Alterity Morality

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Moral education as pedagogy of

alterity

Pedro Ortega Ruiz*University of Murcia, Spain

In this paper the author states that education could be better dened as reception and responsibility

and that this ethical relationship between educator and pupil is the root or essential element of

education. The author proposes a new paradigm, the pedagogy of alterity, inspired by Levinas, as a

different model for educational praxis and research. Education as reception and responsibility

facilitates the learning of values and a moral environment in the classroom and it is a fundamental

support for the pupils in the current crisis of education. In this model, education is also political

complaint and commitment. Being responsible forthe other, taking responsibility for the other, means

accepting the socio-historical conditions of the pupil. Otherwise, we would not be referring to

human beings of esh and blood, but to spiritual entities.

Introduction

It is impossible, or at the very least extremely difcult, to understand a text without

context. Some of the issues dealt with in this paper relate to the current debate among

Spanish pedagogical specialists concerning models (or paradigms) in education,

specically in moral education. It can be afrmed that at the moment the argument is

still open. Until just a decade ago Kohlberg's model could be said to dominate moral

education, but today there are other approaches making themselves felt in pedagogical

research and in educational proposals. The basic questions under scrutiny here are:

what type of relationship is established between teacher and student?; what is thepupil for the teacher?; is the pupil a mere object of knowledge or someone with whom it

is necessary to establish a moral relationship? Whatever the answer to these questions,

it conditions all the teacher's activity. Much research has been carried out into the

variables which inuence the teachinglearning processes, but it is forgotten that if the

aim is to achieve `something more' than transmitting knowledge and teaching skills or

abilities, the perception held by teachers of their educatorlearner relationship and

their attitudes towards learners constitute decisive variables in the education process.

The proposal here is that the most radical and original relationship between teacher

*Corresponding author. Facultad de Educacio n, Campus Universitario de Espinardo, Universidad

de Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain. Email: [email protected]

Journal of Moral Education,

Vol. 33, No. 3, September 2004


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and student in an educational situation is a moralrelationship, which is translated into

an attitude of reception and a commitment to the learner, which is to take

responsibility for him or her. For this reason the teachertechnician relationship of the

educational expert is no longer the very kernel of educational action; in its place is themoral relationship which denes it and, as such, constitutes educational action. This

obliges us to completely revise both the content and the strategies which are currently

prevalent in moral education. It also obliges us to approach moral education from

another paradigm, where the protagonist is neither the autonomous subject of

Kohlberg's morality and discourse ethic, rooted in Kant's philosophy, nor the

utilitarian and communal morality of Rawls and Rorty, but the primacy of the other. It

is the other, concrete person, not an abstract subject, but the one who makes us moral

subjects when we are responsible for them (Levinas, 1991). Any pedagogical

discourse owes a debt to an anthropology or an ethic, it is situated in and responds to a

context, it is fuelled by experiences within a tradition. Therefore, there is no pedagogywithout experience and situation. Our proposal for moral education is rooted and

situated in the ethics of Levinas, which have gained ground in the course of the last

decade in the centre of Europe, based on their starting point of recognition of the

other. This logically leads us to a new model of moral education: pedagogy in alterity.

Insufciency of the technological paradigm in education

For decades education has been thought of and performed following a model of

efciency. Controlling the variables which operate on the teachinglearning processeshas become the main concern of pedagogical research and practice. To `realize', to

explain what is happening in the classroom, has been and still is the main aspiration of

pedagogical know-how. There is no doubt that the level of rationality and the

optimization of educational action have increased, overcoming a stage of practice

linked exclusively to common sense or accumulated experience. However, this

preoccupation with efciency and the control of learning, although necessary in

educational action, has not given rise to better education of all the dimensions of a

person to the same degree. More rational and scientic pedagogy has not given rise to

pedagogy with a human face. The paradigms which have congured teaching for years

are still prevalent: they have done this by trying, in vain, to submit it to levels of controland rationalization similar in their aims to those of industrial processes. The intention

here is not to advocate a return to the past. Neither is it to refuse to introduce new

elements which might increase the level of rationalization in educational processes.

Our point of view is that the dominant use of technological reason (Sarramona, 2003)

in education converts our students into efcient, specialized machines, but if we want

to achieve a more human individual, the appropriation of the moral values which

make Homo sapiens a human being should not be considered as secondary. In

classrooms there is a whole network of relationships which cannot be explained by

positivist methodologies: intersubjectivity, interaction, communication, ethics ; lifeows throughout a classroom (the world of life, as Husserl calls it) and this cannot be

explained by positivist methodologies (Abdallah Pretceille 2001)

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The growing social demand for greater professionalism of teaching staff has given

rise to a more intense incorporation of new information technology into classrooms,

to a style of teaching more determined by rationalist criteria, to greater control over

the teachinglearning processes and to a type of assessment based more on academicand educational results. Although these are plausible objectives, they are not sufcient

indicators of quality on their own. The so-called `technological pedagogy', widely

used in Spanish pedagogy in the last few decades, is rooted in this rational and

scientic view of education (Vazquez, 2003). However, even though we might be sure

of having created a more rationalist style of teaching, we cannot be so sure of having

helped to train free citizens, free men and women; in theory we have assumed that we

ought to educate a person in all his dimensions, but in practice we have reduced the

person merely to intelligence or the development of skills and abilities, forgetting, as

Ortega y Gasset (1973) said, that the head has its roots in the heart. A simple review of

teaching methodology, even in the education of values, shows the dominance ofcognitive over socio-affective strategies. Aspects such as interest in another person,

empathy, giving importance to affairs of the community, solidarity, tolerance, civic

responsibility and so on have not formed part of the baggage of an educated person.

