WORLD-CENTRED EDUCATION

This book makes an intervention in a long-standing discussion by arguing that

education should be world-centred rather than child-centred or curriculum-
centred. This is not just because education should provide students with the
knowledge and skills to act effectively in the world, but is first and foremost
because the world is the place where our existence as human beings takes place.
In the seven chapters in this book Gert Biesta explores in detail what an exis-
tential orientation to education entails and why this should be an urgent concern
for education today. He highlights the importance of teaching, not understood
as the transmission of knowledge and skills but as an act of (re)directing the
attention of students to the world, so that they may encounter what the world
is asking from them. The book thus shows why teaching matters for education.
It also highlights the unique position of the school as the place where the new
generation is given the time to meet the world and meet themselves in relation
to the world. The extent to which society is still willing to make this time avail-
able, is an important indicator of its democratic quality.
This important text demonstrates, not only to academics, but also to students,
teachers, school administrators, and teacher educators, the urgency of a world-
centred orientation for education today.

Gert Biesta is Professor of Public Education in the Centre for Public Education
and Pedagogy at Maynooth University, Ireland, and Professor of Educational
Theory and Pedagogy at the Moray House School of Education and Sport,
University of Edinburgh, UK.
WORLD-CENTRED
EDUCATION
A View for the Present

Gert Biesta
First published 2022
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CONTENTS

Preface vi
Acknowledgements x
About the Author xi

1 What Shall We Do with the Children? 1

2 What Kind of Society Does the School Need? 13

3 The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two

Paradigms of Education 25

4 Subjectification Revisited 40

5 Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching 58

6 Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education 75

7 World-Centred Education 90

Bibliography 103
Index 111
PREFACE

The ideas presented in this book can be seen as the culmination of the writing,
speaking, and teaching I have been involved in over the past 35 years or so. In
one sense the trajectory goes back to 1987, the year in which I published my first
academic paper. But my fascination with education and, more specifically, with
its “form” – a theme I discuss in Chapter 6 – is of a much older date; a theme
running through my biography more than a deliberate choice or decision.
The chapters in this book speak to a “missing dimension” in contemporary
education, to a sense of loss and a kind of forgetfulness. They stem from a con-
viction, which has grown over the years and not only has become stronger but
also has gained in focus and precision, that something is missing in contemporary
educational discourse and practice. They stem from a conviction that what is
distinctively educational1 about education has disappeared from sight or has, at the
very least, moved to the margins of the contemporary educational conversation
(see also Biesta & Säfström 2011; Biesta 2018a).
This conversation nowadays is rife with references to “learning” and “devel-
opment.”Yet one thing that seems to be forgotten again and again is that “learn-
ing” and “development” are directionless terms. To the extent to which the word
“learning” has any meaning at all,2 there is always the need to specify what the
learning is about and what it is supposed to be for. And the same holds for devel-
opment which, in itself, can go in any direction. Just to say, therefore, that the task
of the school is to support children’s learning or promote their development is
rather meaningless, perhaps also because it tends to forget that criminals need to
learn and develop as well.
This is not to suggest that the problems are solved once we put learning and
development in a normative, moral or ethical framework. Even to learn with a
sense of purpose or to seek to develop oneself in a particular direction does not
 Preface  vii

really capture the “reality” of education. After all, one can learn and develop on
one’s own, whereas education at least requires two: an educator and one “receiv-
ing” the education (and there are, of course, further questions to be asked about
what it means to educate and what it means to “receive” education).
The main idea explored in this book, is that what is at stake in this relationship
is not what the one “receiving” may learn from the educator or how the one
“receiving” the education may develop in response to the affordances provided
by the educator. Rather the key issue at stake is what the one “receiving” will do
with what he or she has learned and with how he or she has developed and with
who he or she has become and, more specifically, what they will do when it mat-
ters, that is, when they encounter something in their lives that addresses them and
calls for them. What – or who – this “something” is and when and from where it
may arrive, is something we can never know in advance, which also means that
it is fundamentally beyond our control. It is given, not taken.
It is in this remarkable and precious region that the educational work of
education takes place. It takes place without guarantees – which means that, in
a sense, it is “impossible” (see Donald 1992, pp. 1–16) – and hence always entails
a risk (see Biesta 2014a).Yet, this risk is beautiful – an aesthetic term3 – because
what is at stake in this risk is the very appearance of the “I” in the world. It is, in
other words, the event of subjectification, that is, of the arrival of the “I” in the
world as subject of its own life, not as object of forces or desires from “elsewhere.”
I am not suggesting that this is all that matters in education, or that schools,
colleges and universities should only be concerned with this. But I am suggesting
that when this dimension is absent, when either it is forgotten or actively being
obliterated, that education ceases to be educational. It turns into the production
of things – of learning outcomes or of students with a particular character or in
the possession of a particular set of competences. It becomes a process of objec-
tification, or turns into a demand, on students, for self-objectification. It trans-
forms education into applied psychology, applied sociology, applied neuroscience,
applied learning theory, and so on, but forgets, even with an overload of good
intentions, to pose the question whether anyone is “there.”
Yet it is this simple question, which can be enacted in many different ways,
that goes to the heart of what makes education educational. In the seven chapters
that follow, I will do my best to make the case for this particular way to engage
with education or, in more precise terms, to engage with education education-
ally. I hope that my explorations will be useful, although I must disappoint those
readers who are looking for concrete suggestions for how this should be done.
The reason why I am not providing such suggestions is not because the ideas
put forward in this book bear no meaning for educational practice, but because
I believe that education is a thoroughly practical art.
This means that the point of educational scholarship is not to tell educa-
tors what they should do, but to provide them with resources that may inform
their educational artistry (on the latter term see Stenhouse 1988; Eisner 2001),
viii  Preface

that is, their own educational judgement and inventiveness. In this regard I also
fully agree with Richard Peters’s observation that to be educated “is not to have
arrived at a destination (but) to travel with a different view” (Peters 1965, p. 110).
The best I can hope for, therefore, is that this book may slightly alter the outlook
of educators, will slightly redirect their attention, so that they may see new things,
or see familiar things in a new light.
While the journey has been my own, I have had the good fortune of encoun-
tering many fellow-travellers on my way.They have inspired me, they have encour-
aged me, they have given me new questions, they have also interrupted me, they
have confused me from time to time, and, in doing so, have altered my own out-
look and trajectory. During the journey I have tried as best as I could to engage
with what came my way.This has involved risks, and some risks worked out better
than others, but in all cases the risk was worth it, even if it wasn’t always easy.
As with many things that were planned to happen in 2020, the writing of this
book has experienced some interruptions. I had received a most generous invita-
tion from Professor Shigeo Kodama to spend the month of March 2020 at the
Graduate School of Education of the University of Tokyo, and had planned to
make significant progress with my writing during my stay and to discuss a draft of
the book with colleagues and students. Unfortunately, this visit had to be cancelled
and it was only towards the end of 2020 that I managed to pick up the thread of the
writing again. I am, however, very grateful to Professor Kodama for the invitation,
also because it provided an important impulse for considering this book project in
the first place, and I do hope to be able to return to Japan in the future.
I would like to thank Barbara Thayer-Bacon for the invitation that allowed
me to explore the relationship between school and society in more detail and
to work on this wonderful question of what kind of society the school actually
needs. I am grateful to Christoph Teschers for alerting me to this question in the
first place. I would like to thank Jim Conroy for providing the inspiring setting
in which I was able to probe questions about gifts, giftedness, and the gifts of
teaching. Ingrid Lindell, Daniel Enstedt and Christer Ekholm created a unique
opportunity to revisit my ideas about the purposes of education, and particularly
this tricky idea of “subjectification.”
The idea of the Parks–Eichmann paradox came to me in the context of work
I did with Patricia Hannam, David Aldridge, and Sean Whittle on religious lit-
eracy. I am grateful to Patricia for our ongoing explorations of the meaning of
world-centred education for the field of religious education. Johannes Bellmann
has been very helpful in deepening my understanding of the complexities of
the German discussion about “Bildung” and “Erziehung.” I am grateful to Karin
Priem for introducing me to the work of Klaus Prange, and to Karsten Kenklies
for providing clarification on some intricacies of German educational thought.
I would like to acknowledge Daniel Haskett’s efforts in keeping Homer Lane’s
ideas in print, and would like to thank him for his generous sharing of secondary
literature on Lane.
 Preface  ix

Lærke Grandjean keeps reminding me that the struggle for education must
go on, and keeps encouraging me to continue, while Steen Nepper Larsen keeps
me grounded by asking the right questions at the right time. Much of the think-
ing that has gone into this book has benefitted from the slow conversations with
colleagues at the University of Agder, Norway. I would like to thank Tore Dag
Bøe, Bård Bertelsen, Lisbet Skregelid, Monica Klungland, Aslaug Kristiansen,
Dag Øystein Nome, Sigurd Tenningen and Rolf Sundet for our joint intellectual
quest, which has taken us in remarkable directions. I would also like to thank
Herner Sæverot for his ongoing contributions to the field of educational theory,
John Baldacchino for his remarkable energy and enthusiasm, and Carl Anders
Säfström for his generosity and friendship.
A final word of thanks goes to all those who have contributed to the transla-
tion of my work over the years. I would particularly like to thank Masamichi
Ueno who, together with colleagues, has made a major effort in making my
work available in Japan, and Kang Zhao for his significant and ongoing efforts to
make my work available in China.
Rest me to say that I was already quite surprised when my “trilogyc – Beyond
Learning (2006a), Good Education in an Age of Measurement (2010a) and The
Beautiful Risk of Education (2014a) – became a quartet with the publication of The
Rediscovery of Teaching (2017a). I am even more surprised that this has now devel-
oped into a quintet. In Me-ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things, Bertolt
Brecht writes: “Every teacher must learn how to stop teaching, when the time
comes. That is a difficult art. Only a few are able, when the time is right, to allow
reality to take their place” (Brecht 2016, p. 98). Perhaps the arrival of the fifth
volume of the “quintet” means that the time has come to heed Brecht’s advice.
Edinburgh, January 2021

Notes
1 I am aware that the way in which I use the adjective “educational” may sound unfa-
miliar and, in a sense, even odd, but I invite the reader to stay with me as things hope-
fully will become clear throughout the chapters. For my own encounter with a
reviewer who thought that using the word “educational” in this way was simply non-
sensical see Biesta (2011).
2 Elsewhere (Biesta 2014a, pp. 69–70) I have argued that “learning” is neither a verb – it
doesn’t describe any particular activity – nor a noun – it doesn’t refer to a particular
phenomenon or process – but at most can be understood as an evaluative term, that is
as a judgement we make about change, after the change has occurred. We can never
tell, in the here and now, whether we are learning anything, but can only come to this
conclusion after the event, that is, retrospectively. There is, therefore, no particular
activity to which we can refer as “learning” or a “learning activity,” which means that
it is better to use such phrases as “studying,” “trying out,” “making an effort,” and so
on. I return to this discussion in Chapter 6.
3 I refer to the original sense of “aesthetic” as referring to being perceivable by the
senses.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For Chapter 2 I have made use of ideas first published as “What kind of soci-
ety does the school need? Redefining the democratic work of education in
impatient times,” in Studies in Philosophy and Education 38(6), 657–668 (2019).
For Chapter 3 I have made use of material first published as “Can the prevail-
ing description of educational reality be considered complete? On the Parks-
Eichmann paradox, spooky action at a distance, and a missing dimension in the
theory of education,” in Policy Futures in Education 18(8), 1011–1025, 2020).
Chapter 3 is based on “Risking ourselves in education: Qualification, sociali-
sation and subjectification revisited,” published in Educational Theory 70(1),
89–104, and a first exploration of Marion’s work was published as “The three
gifts of teaching: Towards a non-egological future for moral education,” in the
Journal of Moral Education (2020). I am grateful for the opportunity to use this
material in this book.
AUTHOR

At the time of publication, Gert Biesta (www.gertbiesta.com) is Professor of

Public Education in the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth
University, Ireland, and Professor of Educational Theory and Pedagogy at the
Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, UK.
In addition, he holds visiting professorships at the University of Agder, Norway,
and the University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland. He is co-editor of the British
Educational Research Journal and the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, and
associate editor of Educational Theory. From 1999 until 2014 he was editor-in-
chief of Studies in Philosophy and Education. He also co-edits two book series with
Routledge: New Directions in the Philosophy of Education (with Michael A. Peters,
Liz Jackson and Marek Tesar), and Theorizing Education (with Stefano Oliverio).
During 2011–2012 he was President of the Philosophy of Education Society
USA – the first president from outside of North America. He has served a four-
year term on the Education Council of the Netherlands (“Onderwijsraad”)
(2015–2018), the advisory body of the Dutch government and parliament. In
2020 he was appointed to the National Scientific Curriculum Committee in
the Netherlands. His work focuses on the theory of education and the theory
and philosophy of educational and social research. He also has an interest in
education policy and in questions concerning teaching, teacher education, and
curriculum, particular with regard to citizenship education, arts education, and
religious education. In all this he has a concern for the relationships between
education, democracy and democratisation and for the public role of schools, col-
leges, and universities. He has published widely on these topics and his work has,
so far, appeared in 20 different languages. Recent books include: The Rediscovery
of Teaching (Routledge 2017); Obstinate Education: Reconnecting school and society
(Brill 2019); and Educational Research: An Unorthodox Introduction (Bloomsbury
2020).
1
WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE
CHILDREN?

This is a book about education. It is not the first book ever written about edu-
cation, and it will definitely not be the last. One may well wonder, therefore,
whether there is still anything to add to the ever-increasing stream of publica-
tions, and, more importantly, whether there is still anything new to say about edu-
cation. The ambitions I have with this book are, however, relatively modest. I am
not presenting revolutionary new insights about education, nor am I providing
a new agenda for education policy, or a new model or approach for educational
practice. I actually tend to think that one of the main problems in contemporary
education is that there are too many models and approaches on offer, and that
so many of them come with the promise that they will be able to “fix” educa-
tion once and for all. Research from a wide range of disciplines continues to
make a significant contribution to the proliferation of such “solutions.” But the
global education measurement industry (Biesta 2015a) may well have become
the strongest voice in the discussion about what education is and what it is sup-
posed to be for.
In light of this, it is rather disappointing to see that so many policy makers and
politicians are unable to put findings from PISA and similar systems in a mean-
ingful perspective. Their knee-jerk responses – either taking pride in being at
“the top,” or acknowledging that there are “serious problems” that need “urgent
attention” – do little in challenging the “educational order” (D’Agnese 2017)
which the global educational measurement industry seem to have managed to
establish (see also Derwin 2016). And while policy makers and politicians may
have room for manoeuvre, albeit within the complex dynamics of politics and
policy making, this is far less so at the level of schools, colleges, and universities.
Here teachers and administrators are often simply subjected to ongoing policy
directives that provide little opportunity for their own judgement and agency
2  What Shall We Do with the Children?

(see Priestley, Biesta & Robinson 2015). This is particularly problematic when
their jobs are being made dependent upon producing an ongoing increase in
student test-scores or securing constant student progress along predefined trajec-
tories (see, e.g., Baker et al. 2010; Ravitch 2011).
One rather curious aspect of many of these developments is that they all
stem from good intentions, particularly the promise to make education better. In
my rather long career in education I have actually never met anyone who was
deliberately trying to make education worse. Everyone seems to be committed
to educational improvement, although ideas about what counts as improvement
and what meaningful ways of achieving it are, vary widely (see also Biesta 2016a).
And there are, of course, also elitist agendas that focus on improvement for the
few, but not for the many. All this, plus the sheer size of the educational “enter-
prise” around the world, helps to explain why the field seems to be moving in so
many different and even opposite directions. With so many “pushes” and “pulls”
it has become increasingly difficult to maintain or even establish a sense of direc-
tion. And this is a problem for policy makers and politicians as much as it is for
teachers and administrators, and even for pupils and students themselves.
All this is further exacerbated by two developments. One is the rather poor
quality of the educational discourse itself, which, as I have argued extensively in
previous publications (see particularly Biesta 2006a, 2010a, 2018b), has become
dominated by the rather bland and educationally unhelpful language of learning,
and the proliferation of this language has been going on and on. The other is the
fact that educational problems, including the problem of how to improve educa-
tion, are predominantly seen as matters of control. Not only are there huge sums
of money being invested in research that seeks to find out which educational
“interventions” are most effective in generating particular “outcomes.” Also,
students themselves are increasingly being made complicit in this ambition, for
example when they are called to become “self-regulated learners” who should
take “ownership” of their own learning – a strategy that may sound liberating but
actually is a demand for what I tend to see as forms of self-objectification (see
also Vassallo 2013; Ball & Olmedo 2013).

Existing as Subject
What seems to be forgotten in all this – and some might say: what is conveniently
forgotten in all this – is that pupils and students are not simply objects of edu-
cational “interventions,” effective or otherwise, but that they are subjects in their
own right.What seems to be forgotten, in other words, is that the whole point of
education can never be that of subjecting students to ongoing external control,
but that education should always be aimed at enhancing the ability of pupils
and students to “enact” their own “subject-ness,” to use an awkward formula-
tion. This is perhaps the main problem with the language of learning, because
as soon as we claim that education is “all about learning,” we quickly forget that
 What Shall We Do with the Children?  3

what really matters is what pupils and students will do with everything they have
learned. We are too quickly drawn into monitoring and measuring the learning
itself, looking for the interventions that produce the desired learning outcomes,
trying to control the whole machinery, and thus easily lose sight of the fact that
children and young people are human beings who face the challenge of living
their own life, and of trying to live it well.
In this book I will argue that it is this existential question – the question how
we, as human beings, exist “in” and “with” the world, natural and social – that
is the central, fundamental and, if one wishes, ultimate educational concern. It
is also the reason for suggesting that education should be world-centred, that is,
focused on equipping and encouraging the next generation to exist “in” and
“with” the world, and do so in their own right. This is not to suggest, of course,
that existing in one’s own right is the same as “just doing what one wants to do.”
On the contrary, to exist as subject “in” and “with” the world is about acknowl-
edging that the world, natural and social, puts limits and limitations on what we
can desire from it and can do with it – which is both the question of democracy
and the question of ecology. This is one of the main reasons why I continue to
favour the word “subject,” as it highlights at the very same time that we are origi-
nators of our own actions and that we are subjected to what the world, natural
and social, “does” with our “beginnings,” to use an Arendtian term (see Arendt
1958, p. 184). “Subject” – or, to use another awkward word: subject-ness (see
also Biesta 2017a, chapter 1) therefore does not refer to individuals but to how
individuals exist (see also Böhm 1997).
The existential orientation put forward in this book is not meant as a denial
of the fact that children develop and learn. But as John Dewey already has help-
fully noted, “pure” child-centred education that only takes its direction from
how children learn and develop is actually “really stupid” (Dewey 1984, p. 59).
As educators we should at the very least be interested in the direction in which
children develop and in the substance of what they might learn, since learning
and development can go in so many directions, and not all of them are helpful for
engaging with the challenge of trying to lead one’s life well. Pure curriculum-
centred education, however, is equally “stupid,” because just trying to get cur-
riculum content into children and monitor retention and reproduction, without
any concern for who they are and for what they might do with all the content
they are acquiring, misses the existential point of education as well, and would, in
my view, therefore miss the point of education altogether.

“Education”
A complicating factor in all this has to do with the word “education,” and even
more so with the fact that the English language only has one word to speak “in”
and “about” education, whereas other languages, such as German and Dutch or
the Scandinavian languages, have a more diverse and, in a sense, more nuanced
4  What Shall We Do with the Children?

vocabulary. There is, of course, something nice about the openness of the word
“education,” as it is sufficiently vague to allow for a range of different interpre-
tations and definitions. Yet this can also be confusing, particularly when people
think that they are speaking about the same “reality” but are actually referring to
rather different phenomena or agendas. The solution for this is not to end up in
a fight over the “right” definition of the word or over who actually “owns” the
meaning of “education.” The challenge rather is to develop ways of speaking that
allow for a sufficient degree of precision in articulating what matters and what
should matter in “education.” This is the reason why I continue to argue that
language really matters for education (see Biesta 2004), and why I continue to
develop new and hopefully more precise and more meaningful ways of speaking
“in” and “about” education.
One thing I should clarify at the outset, therefore, is that when I use the
word “education,” I tend to think of it as a verb and not as a noun. For me,
“education” refers to an activity, that is, to something educators do. In more
formal language I would say that education is a form of intentional action,
that is, something educators do deliberately, albeit that for me this includes the
perhaps slightly odd but educationally important category of intentional non-
action. After all, sometimes the best thing to do as educators in a particular
situation is precisely not to act, not to intervene, not to say anything, not to rub
it in, but to bite our lip, because “rubbing it in” may have the opposite effect
of what we hope to achieve. For me, then, “education” does not refer to more
or less “amorph” processes that in some way may or may not have an influence
on children. I am not denying that such processes take place and that they may
have an impact, but I am suggesting that we retain the word “education” for
the more specific category of intentional action or, if that works, of intentional
educational action.

What Shall We Do with the Children?

This immediately raises a number of further questions, such as why such action
actually exists, what such action seeks to achieve, and how such action can be jus-
tified (on the latter question see, for example, Flitner 1989[1979]; Prange 2010).
With regard to the first question we could follow the German educational-
ist Siegfried Bernfeld (1973, p. 51) in his suggestion that education is society’s
response to the “fact of development,” although I tend to prefer Hannah Arendt’s
formulation that education has to do with “our attitude toward the fact of natal-
ity,” that is, “toward the fact that we have all come into the world by being born
and that this world is constantly renewed through birth” (Arendt 1977, p. 196).
In more everyday language we could say, therefore, that education starts with this
simple question: “What shall we do with the children?”
While this question may sound simple, it actually brings us quickly to some of
the main predicaments and enduring questions of education. The question first
 What Shall We Do with the Children?  5

of all highlights the existence of a “we,” and thus raises the question of who this
“we” is, that is, what the identity of being an educator is, and also what gives this
“we” the right of even wanting to “do” something with “the children” in the first
place. The question also highlights the existence of a category called “children,”
which raises further questions about who is included in this category, what our
notion of the child in the context of education actually is, and why “we” would
assume that “the children” actually need education.
With regard to the latter point, we could say that the question what we shall
do with the children is actually rather presumptuous – as if it is for “us” to decide
and for “the children” simply to accept. This not only helps to see that in a very
fundamental sense education always arrives as an unwanted intervention; it is not
something “the children” asked for. It also helps to see, which is crucial as well,
that education always arrives as an unwarranted intervention. Education always
arrives as an act of power. In retrospect, children may turn back to their educa-
tors and affirm that their interventions were actually quite helpful, but there is
no guarantee whatsoever that children will ever do so. If it happens, we could say
that the children “authorise” the power enacted by the educator, thus transform-
ing (unidirectional) power into (relational) authority.1 But as educators we can
never assume or take for granted that this will happen, sooner or later, which
means that as educators we always also are risking ourselves in education. (I will
return to this in Chapter 4.)

So What, Then, Shall We Do with the Children?

When we look at the history of Western education, we can discern a number of
different answers to the question what “we” should do with “the children,” that
is, to the question what the point of education might be. Interestingly, many of
these answers still play a role in contemporary thought and practice.
In ancient Greece, for example, a main “agenda” for education, under the
name of paideia (παιδεία), was to give free men – not women, slaves, or arti-
sans – the time and resources to cultivate themselves towards civic excellence
(in Greek: ἀρετή). We can still recognise this, positively, in notions of Bildung
and liberal education and, negatively, in elitist conceptions of education. When,
with the Reformation, the Bible became a book that everyone was allowed to
read, the question of making sure that everyone can read joined the educational
agenda. This is the theme of “literacy,” which again is still very much present in
contemporary education. The main theme of the Enlightenment was the claim
that everyone should think for themselves and should be allowed to think for
themselves, that is, make use of their own rational capacities.We can still find this
today in notions of education for critical thinking, although what is interesting
is that Immanuel Kant, one of the main philosophers of German Enlightenment,
did not so much emphasise the need for developing the capacity for critical
thinking as the need for developing the courage to use one’s rational capacities.2
6  What Shall We Do with the Children?

Towards the end of the 19th century education became increasingly interested in
providing educational opportunities for everyone, and doing so in equal measure.
And again, this is still an important theme today, for example in the UN’s sus-
tainable development goals and in the ambition many countries have to provide
equal educational opportunities for everyone.
In light of these impressive ambitions, it is rather disappointing to see that the
educational conversation in our time seems to be focused on scoring “high” in
PISA, becoming as good as “Finland” (or wherever the latest “top” performing
country may be), taking up the first place in whatever league-table, and so on.
Now one could say that this is simply the choice we are currently making – albeit
that the question who actually has a voice in these choices remains key, of course
– just as in previous eras different choices were made. It is true that answers to
what we believe education should aim for are historically contingent: they work
out differently in different historical periods and with regard to different histori-
cal developments. But that doesn’t mean that we can just pluck them from the air.
It rather means that the answers we give depend on the histories we seek to relate
to; the histories we recognise and acknowledge as “our” histories.

Education After “Auschwitz”

I wish to suggest that, from an educational point of view, we still live in the
shadow of “Auschwitz.” This is not just because “Auschwitz” has shown us that
the systematic eradication of (other) human beings is a real possibility but also
because, in doing so, it has shown us that the systematic objectification of (other)
human beings is a real possibility with disastrous consequences.That is why I tend
to agree with the opening sentence of Theodor Adorno’s essay “Education after
Auschwitz,” in which he states that “the premier demand upon all education is
that Auschwitz not happen again” (Adorno 1971, p. 79). Interestingly, Adorno
adds that this demand has such a priority “before any other requirement” that
he believes that he “need not and should not justify it,” as “to justify it would be
monstrous in the face of the monstrosity that took place” (ibid.).
It is, of course, one thing to agree that this is the first demand upon all educa-
tion, but still another to figure out how education might ensure that Auschwitz will
not happen again. In this regard, Primo Levi’s observation that because Auschwitz
has happened “it can happen again” (Levi 1986, p. 199), is perhaps more realistic
and also more honest. After all, it acknowledges that “Auschwitz” is not simply
the evil that is outside of us and should be kept at bay. It rather acknowledges that
we all carry the possibility of “Auschwitz” also inside ourselves.
“Auschwitz” not just shows us the possibility of evil, including how “banal”
evil actually can be (Arendt 1963). “Auschwitz” also confronts us with our free-
dom; with the fact of our freedom, the “issue” of our freedom, the question of
our freedom, the riddle of our freedom and even the mystery of our freedom.
“Auschwitz” shows us that we can act, and also reminds us that we must act, that
 What Shall We Do with the Children?  7

is, that our life is not laid out before us but that we are agents in it – which is not
to suggest, of course, that our agency is total and without limits. We always act in
a world, natural and social, that is not of our making and offers both possibilities
and constraints. We can, of course, use our agency to forfeit our freedom. We can
decide to hand over our freedom to external authorities, where acting in good
faith – which can be important in some situations – turns into acting with blind
faith. And we can end up in situations, or “find” ourselves in situations, where the
whole idea of our freedom simply hasn’t arisen or is impossible to arise (on this
point see Freire 1993).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762), is one of the first
texts that put the question of freedom explicitly on the educational agenda. In
the book, Rousseau argued that part of the work of the educator is to protect
Emile from too strong influences from the outside world. This is indicated in the
famous opening sentence of the book: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands
of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man” (Rousseau
1979, p. 37). Rousseau also showed in much detail, however, what the educator
should try to do in order to make sure that Emile is not overwhelmed by forces
from the “inside” – the “passions,” as Rousseau calls them.
Unlike popular belief, Rousseau is therefore not advocating a romantic ver-
sion of child-centred education in which the world is seen as “bad” and the
child is seen as “good” (on this see also Böhm 2016). Rather, what is at stake in
Rousseau’s “project” is the possibility for the child to exist as subject of its own
life in the world and with the world, so to speak, and the work of the educator
is aimed at safeguarding the “space” within and the conditions under which the
child’s existing-as-subject can become a possibility.
In more general terms we can say, therefore, that Rousseau depicts the work
of the educator as being aimed at giving the new generation a fair chance at
their existence as subject, and this, so I wish to suggest, is a key justification for
“us” wanting to do something with “the children.” It is, of course, still the child
who will have to “enact” its own subject-ness, because that is the very thing the
educator cannot do for the child. What educators can do, however, is encourage
children to “take up” their subject-ness, helping them not to forget the possibil-
ity of existing as subject of their own life, and working on the conditions under
which this remains a real possibility.

