Abstract
The previous chapters have elaborated some of the major themes in Gadamer’s reworking of the hermeneutic tradition : ‘the power of prejudice ’, ‘the fusion of horizons ’ and ‘the problem of method ’. Along the way some important insights have been gathered into the implications of this tradition for education . I have characterised these as ‘becoming ourselves’, ‘becoming attentive’ and ‘becoming worldly’. In this final chapter I address the question: what sort of a society can we imagine in the light of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and what are the implications of such an imagined society for education? The response to that question focuses on the need to reclaim a humanistic vision for education, to build our education practice around the need to reason together while respecting the individuality of the individual, and to value education as an essential civic space within society. Education constitutes a ‘free space ’ of mutuality and recognition within which we achieve personal fulfilment through our willingness to engage with the strange and the unfamiliar.
We must learn to respect others and otherness. This implies that we must learn that we could be wrong. We must learn how to lose the game—that begins with the age of two or may be even earlier. He, who has not learned this early, will not be able to completely handle the greater tasks of adult life. (Gadamer 1992, 233)
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Notes
- 1.
Plutarch’s essay ‘On Listening’ might well be adopted as a set text on all teacher education courses.
- 2.
Having completed his discussion of the virtues, Aristotle turns in the concluding section of The Nicomachean Ethics to a consideration of eudaimonia since (as he puts it) ‘we hold it to be the end of human conduct’ (Aristotle 1976, 326).
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Nixon, J. (2017). Educational Imaginaries. In: Hans-Georg Gadamer. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52117-6_5
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