What does it mean to conceive of education as the mastery...

What does it mean to conceive of education as the mastery of the relationship between generations and not as the mastery of the younger generation itself? Following Agamben's reading of Benjamin, we could say it means neither must the older generation master the young generation nor the younger the older, nor must both generations be surpassed in a third configuration that would represent their dialectical synthesis. Rather, Agamben writes, 'according to the Benjaminian model of a "dialectic at a standstill", what is decisive here is only the "between", the interval or, we might say, the play between the two terms, their immediate constellation in a non-coincidence'. When the oedipal tension between the generations is deactivated, the both can see the other as a harbour of potentials or images that, when encountered in the space between, can propel the lives of each to a new, more intelligible mode of existence, the collective forward dawning of thought wrought by the disappearance of the subject.

Aaron Hillyer, The Disappearance of Literature