„Education and Social Critique - Critical Theory and Philosophy of Education in Dialogue“

June 26th, 2pm - June 28th, 2pm, 2025

Critical philosophical reflections on education have a long tradition. Both within academic discourses and in social debates, questions about the goals, possibilities, scope and limits of education date back to ancient times. However, addressing educational issues from the perspective of the Critical Theory in the sense of the Frankfurt School is a relatively new and still underdeveloped enterprise. 

The conference offers a forum to explore the ways, in which the main purpose of the Critical Theory not only to describe the society, but also to change it in a positive way could be spelled out in relation to education policy.

In particular, we should explore, how main concepts and approaches of the Critical Theory, (for example its focus of social pathologies and socially caused suffering) might offer relevant new answers to classical normative questions of the Philosophy of Education like the ones about goals and values of institutionalized education, or about equity and educational justice. As a result, a dialog between critical theorists and philosophers of education from various schools of thought (e.g. Analytic Philosophy, Poststructuralism etc.) should be established at the conference. 

Keynotes by: Christopher Martin (University of British Columbia, Canada), Maeve Cooke (University College Dublin, Ireland), Douglas Yacek (TU Dortmund, Germany), Krassimir Stojanov (Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany).

Contributions might address (but are not limited to) one or more of the following topics:

• Education and (the erosion of) democracy. Populism, propaganda and indoctrination as social pathologies in and through education
• Education and marketization
• Inequalities in education and educational justice
• Bildung and human flourishing as goals of institutionalized education