Ethical Education? Recovering the Sense of a Transgenerational and Worldly Ethics in Education

In this speculative philosophical article, I consider what sense of educational ethics emerges under certain purposes in education. The philosopher of education, Gert Biesta, has noted that education always involves someone educating someone else with a certain purpose in mind toward a certain end. What we mean by “the ethical” in education no doubt depends upon what we assume the ends and purposes of education are. Tapping into Biesta’s tripartite understanding of the purposes of education, my article begins by discussing the two most commonly assumed ends of education, “qualification” and “socialization,” and the ethical limits within their approaches. I then move to consider the significance of a third educational purpose, one which has become less commonly invoked (even disparaged and wholly dismissed) in current educational discourse. However, while Biesta calls this third educational end “subjectification,” I in turn call this aim “becoming-singular-plural.” I do so in order to emphasize the primacy of “relationality” at stake in an education that seeks to foster our sense of being uniquely and singularly charged with responding to a transgenerational relationship to the world. In the last part of the article, I go on to discuss how the educational concern with “becoming-singular-plural” necessarily unleashes an ethical transgenerational thinking and attentiveness to “passing time together.” This ethical transgenerational thinking, I discuss, stands in sharp contrast to the narrow sense of ethics implied within the aims of “qualification” and “socialization,” and to our present time of “learnification,” when the ubiquitous pursuit of qualification (as a frantic concern with my sole survival and my own success) has become itself a dominant form of socialization. At stake, is the recovery of a more expansive sense of educational ethics that stands in relation to those no longer here who hand us a world to take care of, and to those not yet present who will one day receive the world we are tending