The immediate consequence of this approach has been an `intellectualist' education

centred not on the student, on the development of the whole person, but on the

interests of the school and the demands of society, and this translates into the

maintenance of forms of organization which are contradictory if the aim is really to

provide valuable learning to all students (Escudero, 2001). The lines of communi-

cation between the school and the reality which surrounds it have been cut,postponing the coming of age of students, and an autism has been produced in

teaching which makes it unable to contribute to the training of adults able to integrate

into society, criticize it and transform it.

A new proposal

Among philosophers and educational theorists it is becoming clear that there has to be

much debate about the incorporation of new language and new content into

education; about whether technicalprofessional training, which is indispensable as

an educational objective in teaching processes, is to be accompanied by other morallearning. In this way, pedagogical discourse is focused not only on how we are

teaching, but also on whatand why we are teaching (Fullat, 1997). There needs to be a

debate on whether it is necessary, in short, to recover the anthropological and ethical

discourse in terms of which educational action makes sense (Escamez, 2003). It is

already acknowledged, in pedagogical circles at least, that it makes no sense to educate

without anthropology; to do so is to proceed without any direction or aim, making

education a simple training exercise. This is not the same as turning our back on the

advances made by pedagogical research, including knowledge from other sciences in

the construction of one's own know-how, explaining some educational processes by`something more' than common sense or accumulated experience. Rather, it means

that without abstaining from science pedagogy is concerned in equal measures of

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intensity with both teaching methods and the why of teaching. Positivism has `reied'

educational action, supposedly monitoring it as an intervention in the interests of

efciency. The teacherpupil relationship has been seen as purely didactic or

procedural, forgetting that in essence the educational relationship is, or should be,ethical. Wherever education takes place there is a meeting, not between one who

knows and one who does not know, between teacher and pupil, in an exercise of

transmission of knowledge, but between two individuals, one of whom knows that he

is responsible for the other, obliged to give answers in their situation of alterity. Thus

we are faced with a moral relationship, not simply a professionaltechnical one,

between teacher and pupil.

Until now, most effort has been expended on how to teach certain knowledge,

which has been considered as the main, if not the only, task of teachers. Pedagogical

competence has revolved around the programming of content which is supposed to

better prepare students for the exercise of a profession. For this reason pedagogicalliterature always talks about the student as a learner; as someone who principally has

to acquire knowledge, and also attitudes, values, skills or abilities which are

considered necessary for their placement in employment and social life. In a nutshell,

one person has the function of transmitting (the teacher) and the other of receiving

(the pupil). Thus is designed a one-way action which leaves the pupil with no option

but to be the beneciary of the supposedly benecial action of the teacher. The

teacher's responsibility begins and ends with the programming of content, the

implementation of strategies which promote the best learning, the creation of an

appropriate classroom atmosphere for work and so on. The teacher is perceived andseen as a demonstrator, a transmitter of know-how and knowledge, but not as a moral

mediator who promotes the personal growth of the pupil.

If the idea is that teaching should have a rationalized basis, it is to be hoped that the

teachinglearning processes start, as far as possible, from knowledge both of the

variables which operate on the situation of the pupils and also of the objectives or aims

which need to be achieved. However, none of this substitutes for the inevitable

mediation on the part of the teacher, who, from what he is, in other words, from the

experience of the values he transmits, is placed between what the students learn and

the path or strategies they follow in learning it. Even scientic knowledge, held to be

neutral or objective, is not free of this mediation. It might seem that only the teachingof values, due to its subjective content, would be affected by this dependence, leaving

the rest of the content to be taught free of such interference. This is not the case. The

teacher is present and active in the learning of the pupils not only because of the

strategies they use, but also on account of the moral credit or authority they has over

them. It is not always possible to separate pedagogic competence and moral

competence in education. At times the teacher trusts in the efciency of the strategies

used in the teachinglearning processes to facilitate the appropriation of a value on the

part of the pupils, allowing strategies to work the miracle of education on their own.

However, this `extraordinary' action never occurs. Any action on the part of theteacher in the course of implementing classroom strategies must necessarily be

mediated by his way of behaving and acting in the classroom in other words by what

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she/he is. This is baggage which cannot be discarded and it always accompanies any

professional action in the classroom.

To educate is, and assumes something more than, simply implementing strategies

or directing learning processes. We understand that the most radical and originalrelationship which occurs between teacher and pupil in an educational situation is the

moral relationship which becomes reception, not the teachertechnical relationship of

the education expert. Furthermore, this moral receptivity is what denes the teacher

pupil relationship as an educational relationship. When one educates, one does not

see the pupil as a mere object of knowledge, nor as a subject which has to be

understood in terms of all their personal and social variables in order to guarantee the

success of the teaching process, nor as an empty space which has to be lled with

knowledge, nor yet as a prolongation of oneself. `Between educator and pupil there is

no power. Power converts asymmetry into possession and oppression, the educator

into a master and the pupil into a slave' (Melich, 1998, p. 149). To educate meanstaking to the extreme the prohibition of reducing what is other to sameness, what is

multiple to totality, in the words of Levinas (1993a). `To receive the other in teaching

is to receive what transcends me and is more than me; what goes beyond the

capacity of my self and forces me to come out of myself, out of my self-centred world,

to receive him' (Barcena & Melich, 2000, p. 160). Thus, the educational relationship

between teacher and pupil is not a conventional relationship which can be delimited

by language in which all problems, translated into technical questions, can be solved,

controlled and mastered. For this reason education itself is an ethical event, an ethical

experience, not an experiment in which any reference to ethics comes from `outside'.In the educational relationship the rst step taken is that of reception, of accepting

the other person in the concrete reality of his traditions and culture, not just in the

