This book offers both an intellectual history and a sustained argument for the inescapability of education's immortality agenda. It seeks a Hegelian synthesis of common ideas about living in one's students by giving them something of oneself, developing the image of immortality as an a-temporal, mythic, meaning-making, relational enterprise. Chapter 1, "Education and the Longing for Immortality," discusses education as immortality, classical roots, contemporary Platonists and Sophists, the problem of egotism, and working toward equilibrium. Chapter 2, "Immortality Alone," discusses death's distance and return, education and finitude, education as immortality, learning the science of immortality, and awakening to the voice of the other. Chapter 3, "Living through Others," discusses teaching and the transivity of living on, teacher influence as a mode of caring, caring and the truth of teaching, and education, authenticity, and immortality. Chapter 4,"The Mechanics of Immortality," discusses the race against time, the magic of ritual, and hermeneutics and the retrieval of meaning. Chapter 5, "Further Questions," presents two closing questions. (Contains approximately 190 references.) (SM)