Journal of Moral Education,

Vol. 33, No. 3, September 2004

Moral education as pedagogy of

alterity
Pedro Ortega Ruiz*
University of Murcia, Spain

In this paper the author states that education could be better de®ned as reception and responsibility
and that this ethical relationship between educator and pupil is the root or essential element of
education. The author proposes a new paradigm, the pedagogy of alterity, inspired by LeÂvinas, as a
different model for educational praxis and research. Education as reception and responsibility
facilitates the learning of values and a moral environment in the classroom and it is a fundamental
support for the pupils in the current crisis of education. In this model, education is also political
complaint and commitment. Being responsible for the other, taking responsibility for the other, means
accepting the socio-historical conditions of the pupil. Otherwise, we would not be referring to
human beings of ¯esh and blood, but to spiritual entities.

Introduction
It is impossible, or at the very least extremely dif®cult, to understand a text without
context. Some of the issues dealt with in this paper relate to the current debate among
Spanish pedagogical specialists concerning models (or paradigms) in education,
speci®cally in moral education. It can be af®rmed that at the moment the argument is
still open. Until just a decade ago Kohlberg's model could be said to dominate moral
education, but today there are other approaches making themselves felt in pedagogical
research and in educational proposals. The basic questions under scrutiny here are:
what type of relationship is established between teacher and student?; what is the
pupil for the teacher?; is the pupil a mere object of knowledge or someone with whom it
is necessary to establish a moral relationship? Whatever the answer to these questions,
it conditions all the teacher's activity. Much research has been carried out into the
variables which in¯uence the teaching±learning processes, but it is forgotten that if the
aim is to achieve `something more' than transmitting knowledge and teaching skills or
abilities, the perception held by teachers of their educator±learner relationship and
their attitudes towards learners constitute decisive variables in the education process.
The proposal here is that the most radical and original relationship between teacher

*Corresponding author. Facultad de EducacioÂn, Campus Universitario de Espinardo, Universidad

de Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain. Email: portega@um.es
ISSN 0305±7240 print/ISSN 1465±3877 online/04/030271-19
ã 2004 Journal of Moral Education Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0305724042000733055
272 P. O. Ruiz

and student in an educational situation is a moral relationship, which is translated into

an attitude of reception and a commitment to the learner, which is to take
responsibility for him or her. For this reason the teacher±technician relationship of the
educational expert is no longer the very kernel of educational action; in its place is the
moral relationship which de®nes it and, as such, constitutes educational action. This
obliges us to completely revise both the content and the strategies which are currently
prevalent in moral education. It also obliges us to approach moral education from
another paradigm, where the protagonist is neither the autonomous subject of
Kohlberg's morality and discourse ethic, rooted in Kant's philosophy, nor the
utilitarian and communal morality of Rawls and Rorty, but the primacy of the other. It
is the other, concrete person, not an abstract subject, but the one who makes us moral
subjects when we are responsible for them (LeÂvinas, 1991). Any pedagogical
discourse owes a debt to an anthropology or an ethic, it is situated in and responds to a
context, it is fuelled by experiences within a tradition. Therefore, there is no pedagogy
without experience and situation. Our proposal for moral education is rooted and
situated in the ethics of LeÂvinas, which have gained ground in the course of the last
decade in the centre of Europe, based on their starting point of recognition of the
other. This logically leads us to a new model of moral education: pedagogy in alterity.

Insuf®ciency of the technological paradigm in education

For decades education has been thought of and performed following a model of
ef®ciency. Controlling the variables which operate on the teaching±learning processes
has become the main concern of pedagogical research and practice. To `realize', to
explain what is happening in the classroom, has been and still is the main aspiration of
pedagogical know-how. There is no doubt that the level of rationality and the
optimization of educational action have increased, overcoming a stage of practice
linked exclusively to common sense or accumulated experience. However, this
preoccupation with ef®ciency and the control of learning, although necessary in
educational action, has not given rise to better education of all the dimensions of a
person to the same degree. More rational and scienti®c pedagogy has not given rise to
pedagogy with a human face. The paradigms which have con®gured teaching for years
are still prevalent: they have done this by trying, in vain, to submit it to levels of control
and rationalization similar in their aims to those of industrial processes. The intention
here is not to advocate a return to the past. Neither is it to refuse to introduce new
elements which might increase the level of rationalization in educational processes.
Our point of view is that the dominant use of technological reason (Sarramona, 2003)
in education converts our students into ef®cient, specialized machines, but if we want
to achieve a more human individual, the appropriation of the moral values which
make Homo sapiens a human being should not be considered as secondary. In
classrooms there is a whole network of relationships which cannot be explained by
positivist methodologies: intersubjectivity, interaction, communication, ethics ¼; life
¯ows throughout a classroom (the world of life, as Husserl calls it) and this cannot be
explained by positivist methodologies (Abdallah-Pretceille, 2001).
 Moral education as pedagogy of alterity 273

The growing social demand for greater professionalism of teaching staff has given
rise to a more intense incorporation of new information technology into classrooms,
to a style of teaching more determined by rationalist criteria, to greater control over
the teaching±learning processes and to a type of assessment based more on academic
and educational results. Although these are plausible objectives, they are not suf®cient
indicators of quality on their own. The so-called `technological pedagogy', widely
used in Spanish pedagogy in the last few decades, is rooted in this rational and
scienti®c view of education (VaÂzquez, 2003). However, even though we might be sure
of having created a more rationalist style of teaching, we cannot be so sure of having
helped to train free citizens, free men and women; in theory we have assumed that we
ought to educate a person in all his dimensions, but in practice we have reduced the
person merely to intelligence or the development of skills and abilities, forgetting, as
Ortega y Gasset (1973) said, that the head has its roots in the heart. A simple review of
teaching methodology, even in the education of values, shows the dominance of
cognitive over socio-affective strategies. Aspects such as interest in another person,
empathy, giving importance to affairs of the community, solidarity, tolerance, civic
responsibility and so on have not formed part of the baggage of an educated person.
The immediate consequence of this approach has been an `intellectualist' education
centred not on the student, on the development of the whole person, but on the
interests of the school and the demands of society, and this translates into the
maintenance of forms of organization which are contradictory if the aim is really to
provide valuable learning to all students (Escudero, 2001). The lines of communi-
cation between the school and the reality which surrounds it have been cut,
postponing the coming of age of students, and an autism has been produced in
teaching which makes it unable to contribute to the training of adults able to integrate
into society, criticize it and transform it.

