The theology of education to come

Abstract

Psychology has achieved hegemonic status as virtually the default discipline in the study of education. Yet, its achievements are not always as impressive as its claims. Crucially, as it is generally conceived and practised, it does not offer us much help in making sense of what may be called our ‘mindedness’, the logic of our souls: how we turn away from life and from plenitude. Although some philosophers have addressed this, there is a case for saying that the vital discipline for education is less philosophy, especially philosophy of the Anglophone tradition, than a kind of theology. Negative theology, as it is called, gives us ways of understanding education’s aporias, its idealistic longings and how we are to think of cultivating responsibility to other people. It helps us to see that education is always and rightly bound never to be good enough, always destined to fail.