The Education of Consciousness: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Abstract

Attempting to explore and push the margins of philosophy of education, this article describes Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and its characters, staying inside the and observing the education of their consciousness. The description offered is limited to educational reflections on what happens, avoiding normative questions and concerns. However, the conclusion hints towards ways in which philosophers of education who are interested in normative questions and concerns might approach this text in ways which this article does not. The expressions used in this paper – dispositions, consciousness, unconscious– are gestural and figurative rather than exhaustive and scientific. The argument is not concerned with what these words mean in general but rather with what they might mean and might elucidate for educational thought in the context of reading The Waves. This article rejects the need to do something un-literary by comprehensively elucidating key concepts, saying why they are important, relating them to everyday life, and defending claims like «dispositions are in-educable». The educational resonances of the text itself are presented as evidence, context, and point of interest. Implicit to the argument of this paper is a critique of limited and institutionally biased conceptions of experience as education.