A new proposal
Among philosophers and educational theorists it is becoming clear that there has to be
much debate about the incorporation of new language and new content into
education; about whether technical±professional training, which is indispensable as
an educational objective in teaching processes, is to be accompanied by other moral
learning. In this way, pedagogical discourse is focused not only on how we are
teaching, but also on what and why we are teaching (Fullat, 1997). There needs to be a
debate on whether it is necessary, in short, to recover the anthropological and ethical
discourse in terms of which educational action makes sense (EscaÂmez, 2003). It is
already acknowledged, in pedagogical circles at least, that it makes no sense to educate
without anthropology; to do so is to proceed without any direction or aim, making
education a simple training exercise. This is not the same as turning our back on the
advances made by pedagogical research, including knowledge from other sciences in
the construction of one's own know-how, explaining some educational processes by
`something more' than common sense or accumulated experience. Rather, it means
that, without abstaining from science, pedagogy is concerned in equal measures of
274 P. O. Ruiz

intensity with both teaching methods and the why of teaching. Positivism has `rei®ed'
educational action, supposedly monitoring it as an intervention in the interests of
ef®ciency. The teacher±pupil relationship has been seen as purely didactic or
procedural, forgetting that in essence the educational relationship is, or should be,
ethical. Wherever education takes place there is a meeting, not between one who
knows and one who does not know, between teacher and pupil, in an exercise of
transmission of knowledge, but between two individuals, one of whom knows that he
is responsible for the other, obliged to give answers in their situation of alterity. Thus
we are faced with a moral relationship, not simply a professional±technical one,
between teacher and pupil.
Until now, most effort has been expended on how to teach certain knowledge,
which has been considered as the main, if not the only, task of teachers. Pedagogical
competence has revolved around the programming of content which is supposed to
better prepare students for the exercise of a profession. For this reason pedagogical
literature always talks about the student as a learner; as someone who principally has
to acquire knowledge, and also attitudes, values, skills or abilities which are
considered necessary for their placement in employment and social life. In a nutshell,
one person has the function of transmitting (the teacher) and the other of receiving
(the pupil). Thus is designed a one-way action which leaves the pupil with no option
but to be the bene®ciary of the supposedly bene®cial action of the teacher. The
teacher's responsibility begins and ends with the programming of content, the
implementation of strategies which promote the best learning, the creation of an
appropriate classroom atmosphere for work and so on. The teacher is perceived and
seen as a demonstrator, a transmitter of know-how and knowledge, but not as a moral
mediator who promotes the personal growth of the pupil.
If the idea is that teaching should have a rationalized basis, it is to be hoped that the
teaching±learning processes start, as far as possible, from knowledge both of the
variables which operate on the situation of the pupils and also of the objectives or aims
which need to be achieved. However, none of this substitutes for the inevitable
mediation on the part of the teacher, who, from what he is, in other words, from the
experience of the values he transmits, is placed between what the students learn and
the path or strategies they follow in learning it. Even scienti®c knowledge, held to be
neutral or objective, is not free of this mediation. It might seem that only the teaching
of values, due to its subjective content, would be affected by this dependence, leaving
the rest of the content to be taught free of such interference. This is not the case. The
teacher is present and active in the learning of the pupils not only because of the
strategies they use, but also on account of the moral credit or authority they has over
them. It is not always possible to separate pedagogic competence and moral
competence in education. At times the teacher trusts in the ef®ciency of the strategies
used in the teaching±learning processes to facilitate the appropriation of a value on the
part of the pupils, allowing strategies to work the miracle of education on their own.
However, this `extraordinary' action never occurs. Any action on the part of the
teacher in the course of implementing classroom strategies must necessarily be
mediated by his way of behaving and acting in the classroom, in other words, by what
 Moral education as pedagogy of alterity 275

