Fulfilment
Crisis, discontinuity and the dark side of education
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11952582 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Norm Friesen (0000-0002-7810-7129, Healthcare, Catholic University of Applied Sciences North Rhine-Westphalia , 79-81 Konrrad Adenauer Ufer, Cologne, North-Rhein Westphalia, Germany, corresponding author), Tobias Hölterhof (0000-0001-6255-1244, Healthcare, Catholic University of Applied Sciences North Rhine-Westphalia , 79-81 Konrrad Adenauer Ufer, Cologne, North-Rhein Westphalia, Germany, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 547-559 |
| Publication date | 2022-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Philosophy of Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0309-8249 • E-ISSN: 1467-9752 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9752.12676 |
| OpenAlex | W4296929366 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 16 |
The Oxford English Dictionary defines fulfilment as ‘satisfaction or happiness as a result of fully developing one's potential or realizing one's aspirations; self-fulfillment’. Not only has the idea of fulfilment underpinned ‘approximately twenty centuries of philosophy’ as Lefebvre notes, it plays an indispensable role in both popular and scholarly accounts of education and upbringing. Experiences of education, of upbringing and of ‘life lessons’, however, are so often not about the fulfilment of oneself, about the discovery and actualisation of one's full potential. Such experiences instead involve moments of sometimes irreparable failure and loss—a matter that has not received a great deal of attention in educational research and theory. After briefly examining the way that fulfilment is favourably framed both in humanistic psychology and in neo-humanist Bildungstheorie, this paper considers some of the exceptions to the nearly ubiquitous identification of education with fulfilment: Arthur Schopenhauer's view of the irrationality of human (developmental) experience and Ludwig Wittgenstein's use of the term ‘conditioning’ (Abrichtung) in some of his accounts of learning and socialisation. We then focus on failure and loss in education through an overview of the pedagogical theory of O.F. Bollnow. Bollnow, as is gradually being recognised in English-language scholarship, saw moments of uncertainty, disorientation and above all crisis as indispensable in educational experience—for both student and teacher. In this way, we show that instead of being the pursuit of self-fulfilment, education is unavoidably a matter of difficulty, disruption and also failure. It reshapes us, and this reshaping can be seen as being as much about formation as it is about deformation
Education theory · Epistemology · Happiness · Higher education · Humanism · Irrationality · Philosophy of education · Political science · Rationality · Scholarship · Sociology · Educational Philosophies and Pedagogies · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Social Psychology · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications
Toward a psychology of being.
Interrupting the Politics of Learning
Another Relationship to Failure
Training and Abrichtung
The Educated Subject and the German Concept of Bildung
A theory of human motivation
Philosophical investigations
Everyday life in the modern world
How Is Individuality Possible? Georg Simmel's Philosophy and Sociology of Individualism
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |