The last 20 years have seen the rise of a neo-liberal knowledge-based educational monoculture in Europe centered on “learning” and its market values. The dominance of this educational monoculture has brought about increasing educational “resistance movements” among teacher educators, teachers, researchers and parents. Correspondingly, in Norway, many educational theorists and phenomenologists insist on going back to “education,” both in its formalized and informal practices and non-specialized languages and cultures. This also includes a return to scholarship as a kind of reflection on practice, and to what pedagogikk and didaktikk, upbringing and teaching actually are. The main access to education in this context is practice—the concrete, existential encounter between child and adult and subject-matter. Similarly, educational research is seen in this context as taking place in the complex meeting between the researcher and pedagogical thinking and writing. Both research and practice appear as existential encounters with the possibility of radical change. Education in this existential sense is (or should be) the focus of research and practice in a variety of professions in early childhood institutions, as well as those focusing on the home, school, leisure activities, and also on welfare for children and young people, refugees, unaccompanied minors and students in general (e.g. Hilt 2016; Pettersvold & Østrem 2019; Sundsdal & Øksnes 2018; Saevi 2015). Säfström & Månsson (2015) significantly distinguish between, “Education for making a living and education for making a life” (p. 69). Education as pedagogikk has as its basis the moral interest in children’s lives and in the subjective experience of self, others and the world. The relationship between adult and child is a relation between human beings rather than a relation defined by roles or professionalized “functions.” It is instead an asymmetrical interpersonal relationship, developed and maintained for the sake of the child and his or her life. Every pedagogical act is the materialization of both authority and freedom—the authority and thus responsibility of the adult, and the freedom of the child. Adults’ educational responsibility emerges in a threefold structure, centered on self, others, and world; and it is expressed, as Mollehauer (2013) has shown, through both “presentation” and “representation” as pedagogical practices and tasks. To put it another way, education is based on the relation between the old and the younger generation (Oelkers 1993), and on how the older responds to being called to responsibility in this context.

Hilt, L. (2016). Education without a shared language: Dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in Norwegian introductory classes for newly arrived minority language students. International Journal of Inclusive Education. 21: 585-601. Mollenhauer, K. (2013). Forgotten connections. On culture and upbringing. New York: Routledge. Oelkers, J. (1994). Influence and development: Two basic paradigms of education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 13, 91-109. Pettersvold, M. & Østem. S. (2019). Mestrer, mestrer ikke. Jakten på det normale barnet. Oslo: Res Publica. Saevi, T. (2015). Learning in pedagogic relationships. Scott, D. & Hargreaves, E. (Eds.). The Sage Handbook of Learning. London: Sage, 342-353. Säfström, C.A. & Månsson, N. (2015). The ontology of learning, or teaching the not – person to learn. Interacções, (37), 66-82