Chapter 1: Possibility and Rebellion in Sartre and Camus: Existential Possibilities for Education

Seeking a reconceived view of contemporary education, which remains in the grip of social efficiency, this chapter focuses on Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, thinkers embracing the unique existential view of human “potential” above “actuality,” which runs counter to the tradition in Western metaphysics. We show how this idea lives at both ontological and historical levels as related to education. Through Sartre, we explore the “life-projects” of students with the understanding that learning occurs in its most authentic form as a living and dynamic “process,” and should not be sought in any “actualized” concrete or objectified results standing outside or beyond either the individual or the educational process itself. We relate Sartre’s phenomenological ontology of conscious intentionality, nothingness, and the potential for finite transcendence to an understanding of learning and curriculum development favoring a line of process-product curriculum (existential) over the more traditional form of curriculum grounded in the antiquated product-process (technical) model for learning. In Camus, we analyze Rebellion and the aporetic-tension between freedom and justice, which must be enacted in terms of identifying, critiquing, and changing ideas and practices that heedlessly exceed the ethical limits of the human community of learning. The fragile balance between freedom and justice must be acknowledged and respected in dialogue, for each holds the potential to degenerate into and manifest as authoritarian subjugation and social injustice. Through “generosity,” a mode of revelatory attunement, it is possible to gain access to a world where ongoing acts of rebellion, grounded in critical communication, instantiate original practices of education in terms of epiphanic events of learning. Remaining true to these philosophers, we offer intimations of a view to education understood as “existential” in nature, however, we refrain from establishing definitive and indelible principles for education derived from their philosophies; to do so, would betray the fundamental understanding of existentialism.