Research project Education and other journeys
This dissertation challenges the common idea that education is mainly a tool for achieving specific, predetermined goals. It highlights how this instrumental view can limit the meaning of education, reducing it to a set of outcomes rather than exploring its deeper significance in human life.
Today's instrumental view on education carries many problems and often leads to educational aims that rely on assumptions about the human experience. This dissertation explores the reasons and consequences of such instrumental view from a philosophical perspective and suggests a different approach to thinking about and considering education.
The dissertation has two aspirations. The first one is to highlight specific problems in education and trace their philosophical roots. It points out a tendency in the way we think about and approach education to see it in terms of its instrumental goal rather than its meaning and place in our lives.
The second aspiration is to present the concept of education as a perpetual, open-ended journey of growth and transcendence that we embark upon together with the other. This journey, the dissertation concludes, is carried by hope—especially for those who feel unheard or unseen in today’s systems. It invites us to rethink what it means to learn, to teach, and to live well together.
Dissertation in full text (Open Access):
Education and other journeys: The Self, the Other and Stanley Cavell’s Moral Perfectionism
Project description
The dissertation has two aspirations. The first one is to highlight specific problems in education and trace their philosophical roots. It points out a tendency in the way we think about and approach education to see it in terms of its instrumental goal rather than its meaning and place in our lives. This approach renders education a reductive and customised concept that exists for the achievement of certain assumed and predetermined ends.
To fulfil these ends, educational planning principles rely on assumptions that defuse the complexity of the human experience and overlook the concept of the other. This thesis argues that these problems, which are the reliance on fixed ends and the dismissal of the notion of the other, have roots in the Western philosophical grounding of education.
The second aspiration is to present the concept of education as a journey: an alternative non-instrumental approach to education based on Stanley Cavell’s concept of Emersonian Moral Perfectionism. It is an approach that views education as a perpetual, open-ended journey of growth and transcendence that we embark upon together with the other. Through overcoming the notion of fixed ends and placing the other in a neighbouring position on the same level as the self, education as a journey illuminates a way out of the aforementioned problems of education.
It does so by, first and foremost, focusing on changing the way we think about and coexist with the concept of education, before we start to consider solutions and applications. Through exploring Cavellian ideas like nonconformity, romanticism, justice, lostness and the ordinary, this dissertation explores the perfectionist concept of education as a journey.
This dissertation concludes by suggesting that this journey is always taken on a vehicle of hope: a hope, especially for those who feel powerless, silenced, unseen or unheard in education systems, that it is possible to navigate the difficult condition of education. Embarking on this journey is a process of planting a seed of gradual and soft revolutionary change—a process of finding hardness in the soft and power in the invisible and silent.
Project members
Project managers
Rama Alshoufani
PhD student