The Broad Remit of Education

The question that may arise at this point, is whether this is all “we” should be
doing with “the children.” Is this all that education is about and should be about?
That is not the position I will be advocating in this book. In addition to the
important work of what I have called subjectification – bringing the subject-ness of
the child “into play” – education also has an important role to play in providing
the new generation with orientation into the traditions, cultures, and practices
8  What Shall We Do with the Children?

of past and present. This is the important and difficult work of socialisation. Such
work is not just difficult because it raises all the complex questions of how such
traditions, cultures and practices can be (re)presented in the curriculum, how we
can make meaningful selections, knowing that it is not possible to (re)present
everything to everyone (on this see Mollenhauer 1983). The work is also dif-
ficult, because it always runs the risk of forgetting about the subject-ness of stu-
dents, turning them into “objects-to-be-socialised,” and measuring the “success”
of education in terms of how closely students have met our ideals. This is where
many, even well-intended socialisation agendas can easily go wrong.
In addition to subjectification and socialisation, education also has important
work to do in providing the new generation with “equipment for living,” to
use Kenneth Burke’s helpful phrase (see Burke 1973; see also Rivers & Weber
2010). This is the difficult work of qualification, that is, of providing students with
the knowledge and skills that make it possible for them to act in the world. And
again, this work is not just difficult because of the question which knowledge and
skills should be “on offer.” The work is also difficult because, again, there is a risk
that the subject-ness of the student is forgotten in the desire to make the work
of qualification efficient, effective and eventually “perfect” (on the problems with
perfection, see Biesta 2020a). This, as I have already pointed out, is a real risk in
the “age of measurement,” an age obsessed with the production of measurable
“learning outcomes” rather than that it focuses on encouraging children and
young people to become knowledgeable and skilful in their own right.
I am, therefore, not advocating that we replace qualification and socialisation
with subjectification, but am suggesting that we should consider changing our
educational priorities. Right now, qualification seems to occupy the centre of the
educational universe. Socialisation tends to enter the scene when there are con-
cerns about the behaviour of children and young people, which often is the
rationale for the inclusion of such things as values education, character education,
citizenship education, or environmental education. In such a set-up, the concern
for the student-as-subject and for the subject-ness of the student often appears at
the very end, as a kind of luxury, when the alleged basics have been taken care of
and there is still some time left – which means that it may happen for some and
not for others, or may only happen haphazardly.
My suggestion would be to put this curricular hierarchy on its head as a kind
of “flipped” curriculum (not a flipped classroom), by acknowledging that the
question of the subject-ness of the student is the real “basic” of education. Of
course, this subject-ness does not exist in a vacuum but always “in” and “with”
the world, which means that education needs to provide the student-subject with
orientation and needs to equip the student-subject with knowledge and skills, so
that the student-subject can find its way in the world and can act in the world.
But without a concern for the subject-ness of the student, that is, for the pos-
sibility for the student to exist as subject, education ceases to be educational and
becomes the management of objects, effective or otherwise.
 What Shall We Do with the Children?  9

An Outline of the Book

The chapters in this book centre around two ideas. One is, that educational ques-
tions are fundamentally existential questions, that is, questions about how we try to
exist as human beings, how we try to live our life in and with a world that is not
of our making and that is under no obligation to give us what we want from it or
expect from it.3 The existential challenge, to use a beautiful phrase from Hannah
Arendt (1994), is that of “trying to be at home in the world” (see also Biesta
2019a), knowing that to be in the world requires that we leave our “home.” The
other key idea in this book is, that the educational “work”4 related to this existen-
tial challenge comes to the student. It is therefore not about students’ learning or
understanding – which go out from the student towards the world – but about
what crosses their path, about what speaks to them, what addresses them, what is
given to them, irrespective of whether they were looking for it or not, and irre-
spective of whether they wanted it or not. This means that the basic educational
“gesture” is that of teaching, although I hasten to add that educational teaching – or
with a slightly better phrase: teaching that matters educationally – is never about
controlling the student, but is precisely about alerting them to the possibility of
their subject-ness, to put it briefly (see also Biesta 2017a).
In Chapter 2, I discuss these issues in terms of the relationship between
“school” and “society” where, instead of asking what the schools should “do” for
society – which seems to have become the most prominent way in which the
task of the school is nowadays being conceived – I ask what society should “do”
for the school so that the school can be school, the free, emancipated time that
can help in giving the next generation a fair chance at their subject-ness. I sug-
gest that to the extent to which contemporary society has become an “impulse
society” and to the extent to which this logic has also become part of educational
institutions, the chances that such institutions can indeed still do the work of
education are significantly diminished.
In Chapter 3, I zoom in on the suggestion that educational questions are fun-
damentally existential questions. On the one hand, through a discussion of what
I refer to as the Parks–Eichmann paradox, I try to make clear what existential
questions are and how they are fundamentally different from other ways in which
we can look at human beings and their learning and development. I also discuss
how this reflects on education itself, suggesting that in addition to the widespread
idea of education as a process of cultivation, we need a different, existential “para-
digm” in order to ensure that the existential core of education can be properly
addressed, in educational theory as much as in educational practice.
Chapter 4 looks in more detail at educational practice, by exploring what
the idea of “subjectification” as one of the three domains of educational pur-
pose entails, which also means that I try to make clear what it is not about, as
many aspects of education that, at first sight, may look like they have something
to do with subjectification often turn out to be “after” something else. The
10  What Shall We Do with the Children?

discussion about subjectification also gives me an opportunity to highlight what

the educational work vis-à-vis the existential dimensions of education looks
like, highlighting three crucial qualities of this work: interruption, suspension,
and sustenance.
The idea that education is a form of intentional action and therefore some-
thing that comes to the student – something that is given, not taken – forms
the central focus of Chapter 5 where I explore the idea of “givenness” against
the background of a summary of my concerns about the language of learning
in education and the more general “learnification” of educational discourse and
practice. In dialogue with ideas from Jean-Luc Marion I try to show what it
means to take “givenness” seriously – which, as I try to explain, is precisely not
a matter of “taking.” I also provide examples of where givenness shows up in
education by highlighting three “gifts” of teaching.
I continue the discussion about teaching in Chapter 6 where, relying on the
work of Klaus Prange, I explore the idea that the form of teaching itself, rather
than just the intentions with which we teach, bears educational significance.
Starting from the rather old idea of teaching as a process of the (re)direction
of someone else’s attention, I reconstruct main aspects of Prange’s operational
theory of education in order to give meaning to the idea that the educational sig-
nificance of teaching is not something that needs to be supplemented to teaching
from the outside, but actually can already be found in the very way in which
teaching is enacted, namely as an act of pointing towards the world which, as
Prange explains, is always a showing of the world to someone. I suggest that, edu-
cationally, the gesture of teaching is therefore about calling the student to attend
to the world and to its own attending.
In the final chapter, Chapter 7, I (re)turn to the idea of world-centred educa-
tion, focusing on the question how best to understand our encounter with the
world. Rather than thinking of this in terms of the gesture of learning and com-
prehension – which is a gesture that puts the student in the centre and makes the
world into his or her object – I explore the case for the opposite direction, where
the world speaks to me, addresses me, and in this sense tries to teach me. This
gesture doesn’t put the student in the centre but rather puts the student in the
spotlight. The guiding question here, therefore, is not about what I would want
from the world, but what the world is asking from me. I suggest that this is the
central “gesture” of world-centred education and that it is precisely in this region
that the educational work of education takes place and has its place.
The guiding intuition behind the idea of world-centred education is nicely
captured in Bertolt Brecht’s observation about the modern theatre, which, for
Brecht, “mustn’t be judged by its success in satisfying the audience’s habits but by
its success in transforming them” (Brecht 1964, p. 161). This means that it needs
to be questioned “not about whether it manages to interest the spectator in buy-
ing a ticket – i.e., in the theatre itself – but about whether it manages to interest
him in the world” (ibid.).
 What Shall We Do with the Children?  11

A View for the Present

This, then, brings me to the subtitle of this book: “a view for the present.” It
seems to be common sense to suggest that education is for the future and should
therefore be future-oriented. The idea of future-oriented education has actually
become a very popular trope in contemporary education, particularly in relation
to the suggestion that the world is changing so fast that we do not really know
what the future will look like. This has become an argument for saying that edu-
cation should no longer focus on giving children knowledge – often referred to
as “old knowledge” – but should rather focus on giving them the skills to adapt
quickly and effectively to ever changing circumstances. There are, however, quite
a lot of things wrong with this suggestion. One is that life can never just be about
adapting to circumstances and for education to provide the skills for doing so
swiftly and smoothly. The first question that needs to be asked in any situation
is whether the particular circumstances are worth adapting to, or whether there
is a need to resist and refuse adaptation. The suggestion that children and young
people should just be made ready to adapt is therefore mindless and dangerous.
There is also the question whether the world is indeed changing that fast.This,
I think, all depends on which “world” one is actually talking about. For some
people in some parts of the world and with regard to some parts of their life,
things have been changing fast and will continue to change fast.Work in modern
Western countries has indeed changed rapidly, particularly because of the transi-
tion of much production from the “West” to the “East” and the increased role
of robots and ICT. But there are other parts of the world and other areas of life
that have remained remarkably unchanged. For many people there is still the
challenge of finding enough to eat, having clean water and proper sanitation, and
the luxury of a roof above one’s head, and this also happens in the “West.” In this
regard the idea of a world that is just changing rapidly is a typical example of an
ideology: by expressing a truth it is “conveniently” hiding another.
I would also be surprised if the great challenges of human existence – how we
care for each other, and particularly for those who cannot yet or can no longer
care for themselves; how we try to live together peacefully; how we achieve a fair
distribution of the limited resources available to us; and how we make sure that
we do not exhaust the planet we live on – will disappear in the future. These are
“constants” that will not go away that easily, which is another reason why the
suggestion that the future is this unknown black hole actually makes little sense.
Yet the main reason for highlighting the importance of the present for educa-
tion, has to do with the simple fact that education has to take place in the here
and now. The question what we shall do with the children is not a question for
the future, not a question we can conveniently “bracket” until we have found the
perfect answer. Education has an inherent and undeniable urgency. We cannot
tell our children that they should wait until we have figured out what to do with
them. And similarly, we cannot tell our students to go home and only return once
12  What Shall We Do with the Children?

we have found the perfect way of engaging with them. We are always already in
the middle of education, and need to make the best of it – which is precisely why
we need artistry as educators, not recipes or prescriptions, irrespective of whether
they are evidence-based or not. That is why education first and foremost needs
a view for the present in order to help educators to be able to see with more
precision and clarity what is right in front of them, so to speak. The chapters in
this book are intended as a modest contribution to this task.

Notes
1 For a more detailed discussion of this dynamic see chapter 1 of The Rediscovery of
Teaching (Biesta 2017a). On the relational nature of authority see Bingham (2009).
2 Kant (1992, p. 90) formulated the “motto” of the Enlightenment as follows: “Have the
courage to use your own understanding.”
3 The latter expression is attributed to Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind.
4 I wish to emphasise that I mean “work” here in a neutral and everyday sense, that is,
as the educator’s activity or action, and not in the way in which Hannah Arendt dis-
tinguishes between labour, work and action as three modalities of the active life.
2
WHAT KIND OF SOCIETY DOES THE
SCHOOL NEED?

I have argued that the main justification for education and, more specifically
for education “after Auschwitz,” is to give the new generation a fair chance at
their existence as subject, “in” and “with” the world.The work of educators with
regard to this is partly directed towards the new generation. Here it has to do
with encouraging them to “take up” their subject-ness and with helping them
not to forget the possibility of existing as subject of their own life, rather than
succumbing to all the objectifying forces they are exposed to.Yet, giving the new
generation a fair chance at their existence as subject also requires attention to the
conditions under which this may – or may not – happen. In this chapter I look
at this wider picture by exploring the relationship between school and society.
Unlike the tendency to ask what kind of school society may need or want, I
follow the suggestion put forward by Eckart Liebau (1999) by asking what kind
of society the school actually needs in order to be a school, that is, an institution
where education can literally take place (see also Biesta 2018c).1

The Modern School, Solution or Problem?

The history of the modern school is closely connected to the promises of social
democracy and the welfare state. In this set-up the school is generally seen as part
of the “solution,” that is, as the institution that will contribute to, or even will
bring about individual progress, social inclusion, democratisation, prosperity, and
well-being. Of course, there are ongoing concerns about the degree to which the
modern school is able to deliver on these ambitions (see, for example, Hopmann
2008; Ravitch 2011). But the very fact that these concerns are being expressed
indicates that the particular horizon of expectations about the school is gener-
ally still in place. This is not to suggest that everything is well with the modern
14  What Kind of Society Does the School Need?

school. In many places around the world schools are under a relentless pressure
to perform, and the standards for such performance are increasingly being set
by the global education measurement industry (Biesta 2015a), with OECD’s
PISA “leading” the way (for a critical analysis see D’Agnese 2017; see also Sellar,
Thompson & Rutkowski 2017).
All this puts pressure on schools, teachers, and students, but also on policy
makers and politicians, who all seem to have become caught up in a global edu-
cational rat-race. There is a discourse of panic about educational quality, which
seems to drive an insatiable need for improvement, geared towards ever narrower
definitions of what counts as education and what counts in education. The sur-
prising result of all this is that the modern school is increasingly seen as part of
the problem rather than as part of the solution, with high levels of dissatisfaction
amongst teachers, students, politicians, the media and the public at large, who
all want something better from the school, but disagree about what this “better”
may be or how it might be brought about.The question this raises is whether we
should give up on the modern school and its promise and hand it over to edu-
cational capitalists such as Pearson, who are probably “keen and ready” and most
likely will make significant amounts of money out of running education (see
Sellar & Hogan 2019), or whether we should remain committed to the promise
of public education, and resist the many ways in which the private sector will or
is already taking over public education (see Ball 2007, 2012).
The reflections I offer in this chapter are primarily meant to think again about
the relationship between the school and society. In doing so, I will argue for a
more “obstinate” school (Biesta 2019b) and a less “impulsive” society (Roberts
2014). Whether such a recalibration of the relationship between school and soci-
ety is possible, is not just an indication of the state of contemporary education,
but is also a test of the democratic quality of society itself.There is, therefore, quite
a lot at stake. And it all begins with the question of quality.

A Question of Quality
One remarkable thing about the present state of education is that there is a lively
and very visible debate about the quality of education. Although this may give
the impression that many are concerned about the quality of education, the focus
on quality is not without problems. Perhaps it is even the case that all the talk
about “quality” distracts us from the questions that should really be asked.
One problem with the focus on quality is linguistic and has to do with the fact
that the word “quality” could be characterised as a “non-objectionable,” that is,
one of those words that it is difficult to argue against. Who, after all, wants to be
against quality? This already indicates that just to say that one aims for “quality” –
or even more problematic: that one aims for “quality education” – is not saying
very much, if it is saying anything at all.There are, after all, competing definitions
of what quality is and competing views about what counts as quality, and these, in
 What Kind of Society Does the School Need?  15

turn, have to do with competing underlying values. “Quality,” after all, is a judge-
ment and, more specifically, a judgement about whether we consider something
to be good or not.This reveals that the question of the quality of education is not
a technical question but a deeply political one. This, in itself, should not surprise
us.What should surprise us, is that many seem to think that questions about qual-
ity, about what good education is, can be resolved by technical means, such as in
the ongoing obsession with generating evidence about what apparently “works”
(see Biesta 2007, 2010b).
With regard to discussions about the quality of education, there are three
common misunderstandings. The first has to do with the mistaken idea that the
quality of education has to do with matters of effectiveness and efficiency. The
problem here is that although effectiveness and efficiency are values, they are pro-
cess values which indicate how good a particular process is at bringing about what
it intends to bring about (effectiveness) and how it utilises resources for doing so
(efficiency). But effectiveness and efficiency are entirely neutral with regard to
what the process is supposed to bring about. To put it crudely: there is effective
and ineffective torturing just as there is efficient and inefficient torturing. But
that doesn’t mean that effective and efficient torturing are good. The real quality
question, therefore, is not whether particular educational processes and practices
are effective and efficient, but has to begin with asking what such processes and
practices are supposed to be for.
A second misunderstanding in the discussion about quality is the assumption
that quality is a matter of giving customers what they want. Quite remarkably,
this dictum is the first “quality management principle” of the ISO 9000 quality
standards. It says:

The primary focus of quality management is to meet customer require-

ments and to strive to exceed customer expectations.
(ISO 2015, p. 2)

While this may sound attractive and also has entered the domain of education
in the idea that educational institutions should first of all satisfy the needs of
students, that is, give them what they want, problems arise when customers want
something immoral or when students want something uneducational (such as
the right answers to exam questions or written guarantee that they will succeed;
on these problems see, for example, Eagle & Brennan 2007; Nixon, Scullion &
Hearn 2018).
And then there is the problem of “performativity” (Ball 2003; Gleeson &
Husbands 2001), where indicators of quality are taken as definitions of quality so
that organisations begin to define their strategic ambitions in terms of reach-
ing a certain position in a league table and cynically steer their performance
towards the indicators that would result in such a position. How such behaviour
can significantly erode a concern for the quality of education itself has been
16  What Kind of Society Does the School Need?

documented in chilling detail by Dianne Ravitch in her 2011 book The death
and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining
education. In the “age of measurement” (Biesta 2009), then, it seems that we are
often valuing what is being measured, rather than trying to measure what we
value about education, also not forgetting that not everything that is of value can
or should be measured.

The Purposes and Dynamics of Education, and Doing What

Needs to Be Done
The foregoing observations show that the real question of educational quality is
not about how we can make education more effective and efficient, how we can
ensure that the customers of education remain happy and get what they ask for,
or how we can achieve high scores on quality indicators. All this remains vacuous
as long as we do not engage with the question what education is for. I wish to
suggest that there are three “layers” to this question: one having to do with the
purposes of education; a second having to do with the dynamics of education;
and a third having to do with “doing what needs to be done.”
In Chapter 1, I have already alluded to the fact that the language of learning,
which has become dominant in contemporary discussions about education, is
rather unhelpful as an educational language. The reason for this is that the point
of education can never be that children and young people “just” learn, because
from the standpoint of education there is always the need to specify what the
learning is supposed to be for (and we also shouldn’t forget that there is more
to education than learning; see particularly Biesta 2015b). With regard to the
question what education is for, I have suggested that there are three domains
of purpose that education needs to be concerned about and oriented towards:
the domain of qualification, the domain of socialisation and the domain of
subjectification.
I have also argued that rather than thinking that qualification comes first,
that socialisation comes second, and that subjectification comes third – if there
is time left – there are important reasons for putting this hierarchy on its head
and work from the assumption that subjectification is the core of all education.
Not, as I have explained, in order to suggest that subjectification is the be-all and
end-all of education, but in order to acknowledge that students are not “units”
that just need to become socialised and qualified, but that they are human beings
who need orientation in the world and “equipment” for living “in” and “with”
the world. To move from the bland language of learning to the question what
learning is supposed to be for, begins to add substance to the discussion about
the quality of education. And the suggestion that education has three legitimate
domains of purpose begins to outline the broader remit of the modern school
and thus provides a way to counter-act attempts at narrowing this remit down to
the production of measurable outcomes in the domain of qualification.
 What Kind of Society Does the School Need?  17

Seeing that there are three domains of purpose for education also has important
implications for the discussion about educational effectiveness and efficiency. This is
first of all because in education students do not just learn from what we provide them
with and what we ask from them – in short: curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.
They also learn from how we engage with them, and students tend to be really good
at spotting the contradictions between the “what” and the “how.” In education the
“how” matters as much as the “what,” which is why we should never think of teach-
ing as just a neutral “intervention.”That is why reward and punishment may be effec-
tive, and perhaps even efficient, in producing particular results and “outcomes,” but are
hardly ever educationally desirable ways of engaging with our students.To this comes
the fact that what may be effective or efficient in relation to one domain of pur-
pose may actually be counter-productive for another domain. Questions about effec-
tiveness and efficiency are therefore meaningless without reference to the specific
dynamics of education and the complexities of the three-fold purpose of education.
A third consideration with regard to the substance of educational quality has
to do with the fact that in discussions about the quality of education we should
not just be focused on the “outcomes” of education, that is, on what all our edu-
cational endeavours are supposed to bring about or are actually bringing about.
In addition to the “outcomes-argument” there is also a “civilisation-argument”
that needs to be taken into consideration.This is about the things we value per se,
as a civilised society so to speak, irrespective of whether they have an impact on
(measurable) outcomes. That students deserve decent and even beautiful school
buildings may be such a consideration, irrespective of whether such buildings
make any difference to the outcomes of education. Or that the school should be
a place where students can meet other students they would not “normally” meet
in their lives could be an important civilisation argument, irrespective of the
impact on outcomes – or to go one step further: even if it would have a negative
impact on certain outcomes or the outcomes of some. The civilisation argument
may also be a key reason why we may decide not to hand over schools to the
market or the private sphere, even if we were to save money doing so. The point,
as Oscar Wilde reminds us, is that we should not forget that knowing the price
of something is very different from knowing its value.2

The Double History of the Modern School

In this chapter I am trying to understand why the modern school seems to have
become a problem and how the modern school seems to have become a problem.
So far I have shown that this has something to do with discussions about the
quality of education which, as I have tried to explain, are at least misleading and
probably misguided, particularly because they are disconnected from substantial
questions about the aims and purposes of education and about the concerns a
civilised society should have about schools anyway, that is, irrespective of whether
or not there is an “impact” on “outcomes.”
18  What Kind of Society Does the School Need?

The question about educational quality is, however, not only a question about
definitions of quality and the values that are at stake in such definitions. There
is also a more political dimension, which has to do with the question who has
a legitimate voice in defining and assessing the quality of education. This brings
me more directly to the theme of the relationship between school and society
and the question of the history of the modern school. The suggestion I wish to
make with regard to this, is that modern schools come out of two different and
in a sense competing histories that create a fundamental tension at the heart of
the modern school. This not only helps to understand the predicament of the
modern school, but also sheds light on the ways in which we can think about the
relationship between school and society.
In the first and in a sense more common history of the modern school, it is
suggested that the modern school emerged as a result of the modernisation of
society and more specifically as part of the differentiation of societal fields and
functions (see Parsons 1951; Mollenhauer 1973). In a society in which life and
work are closely interwoven, such as in agricultural societies, the new generation
will probably “pick up” everything they need to know by just “hanging around.”3
But when work moves to factories and offices, this is no longer possible. As
a result of functional differentiation, society thus begins to lose its educative
“power,” and this raises the need for special institutions where children are being
prepared for their future participation in society. The modern school is the key
institution emerging from this development; the institution tasked with prepar-
ing children for their future life in society (see also Mollenhauer 2013).
The key thing about this history is that the modern school emerges as a func-
tion of and a function for society. In more everyday language it means that the
school emerges as the institution that needs to do an important “job” for society.
This does not just mean that the school needs to do this job well. It also means
that society has legitimate expectations towards the school. This history of the
modern school not only gives society a strong voice in deciding what the school
should do, but also gives it the legitimate right to check whether the school is
indeed giving society what it wants from it. Contemporary concerns about edu-
cational quality fit well into this history, and the global education measurement
industry is in a sense just the logical next step in it. One could even argue that
as long as the school is just a “performing function,” as long as the only “job”
for the school is to serve society, it doesn’t really matter whether this function is
performed by public institutions or private companies, as long as the job is done.
If this were all there is to say about the modern school and its relation to
society, we could well stop here, or just turn to technical questions about finetun-
ing the ways in which the school can become a more “perfect” instrument for
society. I wish to suggest however, that there is another history to be told about
the school; an older, more hidden and perhaps almost forgotten history. In this
history, the school is not a function of and for society but a rather curious place
halfway in between “home” and the “street,” halfway in between the private life
 What Kind of Society Does the School Need?  19

of the family and the public life of society. In this history, the school is a kind
of “halfway house” that is neither “home” nor “work,” but a place and space for
practising, for trying things out. In this history, as Hannah Arendt has argued, the
school

is by no means the world and must not pretend to be; it is rather the institu-
tion that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world
in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all.
(Arendt 1977, pp. 188–189)4

Changing the Question

In the first history, society has a legitimate claim on the school and the school has
a duty to “perform,” that is, to meet this claim and to be entirely transparent to
society about how it is performing.Whereas in this first history there is a need for
the school to be “open” towards society, the second history suggests the opposite,
that is, a need for the school to be protected and shielded off from the demands
of society, precisely in order to give the new generation the time to encounter
the world and encounter themselves in relation to the world, and try to figure
out what this all means for them and asks from them.What the double history of
the modern school thus helps to see, is that there is a structural tension at the very
heart of the modern school: a tension between the demand to do what society
wants from it and the demand to keep society at a distance; a tension between
the demand to “perform” and the demand for “free play.”
Most teachers know this tension well and generally also know how to deal with
this tension. They know that they sometimes need to be strict and demanding;
and that sometimes they need to let go, need to give their students time and space.
The problem is not, therefore, that the tension is not known or understood or that
teachers lack the capacity for navigating the tension. But if what emerges out of this
double history is the image of the school as a “servant of two masters,” the problem
with the school in our time is that the voice of one master – the master who says
to the school: perform! give society what it needs! be functional! be useful! – has
become much louder than the other voice, the voice that understands that the
constant pressure to perform ultimately ends up as a form of terror (Ball 2003). It is
not, then, that there is a legitimate and an illegitimate voice – in which case there’s
a danger that we would replace a too functionalist conception of the school with a
too romantic one. The main problem is that the situation is out of balance, and it is
this that requires a recalibration, as I have put it earlier, that is, a system “reset.”
The problems surrounding contemporary education seem to stem from a rather
one-sided view of the relationship between school and society, one in which it
is assumed that the only legitimate and, for some, the only possible question to ask
about this relationship is the question what kind of school society needs. In this
20  What Kind of Society Does the School Need?

set-up we can clearly see the influence of the first history of the modern school:
a history in which society asks and the school serves.Yet there is another question
that can be asked about the relationship between school and society, namely the
question what kind of society the school actually needs and, more specifically,
what kind of society the school needs in order to be school – the time we free up
for the new generation – and not just a more or less perfectly “performing func-
tion.”With this question, suggested by Eckart Liebau (1999, p. 5), we can turn the
spotlight away from the school and its alleged “problems,” and look instead in the
direction of society.

The Rise of the Impulse Society

A compelling and in my view highly relevant analysis of contemporary society
which I wish to introduce at this point in the discussion centres around the claim
put forward by Paul Roberts that contemporary society has to a large degree
become an “impulse society” (Roberts 2014). The rhetorical question Roberts
asks in the subtitle of the British edition of his book – What is wrong with getting
what we want? – already reveals where the problem may lie, although the subtitle
of the American edition – America in the age of instant gratification – summarises the
diagnosis Roberts gives with even more urgence and accuracy.
A central distinction in Roberts’s analysis is that between “needs” and “wants.”
Roberts shows that about 70% of the US economy focuses on “discretionary
consumption,” that is on the things we don’t really need but nonetheless want.
And this creates problems, not just because of the fact that “an economy reori-
ented to give us what we want … isn’t the best for delivering what we need”
(Roberts 2014, p. 8; emph. in original), but also because it may be quite difficult
to “cope with an economic system that is almost too good at giving us what we
want” (ibid., p. 2) – think, for example, of obesity as one of the “outcomes” of
such a set-up, but also all the environmental problems created by “fast fashion.”
This does raise the question where our wants actually come from, which has
something to do with the dynamics of contemporary capitalism.
One of the problems with capitalism is that it needs to grow in order to sus-
tain itself. For a long time, capitalism could do this through expansion in space,
that is, through constantly opening up new markets. This strategy which, in a
sense, started in the age of colonialism, reached its limits when the economy lit-
erally became global and literally ran out of space. At that point global capitalism
discovered a different way to grow, by making money out of time, mainly through
the logic of the stock market. As long as one could stay (just) ahead of others with
buying and selling on this market, it was possible to make money out of time –
giving the old idea that “time is money” an altogether new meaning. But with
ever faster computer algorithms, this enterprise reached its limits as well. This
was one of the main reasons behind the financial crisis of 2008 where capitalism
literally ran out of time.
 What Kind of Society Does the School Need?  21

There was, however, one “register” left, and this has become the defining
focus of contemporary capitalism. The best example of what has emerged here
is probably Apple, once we see that Apple doesn’t so much sell mobile phones as
that it sells the desire for a new mobile phone. It sells this desire for free, but once
it has arrived “inside” us, we often find ourselves more than willing to exchange
our hard-earned cash for the latest model. Contemporary capitalism, so we might
say, is in the business of selling desires. “Bit by bit,” Roberts concludes, “the con-
sumer market place has effectively moved inside the self ” (ibid., p. 6; emphasis in
original), and what is genius about this “turn” is that it seems to allow for growth
without limits, as “only the bottomless appetites of the self [can] contain all the
output of a maturing industrial capitalist economy which can never stop grow-
ing” (ibid., p. 7).
In his book, Roberts shows that the logic of instant gratification has not just
become the defining quality of contemporary capitalism, but has affected all
dimensions of contemporary society. That is why we are not just suffering from
an impulse economy but from an impulse society. And what is new in the impulse
society is not that we have desires and that some of our desires are selfish but
“that the selfish reflexes of individuals have become the reflexes of an entire
society” (ibid., p. 4; emphasis added). What is also worrying, and this is an impor-
tant aspect of Roberts’s analysis as well, is that “the very institutions that once
helped to temper the individual pursuit of quick, self-serving rewards” – and here
Roberts mentions “government, the media, academia, and especially business”
but has surprisingly little to say about education – “are themselves increasingly
engaged in the same pursuit” (ibid.).
This is how we can understand the recent rise of populist politics, where the
main message from politicians seems to be that if people vote for them, they
promise that they will give them everything they desire (without spending too
much time outlining the complexities of doing so or pointing out the sheer
impossibility of giving everyone everything they desire). More importantly for
the discussion in this chapter is that this is also how we can understand the pre-
dicament in which contemporary education finds itself, that is, caught up in the
desires of an impatient society that wants the school to become “perfect,” and
that finds it increasingly difficult not to succumb to the logic of giving its “cus-
tomers” what they desire rather than asking the difficult but important question
whether what students, or their parents or society say that they desire is what, on
reflection, they should actually be desiring or should want to desire.

The Urgency of Education

It is exactly here, however, that we find the “urgency” of the work of education
(for the phrase see Meirieu 2007, pp. 53–58), which is not just the urgency of the
educational work of education, so to speak, but also the urgency of the democratic
work of education. The educational point is made quite well by Meirieu who
22  What Kind of Society Does the School Need?

argues that the wish to simply pursue one’s “own” desires is a normal phase of
the child’s development (see ibid.).Whether we call this phase “initial narcissism”
or “infantile egoism” doesn’t matter that much, according to Meirieu. The main
point, so Meirieu argues, is that children, caught up in their own desires and not
yet able to name and identify them and make them a meaningful part of their
encounter with the world, are tempted to spur into action – instant gratification
– and do not yet understand that not everything they desire can be achieved or
realised. The (slow) work of the educator – and hence the (slow) work of educa-
tion – is to accompany children on this journey, encouraging them to go on the
journey, and helping them to gain insight in their desires, to gain a perspective
on their desires, to come into a relationship with their desires, so as to find out
which desires are going to help with living one’s life well in the world with oth-
ers, and which desires are going to hinder in this task.
Rather than supporting the child’s “development,” education’s main task
here is that of interrupting the child’s desires by offering resistance to them –
hence Meirieu’s claim that education has a duty to resist (“le devoir de resister” –
Meirieu 2007) – so that children can come into a relationship with their desires,
that is, exist as subject, rather than that they remain determined by their desires,
that is, exist as object. This is the challenge of trying to exist in the world in a
“grown-up” way (for this term see Biesta 2017a, chapter 1) rather than in what
we might term an “infantile” way. We should be mindful, however, that this
is not simply a matter of age. It is not that young people are unable to be in a
relationship with their desires where older people are. On the contrary, we can
see many examples of older people who are entirely consumed by their desires,
just as we can see many examples of younger people who are in a relation-
ship with their desires and are able to achieve a degree of sovereignty vis-à-vis
their desires. In this regard, then, the question who “the children” actually are
becomes a more interesting, a more complex and also a more urgent and more
political question, than just assuming that this is a matter of age. As Meirieu
puts it, the “infantile” actually haunts us throughout our lives (Meirieu 2007, p.
54). The desire just to pursue our desires without asking “difficult questions” is
never permanently resolved. There is always the temptation, Meirieu writes, to
destroy the other and see ourselves, even for a short moment, as the sole ruler
of the universe (see ibid.).
This is also why Meirieu argues that it is quite difficult to escape from our
desires on our own. He argues that we rather need social configurations where
we help each other to come into a relationship with our desires, to gain a per-
spective on our desires, to figure out which desires we should desire, and which
desires we should leave behind. The school, not as performing function but as
“schole,” as free or emancipated time, not yet completely claimed and deter-
mined by society’s demands, is precisely such a social configuration. And the real
question for contemporary education and for contemporary society is whether
such a social configuration is still possible.
 What Kind of Society Does the School Need?  23

Can the School Still Be School?

When we put this next to Roberts’s analysis of the impulse society, two rather
shocking conclusions follow. The first is that the impulse society actually doesn’t
want us to question our desires. The impulse society doesn’t want us to grow up
or try to exist in a grown-up way precisely because it makes so much money out
of us staying (or becoming) “infantile,” that is, coinciding with our desires rather
than being in a relationship with them. The impulse society, to put it differently,
is not interested in our subjectification, that is, our existence as subjects, because
its “business model” relies on an ongoing objectification. The second conclusion
is that the impulse society has eroded the very institutions that used to be able to
help us – or rather: where we could help each other – to rise “above” our desires,
to have desires rather than be (our) desires.
It is here that democracy enters the discussion, because one could argue that
the whole point of democracy – unlike populism – is precisely to ponder all
the desires of individuals and groups in order then to find out which of those
desires can be “carried” by society as a whole and which of those desires cannot
be carried, for example because they put pressure on or run the risk of under-
mining the key democratic values of liberty and equality. Unlike populism, the
very point of democracy is that you cannot always get what you want (see Biesta
2014b), which is not just the reason why democracy is difficult, but why it is
becoming increasingly unpopular in an age in which we are being told again and
again that there are no limits.
If the preceding reflections and observations make sense, they begin to raise an
important question for contemporary society, namely whether in such a society
the school can still be school or, to put it more precisely, whether the school can
still be “schole,” the halfway house in between “home” and “the street.” Rather
than thinking of such a view of the school as romantic or outdated, I have tried
to suggest that we need such a space or place in order to give the new genera-
tion an opportunity to meet the world and themselves and, most importantly, to
meet their desires vis-à-vis the world and themselves, and to be given the time
to “work through” what they meet there. And this is important so that they can
begin to come into a relationship with their desires rather than be determined
by them. This is the school as place and space but perhaps first and foremost the
school as time – as the time we give to the new generation to try, to fail, to try
again … and to fail better, as Samuel Beckett once put it.
What kind of society does such a school need, then? Obviously not an
impulse society that just wants the school to “perform and deliver,” but rather
a democratic society that still understands that not everything that is desired or
emerges as a desire can and should be pursued. Whether such a school, a school
that comes out of the second history of the modern school, is still possible, is
therefore not just an educational matter but ultimately a test of the democratic
quality of society itself. For this we also need a school that understands that it
24  What Kind of Society Does the School Need?

stands in a double history where, on the one hand, it needs to serve society but
where, on the other hand, it also needs to offer resistance and be obstinate (Biesta
2019b), precisely in order to show that not everything that society desires from it
is desirable – for the school, but ultimately also for society itself. Ironically, then,
offering such resistance, being obstinate in precisely this way, is perhaps the most
important way in which the school can serve society if, that is, society becomes
interested once more in its democratic and grown-up future.

