LOST AND FOUND: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON EDUCATIONAL EARNESTNESS AND THE POWER OF LOVE

摘要

In this essay, Polly Graham addresses a current instantiation of what might be called self-loss within education in the United States. Graham observes that, in her experience, many students and educators, whether decidedly or without reflection, conform to superficial schooling practices that circumscribe the possibility of receiving affirmations for the sense of self we implicitly know to be authentic. Through narrative, she puts forward the possibility of "educational love" as a counter to the fundamental insecurity associated with habits of acting in conformance with superficial, alienated, school-determined identity criteria. The question of "repetition" in a Kierkegaardian sense invites the reader to resist the logic of standardization - which assumes and valorizes comparability and reliability from an outsider perspective - in favor of a consideration of generalizability as embedded within the intimacy of a particular relation. As such, educational love is resonance rather than dictation.