The Troubadour of Knowledge

Book excerpt: What do we do when we raise a child, teach a student, or educate a person as a member of society? For the French philosopher Michel Serres, all these forms of pedagogy require painful yet exhilarating departures from home and encounters with otherness. In this wide-ranging meditation on learning and difference, Serres explores numerous pathways in philosophy, science, and literature to argue that the best contemporary education requires knowledge of both science's general truths and literature's singular stories. He heralds a new pedagogy that claims that from the crossbreeding of the humanities and the sciences a new educational ideal can be born: the troubadour of knowledge.