Ethics and Education

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The bare classroom- representation and the

liminal presence of others

Ido Gideon

To cite this article: Ido Gideon (2019) The bare classroom- representation and the liminal
presence of others, Ethics and Education, 14:2, 258-270, DOI: 10.1080/17449642.2019.1587732

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Published online: 18 Mar 2019.

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ETHICS AND EDUCATION
2019, VOL. 14, NO. 2, 258–270
https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2019.1587732

ARTICLE

The bare classroom- representation and the liminal

presence of others
Ido Gideon
Ben Gurion University of the Negev

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article begins with an account of an improvised class- Liminality; representation;
room in a refugee camp. From this account, and building on ethics; presence; encounter
Heidegger's' analysis of spatiality, two fundamental charac-
teristics are identified as: first, that classrooms are 'sanc-
tioned-off' from the world, and secondly, that educational
situations involve attention to the world.
Arendt's distinction between education and politics is pre-
sented not only as a normative call to action, but also, and
perhaps primarily, as a phenomenology of education as a basic
human activity. The article turns to Mollenhauer's account of
the emergence of a pedagogical sphere in early modernity,
and particularly to his notion of representation, to understand-
ing the way things of the world appear in classrooms.
The article proposes the concept of liminality to describe
the classrooms as neither 'inside' nor 'outside' the world,
and could therefore offer their inhabitants (i.e. students and
teachers) opportunities for imaginative exploration, as well
as ethical encounters.

“Life begins with awareness, and with no otherness there is no awareness. Life begins
when you get outside – come out of the insideness and of the womb and become both
insideness and outsideness and self-observing – and realize the outsideness and inside-
ness of the otherness.” (Buckminster 1973, 18)

P. Who will teach me this?

M. I, by God’s help.

P. How?

M. I will guide thee thorow all.

I will shew thee all.

I will name thee all.

P.See, here I am; lead me in the name of God. (Comenius, ‘Invitation- The Master and

the Boy’, Orbis Pictus)

CONTACT Ido Gideon Ido.gideon@gmail.com

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 ETHICS AND EDUCATION 259

Introduction
I happened to meet two aid workers who had just returned from the refugee camps
of Greece. I (naturally) asked them whether any education is available for refugee
children, and how it takes place within such a chaotic situation. There was such an
effort at one point, they said, to have regular lessons taught by volunteers, but it only
lasted for a short while, due to administrative and material limitations. They told me
how, in their experience, they believed the children were thrilled to participate in the
lessons. Since this conversation was occasioned by a social event, it seemed inap-
propriate to drill them on the many curricular, instructional or political aspects
summoned by the story. However, they did share one anecdote that stuck: since
no real rooms or tents were available for the improvised lessons, students and
teachers had to mark a classroom in the dirt, using four lines of stones. They took
those rectangular lines so seriously, one of the aid workers said smiling, that when
a student misbehaved, he or she would be ‘sent out of the classroom’ by way of
punishment.
This anecdote left a powerful impression, offering a glimpse into the two initial
experiences that ‘mark’ classrooms. The first is the enclosing of space and time for
education, in the action of drawing a separation – the lines in the dirt which create
the improvised classroom, an enclosure made in order to keep the outside out.
Schools are exclusionary public institutions: they are defined by those who may not
enter them, no less than by those who may. Unlike other such institutions like
courtrooms or parliaments, classrooms are much less heavily regulated and
guarded. This article will propose liminality as a way of thinking through this
inherent separation between the ‘outside’, or the world, and the ‘inside’- the class-
room. The liminality of the classroom bears on the way the world is represented, as
well as on the relations between the teacher and students.
Lessons are fragile: anything that distracts the students and the teachers
may put an end to the work being done this marks the second initial experi-
ence of education. When we think about the lesson in the improvised class-
room, a subtler distinction between the classroom and the world, one that is
not based on any public allocation, is disclosed. It seems improbable that the
fact that the lesson is taking place in a refugee camp eludes the teacher and
students even for a second. And yet it also seems probable that the lesson did
not address any of the practical questions that occupy daily life in the camp.
What was the lesson about? Perhaps math, some European language, or
science. The subject of the lesson was conjured by the attention of the teacher
and the students. In a sense, it was ‘made present’ in the classroom. The
teacher’s relation to the subject of study is also a matter of representation:
she may choose to preform certain positions or attitudes for the sake of
learning. Her presence in the classroom is somehow flexible. Unlike teachers,
the place of the students in classrooms is defined by their uniformity: they are
together and the same. This article will explore the ways in which classrooms
260 I. GIDEON

