Volume 29, 1998
Philosophy of Education
Mirta A. Giacaglia
Pages 105-108
Rethinking Education
Philosophy is a special way of signifying the world. If philosophy is the place where the question is radical, then the task of the philosophy of education is to turn education into a problem through the practice of criticism. With this in mind we ask, Is teaching possible? What can really be transmitted? If man, as psychoanalysis indicates, is constituted as a desirous being, learning is possible only if desire is present. This interweaving of philosophy and psychoanalysis leads us to consider the impossibility of education in terms of three questions. (1) Is it possible or desirable to transmit the culture in its entirety? (2) Is learning possible without desire? (3) Could any pedagogical syllabus cover for lack in the other?