Notes
1 I am grateful to Christoph Teschers for alerting me to Liebau’s brilliant question.
2 In Lady Windemere’s Fan Wilde defines a cynic as “a man who knows the price of everything
and the value of nothing.”
3 The principle of “picking up by hanging around” has been made popular by Lave and
Wenger (1991) under the label of “legitimate peripheral participation.”
4 This history of the school connects well with the Greek meaning of schole as free time,
that is, as time not yet claimed or determined by society (see Prange 2006; also
Masschelein & Simons 2012). What is perhaps also interesting to know, is that “peda-
gogue” was the name for the slave who was tasked with bringing children to school,
to this “zone” of free, unclaimed time.
3
THE PARKS–EICHMANN PARADOX
AND THE TWO PARADIGMS OF
EDUCATION

The idea I am pursuing in this book is that the question as to how we exist
as human beings “in” and “with” the world, natural and social, is the central
educational question. At the heart of education, we therefore find an existential
concern, and it is this concern that gives direction to and provides an important
justification for the work “we” do with “the children.” In the previous chapter
I have explored to what extent the modern school can still be a place where
the new generation is provided with the time and resources for engaging with
the challenge of their existing-as-subject. In doing so, I have also shown that
this challenge is not just there for the new generation but is a truly lifelong
challenge. After all, the infantile “impulse” is never completely resolved but
“haunts” us throughout our lives.
Rather, therefore, than assuming that “we” as educators are “fine” with regard
to our subject-ness and that “the children” are lacking – which would be utterly
presumptuous – I have argued that the task of education is about giving the new
generation a fair chance at their existing-as-subject. In this chapter I focus on the
question what the existential orientation of education implies for the ways in
which we theorise education. I will suggest that the prevailing description of
educational reality – one that sees education as a process of cultivation – is unable
to account for the existential “dimension,” and thus needs to be complemented
by a second educational “paradigm.” I try to make clear what the difference
between the two “paradigms” entails, and discuss a number of implications for
educational practice.1
26  The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education

Can the Prevailing Description of Educational Reality Be

Considered Complete?
The inspiration for this chapter comes from a paper that was published
on 15 May 1935 in the journal Physical Review. The paper was titled “Can
the quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered com-
plete?,” and was authored by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan
Rosen (Einstein, Podolsky & Rosen 1935). In the paper the authors argued
that the prevailing interpretation of quantum mechanics – the so-called
“Copenhagen interpretation” – contained a paradox and could therefore
not be seen as a complete description of physical reality. The paradox, which
subsequently has become known as the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox,
has to do with the fact that particles can interact in such a way that it is pos-
sible to measure both their position and their momentum more accurately
than Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle would allow for, unless measur-
ing one particle would instantaneously affect the other. The latter, however,
would require that information travels faster than the speed of light, and
such “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein called it, was considered to
be impossible.2
The question I address in this chapter is, in a sense, similar to the argument put
forward by Einstein and his colleagues, in that I wish to explore to what extent
the prevailing description of educational reality that can be found in contemporary
research, policy, and practice can be considered complete. The motivation for ask-
ing this question stems from an educational paradox to which I will refer as the
“Parks–Eichmann paradox.”This paradox has to do with the fact that what appears
as educational success from one perspective, is actually quite problematic when
viewed differently, whereas what appears as educational failure may actually reveal
something that is of crucial importance educationally.The paradox thus leads to the
suggestion that the prevailing description of educational reality – to which I will
refer as the “paradigm” of education as cultivation – is insufficient or incomplete.
As I will discuss in more detail later on in this chapter, the idea of education as
cultivation refers to the suggestion that education is a process in which “things” –
in the widest possible sense of the word – are cultivated through influences from
the “outside.” My focus is on such an understanding of the dynamics of education,
not on the particular aims or ambitions with which such cultivation takes place –
which can cover a whole spectrum from cultivating obedient behaviour, cultivating
knowledge and understanding, up to cultivating critical thinking. The point is that
education as cultivation sees education as influence from the outside upon the stu-
dent, and I try to contrast this with a very different, existential “reality” which has to
do with the fact that as human beings we lead our own lives from the “inside” out,
so to speak. Put differently, I invite the reader to consider the difference between a
third-person perspective on education and a first-person perspective (on the latter
distinction see also Chapter 1 in Biesta 2017a; and see Böhm 2016).
 The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education  27

I use the work of John Dewey to highlight key characteristics and key short-
comings of this “paradigm” and argue that it needs to be supplemented by what
I will refer to as an existential educational “paradigm.” I highlight the distinction
between the two paradigms through the question whether it is possible to edu-
cate “directly” – an option which Dewey explicitly denies. I then turn to the
German notions of Bildung and Erziehung in order to explore to what extent
they provide us with a set of concepts for articulating the distinction between
the two educational paradigms. I will show that this is not as straightforward as
it may seem, as there turns out to be no agreement about the exact definitions
of the terms. However, having two terms rather than just the word “education”
is important in order to be able to make the distinction I am after, and here the
terms Bildung and Erziehung are helpful. I conclude the chapter with a brief
sketch of the “existential work” of education in order to outline what the exis-
tential paradigm implies for educational practice.3 But let me begin, then, with
a paradox.

The Parks–Eichmann Paradox

On 1 December 1955 in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks rejected
the order from the driver of the bus she had boarded to give up her seat in the
“colored” section to a white passenger,4 just as Claudette Colvin had done nine
months earlier (for the latter see Hoose 2009). Although Parks did comply with
the message on the sign in the bus which read “white forward, colored rear,” she
refused to obey the driver’s authority to assign seats, which eventually led to her
arrest.5 This triggered the so-called Montgomery Bus Boycott which lasted from
5 December 1955 until 20 December 1956, the day on which a federal ruling
was implemented that declared that the Alabama and Montgomery laws about
passenger segregation on busses were unconstitutional.
On 11 April 1961 a special tribunal of the Jerusalem District Court began the
trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS-Obersturmbahnführer who had been tasked
with organising and managing the logistics of the mass deportation of Jews and
others to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe
during World War II. After a lengthy process, Eichmann was convicted on 15
counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people,
and membership of a criminal organisation, although he was not declared guilty
of personally killing anyone. On 15 December 1961 Eichmann was sentenced
to death by hanging. The appeal against the verdict was eventually denied, as was
a request for clemency, and Eichmann was eventually executed on 1 June 1962.
What made Eichmann’s case famous (see, e.g., Arendt 1963) is the fact that he did
admit arranging the mass deportation of Jews and others but denied responsibil-
ity for the consequences – their extermination – on the account that he was only
following orders.
28  The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education

When looked at from an educational angle, the cases of Rosa Parks and Adolf
Eichmann present us with a paradox. If we assume, as is done in a still growing
number of research studies and in a still increasing number of schools, colleges,
and universities, that education is an intervention that is supposed to bring about
certain pre-defined effects or outcomes, and if it is also assumed that the more
effective the link between intervention and outcome is, the more successful edu-
cation can considered to be, then it seems as if we should declare the education
of Adolf Eichmann a success and the education of Rosa Parks a failure.6 With
Eichmann there was, after all, a perfect match between what was expected from
him and his own actions. Eichmann had learned to listen well, so we might
say. And although Rosa Parks was able to effectively decode the messages that
were targeted at her – her functional literacy was in order, as was her ability
to understand laws, rules, and regulations – she obviously didn’t act upon this
understanding.
The paradox, however, has to do with the fact that what appears as success
(Eichmann) or failure (Parks) from the perspective of effective instruction and
successful learning – education as qualification and socialisation – turns out to be
the opposite when viewed from what we might term the “humane” perspective,
that is the perspective of our existing-as-subject – education as subjectification.
This raises the question of the exact “status” of the latter perspective and how it
relates to the former. For an answer to this question I turn to an interesting argu-
ment in the work of the German educational scholar Dietrich Benner.

Does Education Make a Difference?

In a fascinating passage in his book Allgemeine Pädagogik (Benner 2015), Benner
asks whether education matters, that is, whether the work of parents, teach-
ers, and other educators makes a difference for the one being educated. He
approaches this question in the context of the nature–nurture debate, and asks
what the relative contribution of nature, nurture, and education to the formation
of human beings might be.This seems to be an important question for educators,
because if it turns out that our genetic make-up (nature) would account for, say,
75%, and the influence from the environment (nurture) for, say, 20%, then there
is very little scope left for education to make a difference. This issue is particu-
larly important in our time, partly because there are studies that suggest that the
contribution of our genetic-make-up is even higher than 75% (see, e.g., Harris
2009), and partly because many parents and teachers really struggle to limit the
influences from the outside world on their children and students, for example in
relation to what enters the home and the school through social media.
While one might expect that Benner, as an eminent professor of education,
would try to make the case for a rather large contribution of education vis-à-vis
the influences from nature and nurture, he comes with the remarkable sugges-
tion that irrespective of what percentage one would claim for nature on the one
 The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education  29

hand and nurture on the other, together these always add up to 100% (see Benner
2015, p. 73).Yet rather than reading this as an argument for giving up on educa-
tion altogether, Benner pursues a different line by arguing that the educational
question7 – and hence the orientation of the educational work of parents and
teachers – is actually of an entirely different order. An order that is not “bio-neuro-
socio-cultural,” to use my own words, but thoroughly existential.
Education, so Benner suggests, is not about the ways individuals are shaped
from the inside-out, that is as a result of the development of their genetic make-
up and biological constitution; nor is it about how individuals are shaped from the
outside-in, so to speak, that is, as a result of influences from the environment.This
is not because these processes do not happen, but because education is interested
in an altogether different question, namely the question how human beings, as
individuals, exist, that is, how they try to lead their own life, make choices, say “yes”
to some opportunities and “no” to others, get out of bed in the morning or have
a lie in, fall in love, are faced with illness, grow old, feel joy and guilt, and so on.
If the question of nature and nurture is about the way in which the human
organism develops and grows, both as a result of “internal” biological processes
and influences from the outside – development and learning, we might say (see
also Böhm 2016, p. 169) – the educational question, to put it briefly but accu-
rately, is about how an “I” can step forward from all this. And here we can find
the educational reading of the Parks–Eichmann paradox, because whereas Rosa
Parks did step forward as an “I” – an “I” who asserted that she no longer wanted
to be part of the particular societal order she found herself in – Adolf Eichmann,
when asked, said that his “I” was actually not involved, other, that is, than in fol-
lowing orders. He was, in other words, willing to submit his “I” to an external
societal order. Whereas Rosa Parks’s “I” stepped forward, so to speak, Eichmann
withdrew his “I.”8
Viewed in this way – and this is the point Benner is after – we can say that
the educational question is not the question of who we are and how we (have)
become who we are – which is the question of identity.The educational question
rather is the question of how we are, how we exist, how we try to lead our own
life, what we will do with who we have become, with what we have learned,
with the skills we have acquired, with the competencies we have developed, but
also with our incompetence, our blind spots, the things we are not able to do, and
so on.9 Rather than identity, this is the question of what we might refer to as our
“subject-ness,”10 our way of and our attempts at existing-as-subject of our own life,
not as object of influences from “elsewhere” (see also Böhm 1997).11
With the help of Benner, I have made a rather strong claim about what educa-
tion is, arguing that education is concerned with the question of the “I” and, more
importantly, with the question of how the “I” exists as “I.” I wish to emphasise that
the point I am trying to make is not semantic – it is not about the definition of
the word “education” – but that it is about identifying a dimension of educational
reality that runs the risk of disappearing from sight if we only think of education in
30  The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education

terms of effective instruction and successful learning. How we “name” this dimen-
sion is important as well, and in relation to this question there is a problem with
the fact that the English language only seems to have one word – “education” – to
speak about the reality of education. This is why, later, I will have a look at the
two concepts, Bildung and Erziehung, that play a central role in the vocabulary of
German educational scholarship. Before I do so, I would like to say more about
the two “dimensions” of educational reality that I seek to bring into view in this
chapter, suggesting that, in addition to a “paradigm” that sees education as cultiva-
tion, there is also the need for what I will refer to as an existential “paradigm” of
education.

Paradigm 1: Education as Cultivation

The paradigm of education as cultivation is interested in the way in which human
beings become who they are as a result of the interplay of “internal” factors and
“external” influences. It focuses, in other words, on the way in which human beings
become and continue to become who they are through their engagement with “cul-
ture” in the broadest sense of the word.The paradigm of cultivation partly provides an
explanation of how individuals become who they are as a result of these processes – it,
explains, for example how individuals become speakers of a particular language or
adopters of particular attitudes and values. But the paradigm of cultivation is also an
educational programme, that is, a way of organising and “doing” education. According
to this paradigm, the task of education is making sure that individuals can engage with
the widest possible range of culture – or cultural “tools” – in order to allow them to
develop the largest number of capacities and capabilities in the fullest way possible.
There are many contemporary examples of the paradigm of cultivation – for
example educational practices that seek to provide children and young people with
cultural and social capital; educational practices that seek to make room for the
many languages of children, their natural curiosity, the development of their innate
capacities, or educational practices that focus strongly on providing opportunities
for children and young people to flourish in the widest sense possible. I wish to
suggest that a “paradigm case” of this way of understanding and “doing” education
can be found in the work of John Dewey.12 Dewey does see education basically
as a process of cultivation as can be seen, for example, in his contention that “(t)he
ultimate problem of all education is to co-ordinate the psychological and the social
factors” (Dewey 1895, p. 224), that is, how individual development can “connect”
with social and cultural resources. It is also indicative that out of this process human
individuals emerge as what Dewey refers to as “acculturated organisms” (Dewey
1988, p. 15); organisms who have “acquired” culture and through this have become
“encultured” or “acculturated.”
It is interesting that Dewey also explicitly rejects the idea that educators should
determine the aims of education, suggesting that this puts external and, in a sense,
artificial limits on the ways in which children become. Instead, Dewey argues
 The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education  31

that education should focus on growth and should be understood as growth. His
argument for this is that “since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all
one with growing; it has no end beyond itself ” (Dewey 1985, p. 58). When one
reads his views on democracy from this angle, it can be argued that the first and
perhaps main reason why Dewey is interested in a democratic society as a society
with varied interests and free interplay (see Dewey 1985, p. 89), is because such
a society provides the optimal conditions for the growth of all individuals (for
such a reading see Biesta 2016b). It is, in other words, the optimal situation for
human cultivation.

Can We Educate Directly?

One remarkable implication of the paradigm of cultivation that can be found in
Dewey’s work has to do with his claim that it is impossible to educate directly, but
that we can only educate “indirectly, by means of the environment” (Dewey 1985,
p. 23). The reason Dewey makes this claim, stems from the fact that he conceives
of human beings as living organisms who are in constant “transaction” (Dewey’s
term) with their environment. This is a process of constant “doing and undergo-
ing” – Dewey compares it with breathing, for example – in which the organism
seeks to maintain an interactive equilibrium with its environment. In this pro-
cess both the organism and the environment change over time; the environment
changes as a result of the actions of the organism, but the organism also changes
in order to adapt to the (changing) environment. Dewey refers to these changes as
“habits,” which are not actions in themselves but “predispositions to act.”
While much of this goes on naturally, so we might say – in most cases we
manage to adjust quickly and easily – Dewey particularly focuses on those situ-
ations in which the organism encounters a situation that calls out conflicting
habits. In everyday language we might say that in those situations the organism
is not sure what to do, which also means that for the organism it is actually not
clear what kind of environment it is encountering. Dewey argues that one way
to resolve this predicament is through trial-and-error. This is how we often are
able to restore transaction, but the problem with trial-and-error is, of course, that
we can err, and some errors can be lethal. It is therefore important, from the per-
spective of the survival of the organism, to get our actions “right.” This is where
human organisms have an advantage, because they can come in the possession of
symbols which allow them to “act without acting,” as Dewey puts it, that is, first
trying out different ways of responding symbolically, in imagination or thought,
and then, once one has identified the most plausible or least risky way forward,
to act in that way.
Of course, there is still a risk that the transaction is not restored – the proof
of the pudding remains in the eating – but at least the action has become more
“intelligent,” as Dewey calls it, and less dependent on “blind” trial-and-error.
Symbols are not innate, according to Dewey, but emerge from social interaction,
32  The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education

that is, from the ways in which human organisms try to co-ordinate their inter-
action. Dewey refers to such co-ordination as communication, which he defines
behaviourally, as “making something in common in at least two different centres
of behaviour” (Dewey 1958, p. 178).
Dewey thus provides a detailed account of the way in which human organ-
isms become cultivated, showing that this is an interactive process of organism
and environment, not just development from “within” or only about influences
from the “outside.” On the one hand Dewey’s theory can be understood as a
theory of reflective or intelligent problem solving aimed at restoring the transac-
tion of organism and environment, including the transaction of organisms with
other organisms. At the same time Dewey provides us with a theory of (reflec-
tive) learning. Such learning first of all takes place at the level of the body, that is,
through the way in which organisms constantly acquire new habits, new patterns
of action that are functional for the environments they are in interaction with.
Yet when the human organism makes use of symbols in the process of problem
solving, there is also an outcome at the level of symbols: knowledge, learning and
understanding. The reason why Dewey holds that we can never educate directly
but only by means of the environment, is because, according to Dewey’s theory,
the only way in which we can promote the acquisition of new habits and knowl-
edge is by putting the human organism in new environments, as it is through
transaction with such environments that human organisms acquire new habits
and knowledge and hence learn.13

What Is Missing in This Picture?

Dewey thus provides an interesting account of how human organisms become
enculturated. What is particularly attractive about Dewey’s approach is that he
doesn’t see this as a purely “mental” or “cognitive” process, but as something
that is fully “embodied.” What is also attractive about Dewey’s approach is that
he doesn’t see it is a purely individual process but as a social or, to be more pre-
cise, intersubjective process, in which communication understood as the mutual
coordination of the actions of at least two organisms, plays a central role. For
these reasons Dewey’s theory has, over the years, become quite popular and is
still gaining in popularity. But although the theory looks quite complete and
comprehensive, there is something missing. Dewey’s theory – which I have pre-
sented as a “paradigm case” of the paradigm of cultivation – is a theory of intel-
ligent adjustment to always evolving environing conditions. It is, in other words,
a theory of intelligent survival. The problem I wish to highlight here, however, is
that survival is not the same as life. Survival is not the same as human existence
or it is at least not the only “modality” of human existence.
While Dewey provides us with a sophisticated and detailed account of the
ways in which human beings can adjust reflectively and intelligently to the situ-
ations they find themselves in, the thing that is remarkable absent in Dewey’s
 The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education  33

account is the possibility for the human organism to refuse such adaptation and
adjustment. What is remarkably absent in Dewey’s theory, so we might say, is the
possibility for the human organism to say no – and in the two vignettes with
which I have opened this chapter I have tried to make clear how important say-
ing no can be for our existence as human beings. We could say, therefore, that
Dewey provides us with a theory of learning – and there is no doubt that Rosa
Parks and Adolf Eichmann both learned – but not with a theory of education
in the way in which I have presented this earlier, that is, as a theory that seeks
to foreground the question of the “I,” and more precisely, the “I” who stands for
the task of leading his or her own life, rather than just being focused on securing
“smooth” transactions with its environment. It is the “I” who will sometimes say
“yes,” but in other situations will say “no” and will have to say “no.”The paradigm
of cultivation is thus able to “explain” Eichmann, but not Parks. This is perhaps
the main blind spot, the main thing that is missing, in the paradigm of cultivation.
It thus suggests the need for an altogether different educational paradigm.

Paradigm 2: Existential Education

In the line of thought presented so far, I have already indicated a number of times
what the central focus of this different educational paradigm is. Very briefly we
might say that this paradigm is the paradigm of the “I,” where the “I” is not an
organism that becomes cultivated but a human individual who exists and stands
for the challenge to lead his or her own life. That is why this paradigm can be
characterised as an existential paradigm. One of the interesting things about this
paradigm – which reveals that it is fundamentally different from the paradigm
of cultivation – is that the “I” is not the outcome of a process of cultivation and
therefore not something that can be produced educationally (or to be more pre-
cise: that can be produced through cultivating work upon a “thing”). The “I,” as
Winfried Böhm puts it succinctly, is fundamentally the “work of the self ” (see
Böhm 1997, p. 199). The “I” has to be its own “I,” so to speak, and no one can do
this for the “I.”
This doesn’t mean, however, that education has nothing to do here, but the
educational work is not a matter of trying to influence, direct or support the devel-
opment of the human organism, but rather has to do with encouraging the self to
be a self; encouraging the self not to walk away from itself, so to speak. Dietrich
Benner, using a phrase from Johann Gottlieb Fichte, calls this work “Aufforderung
zur Selbsttätigkeit,” which we could translate as “summoning to self-action” (see
Benner 2015; see also Langewand 2003; Benner 2003). It is important to see,
however, that this summoning is not the injunction to be yourself – which would
quickly turn everything back to the question of identity – and even less so the
summoning just to become active. It rather is the injunction to be a self, to be an
“I.” In very simple terms that go to the heart of the matter, this summoning hap-
pens when we say “Hey, you there! Where are you?” – and I have shown that when
34  The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education

Eichmann encountered this question he almost literally said “I am not here,” “It
wasn’t me,” “I was only following orders”.14
This injunction, this “Hey, you there, where are you?” is a very direct question.
It is, in other words, an example, and perhaps even the prime example, of direct
education, because it goes from “soul” to “soul,” so to speak (on this terminology
see Biesta 2017b) rather than that it is a matter of organisms trying to adjust
their actions to each other to secure ongoing successful transaction. If, from
the paradigm of cultivation, such direction education is the kind of action at a
distance that is considered impossible and hence can only appear as “spooky,” in
the existential paradigm of education such direct education, such spooky action
at a distance, actually goes to the heart of the matter, perhaps first of all literally,
because the “Hey, you there, where are you?” speaks to the heart.

Finding a Language: Bildung, Erziehung, and the Importance of

a Distinction
By outlining two different educational paradigms I have tried to make a distinc-
tion and, as I have tried to make clear so far, it is the distinction that matters for
the theory and practice of education.The distinction is not my invention but can
be found in the educational literature, albeit that not everyone makes the distinc-
tion, is sufficiently aware of it or – and this is particularly important – has words
for making the distinction. It is here that there is a particular difficulty with the
English language, which only has the one word “education.” It is also here that
there is something potentially interesting in the German language, where there
are (at least) two words to refer to the reality of education, one being Bildung and
the other being Erziehung.
Whereas in recent years the idea of Bildung has become more visible in the
English-speaking world (see, for example, Løvlie & Standish 2002; Biesta 2002;
Pinar 2011; Horlacher 2017), the word Erziehung has remained remarkably invis-
ible (for a recent exception see Guilherme 2019). It can be argued, however, that
together they are the foundational concepts of German educational thought (see,
for example, Benner 2015), and of Continental educational thought more gener-
ally (see Biesta 2011).This raises the question whether these two terms may have
something to do with the two educational paradigms I have outlined earlier: the
paradigm of education as cultivation and the existential educational paradigm.
The honest answer to this question has to be that it depends and, more specifi-
cally, that it depends on who you ask. As Benner (2020 p. 46) makes clear, one
of the difficulties with the terms is that even in the German context there is no
agreed upon definition of them, and amongst German scholars there are actually
quite different interpretations and preferences. Some, such as for example Peter
Petersen, see Erziehung as a rather restrictive term that refers to ways in which
educators try to tell children what to do and how to think – close, even, to
indoctrination – whereas Bildung is seen as a rather open process of development
 The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education  35

and (self)cultivation. Benner also refers to the views of Heinz-Joachim Heydorn,

who saw Erziehung as reproduction of the existing social order and Bildung as
orientated towards emancipation (see Benner 2020, pp. 46–47). Benner himself
provides a rather different reading of the two terms and of the distinction that
can be made with them (see particularly Benner 2020, pp. 46–50).
Going back to Plato, Benner connects Bildung to the human ability to direct
one’s own gaze, that is, to focus one’s attention on some aspect of the world.
Erziehung, then, is the art of directing the gaze of another human being. Bildung, in
this approach, thus has to do with our own ability to engage with the world out-
side of us and, to put it carefully, learn from this engagement, whereas Erziehung
has to do with the ways in which educators can encourage children and young
people to do so, that is, encouraging them to engage in their “own” Bildung.
For Benner this makes Bildung into a lifelong process that never finishes, and
Erziehung into a process that ends at some point, namely when the child or young
person no longer needs encouragement from the “outside.”15
Benner’s way of making the distinction thus gets closer to how I have out-
lined the two educational paradigms, although it seems as if in this particular
reading the work of Erziehung is not so much the summoning to self-action in a
general sense – the summoning to be an “I,” as I have called it – as that it is the
summoning to engage in one’s own Bildung, which for Benner is mainly under-
stood as the summoning to engage in one’s own learning. This is not entirely
satisfactory, so I wish to suggest, because one could argue that both Parks and
Eichmann did learn, but that the way in which their “I” was “connected” to
or “involved” in their learning turned out to be very different. To summon
someone “just” to be a learner is therefore not enough, and potentially even
problematic from the educational point of view I am trying to articulate in this
chapter (see also Biesta 2013a).
An author who focuses more explicitly on the question of existence – rather
than reducing existence to learning – is Winfred Böhm who, in his “Pädagogik der
Person” (educational theory of the person) characterises Bildung as the work of the
self at being a self, which would then allow for Erziehung to be the “support” of
and perhaps encouragement for this work (see Böhm 1997, p. 201). Böhm’s work
is particularly helpful because of his existential reading of the notion of “person,”
which is not the same as individual (and even less so: organism), but refers to the
way in which the individual exists (see Böhm 2016). In my own work (see particu-
larly Biesta 2017a) I have suggested that education – which, in German I now
would describe with the word Erziehung – is about arousing the desire in another
human being for wanting to exist in and with the world in a grown-up way, that
is, as subject.Trying to exist in a grown-up way is trying not to be purely driven by
one’s desires but always raise the question whether what one desires or encounters
as a desire is what one should desire, in light of living one’s life well, with others,
on a planet with limited capacity for fulfilling all our desires (see Biesta 2017a,
Chapter 1). This question is a radical first-person question: it is a question that
36  The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education

ultimately each of us has to engage with for ourselves and where we should be
mindful not to try to determine for others how they should answer this question,
although we can encourage them not to forget the question.

The Existential Work of Education

In this chapter I have asked whether the prevailing description of educational
reality – one that focuses on education in terms of effective instruction and
successful learning, to put it briefly – can be considered complete, or whether
there may be something missing. With the help of the Parks–Eichmann paradox
I have tried to show that what appears as success/failure from the perspective of
effective instruction and successful learning, turns into its opposite when looked
at from what, perhaps a little clumsily, I have referred to as the perspective of the
“I.” We might say that whereas Rosa Parks inserted her “I” in between what she
had learned and her actions, Adolf Eichmann withdrew his “I” and thus ended
up coinciding with the existing societal order.
Through a number of steps, I have tried to argue for the importance of the
existential perspective, the perspective of the “I,” and have tried to argue that this
perspective is absent when we think of education as cultivation – which I have
taken as a general “paradigm” in which notions of effective instruction and suc-
cessful learning have their place. While cultivation does help human beings to
acquire “culture” in the broadest sense of the world, and while education can be
said to have an important role to play in making this acquisition possible – which
is the work of qualification and the work of socialisation – I have tried to show
that we need a different “angle,” a different paradigm, to account for the question
of the “I” and the educational work orientated towards subjectification.
Rather than seeing the “I” as the outcome of the cultivation of human organ-
isms, I have suggested, with Benner, that the question of the “I” is of a different
order: an existential order and not a bio-neuro-socio-cultural order.The “I,” so we
might say, breaks through the latter order and this is the reason why the educa-
tional work here is not that of cultivation – which will “only” lead to identity –
but of “Aufforderung,” of “summoning,” of “calling.” It is the simple but crucial
gesture of the “Hey, you there! Where are you?” which manifests itself as spooky
action at a distance rather than an intervention in the acculturation of the organ-
ism, for example through structuring the organism’s “learning environment.”
And the whole point of the summoning here is that no one can respond to this
call but me. This means that it is this call that subjectivises, puts the subject-ness
of the one being called “at stake” (although the “I” may still decide to walk away
or keep silent, of course).
This implies, amongst other things, that the existential work of education is
first and foremost interruptive (see Biesta 2006a on the “pedagogy of interrup-
tion”). It interrupts the being-with-oneself, it interrupts identity, it interrupts
flourishing, it interrupts growth, it even interrupts learning. Such interruptions
 The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education  37

are not meant to destroy the self, to deny identity, to stop flourishing, or to hinder
growth and learning.They are meant to call the I who is trying to be, who is try-
ing to be someone, who is trying to flourish, grow and learn into the world, so we
might say; they are meant to call the “I” into its own existence, bearing in mind
that it is entirely up to the “I” to decide how to respond to the call. The work of
the “I,” after all, is ultimately and radically the work of the “I” itself. It is the work
that no one else can do for the “I.”
I have argued that one of the problems with the English language is that it
only has one word for referring to the reality of education, namely the word
“education,” and that this makes it difficult to keep the awareness of the need for
two educational “paradigms” into view. In this regard the German tradition is in
a better place since it has two key concepts to articulate the reality of education,
Bildung and Erziehung. As is so often the case, the words themselves cannot do
the work for us, as there are ongoing discussions about the ways in which the
words should be interpreted. But the two words do act as a reminder that the
reality of education is “split,” or, to put it differently, that it consists of two differ-
ent “orders” – a bio-neuro-socio-cultural order and an existential order. And it is
this difference that matters.

A Final Observation
This brings me to a final observation. I have developed my argument in this
chapter from an insight I “found” in the Parks–Eichmann paradox, which claims
that Rosa Parks stepped forward as an “I” whereas Adolf Eichmann withdrew his
“I.” I do think that stating the paradox in this way helped to bring the missing
dimension in the paradigm of education as cultivation into view, as it highlighted
that what counts as success in terms of that paradigm, actually flies in the face
of what we would generally see as successful or as problematic when looking at
the cases of Parks and Eichmann. However, one could argue that it was not so
much that Parks’s “I” was present and Eichmann’s “I” was absent, but rather that
Eichmann – or perhaps Eichmann’s “I” – was as present as the “I” of Rosa Parks,
but simply made a different choice.
Could it be, then, that we have perhaps been blinded by the fact that many
(but not all) would consider what Rosa Parks did as morally right and many (but
not all) would consider what Adolf Eichmann did as morally wrong? Does it
mean that at this more fundamental level there is actually no paradox at all? Or,
more precisely, that the difference between Parks and Eichmann has nothing to
do with the alleged presence or absence of their “I,” but with the moral choice
they made in the situation? On that reading, which is not impossible, we would
quickly end up with moral education, that is, with the attempt at making sure
that children and young people acquire the right knowledge, skills, and disposi-
tion and, moreover, the right moral frameworks and virtues so that the likelihood
that they will choose right over wrong increases. On that reading, then, we would
38  The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education

very quickly be back to what, in terms of this chapter, we can characterise as

moral cultivation, which is ultimately aimed at “containing” the risk that children
and young people may make wrong decisions.
If moral cultivation makes children and young people into objects of moral educa-
tion, the line I have tried to pursue in this chapter is interested in the question how
children and young people may be ccalled,” summoned, and encouraged to become
subjects of moral action. For the latter even to become possible, their “I” needs to come
into play, and it is this that is at stake in the existential paradigm of education.Without
an “I,” there is after all no possibility for moral action and judgement to begin with.
From this angle we can see that Eichmann did withdraw his “I,c was happy to exist
as object rather than as subject, so that the whole question of his responsibility would
never arise or would never “meet” him. Parks, on the other hand, did bring her “I”
into play, knowing perfectly well that she would be arrested as a result of doing so, and
was entirely willing to take on the consequences of her actions.
Existential education is therefore not a form of moral education and definitely
not a form of moralising education, but education that seeks to bring the “I” of
the student into play, so to speak, and keep the “I” of the student into play. Jacques
Rancière captures this dynamic in a very interesting way when he describes the
“call” of the “emancipatory teacher” as the one which “forbids the supposed
ignorant one the satisfaction … of admitting that one is incapable of knowing
more” (Rancière 2010, p. 6). Refusing students the satisfaction of being an object,
of objectifying themselves, of not having to be “there” as an “I,” is perhaps indeed
the moment where existential education takes off.

