What place might ambivalence have in education? Where will it arrive, and in what guise? This paper explores how our understanding of ambivalence would shift if se saw it as an inherent and essential part of the ordinary work of education. In a postmodern world the focus on difference as a source of cultural vitality and economic renewal has posed new challenges for education now forced to manage the heterogeneity of human existence. At the same time, educational initiatives have been deeply ambivalent about this heterogeneity – they often embrace social and cultural diversity at the same time as promoting social controls that limit and exclude difference. Hence, in order to respond to the conditions in which we find ourselves today, it seams that education needs to do more than just honour and celebrate difference - it also requires a commitment to broader concepts of solidarity and justice. And such a commitment to justice and solidarity, we will argue, precisely involve learning to live with what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “stranger” or the “scandal of ambivalence”. Following Bauman’s sociology of the stranger, our presentation will unfold in three movements. In the first part we discuss the preconditions of modern education which since the dawn of the Enlightenment has been guided by the postulate that there is and ought to be a rational order in the social world. By using the logic of modern reason, in the second part we arrive at the conclusion that there is no room for ambivalence in a world-ordered education. Ambivalence can only present itself as a stranger in relation to the structures of a given society; hence it is viewed as disorder and as a danger to social progress. In the third part we consider the suffering and intolerance the modern will-to-order has caused strangers by treating them as unwanted peculiarities constantly out of place. Since the stranger appears as a liminal category that falls between and disturbs the boundaries of already established social categories, she can only be viewed as an antithesis of a well-ordered society. As a way of conclusion we argue that that we do not seem to get more human by purging ambivalence. In a postmodern world of difference we would do better not to construe our lives with ambivalence as a problem, but as a quest for humanity and justice. In this way ambivalence, rather than being brushed aside, can be put to work in education and opening a space in which to begin imagining human togetherness otherwise. This is a rather difficult endeavour, since living with ambivalence means living with strangers - but is this not precisely the challenge education is facing today?

Since the stranger is a product of society’s ordering ambitions, the image of the stranger reconstructed and reproduced through time is an illustrative anti-model exposing the ambivalence within those constructing it. The possibilities of living together lie in the acceptance of ambivalence, not by getting rid of it through creating stranger-free environments. The paper concludes with the argument that instead of imposing social, cultural and symbolic boundaries in education through which it is possible to exclude and marginalize anyone who comes to symbolise ambivalence by being too different, we would do better by acknowledging the stranger on her own rights, that is, as a moral being and not as a negative category constantly out of place.