Wonder

Guarding against Thoughtlessness in Education

Abstract

Hannah Arendt has a particular notion of thinking that both is and is not (in her sense of the term) philosophical. While not guided by the search for meta princi- ples, nor concerned with establishing logical systems, her notion of thinking as the examination of “whatever happens to come to pass”, and its significance for saving our world from thoughtlessness, retains and is motivated by the fundamental pa- thos at the heart of philosophy – wonder. In this paper, I consider the limiting and enabling sense in which Arendt invokes “wonder” for the possibility of thinking. I do so, in turn, to explore what the pathos of wonderment might offer education – an institution charged with cultivating “thinking” and, yet, constantly susceptible to the thoughtless trappings of technocratic jargon and the mechani- cal logic of asses- sment, learning processes and social reproduction. Can wonder – the very pathos of philosophy – cultivate a thinking that helps us retain an “unclouded attentiveness” to what is educational in education? Might wonder help us to overcome the thou- ghtlessness that dulls our attention to what we do to each other through education?