Vesna Pobežin Roš: The Teacher – Vigilant Bureaucrat

Vesna Pobežin Roš obtained her PhD in 2015 with her dissertation entitled Ideologija, avtoriteta in subjekt v konstituciji pedagoškega polja (Ideology, Authority and Subject in the Constitution of the Pedagogical Field) at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, under the supervision of Prof Mladen Dolar. Her main theoretical interests are psychoanalysis, upbringing and education. She was the initiator of the expert meeting The Other of Pedagogical Discourse and edited the eponymous proceedings in collaboration with the Institute of Pedagogy. Her book Pedagoška ideologija ali Kdo zdaj tu uživa?(Pedagogical Ideology or Who’s Enjoying This Now?) was published by the Association for Theoretical Psychoanalysis.

The lecture highlights the context of critical reflection on contemporary education, where for some time now the intrusion of entrepreneurial, managerial and neoliberal logics and terminology into the field of education, university studies and academic work has been problematised. In a similar context, also Fisher highlights the progressive bureaucratisation that is one of the most prominent features of the field of education throughout its entire vertical. But besides the questions of what ‘optimisation of work processes’, ‘profit’, ‘quality’ and similar terms mean to us when we use them in the field of teaching, besides the questions of the usefulness of checking for bureaucratic diligence, which is what most school inspection activities are based on, it is equally reasonable to raise the question of ‘teacher competence’ – what is that supposed to be today? So, what is it that teachers are supposed to possess in order to meet the almost mystical ideal of a good school? Last but not least, who are the contributors to the imaginary that defines the contemporary pedagogical field? The lecture will try to outline the conceptual and phantasmatic pool that feeds a current which is complementary to the aspect of ‘managerialisation’ and which can be called the pedagogisation of society, and how it can be linked to Fisher’s description of depressive hedonism.