she/he is. This is baggage which cannot be discarded and it always accompanies any
professional action in the classroom.
To educate is, and assumes something more than, simply implementing strategies
or directing learning processes. We understand that the most radical and original
relationship which occurs between teacher and pupil in an educational situation is the
moral relationship which becomes reception, not the teacher±technical relationship of
the education expert. Furthermore, this moral receptivity is what de®nes the teacher±
pupil relationship as an educational relationship. When one educates, one does not
see the pupil as a mere object of knowledge, nor as a subject which has to be
understood in terms of all their personal and social variables in order to guarantee the
success of the teaching process, nor as an empty space which has to be ®lled with
knowledge, nor yet as a prolongation of oneself. `Between educator and pupil there is
no power. Power converts asymmetry into possession and oppression, the educator
into a master and the pupil into a slave' (MeÁlich, 1998, p. 149). To educate means
taking to the extreme the prohibition of reducing what is other to sameness, what is
multiple to totality, in the words of LeÂvinas (1993a). `To receive the other in teaching
¼ is to receive what transcends me and is more than me; what goes beyond the
capacity of my self and forces me to come out of myself, out of my self-centred world,
to receive him' (BaÂrcena & MeÁlich, 2000, p. 160). Thus, the educational relationship
between teacher and pupil is not a conventional relationship which can be delimited
by language in which all problems, translated into technical questions, can be solved,
controlled and mastered. For this reason education itself is an ethical event, an ethical
experience, not an experiment in which any reference to ethics comes from `outside'.
In the educational relationship the ®rst step taken is that of reception, of accepting
the other person in the concrete reality of his traditions and culture, not just in the
abstract sense of the individual; it is the recognition that the other person is someone,
valued in his irrefutable dignity as a person, not just a learner of knowledge and
competencies. It is this moral relationship which has to be saved if the intention is to
educate, not to do `something else'. Rarely do educators and pedagogues realize what
it means to be placed in front of a pupil as someone who demands to be recognized as
such. To educate implies, ®rstly, stepping out of oneself, `doing it from the other side,
crossing the barrier' (BaÂrcena & MeÁlich, 2003, p. 210); it is seeing the world through
the experience of the other person. However, in order to do this, it is necessary to
abdicate any form of power, because the other (the pupil) can never be an object of
dominance, possession or intellectual conquest. Secondly, it demands a responsible
or moral response to the presence of the other. In short, one must take responsibility
for the other, assuming the responsibility of helping in the birthing of a `new reality'
through which the world is constantly renewed (Arendt, 1996). If reception and
recognition are indispensable for the newborn to acquire a genuinely human face
(Duch, 2002), reception and taking responsibility for the other are indispensable
conditions for us to be able to speak of education. This is the whole raison d'eÃtre of
education, its original and radical meaning. It is not possible to educate without
recognizing the other (the pupil), without being willing to receive. Neither is it
possible to educate (to engender something new) if the pupil does not identify that the
276 P. O. Ruiz

educator recognizes him as someone with whom it is necessary to establish a moral

relationship and as someone who is received as what he is and all that he is, not only as
what he does or produces. By extension, neither is it a moral relationship established
in terms of an absolute duty outside time and space; nor is it a factum de pure practical
reason, separated from all experience, as Kant maintains. Rather, it is a relationship or
response not to the other person, but from the other concrete, individual and historical
person, who feels, enjoys, suffers and lives, here and now, as LeÂvinas asserts.
However, not only is education de®ned as reception; the person himself, from the
anthropological point of view, also needs to be received.
At the moment of his birth Man is an invalid and disorientated being; he lacks reliable
points of reference and, above all, adequate language to situate himself in the world, that
is, to humanise himself while humanising his environment. ¼ For this task to be carried
out with any guarantee of success it will be necessary to have a set of transmissions which
promote insertion into the appropriate route, in the course of which he will be received
into the bosom of a community and recognised by it. (Duch, 2002, pp. 11±12)

The opportunity to be received is indispensable for the constitution of a human being

as a human and cultural being, since this is not solely a question of biology and nature.
We are therefore obliged to discard any `spiritualist', de-physicalizing interpretation of
the person. This type of approach exists in speci®c historical circumstances. The
person received is not abstract, not without past and present, but someone who lives
here and now. And their `circumstances', their past and their present, are inseparable
from the act of reception. If this were not the case, taking responsibility for the other
person would remain an empty expression, lacking all sense; it would seem sarcastic.
If this moral relationship of receiving the other and taking responsibility for the other
does not take place, there is nothing more than teaching or instruction. Thus,
reception in education leads us towards realism and situates us ®rmly in the socio-
historic conditions in which the pupil lives, freeing so-called pedagogical realism from
a reductionist concept of the pupil. The reality of the subject is not reduced to
personal characteristics or features; socio-cultural baggage and lifestyle also form a
part of `what he is' in each individual case and cannot be left out of educational
processes. The conditions of the pupil's life must also be affected if the intention is not
to reduce education to a neutral action outside time and reality. This intellectual
position leads us to a new model for understanding and carrying out educational
processes in general, and in particular moral education: the pedagogy of alterity, which,
by including the positive elements of other models or approaches to education,
responds more effectively to the ethical, original demands of education. This new
paradigm is beginning to carry more weight in European pedagogical re¯ection and
praxis (Abdallah-Pretceille, 2001).

The pedagogy of alterity

In recent decades there has been a huge increase in the amount of literature published
about education and values. The study of the nature of values and related teaching
strategies ®lls many pages on our shelves (Ortega & MõÂnguez, 2001a). After the initial
 Moral education as pedagogy of alterity 277

concern with the teaching of sciences (knowledge) there has been disquiet and
urgency regarding the teaching of values. However, we have remained with the how of
our teaching, in didactics, and although this in itself is a necessary task in which we
must continue to improve, especially if we are to continue emphasizing the
experiential character of values, I believe that we are overlooking what ought to
have been ®rst on our list in this new approach. We need to leave behind the concept
of teaching with authoritative aims, a concept based on the idea that the student is
someone who is passing through, a user or temporary resident of a space and time
which it is the teacher's job to administer. This re¯ects a school of thought obsessed
with rules and discipline, designed more in order to maintain organizational shape
than to encourage valuable learning for all students. We ought to have left behind this
school of thought, whose aim was more to continue and reproduce, to repeat what has
already been done, than to create, reinterpret and innovate, because it is not possible
to educate for values if education is not based on values. The idea has been to make a
`different' education within the same framework we already had, maintaining the
same organizational structure and shape, the same management mentality and the
same bureaucracy in its running. This dif®cult marriage has given rise to a
schizophrenic situation in a large number of teachers, who ®nd themselves unable
to plan new content and learning strategies. At the same time, in many cases
educational institutions, as well as the administration itself, did not realize in time that
the new educational proposals demanded new forms of organization and teaching.
Darling-Hammond (2001, p. 55) describes this situation accurately: `Just as in
manufacturing industries, schools were developed as organisations based on the
specialisation of functions and management through procedures which were carefully
prescribed and designed in order to obtain standardised products' forgetting that
education is a singular, one-off process, whose results are never certain.
According to the pedagogy of alterity, the educational process begins with the
mutual acceptance and recognition of teacher and student and is based on a
willingness to be responsible for the other person on the part of the teacher, on a freely
given and sel¯ess reception which is offered to the student in such a way that the
student perceives that they are someone to the teacher and that they are recognized in
terms of personal singularity. Without recognition of and commitment to the
individual person there is no education. Therefore, when we talk about education we
are talking about an event, a singular, one-off experience in which we can see ethics as
a genuine happening, where we are mainly provided with an opportunity to be part of
a meeting with another person, to witness the birth of something new which is not us.
`In this adventure, perhaps what we learn is to be available, to be receptive, to be
prepared to respond pedagogically to the demands of an education situation in which
another human being makes demands of us and calls on us' (BaÂrcena & MeÁlich, 2000,
p. 162). From this it would seem that the conclusions are: (a) that one cannot educate
if one does not love, because if one looks only in oneself or is self-centred, one cannot
give birth to a new existence; (b) that the educator is an impassioned lover of life who
seeks in his pupils the plurality of singular forms in which life can exist; (c) the
educator is a person who constantly studies originality and everything which can
278 P. O. Ruiz