Notes
1 I would like to thank Johannes Bellmann for his very helpful insights in the German
discussion about Bildung and Erziehung; and I would like to thank Dietrich Benner for
allowing me to read the manuscript of his latest book.
2 The phenomenon Einstein and his colleagues referred to is known as “entanglement” –
a term coined by Erwin Schrödinger (see Schrödinger 1935). In contemporary physics it
is assumed that this phenomenon exists, though not as action at a distance.‘Entanglement’
seems to have become a popular term in contemporary social theory, though it must be
emphasised that in physics the phenomenon of “entanglement” is located at sub-atomic
level and therefore cannot be that easily transposed to the level of social reality, other, that
is, than as a metaphor. The argument presented in this chapter is entirely different from
current usage of “entanglement” in social theory.
3 In Biesta (2020b) I discuss the implications for educational research.
4 For the details see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/
12/01/5-myths-about-rosa-parks-the-woman-who-had-almost-a-biblical-
quality/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.34441056eb50;last accessed 31 December 2020.
5 Parks has been very clear about her reason for not giving up her seat.

People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true.
I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I was at the end of a working day…
No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
(Parks with Haskins 1992, p. 116)
 The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education  39

6 I am using the notions of “success” and ‘failure” here in order to expose a problem in
the idea that successful education occurs when “interventions” (such as teaching or
instruction) generate the intended “outcomes.” This is the assumption upon which
much research on educational effectiveness appears to be based, including the large-
scale randomised controlled trials of evidence-based education. What I am seeking to
highlight is that this way of approaching and understanding education seems to “over-
look” the “I” of the student.
7 Where I use “education” in this context, Benner uses the word “Erziehung.” I will
explain later why and how this matters.
8 One could of course argue – and this is entirely correct in my view – that it was
Eichmann’s “I” who withdrew his “I,” to put it briefly; that, in other words, Eichmann
made the decision to hand over his “I” to orders from elsewhere. I hope that the reader
will see that this does not invalidate the argument I am trying to pursue in this chapter,
but rather highlights that the question of the “existence” or “arrival” of the “I” is a
thoroughly existential matter – and that again and again in our lives we encounter the
possibility of withdrawing our “I” from the situation or staying with it.
9 Competence-based approaches to education tend to forget that human beings are
never “fully competent,” and that this is a fact of our existence we have to acknowl-
edge in our everyday lives.
10 I prefer the rather awkward term “subject-ness” over the word “subjectivity,” as the
latter runs the risk of being read as an epistemological category, not an existential one,
and it is the existential “perspective” that I am after here.
11 Böhm’s ‘Pädagogik der Person’ (Böhm 1997), that is, his educational theory of the
person or his personalist educational theory, comes quite close to the existential
approach I am pursuing in this book.
12 I have discussed Dewey’s work extensively in a number of publications (see, for exam-
ple, Biesta 1995, 2006b, 2014c; Biesta & Burbules 2003). My point in discussing
Dewey here is not to engage in a discussion about his work as such, but to present him
as a powerful and rather “precise” example of the idea of education as a process of
cultivation. As mentioned earlier, the idea of education as cultivation concerns the
dynamics of education – but those dynamics can “work” for a wide range of educa-
tional purposes and ambitions.
13 Educating directly would mean that we would be able to go straight into the mind of
our students, so to speak, and this is the possibility Dewey denies. Of course, as educa-
tors, we are also in the environment of our students, but it is up to students to adjust
themselves and their understandings to such environments which we, as teachers or
educators, cannot do for our students. This is the constructivist intuition that perme-
ates Dewey’s thought. The point is also made elegantly by Niklas Luhmann when he
states that human beings can participate in each other’s environments but not in each
other’s autopoiesis (see Vanderstraeten 2005, for a more detailed discussion).
14 It is, of course, interesting, that Eichmann still had to use the word “I” in order to
withdraw his “I” from the situation. In this regard we can say that the question of the
‘I’ is not that easy to escape.
15 There is of course the question whether this need for encouragement ever goes away
completely; see the discussion about the “infantile” and the “grown-up” in the previ-
ous chapter.
4
SUBJECTIFICATION REVISITED

The suggestion that education should have an existential orientation, that is, an
orientation towards how children and young people can be encouraged and sup-
ported to exist as subjects of their own life rather than as objects of cultivating
forces and interventions, does not just raise questions about whether there is a
place for this in the modern school and modern education systems more gener-
ally (Chapter 2), and whether there is a place for this in contemporary educa-
tional theory (Chapter 3). It also raises the question whether there is a place for
this in the everyday practice of education. This is partly a question of “doing,”
that is, of how we, as educators, make place for the existential orientation of edu-
cation in our daily endeavours. But practice is never mere doing; good practice
is thoughtful practice. This means that there is also the need for theory and for
language that can help us to speak and think well about our educational practices.
In this chapter I focus on this by revisiting the three concepts I have introduced
for denoting the broad “remit” of education, namely qualification, socialisation,
and subjectification.
When I introduced these concepts (in Biesta 2009), I thought that they pro-
vided a useful and concise way for distinguishing different “aspects” or “dimen-
sions” of education, by highlighting the work education does in relation to
knowledge and skills, the work it does in relation to values, cultures, and tradi-
tions, and the work it does in relation to the formation of the student as person.
While this did make sense to me, and also made sense to many others who have
been using these notions, I also encountered interpretations that seemed to be
missing some of the points of what I tried to articulate by means of the distinc-
tion between these three “domains” of educational purpose. And of the three,
it was particularly the notion of “subjectification” that generated confusion. In
hindsight, I would say that “subjectification” denotes the existential dimension
 Subjectification Revisited  41

of education, but I have to confess that I also needed time to understand this
properly and find appropriate language for expressing this. In this chapter I there-
fore take another look at the three domains, focusing particularly on the idea of
“subjectification.”

A “Complicated and Unusual Incident”

Homer Lane (1875–1925) is one of the little-known figures in the history of
20th century education. I must confess that I had never heard of Lane and his
work until I came across him in the writings of A.S. Neill, founder of Summerhill
school. Interestingly, Neill not just mentions Lane, but actually refers to him as
“the most influential factor” in his life (Neill, quoted in Armatyge 1975). Being
a fan of Neill, I became curious about Lane and his “Little Commonwealth,”
the residential school based on democratic principles of participation and self-
governance which he set up and ran in rural Dorset, England, from 1913 to 1918.
There isn’t a lot of literature about Lane and his school (Bazeley 1928;Wills 1964;
see also Brehony 2008), and Lane himself also wrote very little. The only more
or less comprehensive account he gave of his educational ideas is in a short book
called Talks to Parents and Teachers, published in 1928 (Lane 1928).
Lane set up his school in order to give young boys and girls from inner-city
contexts who all had “difficult” backgrounds (in most cases criminal convic-
tions) a second, and sometimes third or fourth chance. Interestingly, he did not
do this through discipline, behavioural management or by a strict regime of
“re-education,” but through freedom. Instead of taking his students’ freedom
away, he actually returned their freedom to them, so to speak, in the hope that
they would reconnect with their freedom and make it into their “own” freedom.
From a more conventional view of education, Lane took quite a lot of risks with
his approach – just as A.S. Neill would do later at Summerhill – and there are
numerous stories of young people running away from the school and getting into
trouble in the nearby village. But there are also examples of the opposite.
In one of the chapters of Talks to Teachers and Parents, entitled “Misconceptions
of Power” (Lane 1928, pp. 159–169), Lane writes about an encounter over tea
with a boy of sixteen years old who he calls Jason; a rather “rough” boy with a
criminal record and a history of running away from the Little Commonwealth.
Jason is obviously unhappy at the Little Commonwealth, so Lane suggests that he
gets some of his friends together for the next election of officers for the school,
so as to be able to change things. When Jason declares that he “would just like
to run the place,” Lane asks him what he would do first. Not immediately sure
what to say, Jason, after some looking around for clues, responds that he would
like to “smash up those fussy tea-things” – the cups and saucers – as they are “for
women and la-di-da boys,” but not for boys like him. Lane responds by saying
that he wants Jason to be happy at the Little Commonwealth and if smashing the
cups and saucers would do so, he should smash them up.
42  Subjectification Revisited

In the short sequence that follows, Lane describes how he provides Jason
with the poker from the hearth and that Jason does indeed smash up the cup
and saucer, and two more, put in front of him by Lane. Other boys in the room
see what is happening and actually begin to accuse Lane, saying that by daring
Jason to smash the cups, he is making him do it, inciting him to make a fool of
himself. Jason picks up on this interpretation, saying that actually the problem
“ain’t the dishes, but that you dared me to smash them” (Lane 1928, p. 166) The
event unfolds further when one of the other boys in the room observes that the
cups and saucers actually didn’t belong to Homer Lane so that he had no right to
offer them to Jason for being smashed up. In an interesting turn of events, Jason
suddenly becomes the hero of the situation and Lane the wrong doer. Jason does
indeed defend himself by saying that his main reason for smashing the cups and
saucers was that he always takes a dare because “I’m no coward.”
At that point Lane takes his watch, puts it in Jason’s hand, saying: “Here’s my
watch, Jason. I dare you to smash it.” Lane continues:

The lad looked at the watch and glanced round at the anxious faces of his
friends in indecision. After a moment his expression changed to despera-
tion. He raised the watch as to dash it into the hearth, and glanced at me,
hoping that I should at the last moment exercise authority, and so leave
him falsely victorious in the possession of his cherished attitude. The
moment’s hesitation brought the real Jason to the surface. He lowered his
hand and placed the watch on the table. “No, I won’t smash your watch,”
he said, with an attempt at good-natured generosity to cover his
embarrassment.
(Lane 1928, pp. 167–168)

Eventually Jason leaves the room with his friends.When he returns the following
morning, he asks Lane if he can have work in the school’s carpentry shop. When
Lane asks why, he says, with a smile: “Oh, I’ve just got to earn extra money to pay
for them dishes you busted last night.” (Lane 1928, p. 168)
I recount Homer Lane’s story – which he himself refers to as a “complicated
and unusual incident” (Lane 1928, p. 169) – not because of its apparent success
in “turning around” a difficult youngster,1 but because Lane’s actions provide a
vivid and rather precise example of education as subjectification. Let me take one
step back in order then to explain why Lane’s story is such a telling “case” of this.

The Three Domains of Educational Purpose

In a number of publications, going back as far as 2004 (see Biesta 2004), I have
expressed concerns about what eventually I termed as the “learnification” of
education. “Learnification” refers to the shift in educational discourse, policy,
and practice towards learners and their learning and hence away from teachers,
 Subjectification Revisited  43

teaching and curriculum. This shift is often presented as a response to top-down

conceptions and practices of education that focus on teaching, curriculum, and
the input-side of education more generally.The turn towards learning is also pre-
sented as a response to authoritarian theories and practices of education in which
education is seen and enacted as a form of control – not unlike Freire’s notion of
“banking education” (see Freire 1993). From that perspective the turn towards
learning is seen as a progressive move where, instead of teachers and the curricu-
lum, learners and their learning are in the centre. This way of viewing and doing
education is supported by constructivist theories of learning and knowledge in
which it is argued that at the end of the day learners have to make up their own
minds and come to their own understandings; something which teachers obvi-
ously cannot do for them.
One important aspect of my critique of the rise of the “new language of
learning” and the more general “learnification” of education had to do with
the fact that the term “learning” is actually a rather empty process-term which
doesn’t say much – if anything at all – about what the learning is about or what it
is for.Yet these questions are crucial for education, because the point of education
is never that students simply learn – they can do that anywhere including, nowa-
days, on the internet – but that they learn something, that they learn it for a reason,
and that they learn it from someone. A key problem with the language of learning
is that it tends to make these questions – about educational content, purpose, and
relationships – invisible, or assumes that the answer to these questions is already
clear and decided upon.2
In addition to these concerns, I have also argued that the idea of the
teacher as a “facilitator of learning,” misconstrues the complexities of edu-
cational relationships and the work of the teacher in such relationships (see,
for example, Biesta 2012). And I have argued that the opposition between
“traditional” and “progressive” education, where the first is about teachers
and teaching and the second about learners and learning is simplistic and
misleading and that there is a need for a rediscovery of teaching (Biesta
2017a) in which teaching is reconnected to progressive agendas and ambi-
tions, rather than only thought of in terms of power and control. I also tend
to think that there is more to life than learning, which is an important reason
why education should not be confined to learning (see Biesta 2015b) and
why there should not be a blanket duty to keep on learning throughout one’s
life (Biesta 2018b).
One point that particularly has gained attention in the discussion about the
learnification of education, has to do with the question of education’s purpose.
Here I have suggested that what is special and most likely unique about educa-
tion is that it is not orientated towards one purpose – such as medicine’s orien-
tation towards (the promotion of) health or the legal profession’s orientation
towards (the pursuit of) justice – but that education is actually orientated towards
three purposes or, as I prefer to call it: three domains of purpose.
44  Subjectification Revisited

The argument for this starts from a simple analysis of the way in which much
education functions. Many would probably agree that one of the key functions
of education has to do with the transmission and acquisition of knowledge, skills,
and understanding. The qualification function of education is an important task
for education and provides an important justification for (compulsory) school-
ing.Whereas some would argue that this is all school education should do – they
think that anything that goes “beyond” the domain of qualification gets involved
in difficult normative questions that schools should stay away from – it is not too
difficult to see that even the simplest provision of knowledge and skills already
provides a certain way of (re)presenting the world and presenting what is consid-
ered to be of value (see Mollenhauer 2013). Given that the world can never be
(re)presented in its entirety, even the domain of knowledge and skills is already
permeated with value-laden choices and selections. In addition to qualification
there is, therefore, always also socialisation going on – the (re)presentation of par-
ticular cultures, traditions and practices, either explicitly but also implicitly, as
the research on the “hidden curriculum” has shown. All this also impacts on the
student as individual – either enhancing or restricting their capacities and capa-
bilities – which can be called individuation although I have suggested to refer to
this as subjectification.
From the observation that education always functions in relation to three
domains – qualification and socialisation are always going on and always impact
on the student as person – it can be argued that those involved in the design
and enactment of education should always engage with the question about what
their efforts seek to bring about in each of the three domains. In precisely this
way the three functions of education become three purposes of education or, if it
is acknowledged that under each “heading” more concrete decisions still need to
be made, become three domains of educational purpose.
The suggestion that education has an orientation towards more than one pur-
pose is, of course, not unique. Kieran Egan, for example, has suggested that educa-
tion should focus on socialisation, the acquisition of (academic) knowledge, and
the promotion of individual development, and has argued that it should be pos-
sible to give all three a place in education (see Egan 2008, particularly Chapter 2).
Zvi Lamm has made a similar distinction between socialisation, acculturation, and
individuation as three possible aims of education, although he tends to think that
they cannot be united within one system (see Lamm 1976). Jerome Bruner, discuss-
ing “the complexity of educational aims,” identifies three “unresolvable tensions”
regarding the aims of education: the tension between individual development and
cultural reproduction; the tension between the development of talents and the
acquisition of tools; and the tension between the particular and the universal (see
Bruner 1996, pp. 66–85).
All three authors do acknowledge that education is not just about getting
something into students, for example for the sake of cultural reproduction and
continuity, but that it also does something “with” the student and should be of
 Subjectification Revisited  45

benefit for the student. In addition to qualification and socialisation there is,
therefore, support for the idea of a third domain that has something to do with
the student as individual, and this is also what I have seen in the uptake of my
own ideas about the three domains of educational purpose.Yet what remains dif-
ficult to grasp and what, as mentioned, also took me time to grasp and articulate
properly, is what is at stake in the third domain and, more specifically, why “sub-
jectification” is an appropriate concept here.

Subjectification: Be a Self!
Rather than starting with a definition, I think that it is more helpful to begin by
highlighting what is at stake in the idea of subjectification, which is our freedom
as human beings: our freedom to act or to refrain from action (see my point
about intentional non-action in Chapter 1). This is not freedom as a theoreti-
cal construct or a complicated philosophical issue, but concerns the much more
mundane experience that in many, and perhaps even all situations we encounter
in our lives we always have a possibility to say yes or no, to stay or to walk away,
to go with the flow or to resist – and encountering this possibility in one’s own
life, particularly encountering it for the first time, is a very significant experi-
ence. I am not just thinking of children here, although it is interesting to reflect
upon one’s own biography and try to remember the first encounter with this
experience. I am also thinking of all the societal, historical, political, and mate-
rial conditions that prevent people from encountering the option of their own
agency, freedom, and subject-ness. Freedom viewed in this way, as I have already
mentioned earlier in this book, is fundamentally an existential matter; it is about
how we exist, how we lead our own life – and there is no one else who can do
that for us. Put differently, freedom is a first-person matter, just as, for example,
walking, which is also something I have to do and no one else can do for me (see
also Mollenhauer 2013). It is about how I exist as subject of my own life, not as
object of what other people want from me.
As I have already mentioned in Chapter 1, education has not always had an
interest in freedom or, to be more precise, it has not always had an interest in
the promotion of freedom (and we could even say that in many instances educa-
tion still hasn’t got an interest in freedom). For a long time in the history of the
West, education’s interest was, as Jaeger (1965) has put it,“aristocratic” rather than
“democratic” (see also Säfström 2019). It was there to provide those who were
already free with the cultural resources to work on their own perfection, and in
many elitist corners of education this is still at the top of the agenda, which makes
the question of equal educational opportunities both urgent and complex (see
also Biesta 2020a).
Rousseau’s Emile, as mentioned, is one of the first texts – and perhaps the first
text; I leave this matter to educational historians – that put the question of human
freedom at the heart of the educational “agenda.” Despite the complexities and
46  Subjectification Revisited

contradictions of Rousseau’s text, I do wish to argue that Rousseau presents the

work of the educator as orientated towards the “sovereignty” of the child – or,
with the phrase I’ve used a couple of times already: orientated towards and moti-
vated by giving the new generation a fair chance at their own existence as subject
in light of all the natural and societal forces that try to undermine or prevent this
possibility.
The interest in the promotion of freedom presents educators with a predica-
ment, expressed succinctly by Immanuel Kant as the so-called “educational par-
adox,” which he summarised as the question “How do I [as educator] cultivate
freedom through coercion?” (see Kant 1982, p. 711, my translation).3 Yet rather
than thinking of the educational “act” as one of cultivation, which, as I have
argued in the previous chapter, runs the risk of reducing the one being edu-
cated to the status of object, Dietrich Benner’s idea of education (Erziehung) as
“Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit” (Benner 2015) is much more accurate and
much appropriate. “Aufforderung” – summoning, encouraging – is, after all, not
an intervention upon an object, but speaks to the one being educated as subject.
Put simply: to say “Hey, you there,” rests on the assumption that there is a “you”
“there.”
Three things are worth mentioning in relation to this. The first is that the
assumption that there is a “you” “there” is nothing more than an assumption.Yet
acting on the basis of this assumption is perhaps the most fundamental educa-
tional “gesture.” In Chapter 5 of The Rediscovery of Teaching (Biesta 2017a) I have
characterised this gesture as “counterfactual,” that is, as an assumption we work
with as educators – and must work with as educators – but that may go against
all available evidence. This, however, is the whole point of this educational ges-
ture. It is not that we first ask from our children or students that they provide
us with proof that they are subjects and that, only after they have convinced us
education can take off. On the contrary, if, as educators, we don’t act upon the
assumption of the subject-ness of those we address, nothing may happen at all
or, more strongly: nothing will happen. This is why parents speak to their new-
born babies. Not because they assume that their baby will be able to understand
what they are saying, but because in speaking to them they address their baby as
subject. And precisely in doing so they open up the possibility for their child to
exist as subject, in and with the world. Or to rephrase it slightly differently: they
open up the world for their child to exist in and with as subject.
The second point to mention here has to do with “Selbsttätigkeit,” which,
as I have explained in the previous chapter, can be translated as self-action. Yet
the “Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit” is not the summoning to be(come) active
but to be(come) self-active. In more everyday language this is not about being/
becoming yourself, and particularly not about being yourself in the simplistic
sense of just doing what you want to do, but about being a self, being a subject of
your own life. “Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit,” summoning the child or young
person to be a self (Benner), arousing a desire in children and young people to
 Subjectification Revisited  47

exist as subject of their own life (Biesta), refusing children and young people the
comfort of not being a subject (Rancière), is what education as subjectification
(or: subjectifying education; see later) is about.
It is, therefore, not about the educational production of the subject – because
in the language of production the subject is turned into a “thing-being-pro-
duced-by-interventions-from-the-outside” – but about bringing the subject-ness
of the child or young person “into play,” so to speak; helping the child or young
person not to forget the possibility of their existence as subject. This shows that
the educational gesture here is fundamentally non-affirmative – another helpful
phrase from Benner (see Benner 1995) – because the educator is not telling the
child or young person how they should become, what they should do with their
freedom, which “template” or “image” they should adopt and aspire to, which all
would be instances of affirmative education or, with the terms I have introduced,
of “strong” socialisation.
In all of this we should not forget, of course – and this is the third point – that
whether the child or student will respond to the call, is entirely up to them and
can neither be produced nor controlled by the educator. That is why what is at
stake in subjectification is the freedom of the one being educated.
What I particularly value about Homer Lane’s “complicated and unusual inci-
dent” – which was not pre-planned but was an educational opportunity Lane
was able to spot and seize – is that it provides such a clear example of both the
dynamics and the orientation of education as subjectification. What Lane does,
almost literally, is putting Jason’s freedom in Jason’s own hands. Lane doesn’t
condemn Jason; he doesn’t say, for example, that Jason is irresponsible and should
act more responsibly. He is not saying that Jason has the wrong traits and should
work on his character or receive some character education. Nor is he saying that
Jason lacks something and is in need of learning.
Lane is doing nothing more – but also nothing less – than confronting Jason
with his freedom, reminding him that it is his freedom, not Lane’s freedom, and
that the whole point of having this freedom is that it is up to Jason to decide
what to do with this freedom. Lane is, in other words, “reminding” Jason of his
possibility to exist as subject of his own life, not as object of all the forces that
“come” at Jason, both from the “outside” (such as his friends’ perceptions and
social expectations) and from the “inside” (such as pride, embarrassment, or self-
image).The story is perhaps a little sugar-coated – in a sense, as mentioned, it is a
“success story” – but the dynamics are real, and Jason was of course entirely free
to smash the watch as well, had he decided to do so.

Freedom, Existence and the Limits of the World

Although freedom is at the very heart of educational subjectification, it is impor-
tant to see that this is not the freedom just to do what you want to do; it is not
the neo-liberal “freedom of shopping,” to put it differently (see Biesta 2019c).
48  Subjectification Revisited

Subjectification rather is about “qualified” freedom, that is, freedom integrally

connected to our existence as subject. This is never an existence just with and
for ourselves, but always an existence in and with the world. An existence with
human beings and other living creatures and “in” a physical environment that is
not a simple backdrop, a context in which we act, but rather a complex network
through which we act; a network, moreover, that sustains and nurtures us.
This world, natural and social, is real and both makes our actions possible and
puts real limits on our actions, albeit that one important aspect of trying to exist
as subject in and with this world is to figure out what these limits are, which
limits should be taken into consideration, which limits are real, so to speak, and
which limits are the effect of arbitrary (ab)use of power. The question of democ-
racy has everything to do with the limits that our living together poses to our
own freedom. The ecological crisis shows us in a very forceful manner that our
engagement with the living and the physical world cannot be limitless.
Hannah Arendt’s reflections on action and freedom remain helpful here,
because she provides a rather precise definition of human action which results
in a more precise, more political and more existential understanding of freedom.
Arendt makes a distinction between the human capacity to begin, to take initia-
tive, as she puts it, and what it means for those initiatives to become real, that is,
to “arrive” in the world. For the latter to happen, our initiatives need to be taken
up by others and it is only when this happens that Arendt speaks of “action.”
“Action,” for Arendt, thus refers to our beginnings plus the ways they are taken
up by others. This helps to understand why Arendt claims that we can never act
in isolation – “to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act” (Arendt
1958, p. 188) – because we are entirely dependent upon the ways in which others
take up our beginnings.
This is also why Arendt prefers the word “subject” over notions such as “indi-
vidual,” because, as she writes, we are subject in the two-fold sense of the word:
we are the subjects of our own initiatives, our own beginnings, but we are sub-
jected to whether and how others take up and continue our beginnings. And
here we have to bear in mind that others are beginners as well and thus have the
freedom to take up our beginnings in their own way rather than how we may
have wanted them to handle our beginnings. Arendt writes that it is tempting to
want to control what other people do with our beginnings, but then we block
their opportunities for bringing their own beginnings into the world and thus
for bringing themselves into the world. We would end up in a world in which
only I can act, and everyone else would end up as follower.
A slightly different way of making the point that our freedom is not unlim-
ited, has to do with the fact that we exist, that we live our lives, in a world that
is not of our own making, but that exists independent from us. We live, in other
words, in a real world, not a phantasy (and this real world includes “our” body
as well). As I have discussed in more detail in The Rediscovery of Teaching (Biesta
2017a, particularly Chapter 1), we encounter this reality when our initiatives
 Subjectification Revisited  49

meet resistance: the resistance of the material world, the resistance of the natural
world, but also the resistance of the social world, that is, the resistance of other
human beings who, if they take up our beginnings at all, may do so in very dif-
ferent ways. From the perspective of our intentions and initiatives, the encounter
with resistance may generate a degree of frustration.
Out of such frustration we could either try to push harder in order to over-
come the resistance we encounter.This is sometimes important for our initiatives
to arrive in the world but there is always the danger that if we push too hard
we may destroy the very world in which we seek to arrive. If, at one end of the
spectrum we thus find the risk of world-destruction, at the other end of the spec-
trum we find the existential risk of self-destruction: when, out of our frustration,
we step back and withdraw ourselves from the situation. This suggests that the
existential challenge – which is lifelong – is that of trying to stay in the difficult
“middle ground” in between world-destruction and self-destruction. This is the
place, physically and metaphorically, where, once more with very helpful phrases
from Hannah Arendt, we try to be “at home in the world” and try to “reconcile
ourselves to reality” (see Arendt 1994, pp. 307–308).
The difference between phantasy and reality maps onto an important distinc-
tion in the educational literature between an “infantile” and a “grown-up” way of
trying to live one’s life (see particularly Meirieu 2007; and see Chapter 2). If the
infantile way of leading one’s life is characterised by a disregard for what is real –
just pursuing one’s desires, just doing what one fancies to do – the grown-up way
of trying to lead one’s life is characterised by the desire to give one’s intentions
and desires a “reality check,” so to speak, so as to come into a relationship with
what and who is other, and not simply overrule or deny it.
The terms “infantile” and “grown-up” are rather stark, particularly because
they seem to suggest that the difference has something to do with age. It seems to
suggest that once we have reached a certain age we have resolved the difficulty of
engaging with what is real, and have resolved it for the rest of our lives, whereas
up to a certain age we are supposed to be unable to do this.We all know, however,
that the challenge of reconciling ourselves to reality is a lifelong challenge and
is, as I have discussed in Chapter 2, even a bigger and more urgent challenge in
the context of an “impulse society.” We also know that children are sometimes
perfectly able to stay in the middle ground, whereas many adults – and I think
we can add: entire societies – keep pursuing phantasies. A slightly better but more
technical set of terms, inspired by Levinas (1969, p. 35), is therefore to see it as
the difference between an “ego-logical” and a “non-ego-logical” way of trying to
exist, that is, of trying to lead one’s life (see also Biesta 2017a).

Subjectifying Education
Education that takes the question of subjectification seriously, is therefore clearly
orientated towards grown-up ways of existing, grown-up ways of trying to lead
50  Subjectification Revisited

one’s life. But it doesn’t think of grown-up-ness as the outcome of a develop-

mental trajectory or a process of cultivation or socialisation, but rather as an ori-
entation towards the never-resolved existential challenge of trying to live one’s
life in the difficult “middle ground.” “Subjectifying education,” to use a more
precise but slightly awkward phrase, is not about forcing children and young
people to stay there, but is better described as encouraging an “appetite” for try-
ing to live one’s life in the world. It is about arousing a desire for wanting to try
to live one’s life in the world without thinking or putting oneself in the centre of
the world, as Philippe Meirieu (2007, p. 96) has put it.
Unlike what some may think – it is, after all, quite easy to renounce subjecti-
fication as something “vague” or unpractical – all this suggests a rather concrete
set of educational “parameters,” where it is, of course, first and foremost up to
teachers to create good educational practice out of this. One thing it asks is that
education makes encounters with what is real possible; that education, in other
words, allows for a “reality check” of our initiatives, ambitions, and desires. This
requires, among other things, that education does not remain conceptual but that
there is something real at stake; that the world, in its materiality and its sociality,
can be encountered. In a sense, this is the question of the curriculum, not as a
set of “learning outcomes,” but as that which is put “on the table” of students, as
something to engage with – and here I wish to stress that learning is only one of
the ways in which students can engage and can be asked to engage with what is
put in front of them.
An encounter with what is real often manifests itself as an interruption – an
interruption with the flow of intentions and initiatives – which means that sub-
jectifying education has an interruptive quality. Meeting the real, and meeting
one’s desires in relation to what is real, is not a “quick fix” but actually requires
time. That is why education as subjectification needs to work with the principle
of suspension – of slowing down, of giving time, so that students can meet the
world, meet themselves in relation to the world, and “work through” all this.The
reminder that the Greek word “schole” actually means “free time” (see Prange
2006), time that is not yet made productive, is very helpful here, as it highlights
that a school that takes subjectification seriously – and in Chapter 2 I have argued
why this is now more urgent than ever – needs to provide this slow time, this
time for slowing down, this time where students can try, fail, try again and “fail
better” (Samuel Beckett). Interestingly, I think that what A.S. Neill tried to do at
Summerhill School was precisely giving young people time, particularly the time
to encounter their own freedom, because only once they had encountered their
own freedom, more formal education would become possible and meaningful
for them (see Neill 1960, 1966).
If subjectifying education keeps referring students “back” to the middle
ground, so to speak – as it is there that they can meet the call of being a self
and work through the question as to what this might mean and might ask
from them – it is important that education provides them with support and
 Subjectification Revisited  51

sustenance for staying in this middle ground. Interruption, suspension and suste-
nance are therefore three important and in a sense very concrete aspects of what
is required from education if it takes subjectification seriously. Although it is also
not difficult to see that they go against the grain of where much contemporary
education seems to be going in its rather single-minded orientation on quali-
fication and socialisation: “fast and furious” rather than slow and with a degree
of patience and trust.
Subjectifying education, education that seeks to take the question of the
grown-up subject-ness of children and young people seriously, is therefore not
education that seeks to replace qualification and socialisation with subjectifica-
tion – this would quickly turn education into a form of navel-gazing therapy –
but is rather education that thinks differently about its priorities. It is education
that puts the question of the subject-ness of children and young people – that
is, their existence in and with the world – at the centre of attention. It is educa-
tion that constantly seeks to bring the subject-ness of students into play, not in
confrontational or moralising ways, but by keeping children and young people
“turned” towards the world, so to speak. This requires, as I have already men-
tioned in Chapter 1, that education also provides children and young people with
orientation in the world – which is the work of socialisation. And it requires that
education provides children and young people with “equipment for living” – the
work of qualification.
The main suggestion, to repeat, is that we put the more common way of
thinking about the priorities of education on its head. It is not that qualification
is the core, that socialisation can sometimes be added, and that subjectification is
a luxury, something for those who have the time and the resources. It rather is
that all education should first and foremost be interested in the student’s subject-
ness, knowing that arousing a desire for wanting to exist in and with the world
needs to make this encounter with the world possible – socialisation – and needs
to ensure that children and young people are sufficiently equipped to act in the
world – qualification. This is not a flipped classroom – an idea that relies far too
much on the logic of learning – but a flipped curriculum where the work of
qualification and the work of socialisation are always done with an eye on the
question how, in this particular subject-area, with regard to this particular topic,
for this particular task, in this particular curricular area, students can encounter
the world, can encounter themselves in relation to the world, and can explore
what it means to exist in and with the world in a grown-up way.

