ABSTRACT
Words of an elementary school principal are, on the face of it, rather commonplace and familiar. Education is concerned after the arrival of "the young" in the sense of the arrival of new teachers into the profession. Education entails a relation to the young, the vulnerable, and the new. Going back to what is first for the community is going back to what is at its heart: the fact of natality, the fact that children are born into the world and that the community can go on only through its concerted attention to this arrival and to the conditions under which such arrival can be generously sustained. without new initiates entering in the community of education—without the continual arrival of new children, new teachers, new knowledge, new worldly circumstances—that community itself would cease to be.
