First as tragedy, then as curriculum: Why educational reform fails

This article reframes anxiety as constitutive of the educational encounter, arguing against prevailing approaches that treat it as a pathology to be managed. Drawing on Žižek’s work, it develops a taxonomy of institutional responses to educational anxiety—obsessive (rigid metrics and control), perverse (instrumental compliance with authority), psychotic (foreclosure of symbolic reality), and hysteric (persistent questioning)—demonstrating how each attempts to resolve the fundamental ‘gap’ between teaching and learning within Biesta’s three domains of educational purpose. While obsessive, perverse, and psychotic responses disavow this gap through fantasies of mastery, evidence, or totalization, the hysteric response alone sustains anxiety as an ontological condition, revealing the contingency of educational structures. The analysis exposes why reform cycles inevitably reproduce disappointment, as they seek to realise impossible fantasies rather than confront education’s inherent contradictions. Instead, the article proposes embracing educational anxiety as a site of pedagogical possibility, reimagining it as generative rather than obstructive.