BEYOND THE HUMAN LEARNER: ONTOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON POSTHUMAN EDUCATION

Abstract

Contemporary education has largely been organised around a human-centred ontology in which the learner is constructed as an autonomous, rational and intentional subject who acquires knowledge from teachers, texts, technologies and the surrounding environment. The emergence of posthumanist thought challenges this assumption by questioning human exceptionalism and proposing that learning is produced through relational encounters among humans, technologies, material objects, animals, environments and other forms of more-than-human agency. This conceptual paper examines the ontological and ethical implications of posthuman education. Drawing upon recent scholarship in posthumanism, new materialism, posthuman pedagogy and educational research, the paper argues that posthuman education should not be understood simply as education enhanced by advanced technologies. Rather, it involves a fundamental reconsideration of what a learner is, how learning comes into being, whose agency matters, and what responsibilities education carries toward human and more-than-human worlds. Ontologically, posthuman education conceptualises learners as relational, embodied, materially situated and continually becoming. Ethically, it shifts education from individual achievement towards responsibility, reciprocity, care, ecological coexistence and accountability for the consequences of knowledge-making. The paper proposes a relational posthuman educational perspective organised around five principles: relationality, distributed agency, materiality, ethical responsibility and ecological interconnectedness. It concludes that posthuman education can contribute to more sustainable, inclusive and ethically responsive educational futures while retaining critical attention to inequality, coloniality, technological power and human responsibility.