The field of education is in a process of profound transformation. This process is not so much brought about by the rise of new technologies and the opportunities they afford, but the epistemological crisis they have engendered. At the heart of this crisis lies the question of how we come to know things. What is the role of the body in learning? What is the felt ground from which language arises? What are the terms and conditions of education? Where does it happen? How does learning accommodate opacity and unavailability? What infrastructures truly generate knowledge? Who has the right to educate?

When Ivan Illich published Deschooling Society in 1971, the school acted as the paradigmatic institution: the institution of all institutions and the first, necessary subject of all institutional critique. Illich casts the institution of education as cruel and dehumanising. To this day, it remains one of the great paradoxes of modern society that school is perceived as a place of personal growth and realisation, while the structures and ideologies that frame it – from segregation according to age or performance and the ritualisation of progress, to the way education is bureaucratised and tethered to the economy – foster exhaustion and depression. While more noticeable in some countries than others, we see this tendency everywhere. In some cases, such as the United Kingdom, traditional education systems seem to be collapsing. At the same time, numerous independent education projects are emerging that thrive on both intellectual rigour and a commitment to a duty of care.

Illich writes at one apex of a wave that oscillates between revolt and complacency, animated by radical ideas about education that emerge in the mid-nineteenth century. But this oscillation is becoming denser, the energy more focused, and the question ever more central to contemporary society.

After Education is a major project within Field Studies and the framework within which the school’s teaching philosophy evolves. It is also the eponymous inaugural residency for Terms and Conditions 2027–28, culminating in a series of events, symposia and performances in Vienna in October 2027. To learn more about the programme or get involved, email info@field-studies.org.