Rethinking the Philosophy of Education Essay -- Teaching Education Res

Rethinking the Philosophy of Education ABSTRACT: Philosophy is a special way of signifying the world. If philosophy is the place where the question is radical, then the task of the philosophy of education is to turn education into a problem through the practice of criticism. With this in mind we ask, Is teaching possible? What can really be transmitted? If man, as psychoanalysis indicates, is constituted as a desirous being, learning is possible only if desire is present. This interweaving of philosophy and psychoanalysis leads us to consider the impossibility of education in terms of three questions. (1) Is it possible or desirable to transmit the culture in its entirety? (2) Is learning possible without desire? (3) Could any pedagogical syllabus cover for lack in the other? "In the field of teaching, no one should be in his place anywhere (I quieten down with this continuous shifting: if some day I found my place, I would not even pretend to teach, I would absolutely give up)" Roland Barthes, L’obvie et l’obtus. We are living a moment of deep, historical mutation, in which traditional meanings are dissolving. This makes it necessary to re-think the certainties which the essentialist and totalizing Modern conception has crystallized; to question them from the standpoint of the crossroads at which this age of postmodernism has placed us. But Modernity has not been a homogeneous process: some new routes have been opened and they allow us to question those truths. Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Foucault and many others enable today's reflexion taking other different standpoints. This is what we will try to do in relation to education. Philosophy is a special way of signifying the world and turning reality... ...ndiscipline, failure, maladjustment. In a multiple, globalized, changing world, subject to deep, social unfairness, the philosophy of education must question thought in order to keep on resisting, in order to dare to think the unthinkable and must prosecute the underground task of unmasking of the nietzschean mole. Notes (1) F. Kafka, Carta al padre, Nuevomar, Mà ©xico, 1983. p.26-27. (2) M. Heidegger,  ¿Quà © significa pensar?, Nova, Buenos aires, 1958, p. 20. (3) I. Bergman, Las mejores intenciones, Tusquets, Mà ©xico, 1993. (4) J. Lacan, El Seminario 6. El deseo y su interpretacià ³n, Paidà ³s, Buenos Aires, 1995. (5) A. S. Neil, Summerhill. Un punto de vista radical sobre la educacià ³n d elos nià ±os, Fondo de Cultura Econà ³mica, p. 20. (6) A. Puiggrà ³s, Volver a educar. El desafà ­o de la enseà ±anza argentina a finales del siglo XX, Ariel, 1995, p. 95