What Subjectification Is Not

If the foregoing sheds some further light on what subjectification is about and
what subjectifying education aims at and looks like, I now wish to make a few
observations about what subjectification is not, particularly in order to clarify
what the difference is that the idea of subjectification seeks to articulate.
52  Subjectification Revisited

One suggestion that is frequently made, is that subjectification and, more spe-
cifically, the notion of subject-ness, is the same as the notion of identity. Although
identity is a complex and multi-faceted notion and discussions about its meaning
and status are ongoing (see, for example Schwartz, Luyckx & Vignoles 2013), it
seems safe to say that identity concerns the question of who I am, both in terms of
what I identify with and how I can be identified by others and by myself. Identity,
in short, is the question of identification. The question of subject-ness, however,
is not the question of who I am but the question of how I am, that is to say, the
question how I exist, how I try to lead my life, how I try respond to and engage
with what I encounter in my life. It therefore includes the question of what I
will “do” with my identity – and with everything I have learned, my capacities
and competences, but also my blind spots, my inabilities, and incompetence – in a
given situation, particularly when I am called upon or, to put it differently, when
my “I” is called upon. This means that the “work” of identity actually takes place
in the domain of socialisation. It is, after all, in that domain that education seeks to
provide students with access to cultures, traditions and practices, with the invita-
tion that students “locate” themselves in some way in such cultures, traditions,
and practices, bearing in mind, of course, that this is not a process over which
we have total control, also because our self-identifications may be quite different
from how others identify us.
Subjectification also has nothing to do with personality and personality
development. Personality is a psychological construct that seeks to explain the
tendencies that underlie differences in behaviour, often in terms of particular
personality “traits.” It is not just that personality is a psychological concept
whereas subject-ness is an educational one. Much more important for the line
of thought in this chapter is the fact that personality is an explanatory concept.
It is an attempt at explaining why people act as they act. In doing so it looks
at individuals as explainable “objects” (or with a slightly “softer” word: entities)
from the outside, from a third-person perspective. Subject-ness, on the other
hand, is not an explanatory concept, but refers to how individuals exist – it
refers to how I exist – from the inside-out, so to speak. It is a first-person per-
spective concept, that is, a concept that refers to the perspective from the indi-
vidual who acts (or decides not to act). To see that personality and subject-ness
are of a very different order – an explanatory order versus an existential order
– is not just important in order to grasp what the whole idea of subjectifica-
tion is about. It is also to ensure that the existential domain of subjectification
is not colonised by personality tests and personality measurement – such as, for
example, the currently rather popular “Big Five Inventory” that seems to be
making its way into education or the way in which the OECD seeks to expand
its measurements into the domain of student personality (on these and similar
developments see also Williamson 2017; Sellar & Hogan 2019). Subjectification
is, in other words, not another category for student performance they should
be tested on.
 Subjectification Revisited  53

Subject-ness is also not about the subjective or the personal. In a sense we

could even say that subject-ness is the opposite of the subjective or the personal,
because it is about our existence in and with the world, natural and social, rather
than about one’s own personal or subjective opinions, thoughts, and beliefs. In a
sense, subject-ness only comes into play when we encounter “objectivity,” that is,
when we encounter a real world outside of ourselves, not constructed by us and
not necessarily as we would want it to be. This also means that subjectification is
not about expressing one’s personal opinion or inner feelings, but, as I have tried
to outline earlier, about how such opinions and feelings “encounter” the world.
Subjectifying education is therefore explicitly not about asking students for their
opinions, or providing them with opportunities to express themselves “without
limits.”4 This doesn’t mean that subjectification is about forbidding students to
express themselves. It rather is about making sure that what students seek to
express can “meet” the world so that a “reality check,” as I have put it, becomes
possible. After all, students may express wonderful things, but also very problem-
atic ideas and convictions, so just to “accept” any expression because it comes
from the student, is not just un-educational but can actually be problematic and
even dangerous (on this particular point see Biesta 2019d).
It is perhaps not too difficult to see now, that subjectification should also be
distinguished from individuation. It is, again, one thing to become an individual
through one’s interaction with “culture” in the widest sense possible – the pro-
cess of cultivation – yet still another to exist as subject in relation to one’s indi-
viduality, in relation to and “with” everything one has gained, learned, acquired
and with how one has developed. After all, both Parks and Eichmann were indi-
viduals, had learned and developed, but they ended up doing something quite
differently with all that. This also means, and this is important too, that subjec-
tification should not be understood as a process of becoming, as a development
towards being a subject. Subjectification is what always interrupts our becoming,
so we might say. It is an event that always occurs in the here and now, not in some
distant future.
There are two more points I wish to make here. One more minor point is
that subjectification should also not be conflated with what I suggest referring
to as “self-objectification.” In many countries students are now encouraged – or
simply being told – that they should take ownership of and responsibility for their
own learning, and there are detailed strategies, including learning contracts, that
try to make this happen. This is “supported” by psychological theories about self-
regulation and self-determination which, from the existential perspective I seek to
pursue in this book, all miss the point.5 Although at first sight it may look empow-
ering to hand over ownership to students, what is actually happening is that we
force students into modes of self-management where they need to monitor and
regulate themselves and their behaviour, thus basically turning themselves into an
object of their own control and management. This is where self-objectification
takes place, also resulting in a remarkable split between the self who manages
54  Subjectification Revisited

and the self who is being managed. Rather than empowering, these strategies
often offload the responsibility of teachers onto students. And in most cases the
empowerment they claim to offer is actually pseudo-empowerment, because as
soon as students would take ownership by saying that they would rather not learn
or would rather leave the school altogether, they will probably be told that that’s
not possible.
The final point I wish to make, is that subjectification also should not be
understood in terms of being responsible or, more specifically, in terms of taking
one’s responsibility. Subjectification, in other words, is not a moral category, just
as subjectifying education should not be understood as a form of moral educa-
tion, and definitely not as a form of moralising education or moral socialisa-
tion.6 Put simply, subjectification is not about responsibility but about freedom,
including the freedom not to be responsible, the freedom to walk away from
one’s responsibility, so to speak. After all, when Homer Lane offered his watch to
Jason he didn’t say “I want you to act responsibly,” but rather signified “Here is
your freedom and it is up to you what to do with it.” This is not to suggest that
subjectification and responsibility have nothing to do with each other, but the
relationship is a different one, and it is important to bear this in mind,7 also in
order not to assume that subjectification is entirely or automatically positive and
happy. Human freedom can, after all, lead to the most wonderful but also to the
most disastrous things we can imagine. And the very encounter with one’s own
freedom can be as wonderful as it can be difficult.
Responsibility – and here I follow Emmanuel Levinas – is not something we
choose, but is actually something we encounter. And it is in such encounters,
when a responsibility comes to me, so to speak, that my subject-ness, my exis-
tence as subject, actually begins to matter or comes into play. Zygmunt Bauman
has captured this wonderfully when he wrote that “responsibility is the first real-
ity of the self ” (Bauman 1993, p. 11). This means, to put it briefly that the self
doesn’t first exist and then decides whether or not he or she wishes to become
responsible. It is actually in situations of responsibility that the whole question
of the self, of “me,” begins to matter, because responsibility always calls me. But
whether I “take” responsibility for the responsibility I encounter – again a helpful
formulation from Bauman (see Bauman 1998) – or whether I walk away from
the responsibility I encounter, is entirely up to me. That is the exercise of my
freedom and the event of my existing-as-subject. The encounter with respon-
sibility is therefore the “moment” where I encounter my freedom and thus my
unique existence as subject – unique in the sense that it is up to me what to
do there, which no one can do for me. This is uniqueness-as-irreplaceability –
where I find myself in a situation where it’s up to me to figure out what do to
which no one else can do in my place – which is very different from the idea
of uniqueness-as-difference that characterises the phenomenon of identity (see
Biesta 2017a, Chapter 1). Again: “difference” explains and looks from the outside;
“irreplaceability” is what I encounter when my “I” is put at stake.
 Subjectification Revisited  55

The Risks of Education, and Why They Are Beautiful

I have paid considerable attention to the domain of subjectification, not just
because it is the most difficult of the three domains and perhaps the one that
has been most misunderstood. I also tend to think that it is the most impor-
tant of the three domains. This is not because knowledge, skills, cultures, values,
and traditions don’t matter, but because it is only when subjectification enters
the scene that we are in the domain of education, whereas without a place for
subjectification we remain in the domain of training. After all, as John Dewey
(1985, Chapter 2) already put very well, training is something we do to some-
one, whereas education always happens with someone. Or as I would put it: we
train objects, we educate subjects. Let me conclude, therefore, with some further
observations about education and, more specifically, about the role and position
of the educator by returning to an idea I put forward in The Beautiful Risk of
Education (Biesta 2014a), namely that education always entails a risk or, actually,
that education entails several risks. What are these risks and why does it make
sense to characterise them as “beautiful” risks?
At one level, the risk of education is simple and clear: we, as educators, have
intentions – such as providing students with knowledge, skills understanding,
values, attitudes, ways of doing and ways of being – and what is important is
that student “get it” and that they get it “right.” But this can never be taken for
granted, and in this regard there’s always the risk that our intentions as educators
will fail. Of course, much of the work we do as educators is about trying to get
our students closer to “getting it right,” getting them to the right knowledge
and understanding, the right values and attitudes, and so on. But we as educa-
tors cannot “get it right” for them and in this regard there is a fundamental gap
between the work we do as educators and what students are able to take from
it, precisely because the “taking” is their work. Klaus Prange, whose ideas I will
discuss in more detail in Chapter 6, refers to this as the “educational difference”
(“die pädagogische Differenz”) (see Prange 2012a).
A huge part of educational research and policy nowadays is aimed at reducing
this risk, and at one level this is entirely justified, because getting it right mat-
ters. But there is a tipping point in the ambition to reduce this particular risk.
This is the point where education becomes nothing but perfect reproduction;
the point where education turns into indoctrination; the point where there is
no longer an opportunity for the student to exist as subject, because they have
been entirely objectified. This partly is the “big” question as to whether there is
space for students to exist within educational situations and settings. But is also
a very practical question, where education should also make room for student
sense-making – which teachers indeed cannot do for their students – and for
exploring the unknown or the not-yet-known. After all, teachers who think
that they can state at the start of a lesson what students will have experienced,
encountered and achieved at the end of the lesson, could as well be teaching
56  Subjectification Revisited

without any students in their classroom. Even good and meaningful qualification
and socialisation need to leave room for this risk because without it there is no
room for the student.
As soon as we add the subjectification dimension to the mix, it becomes even
more clear that the subject-ness of the student is not a problem that needs to
be overcome – either through behavioural management or by trying to achieve
100% effectiveness of educational “interventions” – but that it is the very point
and purpose of our educational endeavours. From the perspective of subjectifi-
cation we want our students to go their own way, we want them to take up their
own freedom and “own” it in a grown-up way, which means that they may go
in a very different direction from what we envisage for them, up to explicitly
refusing the future we may have had in mind for them. This risk is there as well
in education, and it is one of the reasons why, from the perspective of subjectifi-
cation, we should be mindful that our intentions as educators are broken inten-
tions, as Klaus Mollenhauer (1972, p. 15) has put it – not accidentally broken
but structurally broken.
These risks, then, are proper to education; they belong to education if, that
is, education takes its broad remit of qualification, socialisation and subjecti-
fication seriously; if, that is, it acknowledges that students are and ought to
be subjects of their own life, not just objects of more or less effective edu-
cational “interventions.” Allowing for these risks, then, means that education
will become less effective in achieving certain pre-determined ends. In pre-
cisely this sense, then, these risks are not productive risks. I also hesitate to call
them “good” risks, because that would draw the discussion too much into our
(moral) judgements about our students’ subject-ness. Rather, the risks are there
so that students can appear as subjects in educational settings and relationships,
and it is because their appearance as subjects is at stake, that an aesthetic term
is appropriate here.
Yet it is not just a matter of us, as educators, allowing for these risks. As educa-
tors we also risk ourselves in the process, and this is the third (beautiful) risk of
education. The reason we risk ourselves in education, has to do with the simple
fact that, as I have already alluded to in Chapter 1, education always “arrives”
with the student as an act of power, as an uninvited, unwanted and unwarranted
“intervention,” even if the intervention is well-intended.We should not hide this
fact by such suggestions as that the teacher is “just” a facilitator, or “just” a coach,
“just” a fellow learner or even “just” a friend. In teaching we give something that
students didn’t ask for, so we might say. (I return to this point in the next chapter.)
What we hope for is that, at some point, students will turn back to us and tell us
that what we tried to give them was actually quite helpful, meaningful, even if,
initially, it was difficult to receive. At that point we can say that the unidirectional
exercise of power transforms into a relationship of authority, where what inter-
vened from the outside is authorised by the student – is “allowed” to be an author,
is “allowed” to speak and have a voice.
 Subjectification Revisited  57

This is the reason why in education we always risk ourselves as well, and why
we can never know whether this risk will be “resolved.” Students, after all, may
not “return” our gift, or may not do so in the short term but only realise much
later in their lives that what initially arrived as an interruption actually turned
out to be meaningful, helpful, significant, and so on. But the possibility that our
acts of power remain “unresolved,” that they remain without “return,” is a risk we
should be willing to carry as educators as well, precisely because it has everything
to do with the freedom of our students.

Notes
1 Lane mentions that Jason became “the best carpenter in the community,” was elected
judge of the school’s Citizens’ Court, eventually joined the army and was sadly killed
in France during the war (see Lane 1928, p. 169).
2 One of the problems with the current “age of measurement” (Biesta 2010a) is that the
question of the purpose of education is often answered in terms of the production of
measurable “learning outcomes,” where what is being measured tends to drive the
discussion.
3 In German it reads: “Wie kultiviere Ich die Freiheit bei dem Zwange?”
4 For a detailed critique of educational “expressivism” see Biesta (2017c).
5 I use the expression “missing the point” not in order to suggest that they are wrong or
pointless, but that they address different questions and, in a sense, speak about a differ-
ent reality than what the existential “core” of education is about. They are, with the
phrase I used in Chapter 3, of a different order. Put briefly: self-regulation and self-
determination theories are explanatory theories that look at individuals from the out-
side and try to explain why they do as they do; but that’s entirely different from the
first-person challenge to live one’s own life, and to live it well in and with the world.
In this regard – and I mean this entirely seriously – I do not see why “competence,
relatedness and autonomy” (Ryan & Deci 2017) are any different from “sex and drugs
and rock ‘n roll” (Ian Dury) if we seek to explain what motivates human behaviour.
What choices we might make when encountering these options is, of course, an
entirely different (existential) matter.
6 If it is part of any form of education at all, it is first and foremost a form of existential
education (see particularly Sæverot 2012).
7 See also the distinction I made at the end of the previous chapter between being an
object of moral education and a subject of moral action.
5
LEARNIFICATION, GIVENNESS, AND
THE GIFTS OF TEACHING

In Chapter 1, I have explained that I use the word “education” as a verb, that
is, as something educators do. This includes, as I have emphasised, the category
of “intentional non-action,” which is about the situations where we decide, for
good educational reasons, not to act, not to interfere, not to speak, not to “rub it
in,” and so on. I am looking at education, therefore, from the perspective of the
educator and have tried to capture this perspective in the question what “we”
shall do with “the children.” I have suggested, and clarified in the chapters so
far, that the educational work educators do with “the children” is interested in
their existence as subjects of their own life. The educational work of educators
is therefore orientated towards the freedom of those being educated, bearing in
mind that this is not the freedom just to do what one wants to do, but grown-up
freedom in and with the world.
The reason why there may be educational work to do here, is because this
freedom cannot be taken for granted. Here lies the ongoing importance of
Rousseau’s insight that our freedom is under a constant threat, both from the
“outside” (all the societal forces that are keen to take over our existence) and
from the “inside” (the “infantile” impulses that haunt us throughout our lives, as
Philippe Meirieu has put it).This is why I have suggested that part of the work of
the educator (and maybe even all of the work comes down to this) is to give the
new generation a “fair chance” at their own grown-up freedom. Because what
is at stake here is the freedom of the child or student, that is, their existence as
subject, the educational work remains risky. This is not just because it can never
be enacted as a form of control, but also because, as I have discussed in Chapter
4, we, as educators, risk ourselves in this work.
The fact that I am coming to education from a particular angle (education
as a “verb”) and with a particular interest (in the grown-up existence-as-subject
 Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching  59

of those we educate) hopefully helps to explain why I do not focus on stu-

dents and their learning. This is not because I would hold that students are not
important or because I would deny that learning exists – albeit that I remain
concerned about the extremely superficial use of the word – but because the
work of education can neither be reduced to nor understood through students
and their learning. In this regard there is an additional “educational difference,”
not just between “teaching” and “learning” (Prange’s point that teaching doesn’t
determine learning; see Prange 2012a) – but between the discourse, practice,
and reality of education (as a verb) and the discourse, practice, and reality of “the
work of the student.”1
This doesn’t mean, however, that what I have discussed so far has no implica-
tions for the student or would make no difference from the perspective of the
student. In earlier publications I have tried to articulate this by means of the
distinction between “learning from” and “being taught by” (see Biesta 2013b).
While we can learn many things from watching other people, listening to them,
trying to emulate them, and so on, this always remains our own activity – and
there is, of course, nothing wrong with that. This, we might say, is the truth of
constructivism, “radical” (von Glasersfeld 1995) or otherwise. “Being taught by,”
however, denotes a different direction, and begins to reveal the limits of the
“constructivist metaphor” (see Roth 2011; I will return to this in Chapter 7).
“Being taught by” is precisely not about what I try to learn from or about the
world outside of me; it is precisely not about how I try to make sense and come
to a degree of understanding of what is outside of me. “Being taught by” is about
what comes to me, what is given to me, what arrives with me, irrespective of
what I was looking for and irrespective of what I desired or was hoping for –
which means that it always interrupts. This interruption is not necessarily a bad
thing; it’s first of all a fact of life, even if it can be an inconvenient fact.
One of the bigger claims I made in my book The Rediscovery of Teaching (Biesta
2017a), which I exemplified in more detail in my short book Letting Art Teach
(Biesta 2017c), was the suggestion that we may have lost our “appetite” for this
second direction – our “appetite” for transcendence, as I have put it somewhere
(Biesta 2015c; see also Biesta 2017d). This is the case at the level of the theories
and philosophies through which we try to make sense of our human condition,
our being-in-the-world. It is also the case at the level of the theories and prac-
tices of education, which in so many places have become entirely student- and
learner-centred. And the impulse society is another significant manifestation of
the difficulty we seem to have with not putting ourselves and our desires at the
centre.
In this chapter I want to take a further look at some of these issues. I do this
partly by revisiting the concerns I have articulated in the past about the “learni-
fication” of education, and partly by looking in more detail at the ways in which
teaching can be understood as a “gift” that arrives from the “outside,” that is, a
way of looking at teaching in terms of the experience of “being taught.” I also
60  Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching

include a more fundamental philosophical discussion about the idea and very
possibility of “givenness.”
In earlier works (see particularly Biesta 2017a, Chapter 3) I have expressed
concerns about what I have termed the “hermeneutical worldview,” which I use
as shorthand for the idea that our relationship with the world is first and foremost
one of sense-making and understanding – man as a “meaning-making animal,” as
some have put it (see for this phrase Glaser 1998, p. 32; see, for a more nuanced
view, Burke 1966) – a gesture that goes from the self to the world. The explora-
tions of the idea of “givenness” that I offer in this chapter look more positively
at the possibility of a “gesture” that goes in the opposite direction. I try to make
clear why it is important to give a place to this gesture, and what the difficulties
are when we try to do so. Through all this, I hope to give additional significance
to the fact that in teaching something is literally given – although it may not be
the teacher who is in control of this (see Biesta 2019e) – and that for that reason
the reduction of all educational matters to learning is problematic. I also hope to
provide additional support for the suggestion that the very possibility of “being
taught” may actually reveal something unique and distinctive about our human
condition.

Learnification Revisited
When, about ten years ago, I coined the word “learnification” (see Biesta 2009),
it was first and foremost in order to denote the problematic impact of the rise of
the “new language of learning” on the discourse and practice of education. My
main concern at the time was that the emergence of notions such as “learner,”
“learning environment,” “facilitator of learning,” and “lifelong learning” – which
had replaced older notions of “student,” “school,” “teaching,” and “adult educa-
tion” – were all referring to education in terms of learning, without asking what
the learning was supposed to be about and, more importantly, without asking what
the learning was supposed to be for. It was particularly the absence of a nuanced
debate about the purpose of education (other than empty statements such as that
education should supposedly bring about “learning” or should effectively produce
“learning outcomes”) that worried me most. It prompted me to propose that edu-
cation should always be concerned with and orientated towards three domains of
purpose – qualification, socialisation, and subjectification – which I have already
explored in more detail in the previous chapter.
I wish to argue that, ten years on, the learnification-thesis still stands.2 Talk
about learning is still rife in educational circles. New expressions such as “deep
learning,” “brain-based learning” and “machine learning” have entered the edu-
cational conversation. And policy makers continue to produce remarkable and,
in my view, completely incomprehensible sentences such as that schools should
“deliver at least one year’s growth in learning for every student every year”
(Department of Education and Training 2018, p. x; see also Allen, Rowan &
 Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching  61

Singh 2018 for a critical discussion).While there is evidence of a growing interest

in the question of the purpose(s) of education (see, e.g., Hattie & Nepper Larsen
2020), much of what can be found in policy, research, and practice continues
to have a rather one-dimensional focus on learning, also due to the dominance
of the frameworks promoted by the global education measurement industry.
It remains important, therefore, to continue to engage in discussion about the
purpose(s) of education.
There was, however, a further dimension to the learnification-thesis which
was less prominent at the time I started to use the word, and also took me some
time to fully grasp (for a first articulation see Biesta 2015b). The key idea here is
that teaching – and the whole spectrum of educational endeavours more gener-
ally – should not necessarily result in learning, which also means that teaching
should not necessarily aim at learning. And the main reason for the idea that
there is more to teaching than learning, just as there is more to education than
learning, is that there is more to life than learning. After all, as I have shown in
Chapter 3, Rosa Parks and Adolf Eichmann both learned, but where they dif-
fered was in what they did with their learning. Where they differed, in other
words, was in how they brought their “I” into play in relation to everything
they had learned. Unlike what Benner (2020) seems to suggest, therefore, the
“Aufforderung” of education should be directed at the question of the “I,” that
is the question what I will do with everything I have learned, and particularly
what I will do when it matters, not at the question of learning. The educational
“Aufforderung,” to put it differently, is to be a self, not to be a learner. This is
the key reason why I found it important to argue for the need to “free” teach-
ing from learning (Biesta 2015b), so that other “existential possibilities” (ibid.)
that lie beyond learning (Biesta 2006a) can come into view and can be brought
into play.
I found helpful suggestions for exploring this dimension of the learnification-
thesis in work from American philosophers of education working in the analytic
tradition. Interestingly, this work largely predated the rise of the new language of
learning (see, for example, Fenstermacher 1986; see also Biesta & Stengel 2016).
The most explicit position was the one taken by Paul Komisar, who argued that
“learning is not what the “teacher” intends to produce” (Komisar 1968, p. 183;
see also Komisar 1965). He suggested that the intention of teaching might better
be captured in terms of the “awareness” of an “auditor” – not a learner or student
for Komisar – “who is successfully becoming aware of the point of the act [of teaching]”
(Komisar 1968, p. 191; emphasis in original). One thing that is helpful about this
rephrasing, is that it puts the “I” of the student in the picture. Someone who is
trying to become aware of the point of teaching is, after all, not a passive recipi-
ent of instruction or an obedient reproducer of curricular content. The other
thing that is helpful here, is that it suggests that the “point” of teaching may cover
a rather wide spectrum of options of which learning is only one possibility, but
neither the sole nor the only one.
62  Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching

An important reason for creating a distance between teaching and learning, as

mentioned, has to do with the suggestion that there is more to life than learning.
Learning, in other words, neither defines nor exhausts what it means to exist in
and with the world, despite what some learning theorists seem to claim. There
rather is a whole range of “existential possibilities” (Biesta 2015b) and existential
challenges, of which learning is just one, and the task of education is to open up
this range to our students, rather than only providing them with the position and
identity of “the learner” (see also Biesta 2010c). The point here is not just exis-
tential – it is not just about how we understand our existence as human beings
and how we bring this into play in education. The point is also highly politi-
cal, particularly in response to attempts by policy makers, politicians, the global
education measurement industry, and lobbying groups such as the “partnership
for 21st century skills,” to force people into the “learning position,” most notably
through the demand to become a lifelong learner (see Biesta 2018b).
It is against this background that, in recent years, I have started to make an
explicit case for the rediscovery of teaching, which I also see as a recovery of
teaching (Biesta 2017a). This is partly in order to restore teaching to its proper
place in the educational endeavour – to give teaching back to education (Biesta
2012) – and not see it as something outdated and of the past that we should be
embarrassed about as educators. And it is partly in order to highlight that what
is distinctive about education is not the phenomenon of learning – which, after
all, can also happen outside of education and can occur without teaching – but
precisely the presence of and the encounter with teaching. Whereas learning is
accidental to education, teaching, so I wish to suggest, is essential to education,
albeit that the question what teaching is and how it might or should be enacted
does, of course, need careful consideration in order not to fall back on nar-
row and naive notions of teaching as (one-directional) instruction or teaching as
(authoritarian) control.
Whereas learning in some way always originates and emanates from the
learner, that is, from the one who seeks to acquire knowledge, skills and under-
standing and who approaches the natural and social world as a “resource” where
this can be found – a bit like foraging – teaching moves in the opposite direc-
tion, as it comes to the student from “elsewhere.” The question of what this
“elsewhere” is, requires further consideration, also because it is not necessarily
the teacher who is the origin of teaching (see also Biesta 2019e). In earlier work
(Biesta 2013b) I have explored these dynamics in terms of the gift of teaching.
An ongoing challenge in relation to this is how we can make sense of what,
in more general terms, we might call the givenness of teaching, and it is this
challenge which I seek to engage with in this chapter. One particular difficulty
here is that as long as we think that it is up to us to make sense of this givenness,
we are not taking the idea of “givenness” seriously enough. Making sense of
givenness runs the risk of trying to “contain” it within our own understanding,
which is precisely what “givenness” is not about. One author who, in my view,
 Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching  63

has managed to engage quite productively with this predicament, is the French
philosopher Jean-Luc Marion. In the next section I discuss some of his ideas on
“givenness” in order to connect them to the question of the givenness and gift
of teaching.3

Being Given
Over the past four decades Jean-Luc Marion has made major contributions in
a number of fields, including the history of philosophy, theology, and phenom-
enology, with clear interconnections between his work in these three domains.
Even a proper reconstruction of Marion’s contributions to phenomenology –
articulated in three main volumes and numerous other publications (see par-
ticularly Marion 1998, 2002a, 2002b, 2011, 2016) – lies well beyond the scope
of this chapter. More modestly, I will discuss one theme from Marion’s writing
and will utilise one particular “way in,” in order to shed light on the phenom-
enon of “givenness” – which, for Marion, also has to do with the givenness of
the phenomenon.

Exploring Givenness
“Givenness” is one of the central themes in Marion’s work, and the question he
has been pursuing consistently is whether and, if so, how we can make sense of
givenness, bearing in mind, as mentioned, that the whole point of “givenness”
is that it doesn’t emanate from and not even depends upon our acts of sense-
making, precisely because it is given and not taken. This already indicates, firstly,
that Marion’s question has an epistemological dimension, because it raises the ques-
tion whether and to what extent knowledge is constructed by us or given to us.
Secondly, Marion’s question also has a theological dimension, which figures promi-
nently in his work as well. Put simply, the issue of “givenness” is linked to the
question whether revelation is possible,4 or whether everything that comes to us
from “beyond” is in some way of our own making or would at least require our
own understanding or sense-making.This indicates, thirdly, that Marion’s question
also gets us into the field of hermeneutics, particularly with regard to the question
whether the human being is first and foremost an interpreting being – a meaning-
making animal (Glaser) or, with the words from Kenneth Burke, a “symbol-using,
symbol-making and symbol-misusing animal” (Burke 1966, p. 6) – or whether
there is something that precedes and must precede our acts of meaning-making.
This, fourthly, means that Marion’s question is also the question of phenomenology,
starting from Husserl’s ambition to go back to “the things themselves” rather than
our interpretation of these things. Which then, and this is the fifth dimension of
Marion’s pursuit, also raises the question of the “I.” Put simply, this is the question
whether everything starts from the “I” or whether there is something that pre-
cedes the “I.”
64  Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching

One has to admire Marion for his ambition to engage with this cluster of
questions, because just from a first attempt at unravelling all its dimensions, we
can already see that we are in the middle of the big questions of modern phi-
losophy and perhaps even the big questions of philosophy anyway. Moreover,
these questions are not just philosophical – they are not just philosophy’s ques-
tions – but touch upon the big questions of human existence itself. In one sense,
then, they are of all times. Yet, they also speak to major contemporary issues.
They speak to neo-liberalism by asking whether the self is (in) the centre of the
world and the world is just there for the self to conquer, master, and consume.
This means that Marion’s questions speak both to the ecological crisis and the
crisis of democracy.
Marion’s questions also ask whether a religious worldview, a “belief ” in tran-
scendence, is a form of outdated superstition that should have no place in a modern
world, or whether the encounter with transcendence is more difficult to shrug off
than many might think (see also Biesta 2017d) – which is the question of “post-
secularism” (see Habermas 2008, 2010; see also Biesta & Hannam 2019). And from
an educational perspective, Marion’s “intervention” is important, because it asks
whether teaching is actually possible, or whether the reduction of everything edu-
cational to learning is inevitable. It asks, in other words, whether the distinction
between “learning from” and “being taught by” is meaningful or not.