liberate the pupil from conformity to a single way of thinking; (d) to educate is to help
to invent or create `original' ways of living one's existence within a culture and not the
repetition or cloning of pre-established models which are to be faithfully reproduced
and which are useful only for purposes of manipulation; (e) to educate is to help to
give birth to something new, something singular, while continuing a tradition which
has necessarily to be reinterpreted.

What does it mean to receive another person?

In the pedagogy of alterity, what does it mean to receive another person? For the pupil
it means feeling recognized, valued, accepted and loved for what one is and as what
one is. It means trust, company, guidance and direction, but it also means acceptance
of being taught (pupil) by the `other' who breaks into our life (the educator). LeÂvinas
(1987, p. 75) expresses it thus:
To deal with the Other in discourse is to receive his expression, where the idea that
implies a thought always overwhelms. Thus it is to receive the Other beyond the capacity
of the Self; more speci®cally, this means addressing the idea of the in®nite. But this also
means being taught. The relationship with the Other, or Discourse, is a non-allergic,
ethical relationship, but the received discourse is teaching in itself. This teaching,
however, is not mayeutic. It comes from outside and brings to me more than I contain. In
this non-violent transitive action the epiphany of the face occurs.

To receive is to be present, with one's valuable experiences, in the life of pupils, as

someone who can be trusted. In reception the pupil starts to have the experience of
understanding, affection and respect for the totality of what he is, and this experience
can also be created in classmates, because they are also received. In future, the
learning of tolerance and respect for other people will be associated for the pupil with
the experience of being received, in terms not only of tolerance for the ideas of others,
but also of being accepted by the concrete person who lives here and now and
demands to be recognized as such. Reception in education is a recognition of the
radical alterity of the pupil and his inalienable dignity; it is stepping out of oneself to
recognize oneself in another person; it is passion (from the Latin `pati') and giving. It
is never a `state', rather it is a `passion', a `passing' through life listening, interpreting
and responding to the demands of others (Duch, 2002). It is refusing to be repeated or
cloned in another person, in order for the other person to have their own identity.
`Between father and son, as between educator and pupil or master and disciple, there
are forms of relationship which are founded in the discontinuity of the who' (BaÂrcena,
2002, p. 513). Furthermore, at the same time it consists of responsibility (from the
Latin `respondere', to answer), commitment, responding. It is fundamentally a moral
act. However, one can respond to the other or for the other. In the ®rst case, we answer
a question, as Kantian ethics suggests; in the second case, we respond to a demand, a
plea, as understood by the ethics of LeÂvinas. We are talking now about the pedagogy
of alterity, of being responsible for the other person. The most appropriate way of
de®ning education is therefore as an ethical event (BaÂrcena & MeÁlich, 2000), i.e. an
unpredictable happening which suddenly takes place without warning, which places
 Moral education as pedagogy of alterity 279

us in front of the other person in such a way that we cannot fail to look and respond.
Unlike a simple `event', a fact, which we can ignore or which can leave us indifferent,
without affecting us, this `happening' speaks to us, transforms us, affects us. If this is
applied to education it forces us to rethink everything because the event, being
unpredictable, cannot be programmed or planned. Thus, in education there is
inevitably a Utopian component which de®es prediction and control. What is more, it
leads us not to separate out the part of education which is at root the moral
component. Reception and taking responsibility for the other is a question of attitude,
of `guts', which de®es any attempt to plan and control it.
However, when we talk about the moral roots of education, we are not referring to
the simple deontology which obliges the teacher, as it does any other professional, to
adopt a moral behaviour while doing his job; we are not concerned here with
submitting people to established rules or a written contract nor to rules and
regulations which orientate educational action in classrooms in terms of ful®lling their
`duty' (MartõÂnez, 1998). This kind of moral obligation would be imposed `from
outside', it would be external to educational action, it would come afterwards. Here
we are talking about `something else', something different, which comes before the
teacher can ful®l his duty, from the very kernel of the educational action and from
what de®nes this action as such. When we educate, we give a response to the other
person, in order that in a new reality they should be themselves and continue thus,
building a new existence in a tradition and a culture. In this way, we install the moral
component without which there would be no education, only manipulation and
domination, right at the heart of educational action. Thus the educator is present to
witness the miracle of new birth, a new creature. This is what makes it possible
for `human society not to always remain the same, but continuously renew itself
through constant births, through the arrival of new human beings' (Arendt, 1996, p.
197).
Education as a moral response translated into the experience of reception, not only
in the teacher but also in the pupil (recognizing the other person and taking
responsibility for them), encourages the creation of a moral climate in the school and
in the classroom, of the right `atmosphere' in which to learn socio-moral values.
Obviously, we do not understand reception as a useful resource for `moralizing' the
life of the school, with a list of prescriptions which regulate the behaviour of pupils and
teachers. We are talking here about `another morality', which makes us responsible for
other people and for the affairs which affect us as members of the community, starting
with the school itself. Interiorizing the relationship of dependence or moral
responsibility with others, even with strangers, means that life is not a `private'
matter, but has unavoidable repercussions as long as we continue to live in society. In
a word, it means that no-one can be indifferent to me. I have acquired responsibility to
any other person, a moral dependence which I cannot shed, even before they ask me
to be accountable.
The link with the other person is initiated simply as a responsibility, independently of
whether it is accepted or rejected, whether a person knows how to assume the
responsibility or not, whether something speci®c can be done for the other person or not
280 P. O. Ruiz

