Sartre and the Phenomenology of Education

This book provides a phenomenological analysis of “committed” and “institutionalized” education in Sartrean thought. The author argues that the former is a form of resistance, cultivates the imagination, and personalizes students, while the latter instills passive acceptance, represses the imagination, and is a form of depersonalization.

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Through 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.