abstract sense of the individual; it is the recognition that the other person is someone,

valued in his irrefutable dignity as a person, not just a learner of knowledge and

competencies. It is this moral relationship which has to be saved if the intention is to

educate, not to do `something else'. Rarely do educators and pedagogues realize what

it means to be placed in front of a pupil as someone who demands to be recognized as

such. To educate implies, rstly, stepping out of oneself, `doing it from the other side,

crossing the barrier' (Barcena & Melich, 2003, p. 210); it is seeing the world through

the experience of the other person. However, in order to do this, it is necessary toabdicate any form of power, because the other (the pupil) can never be an object of

dominance, possession or intellectual conquest. Secondly, it demands a responsible

or moral response to the presence of the other. In short, one must take responsibility

for the other, assuming the responsibility of helping in the birthing of a `new reality'

through which the world is constantly renewed (Arendt, 1996). If reception and

recognition are indispensable for the newborn to acquire a genuinely human face

(Duch, 2002), reception and taking responsibility for the other are indispensable

conditions for us to be able to speak of education. This is the whole raison d'etre of

education, its original and radical meaning. It is not possible to educate withoutrecognizing the other (the pupil), without being willing to receive. Neither is it

possible to educate (to engender something new) if the pupil does not identify that the



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educator recognizes him as someone with whom it is necessary to establish a moral

relationship and as someone who is received as what he is and all that he is, not only as

what he does or produces. By extension, neither is it a moral relationship established

in terms of an absolute duty outside time and space; nor is it a factum de pure practicalreason, separated from all experience, as Kant maintains. Rather, it is a relationship or

response not to the other person, but from the other concrete, individual and historical

person, who feels, enjoys, suffers and lives, here and now, as Levinas asserts.

However, not only is education dened as reception; the person himself, from the

anthropological point of view, also needs to be received.

At the moment of his birth Man is an invalid and disorientated being; he lacks reliable

points of reference and, above all, adequate language to situate himself in the world, that

is, to humanise himself while humanising his environment. For this task to be carried

out with any guarantee of success it will be necessary to have a set of transmissions which

promote insertion into the appropriate route, in the course of which he will be receivedinto the bosom of a community and recognised by it. (Duch, 2002, pp. 1112)

The opportunity to be received is indispensable for the constitution of a human being

as a human and culturalbeing, since this is not solely a question of biology and nature.

We are therefore obliged to discard any `spiritualist', de-physicalizing interpretation of

the person. This type of approach exists in specic historical circumstances. The

person received is not abstract, not without past and present, but someone who lives

here and now. And their `circumstances', their past and their present, are inseparable

from the act of reception. If this were not the case, taking responsibility for the other

person would remain an empty expression, lacking all sense; it would seem sarcastic.If this moral relationship of receiving the other and taking responsibility for the other

does not take place, there is nothing more than teaching or instruction. Thus,

reception in education leads us towards realism and situates us rmly in the socio-

historic conditions in which the pupil lives, freeing so-called pedagogical realism from

a reductionist concept of the pupil. The reality of the subject is not reduced to

personal characteristics or features; socio-cultural baggage and lifestyle also form a

part of `what he is' in each individual case and cannot be left out of educational

processes. The conditions of the pupil's life must also be affected if the intention is not

to reduce education to a neutral action outside time and reality. This intellectual

position leads us to a new model for understanding and carrying out educationalprocesses in general, and in particular moral education: thepedagogy of alterity, which,

by including the positive elements of other models or approaches to education,

responds more effectively to the ethical, original demands of education. This new

paradigm is beginning to carry more weight in European pedagogical reection and

praxis (Abdallah-Pretceille, 2001).

The pedagogy of alterity

In recent decades there has been a huge increase in the amount of literature publishedabout education and values. The study of the nature of values and related teaching

strategies lls many pages on our shelves (Ortega & Mnguez 2001a) After the initial

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concern with the teaching of sciences (knowledge) there has been disquiet and

urgency regarding the teaching of values. However, we have remained with the how of

our teaching, in didactics, and although this in itself is a necessary task in which we

must continue to improve, especially if we are to continue emphasizing theexperiential character of values, I believe that we are overlooking what ought to

have been rst on our list in this new approach. We need to leave behind the concept

of teaching with authoritative aims, a concept based on the idea that the student is

someone who is passing through, a user or temporary resident of a space and time

which it is the teacher's job to administer. This reects a school of thought obsessed

with rules and discipline, designed more in order to maintain organizational shape

than to encourage valuable learning for all students. We ought to have left behind this

school of thought, whose aim was more to continue and reproduce, to repeat what has

already been done, than to create, reinterpret and innovate, because it is not possible

to educate forvalues if education is not based on values. The idea has been to make a`different' education within the same framework we already had, maintaining the

same organizational structure and shape, the same management mentality and the

same bureaucracy in its running. This difcult marriage has given rise to a

schizophrenic situation in a large number of teachers, who nd themselves unable

to plan new content and learning strategies. At the same time, in many cases

educational institutions, as well as the administration itself, did not realize in time that

the new educational proposals demanded new forms of organization and teaching.

Darling-Hammond (2001, p. 55) describes this situation accurately: `Just as in

manufacturing industries, schools were developed as organisations based on thespecialisation of functions and management through procedures which were carefully

prescribed and designed in order to obtain standardised products' forgetting that

education is a singular, one-off process, whose results are never certain.

