When education forsakes for ends or beginnings, it is deadly. (Grumet, 1995, p. 17) In ... In her response to question of is to education, Madeleine Grumet argues that most schooling practices have forgotten that learning that matters to anyone is rooted in history, context, and practice. It has no real starting points or finishing lines but, rather, is always and already in middle--in spaces amid past and future, fixed knowledge and emergent interpretation, expectation and hope. Grumet's (1995) comments are presented as a caution to educators, urging us to resist temptation to organise schooling around a set of foundations that are assumed to be universal and unchanging. is basic to education, she contends, is an issue that can only be considered in terms of place, era, intention, desire. Grumet explains: What is basic to education is neither system that surrounds us nor situation of each individual's lived experience. is basic to education is relation between two (p. 16). is basic, then, are acts that link text, community, nature, and school. Education exists and consists in these sorts of junctions--that is, etymologically, the places where things meet. More provocatively, perhaps, education is not just about junctions, midsts, or meetings, but manner in which things are brought together. Jerome Bruner (1986, 1990) refers to such acts of linking in terms of subjunctive that is, dealing with ifs of experience. Linguistically, subjunctive is verb form that is used to refer to contingent or hypothetical action. The subjunctive is used to flag imagined spaces; it is glue of language that, when properly situated in midst of assertions, transforms what is thought to be known into new possibilities for insight. In her novel Unless, Carol Shields (2002) adds that we also make use of other parts of speech to invoke subjunctive: A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to link them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet. (p. 313) The subjunctive exists only in middle, and it is perhaps for that reason that it is, as Bruner (1990) notes, one of most difficult aspects of language to learn. Even so, it is perhaps most important, required for all imaginative and propositional thought. Unfortunately, much of formal education is conceived and framed in terms of absent middles, articulated as inevitable tensions or irresolvable dyads that include personalised/generic, mind/body, theory/practice, thought/action, knowledge/knower, self/other, and individual/collective. The list goes on. Such constructs, we would argue, have forsaken their pedagogical responsibility. They have replaced need to interpret and propose--that is, need to enter subjunctive spaces--with impersonal and nonnegotiable slash. The assumption of contradiction has obviated obligations to imagine and reconcile. So, what if slash were to be replaced by subjunctive? How might education look if it not just tolerated but embraced possibilities like individual-yet-collective, public-but-also-private, and self-therefore-other? In middle, but not in centre ... Or, phrased somewhat differently, what might this middle be that Grumet suggests is place of our existence? This is not an easy question in context of formal education, where terms abound that seem to suggest a sense of middleness. For example, one might imagine that could be construed as core curriculum, currently defined in terms of those knowledge domains associated with literacy, mathematics, science, and social studies. …