It would be difficult to overstate the significance of Martin Heidegger for the thinking of the twentieth century. He was without doubt one of the most influential—and controversial—philosophers of his time and commentators credit him with influencing numerous disciplines in addition to philosophy: theology, psychiatry, literary criticism, historiography, theory of language, philosophy of science, and the analysis of technological society.2 Over several generations, prominent thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty have acknowledged their debt to him. In addition to the seminal quality of his writing, there is its sheer mass. It has been estimated that his collected texts, which are in the process of being published, will amount to some hundred volumes. And although he rarely explicitly addressed the topic of education as such, because of the profundity of his insights into the human condition and into the nature of learning, thinking and understanding, the field of education is one in which his ideas have the potential to make a huge impact—which is now beginning to be recognized.
Martin Heidegger was born in Messkirch, Germany on 26 September 1889. He went to the University of Freiburg in 1909 to study theology and philosophy and was appointed to teach philosophy at the University of Marburg in 1922. Here he gained a reputation as an inspirational teacher whose passion for thinking shone through in a way that both startled and communicated itself to his listeners.4 His first major work, the hugely influential Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), was published in 1927, and this both led him to be appointed to the chair of Philosophy at Freiburg in 1928 and propelled him into international prominence. With some disruption during the Second World War and its aftermath, he continued to give lectures until 1967 and to write until his death on 26 May 1976. He was buried in the place of his birth.
This apparently highly academic life should not deceive one into supposing that his ideas are of merely academic interest. In the context of education, his development of the notions of thinking and of personal authenticity, and his radical critique of the essence of modern technology, have the potential to be taken up in ways that have profound consequences for the development of educational practice. As the quotation that heads this essay suggests, Heidegger saw learning as a highly demanding and participatory affair, which required the full engagement of the learner and was certainly not something that could be instilled from without through a heavily didactic process. Nor, indeed, on his account, could it be conceived of in terms of the achievement of a pre-specified set of detailed learning objectives as set out in some national curriculum. The teacher has to let pupils learn, not impose learning upon them. This may make learning sound rather passive in character, but such an interpretation could hardly be farther from the truth. What was crucial for Heidegger was that learners submit themselves to the demands and rigour of thinking—to listen to what calls to be thought from out of the unique learning situation in which they are involved. He was against the mechanization of thinking which attempts to enframe it in pre-specified and often highly instrumental structures, thus closing down its possibilities. For Heidegger, genuine thinking is not the assimilation of a series of gobbets of pre-specified information and ideas, but an exciting and demanding journey into the unknown. It is drawn forward by the pull of that which is somehow incipient in our awareness but has yet to reveal itself.
The power of this view of learning is magnified when we consider Heidegger’s view of the nature of the authentic life and of authentic understanding. Heidegger’s (uncompleted) quest in Being and Time is to understand the nature of ‘Being’—that through which things exist. In order to pursue this understanding he begins a profound analysis of the place where beings show themselves—human life and understanding (‘Dasein’).
And while, for Heidegger, this analysis of human existence is only a precursor to investigating the question of Being, it is, in itself, very suggestive for the enterprise of education. Central to Heidegger’s characterization of human beings in Being and Time is that they are the entities for whom their own being is an issue. We live understandingly, having some conception of ourselves in situations in which there are choices to be made. But for much of the time the personal cogency of this understanding is tranquillized through our submersion in the ‘idle talk’ and ‘hearsay’ of what Heidegger refers to as the ‘they-self’.
This is a frame of mind in which we are carried along by the busyness of immediate practical concern and the ‘common sense’ of the ‘they’—what ‘everybody’ thinks and says. This is an essentially irresponsible ‘averaged off’ understanding of life in which we don’t think things through in terms of their meaning for our own unique existence—an existence ultimately bounded by, and given urgency by, the fact of our own inevitable death—but understand them only in terms of what is current in the fashion and the gossip, which readily passes on to the next thing rather than test the validity of its assumptions in truly personal terms. To live thus is to live ‘inauthentically’—to live in a way which is not true to ourselves.
If we relate these ideas to his view of the nature of genuine thinking previously discussed, we can see that a radical challenge is issued to much that goes on in conventional schools. For example, it raises the following kinds of question. To what extent does the learning that goes on in schools largely have the character of ‘hearsay’—pupils having little opportunity, much less encouragement, to truly relate what they learn to their sense of their own existence? To what extent does the conception of education which motivates school learning derive from instrumental conceptions of life and work which eschew underlying questions of personal meaning and the open quality of engagement with issues described earlier? On a Heideggerian account, education proper is no more about acquiring the skills required to feed the demands of global capitalism than it is about the acquisition of knowledge purely for its own sake. It is pre-eminently concerned with the value and meaning that we derive from learning—how we feel it should affect our outlook and our actions, and our conception of ourselves both as responsible individuals and as participants in the human condition.