According to the pedagogy of alterity, the educational process begins with the

mutual acceptance and recognition of teacher and student and is based on a

willingness to be responsible for the other person on the part of the teacher, on a freely

given and seless reception which is offered to the student in such a way that the

student perceives that they are someone to the teacher and that they are recognized in

terms of personal singularity. Without recognition of and commitment to the

individual person there is no education. Therefore, when we talk about education weare talking about an event, a singular, one-off experience in which we can see ethics as

a genuine happening, where we are mainly provided with an opportunity to be part of

a meeting with another person, to witness the birth of something new which is not us.

`In this adventure, perhaps what we learn is to be available, to be receptive, to be

prepared to respond pedagogically to the demands of an education situation in which

another human being makes demands of us and calls on us' (Barcena & Melich, 2000,

p. 162). From this it would seem that the conclusions are: (a) that one cannot educate

if one does not love, because if one looks only in oneself or is self-centred, one cannot

give birth to a new existence; (b) that the educator is an impassioned lover of life whoseeks in his pupils the plurality of singular forms in which life can exist; (c) the

educator is a person who constantly studies originality and everything which can



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liberate the pupil from conformity to a single way of thinking; (d) to educate is to help

to invent or create `original' ways of living one's existence within a culture and not the

repetition or cloning of pre-established models which are to be faithfully reproduced

and which are useful only for purposes of manipulation; (e) to educate is to help togive birth to something new, something singular, while continuing a tradition which

has necessarily to be reinterpreted.

What does it mean to receive another person?

In the pedagogy of alterity, what does it mean to receive another person? For the pupil

it means feeling recognized, valued, accepted and loved for what one is and as what

one is. It means trust, company, guidance and direction, but it also means acceptance

of being taught (pupil) by the `other' who breaks into our life (the educator). Levinas

(1987, p. 75) expresses it thus:

To deal with the Other in discourse is to receive his expression, where the idea that

implies a thought always overwhelms. Thus it is to receive the Other beyond the capacity

of the Self; more specically, this means addressing the idea of the innite. But this also

means being taught. The relationship with the Other, or Discourse, is a non-allergic,

ethical relationship, but the received discourse is teaching in itself. This teaching,

however, is not mayeutic. It comes from outside and brings to me more than I contain. In

this non-violent transitive action the epiphany of the face occurs.

To receive is to be present, with one's valuable experiences, in the life of pupils, as

someone who can be trusted. In reception the pupil starts to have the experience ofunderstanding, affection and respect for the totality of what he is, and this experience

can also be created in classmates, because they are also received. In future, the

learning of tolerance and respect for other people will be associated for the pupil with

the experience of being received, in terms not only of tolerance for the ideas of others,

but also of being accepted by the concrete person who lives here and now and

demands to be recognized as such. Reception in education is a recognition of the

radical alterity of the pupil and his inalienable dignity; it is stepping out of oneself to

recognize oneself in another person; it is passion (from the Latin `pati') and giving. It

is never a `state', rather it is a `passion', a `passing' through life listening, interpreting

and responding to the demands of others (Duch, 2002). It is refusing to be repeated orcloned in another person, in order for the other person to have their own identity.

`Between father and son, as between educator and pupil or master and disciple, there

are forms of relationship which are founded in the discontinuity of the who' (Barcena,

2002, p. 513). Furthermore, at the same time it consists of responsibility (from the

Latin `respondere', to answer), commitment, responding. It is fundamentally a moral

act. However, one can respond to the other orforthe other. In the rst case, we answer

a question, as Kantian ethics suggests; in the second case, we respond to a demand, a

plea, as understood by the ethics of Levinas. We are talking now about the pedagogy

of alterity, of being responsible for the other person. The most appropriate way ofdening education is therefore as an ethical event (Barcena & Melich, 2000), i.e. an

unpredictable happening which suddenly takes place without warning which places

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us in front of the other person in such a way that we cannot fail to look and respond.

Unlike a simple èvent', a fact, which we can ignore or which can leave us indifferent,

without affecting us, this `happening' speaks to us, transforms us, affects us. If this is

applied to education it forces us to rethink everything because the event, beingunpredictable, cannot be programmed or planned. Thus, in education there is

inevitably a Utopian component which dees prediction and control. What is more, it

leads us not to separate out the part of education which is at root the moral

component. Reception and taking responsibility for the other is a question of attitude,

of `guts', which dees any attempt to plan and control it.

However, when we talk about the moral roots of education, we are not referring to

the simple deontology which obliges the teacher, as it does any other professional, to

adopt a moral behaviour while doing his job; we are not concerned here with

submitting people to established rules or a written contract nor to rules and

regulations which orientate educational action in classrooms in terms of fullling their`duty' (Martnez, 1998). This kind of moral obligation would be imposed `from

outside', it would be external to educational action, it would come afterwards. Here

we are talking about `something else', something different, which comes before the

teacher can full his duty, from the very kernel of the educational action and from

what denes this action as such. When we educate, we give a response to the other

person, in order that in a new reality they should be themselves and continue thus,

building a new existence in a tradition and a culture. In this way, we install the moral

component without which there would be no education, only manipulation and

domination, right at the heart of educational action. Thus the educator is present towitness the miracle of new birth, a new creature. This is what makes it possible

for `human society not to always remain the same, but continuously renew itself

through constant births, through the arrival of new human beings' (Arendt, 1996, p.

197).

Education as a moral response translated into the experience of reception, not only

in the teacher but also in the pupil (recognizing the other person and taking

responsibility for them), encourages the creation of a moral climate in the school and

in the classroom, of the right àtmosphere' in which to learn socio-moral values.

