Abstract
George Orwell once remarked that it often takes an enormous effort to “see what is under our nose.” Time and the Rhythms of Emancipatory Education is one of those books to help us see something “under our nose”—time and education—from a fresh and critical perspective. It is no small matter to take a topic like time, which is very widely researched already, and say something genuinely novel, but Michel Alhadeff-Jones, a Swiss scholar working between Columbia University and Geneva, does so with great acuity in this fascinating new publication.
The book’s premise is that the experience, conceptualization, and negotiation of highly heterogeneous temporalities are of fundamental importance to the theory and practice of education. In order to accurately describe the tensions and contradictions within our layered personal and social experience of time, and to comprehend the relevance of this education, Alhadeff-Jones brings our attention to a body of research exploring rhythms. Drawing on rich and diverse sources (Castoriadis, Lefebvre, Bachelard, Pineau, Sauvanet, and Biesta), the book outlines an approach—rhythmanalysis—which is attentive to complexities of our lived experience of time and invites us to rethink how we understand autonomy and emancipation in education.
These stimulating arguments are built systematically and incrementally through the 12 chapters of the book. (The chapters are written so they can be read in isolation.) It is divided into three parts. In the first, Alhadeff-Jones outlines a very broad, but necessarily selective, overview of research on time across academic disciplines. He explores how temporality has been approached in education and makes a case for transdisciplinary and “multireferential” research (pp. 36–48). He persuasively argues, based on his reading of French thinker Edgar Morin, for a theoretical approach capable of grasping and working nonreductively with temporal complexity.
The second explores the relationship between temporal constraints and autonomy in the sociohistorical development of education. In a brief, insightful discussion of early Jewish and ancient Greek monastic education and early modern schooling, Alhadeff-Jones explains how a specific, and constitutive, form of temporal discipline underpinned each of these periods. He outlines how technological innovation and development of industrial capitalism transformed the organization and experience of time in society. The standardization, management, and commodification of time—based on drive for efficiency—began to affect the rhythms of everyday life in profound and unprecedented ways. As schooling became a “mass” phenomenon in the 19th century, teaching and learning time became increasingly regimented: Education became a space in which students adapted to, and internalized, dominant notions of social time. Institutionalized time conflicts with the need and desire for “self-time” (p. 91), and this generated, and continues to generate tensions, estrangement and alienation in education. One of the most intriguing sections discusses “a countermovement favoring the development of a more holistic conception of education” (p. 101) based on “rhythmic theories” which Alhadeff-Jones traces back to German Romanticism and describes through the educational initiatives of Steiner, Bode, Jacques-Dalcroze, and Mandelstam.
A critique of these earlier attempts to develop rhythmanalysis in education is used as the basis to explore the constraints, fragmentation, and “double binds” associated with time, work, and education in the era of lifelong learning. It is important to stress that Alhadeff-Jones sees the tensions, discontinuities, and rhythmic dissonance, which is produced by living and learning within heterogeneous temporalities as necessary and potentially generative. Education is thus tasked with becoming “an organizing process through which one learns to relate what constitutes the fragments and discontinuities of one’s own life” (p. 136). This argument builds on over two decades of life history research in Europe conducted by Pierre Dominice, Barbara Merrill, Peter Alheit, and Linden West. In fact, part of the value of the book is its presentation and interpretation of European, especially Francophone, research on time, complexity, adult learning, and life history.
It is likely the final part exploring time and rhythms in relation to emancipatory education is the section that will be read with the keenest interest by students and scholars of transformative leaning. Here, the terms of his own rhythmanalysis are explicated through a critique of Freire, Mezirow, and Ranciere and by drawing on the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre. The earlier discussion of autonomy understood in part as the “conquest of one’s own rhythm” (p. 78) is framed as a reaction to temporal alienation achieved through transgressive moments. Through such moments, we reappropriate time, recombine and balance our experience of heterogeneous temporalities, and elaborate new rhythms. I read Chapter 11 that explores these arguments in relation to the life story of Ruth, with genuine excitement. It offers a wonderfully nuanced and sensitive account of the biographical rhythms of learning, which breaks new ground in thinking about this aspect of transformative learning.
This is an important book, dense with insights, the fruit of careful and critical scholarship. It engages a very broad range of sources and Alhadeff-Jones’s elegant scrupulousness with ideas makes the text a rich resource. Theoretical ambition, grounded in a firm, perhaps unfashionable, belief in the importance of theory to education, and a sensitivity to complexity are defining features of the book as a whole. Alhadeff-Jones approaches time and education in a sophisticated, dialectical manner avoiding pitfalls of “either/or” thinking. The result is an elaborate theoretical framework, capable of moving between, and thinking across, social, institutional, and biographical levels of analysis, offering a rich, relational conceptualization of temporal dimensions of education and learning.
Overall, it is an excellent piece of work. I want to note two criticisms. First, the book is remarkably ambitious but relatively short. It manages to cover a vast range of ideas in a coherent and nonsimplistic fashion by using multiple subheadings, yet the condensed form leaves little room for illustrative examples or anecdotes. This lends the book its own insistent, sometimes staccato, almost urgent rhythm. This is not a problem per se and is likely a consequence of the trend within contemporary academic publishing toward brevity. However, a number of sections are simply too short. Examples are the discussion of the influence of utilitarian and behaviourist ideas on educational time, the truncated overview of Greek philosophy, and the cursory treatment of critical pedagogy and Dewey, but also the author’s own key arguments.
Second, and this is a more substantive issue, emancipation is discussed in a relatively one-sided and, in certain respects, unpersuasive way. The careful attention given to the biographical rhythms of emancipation is not complemented with a detailed exploration of sources, dimensions, and rhythms of collective praxis. Emancipation is framed primarily in terms of remaking of self. This is a vital first step, but the book stops there and does not explore how this is linked to, but distinct from, collective experiences of emancipation. Analyzing emancipation in terms of time, transgression, and individual freedom is only half the story. As Lefebvre argued, questions of emancipation can only be grasped by paying careful attention to the spatiotemporal organization of capitalism and the potential of collective movements for autonomous action leading to redistribution, more just forms of social recognition and meaningful democratic participation in political processes.
These caveats should not obscure the fact that this book is a major contribution to educational scholarship, which I found immensely rewarding to read and I think deserves to be discussed and debated very widely within adult education.