Philosophy, Death and Education

Introduction

Death: An Educational Perspective

Often regarded as one of life’s few certainties, death is both instantly familiar to us and deeply mysterious. Every adult will have encountered death in some form, sometimes through the loss of a family member, sometimes less directly via friendships with others or the viewing of news items on television or the Internet. Yet, few take the time to examine death closely and to consider its significance in shaping and potentially educating human lives. This is, in part, because death can be a highly sensitive, ‘charged’ topic. Indeed, in the realms of human experience and thought, it is perhaps the most difficult subject of all. No reflective person can approach the question of death lightly. In existential terms, death holds us all to account: we cannot escape its clutches, yet we often spend our lives attempting to do just that. Death can be dignified but it can also be horrific. Death takes many forms, and attitudes towards it have varied greatly across different cultures and historical periods. Death generates its own distinctive rituals, reflecting the diverse pathways taken in understanding and responding to this one event that all lives have in common.

For centuries philosophers have wrestled with the meaning and significance of death, examining its ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. The rich body of philosophical work associated with death stretches back more than 2000 years, in both the East and the West. Death has been a favorite theme too for novelists, playwrights, poets, and film-makers, and has featured prominently in the history of painting and sculpture. Death has been ←vii | viii→studied at length in a range of other academic fields, including Theology, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology. Educational theorists have, with some exceptions, been more reluctant to tackle this topic. The reasons for this relative lack of engagement are not clear. It may have something to do with the sensitivities to which we referred above. Or, perhaps it is believed that death is simply not relevant to the theory and/or practice of education and that little of value will come from work in this area. This book sets out to suggest otherwise. Drawing on insights from Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Unamuno, Heidegger, Levinas, and Weil, among others, the book considers some of the key elements of death as an object of philosophical investigation and explores its educational implications.

‘Death education’ has a strong practical and professional focus; the ‘philosophy of death’ draws primarily on the analytic philosophical tradition in its methods and aims. Other approaches to the question of death are possible. There is, in particular, a longstanding interest in death among existentialist thinkers, and it is in this tradition that we place most chapters of the present volume. Death, we argue, has a valuable educational role to play in allowing us to better understand the nature, meaning and significance of human existence. The book begins, in the first chapter, with an overview of ideas on death from antiquity to the present day. The chapters that follow build on the philosophical foundations established in Chapter 1 and offer fresh perspectives on contemporary themes, questions and debates in education. In keeping with the history of existentialist inquiry, we do ←viii | ix→not construct rigid boundaries between different genres of work, drawing on literature as well as philosophy and educational theory in developing our argument. We have also been influenced by Kierkegaard and other existentialists in our decision to retain author names for each chapter. This is a co-authored volume, not an edited collection, and this project has been conceived and developed jointly, over several years, in a spirit of collegiality, dialogue and friendship. The book has been designed to be read holistically, not in parts, and there are clear thematic links across chapters. At the same time, we wanted to uphold the existentialist principle of respecting the integrity and distinctiveness of each individual authorial voice. Both our similarities and our differences are important in shaping the ideas developed in the pages that follow. As one of the first book-length studies of death from an educational perspective, there are risks associated with the scholarly exploration undertaken here. But we believe these are risks worth taking. We hope the book will be of interest to anyone who has probed this most troubling of subjects and will open up new areas for educational inquiry.