Building towards the future yet living towards death constitutes the existential condition of late modernity. Educational institutions within modern liberal societies can be said to reproduce this condition, building towards the future repressing the anxiety of death by promising employability, prosperity and progress.

As a way to challenge the idea that human existence is directed towards death and the future, this paper seeks to explore ways in which education can become a place in the present where new possibilities for human coexistence can be created. Following Hannah Arendt, Luce Irigaray and Hans-Georg Gadamer who all argue that if anything is going to change in our ways of living together it can only come from some kind of newness, the purpose of the paper is to examine how reassessing education in birth (Irigaray), natality (Arendt) and play (Gadamer) can make new beginnings possible in and through education. For Arendt, the notion of natality represents a second birth ultimately linked to one’s sense of communal identity. For Irigaray, by contrast, birth is first and foremost a birth from a mother. For Gadamer, ultimately, play is not primarily a means through which the child explores the world but a way of being in the world that brings the world to the child.  

What the notions of birth, natality and play can offer, albeit in different ways, is a way of living in the world that is not directed towards death but towards life; a kind of connectedness with the world much needed in a time when curricula reforms in many European countries seem to be leveling out the different ways in which a child, as a new beginning and creation, can itself begin and create. The question explored is what this connectedness demands of teachers and educators as a way of creating new possibilities for human coexistence in an increasingly uncertain world.

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