Obviously, we do not understand reception as a useful resource for `moralizing' the

life of the school, with a list of prescriptions which regulate the behaviour of pupils andteachers. We are talking here about ànother morality', which makes us responsible for

other people and for the affairs which affect us as members of the community, starting

with the school itself. Interiorizing the relationship of dependence or moral

responsibility with others, even with strangers, means that life is not a `private'

matter, but has unavoidable repercussions as long as we continue to live in society. In

a word, it means that no-one can be indifferent to me. I have acquired responsibility to

any other person, a moral dependence which I cannot shed, even before they ask me

to be accountable.

The link with the other person is initiated simply as a responsibility, independently ofwhether it is accepted or rejected, whether a person knows how to assume the

responsibility or not whether something specic can be done for the other person or not



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I am responsible to and for the other person without the need for reciprocity, even if it

costs me my life. Reciprocity is theirproblem. More exactly, in as far as between the other

person and myself the relationship is not reciprocal, I depend on the other; and I am

essentially a `subject' in this sense. (Levinas, 1991, pp. 9192)

And this moral responsibility to the other person, `who arrives without warning', is

what makes me a moral subject. Levinas' moral is anarchic (without principle); his

moral does not refer to any previous idea or principle (Chalier, 2002).

The relationship of alterity, face to face, which Levinas mentions, is an original

moral relationship. He expresses it through the image of the face: `The face is imposed

on me without my being given the chance to ignore its call, or forget it; I cannot avoid

being responsible for its misery. Consciousness loses its primacy' (Levinas, 1993a, p.

46). And Levinas himself explains what the face is: `In no way is it a plastic shape like a

portrait; the relationship with the face is a relationship with something completely

fragile, completely exposed, naked and, as a result, with whom one is completely aloneand thus can suffer the utter abandonment of death' (Levinas, 1993b, p. 130). The

face is meaning, meaning without context. The other person, in the simplicity of his

face, is not a character in a concrete context. The face is what cannot be killed, its

meaning consists of saying `Thou shalt not kill' (Levinas, 1991). This appearance of

the other person as a face reveals the position of absolute nakedness and vulnerability

from which he orders `Thou shalt not kill', a categorical order which is at the same

time impotent. Despite this, it arouses in the interlocutor, the I, an innite

responsibility which conrms him as a singular and free moral subject. `Singular

because nobody can answer for them or give an answer which is absolutely un-transferable. Free because the I can choose to open up to the other person and listen

to the order or opt to actively ignore, which is symbolic violence or annihilation'

(Bello, 1997, p. 126). In this way Levinas moves away from the `intentionalist' version

of language, substituting the relationship of the speaker with the other person for the

relationship with his own conscious intention. By dissociating himself from this

version he moves away from the traditional image of autonomy, one of the main

constituents of classical ethics. Levinas occupies territory which has not previously

been occupied: the heteronomy which lies in the relationship with the other person,

who by their mere presence makes the I responsible for another person and conrms

him as a moral subject (Bello, 1997). Thus ethics does not begin with a question butwith an answer, not only to but also for the other person. Morality therefore has a

heteronomous origin (Levinas, 1987), rather than coming from the autonomy of the

moral subject of Kantian ethics.

In Levinas there is a clear wish to replace self-reection, self-consciousness, the

basis of individualist ethics, with the relationship with the other person as a proposed

alternative morality; he moves away from ethics as self-love and moors himself in

another ethic which constructs its meaning on the foundation of the relationship with

the other. This new concept of ethics inevitably has consequences for education,

especially moral education. It translates into the development of empathy, ofdialogue, of the ability to listen and pay attention to the other person, of sympathetic

solidarity as the main condition of a moral relationship but also the development of

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the ability to critically analyse the reality of one's own environment using just and

equitable parameters, of taking on the pupil in all his reality, because a human being

cannot be understood outside his environment and the network of relationships he

establishes with others. This means that to be a moral person is to be able to takeresponsibility for another person. This is impossible without a fundamental

willingness to be open.

If, from the point of view of the pedagogy of alterity, moral education is understood

to be a moral act and receptive attitude, this frees us from paralysing intellectualism

and obliges us to base educational action not on ideas, beliefs and knowledge so much

as on the concrete person that is the pupil. A glance at the literature on intercultural

education provides the best example of this. Schooling has placed intercultural

education in the eld of the cognitive as if it were simply a question of knowing,

understanding and respecting the ideas, beliefs, traditions and language of a

community, in other words, the culture of another person, relegating to a secondarylevel of importance the concrete subject who lies behind that culture. The Anglo-

Saxon and North American tradition has more heavily stressed the cultural aspects

than the anthropological and moral side, and intercultural education does not end

with respect for others' cultures, rather it ought also to imply the acceptance and

reception of another person. The object of intercultural education ought to be the

human being in the realization of his or her concrete existence, within a tradition and a

culture. This is not reduced to the ìntellectual understanding' of cultural differences.

Rather, it is taking responsibility for another person, along with that person's present

and past reality (Ortega & Mnguez, 2001a). It is not so much a pedagogy ofdifference as an education for deference, for `taking responsibility for the other person,

his happiness and his pain, his smiles and his tears, his presence and his absence'

(Melich, 2002, p. 115). Looking at the inevitable implications of intellectualist

education, Steiner (1998, p. 105) warns us of the dangers implicit in an attitude of

leaving ourselves at the mercy only of ideas and the risk of understanding cultural

differences only at an ìntellectual' level. Òne of the principal works on the complete

interpretation of Holderlin's poetry was written a stone's throw from a concentration

camp. Neither did Heidegger's pen falter, nor did his spirit quail.' Never have human

rights been talked about so much as in the last century and never have they been so

steamrollered. Ideas and arguments have not been enough to make people livetogether peacefully and to stop barbarity. The other person, different and diverse,

demands to be recognized, not as much on account of ideas and beliefs as because of

what they are. The other person becomes important to us more through the immediacy

of face and dignity than through any argumentative reasoning. It is therefore a

question of learning to consider the other person as another person, rather than in

relation to their different culture or belongings; there is no subject without

intersubjectivity, without a fabric of intrinsic relationships with other subjects.

