Taking Education Seriously: The Ongoing Challenge
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Pablo Picasso allegedly once said that it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. I feel that something similar has been the case where it concerns my own contributions to the field of educational scholarship. Looking back, I would say that it took me about twenty years from the start of my studies in education to the publication of the first monograph, Beyond Learning,1 in which I felt that I was making a slightly original contribution to the educational conversation. During these twenty years I was mainly a student of other people's ideas, and much of my writing during that period consists of accounts and interpretations of the work of a number of philosophers, most notably John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Rancière. In the fifteen years following the publication of Beyond Learning, I published four more monographs — Good Education in an Age of Measurement (2010), The Beautiful Risk of Education (2014), The Rediscovery of Teaching (2017), and World-Centered Education (2021)2 — and also a few more "minor" works. The main trend I discern in these publications is my ambition to get closer to education or, in terms of the title of this paper, my ambition to take education itself seriously. While it is entirely legitimate for philosophy of education to ask philosophical questions about education or for psychology of education to ask psychological questions about education, such work does raise the question of how philosophers or psychologists would identify the object of their studies, that is, education itself. In some of my writings on these issues I have phrased it by asking who is asking educational questions about education, although I have also experienced that for those who have been educated in the Anglo-American "construction" of educational studies,3 such a question is actually quite difficult to make sense of. As I recount in one of my papers, I once received feedback from a reviewer who said that the suggestion that one can ask educational questions about education was "as nonsensical" as the idea that one can ask "cookery questions about cooking."4 Over the years I have found that trying to figure out what education itself actually is, is far more difficult than many would assume, which is the reason why I think that I'm only slowly moving in the direction of finding a satisfactory answer to this question. It is, in that sense, indeed taking "a lifetime." The reason why I have persisted, however, is because I also think that it is a really important question to ask. A key reason for this is that without a sufficiently robust account of what education itself is, there is a danger that education, and particularly the practice of education, is quickly taken over by other logics, agendas, and priorities. This is what has happened and is continuing to happen due to the impact of the global education measurement industry,5 which has been trying to redefine the main concerns of education in terms of producing measurable learning outcomes that can then be plotted against each other in order to decide which systems or countries perform "best." In my view, this has resulted in a massive distortion of educational practice in many countries around the world.6 It has also contributed significantly to the rise of a cynical attitude toward education, one in which the pursuit of a league table position, irrespective of what it means for the quality of education, becomes the main driver of policy and practice.7 The other problem I have identified in my work is a development to which I have referred as the "learnification" of education. Put briefly, this is the tendency to assume or claim that education is "all about learning," and that the best way to grasp what education is and what it is about is by using the language of (learners and their) learning, rather than to understand education in terms of, say, teaching or curriculum — two areas that, in my view, both deserve "reinvention" and need "rediscovery."8 The learnification of education has resulted in a number of "shifts" in educational scholarship — we could also call them colonizing tendencies — such as the increasing influence of the learning sciences on education, the turn in education toward cognitive psychology and its insights about the workings of human memory, or the many claims about what education should do when it bases itself on insights from neuroscience. While such fields may have interesting things to say, they are not automatically or necessarily relevant for education, and often actually miss the point of education completely. This is one reason why I agree wholeheartedly with Jostein Sæther's argument that there is a need for educational psychology to take education much more seriously.9 While there are many problems with the very idea of "learning,"10 the key point for the theory and practice of education may well be the insight that people do not need education in order to learn. Learning is free, so we might say, so if people want to learn, they can just do so. And by simply having a job, or "hanging around," or being part of a criminal gang, people will learn an awful lot. From the angle of education, however, the question is not how we can make children and young people learn — they will do that anyway. Education is and should be interested in far more specific questions. First of all, there are questions about what children and young people should and should not learn — which we could call the question of content. Given that we are phrasing this in terms of "should and should not," there is also the question of justification or, in a more educational manner, the question of purpose: What is the learning supposed to be for? And education, unlike life, always involves educators, and thus raises the question of their roles and responsibilities, and of the importance, or lack therefore, of relationships in education. It is only when we begin to ask questions about content, purpose, and relationships that the discourse of learning becomes educationally significant. In this regard I have argued that the question of purpose should always come first, as it is only when we have a meaningful and justifiable answer to the question what our educational endeavors