enable the presence of the world, the teacher and the students, by qualifying
these presences as educational.

The classroom as a sanctioned space

In order to understand the spatial qualities that make classrooms, this part of the
article will inquire the process through which classrooms are defined as distinctly
educational spaces. It will begin by presenting the classroom as a place, that is
a functional area of space within the world, as it is experienced by its main
occupants, students and teachers. Formulating the notion of spatiality suggested
in this article requires some philosophical engagement with space as an experience.
In Being and Time (2007) Heidegger presents a fundamental ontology of
human existence, as Dasein. Grounding his project in the phenomenological
method, Heidegger seeks a description of our being as it is experienced, rather
than giving metaphysical or epistemic explanations of being that occupy the
western philosophical tradition. Heidegger’s treatment of spatiality comes in in
division I, part 3 of Being and Time, immediately after his rebuttal of Descartes’
ontology of the world, and the dichotomy that follows between an unembo-
died Ego and the things of the world. Descartes’ dualism, so Heidegger argues,
does not consider the fundamental facticity of Dasein, i.e. that we experience
the world, and therefore inhabit the world, before we know it (this is the
‘fallenness’ of Dasein). Descartes can therefore only ever provide ontic expla-
nations of the experience of things. Heidegger’s ontological account of spati-
ality seeks to make clear ‘the difference between the nominal expression “we
exist in space” and the adverbial expression, “we exist spatially.” He wants to
describe spatiality as a mode of our existence, rather than conceiving space as
an independent entity.’ (Arisaka 1995, 40)
To do this, Heidegger first rejects two traditions of spatiality, viz. the objecti-
vist, Newtonian understanding of space as a receptacle (‘the world in space‘),
and the Kantian notion of space as a subjective sensibility in relation to the
things of the world (‘space in the subject‘). To better understand the distinction
between the two we can consider the notion of orientation: Newton’s concep-
tion of space related to universal, objective notions such as north and south,
whereas Kant would emphasize the relational, subjective ‘feeling’ of left and
right. Objecting to both conceptions, Heidegger proposes an existential account
of spatiality that he calls ‘Being in the world’ (2007, 146). In his account, we are
never simply ‘at’ locations, to be described through measured coordinates or
physical attributes. Spaces that have meaning for us are called places.
This does not mean that space is totally subjective. Rather, our experience
of space is based on the relation between Being (the fact of our existence) and
the world, manifested through care. The world, into which Dasein is ’thrown‘, is
disclosed by things that are ‘presenced’ as a part of their contextual meaning.
In other words, Heidegger rejects both accounts of spatial experience to
 ETHICS AND EDUCATION 261

suggest that Dasein’s spatial experience is ‘split up into places’ (2007, 138): we
have a sense of the place where we are, and therefore we can posit its
meaning as our relation to where and what things are. For Heidegger, things
presence themselves or appear to us within their region (as ready-to-hand),
rather than ‘catalogued by the observational measurement of space’ (137). The
point Heidegger makes here is that the functions of certain places is disclosed
through our care, our attachment to the world: ‘referential functionality is an
inherent feature of space itself, and not just a “human” characteristic added to
a container-like space.’ (Arisaka 1995, 458). Spatiality thus describes Dasein’s
relational dealings with entities within the world, and this encountering within
context indicates the place of things, or the way in which things are ‘ready-at-
hand-within-the-world’:

The where of its readiness-at-hand is put to account as a matter for its concern, and
oriented towards the rest of what is ready-to-hand. Thus the sun, whose light and
warmth are in everyday use, has its own places- sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight;
these are discovered in circumspection and treated distinctively in terms of changes
in the usability of what the sun bestows (Heidegger 2007, 137).