Marion’s Principle
One of the shortest formulations Marion provides of his thoughts on givenness
is through the “principle,” as he calls it with some hesitation, “that everything
that shows itself must first give itself ” (Marion 2011, p. 19).5 This phrase already
contains an important epistemological point, because it suggests that before any
intentional “act” of knowing can take place, something must have given itself
to the knower (see also Roth 2011), although there are further questions about
what the alleged status of a “knower” is and whether we can assume that the
knower is already “there” before something “arrives” – an option Marion denies;
see below. Marion emphasises that his principle does not articulate an interest in
what is given but in the how of “givenness.” Marion is interested, in other words,
in “givenness as a mode of phenomenality, as the how or manner of the phenom-
enon,” as he puts it (Marion 2011, p. 19; emphasis in original). He explains that
this is not about “the immediate given, the perceptive content, or the lived expe-
rience of consciousness – in short, of something that is given, but instead of the
style of its phenomenalization insofar as it is given” (Marion 2011, p. 19; emphasis
in original). Marion is, in other words, trying to figure out what “givenness” is,
rather than focusing on what is given.
In more philosophical terms, this means that Marion is after a phenomenology
of the phenomenon of givenness, not an ontology or metaphysics of givenness
(see also Marion 2011, p. 20). An ontology or metaphysics of givenness would try
 Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching  65

to specify the exact nature of the “what” that is given, and would also try to spec-
ify what it is that gives this “what.” It would try, in other words, to give the “total
picture” of what is going on before and behind the “scene.” The problem with
such an ambition, as mentioned before, is that it tries to go “beyond” givenness
itself and would therefore cease to be an account of givenness itself. Moreover,
it would, in its ambition to go “behind” the phenomenon of givenness, deny the
very idea that what shows itself must first give itself. It would, in a sense, refuse
givenness. This is why givenness needs a phenomenology.
What is exciting about Marion’s work, is that he pursues this agenda in an
extremely consistent manner. At first sight this often leads to counter-intuitive
statements and conclusions, but one could say that this is precisely the point of
what Marion is trying to do. He is exposing and in a sense also testing our intu-
itions. One part of Marion’s line of argumentation challenges the epistemological
assumption that everything that shows itself is showing itself to a pre-existing
consciousness. It will not be too difficult to see that on such a view that what
gives itself begins to disappear, because its manifestation, its givenness, is made
dependent upon the activities of a knowing consciousness. This is the Kantian
view of knowledge which does indeed start from a “transcendental ego” that
comes “before” the world and that sees phenomena as objects that appear accord-
ing to the conditions of experience (see Marion 2016, p. 47).6
This is why Marion argues that taking givenness seriously means that we have
to assume – or perhaps “accept” is the better word here – that the phenomenon
“shows itself in itself and from itself ” (Marion 2016, p. 48), which also means it
“gives itself from itself ” (Marion 2016, p. 48), and is not given or assumed to
be given by something or someone else. Taking “givenness” seriously means, in
other words, that we do not assume that there is some “big giver in the sky” who
is the cause of all that is given. This is the question of – a certain conception of
– God, as well as the question of – a certain conception of – the teacher. What
Marion is challenging here, in other words, is the idea of God as the first cause of
everything, just as he is challenging the idea of the teacher as the one who is “in
control” and, more specifically, the teacher as the cause of “learning.”

A Third Reduction
Marion locates his endeavours within the philosophical tradition of phenom-
enology, because, as he explains, “in its most radical ambitions, philosophy, in
the form of phenomenology, has had no other goal than this one: to allow
the phenomenon to broaden out itself in itself, and to show itself from itself ”
(Marion 2016, p. 48) – or, with the words of Edmund Husserl: “Back to the
things themselves!” It is in relation to this that there is a second original theme in
Marion’s work, which has to do with the status of “reduction” in phenomenol-
ogy. Marion suggests that phenomenology is in need of a “third” reduction; not
just a reduction to the object (Husserl) or to be being of the object (Heidegger),
66  Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching

but to givenness itself. Reduction, as Marion explains, “consists in not taking

everything I perceive for granted and in not receiving everything that happens
to me with the same degree of evidence and thus of certainty but in each case
to question what is actually given in order to distinguish it from what is only
pieced together, inferred, or, so to say, acquired in a roundabout way, indirectly”
(Marion 2017, pp. 72–73).
This ambition was central to Husserl’s (re)turn to the things themselves, and
also to Heidegger’s attempt at articulating the difference between things and
their existence (“beings” and their “Being”).Yet Marion’s main point – in a dis-
cussion that is much more sophisticated than what I can present here – is that, in
a sense, Husserl and Heidegger didn’t go far enough with their reductions of the
given. About Husserl, Marion writes that he “sees givenness” and “sees that one
can only reach givenness via reduction, but to a large extent he stays within the
presupposition that the given is a matter of objectness, of a theory of the object”
(Marion 2017, p. 77). Marion thus argues that Husserl “stopped” at the object,
just as Heidegger “stopped” at the being of the object. For Marion, however,
“objectness (Husserl) and beingness (Heidegger) only offer specific and pos-
sible cases, but surely not the most legitimate ones, of the naming of givenness”
(Marion 2017, p. 78). Hence the need for “a third, more original reduction …
namely the reduction to givenness” (Marion 2017, p. 79).7

Two Attitudes to Things

I don’t have the space in this chapter to go into further detail about Marion’s
phenomenology of givenness, but in concluding this section I wish to say a bit
more about the encounter with the phenomenon of givenness in more practi-
cal or everyday language, also in order to draw out some of the implications
for the question of the “I”. All this is also important “groundwork” for the
exploration of teaching that is to follow, because the very possibility of a notion
of teaching – or perhaps we can begin to say: of a phenomenon of teaching – in
which teaching cannot be reduced to learning but is possible in its own terms
and on its own terms, depends in some way on the answer to the question
whether givenness can exist in itself, or whether it remains dependent on the
cognitive acts of the ego. Again, this is the question whether the distinction
between “learning from” and “being taught by” is a meaningful one. So how,
then, can we “make sense” (with the caveat mentioned earlier) of what is hap-
pening here, and particularly, what does taking “givenness” absolutely seriously
imply for the self?
The line of thought that is relevant here, has to do with Marion’s suggestion that
we can have two “attitudes” towards things.8 The first attitude, which is “the most
widespread attitude, the one for which we are trained” (Marion 2017, p. 83), consists
in “reducing the chances that those around us will surprise us; consequently we
continually learn how to better control them” (Marion 2017, p. 83). In this attitude,
 Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching  67

Marion writes,“we really count on being able to anticipate situations and accidents,
to be able to react, to control, to correct, to secure” (Marion 2017, p. 83). This is
a world where we find ourselves surrounded by objects, “which, being essentially
functional, function because they are intended and conceived to function to our
advantage” (Marion 2017, p. 83).This is done “so that we are in the centre” (Marion
2017, p. 83).
Through this attitude “we live in a world that we organize such that we retain
from it only those things that can be constituted as objects, only what we can
grasp with our intelligibility, under the control of a quasi-master and possessor
of nature” (Marion 2017, p. 83). We do this, we constitute such an “object-ive”
world in order to rule out danger. Yet, so Marion asks, “what does ruling out
danger mean if not keeping away from the unexpected,” from that “which cannot
be constituted as object, that against which one cannot protect oneself ” (Marion
2017, p. 83)? While this is all good for thinking ahead, that is, for what can be
anticipated, Marion argues that “this rationality … does not want any of the rest
[but] only retains this layer of reality that one can call the object” (Marion 2017,
p. 84).
However, the object only offers “a very thin and superficial layer of things.
It leaves to the side … everything it cannot foresee, everything it cannot antici-
pate, what is said to be unknowable” (Marion 2017, p. 84).Yet it is precisely here
“that the given is displayed because it characterizes what among things resists
objectification and is given by its own initiative” (Marion 2017, p. 84; empha-
sis added). Marion adds that it is not for us to look for the given, so to speak.
Rather, “in the given, in the phenomenon inasmuch as it gives itself according
to its character as nonobject (…) a place and moment are described where the
ego must know how to allow itself to be found and which it does not decide”
(Marion 2017, p. 85).
Here the ego leaves its central position, “obeys the event, and sees without
foreseeing,” as Marion puts it, and this “seeing without foreseeing” is precisely the
opposite of the seeing-of-objects. Thus, we encounter a reversal of our objective
relation to the world. It is not we who command the world. Rather, “in the case
of the given, we find ourselves commanded by the thing, summoned to come
experience it” (Marion 2017, p. 85). We could also say that we are surprised, in
the literal sense of “being seized.”9 Marion gives the example of a painting in
the cloister of the convent of Trinity-on-the-Mount which has a secret point
where one must be situated to see the painting. This point, Marion explains, “is
determined by the painting and not by the spectator” so that “the spectator must
obey the painting in order to see it” (Marion 2017, pp. 84–85). Marion calls the
principle at stake here “anamorphosis,” and one could say that this principle
reflects the difference between “learning from,” where the “I” approaches the
world as object, and “being taught by,” where the “I” not just subjects itself but,
in a rather precise formulation, is “subjectified,” that is, is confronted with its own
subject-ness.
68  Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching

Although “givenness” so conceived may give the suggestion that it requires

passive receptivity from the side of the ego, Marion stresses that the term “pas-
sivity” is not good enough, precisely “because I cannot remain passive in front
of the event: I make myself available or I avoid it, I take a risk or I run away, in
short, I still decide, and I respond even by refusing to respond” (Marion 2017,
p. 85). This means that in order to “become passive” in such an encounter, “a
certain kind of activity is required; one must leave oneself exposed to things
with a certain amount of courage” (Marion 2017, pp. 85–86) or, in educational
language, one must let oneself be taught.
All this, then, opens up “a different regime of phenomenality imposed on a
different regime of subjectivity,” as Marion puts it. Here the subject is no lon-
ger before the world, before the phenomenon – in space and in time – but rather
“receives itself from what it receives” (Marion 2017, p. 86).The word that Marion
uses for this different “stature” of subjectivity, this different “stature” of the “I” is,
in French, the adonné, which is usually translated into English as the “gifted.” It
echoes the second part of the double meaning of the word “subject,” that is, the
condition of being subjected to what comes to us.

Exposure
The foregoing shows that Marion’s attempt to “think” givenness in its own terms
– but perhaps we can now say: Marion’s attempt to expose himself to givenness
and encourage us to expose ourselves as well – is not just a matter of epistemol-
ogy, and not just a matter of phenomenology, although the question of givenness
opens up these fields in new ways as well, but is also an existential matter. It is a
matter that concerns the existence of the “I.” That is why Marion writes, quite
beautifully I think, that “everything takes on a different meaning if what hap-
pens to me is given to me from elsewhere” (Marion 2017, p. 38) – which has to
do with the “experience” of “being taught.” If, on the other hand, what happens
to me “is a duplication and a product of myself, then even the most marvellous
things lose their meaning” (Marion 2017, p. 38) – which has to do with the
“experience” of “learning from.” If one instead thinks the world as “essentially
an experience of heteronomy, in other words as election, then,” Marion argues,
“everything is worth being lived, being expected, being desired, everything mer-
its making an effort on its behalf ” (Marion 2017, p. 38). Marion is fully aware
however that before trying to respond to the call “there is the more difficult
thing, which is … to discover that there is a call, that is to say, being able to inter-
pret what is as what comes to us” (Marion 2017, p. 39). And “this decision to take
things as calls … decides everything else” (Marion 2017, p. 39).
So how then can this help us to get closer to the phenomenon of education
and the crucial role that teaching plays within it? Let me, in conclusion, consider
this question by looking at three ways in which givenness manifests itself in
teaching and as teaching.
 Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching  69

Three Gifts of Teaching

I have already referred to the redefinition of teaching as facilitating learning;
a redefinition that is part of a more general shift from teaching to learning
and one instance of the ongoing learnification of education. As mentioned,
the shift from teaching to learning is itself not entirely without reason. It is
a response to authoritarian forms of education in which teaching is enacted
as a form of control – and there are still too many of those practices around,
including those that may look benign. The shift from teaching to learning is
also a response to rather poor and unimaginative educational practices that are
nowadays often referred to as “traditional,” “didactic” or “transmissive” teaching,
although these three qualifications are misleading in my view. And the shift from
teaching to learning is the result of the influence of constructivist theories of
learning and social-cultural approaches to education that all, in some way, argue
that everything hangs on the activities of “the learner,” with or without a degree
of “­scaffolding,” to mention another popular idea. In this regard we might say
that contemporary education is still remarkably Kantian, and has perhaps even
become more Kantian in recent years, at least, that is, where it concerns its
­epistemological underpinnings.
All this has moved “the learner” to the centre of the educational endeav-
our and has manoeuvred the teacher to the side-line – coach, facilitator,
fellow-learner, friend, critical or otherwise, but hardly ever teacher. On the
one hand this has given the impression that teaching is outdated, undesirable
and, according to constructivist “dogma,” even impossible and that, therefore,
we should do away with teaching. On the other hand, however, it has also led
to calls for a return of the teacher. Either this is a call for the teacher as the
one who is able to exert control over the whole educational endeavour, which
can be found, for example, in the rhetoric of the teacher as the most impor-
tant “in-school factor” in the effective production of learning outcomes (for
a more detailed discussion see Biesta 2017a). Or it is a call for the teacher
as the one who ought to be able to exert control over the whole educational
endeavour, that is, the call – and the desire – for the return of the authoritar-
ian teacher.
In this section I wish to point at three manifestations of teaching that are not
that easily to dispose of and where we encounter dimensions of education that
cannot be reduced to questions of learning but that, nonetheless, do not end up
in teaching as an act of authoritarian, one-directional control – neither the con-
trol of learning nor the control of the student. They point, in other words, to the
need for a different direction; not the direction of “learning from” but the direc-
tion of “being taught by.” I will refer to these as the three gifts of teaching – one
having to do with curriculum, the second with didactics and the third with what,
in continental terms, might be called “pedagogy” (in German: Pädagogik), that is,
the existential domain of education-for-subject-ness.
70  Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching

The First Gift of Teaching: Being Given What You Didn’t Ask for
In learner-centred education we not just hear that the work of the teacher should
focus on learners and their learning.We also increasingly hear that learners should
take responsibility for their own learning, should self-regulate their learning, and
should take ownership of their own learning, as all this will supposedly make the
learning better.10 Such arguments are not just given in relation to the process of
learning – if such a thing exists – but also with regard to its content. When it is
suggested, for example, that students should set their own learning goals, it often
also means that students should decide about the content of their learning, that
is, about what they should be learning, for example because they have come to
the conclusions that this is their specific “learning need.” This line of thinking is
further amplified because of the impact of neo-liberal, market-driven reforms of
education in which students – or their parents – are increasingly positioned as
customers on a “learning market” and teachers and educational institutions are
positioned as the providers of “learning commodities.” The key idea here is that
the responsibility of teachers, schools, colleges, and universities is to satisfy their
customers by giving them what they ask for or, to put it more succinctly: by giv-
ing them what they desire.
Yet here, I think, the argument breaks down – which is not to suggest that
the rhetoric is absent; on the contrary – because an important rationale for edu-
cation, as I have already alluded to in Chapter 1, is precisely that it should give
students what they didn’t ask for, first and foremost because they didn’t even know
they could ask for it. This is the good old and nonetheless still relevant rationale of
liberal education, which seeks to bring students “beyond the present and the par-
ticular” (for this phrase see Bailey 1984). But it also has to do with the important
distinction between servicing the needs of “customers” – just giving them what
they say they want – and contributing to the definition of such needs (on this
distinction see Feinberg 2001). In light of this, one could – and should, in my
view – argue that the work of educational professionals is not just that of giv-
ing students what they ask for, but is about engaging, with them, in a process of
figuring out what it is they might “need” (just as in the medical profession the
work of doctors in not just to give patients what they ask for but rather figure
out what it is they might need).
Whereas everyone is of course free to learn what they want to learn, the whole
point of education is to give students more, so we might say; to give them what
they didn’t ask for, were not looking for, were not even aware they could be look-
ing for. There are powerful metaphors in the history of education that express
this idea, such as the idea of teaching as “turning” (Plato), as “pointing” (Klaus
Prange), or as attention formation (Bernard Stiegler; see also Rytzler 2017). The
“teacherly gesture” in these notions – which I will discuss in more detail in the
next chapter – is truly world-centred as it points away from the student towards
the world, suggesting that out there, in the world, there may be something that
 Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching  71

may be important for students to encounter, explore, have a look at, stay with, let
into their lives, and so on (see also Biesta 2017b). In this gesture, then, do we find
the first gift of teaching; a gift for which we need the school, not as a place for
learning, but as a place where you may find what you were not looking for and
may receive what you did not ask for.The school, perhaps, as a place of revelation.

The Second Gift of Teaching: Double Truth Giving

If the first gift of teaching lies in the domain of curriculum – of the “what” the
student will encounter – the second gift lies in the domain of “didactics” (to use
the Continental phrase) or “instruction,” and has to do with the idea that teach-
ing is fundamentally an act of what Kierkegaard has called “double truth giving”
(see Kierkegaard 1985; Westphal 2008). Put simply, the idea is that teaching is
not just about giving students the truth, as Kierkegaard puts it, but also and at
the very same time about giving them the conditions “of recognizing it as truth”
(Westphal 2008, p. 25; see also Kierkegaard 1985, p. 14).
There is a complex philosophical discussion in the background (which is
actually first of all a theological discussion about the possibility of revelation; see
Westphal 2008), but the point Kierkegaard is making here is actually remarkable
practical and “down to earth” as well, and is a very effective critique of the idea
that teaching would simply be about giving students knowledge.The whole point,
after all, is that in order to recognize something as knowledge – or more widely
to recognise something as meaningful or true – one not just needs the “content”
itself, but also needs to have, and be on the inside of, the “frame” within which
something makes sense, can be appreciated as knowledge, and so on.
The concrete example I have encountered many times as a student was of my
mathematics teachers who were able to do spectacular things on the blackboard
and, when they met my puzzled gaze, could say no more than “But can’t you see
it?” And the whole problem, of course, was that I was unable to see, not because
I couldn’t see but because I didn’t know what I should be seeing. I was, in other
words, outside of the “frame” within which this seeing was possible, whereas my
mathematics teacher was inside of that “frame.”
The difficult work of teaching, therefore, is not that of providing students
with knowledge – which makes the current insistence that schools should focus
on “knowledge” a bit silly – but is that of pulling students “inside” the frame
within which such knowledge begins to make sense and is able to make sense.
It is precisely this latter act of “pulling” that goes fundamentally beyond all the
sense-making that students are able to do, up to the point where they encounter
something new, something radically “beyond” their own horizon of understand-
ing. This is, therefore, not something students can construct from their current
understanding, but is something that “breaks through” this understanding, so we
might say, just as a sudden insight breaks through; something, therefore, that is
literally given.
72  Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching

Here, then, do we encounter the second gift of teaching, where we are not
just given what lies within the scope of our current understanding, but are given
what lies beyond that scope. And this, to make the point one more time, is the very
thing students – or “learners” – cannot construct by themselves (see also Roth
2011, for a very detailed discussion of these predicaments).

The Third Gift of Teaching: Being Given Yourself

The third gift of teaching brings us back to the existential “core” of the argument
I am pursuing in this book, which is the question of the “I” and its existence as
I, or, in educational terms, the question of subjectification. One could of course
argue that the question of the “I” is a matter for the “I” to resolve, and not some-
thing that is or can be given to the “I,” and, in a sense, this is correct. While our
freedom is not of our own making, it is, however, also not entirely accurate to
see it as a gift we receive, as this would suggest that there is an “I” who, in a sense,
is waiting for his or her freedom to arrive. It seems more accurate to suggest
that the “I” and its freedom “arrive” at the very same time, for example in the
moment when we realise that we can say “no.”
The reason why education nonetheless has something to do here, first of
all has to do with Rousseau’s insight that our freedom cannot be taken for
granted but is under a constant threat. As mentioned, this threat partly comes
from the “outside,” through all the societal forces that try to take over our
freedom, try to control our thinking and doing, and try to get a handle on
“our” desires or feed us with new desires. This is one reason why “schole” as
the free time not determined by society is important. This is not so that stu-
dents can learn more effectively, but in order to provide them with the time
to come into a relationship with the outside world and with the space to keep
this world at a distance.
The other threat, as mentioned, comes from the inside, and has to do with
our passions, as Rousseau calls them, and, again, the work of education has to do
with giving children and young people a fair chance at coming into a relation-
ship with their passions, rather than be determined and overtaken by them. This
is not just the relational work of education in which we encourage our students
to be a self. In addition to the “social configurations” of education, there is also
the curriculum, not viewed as content that should be mastered, but precisely as
the multitude of ways through which students can encounter the world and can
encounter themselves and their desires, and can find forms to come into a rela-
tionship with their desires.
All this can be captured as the summoning to be a self, either positively –
the “Hey, you there…” – or negatively – Rancière’s suggestion that the
emancipatory teacher should deny students the satisfaction of not having to
be a subject (see Rancière 2010). This, as I have explained, is precisely not a
matter of production or cultivation, but is the existential work of education.
 Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching  73

And this work is risky, not only because there are no guarantees that it will
be successful – this all depends on the student – but also because we risk
ourselves when we summon our students to be a self and not to forget about
this possibility or walk away from it. Homer Lane’s “complicated and unusual
incident” remains a powerful example of this third gift of teaching, precisely
because Lane, in putting the watch before Jason, put Jason’s freedom in his
own hands and thus we might say that Jason “received himself from what he
received” (Marion 2017, p. 86).

Concluding Comments
With these three “vignettes” I have tried to highlight aspects of education where
teaching is essential rather than accidental to education. The three gifts of teach-
ing show, in other words, that education cannot be (entirely) reduced to learning.
This is first of all important in order to resist the learnification of education – it
shows, after all, that the language of learning is insufficient to capture the com-
plexities of education. It is also important in order to highlight that there is
more to education than learning and that there should be more to education
than learning. Learning is at most one dimension of our human condition, but it
neither defines nor exhausts our existence-as-subjects in and with the world. In
addition to what we may wish to learn about the world – which can be a useful
“attitude to things,” as Marion makes clear, if our ambition is to reduce surprises
and increase control – there is also a world that is trying to give itself to us, so to
speak. And Marion would most likely claim that this givenness precedes any of our
attempts to get hold of the world. Marion thus opens up a whole new “dimen-
sion” of the human condition; a dimension that comes with a very precise chal-
lenge, which I would summarise as the challenge to let oneself be taught (see
also Biesta 2017c).

Notes
1 In “Freeing teaching from Learning” (Biesta 2015b; see also Chapter 2 in Biesta 2017a)
I have suggested that the work of the students entails (much) more than learning, and
that there is even important “work” that has nothing to do with learning. I will return
to this point later.
2 The term itself seems to have spread, with, to date, close to 9,000 hits in Google and
about a 1,000 items in Google Scholar [accessed 1 January 2021].
3 I am a strong defender of the intellectual integrity and independence of education, and
would resist – and have resisted (see Biesta 2014d) – thinking education as a field of
applied philosophy. (This is also the reason why I prefer to use the notion of “educa-
tional theory” rather than “philosophy of education,” although I understand the history
of the latter phrase.) This doesn’t mean, of course, that education and philosophy can-
not be in conversation, and it is for this reason that I turn to Marion’s writings. I hope
readers will bear with me in looking at a number of philosophical discussions that are
highly relevant for what I am trying to do in this book.
74  Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching

4 Marion not just anticipates that discussing the very possibility of revelation will meet
with resistance. Interestingly, he suggests that such resistance is, in a sense, an inevitable
part of revelation. As he puts it:
(A) correct understanding of the concept of revelation must account for the inevi-
table resistance that it cannot help to encounter. Admittedly, this resistance is not
enough to authenticate it, but at the very least a reception without resistance would
be sufficient to disqualify it as revelation
(Marion 2016, p. 2).

5 The sentence continues, in brackets, with “even if everything that gives itself never-
theless does not show itself without remainder” (Marion 2011, p. 19).
6 The following sentence not only shows the anti-Kantian streak in what Marion is
trying to do, but also gives an important reason for his “project,” because for Kant the
phenomenon in-itself is the very thing that can not appear. Marion writes:

(I)n order that the phenomenon show itself in itself and from itself – that is, in
principle, in order that it abolish the Kantian interdiction that reserved the in-itself
to the thing insofar as it does not appear – it is necessary that this appearing not owe
its appearing to the conditions of possibility of a foreign experience (that of the
transcendental ego), but that it draw its appearing from itself, and itself alone; it thus
must happen from itself – in a word, it must give itself
(Marion 2016, p. 48, emphasis in original).

7 Marion is not suggesting that Husserl and Heidegger didn’t see this at all. Marion sug-
gests that Husserl already went further than Heidegger in some respects. And Marion
also honestly confesses that he only discovered Heidegger’s earlier work (particularly
Heidegger’s 1919 essay on givenness and “es gibt”) after he had written about this (see
particularly Marion 2011).
8 Marion focuses this discussion on objects, but it is not too difficult to see that his
distinction is also relevant for our attitude towards other subjects, to put it briefly.
9 I return to this in Chapter 7; see also the final chapter in Biesta (2017c).
10 Note that in much of these discussions the question of what the learning is “about”
and “for” is not even raised, let alone addressed. Nonetheless it is remarkable – and
worrying – how popular these kinds of phrases have become.
6
FORM MATTERS: ON THE
POINT(ING) OF EDUCATION

As I have mentioned in Chapter 1, the line of thought in this book centres

on two ideas, one being that educational questions are fundamentally existential
questions, and the other that the educational work in relation to this comes to the
student – it is given, not taken – which means that the basic educational “ges-
ture” is that of teaching. In the preceding chapters I have, on the one hand, tried
to explore in more detail what the existential dimension of education entails and
why it matters.The Parks–Eichmann paradox introduced in Chapter 3 is perhaps
the most concise way to show why learning and development are not enough.
After all, there is always the further question what each of us will do with what
we have learned and with how we have developed and, more specifically, what
we will do when it matters. And it matters when we encounter a situation or event
in our lives that speaks to us, addresses us, calls us and calls upon us. In short: it
matters when we encounter the question “Hey, you there, where are you?” – a
question which, as mentioned, can come to us in many different guises, but
always arrives as an interruption. As I have mentioned in the preface, it is in this
remarkable and precious region that the “educational work of education” takes
place. It is in this remarkable and precious region, in other words, that teaching
takes place.
It is one thing to point out where teaching takes place, but still another to
articulate how teaching takes place – which is both the question of the gesture of
teaching itself and the question of the work of teachers in relation to this. In the
preceding chapters I have already shown glimpses of this gesture and of the work
of the teacher, for example in my discussion of Homer Lane’s “complicated and
unusual incident” and in my discussion of givenness and the gifts of teaching. In
this chapter I will continue this exploration by focusing on the form of teaching
and thus the form of education more generally. Why this focus?
76  Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education

In Chapter 1 I have characterised education as a form of intentional action,

that is, as something that educators do and that they do deliberately, with the pro-
viso that this also contains intentional non-action, that is, the deliberate decision
to refrain from action for educational reasons (think, for example, of all the things
Homer Lane did not do in his interactions with Jason). I have, in subsequent
chapters, zoomed in on the intentions of education and the intentions of educa-
tors by arguing that education ought to be orientated towards three domains of
purpose – qualification, socialisation, and subjectification – and that only when
all three are there, we have education worthy of the name. Put differently: with-
out subjectification education runs the risk of becoming the “management of
objects.”1
While this line of argument remains important – it remains important, in
other words, to continue to make a case for a broad understanding of what
counts in education and what counts as education – it could be argued that this
approach is also quite vulnerable. After all, what education is or is not allowed to
be in such a scenario, crucially depends on which agenda manages to be the most
prominent and powerful at a particular point in time. It depends, in other words,
on which agenda manages to become hegemonic vis-à-vis the intentions of
educational action. The enormous power with which the global education mea-
surement industry has managed to set the educational agenda in many countries
– focusing on the production of a narrow set of learning outcomes and a narrow
set of pre-defined identities (the lifelong learner, the good citizen, the resilient
individual, and so on) – shows the problem with an approach that focuses exclu-
sively on the intentional side of education and “forgets” about the “action” side.
The question this raises is whether the way in which particular educational
agendas are achieved is immaterial – which would mean that as long as education
is effective in producing particular “outcomes” everything is “fine” – or whether
there is something in the form of education itself that warrants our attention, per-
haps because there is something uniquely educational in the form of educational
practice itself. The question it raises, in other words, is whether form matters. In this
chapter I will argue that the form education does matter and that it is this form
itself that contains something uniquely educational. I will develop this argument
in conversation with the work of the German educationalist Klaus Prange who,
in my view, has provided the most consistent and most convincing argument that
form matters for education, summarised in his claim that without this specific
form – which he characterises as the act of pointing (in German: “Zeigen”) –
there is actually no education (see Prange 2012a, p. 25).
The German word “Zeigen” can be translated as “pointing” and as “show-
ing.” I will translate it as “pointing” because I believe that it is the most
“descriptive” translation of “Zeigen,” whereas “showing,” in a sense, refers to the
particular intention of pointing. Put differently: the point of “pointing” is that
it seeks to show something to someone, so in this regard showing is entailed in
pointing. The other matter of translation that is important here concerns the
 Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education  77

word “education” which I will use, when referring to Prange, as translation

of the word “Erziehung.” Prange is entirely clear that his arguments are about
“Erziehung,” not about “Bildung” (see Prange 2012b, p. 111) and, in line with
the argument I have pursued so far, does indeed conceive of “Erziehung” as a
form of intentional action.

