ABSTRACT
Most of the literature on “education” is driven by disputes about properties, mechanisms, and root causes but whether one ends with “class,” “race,” “gender,” or the intersection between them, one has blinded oneself to the reality that all involved are alive. In much of the popular social sciences, people facing the difficult and dangerous are presented as “poor.” The poor may be peasants in quasi-feudal societies, factory workers in industrial economies, slaves or quasi-slaves. The poor may be people who fled pogroms, starvation, war, and moved across oceans and deserts. By emphasizing action, including intellectual action, as statements in call-and-response sequences started before any of the participants joined in, and that have no experienceable ending, have emphasized not only temporality, but also uncertainty, activity, and thus, for, “education” as a matter of fundamental deliberation without which no human life proceeds.