are supposed to be for that we can begin to make decisions about content and relationships. And when we begin to ask questions about the purposes of our educational endeavors, it is also important to ask whether we should be interested in more than only the learning of our students. The question, in other words, is whether we should also open for our students "existential possibilities" other than the "learning position."11 To this point, I have suggested that in addition to seeing the natural and social world as an object for our learning, this world actually also puts questions in our direction, so that there is always also the challenge in education to figure out what the world may be asking of us.12 With regard to the question of purpose, I have suggested that education actually has three purposes — or, more precisely, three domains of purpose — to attend to. I have referred to these as qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Qualification has to do with education's task of providing children and young people with knowledge, skills, and dispositions, but also — and more importantly — with insight and understanding that will qualify them to act, either in specific vocational and professional fields or in their daily life as citizens and members of society. In other words, qualification is about providing students with the "equipment for living," to use Kenneth Burke's nice phrase.13 Socialization has to do with education's task in providing students with a degree of orientation into traditions, cultures, and practices. Here, education is a matter of initiation, a way of inviting students to "find their (own) way around," so to speak. This is about gaining a "sense" of what matters in particular cultures, practices, and traditions, including a sense of the values that are at stake. Again, this can be understood narrowly — an introduction into nursing, car mechanics, or physics — but also more broadly, such as an introduction into life in contemporary society. If education is only about qualification and socialization, there is always the risk that it turns into a form of training in which students are merely seen as objects that need to become qualified and socialized. Yet, unlike training or indoctrination, education should be interested in students leaving school and living their own personal and professional lives well. All education is thus interested in students' independence, that is, in providing each student with a fair chance at being the subject of their own life, rather than the object of what others — whether individuals, groups, or more abstract forces such as capitalist social media — may want them to be and do. This is the "madness" of subjectification, to use a word from Derrida,14 that must "watch" over qualification and socialization to ensure that they do not turn into technologies of control. But there is a degree of madness in subjectification as well: to begin with, as educators we hit the paradox of wanting to promote the freedom of our students by educational means — that is, by in some way interfering with their lives — which can easily go wrong. The three domains of purpose are helpful in providing a justification for (formal, public) education. It is not that schools are needed for qualification — much knowledge useful for that purpose can be picked up elsewhere — but the school at the very least can offer knowledge that cannot be picked up easily elsewhere, or that can only be picked up easily by those who have the money and the networks for doing so. And while there may be a lot of useful knowledge on offer elsewhere, the task of the school rather could be to provide students with access to "really useful knowledge."15 Such knowledge, for example, would not be that needed to do a particular job, but the knowledge that interrogates why some people end up as low-paid workers and others as owners of the means of production. Similarly, there is a lot of socialization going on in everyday life — even more, nowadays, through so-called "social media"16 — so it is not that we need the school as socializing agent. But again, the school could offer other modes and modalities of socialization. It could, at the very least, open pathways different from those that students would be exposed to in their everyday lives. This point raises the difficult question what kind of "counter-socialization" schools should offer — which is also part of the ongoing struggle over the curriculum17 — but it also provides an important justification for why the school has work to do in this domain as well. And, third, in societies in which there is little concern for human freedom or for opportunities for children and young people to get a "fair chance"18 at their own existence as subject — which requires time, space, and a degree of being shielded from societal and economic forces not interested in this outcome — there is a reason for the school to see subjectification as its legitimate concern, without claiming that this is easy work to do, of course. These three domains of educational purpose are not intended as a program or agenda for education, nor as a demand that teachers and schools should do this. They are rather meant to give language to what I think is actually going on in schools, colleges, and universities. Moreover, they are meant to give an educational language to what is going on, that is, to provide language that helps us to articulate how education is different from, say, learning, or to explain why the school is not simply a learning environment,19 but has very precise and specific educational "work" to do. Along these lines, it is not a prescription but is meant to make educational policy and practice more thoughtful or, borrowing a helpful expression from John Dewey, to make educational action more "intelligent."20 I am encouraged by the fact that many schools, colleges, and universities actually find it very helpful to think through their educational ambitions in terms of these three domains of purpose. This is not because I want them to follow or apply "my" theory to their work — this is not the ambition I have, and I would even contest that there is a theory I "own" — but because it apparently resonates with and gives words to what matters to them. I am also encouraged by the fact that the three papers to which I respond