The place of things discloses Dasein’s care, which ‘cuts out’ places out of the
surrounding environment. In the anecdote I began with, this act of cutting out
concerns the meaning of the line of stones in the dirt, a ‘sanctioning-off’ of
a portion of space for education. But what does this ‘sanctioning-off’ of the
classroom mean for the public? Classrooms are a shared resource- a place where
teaching and learning are to take place on behalf of parents, states, and
communities. In all cases, the concern that discloses classrooms is a shared
public concern. However, I would argue that the publicity of the classroom as
a shared resource is maintained through a negative, exclusionary relation to the
public. Even in cases where communities participate greatly in the establishment
and maintenance of a school, when lessons are in progress, intrusions are not
welcome. This is the case even if we consider the variety of possible intrusions,
e.g. an outsider (that is, not a student or a teacher) may physically enter the
classroom, or the outside world may intrude or inhibit the process of learning
physically (through more or less violent events – a fire alarm, an earthquake, an
air raid, etc.). The physical separation of education from the adult world signifies,
as the bare classroom uncovers, a much deeper separation.

The classroom as a separation from the world

In The Human Condition (1998 [1958]), Arendt describes three spheres of
human activity: Labour, Work and Action. Educational practice, especially
with younger children, often complies with the natural processes of produc-
tion and consumption that enable life, thereby resembling labour. Education
also represents a form of work, if we consider the task of educators as one in
262 I. GIDEON

which something is manufactured through reification. Critical accounts of

educational practice often demonstrate how educational systems operate
dimensions of social control. However, because of the way in which Arendt
conceptualises the preliminary requisites for political action, she categorically
opposes understanding education as political action.
Political action requires a ‘space of appearance’ in front of others, as well as
a fundamental commitment to the equal political standing of all citizens. It is
therefore action alone, rather than labour or work, that allows individuals to
reveal their uniqueness in the eyes of others who are equal and free (Ibid,
p. 186). This act of revealing one’s uniqueness through speech and action in
public, inherently means exposure and sometimes even self-endangerment.
The exposure inherent to political life must be spared from classrooms. Such
an exposure would mean that classroom conversations and dealings would be
subject to public scrutiny. Returning to the improvised classroom in the
introduction, picture a crowd of adults simply observing the lesson. What
would the adults tolerate, if they could simply interrupt and participate in
the lesson?
Arendt’s phenomenology of practical life, and specifically her thinking about
the relation between education and political life was guided by the notion of
education as a place of transformation that should be separated and shielded
from the world. In her essay Reflections on Little Rock (1959), Arendt analyses
the events following the U.S. federal government’s forceful intervention in the
desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Her (controversial)
conclusion was that by de-segregating schools through governmental force,
the federal government intruded into the protected realm of childhood:

Children are first of all part of family and home, and this means that they are, or
should be, brought up in that atmosphere of idiosyncratic exclusiveness which alone
makes a home a home, strong and secure enough to shield its young against the
demands of the social and the responsibilities of the political realm. (Ibid, p. 54)

Arendt’s analysis of segregation and its causes remain controversial, attracting

writers who wish to expose Arendt’s ignorance, or even latent racism (e.g.
Burroughs 2015). For sure, her oversensitivity to governmental interference in
the private realm of families is perceived as a direct as attack on the public role
of democratic schooling, most markedly in liberal thought (e.g. Gadamer
(1989) deliberative model of citizenship education). The point she makes, put
quite bluntly, is that classrooms are not the places where we solve political
issues, just the places where we learn about them. Nothing practical would
ever come out of a political argument within the classroom, nor should the
fluctuating opinions of the young students serve as a revelation of their
personality. This means that classrooms protect students from the conse-
quences of the adult political world, in terms of what they can say and do;
a place where they can make mistakes – in math, grammar, politics.
 ETHICS AND EDUCATION 263

