Undergoing, Finitude and Education in John Dewey

Abstract

In this paper, drawing from Deweyan oeuvre, I go deep into the significance of undergoing and finitude as related to education. Specifically, I attempt to argue that Deweyan oeuvre clearly displays how the roots of living, existing and educating are also located in finitude and undergoing. It is my argument that Dewey, throughout his work, conducted a systematic dismantling of the concepts of rationality and education as mastery and control. Such a dismantling entails, at the same time, the dismantling of the auto-grounded subject, namely, the subject that grounds itself in the power to master experience. Such a twofold relocation of rationality and subject rather than flowing in a nihilistic/relativistic account of education results in a reinforcement of education that must be understood not so much as the attempt to understand and predict experience but as the means to create new, unpredictable experience. Such a move repositions educational agency away from control and mastery and in the direction of growth and openness.