Sartre and the Phenomenology of Education

Bassiri's lucid account of the differences between Organizational and Institutional education is timely indeed, for at this moment a surprising number of school boards and legislatures around the United States are trying to shut down the kind of teaching that is needed to keep opening up a freer and more democratic world. Without citing this current movement explicitly, his account is helpful in clarifying what is anti-democratic about the recent so-called 'parents' rights' agenda that seeks to ban books and censor curricular content. --Craig Vasey, University of Mary Washington Cameron Bassiri has already established that he is a skilled phenomenologist in the Husserlian mode with his book on the phenomenology of interruptions. In this study he brings new light to a major phenomenological figure and theme in his account of Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy of education. He shows that education, a mostly neglected topic in Sartre studies, is not a side-issue in his thought but central to his conceptions of the identities of individuals and groups and their aspirations for freedom. Maybe most intriguing is Bassiri's exposition of Sartre's view of the constitutive role of imagination, as the primary means by which education relates present, past, and future together, and gives direction to dialectical reason with its critique of ossified institutions. Bassiri expertly draws upon writings from all periods of Sartre's oeuvre to make his argument. This should become an indispensable work in the field of Sartre scholarship. --Richard Velkley, Celia Scott Weatherhead Professor of Philosophy, Tulane University Most people don't think of Jean-Paul Sartre as a philosopher of education. But Cameron Bassiri, in Sartre and the Phenomenology of Education, convinces us that he is--and an important one at that. In this wide-ranging and well-researched examination of Sartre's entire corpus--with emphasis on late works like The Family Idiot and especially the Critique of Dialectical Reason--Bassiri displays Sartre's view of education as an emancipatory, rather than institutional, moment of human social organization. Drawing on Sartre's theory of imagination, Basiri advances the view that Sartre develops a theory of 'education for resistance.' --David Carr, Emory University Though Sartre's ideas about the writer and the engaged intellectual have received considerable attention in interpretations of his thought, the same cannot be said for the implications such ideas have for a philosophy of eduction. This excellent study shows in a compelling fashion how a robust conception of education as the work of freedom emerges from Sartre's reflections on the public intellectual, group and institutional formation, the nature of the subject, and the formation of the person. --James Dodd, Associate Professor of Philosophy, New School for Social Research, New York