In this essay I chart a range of difficulties for the field of human rights education, a field

that has traditionally been preoccupied with universal principles. These difficulties

arise in conjunction with three critiques of the view of morality implicit in this version

of human rights education: Levinas’s ‘‘interhuman’ ’realm of ethical responsibility, the

vicissitudes and resistances to learning elucidated by psychoanalysis, and the complex

nature of the faculty of judgment as described by Hannah Arendt. Although perhaps

philosophically irreconcilable, these three critiques combine to suggest the potential

for human rights education to become an education that attends to the ethical responsibility that occurs apart from the rational aims of knowledge. Rather than merely an instrumentalized, moralized method for ‘securing the future, this latter approach provides an important location for what Arendt called ‘‘thinking without a banister.’’