ABSTRACT
In the foregoing chapters I have presented a different way to understand and approach education, one that isn’t based on a truth about the human being, one that doesn’t claim to know what the humanity of the human being consists of, and one that doesn’t think of education as the production of particular identities or subjectivities or the insertion of newcomers into an existing social order. Instead I have argued for an approach that focuses on the multifarious ways in which human beings as unique, singular individuals come into the world. I have argued that we come into the world as unique, singular beings through the ways in which we take up our responsibility for the otherness of the others, because it is in those situations that we speak with our own “voice” and not with the representative voice of the rational community. I have shown that the world in which we come into presence is a world of plurality and difference, because we can only come into the world if others, who are not like us, take up our beginnings in such a way that they can bring their beginnings into the world as well. I have therefore argued that the educational responsibility is not only a responsibility for the coming into the world of unique and singular beings; it is also a responsibility for the world as a world of plurality
and difference. The creation of such a world, the creation of a worldly space, is not something that can be done in a straightforward manner. It rather entails a “double duty” for the creation of worldly spaces and for their undoing. Along these lines I have tried to articulate a way to understand education that itself responds to the challenges we are faced with today, including the disappearance of a language of education in the age of learning.