For this quality of learning to be achieved there is a need for a qualitatively different conception of the teacher-pupil relationship to that which underlies much current practice. Rather than a teacher-pupil relationship envisaged as the vehicle for conveying (or ‘delivering’) prespecified knowledge and skills (for which both teacher and pupil can subsequently be held accountable), it becomes an open space which constantly takes its start from the quality of the learner’s engagement with the domain in which he or she is operating and arises as a free though not undisciplined response to that engagement. The precise content of learning evolves out of this relationship, not ahead of it, though it is certainly the role of the teacher to stimulate and to provoke further engagement by, for example, helping the learner to identify and to pursue the questions that need to be asked.
In my own development of Heidegger’s ideas for teaching, I have described this role as one of ‘empathetic challenging’ (Bonnett 1994) because it requires the teacher to be both receptive and demanding. The teacher is required to enter sympathetically into the engagement of the learner—but not in such a way as to indulge and thereby stultify this engagement—but rather to provoke and to challenge through a sense of what the subject matter has to offer, what is ‘on the move’ within it and what might be the issues at stake for this learner in this engagement. Openness and mutual trust become the defining characteristics, with the teacher concerned both to accept and to challenge the pupil’s thinking—to listen to what calls to be thought in the engagement and to help the pupil to hear this call for himself or herself. This is clearly far removed from an education driven by a demand to raise generalized predetermined standards, and a form of accountability which requires recurrent public testing for tangible gain in these terms. It is also clearly distinguishable from child-centred views of education, portrayed (often erroneously) as being content to leave everything to what might be the whim of ephemeral and undisciplined interest. A Heideggarian account of education preserves the dignity and the integrity of learner, teacher and content. No doubt it is for this reason he describes the role of the teacher as ‘exalted’.6
This brings us up against another strand in Heidegger’s thinking which is rich in its significance for education: his critiques of technology and rationality. As well as being value laden in all sorts of fairly obvious ways—for example, as expressed in the discipline and moral code of the school, in its rituals, practices, and ethos, its public statement of aims and in the relative status given to various curriculum areas—Heidegger’s thinking can sensitize us to the way education conveys values of a more implicit kind which are nonetheless immensely powerful in conditioning our relationship with the world and thus shaping both our view of that world and our view of ourselves. His analysis of modern technology suggests that in its essence it is a way of revealing Being which expresses a drive to mastery and conceives the world as a resource. And, because of its apparent manifest success, this ‘calculative’ way of thinking, which reckons everything up in terms of its potential to serve human purposes, is in the ascendant and increasingly permeates modern rationality as a whole—firing concerns to classify, to assess, to explain and to predict in order to intellectually possess and to materially utilize.
This is a particularly worrying thought in a situation where many of those who resist an overtly instrumental view of education which gears it to economic ends espouse the development of rationality as an alternative educational aim. The intention of such ‘liberal educators’ is to provide a more generous conception of education which asserts the development and enrichment of the mind as its raison d’être and, through the celebration of rationality in education, takes itself to provide a foundation for the full development of the individual as a thinking being. But Heidegger’s analysis suggests that this view is itself in danger of importing into education a version of that aggressive instrumentalism to which it ostensibly stands opposed. If even that arbiter of good thinking—‘impartial’ rationality—is in fact highly partial and expresses a calculative attitude towards the world, surely educationalists need to be alert to the values that are implicit in the kinds of rationality and knowledge that are used to develop students’ thinking and the pictures that they hold up—and legitimize—of ourselves and the world.
This would not simply be a matter of feeling concern that, for example, in the UK ostensibly ‘calculative’ subjects such as numeracy, science and ICT (information and communications technology) have come to dominate the curriculum in state schools. What is at stake is the character of all subjects and of our understanding of the meaning of quality in teaching. Increasingly, it may be that all teaching will be conceived on a very calculative model in which learning objectives are pre-specified independently of individual learners and are systematically pursued in the absence of the kind of full learner engagement previously described. In keeping with this, literature and the arts may be conceived and structured on very rationalist lines which set them up as centring on conventional categories, canons and truths which can be learnt up and objectively applied (and assessed), rather than as opportunities to participate afresh in the non-prespecifiable presencing of things. This contrasts strongly with a curriculum—including maths and science—being taught in a way that celebrates the more open, ‘poetic’ qualities of its content and the rigour and richness of personal engagement in learning. Among many other things, Heidegger’s thinking confronts us with this choice of fundamental orientation and intimates its significance for a conception of education which is truly for ‘life’.
Red More : Educator Profile - MARTIN HEIDEGGER 1889–1976
