Non-affirmative Education Theory as a Language for Global Education Discourse in the Twenty-First Century

Given the crisis of neoliberal education policy in operation since the 1990s, non-affirmative theories of general education, didactics, and subject matter didactics provide a productive language for global education discourse in the twenty-first century. This school of thought has the capacity to operate as a global meta-language of education due to how it defines the teaching-studying-learning process and how it perceives the dynamic relationship between different forms of societal practices. Given that education praxis occurs at different levels, and does not affirmatively mediate between the learner and society, and educates for a nonhierarchically organised societal praxis, teaching needs to recognise but not instrumentally affirm neither societal interests nor the learner’s life world. Rather, non-affirmative pedagogy helps us to identify and empirically study, at different levels, how education co-creates pedagogical spaces for discerning thought and reflexive practices around experiences, knowledge, and values. The approach offers itself as an alternative to contemporary educational policies such as academic factualism, educational performativism and competencism, pedagogical activism, and instructional technologism.