¼ I am responsible to and for the other person without the need for reciprocity, even if it
costs me my life. Reciprocity is their problem. More exactly, in as far as between the other
person and myself the relationship is not reciprocal, I depend on the other; and I am
essentially a `subject' in this sense. (LeÂvinas, 1991, pp. 91±92)

And this moral responsibility to the other person, `who arrives without warning', is
what makes me a moral subject. LeÂvinas' moral is anarchic (without principle); his
moral does not refer to any previous idea or principle (Chalier, 2002).
The relationship of alterity, face to face, which LeÂvinas mentions, is an original
moral relationship. He expresses it through the image of the face: `The face is imposed
on me without my being given the chance to ignore its call, or forget it; I cannot avoid
being responsible for its misery. Consciousness loses its primacy' (LeÂvinas, 1993a, p.
46). And LeÂvinas himself explains what the face is: `In no way is it a plastic shape like a
portrait; the relationship with the face is a relationship with something completely
fragile, completely exposed, naked and, as a result, with whom one is completely alone
and thus can suffer the utter abandonment of death' (LeÂvinas, 1993b, p. 130). The
face is meaning, meaning without context. The other person, in the simplicity of his
face, is not a character in a concrete context. The face is what cannot be killed, its
meaning consists of saying `Thou shalt not kill' (LeÂvinas, 1991). This appearance of
the other person as a face reveals the position of absolute nakedness and vulnerability
from which he orders `Thou shalt not kill', a categorical order which is at the same
time impotent. Despite this, it arouses in the interlocutor, the I, an in®nite
responsibility which con®rms him as a singular and free moral subject. `Singular
because nobody can answer for them or give an answer which is absolutely un-
transferable. Free because the I can choose to open up to the other person and listen
to the order or opt to actively ignore, which is symbolic violence or annihilation'
(Bello, 1997, p. 126). In this way LeÂvinas moves away from the `intentionalist' version
of language, substituting the relationship of the speaker with the other person for the
relationship with his own conscious intention. By dissociating himself from this
version he moves away from the traditional image of autonomy, one of the main
constituents of classical ethics. LeÂvinas occupies territory which has not previously
been occupied: the heteronomy which lies in the relationship with the other person,
who by their mere presence makes the I responsible for another person and con®rms
him as a moral subject (Bello, 1997). Thus ethics does not begin with a question but
with an answer, not only to but also for the other person. Morality therefore has a
heteronomous origin (LeÂvinas, 1987), rather than coming from the autonomy of the
moral subject of Kantian ethics.
In LeÂvinas there is a clear wish to replace self-re¯ection, self-consciousness, the
basis of individualist ethics, with the relationship with the other person as a proposed
alternative morality; he moves away from ethics as self-love and moors himself in
another ethic which constructs its meaning on the foundation of the relationship with
the other. This new concept of ethics inevitably has consequences for education,
especially moral education. It translates into the development of empathy, of
dialogue, of the ability to listen and pay attention to the other person, of sympathetic
solidarity as the main condition of a moral relationship, but also the development of
 Moral education as pedagogy of alterity 281

the ability to critically analyse the reality of one's own environment using just and
equitable parameters, of taking on the pupil in all his reality, because a human being
cannot be understood outside his environment and the network of relationships he
establishes with others. This means that to be a moral person is to be able to take
responsibility for another person. This is impossible without a fundamental
willingness to be open.
If, from the point of view of the pedagogy of alterity, moral education is understood
to be a moral act and receptive attitude, this frees us from paralysing intellectualism
and obliges us to base educational action not on ideas, beliefs and knowledge so much
as on the concrete person that is the pupil. A glance at the literature on intercultural
education provides the best example of this. Schooling has placed intercultural
education in the ®eld of the cognitive as if it were simply a question of knowing,
understanding and respecting the ideas, beliefs, traditions and language of a
community, in other words, the culture of another person, relegating to a secondary
level of importance the concrete subject who lies behind that culture. The Anglo-
Saxon and North American tradition has more heavily stressed the cultural aspects
than the anthropological and moral side, and intercultural education does not end
with respect for others' cultures, rather it ought also to imply the acceptance and
reception of another person. The object of intercultural education ought to be the
human being in the realization of his or her concrete existence, within a tradition and a
culture. This is not reduced to the `intellectual understanding' of cultural differences.
Rather, it is taking responsibility for another person, along with that person's present
and past reality (Ortega & MõÂnguez, 2001a). It is not so much a pedagogy of
difference as an education for deference, for `taking responsibility for the other person,
his happiness and his pain, his smiles and his tears, his presence and his absence'
(MeÁlich, 2002, p. 115). Looking at the inevitable implications of intellectualist
education, Steiner (1998, p. 105) warns us of the dangers implicit in an attitude of
leaving ourselves at the mercy only of ideas and the risk of understanding cultural
differences only at an `intellectual' level. `One of the principal works on the complete
interpretation of HoÈlderlin's poetry was written a stone's throw from a concentration
camp. Neither did Heidegger's pen falter, nor did his spirit quail.' Never have human
rights been talked about so much as in the last century and never have they been so
steamrollered. Ideas and arguments have not been enough to make people live
together peacefully and to stop barbarity. The other person, different and diverse,
demands to be recognized, not as much on account of ideas and beliefs as because of
what they are. The other person becomes important to us more through the immediacy
of face and dignity than through any argumentative reasoning. It is therefore a
question of learning to consider the other person as another person, rather than in
relation to their different culture or belongings; there is no subject without
intersubjectivity, without a fabric of intrinsic relationships with other subjects.
According to Abdallah-Pretceille & Porcher (1996, pp. 49±50)
As a being in the world, who would not exist without it, my free conscience is immersed
among other subjects; all of them, with their own singularity among other singular beings,
also pursue their own existential project, or, in other words, construct their own identity.
282 P. O. Ruiz