The understanding that education should be shielded from political life, rather
than utilised for its purposes, does not necessarily mean that education has no
political meaning. Arendt in fact imbues education with a primary role in fostering
care for the common world which the students are bound to inherit. Arendt
conceives education as a form of introduction to the world, rather than an
attempt to actively change it: ‘the function of the school is to teach the children
what the world is like and not to instruct them in the art of living’ (Arendt 1993,
195). Since Arendt admits that she is not a pedagogue, it seems fair to point to her
somewhat naïve dichotomous view regarding the two functions of education.
Teaching what the world is like necessarily means taking a stand towards it and
pointing out connections that matter. Klaus Mollenhauer’s concrete historical
account of the development of a pedagogical sphere perhaps succeeds where
Arendt fails, by pointing to the ways in which the basic logic of schooling and
pedagogy demands representations of the world in the classroom.

The classroom as suspended representation

Mollenhauer (2013) presents the separation between the classroom and the world
as a fundamental moment in the historical development of an educational sphere.
Through analysis of historical and artistic evidence, Mollenhauer describes how,
within the early modern process of social compartmentalization, children were
removed from adult life and placed in educational settings designed especially for
pedagogic instruction. As children were expelled from the adult ‘world of work’
(30), upbringing could no longer be a direct emulation of ‘ways of life’ (31). It thus
became the responsibility of the educator, rather than the family, to introduce the
world to children. The question of education then becomes a question of how to
represent the world for children.
Comenius’s Orbis Pictus, the first illustrated handbook for children published
in 1658, is important for Mollenhauer, as it exemplifies the creation of such
pedagogical material. Mollenhauer analyses the organizing principle of the Orbis
Pictus as evidence for the assumption that teaching means connecting the
representations of the world into a structure: ‘Each fact or phenomenon should
be represented to the child in such a way that its location in the context of human
action is clear.’ (Mollenhauer, 39, italics in the original). The educational task of
ordering the world means creating meaningful connections between the things
of the world. For Mollenhauer, this is done by referring to a social-political
structure the underlies the logic and purpose of learning these connections.
Mollenhauer’s use of the term location here is especially significant in his
understanding of the task of teachers. The location of the phenomenon is
within the context of the human world. When we consider the classroom as
a place apart from the world (a characteristic he refers to as a ‘barrier’ erected
between the adult life and the educational sphere), a specific initial
264 I. GIDEON

characteristic of classroom is uncovered- it allows the students to relocate their

attention and make present the things of the world.
Teachers know this and dedicate time, effort and thought into the decora-
tions and graphic information they put up on the walls of the class, with at
least in part, an intention to make the world present and tangible for their
students. The iconic globe on the teacher’s table constantly reminds us that
the classroom is simultaneously a specific location – it is in a particular school,
a neighbourhood, a city, a country – while aspiring to open the world for the
student, allowing her to be elsewhere in thought. The world map on the
classroom wall is obviously not there as a map for use (who needs a paper
map these days, anyway?), but as a clue about the location of the classroom
and the students in many contexts: geographical, historical, political. The
graphic visual aids summon imaginative exploration, potentially extending
the classroom outwards to provide alternative points of view from which to
look back at their own location. Could the same not be said of a historical
timeline, a scientific revelation or a copy of the constitution?
Was anything like this ‘imaginative exploration’ possible in the improvised
refugee classroom? On the one hand, it seems safe to assume the volunteer
teacher did not have the visual aids public school teachers have even in the
most impoverished western public schools. Perhaps the teacher drew on dirt
like Socrates in front of Meno and his entourage. Perhaps she was able to
conjure some improvised board or make some copies of a worksheet or of
relevant photos. The lesson could hardly escape the reality of the situation,
with no physical walls separating them from the refugee camp around them.
On the other hand, we may perhaps imagine an educational moment in which
their current situation seemed farther, deferred by attention to something else
of the world. This suspension of the outside world is a fundamental educa-
tional quality- as Masschelein and Simons (2013) explain:

