Education and/as wandering: philosophical and pedagogical exploration of dérive

Abstract

For decades, education has been under preassure of pedagogization – a poorly named constant demand to provide new ideas, create new methods and find new solutions as to respond to the social, economical, ecological and further crises that the world suffers. Today, in our days of the pandemic, the world war threats, uncertain futures and blurred foundations, education faces even greater challenges and higher expectations. It seems that education should depart from what it has been, wandering in search for its own meaning and purpose. Through this paper, we wander with education and with each other in experimental task of criss-crossing disciplinary boundaries to displace established as well as our own understandings of educational purpose and possibilities of functioning. We challenge the pattern in which the beginning of education (point of departure) and its goal, destination (place of arrival) are predetermined, reducing along the process any deviation from the given trajectory. Has the educational ideal ever been univocal? What kind of education deviates from the given course? Is education without a clearly defined goal set in advance possible at all, and if it is, what does it have to offer? Is it possible to travel without a destination? In the end, all these questions are summed up in one, Deridian, which is: could education be driven by deviation and wandering – education as dérive?