449 Arcilla, Dhillon, and Neiman P H I L O S O P H Y O F E D U C A T I O N 1 9 9 7 Education and the Longing for Immortality David J. Blacker, Dying to Teach: The Educator’s Search for Immortality (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997). EDUCATION OF THE UNDEAD? René Vincente Arcilla Teachers College, Columbia University Last spring, I had one of my best educational experiences ever: I co-taught with Maxine Greene — and so, co-learnt with the students — a course on existentialism and education. We spent several weeks on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a book I had not read since my teens. I was astonished and captivated anew by Sartre’s journey to the heart of la condition humaine, and found myself wondering about existentialism’s absurd end. How did I, following the intellectual culture I grew up with, lose interest in making sense of my mortality? Isn’t it strange that, outside of a few stalwarts like Maxine, the spirit of existentialism so completely vanished, like yesterday’s nouvelle vague? Imagine, then, my great pleasure, and relief, when I discovered what a Manhattan provincial I am, that anguished freedom was alive and writing in Normal, Illinois. Dying to Teach: The Educator’s Search for Immortality challenges educators to respond to two questions. Shouldn’t we affirm education as a humanistic calling, by understanding it as a response to our human, mortal condition? And if so, then what difference would that affirmation make to the practice of teaching? In this brief commentary, I shall support Prof. David Blacker’s claim that we ought to root education in an acknowledgment of the mortality that both individualizes and gathers us together. Proceeding from that central point of agreement, I shall also try to explain, however, some of my reservations regarding his advice to teachers. I worry that the only students who could be fully engaged by David’s education in immortality, and who could be truly at home there, would be the eternal undead. For those who expect to stay in their coffins, on the other hand, this kind of teaching could represent what Sartre calls distraction. I would like to respectfully suggest that David’s project to humanize teaching might be aided by a more focused attack on such distracting forces in our lives, and on the fear that makes us vulnerable to them. Modern Western culture has increasingly distanced itself from death. Building on the historical work of Philippe Aries, David notes that, “Death becomes something essentially alien to ourselves, our true selves, our eternal souls. We shove death away in so many ways (p. 21).” But of course, this distancing is problematic, because our mortality is inescapably closer to us than any putative truths beyond. David agrees with Heidegger that our lives are essentially marked by constant anxiety about our precarious and transient being. When Heidegger states that we are ontically distinctive in that we are ontological, he means that one of the observable characteristics of human beings — and our most unique feature — is that our very existence is always at issue for us. Not that we are always conscious that it is; this awareness of our own contingency, our own mortality, is not typically explicit. But it is nonetheless there, somewhere, at some level (p. 28).