ABSTRACT
Educational disharmony and unsociability are, in this chapter, explored as the limit, adversary, but also resource of the logic of the humanist legacy in education. Forms of educational experience which exceed its harmonising narrative are either negatively stigmatised or become the subject of educational redemption in the name of social progress. Framed by Maurice Blanchot's analysis of culture, humanist aspects of the social and educational thought of Immanuel Kant and John Dewey are opposed to those of Søren Kierkegaard and André Gide. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Gide's The Counterfeiters are shown to both critique and offer alternatives to the humanist legacy's dominant conceptions of educational significance.
