Exploring Shame as a Student’s Self-Destructive Experience: A Study through Sartre’s Concept of Shame

This study aims to interpret the self-divisive situations experienced by students in the classroom as an emotion called shame, and to attempt an educational philosophical interpretation of this emotion. The researcher diagnoses that shame, which has been mainly understood as an opportunity for moral self-cultivation, has lost its educational effectiveness in an educational culture centered on entrance exams and filled with the logic of competition and conflict, and is simply acting as a ‘self-destructive shame’ that erodes various goals pursued by our education. The concept of ‘shame’ presented by Sartre provides great insight into understanding the types of shame experienced by students in educational practice. According to Sartre, shame is an emotion that is caused by ‘the other as a gaze’, and this other consistently gives the subject of the emotion an experience of negative self-understanding. Due to this negative aspect, shame operates in a state where educational possibilities such as self-reflection and improvement are lost, that is, it manifests as a purely negative self-destructive emotion. Based on this understanding of shame, follow-up research is needed to explore the possibilities of educationally meaningful shame in modern society.