The Form of Teaching: Redirection of Attention

One of the oldest depictions of the form of teaching in Western philosophy
can be found in the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic (for a detailed dis-
cussion see Benner 2020, pp. 15–23).2 In it, Plato argues, in a quite “modern”
way we might say, against the idea of teaching as the transmission of knowl-
edge from the teacher to the student. He writes: “(W)e must conclude that
education is not what it is said to be by some, who profess to put knowledge
into a soul which does not possess it, as if they could put sight into blind eyes”
(Plato 1941, p. 232). Plato rather assumes “that the soul of every man does
possess the power of learning the truth and the organ to see it with” (ibid.).
Teaching – or as Plato emphasizes: the art of teaching – is therefore not about
putting “the power of sight into the soul’s eye, which already has it, but to
ensure that, instead of looking in the wrong direction, it is turned the way it
ought to be” (ibid.).
The point I wish to highlight here is not about Plato’s particular interpreta-
tion of what is going on in the act of teaching – that is, his reference to “truth,”
and his judgement about the “wrong” and the “right” “direction” – but about the
depiction of the basic gesture of teaching as that of redirecting someone else’s gaze
(Benner formulates it in German as “die Kunst der Umlenkung des Blicks”; see
Benner 2020, p. 21). Whereas we can assume that human beings are capable to
direct their own gaze – which, in a rather “loose” formulation might be stated
as that all human beings are able to learn (but see the concerns I have already
expressed about learning in previous chapters) – the gesture of teaching is to turn
this gaze, that is, to turn it in a different direction; different from where the gaze
was focusing on and most likely also different from where the gaze was likely
to go next. Benner, in his discussion of Plato, emphasizes that this redirecting is
not caused by teaching and also cannot be enforced by teaching (see ibid., p. 17),
which means that, at most, it can be evoked by teaching. “Aufforderung” might be
an appropriate term here, therefore.
Whereas Benner approaches teaching in terms of the (re)direction of the
student’s gaze and thus approaches teaching first and foremost in terms of looking,
a slightly broader term that is useful here is that of attention, as one could argue
that the basic gesture of teaching is that of trying to (re)direct the attention of
the student to something (see also Rytzler 2017). There are further questions to
be asked about what this “something” is, can be or should be (I will return to this
later in this chapter), why we should be doing this (which is the question of the
78  Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education

purposes of education) and what students should do once their attention has been
(re)directed (I will return to this later as well). And there are also interesting ques-
tions to be asked about how it is possible to (re)direct someone else’s attention.
Yet, my point here is not to explain how the (re)direction of someone else’s
attention is possible – it is, one might say, the assumption upon which all educa-
tion rests – but to point at the gesture of teaching in its “purest” and most basic
form. And while this gesture can be enacted in all kind of ways – for example by
saying “Look there!” or “Pay attention” to our students, or by giving our students
a particular task or challenge – I agree with Prange (2012a, see also Prange &
Strobel-Eisele 2006, pp. 40–48) that the basic “structure” of the gesture of teach-
ing is that of pointing. What is important here is that pointing has a double ori-
entation, in that it is always directed at something – Look there! – and at the same
time orientated to someone – “You, look there!” (see also Prange 2012a, p. 68).
There is, after all, little point in pointing [out] something to oneself. Pointing is,
in this sense, always a communicative act.
What is interesting about Prange’s work is that he builds up his account
of education from this basic form, and thus makes a case that it is the form
itself that has educational significance, so that this significance does not need to
be “added” from the “outside,” so to speak, though particular intentions, pur-
poses or agendas. In the next sections of this chapter I will reconstruct some
of Prange’s main ideas, focusing on his “operational” theory of education, his
discussion of learning, and his ideas about the inherent normativity of the form
of education. In the final section of this chapter I will bring this back to the
main threads of this book.
Before I discuss Prange’s ideas, I do wish to mention that, despite all the
critique of “traditional” and “didactic” teaching, and despite the hype of the
“flipped classroom” – there is actually nothing new about asking students to do
preparatory and follow-up work – it is remarkable how persistent and also how
resistant the form of teaching actually is. Perhaps YouTube is the best example
here, because it is remarkable to find thousands and thousands of instructional
videoclips that all use this basic form of someone talking to an audience and
demonstrating a particular way of doing something (showing how to assemble
a piece of IKEA furniture, for example, or plumbing, repairing a car, hanging
curtains, and so on).3 More generally, the form of sitting together in rows or
a half-circle to listen to someone speaking remains a remarkable popular and
useful form, in education and beyond. And despite many attempts at innovative
school architecture, it is also remarkable to see the constant return to the design
of relatively enclosed spaces where teachers and students can gather; spaces that
aren’t too small but also not too big, and definitely shouldn’t be too noisy – the
question of educational acoustics is a really interesting one – so that joint atten-
tion is possible (see Tse et al. 2018; see also Biesta 2018c). So what does Prange
have to say about all this?
 Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education  79

An Operational Theory of Education

In one sense, Prange’s ambition is rather simple, as he just seeks to describe
what it is that we do when we educate (Prange 2012a, p. 7). By starting with the
question of the form of education or, with the term he tends to prefer, with the
characteristic operation(s) of education, he seeks to develop a theory of education
“from the bottom up” (see ibid.), that is, from the point of view of the practice of
education – or to be more precise: from the ways in which education is enacted
– and not from the (normative) agenda’s, intentions and ambitions that surround
education.
An important reason for taking this route lies in Prange’s concern for what
we might call the “integrity” of education itself, both the integrity of educa-
tion’s practice and the integrity of its theory. Prange observes that in the pub-
lic discourse about education other voices, such as from psychology, sociology,
economics and organisational theory, have become much more prominent than
the voice of education itself, which leaves education in the unenviable position
of having to “translate” the insights from “elsewhere” into educational practice
(see ibid., p. 14). Prange emphasises that the issue here is not about the status of
education as an academic discipline amongst other disciplines,4 and it is also not
a call for the “splendid isolation” of education (Prange 2012a, p. 19), but first
and foremost about the terms of the relationship, so to speak. The main thing is
to ensure that education doesn’t end up as something entirely practical, devoid
of any intellectual dimensions, and also not as something entirely instrumen-
tal, just the “executive arm” of agenda’s set elsewhere. And for this, so Prange
argues, it is key that we are able to articulate what education in itself “is,” or, in
a slightly more linguistic way, we need to be able to articulate what education
itself is about (in German: “eine Bestimmung dessen, was under ‘Erziehung’ zu
verstehen ist” – ibid., p. 19).
In the context of this discussion, Prange refers to an idea first articulated by
J.F. Herbart about education’s “own” or “proper” concepts – Herbart calls them
“einheimische Begriffe,” the German word “Heim” means “home” (see ibid., p.
19). These are the concepts that constitute and characterise the particular edu-
cational way of thinking, talking, seeing and doing. The point here is that each
academic discipline or field has its own particular concepts and theories – its
own vocabulary and grammar, so we might say. These give each discipline their
own “inner” identity and its particular perspective and interest in its interactions
with other disciplines and fields of practice. Whereas Herbart focused on educa-
tion’s proper concepts – and interestingly the two he proposed were “educability”
(“Bildsamkeit”) and “teaching” (“Unterricht”) – Prange suggests that since such
concepts need to articulate what is “proper” about education itself, it makes more
sense to start from the operations that we recognise as characteristic of education
(see ibid., p. 20). As he puts it:
80  Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education

the foundation for conceptusal development doesn’t lie in the aims and
purposes of education and also not in the social and individual conditions
that need to be taken into account when we educate, but first and foremost
in the forms of the enactment of education.
(ibid., p. 20; my translation)

Prange thus makes a case for starting with the “einheimische Operationen,” in
order then to articulate the “einheimische Begriffe” (see ibid.).
The question this raises, then, is to identify both what is characteristic about the
enactment of education and also what is distinctive about it, so as to make sure
that what we identify as characteristic of the enactment of education – that is,
what is always “there” when education “takes place” – is typical for education
and not just for any form of action or interaction. Prange’s proposal here is that
“pointing” – in German: “Zeigen” – is the fundamental operation of education
(see ibid., p. 25), and the challenge he sets himself is so make clear that without
reference to “pointing” it is impossible to understand what education is or, closer
to Prange’s own formulation, that it is impossible to understand what “shows
itself as education” (“was sich als Erzieung zeigt”; ibid., p. 25). Hence his claim
that when there is no pointing, there is also no education (“Wenn es das Zeigen
nicht gibt, dann auch keine Erziehung.” – ibid., p. 25).
Prange develops his argument by means of what we might term the most
basic “account” of education, namely that education is (basically) about someone
teaching something to someone. This already reveals that education consists of
three “components,” namely the one teaching (the teacher or educator), the one
being taught (the student), and what the teaching is about, which Prange refers
to as the “theme” (see ibid., p. 37). The theme is that which is “at stake” in what
the teacher seeks to teach to the student; it is that which is “at stake” in what the
teacher hopes that the student will “acquire.”We can refer to this as “content” but
“theme” allows for a wider and in a sense looser description of what is at stake
in education. Prange gives several examples of possible themes, such as being
able to walk, to speak, to read, to write and to do arithmetic (see ibid., p. 42),
thus suggesting that themes are relatively complex. He also uses the expression of
“cultural meaning” to explain what the status of themes in education is. Prange
refers to the theme as that which the student is supposed to learn, and more gen-
erally connects education and teaching to learning. I will return to this aspect of
Prange’s argument in the next section.
While all education thus entails three components, it is not enough to just
have a teacher who has the intention to make a particular theme available or
accessible to a student. It only becomes education, so to speak, when the ques-
tion of how to do this comes into play (see ibid., p. 47), and this, so Prange
argues, is the question of the form of education or, more precisely, the question
of the particular operation or operations that establish a connection between the
components so that the student can gain access to the “theme” the teacher
 Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education  81

wishes to present to the student. (I am aware that this formulation is a little

vague, but this is because I do not want to confine what is going on in educa-
tion to questions of the transmission of knowledge on the side of the teacher –
which is why I think that “theme” is a more interesting word – and also do not
want to reduce the work of the student or that which the student may “gain”
from the teaching to matters of learning. I will return to this later.)
So what, then, is the operation that establishes the connection between teacher,
theme and student and, in doing so, establishes the identity of the three compo-
nents as the one teaching, the one being taught, and the theme of the teaching?
While Prange acknowledges that what is going on here can be described in many
different ways and that, in a sense, there is quite a wide variety of educational
operations – Prange also mentions Benner’s “Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit” in
this context (see ibid., p. 62); I will return to this later – his central idea is that the
basic gesture that can be found in all the different ways in which education can be
enacted is that of “pointing” (see ibid., p. 65). And what is distinctive about “point-
ing” is its “double character” (ibid., p. 68), as the one pointing is not just pointing
at something but is, in this act of pointing, referring to someone else. The “Look
there!” always means “You look there!” so to speak. One thing to highlight here is
that the work of pointing always needs the hand and that, in this regard, education
is literally a form of manual labour (in German: “Handwerk;” see Prange 2012b).
The other thing to highlight here is that pointing both focuses the attention and
asks for attention or, in a slightly stronger formulation, demands attention.5 In this
sense we could say that pointing is first and foremost an evocative gesture, and I
wish to suggest that this gives pointing its educational significance.6
Now one could say that while pointing is the crucial educational gesture of the
educator – and I am, in this chapter and in this book, focusing on the work of the
educator – educational pointing is never just pointing at something but in one and
the same gesture is pointing (or even better: pointing out) something to someone.
And one could argue that what makes the pointing educational lies in the fact that
the educator hopes or expects that the student will do something with what the
educator tries to focus the student’s attention on. “Hope” and “expectation” are
the right words here.This is first of all because, as Plato already knew, the educator
doesn’t produce the student’s attention but rather acts on the assumption that the
possibility to pay attention is already there. Pointing is a matter of (re)directing
attention. But “hope” and “expectation” are also the right words because at a very
fundamental level the educator has no control over what the student will do once
his or her attention is “caught.” There is, in other words, no causal connection
between the pointing and what may happen on the side of the student – which
shows why “effectiveness” is such an unhelpful notion in this context – although
it doesn’t mean, of course, that the work of the educator is pointless.
With regard to all this, Prange makes two rather strong claims. One is that the
work of the educator is aimed at the learning of the student. He highlights that
education doesn’t produce the student’s learning; this learning is simply there
82  Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education

and can also occur without education. Yet what education aims for, according
to Prange, is to influence and direct the student’s learning, to put it broadly. The
second claim Prange makes is that it is only because of its orientation on learning
that pointing acquires its educational significance7 (see Prange 2012a, p. 67; see
also Prange 2011). Before I add my critical comments, let me briefly reconstruct
Prange’s line of thought.

Education, Teaching, and the Invisibility of Learning

As said, Prange argues for a very close connection between education and learn-
ing or, in slightly more concrete terms, between teaching and learning. To make
a case for a close connection is not to say that they are one and the same thing.
On the contrary, Prange continuously emphasises the importance of the distinc-
tion between the two: that education and learning are two entirely separate pro-
cesses – and also separate operations – and that there is no automatic connection
between the two. After all, people can learn and do learn, so Prange argues, with-
out education. This so-called “educational difference” is therefore a central idea
in Prange’s work. Yet key to the work of education is to establish a connection
between the work of the educator and the work of the student or, in more gen-
eral terms, between education and learning. Prange even suggests at some point
to use “‘education’” (that is the word “education” put in quotation marks) to
refer to education and learning together, and use the word “education” without
quotation marks to refer to the work of the educator. Perhaps in English it makes
sense to make a distinction between educating – as intentional action – and edu-
cation – as the whole “process,” but how important this is, remains to be seen.
While Prange thus gives learning a central position in his operational theory
of education, he does so in a rather interesting and, so we might say, explicitly
educational way. This has something to do with a fascinating claim he puts for-
ward, namely that learning is basically invisible (e.g., Prange 2012a, p. 88) – some-
times he also refers to this as the intransparency of learning (e.g., Prange 2012b,
chapter 11).8 Prange’s point here is that “learning” doesn’t show itself as some
kind of isolated and self-sufficient thing or object we can simply study, like a tree,
for example, but rather is entangled in all kind of situations and constellations
through which we may have some kind of experience that learning has occurred
(see Prange 2012a, p. 83). Learning thus constantly “shows and hides” itself (see
ibid.), which is the reason why Prange claims that “learning is the unknown ele-
ment in the educational equation” (ibid., p. 82).
What, then, does the word “learning” refer to? We assume, Prange writes, that
learning has taken place when a child is able to do something that it wasn’t able
to do before (see ibid., p. 104). Moreover, in education we assume that this may
happen – it is, in a sense, the intention with which we educate – and find con-
firmation of this assumption when what we assumed might happen indeed did
happen. But the “event” of learning itself cannot be “pinned down,” so to speak.
 Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education  83

This also means for Prange that learning research is actually never researching
learning itself but at most the relationship between “trigger” and “reaction” (in
German: “Reizinput und Reaktionsoutput”) (Prange 2012b, p. 173).
Rather, therefore, than trying to say something about learning in general or
without context, Prange suggests that it makes more sense to say something about
learning in its relation to education. And from this angle, Prange makes three
claims about learning or, to be more precise, he formulates “three fundamen-
tal insights about the meaning of learning for (educational) pointing” (Prange
2012a, p. 87): [1] learning exists; [2] learning is individual; [3] learning is invisible.
The claim that learning exists (my formulation; Prange writes “Es gibt das
Lernen.”) means, for Prange, that learning is a reality in itself, independent from
education. In a narrower sense Prange argues that educators work on the assump-
tion that learning exists – it is their operational premise (“Betriebsprämisse”).
More widely Prange argues that learning is an “anthropological constant,” a fact
of human nature (see ibid., p. 88). These claims still raise the question how we
should understand learning, to which I will return. Yet one interesting implica-
tion Prange draws from this claim is that it doesn’t make sense to suggest that we
can learn how to learn, and that we should learn how to learn before learning
can start (see ibid., p. 88). Of course, we may learn how to study, or how to prac-
tice, or how to experiment, but learning “itself,” Prange argues, is not something
that can be learned.
The claim that learning is individual basically means that no one else can do
my learning for me, just as no one else can eat for me or die for me (see Prange
2012a, p. 89).While Prange acknowledges that we can learn with others and from
others, we still have to do our own learning so that, in this regard, we should
be as careful with the phrase “social learning” as we should be with the phrase
“learning to learn” (see ibid.).
The claim that learning is essentially invisible, has to do with the fact that
learning is individual. Prange not only points out that with others we can only
observe the potential “effects” of learning but not the learning itself (see ibid.,
p. 91). But also both with regard to our own learning and the learning of others
we can only retrospectively, that is, after the “event,” claim that learning has taken
place. As Prange puts it: “Parents and teachers can see progress in what children
are able to do, but cannot observe the learning itself.” (ibid., p. 91; my translation).
While education is visible because it is a social act, learning is not, because it is a
form of “reception” by the individual, as Prange calls it, which is only visible in
an indirect way, “just as a litmus-test” (see ibid., p. 92).
From an educational point of view, the question then is not whether we can
say more about learning, albeit that Prange does venture into this terrain as well
(see particularly Prange 2012a, pp. 93–106), but what we can say about the way in
which the co-ordination between (the operation of) education and (the operation
of) learning can be achieved or established (ibid., p. 93). In the German litera-
ture this issue is known as the question of “articulation,” a term introduced by
84  Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education

Herbart. (The English equivalent is probably “curriculum,” as long as curriculum

is not understood as content but as a “course of study.”) Prange discusses it as the
question of the co-ordination of pointing and learning, and particularly the co-
ordination of pointing and learning over time (see ibid., Chapter 5).
We have already seen, and this is also articulated in Prange’s idea of the “edu-
cational difference,” that is the fundamental difference between education and
learning, that education doesn’t cause learning. Learning exists, as an anthropologi-
cal fact or, if we don’t want to overclaim, education proceeds on the assumption
that students learn and can learn; that the learning is going on with or without
education. Rather than to ask, therefore, what learning in itself “is” in order then
to use this knowledge in education – which for Prange is an impossible way of
proceeding – Prange approaches the question by asking how learning becomes
manifest as a result of education and, more specifically, as a result of or response
to pointing. Seen in this way, Prange writes, “educating as pointing is a form
through which learning is provoked” (see Prange 2012b, p. 169; my translation).
The evocation entailed in the act of pointing – the “You, look there!” – calls upon
the student not just to look, not just to (re)direct his or her attention, but to do
something with what is “found” there.
In relation to this Prange makes the interesting suggestion that learning is
brought to appearance (“Das Lernen wird zur Erscheinung gebracht” – ibid.,
p. 171) in function of educational intentions. It shows itself, Prange writes, in the
way in which it is being addressed or called for, so to speak (see ibid.). In practicing,
learning “reveals” itself as imitation; in problem-solving it “reveals” itself as innova-
tion and invention; in projects it “reveals” itself as practical learning, and so on (see
ibid.). Prange therefore compares learning to a chameleon in that it takes on the
“colour” that suits the particular educational “staging” (see ibid.). Prange empha-
sises, however, that the learning “itself ” remains hidden. It only becomes “partially
transparent” in light of educational provocations (see ibid.).
The final point Prange makes in this discussion is that the intransparency of
learning should not be understood as a kind of “darkness” that still needs to be
brought to light (see Prange 2012b, p. 176), but has to do with the fact that the
one who learns – I would prefer the word “student” – in their response to what
is being pointed out to them, respond in a reflexive way, that is, with reference
to themselves, and not in a purely reactive or mechanistic way. In doing so, so
Prange argues, they decide whether and how they want to learn (see ibid.). This
has everything to do with the fact that human beings not only have an “outside”
of observable behaviour and action, but also an “inside” of thoughts and feelings
that is not observable from the outside, although in everyday interaction we try
to “read” the outside for clues of what’s going on inside. In my own terms I
would say that Prange’s point here is that the student is never a mere object of
educational interventions, but a subject to which things are being pointed out; a
subject whose attention is being called for – but it is first and foremost the subject’s
attention, and not some kind of amorph or abstract process or mechanism.
 Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education  85

The Morality of Pointing

The final aspect of Prange’s work that I wish to discuss, concerns the moral
dimension of education. Prange emphasises that for education there is not just
the question of the standards that education should comply with; education also
has a contribution to make to the morality of those being educated, so in this
regard morality appears twice: as standard for and aim of education (see Prange
2012a, p. 137). Although education should live up to general ethical standards,
just as any other field of human practice, the question is whether there are any
particular, education-specific standards that educators need to take into consider-
ation, similar to the particular ethics of medicine, for example.
Prange approaches this in terms of the question what makes education good,
that is, when can we call educational action good. One option he discusses is to
say that educational actions are good when they achieve what they intend to
achieve (see ibid., pp. 144–145). However, while this makes sense in the techni-
cal-mechanical domain –plumbing is good when it fixes the heating system; a
car repair is good when it fixes a car – this line of argument does not apply to
education. We know, after all, that even when educators have done everything
right, there is no guarantee about the impact of their actions on the child or
student, precisely because the relationship between educational action and what
“happens” on the side of the student is not mechanical but reflexive and self-
referential. In other words: the student is subject, not object. And Prange also
reminds us that there are cases where parents and teachers obviously didn’t do the
right things, and nonetheless their children and students turn out well.
Rather than focusing on the question of what education achieves – we might
also say: what education produces – Prange suggests, not surprisingly, to turn to
the question of the form of education, by asking when (educational) pointing
itself is good.9 Or, to put it slightly differently, by asking what good (educational)
pointing is. Prange thus seeks to articulate the morality of pointing itself (in
German: “die Moral des Zeigens”) and comes up with three key requirements.
One is that (educational) pointing needs to be understandable (“verständlich”);
the second is that it needs to be appropriate (“zumutbar”); and the third is that
it needs to be “connectable (“anschlussfähig”) (I will explain this term later).10
With regard to the first requirement, Prange argues that whatever we point at,
we much show it in such a way that it is correct, transparent, and comprehensible
(see ibid., p. 146). This entails the demand of rationality (ibid.) or, phrased slightly
differently, the demand of truth (ibid., p. 148). Prange argues that this requirement
holds both for what we point at, that is, for what we show, and for how we show it,
where it is also important that we make the showing itself transparent and accessible.
With regard to the second requirement, that of “appropriateness,” we must
ensure that what we point at is accessible for the students we show it to, that it
doesn’t go “over their heads.” This doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be challenging,
but the challenge should be feasible, so to speak. Prange suggests that this entails
86  Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education

the demand of respect, that is, that we recognise our students as persons (his term)
or subjects (my term), and do not approach them as objects, as that would turn
education into training or oppression (see ibid., p. 147).
Thirdly, “connectability” is the requirement that students can do something
with what we show them, and particularly that they can continue with what we
present them in their own lives and on their own terms (see ibid.). It means, in
other words, that in what we show we have the interests of our students in mind
and need to find a connection to those interests, and not let our pointing be led
by our own interests. This, so Prange argues, entails the demand of freedom.
It is important to highlight that on what Prange would see as a superficial reading,
one could see the three requirements in purely technical terms, and think of them
as requirements for effective instruction, irrespective of what the instruction seeks
to bring about. To say that teaching should be comprehensible and feasible and, in a
slightly narrow interpretation, should be useful for students, does indeed sound as if
it’s just a matter of making sure that the teaching “fits” with the students, so to speak,
without specifying whether this is for indoctrination or emancipation. Prange empha-
sises, however, that the requirements are not morally neutral, which is precisely his
suggestion that the requirements entail the demand of respect, truth and freedom. As
he explains: any attempt at indoctrination would go against the demand for truth; any
attempt at manipulation would go against the demand for freedom; and any attempt at
social conditioning would go against the demand for respect (see ibid., p. 150).
In this sense, then, Prange comes to the conclusion that the form of educa-
tion – of educational pointing – has its own intrinsic or integral morality, rather
than that this morality needs to be added to it from the outside. This is another
way in which the form of education matters for the integrity of education itself.

Concluding Comments
In this chapter I have provided an exploration of teaching, not focusing on the
aims, intentions or purposes of teaching, but instead on its form. The reason
for this has to do with my focus on education as a form of intentional action
(including intentional non-action) and hence on the “gesture” of education as
something that comes to the student, which is precisely what teaching is about.
Starting from a general and in a sense quite old definition of teaching as the art
of (re)directing of someone else’s attention, I have zoomed in on Klaus Prange’s
“operational” theory of education. This was not just because of Prange’s inter-
esting attempt at building such a theory “from the bottom up,” that is, starting
from the forms of educational practice, rather than from the “top down,” that is,
starting from the aims, intentions, and purposes of education. After all, just having
good intentions, or agenda’s or programmes for education, doesn’t give an indi-
cation of what to do. It was also because of his suggestion that “pointing” is the
most fundamental educational form, captured in this claim that without pointing
there simply is no education.
 Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education  87

Earlier in this chapter I have raised three questions about the idea of teaching
as (re)directing the attention of someone on something.The first question is how
we should understand this “something.” What, in other words, is it that teaching
should focus the student’s attention on. The second question is why we should
do this, that is, what the point of educational pointing actually is. And the third
is what students should do once their attention has been redirected. What, in other
words, do we expect from our students or, in slightly more open terms, what do
we hope that our students might do once we have managed to (re)direct their
attention onto something. Let me try to answer these question with reference to
Prange’s ideas.
What is perhaps the most important and most interesting quality of the ges-
ture of pointing, is that it is a double gesture, because in pointing we are always
pointing at something – with the “Look there!” we are directing someone’s
attention onto something – yet at the very same time we are referring to someone
– with the “You, look there!” we are, after all, trying to direct someone’s attention.
With the double gesture of pointing we are therefore calling someone to attend
to the world. It is not just that we make the world into an object for someone’s
attention; at the very same time and in one and the same gesture we are inviting
someone to attend to the world. While we could say, therefore, that in pointing
we focus the student’s attention on the world, seen as everything “outside” of the
student, the act of pointing actually also points at the student and in this way also
brings the self of the student to the student’s attention. This is not just beginning
to reveal the way in which the gesture of pointing is truly world-centred – a theme
to which I will return in the next chapter. It also begins to reveal that world-
centred education does not preclude the event of subjectification – it doesn’t
turn students away from themselves – but rather calls for them to attend to the
world. Again: “You, look there!”
Before I try to answer the question why we might do this, that is, how the
act of pointing can be justified, I would like to say a few things about the third
question: what it is that we expect from our students once we have managed to
“catch” their attention, so to speak. From my own perspective I find it rather
unhelpful that Prange focuses the answer to this question so strongly on learn-
ing. As I have argued in several places, learning is only one existential possibility
amongst many others (see, for example, Biesta 2015b), so to claim, as Prange does,
that the educational significance of pointing lies in learning, i.e., that learning
gives pointing its educational significance, sounds too narrow to me, as it seeks to
exclude many other ways in which human beings can exist in and with the world
(I return to this in the next chapter as well). In this regard I find Komisar’s sug-
gestion to think of the student as an “auditor” “who is successfully becoming aware
of the point of the act [of teaching]” (Komisar 1968, p. 191; emphasis in original),
far more interesting and relevant, as it allows for a much wider range of possible
“points” of the act of teaching than just learning, and thus opens up for a much
wider range of responses on the side of the student than just learning.
88  Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education

What I do find fascinating about Prange’s discussion of learning is first of all

his idea of the intransparency and invisibility of learning, which is an effective
antidote to all the claims about learning made by the learning sciences, includ-
ing the claim that learning science should provide the basis for education. What
is also very helpful is what we might term the profoundly educational account
Prange gives of learning, that is, his suggestion that the ways in which learning
emerges and shows itself is a function of particular educational provocations –
the idea of learning as a chameleon. In all this, Prange maintains, correctly in my
view, that learning “itself,” if such a thing exists, actually never comes to the sur-
face but that at most we can see change which we can take as an indication that
some learning has taken place. This does mean that Prange’s notion of learning
remains rather formal and, in a sense, empty, in that for Prange “learning” basi-
cally refers to some kind of change and, in line with the most common “formal”
definition of learning, as change that is not the result of maturation. So perhaps it
would have been more helpful if Prange had replaced the word “learning” with
the word “change,” although even then we might say that in education we are
not just after change; sometimes the work we do as educators is to try to ensure
that students don’t change but stay on the “narrow path,” so to speak.
This then brings me to the question of the why of pointing, that is, the ques-
tion what the point of educational pointing actually is. What is very clear is that
pointing is not about control. One could say that this is the beauty of the gesture
of pointing. It says “Look there!,” and even says “You, look there!,” but it doesn’t
force the student to look there and doesn’t determine what the student should do
once he or she has focused his or her attention on what is “there.” The gesture of
pointing is, in this regard, not just an open gesture but also an opening gesture, as
it “opens” the world to the student and, as I have indicated earlier, in one and the
same “move” also “opens” the student to the world.What is at stake in this gesture,
therefore – as Prange indicates in his discussion of the morality of pointing – is the
freedom of the student. This is not, so I wish to add, the freedom for the student
to do what he or she wishes to do, where the world is just an instrument or play-
ground for the student’s desires. It rather is the freedom to exist as subject “in” and
“with” the world, not just pursing one’s own desires but also, and first and fore-
most, meeting the world and encountering what the world may be asking from us.

Notes
1 This phrase may sound rather strong, but I invite the reader to have a look at this
report to get a sense of what I have in mind: Department of Education and Training
(2018). Through growth to achievement: The report of the review to achieve educational excel-
lence in Australian schools. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
2 I am aware that I am only referring to the Western tradition and that I reconstruct this
tradition in terms of the “canon” of Western philosophy. I hope that I will have an
opportunity in the future to conduct a broader historical and comparative investiga-
tion into differing forms of teaching.
 Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education  89

3 The YouTube Creator Academy actually claims that there are “every day, over a billion
learning-related videos [being] viewed on YouTube” (see https://creatoracademy.you-
tube.com/page/lesson/edu-channel-start; accessed 3 January 2021).
4 Whereas in the German context, and many other countries in continental Europe,
education did establish itself as an academic discipline, the main configuration of edu-
cation in the English-speaking world seems to be that of an applied and in a sense
“practical” field of study; see Biesta (2011) for a reconstruction.
5 In German: “macht aufmerksam und fordert Aufmerksamkeit” (Prange 2012a, p. 70).
6 Prange and Strobel-Eisele (2006, Chapter 2) suggest in their book on the forms of
educational action that pointing is the basic educational form (in German:
“Grundform”), and then distinguish between four forms of pointing: ostentatious
(“ostentativ”) pointing (which they connect to practicing); representative pointing
(which they connect to presenting); evocative pointing (which they connect to sum-
moning); and reactive pointing (which they connect to feedback).
7 In German: “Allein durch den Bezug auf das Lernen gewinnt das Zeigen eine
­erzieherische Bedeutung.” (Prange 2012a, p. 67)
8 For Prange this is also a reason for being highly critical of the idea that it is possible to
conduct research on learning itself, and even more so of the idea that education should
be based on the findings of such research (see Prange 2012b, pp. 172–173).
9 I am adding “educational” here in order to highlight that Prange’s discussion is not
about the good of pointing in general, but about the good of pointing as an educa-
tional act.
10 Prange does mention that his explorations are “internal” to education, that is, that by
asking what good educational pointing is, it is already assumed that we are involved in
education.The question whether education itself can be justified lies beyond – and we
could also say: before – this and, for Prange, is a question where educational ethics
“meets” general ethics (see Prange 2012a, p. 148).
7
WORLD-CENTRED EDUCATION

Neither culture nor society but world is the place where the person has to
achieve its calling. While human beings as natural beings develop, and as
societal role-players become socialised, the education of the person always
takes place within the horizon of the world.
Böhm (2016, p. 163; my translation1)

I have given this book the title “world-centred education.” I have been using
this phrase for some time now, particularly as a “label” for the specific approach
to education that I have been pursuing in my own work. Rhetorically, the idea
of world-centred education tries to create an opening in an age-old and rather
fruitless opposition between (proponents of) child- or student-centred educa-
tion on the one hand and (proponents of) curriculum-centred education on
the other. While the pendulum appears to keep swinging back and forth, often
with claims about what is conservative and what is progressive, what is “of the
past” and what is “of the future,” what is traditional and what is new, what is
good and what is bad, what is sentimental and what is authoritarian, what is
educational and what is not, John Dewey did at least understand that educa-
tion needs both the child and the curriculum, and that one-sided approaches
to or conceptions of education simply make no sense. They are “really stupid”
(Dewey 1984, p. 59).
But as I have tried to make clear in the preceding chapters, the idea of world-
centred education is not just an attempt to overcome the opposition between
one-sided conceptions of education that may have rhetorical appeal but mean
little for the everyday practice of education.The idea of world-centred education
is first of all meant to highlight that educational questions are fundamentally exis-
tential questions, that is, questions about our existence “in” and “with” the world,
 World-Centred Education  91

natural and social, and not just our existence with ourselves. The world, in other
words, is the one and only place where our existence takes place. It is to highlight
that the educational work in relation to this is about (re)directing the attention of
the ones being educated to the world, which is why I agree with Prange’s sugges-
tion that pointing is the fundamental operation of education.What makes point-
ing world-centred is the fact that pointing is always a pointing to something; what
makes pointing educational, so we might say, is that pointing is always a showing
of something to someone. As I have suggested in my discussion of Prange’s work,
the double gesture of pointing ultimately is about calling someone – or even more
precisely some one – to attend to the world, which means that it also calls for
attention to one’s own attention, so to speak. That is why world-centred educa-
tion doesn’t preclude subjectification, but actually entails it.
In this concluding chapter I wish to take another look at the idea of world-
centred education, focusing specifically on the question how we might con-
ceive of our “encounter” with the world, and on what this means for how we
understand and, more importantly, how “do” education. While it is entirely
legitimate to think of the world, natural and social, as an object of our learn-
ing, our understanding, and our sense-making, also because such learning,
understanding, and sense-making has real significance for our ability to act
in and with the world, I wish to highlight, picking up a major theme from
Chapter 5, that our existence in and with the world is not exhausted by this
relationship. The point is that the world is not just there as an object for us,
to put it crudely, but exists in its own right and its own integrity. The world,
in other words, is real. And because it is real, it puts limits on what we can do
with it, what we can want from it, and how we can make sense of it. Trying
to be “at home in the world,” to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase one more time,
does require, therefore, that we try to “reconcile ourselves to reality” (Arendt
1994, pp. 307–308).This is not a matter of resignation. It is not to concede that
change is neither possible nor desirable. But it is to highlight the importance
of giving our intentions, actions, and desires a “reality check.”
If the “gesture” of learning, understanding, and sense-making goes from me to
the world, there is, therefore, another “gesture” that runs in the opposite direction,
from the world to me. And one of the things that I seek to articulate in the idea of
world-centred education is that both gestures matter; they matter for education and
they matter for our (co-)existence as human beings on a planet with limit capacity
to fulfil everything we may desire from it, and in societies where not all desires can
be realised in equal measure all the time. If the gesture of learning therefore puts
me in the centre of the picture, the other gesture – which I have referred to as the
gesture of “being taught by” – puts me in the spotlight, so to speak. It puts me in
the spotlight because the leading question here is not what I might want from the
world, but what the world may want from me, that is, what the world is asking from
me (on this “imperative” see also Lingis 1998; and for a fascinating exploration of
this theme see Dijkman 2020).
92  World-Centred Education

Encountering this question is a subjectifying “moment” or “event,” because it

makes me aware that there may be a question for me – not for someone else, not
for anyone or everyone; a question, in other words, that singles me out. It is also
subjectifying, because it makes me aware of and, in a sense, confronts me with my
own freedom. This is not the freedom to do what I want to do, but the freedom
to respond to the question I encounter, which of course includes the possibility
to walk away from it.2 The whole point of freedom, after all, is that it never forces
us to act in a particular way. Homer Lane’s “complicated and unusual incident”
remains an excellent example of this whole dynamic.
While we may be familiar with the idea that other people speak to us, address
us, ask us questions, and even question us, the idea that the world “in general”
speaks to us and may be asking something from us, may sound a little less famil-
iar, particularly when, as I have done, the world is not just the social world but
also the natural world, that is, the world of animate and inanimate things. In the
first section of this chapter I will try to give a bit more meaning to this idea –
although I am aware that “giving meaning” is precisely not the point of what
this is about – by discussing work that explores the “limits of the constructiv-
ist metaphor” (Roth 2011). I will then return to Marion’s observations about
the two “attitudes” to the world, and particularly look at the educational sig-
nificance of the idea of “anamorphosis” for world-centred education. In a brief
third step, I will indicate what this means for teaching and the teacher, particu-
larly highlighting that it is ultimately not the teacher who calls for the “I” of the
student, but for the teacher to turn the student to the world, to call the student
to attend to the world, so that the world may do it’s teacherly work. I conclude
the chapter with a brief statement about the challenges for education today.

