Exemplarity as deliberative curriculum finding out what to study, why, and how

In this article, I discuss how the principle of exemplarity developed in the 1970s by the Marxist educators and theorists Oskar Negt and Knud Illeris can be a model for a deliberative curriculum. Today’s crisis-ridden discourses of ‘taking back’, ‘reclaiming’, etc., the practices and purposes of the university are evidence of a widespread experience of alienation and loss of meaning, but also of theorizations effacing practical responsibility, ownership, and deliberation. The way that Negt, Illeris, and other Marxist educators identified the curriculum as the privileged site for a new take on integrating ends and means can inspire us today with regard to taking responsibility for what to learn, why, and how. There are many similarities between the changes that spurred university reforms in the 1960s and 1970s and the current situation, considered as a crisis of the imagination. Both are basically about what to study, why, and how in the expectation of a new future. I conclude by drawing the contours of what a deliberative curriculum inspired by the principle of exemplarity might look like.