Existentialism (education)

Educational existentialism is a philosophy of education, drawing on existentialist philosophers including Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Buber, that centers the individual student's own freedom, choice and responsibility for constructing personal meaning, favoring an open curriculum of humanities, arts and moral questions that provokes self-examination over a fixed body of content imposed from outside, and prizing an authentic teacher-student relationship, in the Buberian sense of genuine dialogue between an I and a Thou, over a purely instructional one. It remains a minority position among educational philosophies but is regularly taught alongside Essentialism, Perennialism, Progressivism and Social Reconstructionism as the fifth of the traditionally enumerated stances.