Education and the Limits of Reason

‘Inviting us to move away from what has reduced education to an economy of measure, assessment, and application, this book is a golden opportunity to journey inwards, from the bounds of education’s limits to the paradox of its immanence. Doing so through the works of literary giants like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov, Roberts and Saeverot regale us with a way out of the quandary by which education has been consumed. Education and the Limits of Reason provides its readers with a powerful iteration by which we could all begin to liberate ourselves from the limits of schooled reason, where we have mostly and wilfully lost the capacity to critique. One hopes that this volume also offers teachers, young and old, neophyte or experienced, a renewed hope in the passions that pushed them to take up their profession in the first place.’- John Baldacchino, Professor of Arts Education and Director of the Arts Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison

‘The fiction of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov subverts our settled and often moralistic worlds. Peter Roberts and Herner Saeverot show how wider and deeper rationalities are at work in these great writers: we are caught up in the ‘educative deceit’ of Lolita, for example. In contrast to the frantic cyber-world, they challenge us with the rewards of slow, contentious reading, where the familiar is made strange –there’s reason-ing way beyond traditional logocentric philosophy-of-education. Roberts and Saeverot are utterly honest in exposing how slow, unsettling literature expands our capacity to reason. This book is a significant contribution to the humanity of education, which, through its very publication, unsettles the current reductive momentum of education into the social sciences.’ - David Beckett, Professor in Education, The University of Melbourne, Australia.

‘Roberts and Saeverot provide in this scholarly reading of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov an expertly constructed bridge between philosophy, literature and education. Much needed, timely and insightful, the authors and their volume deserve a rightful place in an ancient and today ever more important field of interdisciplinary enquiry.’ - Liam Francis Gearon, Senior Research Fellow, Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, and Co-