in this essay have given this way of engaging with the educational question a prominent role in their reflections and considerations, as it indicates that this approach is also helpful for educational research and scholarship. So what, then, is there to say in response to these three papers? One noticeable difference between the paper by Sara Juvonen and colleagues and the paper by Andrew Thompson lies in their starting assumption. Thompson, mistakenly in my view, seems to think that I am the owner of an educational theory and that my ambition is for schools and teachers to apply this theory in their practice. This is what I read in his references to "Biesta's educational theory," "Biesta's non-egological self," and the intentions he ascribes to me, both positively — "this is what Biesta wants" — or negatively — "Biesta seeks something more."21 He also seems to be unaware of my long career as a teacher and seems more comfortable with positioning me as some kind of aloof theorist who has no interest in the day-to-day complexities of classrooms. This "staging" is, of course, one way to think about the age-old theory-practice relationship in education — one where practice is seen as the application of theory. But it is far from the only way in which this relationship can be conceived. I take inspiration from what in German geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik is known as the idea of theory as a "hermeneutics of practice," that is, a way to try to make sense of and give language to what is going on in the practice of education, rather than conceiving of this as a prescriptive, top-down relationship in which theory directs and practice should follow.22 So if Thompson's main concern is that "teachers cannot make the breadth of Biesta's theory a priority,"23 then I would be the first to argue that in that case teachers should just get on with their job and forget about me. Of course, this leaves open the questions of what "their job" is and how they understand "their job." I must say that in his (fictional?) account of teaching Hamlet, Thompson produces a rather an unhelpful caricature, first and foremost, of his own work as a teacher, as I cannot imagine that an experienced teacher, as he obviously is, would handle teaching Hamlet — or any other topic, for that matter — in this way. Ultimately, I'm left wondering why Thompson feels forced to produce such an "application" of "my" theory, as it obviously doesn't make sense to him as an account of meaningful teacherly practice, nor does it to me. Perhaps it is primarily a matter of the starting point one chooses. What I found interesting about reading the paper by Juvonen and colleagues is that they start from an entirely different assumption: they do not ask, How can we apply this theory onto practice?, or, even more strongly, How can we make sure that teachers adopt this theory?; rather, they begin with the question, What is actually going on in schools and classrooms, and does the distinction between three domains of purpose help in getting closer to understanding the possibilities, complexities, and limitations of what is happening "on the ground"?24 In other words, they take the "route" of the hermeneutics of practice, which not only provides a very different "staging" but also places the one exploring these ideas in a different position. This is not, as is the case with Thompson, a matter of "testing" the theory, but of asking whether these notions and considerations can be of any practical assistance and, based on this, whether such an exploration can then also help by raising further questions for scholarship, research, and policy. In my view, Juvonen and colleagues achieve quite a lot in relation to these ambitions. They show, for example, that talking about what is going on in classrooms and schools in terms of these three domains of purpose helps to identify more precisely what is going on and how what is going on can be "named" and understood. They also show that it is not a matter of clear-cut distinctions, but that in what we might term the "holistic" reality of the classroom, the three domains are always present in "messy" ways and are hardly ever evident in a pure form. What is helpful and interesting is the way these authors reveal the tension between paying attention to the three domains together: for example, by highlighting that what may sound like a idea if the is entirely on qualification narrowly as children in may not be a idea if we also what this for socialization is, the kind of about what is and that students up from this and for subjectification is, how students as of their own Here, it becomes that teaching with a for a very different of classrooms, and a very different about what is than can be by on a Moreover, due to the policy a approach is most to the domain of What I also found is how Juvonen and colleagues show the ways in which ambitions with regard to socialization and subjectification can easily be into the of qualification, where these become for students to and where their is and If socialization becomes a matter of social and if subjectification is for learning," to use an idea that has become in some they are into the of qualification and their educational then becomes a matter of One interesting the authors from their work is that when education qualification, it does a to those students who actually on the school for providing them with This is, of course, an insight from educational but it is particularly in a more or global policy that seems to think that schools should only on qualification and not be with is for those who how to the of — and, in relation to this, the of — but it is entirely to those who need the school in order to access to the often and of the qualification, socialization, and subjectification thus provides helpful language for a in contemporary In relation to this, Juvonen and colleagues also the risk that socialization and subjectification in one and the as important and into the of This I would is not just happening at the of educational practice, even with to my own It is also in the way that the global measurement is — they would say, — their on the outcomes that should be say, learning outcomes in their would be the very of taking socialization and subjectification seriously. One important question Juvonen and colleagues raise