Therefore the situation of one subject is always linked to that of other subjects. It is never
determined in isolation or separation, but always by multiple relationships. To sum up,
there is no subject without intersubjectivity, without a fabric of intrinsic relationships
with other subjects. ¼ The fundamental condition of my being a subject is that all the
others should be subjects as well.

Understanding education from the viewpoint of the radical alterity of the pupil means
seeing education as a moral action of reaf®rming the other person in all that they are,
not just in part. The personage of the pupil becomes the object of my reception, my
moral dependence, instead of his or her ideas and beliefs. These latter simply come
with the pupil.

The pedagogy of alterity and political commitment

The pedagogy of alterity as a model of moral education inspired by Levinas' ethics
does not end with the `intimate' `you and I' relationship formed by particular
individuals present in the same place at the same time. Inevitably it also deals with
relationships with a `third party'.
Language, like the presence of a face, gives neither complicity with the preferred being
nor enough `you and I' to forget the universe; in its spontaneity it rejects converting love
into something clandestine which causes its spontaneity and meaning to disappear. ¼
The third party looks at me in the eyes of the other ¼ the epiphany of the face as a face
introduces humanity. ¼ The face, in all its facial nudity, shows me the indigence of the
poor man and the foreigner. (LeÂvinas, 1987, p. 226)

Education, from the viewpoint of alterity, has a necessary social dimension. It is ethics
and politics, it is passion and commitment. To deprive education of these dimensions
is to reduce it to simple indoctrination. In ethical terms, education is not extricable
from the problems which affect real people, rather it springs from them, from the right
to a digni®ed and fair life, from the right to say one's words, words of the past and of
tradition, the transforming words of the present, which reveal reality and allow a
person to discover the contradictions which prevent him from being a man or a
woman, but also the as yet unsaid words of the future, the words of hope. A person is
intrinsically projected into the future, is the anticipation and the projection of
something (MarõÂas, 1996). Therefore, education itself is a social and political act.
Politics is a part of the very nature of education and for this reason the problems of
education are not solely pedagogical, but also, in essence, deeply political.
Necessarily, education is a moral commitment to the world. Arendt (1996, p. 208)
goes so far as to say that it is an act of love: `Education is the point at which we decide
whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and thus save it from
the ruin which would be inevitable if it were not for renovation, the arrival of new,
young people'. The aim of educating is thus not limited to the ®eld of personal
characteristics; `psychologizing' education implies the training of the subject as a
social being, incorporating all his or her reality. Therefore, education cannot be
extracted from the function of transforming the social reality where the pupil lives, in
 Moral education as pedagogy of alterity 283

such a way that they can become a valuable person, as is implied in education as a
whole.
The origin of this morality is not reason, as in idealist morality, but feeling, `pathos',
solidarity with other human beings who deserve happiness and recognition. It is not
the faculty of reason which moves us to act without duty, but neither is it a mere
irrational feeling. Rather, it is an affection (feeling affected, suffering) in our
conscience for the recognition of others in certain circumstances. Thus there
is no absolute demand from on high or from the conscience. Rather, there is
something obvious, something `natural', which is the aspiration of all human beings,
of all life, to be happy, to have their inalienable right to dignity recognized. There is
a feeling, `charged with reason', that to attempt to justify it with argumentation
would be mocking or sarcastic towards all those whose dignity is denied. For
LeÂvinas, in a world full of `others' or `third parties', the response can be indifference,
power seeking or recognition and reception. In other words, the indifference
which denies them any right to reality, the power seeking which attempts to dominate
others at any cost and the reception of someone who recognizes himself in the
other. In these situations the introduction of the `others' takes place through
the transparency of a face which presents itself in front of us. LeÂvinas calls this
introduction space `ethical', since the moral response is not `comprehension', but
`compassion' (`cum-pati'), understood as a question of `gut feeling' of shared
suffering, of human qualities; in other words, a moral question. In LeÂvinas,
morality ®nds in `compassion' its most complete expression: `For me, compassionate
suffering, suffering because the other is suffering, is just a moment in a far more
complex and complete relationship of responsibility towards the other' (1993b,
p. 133).
Horkheimer (1986) also says that compassion for a broken and abused man shows
us the true face of real humanity. For him, morality takes place only where people
listen to their feelings of indignation, compassion, love and solidarity, without
recourse to any underlying absolute reason. These feelings can be expressed in two
historical ways: compassion and politics (Horkheimer, 1999). For as long as history
for most of humanity is a story of suffering and that majority is unhappy, there will be
compassion. This is not only the origin of morality, but also its constitutive
dimension. Thus, compassion is not a feeling of condescending pity which paralyses
moral responses to the indignity suffered by certain people. On the contrary, it is `a
political commitment to help and liberate, which leads us to work towards
transforming the unjust structures which generate suffering and situations of
dependence and alienation' (Ortega & MõÂnguez, 2001b, p. 108). Compassion does
not replace justice, they are inseparable. Behind compassion there lies a global sense
of justice which is also present in the human being in front of us. `Compassion
necessarily leads to justice, it does not avoid it' (Mardones, 2003, p. 223). Whoever
receives compassion is being paid an `outstanding debt' and whoever gives it simply
pays his dues. But it would be possible to fall into the temptation of considering those
who receive compassion as abstract entities, without history or geography. In fact,
they are men and women of our time `who have been through a hell of deprivation and
284 P. O. Ruiz

degradation on account of their resistance to submission and oppression'

