The Pedagogical Contract

The Economies of Teaching and Learning in the Ancient World

Yun Lee Too

Publication Year: 2000

The Pedagogical Contract explores the relationship between teacher and student and argues for ways of reconceiving pedagogy. It discloses this relationship as one that since antiquity has been regarded as a scene of give-and-take, where the teacher exchanges knowledge for some sort of payment by the student and where pedagogy always runs the risk of becoming a broken contract. The book seeks to liberate teaching and learning from this historical scene and the anxieties that it engenders, arguing that there are alternative ways of conceiving the economy underlying pedagogical activities. Reading ancient material together with contemporary representations of teaching and learning, Yun Lee Too shows that apart from being conceived as a scene of self-interest in which a professional teacher, or sophist, is the charlatan who cheats his pupil, pedagogy might also purport to be a disinterested process of socialization or a scene in which lack and neediness are redeemed through the realization that they are required precisely to stimulate the desire to learn. The author also argues that pedagogy ideally ignores the imperative of the conventional marketplace for relevance, utility, and productivity, inasmuch as teaching and learning most enrich a community when they disregard the immediate material concerns of the community. The book will appeal to all those who understand scholarship as having an important social and/or political role to play; it will also be of interest to literary scholars, literary and cultural theorists, philosophers, historians, legal theorists, feminists, scholars of education, sociologists, and political theorists. Yun Lee Too is Assistant Professor of Classics, Columbia University. She is the author of Rethinking Sexual Harassment; The Rhetoric of Identity in Socrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy; and The Idea of Ancient Literary Criticism, forthcoming; and coeditor, with Niall Livingstone, of Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning.

Published by: University of Michigan Press

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Introduction: Socratizing Pedagogy

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pp. 1-12

The Pedagogical Contract is in many senses a counterintuitive book. It argues that pedagogy ideally must ignore the imperatives of the conventional marketplace - for relevance, utility, and productivity - because teaching and learning...

1. The Pedagogical Contract

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pp. 13-36

The pedagogical scenario is embodied by teacher and student. This chapter examines how rhetorics of materiality - of the body, of money, of gain, of loss - subtend the originary narratives of pedagogy, only to be violently abnegated...

2. The "Disinterest" of Social Contract

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pp. 37-62

The sophistic contract presents teachers as objects of suspicion, but it is not the only iconography of the teacher-student relationship. In this chapter I want to contextualize the iconography of the sophistic or materialistic...

3. The Economy of Desire

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pp. 63-87

One of the points that antiquity has to make to us is that an education cannot simply be bought, because its processes and knowledge cannot be crudely exchanged for material wealth. If the aristocratic class supported...

4. Teaching Out of Context

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pp. 89-117

There is a sense in which any cultural activity is worthwhile only because the community - the activity's consumers, in a rhetoric of commodification - believes that it has value. By analogy, any cultural activity is useless because...

5. The Ends of Pedagogy

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pp. 119-143

The preceding chapters looked at the dynamics that structure and feed the pedagogical scenario; this final chapter of the book explores the ways in which pedagogy requires any relationship between teachers and students to have...

Conclusion

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pp. 145-147

... and so, as far as this book is concerned, the teacher does not ever disappear from the pedagogical scenario. Among other figures from antiquity, the sophists, Protagoras, Hippias, Prometheus, and above all, Socrates return to teach us in their various...

E-ISBN-13: 9780472023226
E-ISBN-10: 0472023225
Print-ISBN-13: 9780472110872
Print-ISBN-10: 047211087X

Page Count: 184
Publication Year: 2000

Series Title: Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural M