Response to Eduardo M. Duarte’s Review of Radical Education and the Common School

Abstract

Our thanks to Eduardo Duarte for such a thoughtful and imaginative critical engagement with our work. The issues he raises and the manner in which he reflects on and extends the discussions we began in our book validate and exemplify our hope for an agonistic democratic politics of recognition. Also, as the concluding sentences of the first half of his essay suggest, he, like us, underscores the need for understanding and celebrating democracy, not just as an agonistic, but as an embodied, existential encounter. Perhaps the most challenging part of Eduardo Duarte’s review, both for us and for him, is a shared aspiration to respond to our metaphorical and literal rallying cry to those writing in this field to author ‘More poetry, less prose’. As he himself says, ‘How might educational critics, theorists and philosophers take up a counteroffensive of poetry? What would more poetry, less prose entail?’ For potential readers, we should first explain that the poetry/prose dichotomy forms just one part of our response to the question with which we open our final chapter, ‘what is to be done?’ Far more space is given over to ‘a discussion about possible processes for transformation’, guided by the work of Erik Olin Wright (on real utopias) and Roberto Unger (on democratic experimentalism) and the concept of prefigurative practice. Nevertheless the call for more poetry and less prose is important and we applaud the bravery and the adventure both of Duarte’s proposal and its enactment within the context of his review. Our response, however much it falls short of our aspirations, is intended to emulate his example, not decry it or dismiss it as hopelessly utopian. For we write within the context of hyper-performativity which, at least in our own country, has been destroying both the manner and the matter of academic writing and enquiry for at least three decades—and which is in sore need of the hopefully utopian. We offer three themes, which we should like to briefly explore here. These are, firstly, the trope of ‘The Box’ which Duarte pursues with such relish; secondly, his own suggestions about the need for a new ‘portal of