En la casa del deseo. Prefacio a una filosofía de la educación

Abstract

The philosophy of education is not a discipline, but a subject installed in a library, in a series of readings and texts that, in teaching, understood as an act of transmission, composes a course, to give to read, to give to think and write, to allow a conversation. But it is also education: an encounter between generations in the filiation of time. Philosophy (of education) has to do with love, with a kind of increased hunger that does not want to be fully satisfied, and with desire, with the house of desire. Desire not for knowledge, but for wisdom, one that brings us pleasure and pain, one that leads a life and gives it shape. This is the starting point here. My starting point as a teacher to think about a philosophy of education. However, despite that pain that sometimes crosses us, or that plunges the friend into the abyss, there is a last sense in which education, thought philosophically (perhaps as a kind of poetic and as a beautiful melody) he insistently reminds us of the most important law of education ever written by the gods: "Don't worry", "Nothing happens", "I'm with you", "Everything is fine." These expressions contain the essence of the pedagogical promise. We promise the impossible. We look for and desire the impossible, because hope never dies and it connects us with life, because the possible already is. And we do it through Eros, which is sweet and bitter, which is health and poverty, and we learn, in love, to inhabit the house of desire.