Introduction

The argument of the present book is a fairly simple one. It argues first that the primary principle of education concerns not where we are going but how to get started. Second, it argues that education is something we undertake and that we have in common. The first entails that rather than think of education primarily from the vantage point of what we want to achieve or what we want education to deliver, we think it from the vantage point of beginning. Rather than a progressive movement from A to B, from ignorant to knowledgeable, from imperfection to perfection, I wish to argue we should focus on how to get started. How to create moments of attention and interest towards something of common concern. This cannot be done in isolation, and hence it is a collective endeavour, even if sometimes it requires solitude. It concerns the directing of a becoming human’s gaze towards some aspect of the world we deem to be important enough to want to share it with the newcomers of this world, or with those who are new to the subject matter at hand. In this sense, education is always about the relation we are able to establish between the educator, the educand, and the world, and education only ever happens in this constellation. This further entails that education can never be student-centred, teacher-centred, nor world-centred. It is only in the coming together of these that education unfolds as a particular – and peculiar – undertaking. It concerns those things that are common, in the sense of being things that are of lasting and shared concern for the community, and it happens in common because it is part of an ever-unfolding conversation about existence on this tiny spot of earth we have been born unto.