Education as a way of love: answering the call of the other in the time of Gestell

This thesis is a transdisciplinary investigation into why, in spite of our best intentions, modern cultures continue to marginalise people and the other-than-human world, and the role that education has in this marginalisation. Firstly, the thesis explores the problems and paradoxes of modern thinking and how these shape educational practice. Beginning with Heidegger’s notion of Gestell, it illustrates how the object worldview, which is the basis of metaphysics, leads, not only to the idea of Bestand, or use, but also to assumptions about the naturalness of making and mastery, progress, praxis and the idea of an authentic, autonomous, free individuality. It explores how the entailments of this worldview share an underlying sameness that permeates seemingly opposing research paradigms and educational methods, a sameness that resonates with Thomas Berry’s concept of the millennial dream and the modern quest for transcendence. The Gestellian worldview is then contrasted with Indigenous, Buddhist and more recent scientific and social-scientific cosmologies that understand that we are not self-sufficient, self-constituting and self-ruling beings, but are intimately connected with others in such a way that we continuously bring one another into being. These cosmologies assume being as participatory and intersubjective, understanding that we do not come into being in silence, but rather in the cacophony of an entangled engagement that disrupts all plans and blueprints for personal freedoms and utopias, thus calling up in each of us, a sense of universal responsibility for a co-arising world. It is this assumption of an unvolitional, intimate engagement with the face of the other with whom we are always-already implicated that Lévinas calls ‘ethics as first philosophy’ and is here called a way of love. In education, as in life, we are called to remain continuously open and responsive to the face of the other – any other – before any responsibility to self, or method, or dream. Finally, the thesis explores how education practised as love without concupiscence (as opposed to education in the service of the dream) could have a very different appearance and a very different effect. The thesis revolves around Sammy/Sammi stories – critical incidents from the author’s own teaching/learning that exemplify the notion of learning as a way of love. It seeks to expose the silences in modern education – pain, risk, wound, forgiveness, promise, gift, joy – and depicts other ways of understanding learning: as feeling learning, as worlding, as enthrallment and as teaching/learning by heart