In 1888, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical “On The Nature Of Human Liberty,” in which he opines that, “judgment must be passed on what has been called liberty of teaching.” A paragraph earlier he says that, “the liberty of which we have been speaking is greatly opposed to reason, and tends absolutely to pervert men’s minds, inasmuch as it claims for itself the right of teaching whatever it pleases.” And why? “The excesses of an unbridled intellect,” the pontiff asserts, “which unfailingly end in the oppression of the untutored multitude, are no less rightly controlled by the authority of the law than are the injuries inflicted by violence on the weak… And the more so because the authority of teachers has great weight with their hearers, who can rarely decide for themselves as to the truth or falsehood of the instruction given to them.” He concludes thusly: “If unbridled license of speech and writing is granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate.”

With the fulfillment of these prophecies in twentieth-century exercises of large-scale ideological engineering, and attendant motifs of autonomy, reinvention, and transparency (including the exposure of clerical pedophilia), we have ended up in an oddly inverse place, with international institutional consensus on issues such as evolution, global warming, and public health running afoul of local culture- and faith-based truth-claims on the one hand, and aligning itself on the other with an absolute axiomatic association of education and liberation. This association has become central to creating a supreme enlightened individual “subject” of utopian politics, for whom Jacques Ranciere is an enthusiastic advocate. “Politics exists,” says Ranciere, “when the figure of a specific subject is constituted, a supernumerary subject in relation to the calculated number of groups, places, and functions in a society.” Nobody likes a supreme enlightened individual better than the art world, and so pedagogy has become an art form, as aesthetes have expanded beyond unique objects and specific products to encompass algorithms and the free exchange thereof. Indeed, fine art has taken a “pedagogical turn,” as evidenced by the “Night School” events at the New Museum and programming at Creative Time in New York, and the recent hijinks at the Manifesta Biennial in Europe, even garnering a survey in Art in America profiling collectives such as the Bruce High-Quality Foundation. All this is happening just as a deficit in intellectual capital is being seen, on various levels, as a reason for our economic debacle, and the education industry has started to become a for-profit proposition. Writing in Artforum this spring about two recent surveys of the history of art schools, Tom Holert stated that "it seems much less crucial to celebrate the educational turn and the current pedagogical flavors in the art world than to critically and insistently review the circulation of knowledge practices and products (aka ideas) in the context of a cultural economy that is discovering the rapidly growing business potential of learning and subjectivization." The ideas dealt with in this issue of Proximity circulate, in some sense, around the prospect of an ideal school that is no longer a school, a crowning self-awareness that oddly matches up with Hegel’s concept of an ideal State that effectively extinguishes the State. While the business potential of that ideal school is not frequently addressed head-on herein, the ideological (aka marketing) value of school is, taken as a whole, this issue’s “hidden curriculum.” The ideal school has a rambunctious history, as seen in Rebecca Zorach’s piece on the “free school” movement in Chicago in the late 1960s, and in Erin Elder’s profile of the experimental Pacific High School, which opened in 1961. Progressive modern conceptions of the ideal school can be discerned in Eve Ewing’s overview of “culturally-specific” schools that have emerged in the last thirty years, or in classroom projects led by Chicago public school teachers Jesse Senechal and Susannah Kite Strang. The ideal school can be more abstract, as in efforts to disseminate information and create community through self-publishing, enacted in projects by Christa Donner, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Elizabeth Knafo and Cassie Thornton, and Brandon Alvendia, or in informal education projects like Chicago’s Midcoast Free School, described by Caroline Liebman. the “Nobody Puts Baby In A Corner” feminist gatherings in New York profiled in Dara Greenwald’s interview, or London’s Exploding School created by Nils Norman, interviewed by Sara Black and John Preus. However, specific temporary community-based projects seem to be the place where the rubber of individual artistic and curatorial practice meets the road of Pope Leo’s “untutored multitude;” examples in this issue include Emmy Bright’s interview with Chicago teaching artist Mike Bancroft, descriptions by Louise Dreier and Paul Sargent of projects undertaken by New York’s Center for Urban Pedagogy, Andrew Oesch’s anecdotes of afterschool work with immigrant children in Providence, Lisa Junkin’s analysis of the collaboration between a Chicago social service provider and a local street gang, Lavie Raven’s manual on spray painting created for his work with the University of Hip-Hop in Chicago, and the work done in New York by Anne Frederick and the Hester Street Collaborative, outlined in an interview with the Institute for Applied Aesthetics. Outside of the U.S. we have the ambitious locally-based archiving and teaching process undertaken by the Transductores group in Spain, detailed by group co-coordinators Antonio Collados and Javier Rodrigo, and the work done in India by the Raqs Collective and by Freeman Murray, respectively profiled by Alexander Keefe and Chris Cronin. Other pieces provide yet more dimension to these contemporary practices. As touched on in critical pieces by Katie Hargrave, Noah Berlatsky, Zach Cahill, and the artist group InCUBATE, many of these projects represent highly creative responses to immediate concerns in specific localities, but, at the same time, can arguably overlap on occasion with disturbing Hollywood-style narratives of the teacher as savior. Speaking of the student as “learner,” Kierkegaard claims that “(w)hat the Teacher can give him occasion to remember is, that he is in Error. But in this consciousness, the learner is excluded from the Truth, even more decisively than before, when he lived in ignorance of his Error.” In every “pedagogical” situation, it is always worth asking first to what degree the student’s participation is voluntary, and thus, when education reinvents the subject, who it is that is doing the reinventing, and who is, in fact, being subjected.