enterprises in outdoor engagement with young people in an attempt to counter the desultory effects of capitalism and urbanisation. Some initiatives were based on summer camps with regular organised activities; others sought to promote deeper, spiritual connections to the natural environment. It is suggested that how such an intolerant and elitist ideology came to see such deep connections to the environment as central to their articulation may be of interest to contemporary practice in outdoor learning… [Direct]
(2020). The End of Isolationism: Examining the OECD Influence in Portuguese Education Policies, 1955-1974. Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, v56 n4 p535-547. This article examines the OECD's role in the construction of education policies in Portugal after the Second World War up to the Carnation Revolution (1974). For a large part of the twentieth century (1926-1974), Portugal lived under a nationalist dictatorship, with elements that were on a par with the European fascism. After analysing the genesis of the OECD (OEEC, as originally established), this article describes how participating in the Mediterranean Regional Programme, designed and conducted by the OECD/OEEC between 1960 and 1968, was important to integrate Portugal in the "western" sphere of influence, and enabled the creation of the basis for an education policy which would represent the most important source of mandate and legitimacy for the "developmentalist" positions and proposals arising from the technocratic sectors of the regime which, increasingly, gained influence in the economic departments and in the offices of education planning and labour force… [Direct]
(2020). US Election 2020 Alerts! Democracy under Threat; Coronavirus Catastrophe; Climate Change Destruction; War. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, v18 n2 p70-118 Sep. This article is about the lead-up to the 2020 US General Election and appears in the last edition of this journal before the vote takes place in that momentous event on November 3. In the article, four specific and inter-related existential threats and dangers are identified that would arise from the re-election of Donald J. Trump: the destruction of democracy in the US; a continuation of the ongoing coronavirus catastrophe in the United States and Trump's callous attempts to promote US capitalism and his own capitalist interests by refuting and/or ignoring the dangers from this or future viruses; a worsening of world-threatening climate change destruction in the light of its denial by Trump; and the increased possibility of (nuclear) war. First, however, some brief comments are made about the Trump persona. The article uses the concept of public pedagogy to explore Trump's rhetoric, pronouncements and associated policies and practices that threaten and promote hatred and fear,… [PDF]
(2017). The "Obnoxious Mobilised Minority": Homophobia and Homohysteria in the British National Party, 1982-1999. Gender and Education, v29 n2 p165-181. This article examines the British National Party (BNP)'s opposition to gay men during the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the sociological concept of "homohysteria," it examines written material from BNP publications during those decades, looking specifically at the AIDS crisis, the party's belief in a "queer conspiracy," and the role which homosexuality played in the decline of the National Front and the birth of the BNP. The first study dedicated to British fascism's anti-gay prejudice, this article argues that the existing scholarship fails to understand the degree and nature of anti-gay sentiment in the BNP, concluding that the party was homohysteric from its inception…. [Direct]
(2018). The Fascist Seduction of Narrative: Walter Benjamin's Historical Materialism beyond Counter-Narrative. Studies in Philosophy and Education, v37 n5 p513-527 Sep. This essay introduces Walter Benjamin's historical materialism to illuminate how history teachers may invoke a critique of the past and present through democratizing the production of knowledge in the classroom. Historical materialism gives students access to the means of knowledge production and entrusts them with the task of generating a critique of politics though encounters with historical objects. The rise of the alt-right, alternative facts, and fake news sites necessitates social studies methods that intervene into the fascist seductions of narrative in history. A Benjaminian pedagogy emphasizes reading practices that acknowledge the political layers of history inscribed within the objects. This generates space for forms of pessimism and dialectic critiques of barbarism that students may experience with history beyond the teacher's capacity for understanding. In the name of democracy over fascism, the article adds a political critique to students' historical and critical… [Direct]
(2017). Former Teachers' and Pupils' Autobiographical Accounts of Punishment in Italian Rural Primary Schools during Fascism. History of Education, v46 n5 p618-630. Despite the prohibition on punishment in the form of emotional, psychological and physical abuse under the Fascist school regulations, it was common–particularly in Italian rural classrooms–for the purpose of managing and disciplining students. Sticks, "chickpeas" or "donkey desks" represent just a few examples of the methods frequently used by teachers to control unruly pupils. These punishments are often recalled by teachers and students in several published and unpublished discourses. This essay, by viewing such memoirs retrospectively, aims to provide a new understanding of the disciplinary practices carried out during 1920-1940 within Fascist Italian schools located in two different rural areas and to investigate the ways in which teachers and pupils look back on this particular aspect of their past…. [Direct]