Education as a reciprocal experience of recognition

contributions of Ricoeurian philosophical anthropology to the philosophy of education

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur didn't devote much of his writing to education, but his philosophy offers significant insights into its main issues. The open writing, concerned with his time issues; focusing on antinomies and paradoxes to move thinking; and his status as a teacher, which always pushed him to write in a way that leads, are some of the characteristics that make Ricoeur's work important as a way to think about education. The problem of recognition, described in The Course of Recognition, helps us think about a poignant demand that emerges from the teaching profession: what does it mean to be a teacher? How can your work be properly recognized? Ricoeur's ultimate proposal to think about forms of mutual recognition, which arise as clearings and gaps in the world of the struggle for recognition, contributes to thinking about these questions. The school language, as a form of symbolic mediation that comes from the teacher's words, is the index of mutual recognition between teacher and student. The teacher's word, as Ricoeur describes it in his essay La parole est mon royaume, is a form of language that constitutes a fundamental other about the student, for the updating of the abilities to speak, act, narrate one's own story and take responsibility for it, which are constituted as universal in the conditions of possibility and as individual in their contingency and vulnerability. The teacher's word, as a form of gratuitousness, is the index of mutual recognition that constitutes teachers and students as subjects of education.