Approximation to the concept of responsibility in Lévinas: educational implications

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the relationship between ethics and education from the perspective of responsibility as an ethical category of analysis. This paper focuses on the pedagogy of alterity as a model of moral education inspired by Lévinas’s ethics. The responsibility (from the Latin «respondere», to answer) in Lévinas is commitment; taking charge of the Other. It implies that I have acquired an obligation, a moral dependence which I cannot shed. The educational action is always an ethical response to the demand of the Other. Only when the educator becomes responsible for the Other, does he respond to him in his situation, become concerned and take care of him. Only then is he in the position to educate. That is why education cannot be understood nor given without ethics, without a responsible relationship with those being educated. That is why when we put forward another model of education, we require other ethical and anthropological assumptions as a starting point, those assumptions that describe man with a more human face. There is another ethics (Lévinas) rooted in the feeling which can provide support for a pedagogy of reception and compassion. The authors propose a pedagogy that considers a historical individual in all his reality, an education responsive to the situation of each student in the uniqueness of his/her existence.