ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a simple and in a sense very basic question, "what is the educational task". It first focuses on the notion of subjectivity or subject-ness and articulates what it means to exist as subject. The chapter then argues that existential matters are ultimately first-person matters rather than matters of theory. It indicates what this means for the question of being-subject and more specifically the idea of uniqueness. The chapter also focuses on the educational "work" that might contribute to making the grown-up existence of another human being in and with the world possible. It explores the role of power and authority in educational relationships and on what this means for teaching and the teacher. World-destruction and self-destruction are the extreme responses to the encounter with resistance, the encounter with the world—responses where people actually end up outside of the world, in a place of non-existence.