. . .the school is the time and space where students can let go of all kinds of socio-
logical, economic, familial and culture-related rules and expectations. In other words,
giving form to the school – making school – has to do with a kind of suspension of
the weight of these rules. (35)

Masschelein and Simons demand that the world and its political and social
constructs be ‘rendered inoperative’ in the school, taken ‘. . .out of production,
releasing it, lifting it from its normal context.’ (Masschelein and Simons 2013,
32–33). But when we consider actual lessons and classrooms, the world never
ceases to be present. Just like the improvised outdoor classroom in the intro-
duction, inhabitants of classroom always have the world in sight. Its operativity
or in-operativity, in the terms of Masschelein and Simons, is a matter of discus-
sion, but its representations in the classroom are not. Furthermore, in the class-
room, political opinions, religious beliefs and social identities may also become
representations of the world. It would be ridiculously unhelpful to ask students
 ETHICS AND EDUCATION 265

to shed these when they enter the classroom. What would it then mean to
‘render inoperative’ a student’s identity?

Classrooms as liminal situations

Later in Being and Time, Heidegger refers back to his spatial analysis to explain
that any location of Dasein is in fact a ‘Situation’ (Heidegger 2007, 346). For
Heidegger it is attention, as a temporal event, that creates places. Even in the
most basic conditions, educational situations are made of the attention of the
participants, whether they are sitting in a refugee camps, visiting a museum or
practicing sports. The classroom, as presented above, is defined not only as
space sanctioned from the world, but also as a place where the world is
habitually represented and made present through the attention of the teacher
and the students. In Heideggerian terms, a classroom takes place in the instance
of being-together-for-the-sake-of-learning. This section of the article will deal with
the second part of this construct, viz. for the sake of learning, developing the
concept of educational liminality.
The use of the term liminality as a defining feature of social practices was
first coined by Arnold Van Gennep (2011 [1909]) to describe the central stage
in a process of transition from one social status to another. Van Gennep
himself does not go into the etymology of the term or explain why he chose
this particular term over any other. However, returning to the Latin source may
provide some insight as to its appeal for Van Gennep. In Latin, ‘limen’ means
‘threshold’, indicating a moment of transition where one is neither in the
original position, nor in the destined position. Van Gennep’s notion of the
liminal stage in social transitions was not taken up systemically in academic
writing until the work of Victor Turner in the second half of the 20th century.
Turner (1969) placed heavy emphasis on the liminal stage, in which things and
people have already left behind their previous identity but have not yet arrived at
their new one. Van Gennep and Turner both point to the transitional dimension in
social practices in which individuals transform their social belonging or identifica-
tion. For Turner, liminality serves a crucial and special function in containing the
potentially disastrous ramifications of social change, precisely by allowing
a moment of seemingly boundless volatility within a structured context:

By verbal and nonverbal means of classification we impose upon ourselves innumerable

constraints and boundaries to keep chaos at bay, but often at the cost of failing to make
discoveries and inventions: that is to say, not all instances of subversion of the normative
are deviant or criminous. Yet in order to live, to breathe, and to generate novelty, human
beings have had to create – by structural means – spaces and times in the calendar or, in
the cultural cycles of their most cherished groups which cannot be captured in the
classificatory nets of their quotidian, routinized spheres of action. (Turner 1969, vii)
266 I. GIDEON

