Newness and human disclosure in Dewey and Arendt: Challenging neoliberal educational agenda

Over the past decades, a neoliberal shift in educational policies has affected educational purposes and schooling practices worldwide and has reframed all of the features of education. From curriculum to teaching methods, from families and students’ perceptions regarding what is worthwhile and what is not to teachers’ professionalism, all aspects of education have been, de facto, deeply transformed by the neoliberal agenda for education. This paper draws on Dewey and Arendt to explore the interplay between the Deweyan call for “a new birth in the world” and the Arendtian questions of “new beginning” and “natality.” It is my contention that such an interplay may furnish a cue for a different conception of education and schooling. In this conception, under the regulation of teachers, the space of not-yet—that is, the space of pure potentiality for growth—may emerge in classroom activities, and new forms of meanings may arise.