Educational Soundings: a Cryptogenealogy of Sounding Differently

This essay presents an imaginative ‘cryptogenealogy’ of four different educational soundscapes spanning several thousand years of Western history. It begins with a return to the Odysseus myth, and in particular Odysseus’s sonic struggle with the Sirens. The article then charts the echoes of this foundational image through two educational spaces—the study and the classroom—as they appear in the Western tradition of educational thinking. Grounding the analysis in historical documents by Comenius and Vives, the essay demonstrates how educational soundscapes are haunted by Odysseus, and in particular themes of embodiment and disembodiment, location and dislocation. The cryptogenealogy then culminates with a turn to the postdigital, which brings disembodiment and displacement to their absolute dominance, and how these sonic tendencies might be interrupted to produce a new educational acoustics beyond the sacrifices traced throughout the cryptogenealogy.