The ‘first’ educator? Rethinking the ‘teacher’ through luce irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference

This article examines historical imagery of the teacher in relation to a story drawn from ancient Greece: that relating to the teacher of the mythic hero Achilles in The Iliad. The article explores the possibility that this early image of a teacher — the aging warrior Phoenix — could be a source for later representations of the teaching function. In an effort to place this historical image into a larger context of cultural symbolism relating to pedagogy, the article asks, why is this ‘first’ educator a man? By what narrative procedure was a man contrived to assume roles such as nurturing and childrearing that had always been (and continue to be) represented as feminine occupations? Using the work of Luce Irigaray, the article raises issues about the sex of the teacher in order to disrupt the seemingly obvious sex-neutrality of modern images of education, which define teaching and learning as humanistic, as social and cultural practices for which gender is irrelevant, and through which abstract disciplines such as literacy and numeracy are represented as transcending the physicality of the sexed body. It attempts to expose the constant deference modern educators unconsciously pay to patriarchal models of the pedagogical relationship, and to reveal the repression of sexual difference at the core of the mythology from which Western images of education have been generated.