POETICS OF ALTERITY
Education today is commonly oriented towards citizenship and skills for
life, with aims of happiness and wellbeing. But this benign image
harbours surreptitious forms of control, which ultimately undermine the
goods it professes to safeguard and stifle education's very purpose.
What release can there be from these constrictions? Release is to be
found, as Soyoung Lee eloquently shows, by attending to elements of
experience that seem to escape our grip, from challenging aspects of our
moral lives to struggles over practicalities of curriculum content. The
more robust, more outward-turning orientation she demonstrates
emphasises engagement with subject-matter, with problems and forms of
narrative, that defy pre-determined formulations and categories. This
requires turning towards objects worthy of attention and towards people
and their claims on us. The arts and the humanities have special
importance as spaces where alterity presents and expresses itself. Lee's
dialogue with Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Celan shows how
acknowledgement of the other must condition not only practices of
teaching and learning but practicalities of our social and political
lives. Attending to anxieties inherent in teaching and learning, in
school and the wider world, the book's powerful rationale for the
curriculum provides nothing less than a new grounding for the
humanities.
