-‘? N. Ethics as Limits of Pedagogical Reflection1

These eyes must never become your measure, and if you should ever come to experience me as such an eye, then I ask you... to forget me. You should penetrate beyond the eyes which fix the events, which classify your childhood as a mere phase of develop ment. (Kolleritsch, 1986, p. 79) This brief passage from a father’s letter to his 16-month-old child seems to be advice to himself as to how to manage his relationship with his son. And it is advice to his son too, to help him fulfill his advice to himself. Both pieces of advice are some what strange compared with how we usually think about the educational relationship between father and son, parent and child, or teacher and student. First, the father does not want to fix his child’s being with his own values and expectations. To look at your child in the way you want him or her to be is to measure the child and to compare him or her with more or less impersonal and imposed standards and norms. This means, however, that the child is regarded not in a direct, but an indirect, way so that the child loses his or her uniqueness. In other words, the relationship needs to be immediate. Second, the father seems to feel that he may fail fulfilling this relationship. Therefore, he needs help from his child, and so he advises the son to go beyond the measuring eyes to reach the realm of immediacy between each other. Thus the father aims for a relationship which transcends any form of unlinear influential power. Like many educational the orists he seems to regard the main characteristic of the educa tional relationship as asymmetrical. And he recognizes a helping capability that the child can offer the parent or educa tor. But can this kind of relationship be called an educational one in the way we conventionally think about it? Or does the father inadvertently seem to give up the idea of education entirely? In an conventional sense education means to be responsible for children by protecting them from danger, by providing the