Norm Friesen

Given at the opening of the 7th International Symposium on Phenomenological Research in Education (video to eventually be posted later here: https://www.youtube.com/@allgemeineerziehungswissen9347 )

It is worthwhile for many reasons, including the fact that he bases his conception of education on Kant’s Lectures on Pedagogy (a source sadly neglected in English). Here’s the opening paragraph:

Jean Luc Marion

Keynote: Phenomenology as a ‘Great Educational Thought’

“Few people have enough character to endure the truth, and to speak it” (Vauvenargue).

Why should we take the question of pedagogy as seriously as we do? Certainly, because it concerns nothing less than the development of humanity in mankind and, to this end, mobilises the resources of all the techniques and treatments that medicine and psychology are constantly adding to our possibilities. However, this consideration is only necessary because, more profoundly, human beings themselves · need their development to continue after birth, for longer than other animals, even until their death. It is as if man discovered· himself to be behind, or even withdrawn from his own humanity, and, by a paradoxical privilege, owed his initial deficit to the possibility of unlimited progress. Hence the decisive character of education, which Kant aptly described: “Man is the only being who needs education. For by education we must understand nurture (the tending and feeding of the child), discipline (Zucht), and teaching, together with culture” (Bildung). He even distinguishes between different degrees of education (Erziehung: first, the protection’ and support of the infant’s physical health (Wartung); then discipline (Zucht), which instils in the child the rules of communal life; and finally, instruction through- teaching (Unterweisung) at school, which goes hand in hand with Bildung. But how does Bildung differ from teaching (Unterweisung). Kant does not specify this, since he sometimes equates Cultur der Seele with Bildung der Seele; yet he clarifies, in parentheses, that all education (and thus also Bildung  presupposes and aims toward insight (Einsicht): “For insight depends on education, and education in its turn depends on insight.” We must understand: Bildung crowns education because it concentrates on the right use of the insight of the mind. To Descartes’ question Quo vita sectabor iter? the answers thus found in Kant’s own other question, “what does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?”, namely ”…which makes it. [reason] the highest good on earth, the prerogative of being the final touchstone of truth”. In other words, to speak again with Descartes, “…the power of judging aright [ … ] which is properly what is called Good Sense or Reason.” The education of the mind thus depends on the use that mind makes of itself.

A deeply insightful presentation on theory and practice in education that I just had to translate, from O.F. Bollnow:

“The discipline of teacher education has long been controversial. Some complain about its inadequate academic status and believe it urgently needs reform. Others, however, find that teacher training has already become too theoretical, alienating teachers from their practical responsibilities. This issue can only be solved by first understanding what it means to be a discipline, and by speaking of pedagogy not in terms of sociology or psychology, but as a specifically educational discipline.”  Bollnow (1989) Theory and Practice in Education

Paper introducing the “human” education of Friedrich Schleiermacher.

In a field increasingly dominated by managerial terminology and constructs of the psychological and neurological sciences, this paper presents education as an explicitly human “science”—as integral to human projects such as individual and collective self-definition as well as cultural reproduction and transformation. This paper undertakes the initial steps toward this human way of thinking about education by introducing the educational work of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher, virtually unknown in English-language educational scholarship today, can be said to have been one of the first to seek to establish education as a rigorous but consistently human way of understanding. I show how Schleiermacher worked towards this in his 70-page introduction to his recently reissued (and soon to be translated) Lectures on Education from 1826. I begin with a short biographical introduction to Schleiermacher and then focus on his treatment of three basic, closely interrelated themes—or rather, pairs of opposed elements:  1) Theory and practice; 2) teacher and student (also parent and child); and 3) education as preparation or as “life itself.”

Klaus Mollenhauer’s late philosophical text, Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing (2014) deals in a highly original and accessible way with education in its most basic human and cultural constituents. Continue reading →