Rama Alshoufani

This dissertation has two aspirations. The first one is to highlight specific problems in education and trace their philosophical roots. It points out a tendency in the way we think about and approach education to see it in terms of its instrumental goal rather than its meaning and place in our lives. This approach renders education a reductive and customised concept that exists for the achievement of certain assumed and predetermined ends. To fulfil these ends, educational planning principles rely on assumptions that defuse the complexity of the human experience and overlook the concept of the other. This thesis argues that these problems, which are the reliance on fixed ends and the dismissal of the notion of the other, have roots in the Western philosophical grounding of education. The second aspiration is to present the concept of education as a journey: an alternative non-instrumental approach to education based on Stanley Cavell’s concept of Emersonian Moral Perfectionism. It is an approach that views education as a perpetual, open-ended journey of growth and transcendence that we embark upon together with the other. Through overcoming the notion of fixed ends and placing the other in a neighbouring position on the same level as the self, education as a journey illuminates a way out of the aforementioned problems of education. It does so by, first and foremost, focusing on changing the way we think about and coexist with the concept of education, before we start to consider solutions and applications. Through exploring Cavellian ideas like nonconformity, romanticism, justice, lostness and the ordinary, this dissertation explores the perfectionist concept of education as a journey. This dissertation concludes by suggesting that this journey is always taken on a vehicle of hope: a hope, especially for those who feel powerless, silenced, unseen or unheard in education systems, that it is possible to navigate the difficult condition of education. Embarking on this journey is a process of planting a seed of gradual and soft revolutionary change—a process of finding hardness in the soft and power in the invisible and silent.

Human beings as imperfect rational beings face continuous challenges, one of them has to do with the lack of recognizing and respecting our inner dignity in present times. In this collective paper, we address the overall theme—Philosophy of Education in a New Key from various perspectives related to dignity. We address in particular some of the constraints and possibilities with regard to this issue in various settings such as education and society at large. Klas Roth discusses, for example, that it is not uncommon that the value of human beings has to do with their price in, inter alia, their social, cultural, political and economic settings throughout the world. He argues that such a focus does not necessarily draw attention to the inner dignity of human beings, but that human beings ought to do so in education and society at large. Lia Mollvik discusses views of inner and outer dignity, and argues that there needs to be a balance in between them, and that the balance ought to be acknowledged in education. Rama Alshoufani discusses the classification of human beings in terms of various diagnoses related to the asserted dysfunction of the brain, and she argues that such classification does paradoxically not necessarily respect people with such diagnoses as ends in themselves. On the contrary, she argues that their inner dignity is not respected, but that it should be. Other such failures are due to the lack of inner dignity when it comes to Children’s rights as discussed by Rebecca Adami, and to the lack of recognition of human beings’ vulnerability as discussed by Katy Dineen. Fariba Majlesi criticizes a too strong emphasis on substantive notions of humanist education, which seem to hinder new ways of thinking; she argues that it is necessary to acknowledge the latter in and through education in order to preserve the dignity of human beings. Dignity, it is argued throughout the paper, has an inner moral worth, and is beyond price.