Edith Stein: per non costruire castelli in aria. La relazione maestro-allievo come forma di Bildung fenomenologicamente fondata

The paper presents a research in the teacher-pupil relationship through the thought of Edith Stein, Husserl disciple born in Breslau 1891 and died in Auschwitz 1942. Analyzing her pedagogical essays treating this special relationship, it tries to expose a complete vision of education founded on a solid philosophical basis. The teacher-pupil relationship needs to be founded on a clear anthropological vision, phenomenologically described as the real essence of human being, constituted by living body, psyche, spirit; expressed in the sexual “species” and in the radical individual form. But empathy is also the necessary “instrument” to build a respectful educative relationship: so the teacher has to know anthropology and has to live the meeting with his/her pupil in a radical form of empathy, i.e. in the total respect of the alterity of every person. The natural place of human education, which Edith Stein inscribes within the important tradition of German Bildung, needs a community context and the mediation of symbolical- cultural systems, but always inscribed in a confident relationship similar to the mother-son one.