The waves of education: swelling as a metaphor in the work of Walter Benjamin

Abstract

This paper draws upon the recent turn toward the early writings of Walter Benjamin on education to make two interventions. First, it suggests that understanding education as awakening in the existing Benjaminian scholarship is only partially correct. A more basic phenomenon that acts as the condition for the possibility of awakening is the movement of swelling. The paper then charts the various ways in which Benjamin discusses education and youth in relation to swellings and exaggerations. Second, the paper uses this insight to reevaluate several discussions within current educational philosophy including the takenfor- granted primacy of the relationship between student and teacher and the fraught relationship between education and politics.