Abstract
Our sense of time changes as we grow and mature. The indefinite days of early childhood gradually give way to a sense of time ruled by clocks and calendars.
From time as a sense of events and their passage, children at school are increasingly led to a chronological sense that is ruled by numbers. Can our earlier sense of time be easily abandoned? Can this sense be ignored or denied in our educational practice? From a phenomenological perspective, this hardly seems possible.
To do so would be to abandon a still-functioning layer of our selfhood. To see this, we must first note that a genetic analysis of our temporal awareness shows that the genesis of our sense of time is also a genesis of the self as a subject.
This is because subjectivity, understood phenomenologically, consists of temporal relations. In considering the genesis of our subjectivity, we find that the earlier levels serve to support the later.
The level, for example, where we gain our primitive sense of time's passage supports our sense of events occurring in time, which, in turn, supports our sense of time as an ordered sequence. Generally speaking, each of our achievements in our growing sense of time depends on what we previously accomplished.
Our genesis as subjects, correspondingly, expresses itself in a series of ongoing dependences. Given this, the education of the child should not be thought of as a "leading out" or abandoning the early stages of his development.
Education, genetically considered, is not a matter of suppression but rather of development, of using the functioning of the earlier stage as a basis for the functioning of the later. In this chapter, I describe phenomenologically the linking of the functionings that give us our developed sense of temporal selfhood, exhibiting the levels that remain active in our developed selfhood.
I conclude by discussing the role of empathy in education.