Turner’s conception of liminality sheds light on the way in which educational

situations give place to ‘imaginative exploration’ through the things of the
world, examining them in different contexts and relations. The suspension of
social hierarchies in educational situations, of the kind Masschelein and Simons
describe is a good example for the way liminality involves ’stepping aside‘
from the rules of adult society. But Turner’s description also involves creating
new possibilities, or ‘generating novelty’ within liminal situation.
This is perhaps what leads Conroy (2004) to suggest that liminal educational
situations suspend ‘asymmetrical power dynamics’ between the teacher and
the student and enables both to encounter ‘an idea, a creation, comprehen-
sion or insight.’ (Ibid., 62). These unexpected encounters are not only descrip-
tive features of education, but also present a normative aspiration in our
contemporary ‘neo-liberal’ or ‘late-capitalist’ societies, enabling students ‘to
see the world somewhat differently from the political center’ (Ibid., 168).
The teacher, within this politically liminal situation, is charged with a role resem-
bling the mythological and ritual ‘trickster’, who often officiates the the liminal time
of the ceremony. The archetype of the trickster is characterised as an essentially
‘homeless’ being, that may transgress borders, penetrating the social structure at
will, but he cannot stay within society. Through his capacity as a figure that controls
and distorts the normalcy of the everyday through play (Turner 1974), Conroy
explores the trickster as a metaphor for the responsibility of teachers in creating
a ‘certain discursive openness that runs counter to the prevailing impulses of
government and corporation.’ (Conroy 2004, 112). The liminality of the classroom
means that the teachers are allowed access to the social structure at any number of
points, and thereby enables the basic pedagogical activity of representation.
At the same time, students experience liminality as a more basic sense of
shared status, that Turner identifies as ‘communitas’, a temporary social situa-
tion that is fundamentally ‘unstructured or rudimentarily structured and rela-
tively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal
individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders.’
(Turner 1969, 360). This seems like a fair description of groups of students in
almost any educational setting. Consider the way even the most professional
adults may share the forbidden joy of chatting through a boring lecture.
Students are together in the lesson, even if only through the demand they
collaboratively step out of the everyday world and ‘an essential and generic
human bond, without which there could be no society’ (Ibid.).
The liminality of educational situations is also the source of a basic ethical
interaction between teacher and student. Beyond their respective roles in the
ceremony of classrooms, the interaction between them may create a momentary
existential bond, of the kind Todd identifies: “a new register where the categories
of teacher and student are suspended; it is more that the opportunities for
becoming – and not the roles as such – become more equal in liminal encounters.
(Todd 2014, 235).
 ETHICS AND EDUCATION 267

Towards an ethics of encounter

The article so far has identified three main experiential features of classrooms
as educational places, viz. (1) that they are sanctioned from the world for the
sake of securing a safe place for education, while at the same time, (2)
providing a place for the world to become ‘present’ in the liminal process of
teaching and learning. Finally, the previous section concluded that (3) class-
rooms provide a place for teachers and students to belong together in a place
that is distinct from the outside. In this liminal place, experiences are shared in
the presence of others. In his essay On the education of character, Martin Buber
(2003 [1947]) engages with the existential features of classroom interaction,
focusing on the relationship between the teacher and his or her students. In
the following excerpt, he demonstrates the primary significance of acknowl-
edging the ‘other’ for classroom practice:

For the first time a young teacher enters a class independently, no longer sent by the
training college to prove his efficiency. The class before him [sic] is like a mirror of
mankind, so multiform, so full of contradictions, so inaccessible. He feels: ‘these
boys – I have not sought them out; I have been put here and have to accept them
as they are – but not as they now are in this moment, no, as they really are, as they
can become. But how can I find out what is in them and what can I do to make it take
shape?’ And the boys do not make things easy for him. They are noisy, they cause
trouble, they stare as him with impudent curiosity. He is at once tempted to check
this or that trouble-maker, to issue orders, to make compulsory the rules of decent
behavior, to say No, to say No to everything rising against him from beneath: he is at
once tempted to start from beneath. And if one starts from beneath one perhaps
never arrives above, but everything comes down. But then his eyes meet a face which
strikes him. It is not a beautiful face, not particularly intelligent; but it is a real face, or
rather, the chaos preceding the cosmos of a real face. On it he reads a question which
is something different from the general curiosity: ‘who are you? Do you know some-
thing that concerns me? Do you bring me something? What do you bring?’ (Ibid., 133)

