Taste for democracy: A critique of the mechanical paradigm in education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article we argue for the need to rethink the crisis of democracy both within and beyond education (Toft and Rüsselbæk Hansen, 2017). This crisis can be explained variously, depending on how it is understood and on what basis. From our point of view, and with inspiration from thinkers as Nietzsche, Arendt, Agamben and Rancière, we argue that the crisis of democracy in today’s schools is related in part to the weak form of authority ascribed to certain individual and collective aesthetic experiences. The scientific experience has been assigned a strong form of ‘evidenced based authority’. As a result of a powerful belief that not all forms of experiences, for instance the aesthetical ones, which are not based on a mechanical logic, are worth paying attention to and are of value, scientific experience has gained hegemonic status. Illustrated by several examples, which stem from both Danish and Canadian educational contexts, we show how aesthetic experiences have the potential to revitalize democratic practices and undermine tyrannical regimes of technocracy in education. We recommend that the concept of Bildung (self-cultivation), which is orientated towards vertical (Apollonian) as well as horizontal (Dionysian) transcending processes, must be given renewed attention. Opportunities for students to play with and suspend the social order, even temporarily, are important if students are to experience themselves, others and the world in new ways. By engaging students’ aesthetic sensibilities in multiple ways, playful schools both produce and provoke the dominant social order thereby fostering students’ taste for democracy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.104 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".