The three gifts of teaching: Towards a non-egological future for moral education

ABSTRACT

The centrality of learners and their learning in contemporary educational discourse and practice, seems to suggest that the self of the student should be at the heart of the educational endeavour. This is not just an educational programme, but actually an expression of a particular way of thinking about human beings and their position in the world; a way of thinking which, after Levinas, I characterise as egological. In this paper I explore an alternative approach that centres on the suggestion that everything begins with what is given to us, rather than what is claimed, constructed or interpreted by us. I explore this philosophically through a discussion of ideas from Jean-Luc Marion around the phenomenon and phenomenology of ‘giveness’. I connect this to a critical discussion of the role of learning in education and explore three ways in which teaching manifests itself as a gift that occurs beyond learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching
• givenness
• Jean-Luc Marion
• moral education
• learnification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Matthew-2-1_2-12/.

2. The term itself seems to have spread, with, to date close to 10,000 hits in google and close to 700 items in google scholar [accessed 8 August 2019].

3. Marion identifies the issue at stake here in the following way: ‘(A) correct understanding of the concept of revelation must account for the inevitable resistance that it cannot help to encounter. Admittedly, this resistance is not enough to authenticate it, but at the very least a reception without resistance would be sufficient to disqualify it as revelation’. (Marion, 2016, p. 2).

4. The sentence continues, in brackets, with ‘even if everything that gives itself nevertheless does not show itself without remainder’ (Marion, 2011, p. 19).

5. An ontology or metaphysics of givenness would not only try to specify the exact nature of the ‘what’ that is given, but would also try to specify what it is that gives this ‘what’. The problem with such an ambition is that it goes ‘beyond’ givenness itself and would therefore cease to be an ‘account’ of givenness itself. Moreover, it would, in its ambition to go ‘behind’ the phenomenon of givenness, deny the very idea that what shows itself must first give itself. It would, in a sense, refuse givenness. This is why givenness ‘needs’ a phenomenology, so to speak.

6. The following sentence not only shows the anti-Kantian streak in what Marion is trying to do, but also gives an important reason for his ‘project’, because for Kant the phenomenon in-itself is the very thing that cannot—or perhaps we can say, in order to connect this view explicitly to Kant—can no longer appear. Marion writes: ‘(I)n order that the phenomenon show itself in itself and from itself—that is, in principle, in order that it abolish the Kantian interdiction that reserved the in-itself to the thing insofar as it does not appear—it is necessary that this appearing not owe its appearing to the conditions of possibility of a foreign experience (that of the transcendental ego), but that it draw its appearing from itself, and itself alone; it thus must happen from itself—in a word, it must give itself’. (Marion, 2016, p. 48, emphasis in original).

7. ‘Husserl sees givenness. He sees that one can only reach givenness via reduction, but to a large extent he stays within the presupposition that the given is a matter of objectness, of a theory of the object’. (Marion, 2017, p. 77).

8. Marion is not suggesting that Husserl and Heidegger didn’t see this at all. He, rather, suggests that Husserl already went further than Heidegger in some respects. And Marion also honestly confesses that he only discovered Heidegger’s earlier work (particularly Heidegger’s 1919 essay on givenness and ‘es gibt’) after he had written about this (see particularly Marion, 2011).

9. Marion gives the example of a painting in the cloister of the convent of Trinity-on-the-Mount which has a secret point where one must be situated to see the painting. This point, Marion explains, ‘is determined by the painting and not by the spectator’ so that ‘the spectator must obey the painting in order to see it’ (Marion, 2017, pp. 84–85). Marion calls the principle at stake here ‘anamorphosis’.

10. Note that in much of these discussions the question of what the learning is ‘about’ and ‘for’ is not even raised, let alone addressed. Nonetheless it is remarkable—and worrying—how popular these kinds of phrases have become.

11. The concrete example that I have encountered many times as a student was of my mathematics teachers who were able to do spectacular things on the blackboard and, when they met my puzzled gaze, could say no more than ‘but can’t you see it?’ And the whole problem was of course that I was unable to see what I should be seeing—I was outside of the ‘frame’—whereas my teacher was inside of the frame and could therefore simply see what he could see. I don’t remember my mathematics teachers being very good at pulling me inside the frame. The fact that from a very unsuccessful student of physics in secondary school I became a rather successful teacher of physics was perhaps due to my experiences with the frame and how to get students ‘inside’.

12. Misunderstandings are often visible in the language that is used as people tend to avoid the rather ‘philosophical’ or ‘theoretical’ notion of subjectification. Hence, I have encountered notions such as personal development, identity formation and even personification as approximations of subjectification. For a response to these understandings see Biesta (in press a).

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Gert Biesta

Gert Biesta is Professor of Public Education at the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University, Ireland, Professorial Fellow for Educational Theory and Pedagogy at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, and NIVOZ Professor for Education at the University of Humanistic Studies, the Netherlands. In addition he is Visiting Professor at the University of Agder, Norway, working across the fields of education, arts and mental health. He is co-editor of the British Educational Research Journal and associate editor of Educational Theory. His work focuses on the theory of education and the theory and philosophy of educational and social research. Recent books include: The Beautiful Risk of Education (Routledge, 2014); The Rediscovery of Teaching (Routledge, 2017); Obstinate Education: Reconnecting School and Society (Brill | Sense, 2019); and Educational Research: An Unorthodox Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2020). So far his work has appeared in twenty different languages.