Pedagogy of the possessed: teaching, certainty and wonder in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons

This essay focuses on two teachers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Demons. The essay examines the teachers’ different assumptions about human beings’ ability to know the world in full and with certainty. Gary Saul Morson’s idea of the confrontation in Russian literature of wonder and certainty is used to examine the teachers’ different assumptions about the reach of human knowledge. Demons, on this reading, shows how a teacher who teaches under the assumption that human beings can map the world with certainty offers students a limited view of life and leaves students vulnerable to the demons of a range of perilous beliefs. A teacher who teaches in light of truths that transcend human understanding, in contrast, invites students to look upon the world in wonder and to forgive and ask forgiveness for our limited knowledge. Beyond showing some of the problems with and alternatives to a philosophy of education popular in nineteenth-century Russia, the essay concludes, Demons can inform the efforts of teachers and policymakers today who want to make education more intellectually adventurous and morally serious.