From Crisis to Kritik : A Theory of Prefigurative Learning Through the Educational Commons

Sammanfattning

Do we only seek community when we are in crisis? This thesis develops the original theoretical concept of prefigurative learning: the educational process through which repeated participation in prefigurative relations transforms individual and collective dispositions, producing capacities for collective judgment that persist independently of the crisis that originally created them. The Greek economic crisis from 2010-2018 and the Solidarity School Movement demonstrates not only how the educational communities that grew out of the crisis continued to exist but became greater and broader in the period following the crisis. Using secondary literature including sociological, ethnographic, and case-based accounts of the Solidarity School of Mesopotamia in Athens, the thesis presents a four-part analytic framework. The first part traces the etymological and philosophical origins of krinein, arguing that the capacity for collective judgment is not incidental to crisis but definitional to it. The second part describes how the Greek economic crisis created the conditions for prefigurative learning through the emergence of Solidarity Schools. The third part focuses on examining the internal educational logic of Solidarity Schools through the original concept of prefigurative learning, developed here using three different theoretical frameworks-habitus, exaptive learning and kritik- arguing that solidarity is developed as a civic skill through the building of collective practice rather than as a value embedded in a curriculum. Finally the fourth chapter grounds this argument in the philosophical work of Hannah Arendt, Freire, Bourdieu, and Korsgaard's education commons by demonstrating that the organizational logic of the commons is an intentionally designed institutional form for prefigurative learning that does not require a state of crisis as justification for existence but rather relies on a sustained political and educational commitment to keep it going.