ABSTRACT
There are two central ideas in this book, namely the idea that education is a form of intentional action and not an amorph process, and the idea that the point of education is the existence of the child or student as subject of its own life. In this chapter I bring these two lines together by exploring in what way education as intentional action is connected to the subject-ness of the student. Rather than thinking of this as a theoretical matter or a normative issue, I follow the suggestion made by Klaus Prange that the best way to capture what education is about is through an exploration of its distinctive form. The form Prange puts at the centre of his explorations is the act of pointing or showing and I argue, based on Prange’s ideas, that the main gesture of teaching is that of summoning the attention of the student towards the world, that is, towards everything the student is not. I discuss Prange’s ideas about the double character of pointing, that is, the fact that pointing is always point out something to someone. I explore the question what the student should do with what the teacher points towards, which is the theme of learning and Prange’s idea about the intransparency of learning, and reconstruct Prange’s answer to the question of the morality of educational pointing, that is, what makes it educationally worthwhile. In all this I argue, with Prange, that form matters for education.