The teacher is initially tempted to rely on the pedagogical knowledge acquired

in his training. However, since this is the first time he is faced with a class
outside of the instructional and evaluative environment of teacher training, the
presence of the students appears something new. He is forced to acknowledge
them in a way that remains elusive in the quote itself, but that suggests
a responsibility towards them that is based on some demand. The teacher’s
demand of the students is to change: to become. This demand is not one
sided, and at the same time the students demand something of the teacher- to
recognize them as subjects who matter- they demand of the teacher to ‘bring’
them something. The teacher, unsure how to begin, opens with a faltering
question:

‘What did you talk about last in geography? The Dead Sea? Well, what about the
Dead Sea?’ But there is obviously something not quite usual in the question, for the
answer he gets is not the ordinary schoolboy answer; the boy begins to tell a story.
268 I. GIDEON

Some months earlier he had stayed for a few hours on the shores of the Dead Sea and
it is of this he tells. He adds: ‘And everything looked to me as if it had been created
a day before the rest of creation.’ Quite unmistakably he had only in this moment
made up his mind to talk about it. In the meantime his face has changed. It is no
longer quite as chaotic as before and the class has fallen silent. They all listen. The
class, too, is no longer a chaos. Something has happened. (Ibid., 134)

The novice geography teacher’s inexperience might be the reason for his
ambiguous phrasing of the question concerning the Dead Sea. Perhaps it is
the character of the student that leads him to portray so poetically the image
of the Dead Sea. Either way, the surprising exchange between the teacher and
the student presents an example of the way in which educational meaning in
the classroom is inherently unpredictable. The classroom – students and
teacher alike – is suddenly confronted with a dimension of meaning that
was certainly not in the lesson plan. The anecdote also reminds us that the
role of the teacher should be considered carefully not only as a vehicle of
instruction, but also as a person, standing unsure and insecure in front of a sea
of noise, drawn to an ethical responsibility towards the students in front of her.
This short anecdote demonstrates quite well the three presences of classroom
life: the ethereal presence of the subject of study, represented by the teacher’s
strange question and the even stranger answer he receives, the presence of the
teacher as the ‘officiator’ of the ceremony of the classroom, in charge of making
order out of the apparent chaos, and the existential presence of others. Buber
highlights the fact that most educational situations mean being with others that
we had not chosen- the teacher did ‘not seek out’ these students, and yet is now
confronted with their faces, and must engage them.
Pedagogical practices seek to navigate the ways in which these different
presences are entangled, implicating each other in educational processes of
becoming. Buber’s anecdote points to one pedagogical action by the teacher,
who, perhaps unknowingly, asks a demonstrably ‘un-pedagogical’ question:
‘what about the Dead Sea?’. Had his pedagogical instructors heard this ques-
tion, they quite certainly would have reprimanded him for its awkward phras-
ing – It is a markedly unproductive question, as it does not ‘further’ the lesson
by supplying new instruction, or by prodding the students towards productive
discussion. However, Buber stresses the fact that such a question does some-
thing, uncovering some subtle existential relation within the classroom and
focusing the attention of the students.
Following Buber, responding to the face of an ‘other’ is the primary source of
ethical responsibility in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Gordon 2004). For
Levinas, one’s response to other human beings as they become present through
their faces makes accessible a possibility of infinite responsibility: ‘a world I can
bestow as a gift on the Other – that is, as a presence before a face’ (Levinas 1979,
50). Biesta describes the educational meaning of this kind of dialogical ontology:
‘Levinas is a teacher who asks questions and in doing so invites, summons and
 ETHICS AND EDUCATION 269

perhaps even forces the student, the learner to respond . . . While for Socrates
questioning is, in that sense, a dialectical process, Levinasian questioning can –
indeed – be called a truly dialogical process’ (Biesta 2003, 66). It is now time to
return to Comenius’s dialogue that opened this article as a bare demonstration of
these three presences:

P. Who will teach me this?

M. I, by God’s help.

P. How?

M. I will guide thee thorow all.

I will shew thee all.

I will name thee all.

P. See, here I am; lead me in the name of God. (Comenius, ‘Invitation- The Master and

the Boy’, Orbis Pictus, 1887: 2)

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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