(Horkheimer, 1973, p. 169).
If, indeed, ethics is compassion and politics, reception and commitment, then, on
the other hand, it seems clear that discourse ethics is insuf®cient to give a moral
response to the concrete situations which affect people today, insuf®cient for a
moral education which is responsible for the other, here and now. In Habermas's
project of intersubjective universal reason (Habermas, 1992) there is a real risk
that reason might be reduced to the domain of argument by those who have power
and the power to speak, depriving `others' of any chance to participate effectively
in discourse. He presupposes an ideal situation in which to speak, with pragmatic
symmetry between interlocutors, an equitable distribution of communicative com-
petence and equal opportunities to send and receive speech acts. This remains an
`illusion'. What about those who do not have a voice to say their words? This `ideal'
dialogic situation is actually impracticable, projecting the historical person into a
situation of `cosmic exile' and putting distance between itself and the concrete
situations where the con¯icts and lives of the moral interlocutors exist (Ortega
& MõÂnguez, 1999). This `oversight' concerning the social conditions which affect the
real life of all human beings is the weakest part of discourse ethics and its inability
to provide a moral response to the real situations which worry people today.
Therefore it is necessary to look for a real pragmatism instead of focusing on potential
conditions for a rational dialogue, conditions which cannot exist in this world
(Camps, 1991).
This is why here we choose a material ethic, distanced from any idealism unable to
offer any response other than formal reasoning and argumentation, which is attractive
but insuf®cient. This justi®es education ethically and politically, as reception and
commitment, as the moral act it is here proposed to be. We do not understand
education to be something which occurs in `no man's land', without a historical
subject. It will always be a political, critical act which transforms those situations
where morality is obstructed, where justice and the right to happiness are not allowed
to these (and all) concrete individuals. According to MeÁlich (1998, p. 37), `The task
of educating implies a commitment to the world, to tradition and history. Only if we
decide that the world we have created and where we live is worthwhile, and that we
can reconstruct it, only if we take responsibility for it, are we in a position to transmit it
to new generations. If you don't want responsibility for the world, don't educate'.
The pedagogy of alterity does not allow us to carry on thinking and `educating' in
current circumstances, where three-quarters of the world's population live in
conditions of inhuman poverty, millions are deprived of their freedom and are
socially and culturally excluded or persecuted for thinking `differently', as if it had
nothing to do with educational action. It seems to me that to act in this way is
enormously irresponsible and turns the sword on those who worry us and whom we
want to educate, converting education into a weapon of totalitarian power. At the
same time as it is a moral act which reaf®rms human beings and human qualities,
recognizing dignity and, in short, af®rming life, education is also a criticism and an
accusation of situations and actions which degrade and offend human beings. It is a
 Moral education as pedagogy of alterity 285

negative pedagogy directed at avoiding evil, refusing to accept present immoral

reality, resisting all attempts to deny human dignity. `If comradely compassion
(education) is to work, it must maintain that negative dialogue, giving no concession
to the slightest optimism regarding the historical age or situation. The march
towards humanisation is better undertaken, there are fewer surprises in store, along
the path of eliminating evil than that of designing good' (Mardones, 2003, p. 227).
Only in this way, as resistance and rejection, is negative pedagogy credible; otherwise,
it is mere af®rmative illusion. However, the pedagogy of alterity is also a pedagogy
of memory which attempts to give justice to those forgotten by history, remembering
the victims of the past, those who were buried alive and entombed in anonymity, as
if they had never been born (Arendt, 1999). It attempts to give us back the eyes of
the oppressed, to see the world through the eyes of the victims, differently, from
another perspective, inverted (Mate, 2003). Thus educating is also telling a story, the
story of those who came before us in the ®ght for justice and freedom and in whom
today we recognize ourselves for what we are and what we have become as humans.
Education is also memory and narration. `If any one human ability has suffered in
post-modernity it is memory. The present is one of a crisis of memory. In post-
modernity, due to time being accelerating, the past has been devoured by the present,
and we might even say that the future has been placed in the hands of current
demands' (MeÁlich, 2002, p. 101). It is impossible to conceive of an education which
takes into account only those present in an ethical relationship. Responsibility is
demanded of us also by the men and women of the future and those who have gone
before us: the former oblige us to build, expecting nothing in return; the latter require
that their existence be prolonged so that they are rescued from the anonymity of
death.

Some dif®culties
Since our standpoint is not based on reason but on feelings and passion, perhaps some
might say that this way of understanding ethics and morality is tinged with `romantic
irrationality'. I must warn though that all the above has nothing to do with the
emotivism of Stevenson, who reduced what is moral to mere individual feelings with
no rational component. Rather, we are dealing with `another rationality', that which
refuses to accept reason as mastery, self-preservation or egoism, that which is
reluctant to reduce moral reason to instrumental reason. This latter discounts and
sidelines the best aspects of moral feeling, `pathos' and compassion, solidarity and
love, as the remains of a mythology. `It means a rationality in which all questions ®t,
not only those which can be expressed conceptually, mathematically or technically.
A rationality which can deal with all conceivable questions, questions of being
and questions of rules, as well as questions about what is called existence' (MeÁlich,
1998, p. 48). The idea is to resist the triumph of the desire for mastery, dominance
and power over compassion and solidarity with those human beings who are
excluded and humiliated. Resistance, according to Horkheimer and Adorno (1994,
p. 149), against `the enemies of compassion, who did not want to identify man
286 P. O. Ruiz

