Grounding Education Philosophically: An Essay on Behalf of Human Happiness

Abstract

The authors envisage finding a philosophical base for grounding education’s endeavour. Methodologically they rely on an argumentative exploration that essays a genealogy of the philosophical attitude as the core of “Paideia”, in order to unveil the philosophical fabric that sets, simultaneously, the rooting of the philosophical and the educational efforts. They start by considering the mythical figure of Eros as the paradigm of the philosopher, which is taken as a reference to show how the philosopher launches himself in search of wisdom, delivering existence to the care of the soul, while addressed to attaining ontological harmony. Such striving is presented as implying an act of conversion that bounds existence to a radicalization of the gaze capable of opening the way of conceptual creation, understood as the core task of philosophy’s quest. A parallel is so established between philosophy and education, as corresponding to a correlative process. Such elaboration allows them to draw some main conclusions. Not only philosophy appears as the basis of education and formation, far beyond the contemporary “utilitarian reason” drift, which is restricting education to its “performativistic” functionalization; as formation, relating to professional qualification, and education, involving socialization and subjectification, will never make sense one without the other, which let the authors infer that although not being admissible to neglect formation, it seems reasonable to admit a primacy of education over formation. Thus, it is claimed that education and formation are both summoned, teleologically, by philosophy, as if it provided their ground and horizon.