ABSTRACT
A close reading of the first three sections of Virginia Woolf's novel, The Waves, provides the primary focus of this chapter, which, through Woolf's fictional descriptions of children's educational experiences, aligns with and takes further educational aspects of the Freudian psychic economy. The Waves not only exemplifies the variable consequences the experience of formal education has for the children, it also gives an indication of the breadth of other forms of educational experience available to and effecting on them. The central argument of this chapter is that these broader experiences are, in fact, educational, despite not conforming to logic inherited from the humanist legacy and perpetuated in the dominant contemporary educational economy.