with misfortune. For them the existence of misfortune is an infamy. Their sensitive
impotence did not tolerate the fact that man should be pitied'. This feeling is not
irrational but rational, although it is different from prevalent reasoning, which does
not speak in favour of morality, does not point in the same direction as moral feeling,
but in the direction of egoism and power (SaÂnchez, 2001). Therefore, we are not
cancelling out reason but `reconstructing' it, rehabilitating moral reason, self-re¯ective
reason, which resists the seduction of power and dominance and is able to reorientate
progress towards its human aim, which shatters the logic of anonymity and keeps alive
the memory of the oppressed and the excluded, the inextinguishable impulse of men
and women towards happiness (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1994); in other words, `the
hope that the injustice which permeates the world at the moment should not be the
®nal word' (Horkheimer, 2000, p. 169). In a society built on ethical principles it
should not be necessary to de®ne or justify the inviolability of each person, his
inalienable dignity, because that would be a further attack on the victims, adding
insult to the injuries of the innocent. `I imagine', Muguerza (2003, p. 20) writes, `that
Kant would have been surprised by the idea that human dignity ¼ needs to or can be
submitted to a referendum in order to endorse it. Faced with a seeming attack on
human dignity, he would say that individual conscience does not need any consensus
to defend dignity'. However, neither can education be adequately understood if it
does not include `pathos', the world of feelings. These feelings play a more decisive
role in personal history than reason and, to a certain degree, they are the place where a
person lives, the surroundings of personal life from which contact is made with others
with the real chance of human presence (MarõÂas, 1993).
On the other hand, some may wish to ®nd a contradiction in the heteronomous
origin of morality as derived from the thinking of LeÂvinas and the materialist nature of
Horkheimer's morality. I do not see this as a contradiction. Compassion and
reception, or taking charge of the other, responding for the other in the thinking of
LeÂvinas, does not contradict the `natural' feeling of rebellion and protest against
Horkheimer's abused and humiliated victims. Admittedly the words foreigner, widow
and orphan are not used referentially or denominationally by LeÂvinas to say
something about their sociocultural characteristics nor does he claim to construct
knowledge about certain social situations. Rather, he uses them to symbolize the
naked relationship of alterity, beyond the identity of its terms (Bello, 1997). The
orphan, the widow, the foreigner, as the expression of the face of any human being in
LeÂvinas, are suppressed and exploited and in need of compassion for Horkheimer.
They both move away from Kantian formalism and to the concrete situation of the
human being they offer the same answer: compassion as commitment (taking
responsibility) and protest. We seem to be looking at a `materialistic' morality, not a
formal one, which emphasizes the other as a moral subject (the foreigner, the widow,
the orphan) and in the other a `third person', in other words all those who share the
human condition, especially the humiliated of the world. They follow parallel paths in
order to reach the same destination and the same intellectual position: the af®rmation
of the other out of compassion.
 Moral education as pedagogy of alterity 287

New demands
Another anthropology, another ethic?
I believe that we must base education, especially moral education, on different
anthropological and ethical premises from those which currently inspire pedagogical
thinking and praxis. Today we need to think long and hard about the anthropological
and moral model (what we teach and why) which supports educational practice. We
have inhabited a model which understands education in a conceptual framework,
which reduces it to technological planning, where the priorities are academic results
and professional success. But education is not simply academic learning processes and
professional competence. On the contrary, it affects and touches on all the dimensions
of a person. It is this whole that is committed in a process of positive transformation,
allowing a `new birth', the birth of `something new', not repeated. This implies
understanding and `doing' education as a moral act of recognition and reception,
taking responsibility for another person with all their past, all their future, but most
importantly all their present; it demands to be conceived as a commitment to life, with
the birthing of someone as a new being, but also as a denial of any totalitarian way of
understanding the world and the human being.
Until now pedagogy has owed a debt to Kantian thought, which conditioned
educational praxis and re¯ection, imbuing it with an idealistic vision of morality and
the human being. In practice, the existence of other anthropologies has been
ignored, and these anthropologies explain the human being not per se, in terms of
autonomy and self-consciousness, but as a reality open to the other, with the other
and for the other. Obviously, any anthropological choice necessarily has implications
for ethics and, of course, for educational proposals. These proposals are not arrived
at `just like that', at random; they spring directly from the anthropological
position which inspires them. It is axiomatic to say that there is no education
without anthropology, nor without an ethic to justify it. But what anthropology,
what ethic? Images and explanations of human beings are numerous; so are
ethics. The problem for pedagogy has been that its only anthropological and moral
support has been the individualist, isolationist explanation of the human being,
more speci®cally the image of a person which dates from the Enlightenment and
which Kantian philosophy repeats in all its versions. The hegemony of Kantian
thinking has not allowed any other interpretation of the human being. The
human being has been made into an abstract entity, ideal, without environment,
ahistorical, by the af®rmation of man in his autonomy, his condition as an aim in
itself, the need to establish the unconditional nature of morality. Furthermore, the
need to af®rm principles has denied a reality: that a human being cannot be
explained without others, without the other; that the other is a dialogical reality and
this openness to the other constitutes and de®nes the human (Buber, Ricoeur,
Lacroix, LeÂvinas, Mounier and so on.). There are other `explanations' or interpret-
ations of the human being which necessarily lead us to another ethic and another
morality and, as such, to other educational proposals. It ought not to be surprising,
then, if from different anthropological and ethical premises there arise new
288 P. O. Ruiz

educational proposals which respond differently to the different ways of understand-

ing human beings.
However, pedagogy demands deep re¯ection not only on life inside the classroom
but also on what's going on in the social and historical context into which pedagogical
action and discourse must necessarily be inserted in order for real life to enter the
classroom. The pedagogy we need today must be based more on the importance of the
other, on his or her historical existence. It is impossible to go on educating as if
nothing were going on outside the school grounds or had happened in the immediate
past, using paradigms which nowadays are clearly insuf®cient, without knowing what
type of men and women, indeed what type of society, we hope to construct.

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