For Gadamer, understanding moves between two different levels. One is the everyday ontological level in which there is a meeting between the familiar and the alien, between the known and the not‐quite‐expected. But understanding can also be a skill to be developed. This is the way in which we achieve good knowledge. In pedagogical terms, encountering the alien is the basis for self‐formation, or bildung, originating in Hegel. But there is an ambiguity at the heart of bildung. The notion of (...) encountering the alien runs together two different notions: (a) being pulled up short, as elaborated by Deborah Kerdeman; and (b) allowing oneself to be interrogated by the other, as described by Charles Taylor. And each of these has affective psychodynamic parallels in Jungian and Freudian psychology, the first in the notion of deflating hubris, and the second, in the reintegration of projection. The experiences of encountering the alien in these two forms can be extremely intense for university students and they constitute significant self‐transformations. (shrink)

This paper aims to question anew the popular and supposedly self-evident affirmation of education, in its modern incarnation as in its historical notion. The “naive” questions suggest that we have recently taken for granted that education ought to be for the masses, that it ought to be upbringing, and that it is better than ignorance. Drawing on the tradition that calls such an understanding of education into question, the author shows that the hidden costs of disregarding such reflection end up, (...) camouflaged and smuggled, taxing the current debates regarding generally accepted education strategies. The characteristic feeling of the currently accepted model of education being in chronic crisis is less a testament to an absence of alternative approaches than to a lack of thorough self-reflection. (shrink)