Retuning Education: Bildung and Exemplarity Beyond the Logic of Progress, Morten T. Korsgaard, New York, NY: Routledge, 2024

There is widespread agreement among scholars of education that current policies and practices tend to reduce teaching and learning to mere technical matters, to be made as efficient as possible in order to serve rather narrow economic interests that continue to exacerbate environmental issues and conflicts globally. This is the uncontroversial starting point of Morten Korsgaard’s new book, Retuning Education (2024). Very quickly, however, Korsgaard surprises in arguing that the solution is not to advocate for student-centered education, nor is it to harness education to attain one or another sociopolitical aim. Rather, education should invite young people to enter a common space of reflection and study that allows them to foster a new relation to the world around them. Korsgaard wants to take us beyond what he calls “the logic of progress” (p. 6). His main allies in this ambitious project are Hannah Arendt and a set of German thinkers writing in the Pädagogik tradition. Two of the book’s ten chapters have previously appeared as journal articles, while another three contain sections from already published material—all from 2019-2020. Korsgaard’s book will be of interest to a wide range of education scholars, particularly those in the Anglophone world who are less familiar with the German Pädagogik tradition. Korsgaard takes issue, at a fundamental level, with all accounts of education that reduce it to a mere function, means, or instrument for some other end, some form of “progress,” whether economic or political. Hannah Arendt (2006) famously questioned this kind of instrumentalization of education, arguing that it might rob the rising generation of its chance to begin something new. A set of German Pädagogik scholars, including Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (2013), and Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski (2019), are also mobilized to assist in this regard. Though the projects of these thinkers differ, they are all trying to articulate an account of education as a kind of sui generis space or time or activity—one that should not be collapsed into something else. For Korsgaard, education is an “act of revealing the commonness of the world to the young generation” (p. 32)—commonness in the sense of ‘shared.’ This emphasis leads to a “flatter ontology of education” (p. 32), where “education can never be student-centred, teacher-centred, nor world-centred. It is only in the coming together of these that education unfolds as a particular – and peculiar – undertaking” (p. 1). So often a particular theory or practice will end up over-emphasizing one or two corners of the so-called pedagogical triangle, leading to the reification of unnecessary dichotomies and confusions. Korsgaard keeps all three in view. Korsgaard coins the term “educational commoning” (p. 52) to describe what should take place in educational settings. He transposes the concept of ‘commons’—a word designating areas of land that are not privately owned and on which people can, for example, forage or let their animals graze—into an educational context in an attempt to defend this space (e.g., the classroom) from commercial interests. In addition, as teachers bring various elements of the world to the attention of students, they can be described as ‘commoning’ these elements—bringing them into this common space, showing the students that we hold these elements in common. In this context, we are not concerned with producing anything, nor with considering the use-value of the element in question; we are only paying attention, to learn, to study, and to develop new relations in common. Several chapters of the book are dedicated to reworking our conception of the student and the process of education and development, or Bildung. This latter term has spilled much ink in philosophy …