Vindication of study as educational concept: on learning / studying a language

Abstract

This paper tries to develop the distinction between learning and studying trough an approach to the educational (and scholastic) relation with the language. Following Borges, Agamben and others, study appears as a relation of attention and care in which a materiality (the language) is revealed and made present. The idea of study can contribute to think education as oriented to the dis-closure of the world; can also contribute to elaborate a definition of school more morphological than functional, that is, oriented to the specificity of times, spaces, activities and immaterialities that constitute school; and can help to think the institutions of schooling separated of the meritocratic and competitive logics that constitute them when they are formatted from the point of view of learning. Through the introduction of the idea of study as a fundamental educational category, the paper also offers an alternative to the cognitive colonization of pedagogical theories and practices; and as a possibility for separate school (from the primary to University) from its subordination to the economic and bio-political logics of the cognitive capitalism. From this point of view, the paper opens the path to think about the difficulties (or the obsolescence) of study in a society (and a school) of learning.

Keywords

• lenguaje
• estudio
• escuela
• educación
• atención, cuidado