Description
Book SynopsisThrough an engagement with texts that span the entirety of Sartre’s career, Sartre and the Phenomenology of Education: Education for Resistance provides phenomenological analyses of two primary orientations toward education. Cameron Bassiri develops a Sartrean approach to education, calling it “committed education,” and argues that such education is ultimately a form of resistance to need, scarcity, the practico-inert, and their cultural manifestations. Bassiri argues that a genuine, liberating form of education cultivates the imagination, instills the appropriate orientation to time in students, and ultimately produces a culture of collective imagining. He then develops its complementary opposite, institutionalized education, which is a form of passive acceptance, assimilation, and oppression. Oppressive approaches to education cultivate perception while repressing or instrumentalizing the imagination, impose an understanding of time on students, and ultimately produce a culture of perception and restricted, serialized imagining. Through these analyses, Bassiri demonstrates the importance of education for the formation of subjectivity, highlighting the role that existential psychoanalysis plays in teaching, as well as two distinct forms of the phenomenological reduction operative in the respective orientations toward education.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Sartre’s Phenomenology of Education
Part I: Committed Education
Chapter 1: Education as Praxis
Chapter 2: The Temporality of Committed Education
Chapter 3: Literature and the Culture of the Imaginary
Part II: Institutionalized Education
Chapter 4: Education as Assimilation
Chapter 5: The Temporality of Institutionalized Education
Chapter 6: Institutionalized Culture as Perpetual Depersonalization
Conclusion: Biography and Prophecy