Encountering the World: The Sound of Surprise3

The idea that the world speaks, to put it briefly, may, at first sight, be quite an
alien idea for education. After all, much work that goes on in education, particu-
larly around the curriculum, is precisely about how we can present the world to
our students and, more specifically, how we represent the world for our students
(see Mollenhauer 1983) – which comes with all the difficult educational and
political questions about selection and modes of (re)presentation.
The idea that the world needs to be represented, which also means that the
world needs to be interpreted, stems from the observation that the world itself
doesn’t tell us how it wants to be understood, how it wants to be known. That
the world remains “silent about itself,” as Meyer-Drawe (1999, p. 329) has put it,
has been taken to mean that it is up to us, as human beings, not just to make sense
of the world but actually to give sense to it. While in education we are familiar
with this line of thought – and perhaps we should say that we have become too
familiar with it – and while this line of thought makes sense, it is unlikely to be
the whole picture.There are, in other words, limits to what Roth (2011) refers to
 World-Centred Education  93

as the “constructivist metaphor,” and having a sense of what these limits are and
where and how we may encounter them, is important in order to have a fuller
picture of what it may mean to exist in and with the world.

On Touching and Being Touched

Roth starts his exploration with a rather everyday but nonetheless significant
observation, namely that in educational settings students are asked to learn some-
thing that they do not yet know. This, so he argues, already raises a crucial ques-
tion for constructivist theories, because how can students be asked to construct
something if they do not (yet) know what it is they should be constructing? And
also, how can students aim for this, how can they work towards this, if they do
not yet know what this “this” is going to be? Roth compares the predicament of
students with that of builders building without a plan and without a conception
of what they are to build. In such a situation, Roth writes, they would not be
constructing a house but would “simply be putting together some stuff ” (Roth
2011, p. 13).
Roth concludes therefore that “there is a whole range of phenomena that
are central to our everyday lives and experiences … that lie outside of what the
constructivist metaphor can explain,” including the phenomenon of “passability,”
which he defines as “our capacity to be affected” (ibid., p. 18). Roth’s argument is
that such phenomena “not only are central to our lives and experiences but also
enable learning to be possible in the first place” because “if the (human) organ-
ism did not exhibit the capacity to be affected … no intentional construction of
anything would be possible” (ibid., p. 17).
To support his claims, Roth discusses the example of encountering “a new
form of food, a wine or olive oil you have never tasted/smelled before” (ibid.,
p. 18). When we encounter this we may “decide to smell, pick up the glass and
bring it to [our] nose” (ibid., p. 18). One question Roth asks, is where such a
decision comes from, that is, how we actually “know to reach out.” Here he sug-
gests that this “knowing to reach out” is not a knowing that precedes our reaching
out, but rather that our reaching out is called for by the things we encounter; that
it is something given to us rather than constructed by us (see ibid, p. 18).The second
point Roth makes about the encounter with a new form of food or drink, is that
the whole point of smelling and tasting lies in the fact that we do not (yet) know
the smell or taste we are going to encounter.
Roth concludes from this – and I think he is right – that we “cannot inten-
tionally construct the smell and taste” (ibid., p. 18), but rather “have to open up
and allow ourselves to be affected” (ibid.).This is an experience of “not-knowing”
that comes with uncertainty “and therefore, also with risk” (ibid.). Because of
this risk, the “standard recommendation” in the case of smelling is that we “wave
the hand such that the smelling can begin with whiffs of odor rather than with
the full, potentially dangerous experience of smell” (ibid.). By “actively exposing
94  World-Centred Education

ourselves” to “the new and unknown,” we are “exposed to the unknown (passive)
[and] are therefore vulnerable” (ibid.).
This vulnerability, so Roth argues, precedes knowing, sense-making and
interpretation, because “it is only after having been affected that we can begin
to think, classify, and relate the experience to something else” (ibid.). What we
encounter here is what Roth, in what, at first sight, may sound paradoxical,
describes as “agency … enabled by passivity, a passivity that is more radical than
any non-action that we might choose as a form of action” (ibid.). Hence, the
“immanent capacity to move, the intention to move, and the experience of
encountering the unknown that we cannot anticipate and therefore construct,
all invoke passability, our capacity to be affected” – which also means that “affect
comes to precede cognition [and] even enable cognition” (ibid.).
For Roth this is not to suggest that construction, sense-making, cognition
and interpretation do not exist or take place, but that they cannot be taken as
originary, because “passability and the passion precede anything that looks like the
cognitive effort constructivists describe and theorize” (ibid., p. 19). It is therefore
“passability and the passions [that] make … cognition possible” (ibid., p. 19).
Much of what we know thus emerges from these experiences, rather than it is
being constructed by us. As Roth writes:

We know pain because we feel it not because we construct it. We know

what it is to be in love with another person because we have experienced
it in flesh and body and not because we have constructed this experience
in our mind. Emotions are not the objects of constructions but rather are
passions that we feel and to which we are subject and subjected.
(ibid., p. 19)

Roth provides a further exploration of the role of affection and passivity in

knowing and coming to know, through a discussion of touching and sensing
which, as he argues, actually is much more revealing about what it means to
come to know than where most discussions about knowledge seem to focus
on, namely the domain of vision and the experience of seeing (see ibid., p. 51;
see also Meyer-Drawe 1999, p. 333). Roth discusses the example of sensing the
nature of a mouse pad surface, noticing that it doesn't suffice to just place one’s
fingers on it, but that one actually has to slide one’s fingers across the surface.
Roth makes a number of observations about this. The first is that “there is
an essential agential moment to learning about the surfaces by means of touch”
(Roth 2011, p. 51), that is, a matter of moving one’s fingers, pushing harder or
less hard. But the texture we experience as a result is not to be understood as “the
sum total of my sense impressions” (ibid.). It rather is “the manner in which the
surface uses the time of our tactile exploration” (ibid., p. 51), and this is a truly
“pathic experience” because “I cannot anticipate the contents of my touching
unless I have seen it before” (ibid., p. 52).
 World-Centred Education  95

To feel by means of touch, I have to open up to allow myself to be affected (…)

As I do not know what to expect, I cannot but allow the world to act upon me
all the while I intentionally move my hand across the mouse pad surface to
sample its texture. That is, although I intend to sample the surface, I actually
have to allow the surface to affect me, as it is only through this affection that
my touch sense functions. Sensing is essentially pathic, where I open up to the
world to affect me.We do in fact say “I am touched” in the passive voice when
something emotionally affects us.
(ibid., pp. 52–53)

In discussing this example Roth emphasises once more that construction has lit-
tle to do here. “I cannot construct the surface because the sensation is an entirely
pathic experience. (…) I cannot in a strong sense construct the knowledge about
the surface as I can only open up and let it (the surface) affect me” (ibid., p. 54).

Attention Without Intention

If it is the case, as Roth argues, that there is a radical passivity that precedes any
knowing and sense-making, then this raises the question what “paying attention”
exactly is and, more importantly, how we can actually focus our attention onto
something if we do not yet know what it is that we will be finding there. Roth
addresses this point through a discussion of intentionality.
On a “traditional” notion of intentionality one would assume that intentionality
precedes the “act” of touching, that is, that we first need to have the intention to
touch and that after this we can begin to experience-through-touch. Roth argues,
however, that although it is the case that “(b)efore my hand can move to reach out
and learn by touch, before my eyes can gaze at some segment of the world and
learn by vision, my hand and eyes need to know that they can move” (ibid., p. 67).
However, the “agent cannot construct this knowledge because it precedes all con-
structive abilities, all intentionality, and all intellectual consciousness” (ibid., p. 67).
Roth argues, therefore, that it is more accurate to say that “I know how to move my
eyes because my eyes know how to move on their own” (ibid., p. 67).
A number of consequences follow from this, but perhaps the most impor-
tant one is that the intention to move is itself “something given rather than
constructed by the agent” (ibid., p. 68). This, in turn, means that “givenness and
passivity enable and make possible agency” (ibid., p. 68; emphasis in original). And
this is the reason why this form of passivity should be termed “radical” as “it can-
not be intended although it is foundational for agency” (ibid.).
These observations are helpful in order to see that attention and intention are
not identical and that it is actually important to distinguish between the two, in
order not to assume that we simply have the capacity to generate intentions – the
intention to see, to feel, to touch, to act – and that it is as a result of our intentions
that we connect to the world. Roth helps us to see that it is actually the other
96  World-Centred Education

way around, that is, that to pay attention is not a matter of intention, of focusing
our attention on something we already know, but that it is about “opening up”
and “allowing ourselves to be affected” (see ibid., p. 18).
Kate Meyer-Drawe comes to similar conclusions in her attempt to depict
the relationship between human beings and the world not in terms of acts of
interpretation but in terms of (a) dialogue I which the things appeal to us, call
us, reach out to us, so we might say, rather than that they are silent objects just
waiting for our sense-making to bring them to life. As I have indicated earlier, she
highlights, like Roth, that the emphasis of modern philosophy on seeing – but
note also the emphasis of modern education on seeing and images and pictures
– makes it quite difficult to grasp the ways in which things affect us (see Meyer-
Drawe 1999, pp. 333–334).This is already quite different in the domain of touch,
the work of the hand, so we might say, and interestingly Meyer-Drawe makes the
point that mistakes in the domain of touch – which are literally mis-takes – are
of a fundamentally different quality from optical illusions.
But what is even more helpful is the way in which Meyer-Drawe reveals what
the quality of the relationship between us and the world is when we focus on the
domain of hearing. Here Meyer-Drawe highlights that in order to hear something
we are completely dependent upon the sound that comes to us from the outside.
We may “open our ears” but whether we will hear something is completely
beyond our control.The only thing we can do, so she argues, is to bring ourselves
in a state of “attentive readiness” (“aufmerksamer Bereitschaft”), but that is all we
can do (ibid., p. 334). There is nothing we can intend, nothing we can construct;
we can only wait and only let ourselves be surprised. And to be surprised literally
means to be overtaken by what is beyond our control.
The fact that in the domain of hearing we are, in a very vivid way, reminded
of the limits of our intentions, makes Meyer-Drawe ask what might happen if we
were to take the auditory as the starting point for our educational theories and
practices, and not the visible.4 She argues that in such an approach we wouldn’t
find a self-aware subject at the centre of the world but would rather find a subject
radically exposed to a world that may or may not announce itself, with little or no
intentionality of the side of the self (see Meyer-Drawe 1999, p. 334).

Anamorphosis: Finding the Place Where One Can Be Found

There is a remarkable resemblance between the distinction that Roth and
Meyer-Drawe seek to highlight and the two “attitudes to things” that Marion
writes about. As I have discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, Marion makes a
distinction between an attitude to things – and to the world more generally –
where things appear as “stable objects” which we are in control of, and an atti-
tude to things – and to the world more generally – which is the exact opposite
of this, where it is not us who are in command of the world but where “we find
ourselves commanded by the thing” (Marion 2017, p. 85).
 World-Centred Education  97

The first attitude, as Marion explains, consists in “reducing the chances that
those around us will surprise us; consequently we continually learn how to bet-
ter control them” (ibid., p. 83). In this attitude “we really count on being able
to anticipate situations and accidents, to be able to react, to control, to correct,
to secure” (ibid.), and this is done “so that we are in the centre” (ibid.). Through
this attitude “we live in a world that we organize such that we retain from it only
those things that can be constituted as objects, only what we can grasp with our
intelligibility, under the control of a quasi-master and possessor of nature” (ibid.).
We do this, we constitute such an “object-ive” world in order to rule out danger.
Marion asks, however, what ruling out danger means “if not keeping away
from the unexpected,” from that “which cannot be constituted as object, that
against which one cannot protect oneself ” (ibid., p. 83)? So while the first atti-
tude is good for thinking ahead, that is, for what can be anticipated, Marion
argues that “this rationality … does not want any of the rest [but] only retains
this layer of reality that one can call the object” (ibid., p. 84). However, the object
only offers “a very thin and superficial layer of things. It leaves to the side …
everything it cannot foresee, everything it cannot anticipate, what is said to be
unknowable” (ibid., p. 84). It is however, precisely there “that the given is dis-
played because it characterizes what among things resists objectification and is
given by its own initiative” (ibid.; emphasis added).
So in the first attitude we go out to the world in order to comprehend it,
which literally means to grasp it in its totality, and thus end up with a world of
objects outside of us, where we are in the centre and the world is “out there” and
more importantly is out there for us. While this attitude has its use, Marion, like
Roth and Meyer-Draw, makes the point that this is not the full picture but actu-
ally only a very “thin and superficial” layer. There is an entirely different attitude
and hence an entirely different encounter with the world possible, one where
the world comes to us, gives itself to us, surprises us, and where, with the rather
strong words Marion uses, the world commands us and summons us to come to
experience it (ibid., p. 85). In this attitude I am precisely not in the centre, I’m
precisely not in control, but rather I am in the spotlight, as I have put it earlier,
which means that I am exposed.
Marion thus provides further arguments for the idea that attention is not
a matter of intention, that is, that it is not about intentionally focusing on
something we already know, but that attention is a matter of opening oneself
up – opening one’s ear, we might say with Meyer-Drawe – but without being
in control of what may or may not arrive. One could think of this as a general
opening up, that is, a kind of being open to everything that may conceivably
arrive; and perhaps this is how human beings begin their life. But what is inter-
esting and helpful about Marion’s discussion of anamorphosis, is that there is
some work to do, so we might say, in order to find the place from where one
might be found. In abstract language this is about the fact that “in the phenom-
enon inasmuch as it gives itself according to its character as nonobject (…) a
98  World-Centred Education

place and moment are described where the ego must know how to allow itself
to be found and which it does not decide” (Marion 2017, p. 85). Yet Marion’s
example of the painting in the cloister of the convent of Trinity-on-the-Mount
is very helpful as well, precisely because it gives an example of a situation where
the spectator must find the point from which the painting can be seen, a point
“determined by the painting and not by the spectator” so that “the specta-
tor must obey the painting in order to see it” (Marion 2017, pp. 84–85). The
spectator must, in other words, engage with the question what the painting is
asking from them, not the other way around.
While Roth and Meyer-Drawe emphasise the passivity that is involved and,
in a sense, required here, Marion helpfully pushes this argument forward with his
observation that it is not a “pure” passivity that is at stake here, precisely because
in the encounter with the world, the world calls upon me. I am called to attend,
as I have put it in the previous chapter; I am called to engage with the appeal that
the world puts to me. That is why Marion argues that “I cannot remain passive
in front of the event: I make myself available or I avoid it, I take a risk or I run
away, in short, I still decide, and I respond even by refusing to respond” (Marion
2017, p. 85) – which all shows, once more, that the encounter with the world is at
the very same time an encounter with oneself, a call to bring oneself “into play,”
which also shows that subjectification is not some kind of “inner” event but is
thoroughly worldly in character.
While it may not be too difficult to envisage the demands other people put
upon us – willingly or unwillingly, deliberately or accidentally, explicitly or
implicitly – it is also important to acknowledge the ways in which the “rest”
of the world, so to speak, puts demands upon us. Prange (2012b), Chapter 1
discusses this in the context of Rousseau’s idea of the education through things
– which Rousseau identifies next to education through nature and education
through other human beings – where he highlights that we do not learn things
themselves, if that expression makes sense, but can only learn through the use or
manipulation of things. And it is precisely there that we encounter a demand, that
is, that we encounter what the thing is asking from us, rather than that the thing
is just an object for our interpretation or our learning. With regard to inanimate
objects, Prange particularly highlights the educational significance of the resistance
that objects offer, because it is in the transformation of resistance into skill (“die
Umarbeitung einses Widerstandes in eine Könnerschaft” – Prange 2012b, p. 18)
that something important takes place. And this transformation is not a matter of
imposing one’s will upon the material, but rather figuring out what the material
does and doesn’t allow; what, in other words, the appeal of the material and of
the particular object is.
Prange argues that this is even more so the case in the encounter with animate
objects, that is, with living things, particularly animals: the hamster, the budgie,
the cat, the dachshund or the golden retriever, but not fighting dogs, at least not
initially (see Prange 2012b, p. 19). The difference lies in the persistence of the
 World-Centred Education  99

appeal, so to speak. Whereas one can put a toy or object away if it doesn’t suit or
if boredom sets in, animals pose an ongoing demand – they need to be fed, they
need to be groomed, they need to be protected, and so on, and these challenges do
not go away, so one could say that animals pull the “I” in a very different way into
the world than inanimate objects do. Elsewhere (for example Biesta 2019c) I have
made a similar observation about the educational significance of plants, suggesting
that what is special about the encounter with plants is that one can think as hard
and long about the plan as one wishes, but that this will have no impact on whether
the plant will flourish or not. In other words, the encounter with the plant does not
pose an appeal to our cognitive powers, and is actually “immune” for our think-
ing, but poses an appeal to our ability to care and be attentive to the plants’ needs.
This pulls a rather different part of the “I” into the world, so to speak; it calls for a
­different kind of attention from the “I.”

Teaching for the Possibility of “Being Taught”

The final point I wish to emphasise here, is that in world-centred education it is
the world that provides the demand, and not the teacher. This is not to discharge
the teacher from his or her responsibility, but it is to see that the key task of the
teacher is to point the student to the world, to (re)direct the student’s attention
to the world, so that it becomes possible, without guarantees of course, that the
student may meet that which the world is asking from him or her. One could
say, that in this regard it is the world – or in the way that Bertolt Brecht also
hints at this: reality5– that teaches, and what teachers do is to try to keep students
“turned” towards the world and “open” towards the world, so that it may become
possible for students to attend to the world and, in one and the same move,
attend to themselves, so to speak, by encountering the question what the world,
this world, this reality right her and right now, is asking from me. Marion’s idea
of anamorphosis suggests that there is constant work to be done for teachers to
“stage” situations where students may encounter this question.
The significance of pointing, of the act of pointing and of the form of pointing,
is that it doesn’t force the student into anything, but appeals to his or her freedom
and, in a sense, reminds the student of his or her own freedom. Precisely because
of this, precisely because the freedom of the student is at stake and, more specifi-
cally, because the freedom of the student is called upon, the work of teaching is
without guarantees. Yet the fact that there is no mechanical causality in educa-
tion, that teaching cannot produce the subject-ness of the student just as it cannot
produce learning outcomes or student achievement, as all this depends on what
student do or don’t do, doesn’t make the work of education pointless, precisely
because, as I have argued, the work of education is of a different order than the
order of the effective production of things.
Prange (2012a, pp. 155–163) discusses this with reference to an interest-
ing idea from Herbart, namely that of “educational causality” (“pädagogische
100  World-Centred Education

Kausalverhältnis”). This is not of the order of “a causes b” – “teaching interven-

tion causes learning outcome” – but rather of the order “a calls for b” – which, in
its shortest formulation, can be read as the world calls for the “I” of the student.
Or, in a slightly more precise formulation: the teacher calls for the student to
attend to the world – “You, look there!” – which is, indeed, an “Aufforderung zur
Selbsttätigkeit,” as it is ultimately for the student to respond to what the world
may be asking. Educational causality, therefore, is evocative causality, so to speak. It
works as an address and seeks to address the “I” of the student. “Hey, you there,
where are you?” Whether the student responds with an “I am here” or with an
“It has nothing to do with me, I was just following orders,” is, as mentioned, up
to the student. But by knocking on the “door” of our students, and by raising
the question whether anyone is “there,” we at least try to give them a fair chance
at their subject-ness, whatever the way in which they will respond to what the
world may be asking from them.

Concluding Comments
I come to the end of this book and return to the question with which I started:
“What shall we do with the children?” I do believe that this is the key educa-
tional question, but think that it is wise to add a further question to it, namely
“What shall do with the infantile desires that continue to haunt us throughout
our lives?” As educators we cannot evade our educational responsibility – we
should take the question what to do with the children seriously in its full com-
plexity – but we should be honest and shouldn’t assume that infantile desires
are a problem for “them,” but not for “us.” Rather, the challenge of trying to
live one’s life in a grown-up way, that is, not running behind one’s desires but
continuously returning to the question whether what one encounters within
oneself as a desire is what one should be desiring, is a truly lifelong challenge
for everyone. And, as I have indicated, this has become even more of a challenge
in the “impulse society,” that is, the society which continuously tells us to desire
more, to multiply our desires, rather than that it encourages us to give our desires
a “reality check” and provides us with the “social configurations” (Meirieu) that
helps us with this task.
Any answer we may give to what we shall do with the children, thus
needs to be given in light of how we encounter and perceive our present
“condition,” so to speak. With regard to this, I do believe that we still live in
the shadow of “Auschwitz,” that is, that we still need to come to terms with
the fact that the total objectification of (other) human beings is a real pos-
sibility, and that, as Primo Levi reminds us, we carry this possibility with us
and within us, rather than that it is the evil we need to keep at bay. In light
of this, we should not just be concerned about the ways in which objecti-
fication continues to emerge “elsewhere,” for example through the way in
which authoritarian regimes suppress the possibility for people to exist as
 World-Centred Education  101

subjects of their own lives. We should also be concerned about the ways in
which objectification shows up within education itself, particularly through
the well-intended but ill-conceived attempts at improving educational sys-
tems that turn the education of subjects into the “management of objects,”
as I have put it. (The demand for self-objectification, as mentioned, is one
symptom of this.)
In this book I have positioned education on the side of subject-ness, that
is, as a form of intentional action that has a central interest in the question
how human beings can exist as subjects of their own life, not as objects of
what other people or forces would want from them. I have, in other words,
positioned education on the side of freedom, highlighting that freedom is not
some kind of abstract philosophical concept but a very everyday and “mun-
dane” experience, which, interestingly, means that it is a very worldly experi-
ence (“mundus” meaning world). It is an experience that is part and parcel of
our existence in the world and with the world where, again and again, we are
faced with the question what the world, natural and social, is asking from me.
Freedom, in other words, is not so much the possession of the I, as that it seeks
for the I and calls for the I; it calls the I of the individual into existence in the
world and with the world.
The work of education – the educational work of education – is not to pro-
duce the subject-ness of the student, because such a productive way of think-
ing would deny the very “thing” we are interested in, namely the student’s
existence as subject of its own life. The educational work of education rather
is about keeping the door to the question of the student’s subject-ness open so
that students may encounter the question, exactly as Homer Lane did in offer-
ing his watch to Jason. But the educational work of education is never about
determining what our students should do when they encounter the question.
The educational work of education, in other words, is not about making the
student into an object of the educator’s judgement, but about encouraging them
to become a subject of their own action, that is, to attend to their own subject-
ness and their own freedom.
This, as I have made clear, is not an “easy” question. The confrontation with
our freedom, with the question of our freedom and the possibility of our free-
dom, can and does interrupt. Yet this interruptive quality matters for education,
albeit that it is not enough “just” to interrupt. Students also need the time and
space – the time of the school as the slow and “not-yet-determined” time – to
work through this question, and they need forms through which this question
can be and remain a concrete question.They also need support and sustenance to
be able to do this work and stay with the question.Whether society is still willing
to “free up” such time for “the children,” that is, for all the newcomers that keep
arriving – which is about the emancipation of time itself for the sake of educa-
tion – is, as I have argued, a key test for the democratic quality of society, not least
for the democratic quality of the impulse society.
102  World-Centred Education

Notes
1 In German:
Nicht nur Kultur oder Gesellschaft, sondern Welt ist der Ort, an welchen die
Person ihrer Berufung nachzukommen hat. Während sich der Mensch als
Naturwesen entwickelt und als gesellschaftlicher Rollenspieler sozialisiert wird,
vollzieht sich die Bildung der Person immer im Horizont der Welt.
2 I say “of course” in order to highlight that human freedom is never just happy or posi-
tive – it is as much the freedom to do good as it is the freedom not to do good. But
the fact that freedom has this range of possibilities does not mean that we should do
away with freedom; that we should “give up” on freedom, but also not to let freedom
just run its course, without limits, without a “reality check.” I will return to this later.
3 In this section I make use of ideas presented in Chapter 7 of my short book “Letting
Art Teach” (Biesta 2017c). The book can be read as an exploration of what world-
centred education may look like in the domain of the arts.
4 Meyer-Drawe is talking about a theory of “Bildung” and it is interesting that the
German notion of Bildung has its roots in the “Bild,” that is, the image. It thus con-
ceives of education first and foremost in terms of the domain of the visible.
5 “Every teacher must learn how to stop teaching, when the time comes. That is a dif-
ficult art. Only a few are able, when the time is right, to allow reality to take their
place” (Bertolt Brecht 2016, p. 98).
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INDEX

Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to note numbers

academic knowledge 44 competence-­based approaches 39n9

adaptation 11 comprehension 10
Adorno, T.W. 6 contemporary capitalism 20–21
Allgemeine Pädagogik 28 “Copenhagen interpretation,” 26
anamorphosis 96–99 critical thinking 5–6
Arendt, H. 9, 12n4, 19, 48, 49
attention 95–96
attitudes 66–68, 92, 96–97 deep learning 60
Dewey, J. 3, 27, 30–33, 39n12, 39n13, 55,
90
Bauman, Z. 54 discretionary consumption 20
The Beautiful Risk of Education ix, 55
Beckett, Samuel 23
Benner, D. 28, 29, 33–36, 38n1, 39n7, 47, “Education after Auschwitz,” 6–7
61, 77 educational causality 99–100
Bernfeld, S. 4 educational difference 82, 84
Beyond Learning ix educational development 2, 4
Biesta, G. 38n3, 57n4, 74n9, 89n4 educational discourse 2
Bildung 5, 27, 34–36 educational language 3–5
Bingham, C. 12n2 educational paradigm: adaptation and
bio-­neuro-­socio-­cultural order 29, 36, 37 adjustment 32–33; cultural and social
Böhm, W. 33, 35, 90 capital 30; existential education 33–37;
brain-­based learning 60 growth 30–31; indirect education
Brecht, B. ix, 99 31–32; trial-­and-­error 31
Bruner, J. 44 educational settings 93
Burke, K. 63 educational theory ix
Egan, K. 44
Eichmann, Adolf 27–29, 33–37, 39n8,
civilisation-­argument 17 39n14, 53, 61
Colvin, Claudette 27 Einstein, A. 26
112  Index

Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox 26 see givenness of teaching; hermeneutical

Emile, or On Education 7 worldview 60; purpose(s) of education
Enlightenment 5 60–61; teaching and 61–63
entanglement 38n2 learning 10, 82; articulation 83–84;
epistemological dimension 63 educational intentions 84; exists
evidence-­based education 39n6 83–84; is individual 83; is invisible
evocative pointing 89n6 83; operational theory 80; outcomes
existential education: Bildung and 99–100; touching and sensing 94–95
Erziehung 34–36; interruptions 36–37; Letting Art Teach 59, 102n3
learning environment 36; summoning Levinas, E. 49, 54
to self-­action 33–34 Levi, P. 100
existential questions 2–3, 9, 90–91 liberal education 5
Liebau, E. 13, 20
Little Commonwealth 41
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 33 lobbying groups 62
form of teaching 10, 99–100; educational Luhmann, Niklas 39n13
pointing 85–86; intentional action 76;
learning process 82–84; operational
theory 79–82; redirection of attention machine learning 60
77–78 Marion, J.-L. 10, 63–68, 73, 74n6, 74n7,
74n8, 96–98
Meirieu, P. 21–22, 50
givenness of teaching 10; attitudes 66–68; Meyer-­Drawe, K. 92, 96–98, 102n4
domain of curriculum 70–71; domain “Misconceptions of Power,” 41
of “didactics,” 71–72; educational Mitchell, Margaret 12n3
endeavour 69; exploring 63–64; modern school 20; history 17–19;
exposure 68; Marion’s principle 64–65; impulse society 20–21, 23–24;
pedagogy 72–73; reduction 65–66 outcomes 17; public education
Good Education in an Age of Measurement ix 14; purpose for education 16–17;
quality education 14–16; social
Herbart, J.F. 79, 83–84, 99–100 democracy 13, 14, 23–24; urgency of
hermeneutics 63 education 21–22
Heydorn, Heinz-­Joachim 35 modes of representation 92–93
Husserl, Edmund 65, 66, 74n7 Mollenhauer, K. 56
Montgomery Bus Boycott 27

impulse society 9, 20–21

intention 95–96 Neill, A.S. 41, 50
intransparency of learning 82, 84
“operational” theory of education:
Jaeger, W. 45 academic discipline 79; characteristic of
80; components 80–81; “educability”
and “teaching,” 79–80; educational
Kant, I. 5, 12n2, 46, 74n6 significance 82; educator work 81–82;
Kierkegaard, S. 71 evocative gesture 81; integrity 79;
Komisar, P. 61 practice of education 79
ostentatious pointing 89n6
Lamm, Z. 44
Lane, H. 41, 42, 47, 54, 101 Parks–Eichmann paradox viii, 9, 29;
Lave, J. 24n3 educational reality 26–27; education
learnification 10, 42–43; constructivism as cultivation 30–33; existential
59; educational “Aufforderung,” 61; education 33–37; mass deportation of
educational difference 59; givenness Jews 27; Montgomery Bus Boycott 27;
 Index  113

nature–nurture debate 28–29; Roth, W.-M. 92–98

pre-­defined effects/outcomes 28 Rousseau, J.-J. 7, 46, 72, 98
Parks, R. 27–29, 33, 35–37, 38n5,
53, 61
“passability,” 93, 94 self-­destruction 49
performativity 15–16 self-­objectification vii, 2, 53–54
Petersen, Peter 34–35 social configuration 22, 72, 100
Physical Review 26 socialisation 8, 44–45, 51
Plato 77, 81 Strobel-­Eisele, G. 89n6
Podolsky, B. 26 subjectification 7–8, 9–10, 42, 92; action
policy making 1–2 48; assumption 46; Aufforderung
“post-­secularism,” 64 zur Selbsttätigkeit 46–47; character
Prange, K., viii 10, 55, 76–88, 89n6, 89n8, education 47; educational purpose
89n10, 98–100 42–45; existential challenge 49; freedom
45–49; individuation 53; personality
“traits,” 52; principle of “suspension,”
qualification 8, 44–45 50; priorities 51; “re-­education,” 41;
quality education 14–16 responsibility 54; risk of education
quality management 15 55–57; self-­objectification 53–54;
support and sustenance 50–51

Ravitch, D. 16 Talks to Parents and Teachers 41

reactive pointing 89n6 theological dimension 63
The Rediscovery of Teaching ix, 12n1, 59
Reformation 5
representative pointing 89n6 Wenger, E. 24n3
Roberts, P. 20, 21 Wilde, Oscar 17
Rosen, N. 26 world-­destruction 49