Peter Roberts devotes the final pages of this ambitious and timely volume to drawing out the pedagogical implications of the philosophical work he undertakes in the preceding six chapters. He engages, in other words, in the painstaking, uncertain, and ever-necessary labor of "rethinking the role of education." Education, Roberts writes, "is anything but a smooth, easy process; it is difficult, messy, complex, and necessarily lifelong. Once the process has begun, it cannot be stopped. Kierkegaard's philosophical approach was, in Bykhovski's words, one of 'restlessness, agitation, passion.' Education is similar to this" (117). Kierkegaard's three forms of despair-"being unconscious in despair of having a self…, not wanting in despair to be oneself, and wanting in despair to be oneself" (12)can help us understand this restlessness, agitation, and passion as sustained by a particular set of tensions. In Kierkegaard's model, "our capacity for reflective consciousness" (117) might be seen as the basis of our relationship to despair. Reflective consciousness opens a clearing between the self and itself, establishing the relationship of the self as an other to itself. This clearing-this reflective space-opens onto the world, and, in turn, provides the space for despair to emerge.Roberts illustrates this in his reading of Dostoyevsky's "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" as a story that is, at least in part, about the acquisition of reflective consciousness. The inhabitants of the "other earth," to which the Ridiculous man travels in his reverie, come to "seek knowledge, where before they had been content to simply accept things as they found them" (75). But they also "suffer greatly" (75) as they begin to feel the weight that comes with this recognition of being a self, among others, in the world. This weight is the realization that we are both mortal and immortal-that there is a pull upward and a desire to leap toward the divine, but the gravity of humanity and the earth always draws us down again. It is precisely this realization that marks the shift from Kierkegaard's second form of despair ("not wanting in despair to be oneself") to the third ("wanting in despair to be oneself"). In the former, one does not recognize the impossible task that he or she * Rachel Longa