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This paper explores the concept of Gelassenheit as developed in the later thought of Martin Heidegger. It seeks to show the relevance of this to aspects of education, especially to the ways that teaching can be enhanced in order to do better justice both to the learners and to what is studied. Thinking in this way helps to overcome the dominance of representational thought, a kind of thinking that imposes barriers on the understanding and restrictions on how the world can come to be. In the end the thinking illustrated by Gelassenheit constitutes a more responsible and more responsive relationship to the truth. My paper provides examples of ways that this can enhance education. In the end, with a caveat, I revisit and re‐examine aspects of Heidegger's work about which I think there is reason to be cautious. This is to encourage a degree of vigilance in relation to Heidegger's thought, but in a way that does not deny its powerful insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of Levinas's philosophy for education has been widely discussed. In 'Levinas: Ethics or Mystification?' however, Alistair Miller questions whether Levinas's work is of value at all, raising doubts about whether his philosophy can, in any way, be helpful when it comes to practical ethical decision‐making, especially within education. Levinas's ethics, he argues, in the light of its lack of rational argument, amounts only to poetic imagery and mystical incantation. The purpose of this paper is to read Levinas in relation to education against this indictment by Miller. This paper proceeds by investigating the basis of Miller's arguments, in the light of exegesis of relevant aspects of Levinas's work. My purpose is not the positing of a new system or the formulation of systematic ideas of ethics but rather achieving an understanding of human experience, especially in contexts of teaching and learning, under a different, more accurate description. In doing so I attempt to show that Levinas's philosophy indeed provides a ground for ethics—that is, a means of understanding the practicality of ethics differently, beyond systematic approaches. In the last section, where education is discussed more directly, ethics will be seen as its very condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]