Since the beginning  of the “Modern times “  in the history of educational science many great educational theoreticians  (such as: Pestalozzi, Schleiermacher as well the Polish - Jewish educationalist Janusz Korczak) have stressed the importance of love and faith  for education.

These categories are in my opinion the educational moments,  which let the educational relationship appear whose primary focus is the  evolvement

 of humanity,  and not education in an intentional sense.

According to Otto Friedrich Bolnow Max Scheler was the first  in  Modern times to have understood the problem of  the unlocking power of love  and has asserted that only love unveils  the essential qualities of the other person.

The person who loves does not love because he would before have perceived  the values but  – on the contrary – it is because he loves, that he is able to see those valuable characteristics of the other person. These characteristics remain unrecognizable from an emotionally  neutral , purely theoretical point of view.

“Love is (however) not love because of failure of  knowledge“ said the French philosopher – Emmanuel Levinas.

Levinas heightens  the problem of the love relationship in his philosophic writings. he point out that love must not be understood as a revocation of knowledge. The love relationship is a relation to that which forever defines  knowledge.

The other as Other is here not understood as an object with specific characteristics, which in certain ways will be our own, it rather retires into its secret.

Janusz Korczak (the pedagogue from Warsaw ghetto) has, like Lévinas, understood love relationship to the child as a secret, as an Other.

I would like to present some reflection   on the thinking about otherness of  the stranger, of other person, of the child as a secret  against the background of the love for the child. My presentation will firstly focus on a basic category of the thinking of Korczak and Levinas: that is  on another perception of the other person, the child – the metaphysical one.

1, Korczak Janusz: Jak kochac dziecko, Warszawa 1993. 2.Levinas Emmanuel: Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, translated by R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. 3.Kaminska, Monika: Interpreting Janusz Korczak's ideas in the context of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In: Dialogue and Universalism, No.6 (2003). 4.Kaminska, Monika:'Caresse' as educational method. Janusz Korczak and Emmanuel Levinas. Nordic Educational Research Association (NERA) Congress. The Danish University Copenhagen, 2003 (unpublished paper).