Whose Life is it Any Rate? Of virtue, temporality and vocational education

Abstract

In the spirit of Lyotard the paper acknowledges the market‐driven functionality at the centre of higher education. Through the understanding offered in Heidegger's phenomenological method it is proposed that education for being‐in‐the‐world is constrained by the social reification of inauthentic natures of temporality as revealed through performativity. It argues that a reconstituted Aristotelian virtue model of self has much to recommend it, offering a more essential mode of revealing ontology. The essence of higher education is not to be found in the ‘present’ expediencies of a succession of fragmented selfs buttressed under the rhetoric of lifetime learning. A fundamental social and moral re‐evaluation of higher‐level provision is urged, which contextualises the problem of an economic model used to drive the purpose of education at higher levels.