Philosophical remarks about educational materials

a threshold of thinking

Abstract

The connection between a non philosophical work and its reception in education through its transformation into a learning/teaching material and a possible philosophical reading, in order to recognize and define the philosophical stance of this very material, could not but be a challenge for philosophy of education itself, namely, in its relation to (or as) practical philosophy. This kind of reduction to the state of material could instrumentalize the latter raising practical, ethical and methodological issues about the pedagogical intention itself; subsequently, the art, literature, philosophy, and science lying behind materials become equally instrumentalized and evacuated. This article attempts, on the one hand, to circumscribe and describe this movement of “becoming material” as a question philosophically and pedagogically challenging and, on the other, to reflect about a critical understanding of this very question as an example of research in practical philosophy.