According to Abdallah-Pretceille & Porcher (1996, pp. 4950)

As a being in the world, who would not exist without it, my free conscience is immersedamong other subjects; all of them, with their own singularity among other singular beings,

also pursue their own existential project or in other words construct their own identity



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Therefore the situation of one subject is always linked to that of other subjects. It is never

determined in isolation or separation, but always by multiple relationships. To sum up,

there is no subject without intersubjectivity, without a fabric of intrinsic relationships

with other subjects. The fundamental condition of my being a subject is that all the

others should be subjects as well.

Understanding education from the viewpoint of the radical alterity of the pupil means

seeing education as a moral action of reafrming the other person in all that they are,

not just in part. The personage of the pupil becomes the object of my reception, my

moral dependence, instead of his or her ideas and beliefs. These latter simply come

with the pupil.

The pedagogy of alterity and political commitment

The pedagogy of alterity as a model of moral education inspired by Levinas' ethics

does not end with the `intimate' `you and I' relationship formed by particular

individuals present in the same place at the same time. Inevitably it also deals with

relationships with a `third party'.

Language, like the presence of a face, gives neither complicity with the preferred being

nor enough `you and I' to forget the universe; in its spontaneity it rejects converting love

into something clandestine which causes its spontaneity and meaning to disappear.

The third party looks at me in the eyes of the other the epiphany of the face as a face

introduces humanity. The face, in all its facial nudity, shows me the indigence of the

poor man and the foreigner. (Levinas, 1987, p. 226)

Education, from the viewpoint of alterity, has a necessary social dimension. It is ethics

and politics, it is passion and commitment. To deprive education of these dimensions

is to reduce it to simple indoctrination. In ethical terms, education is not extricable

from the problems which affect real people, rather it springs from them, from the right

to a dignied and fair life, from the right to say one's words, words of the past and of

tradition, the transforming words of the present, which reveal reality and allow a

person to discover the contradictions which prevent him from being a man or a

woman, but also the as yet unsaid words of the future, the words of hope. A person is

intrinsically projected into the future, is the anticipation and the projection ofsomething (Maras, 1996). Therefore, education itself is a social and political act.

Politics is a part of the very nature of education and for this reason the problems of

education are not solely pedagogical, but also, in essence, deeply political.

Necessarily, education is a moral commitment to the world. Arendt (1996, p. 208)

goes so far as to say that it is an act of love: `Education is the point at which we decide

whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and thus save it from

the ruin which would be inevitable if it were not for renovation, the arrival of new,

young people'. The aim of educating is thus not limited to the eld of personal

characteristics; `psychologizing' education implies the training of the subject as asocial being, incorporating all his or her reality. Therefore, education cannot be

extracted from the function of transforming the social reality where the pupil lives in

282 P. O. Ruiz


13/21

such a way that they can become a valuable person, as is implied in education as a

whole.

The origin of this morality is not reason, as in idealist morality, but feeling, `pathos',

solidarity with other human beings who deserve happiness and recognition. It is notthe faculty of reason which moves us to act without duty, but neither is it a mere

irrational feeling. Rather, it is an affection (feeling affected, suffering) in our

conscience for the recognition of others in certain circumstances. Thus there

is no absolute demand from on high or from the conscience. Rather, there is

something obvious, something `natural', which is the aspiration of all human beings,

of all life, to be happy, to have their inalienable right to dignity recognized. There is

a feeling, `charged with reason', that to attempt to justify it with argumentation

would be mocking or sarcastic towards all those whose dignity is denied. For

Levinas, in a world full of òthers' or `third parties', the response can be indifference,

power seeking or recognition and reception. In other words, the indifferencewhich denies them any right to reality, the power seeking which attempts to dominate

others at any cost and the reception of someone who recognizes himself in the

other. In these situations the introduction of the òthers' takes place through

the transparency of a face which presents itself in front of us. Levinas calls this

introduction space èthical', since the moral response is not `comprehension', but

`compassion' (`cum-pati'), understood as a question of `gut feeling' of shared

suffering, of human qualities; in other words, a moral question. In Levinas,

morality nds in `compassion' its most complete expression: `For me, compassionate

suffering, suffering because the other is suffering, is just a moment in a far morecomplex and complete relationship of responsibility towards the other' (1993b,

p. 133).

Horkheimer (1986) also says that compassion for a broken and abused man shows

us the true face of real humanity. For him, morality takes place only where people

listen to their feelings of indignation, compassion, love and solidarity, without

recourse to any underlying absolute reason. These feelings can be expressed in two

historical ways: compassion and politics (Horkheimer, 1999). For as long as history

for most of humanity is a story of sufferingand that majority is unhappy, there will be

compassion. This is not only the origin of morality, but also its constitutive

dimension. Thus, compassion is not a feeling of condescending pity which paralysesmoral responses to the indignity suffered by certain people. On the contrary, it is à

political commitment to help and liberate, which leads us to work towards

transforming the unjust structures which generate suffering and situations of

dependence and alienation' (Ortega & Mnguez, 2001b, p. 108). Compassion does

not replace justice, they are inseparable. Behind compassion there lies a global sense

of justice which is also present in the human being in front of us. `Compassion

necessarily leads to justice, it does not avoid it' (Mardones, 2003, p. 223). Whoever

receives compassion is being paid an òutstanding debt' and whoever gives it simply

pays his dues. But it would be possible to fall into the temptation of considering thosewho receive compassion as abstract entities, without history or geography. In fact,

they are men and women of our time `who have been through a hell of deprivation and



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degradation on account of their resistance to submission and oppression'

(Horkheimer, 1973, p. 169).

