Education Commons^™

In The Event Of Learning, Alexander M. Sidorkin

Faculty Publications

This is an essay in four movements: it begins with Marx's notion on alienation, and then shows a form of alienation specific to education. The third movement examines Mikhail Bakhtin's treatment of alienation in connection with his participative thinking theory, and the final one suggests ways of overcoming educational alienation based on Bakhtin's notion of eventness of Being. The purpose of this exercise is not to bring Bakhtin into educational theory for the sake of simply enlarging the discussion. Rather, I worry about directions taken by contemporary critiques of education.