Education as Finding the Other in Self

Abstract

As Naoko Saito’s essay, “Gifts from a Foreign Land: Lost in Translation and the Understanding of Other Cultures” notes, international education discourse often suggests that education should lead to mutual understanding of foreign cultures and learning from cultural difference. This stance is more hopeful than another common attitude: that there are inscrutable, essential cultural differences worldwide that are difficult, if not impossible, to bridge. However, within the mutual-understanding approach, one’s experience of fear and alienation in visiting unknown and foreign worlds “tends to be obliterated,” the essay claims. One’s language as a means to comprehend the world and one’s criteria of judgment are challenged in such contexts, creating a sense of loss. Yet through becoming lost and losing one’s sense of centrality to the world, one can be deeply transformed and reborn — not just learn about difference, but learn about one’s self in the world.