If, indeed, ethics is compassion and politics, reception and commitment, then, on

the other hand, it seems clear that discourse ethics is insufcient to give a moralresponse to the concrete situations which affect people today, insufcient for a

moral education which is responsible for the other, here and now. In Habermas's

project of intersubjective universal reason (Habermas, 1992) there is a real risk

that reason might be reduced to the domain of argument by those who have power

and the power to speak, depriving òthers' of any chance to participate effectively

in discourse. He presupposes an ideal situation in which to speak, with pragmatic

symmetry between interlocutors, an equitable distribution of communicative com-

petence and equal opportunities to send and receive speech acts. This remains an

ìllusion'. What about those who do not have a voice to say their words? This ìdeal'

dialogic situation is actually impracticable, projecting the historical person into asituation of `cosmic exile' and putting distance between itself and the concrete

situations where the conicts and lives of the moral interlocutors exist (Ortega

& Mnguez, 1999). This òversight' concerning the social conditions which affect the

real life of all human beings is the weakest part of discourse ethics and its inability

to provide a moral response to the real situations which worry people today.

Therefore it is necessary to look for a real pragmatism instead of focusing on potential

conditions for a rational dialogue, conditions which cannot exist in this world

(Camps, 1991).

This is why here we choose a materialethic, distanced from any idealism unable tooffer any response other than formal reasoning and argumentation, which is attractive

but insufcient. This justies education ethically and politically, as reception and

commitment, as the moral act it is here proposed to be. We do not understand

education to be something which occurs in `no man's land', without a historical

subject. It will always be a political, critical act which transforms those situations

where morality is obstructed, where justice and the right to happiness are not allowed

to these (and all) concrete individuals. According to Melich (1998, p. 37), `The task

of educating implies a commitment to the world, to tradition and history. Only if we

decide that the world we have created and where we live is worthwhile, and that we

can reconstruct it, only if we take responsibility for it, are we in a position to transmit itto new generations. If you don't want responsibility for the world, don't educate'.

The pedagogy of alterity does not allow us to carry on thinking and èducating' in

current circumstances, where three-quarters of the world's population live in

conditions of inhuman poverty, millions are deprived of their freedom and are

socially and culturally excluded or persecuted for thinking `differently', as if it had

nothing to do with educational action. It seems to me that to act in this way is

enormously irresponsible and turns the sword on those who worry us and whom we

want to educate, converting education into a weapon of totalitarian power. At the

same time as it is a moral act which reafrms human beings and human qualities,recognizing dignity and, in short, afrming life, education is also a criticism and an

accusation of situations and actions which degrade and offend human beings It is a

284 P. O. Ruiz


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negative pedagogy directed at avoiding evil, refusing to accept present immoral

reality, resisting all attempts to deny human dignity. Ìf comradely compassion

(education) is to work, it must maintain that negative dialogue, giving no concession

to the slightest optimism regarding the historical age or situation. The marchtowards humanisation is better undertaken, there are fewer surprises in store, along

the path of eliminating evil than that of designing good' (Mardones, 2003, p. 227).

Only in this way, as resistance and rejection, is negative pedagogy credible; otherwise,

it is mere afrmative illusion. However, the pedagogy of alterity is also a pedagogy

of memory which attempts to give justice to those forgotten by history, remembering

the victims of the past, those who were buried alive and entombed in anonymity, as

if they had never been born (Arendt, 1999). It attempts to give us back the eyes of

the oppressed, to see the world through the eyes of the victims, differently, from

another perspective, inverted (Mate, 2003). Thus educating is also telling a story, the

story of those who came before us in the ght for justice and freedom and in whomtoday we recognize ourselves for what we are and what we have become as humans.

Education is also memory and narration. Ìf any one human ability has suffered in

post-modernity it is memory. The present is one of a crisis of memory. In post-

modernity, due to time being accelerating, the past has been devoured by the present,

and we might even say that the future has been placed in the hands of current

demands' (Melich, 2002, p. 101). It is impossible to conceive of an education which

takes into account only those present in an ethical relationship. Responsibility is

demanded of us also by the men and women of the future and those who have gone

before us: the former oblige us to build, expecting nothing in return; the latter requirethat their existence be prolonged so that they are rescued from the anonymity of

death.

Some difculties

Since our standpoint is not based on reason but on feelings and passion, perhaps some

might say that this way of understanding ethics and morality is tinged with `romantic

irrationality'. I must warn though that all the above has nothing to do with the

emotivism of Stevenson, who reduced what is moral to mere individual feelings with

no rational component. Rather, we are dealing with ànother rationality', that whichrefuses to accept reason as mastery, self-preservation or egoism, that which is

reluctant to reduce moral reason to instrumental reason. This latter discounts and

sidelines the best aspects of moral feeling, `pathos' and compassion, solidarity and

love, as the remains of a mythology. Ìt means a rationality in which all questions t,

not only those which can be expressed conceptually, mathematically or technically.

