Beyond the “person”: Secular pedagogy, subjectivation, and reflexive educational practice

This article argues that secular pedagogy requires more than pluralism or generic antidogmatism: it must criticise the anthropological naturalisations through which educational discourse treats the person as a pre-given ontological centre. Drawing on the Manifesto della pedagogia laica, Marx’s VI thesis on Feuerbach, Luporini, and a materialist reading of education, the paper proposes a shift from person to subjectivation. The subject is thus understood as historically constituted within material, institutional, discursive, and conflictual relations. This perspective reframes pedagogical supervision and other second-level reflexive practices as secular dispositifs of critique and collective re-signification, contributing to the democratic formation of subjects capable of judgment and dissent.