In today’s world we appear to place a premium on happiness. Happiness is often portrayed, directly or indirectly, as one of the key aims of education. To suggest that education is concerned with promoting unhappiness or even despair would, in many contexts, seem outlandish. This paper challenges these widely held views. Focusing on the work of the great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, I argue that despair, the origins of which lie in our reflective consciousness, is a defining feature of human (...) life. Education, I maintain, should not be seen as a flight from despair but as a process of deepening our understanding of suffering and its potentially pivotal role in our humanisation. In developing these ideas, I draw on Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, among other sources. (shrink)

Rabelaian carnivalesque provided philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin with a means of exploring the significance of humour through an examination of Middle Age peasant culture and the influence of the Renaissance on its legitimacy. This article argues that a similar phenomenon exists in modern educational settings and provides evidence to suggest that very young children are highly capable of working within this genre as a strategic orientation. It is proposed that the role of the early childhood teacher within this ‘underground culture’ is (...) to be a dialogic partner who recognizes their dual horizontal and vertical roles as both insider and outsider: appreciating humour with children but expecting (and celebrating) the child’s position within a distinct culture that necessarily resides outside officialdom. In doing so, the article concludes that teachers will gain deeper appreciation of the important role of humour as a means of positioning the self within institutions characterized by power dynamics that are typically beyond the young child’s control. Moreover, the teacher has greater opportunities to recognize the potential of humour as a form of social mobility and agency on the part of the child. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 78-87, February 2022.

Peter Roberts’ recent book, Happiness, Hope, and Despair: Rethinking the Role of Education, has launched a ground-breaking effort that challenges dominant Western conceptions of happiness and the r...

This paper takes the position that the aim of existential teaching, i.e., teaching where existential questions are addressed, consists in educating the students in light of subjective truth, where the students are ‘educated’ to exist on their own, i.e., independent of the teacher. The question is whether it is possible to educate in light of existence. It is, in fact impossible, as existence is a subjective matter, meaning that it must be determined individually. In this way the existential teaching appears (...) thus: even though existence cannot be determined educationally, as it is a subjective matter, it does require some kind of education. However, the teacher cannot make use of pedagogical means that coerce the students to take responsibility for their subjective truth. A pedagogical ‘expedient’ is nonetheless required, which deprives of all types of constraint but still opens up for the students taking responsibility for their subjective truth. I argue that this expedient must be irony, but not all types of irony. I therefore discuss which conception of irony the existential teaching should and should not be connected with. (shrink)