A rationality which can deal with all conceivable questions, questions of being

and questions of rules, as well as questions about what is called existence' (Melich,

1998, p. 48). The idea is to resist the triumph of the desire for mastery, dominance

and power over compassion and solidarity with those human beings who areexcluded and humiliated. Resistance, according to Horkheimer and Adorno (1994,

p 149) against `the enemies of compassion who did not want to identify man



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with misfortune. For them the existence of misfortune is an infamy. Their sensitive

impotence did not tolerate the fact that man should be pitied'. This feeling is not

irrational but rational, although it is different from prevalent reasoning, which does

not speak in favour of morality, does not point in the same direction as moral feeling,but in the direction of egoism and power (Sanchez, 2001). Therefore, we are not

cancelling out reason but `reconstructing' it, rehabilitating moralreason, self-reective

reason, which resists the seduction of power and dominance and is able to reorientate

progress towards its human aim, which shatters the logic of anonymity and keeps alive

the memory of the oppressed and the excluded, the inextinguishable impulse of men

and women towards happiness (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1994); in other words, `the

hope that the injustice which permeates the world at the moment should not be the

nal word' (Horkheimer, 2000, p. 169). In a society built on ethical principles it

should not be necessary to dene or justify the inviolability of each person, his

inalienable dignity, because that would be a further attack on the victims, adding

insult to the injuries of the innocent. `I imagine', Muguerza (2003, p. 20) writes, `that

Kant would have been surprised by the idea that human dignity needs to or can be

submitted to a referendum in order to endorse it. Faced with a seeming attack on

human dignity, he would say that individual conscience does not need any consensus

to defend dignity'. However, neither can education be adequately understood if it

does not include `pathos', the world of feelings. These feelings play a more decisive

role in personal history than reason and, to a certain degree, they are the place where a

person lives, the surroundings of personal life from which contact is made with others

with the real chance of human presence (Maras, 1993).On the other hand, some may wish to nd a contradiction in the heteronomous

origin of morality as derived from the thinking of Levinas and the materialist nature of

Horkheimer's morality. I do not see this as a contradiction. Compassion and

reception, or taking charge of the other, responding for the other in the thinking of

Levinas, does not contradict the `natural' feeling of rebellion and protest against

Horkheimer's abused and humiliated victims. Admittedly the words foreigner, widow

and orphan are not used referentially or denominationally by Levinas to say

something about their sociocultural characteristics nor does he claim to construct

knowledge about certain social situations. Rather, he uses them to symbolize thenaked relationship of alterity, beyond the identity of its terms (Bello, 1997). The

orphan, the widow, the foreigner, as the expression of the face of any human being in

Levinas, are suppressed and exploited and in need of compassion for Horkheimer.

They both move away from Kantian formalism and to the concrete situation of the

human being they offer the same answer: compassion as commitment (taking

responsibility) and protest. We seem to be looking at a `materialistic' morality, not a

formal one, which emphasizes the other as a moral subject (the foreigner, the widow,

the orphan) and in the other a `third person', in other words all those who share the

human condition, especially the humiliated of the world. They follow parallel paths in

order to reach the same destination and the same intellectual position: the afrmation

of the other out of compassion.

286 P. O. Ruiz


17/21

New demands

Another anthropology, another ethic?

I believe that we must base education, especially moral education, on differentanthropological and ethical premises from those which currently inspire pedagogical

thinking and praxis. Today we need to think long and hard about the anthropological

and moral model (what we teach and why) which supports educational practice. We

have inhabited a model which understands education in a conceptual framework,

which reduces it to technological planning, where the priorities are academic results

and professional success. But education is not simply academic learning processes and

professional competence. On the contrary, it affects and touches on all the dimensions

of a person. It is this whole that is committed in a process of positive transformation,

allowing a `new birth', the birth of `something new', not repeated. This implies

understanding and `doing' education as a moral act of recognition and reception,taking responsibility for another person with all their past, all their future, but most

importantly alltheir present; it demands to be conceived as a commitment to life, with

the birthing of someone as a new being, but also as a denial of any totalitarian way of

understanding the world and the human being.

Until now pedagogy has owed a debt to Kantian thought, which conditioned

educational praxis and reection, imbuing it with an idealistic vision of morality and

the human being. In practice, the existence of other anthropologies has been

ignored, and these anthropologies explain the human being not per se, in terms of

autonomy and self-consciousness, but as a reality open to the other, with the otherand for the other. Obviously, any anthropological choice necessarily has implications

for ethics and, of course, for educational proposals. These proposals are not arrived

at `just like that', at random; they spring directly from the anthropological

position which inspires them. It is axiomatic to say that there is no education

without anthropology, nor without an ethic to justify it. But what anthropology,

what ethic? Images and explanations of human beings are numerous; so are

ethics. The problem for pedagogy has been that its only anthropological and moral

support has been the individualist, isolationist explanation of the human being,

more specically the image of a person which dates from the Enlightenment and

which Kantian philosophy repeats in all its versions. The hegemony of Kantianthinking has not allowed any other interpretation of the human being. The

human being has been made into an abstract entity, ideal, without environment,

ahistorical, by the afrmation of man in his autonomy, his condition as an aim in

itself, the need to establish the unconditional nature of morality. Furthermore, the

need to afrm principles has denied a reality: that a human being cannot be

explained without others, without the other; that the other is a dialogical reality and

this openness to the other constitutes and denes the human (Buber, Ricoeur,

Lacroix, Levinas, Mounier and so on.). There are other `explanations' or interpret-

ations of the human being which necessarily lead us to another ethic and anothermorality and, as such, to other educational proposals. It ought not to be surprising,

then if from different anthropological and ethical premises there arise new



18/21

educational proposals which respond differently to the different ways of understand-

ing human beings.

However, pedagogy demands deep reection not only on life inside the classroom

but also on what's going on in the social and historical context into which pedagogicalaction and discourse must necessarily be inserted in order for real life to enter the

classroom. The pedagogy we need today must be based more on the importance of the

other, on his or her historical existence. It is impossible to go on educating as if

nothing were going on outside the school grounds or had happened in the immediate

past, using paradigms which nowadays are clearly insufcient, without knowing what

type of men and women, indeed what type of society, we hope to construct.

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Documents

Alterity Morality