Education and other journeys : the self, the other and Stanley Cavell’s moral perfectionism

There is a tendency in the way we think about and approach education to see it in terms of its instrumental goal rather than its meaning and place in our lives. This approach renders education a reductive and customised concept that exists for the achievement of certain assumed and redetermined ends. To fulfil these ends, educational planning principles rely on assumptions that defuse the complexity of the human experience and overlook the concept of the other. This thesis argues that these problems, which are the reliance on fixed ends and the dismissal of the notion of the other, have roots in the Western philosophical grounding of education. Therefore, it aspires to present the concept of education as a journey: an alternative non-instrumental approach to education based on Stanley Cavell’s concept of Emersonian Moral Perfectionism. It is an approach that views education as a perpetual, open-ended journey of growth and transcendence that we embark upon together with the other. Through overcoming the notion of fixed ends and placing the other in a neighbouring position on the same level as the self, education as a journey illuminates a way out of the aforementioned problems of education. This is a doctoral thesis in Education at Stockholm University, Sweden 2025.