Anti-Authoritarian Education: A Phenomenological Perspective

According to Thomas Falk, an authoritarian insurgency against the institutions of liberal democracy operates along both political-economic and phenomenological axes. By corrupting language and stimulating vigilance, this insurgency endeavors to diminish the perceptual and communicative capacities that allow us to articulate a shared reality and exercise agency within it. In this article, he argues that education is a political and economic enterprise concerned with attention-formation. He considers public schools present a site battle in which to defend and promote the conditions and practices of a free and democratic society.