ABSTRACT
One of the key themes found in philosophy of education is the relation between learning and self-actualization, self-affirmation, and/or self-creation. This chapter takes up the perennial relationship between learning and self in order to demonstrate how this relationship always assumes some kind of developmentalism and/or determinism. While certain forms of development and determination are important for learning theories and practices, all too frequently, they transform into oppressive or regressive ideologies of racism, classism, or sexism. In order to sidestep this issue, Chapter Three proposes that we let idle the actualization, affirmation, and/or creation of a self through learning. What remains would be an impersonal education where the self is suspended without being affirmed, negated, or destroyed. This would be a self as not as self, or a self that is barely itself. A self that is less than itself holds onto its potentiality to be and not to be itself. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the educational value of experiencing the potentiality of the self through suspension of the self can be found when students study. In the act of studying, the self is exhausted, distracted, and impersonalized. Rather than a purely depressing state of educational torpor out of which the studier must flee, the chapter suggests that there is a weak sense of educational freedom at work when one studies and thus prefers not to actualize, affirm, or create a self.
