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Existentialism In Education

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Etymologically, philosophy is the love of wisdom. Man since time immemorial has tried to philosophise about the world inside and outside him. And, as the society progressed, education as a separate and special part of life was conceptualised. The result was the emergence of various educational philosophies across the globe. The philosophies progressed in content and form and today they have been arranged under a few popular ones namely Perennialism, Essentialism, Progressivism, Social Reconstruction, Constructivism, Existentialism, Behaviourism, Humanism, Information Processing Theory etc. The theories fall broadly under two categories viz. teacher-centered and student-centered. In this paper, all the above theories would be discussed under …show more content…

It became popular in the aftermath of World War II. Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that the seeds of existentialism germinate when individuals come to encounter the fact that they are responsible for themselves and the final choice is theirs. Thus, for the world war happened because of the choices that were made and those involved were responsible for their action.

Existentialism as an educational philosophy is student-centric and facilitates the student in their journey of finding their own meaning and direction of life. The curriculum includes inner journey of the students and the content left as a personal choice. The teacher tries to create opportunities so that the students could tread the path of self-awareness and self-actualisation. There is no objective grading and tracking of individuals involved. Rather the students are encouraged to be subjective and original in thinking and trace their own path for learning.

The existentialists were criticised for lack of oneness in human beings as the idea of individualism overshadows fraternity and brotherhood. They were also criticised for undermining reason as is also cited by Walter Kauffman. Also, one could easily reason that in a class of so many differing individuals things may turn out to be

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The argument Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, presents on existentialism helps to prove the foundation which is “existence precedes essence”. Existentialism is normally understood as an ideology that involves evaluating existence itself and the way humans find themselves existing currently in the world. For the phrase existence precedes essence, existence’s etymology is exsistere or to stand out while the term Essence means “being” or “to be” therefore the fundamental of existentialism, literally means to stand out comes before being. This can be taken into many different ideas such as individuals having to take responsibility for their own actions and that in Sartre’s case the individual is the sole judge of his or her own actions. According to him, “men is condemned to be free,” therefore “the destiny of man is placed within himself.”

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