is to what the distinction between the three domains of purpose can also be meaningful for particularly in as they that teaching are often — or actually always — They also ask this question because their own in the particular they in this paper has been that using the three domains as an requires attention and I think that the authors are that this way of would be difficult for but they that it requires particular attention to make such a way of and seeing part of professional what I like to teacherly The curriculum provides for this as they in their paper, there are also for example, the risk that education becomes with the of — for me, one of the of the of and of educational more It is with regard to this that the distinction between and that from educational scholarship and I do not think that the curriculum the authors can provide a way to the limitations of the I also that contemporary educational discourse is by the language and of learning to become sufficiently educational in its and but that is a for than only on teachers and their the authors also the of the which teachers all, if we only to argue that teachers should have a of what matters in education, without also against societal that promote a it would quickly become difficult for teachers to with their work in a way. But this is not because teachers lack the for engaging in this but because the for their would be rather than This question me to Thompson, who also for the teacher in a sense, but seems to argue not that these ideas are difficult for but rather that teachers simply do not have the to them. But Thompson also about by that of — which he with to the work of — it would simply be to any attention to the domain of subjectification precisely if I understand his argument the of is the of qualification and socialization, but the of subjectification. Thompson, subjectification is "madness" because it of what schools can One question this raises for me is whether we should agree with so quickly and simply that the school is what it I am not because I am not sure what the argument actually if it is about of I can think of many of these in which subjectification has a precisely as a concern about how teachers and how they and The key distinction is whether and are simply seen as or technologies for about and or whether and can also provide for students. I where and can raise questions that do not from students a response of learning, producing measurable or providing more but raise questions for students such as am I to do The German educational has about the of in the school in relation to this, because do not present a learning task for rather, they need and and thus the world to students in quite a different The interesting question Thompson raises with is whether these are indeed or whether we would just be if we think that education can be other than In response to Thompson's considerations and his particular of my I would like to say that much of what I have been trying to do is to whether this that is, education or is what I think Thompson is often seeing in my that I take particular or I see my work as an ongoing an ongoing to see if there are ways in which we can think and do education of the of I would is a that would the for subjectification. is why I am interested in Levinas, for example, but not because I would use him to say that human should be to or the demand of the other — far from I find such interpretations and I because he helps me to see that in the with — which in itself simply or, as I would is — we not as but as who have freedom and therefore, in any such always need to figure out whether to say or It is in the with that we can that we as of our own life, not as objects of forces of Similarly, work — which I would not as a as that seems to that there is something with it — is helpful because it in the most whether teaching is actually that is, whether something can come to us from the or whether is just a matter of my learning, my my or my This is an important question because if we come to the that can our lives from the then we should just whether teaching with ambitions or teaching as then, what I would Thompson to do is read my work through the questions I am asking rather than seeing it as a of or, even a of and In that I actually think that Thompson raises a really whether in education we should for a for subjectification, or should rather our to doing and and doing it as best as we could indeed say that it is to be open about our socializing intentions and to them well than to be about our ambitions in the domain of socialization and get me, this is the important question Thompson raises in his paper, and it helps to the and response is that I to agree that socialization can achieve a lot and to be well. But if socialization is our only so to it entirely on the intentions of educators and education and as a So long as there is a socialization can achieve But we from that once this will socialization can quickly become a and as can be for example, in the educational of Perhaps my for subjectification — for the "madness" of subjectification, as it is an idea that is to and to give a — from the need to have a different in our educational not necessarily one that should be the time, but one that is when the of socialization its or So I have on the papers by Thompson and by Juvonen and mainly because the between the two papers and the of their authors is helpful in highlighting a number of about education so to — an that I have mainly through the idea of the three domains of educational purpose and the but of the idea of subjectification. While at one the paper by is about a very different question, how can we ensure that educational psychology becomes more educational in its I would like to argue that the key in this is also the of subjectification and, these lines, the three papers do me begin by Sæther's as we both to agree that where psychology has the field of education, it has often so in its own terms and on its own thus that the field of education is not an in which can just and do what they want to do — which would be a case of Education has an so if psychology that itself as to make a it in some to take
Source: Educational Theory
DOI: 10.1111/edth.12646
Author: Gert Biesta
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,760
OpenAlex ID: W4399134305