The Product of Circumstances:Towards a Materialist and Situated Pedagogy

This chapter analyses the meaning of a materialist education. After a brief presentation of the Marxist principles behind such an education, I focus on the figure of the Soviet educator Anton Makarenko, and the way he mobilized the notions of ‘milieu’ and ‘circumstances’ to rethink his pedagogical practice. Instead of a directive education based on the relation between master and student, he conceived of education as being constructed through a collective milieu. Marlon Miguel, ‘The Product of Circumstances: Towards a Materialist and Situated Pedagogy’, in Materialism and Politics, ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva, Cultural Inquiry, 20 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 145–62