Abstract

The consequences of hermeneutics for education are profound and far‐reaching. While the philosophy of education was never a major preoccupation of Hans‐Georg Gadamer's, his writings on Bildung and dialogue, in particular, contain implications for what happens, or might happen, in classrooms. After discussing these two themes, this chapter offers a few reflections on some obstacles to education as hermeneutics conceives of it which are plainly visible in the university of today. The concept of Bildung fell into some disrepute in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries owing to its association in many minds with elitism. Much of the current vocabulary of educational theory and psychology, which is often difficult to distinguish from the economic, has an inveterate tendency to produce a quality of educational experience that closely compares to that of a rat in a maze, as Ivan Illich perceptively described in Deschooling Society.