Education studies and the work of education criticism

Abstract

This paper distinguishes the activity of educational criticism which works in service of education as indicated by the suffix -al, from education criticism which does not. The latter approach is prepared to doubt the mission of education as it is manifested in education institutions and in the broader cultural formation and maintenance of educated subjectivities. An education criticism does not assume that education institutions should be improved or that the production and maintenance of adult educated subjectivity is necessarily good or desirable. As such, it is prepared to risk the environment which makes its criticism possible, drawing from the arts and literature in which artists and writers have set out to perturb and question the epistemic and ethical attachments of their audiences.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Allen, A. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0533-6251
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2026 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in British Journal of Educational Studies is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords:	Criticism; pedagogy; andragogy; education studies; Antonin Artaud; Thomas Bernhard
Dates:	Accepted: 7 June 2026 Published (online): 16 June 2026 Published: 16 June 2026
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Education
Date Deposited:	17 Jun 2026 11:54
Last Modified:	17 Jun 2026 11:54
Status:	Published online
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1080/00071005.2026.2687615
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:241793

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Education studies and the work of education criticism

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