Education and the human condition: Reconceptualizing the activities of teaching and learning

The goal of this project is to show how the challenges, possibilities, and limitations of the human condition are intrinsically present within the activity of teaching and learning. My study claims that previous attempts to establish a relationship between education and humanity are misguided. Such efforts go astray insofar as they are based on erroneously universalizing interpretations of human nature and/or they rely upon instrumental associations between education and humanity. It is my contention that an account of this relationship must arise out of the complex and multi-faceted reality of the human condition, and that this connection has to be identifiable as always already present within the activities of teaching and learning.;My thesis therefore posits that a study of the practice of education must begin with a study of the fundamental structure of human existence. I accomplish this through an analysis of three existential questions: "Who am I?" "What can I know?" and "How shall I live?" In responding to each of these questions, I describe fundamental antinomies, unavoidable predicaments, and insurmountable struggles present within the human condition. The first question addresses individual self-understanding, and it focuses on the ways in which selfhood is caught between competing claims of autonomy and intersubjectivity. My discussion of the second question, concerning human knowledge, explores how efforts to make meaning of the world are influenced by a past which shapes us and a future that beckons at every step. The third question confronts the existential imperative of action, and it discloses how human freedom involves both necessity and choice.;These insights into the complexity of existence resist formulaic accounts of how human beings understand and act within the world. While they do not provide education with a series of generalizable solutions to its problems, they reveal that some of education's most formidable struggles arise out of those that characterize the human condition. As such, their presence within the practice of education serves as an illuminating expression of what it means to be teachers, learners, and human beings.