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Weak Education: Diagnosing the Diagnoser

  • Journal of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • 2024, 81(3), pp.369-396
  • DOI : 10.17326/jhsnu.81.3.202408.369
  • Publisher : Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : July 17, 2024
  • Accepted : August 7, 2024
  • Published : August 31, 2024

SEONJOO PARK 1

1인하대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper is a humanistic inquiry into the structural inter-relationship between modern education and violence, and tries to suggest the reconceptualization of education by shifting from “strength” to “weakness”. William Carlos Williams’s short fiction “The Use of Force” is a literary example where education and violence become intermingled through the discourse of strength and empowerment. The way the discourse of strength emphasizes health and exercises sadistic violence at the same time in this fiction is very similar with the way education system works in the modern society. Foucault and Eve Sedgwick criticize the way modern “disciplinary power” works as biopolitics using the ideas of “normal” and “health”, and try to deconstruct these ideas. Wai Chee Dimock argues that weakness is a more universal human condition and uses the idea of “temporarily able-bodied” in her literary and cultural researches. These insights help education to be re-conceived as a site where weakness is thought as a foundation of more democratic, flexible, and less violent relationality in the classroom.

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