Taking Education Seriously: The Ongoing Challenge

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 good idea if the focus is entirely on qualification narrowly conceived (such as grouping children in competence groups) may not be a good idea if we also consider what this entails for socialization (that is, the kind of messages about what is desired and desirable that students pick up from this approach) and for subjectification (that is, how students "end up" as subjects of their own life).25 Here, it becomes apparent that teaching with a three-dimensional awareness allows for a very different "reading" of classrooms, and a very different judgment about what is desirable, than can be achieved by focusing on a single dimension. Moreover, due to the policy pressures mentioned above, a one-dimensional approach is most likely to emphasize the domain of qualification. What I also found fascinating is how Juvonen and colleagues show the ways in which worthy ambitions with regard to socialization and subjectification can easily be "pulled back" into the logic of qualification, where these become tasks for students to "perform" and where their performance is assessed, measured, and evaluated. If socialization becomes a matter of social skills acquisition, and if subjectification is mistaken for "self-regulated learning," to use an idea that has become popular in some countries, they are immediately pulled back into the logic of qualification and lose their educational significance. Subjectification then becomes a matter of self-objectification. One interesting conclusion the authors draw from their work is that when education overemphasizes qualification, it does a disservice to those students who actually rely on the school for providing them with orientation. This is, of course, an old insight from educational sociology, but it is worth repeating, particularly in a more or less global policy climate that seems to think that schools should only focus on qualification and not be concerned with anything else. That is fine for those who already know how to "navigate" the "logic" of schooling — and, in relation to this, the "logic" of society — but it is entirely unfair to those who need the school in order to gain access to the often implicit and unwritten "rules of the game." Distinguishing qualification, socialization, and subjectification thus provides helpful language for a pressing issue in contemporary schooling. In relation to this, Juvonen and colleagues also helpfully highlight the risk that socialization and subjectification are, in one and the same move, acknowledged as important and incorporated into the logic of qualification. This development, I would add, is not just happening at the level of educational practice, even with reference to my own work. It is also apparent in the way that the global measurement industry is shifting — they would say, "broadening" — their view on the outcomes that should be measured. Because including, say, socio-emotional learning outcomes in their measurements would be the very opposite of taking socialization and subjectification seriously. One important question Juvonen and colleagues raise is to what extent the distinction between the three domains of purpose can also be meaningful for teachers, particularly bearing in mind, as they put it, that teaching situations are often — or actually almost always — "fast paced." They also ask this question because their own experience in the particular projects they document in this paper has been that using the three domains as an "angle" requires attention and energy. I don't think that the authors are saying that this way of theorizing would be too difficult for teachers, but they acknowledge that it requires particular attention to make such a way of thinking and seeing part of one's professional "habitus"26 (or what I like to call: one's teacherly "virtuosity"). The Finnish curriculum framework provides opportunity for developing this "virtuosity," but, as they mention briefly in their paper, there are also risks: for example, the risk that education becomes too concerned with the logic of socialization27 — which, for me, remains one of the shortcomings of the whole tradition of Bildung and of educational cultivation more generally.28 It is with regard to this possibility that the distinction between Bildung and Erziehung that comes from German-speaking educational scholarship remains important, and I do not think that the curriculum tradition the authors mention can provide a way to bypass the limitations of the Bildung paradigm. I also worry that contemporary Finnish educational discourse is too dominated by the language and logic of learning to become sufficiently educational in its outlook and practice,29 but that is a theme for another paper. Rather than focusing only on individual teachers and their agency, the authors also emphasize the importance of the context within which teachers act. After all, if we were only to argue that teachers should have a three-dimensional awareness of what matters in education, without also pushing back against societal discourses that promote a qualification-and-nothing-else approach, it would quickly become too difficult for teachers to engage with their work in a three-dimensional way. But this is not because teachers lack the intellectual capacity for engaging in this way, but because the ecological conditions for their agency30 would be limiting rather than supportive. This question brings me back to Thompson, who also speaks for the teacher in a sense, but seems to argue not that these ideas are too difficult for teachers, but rather that teachers simply do not have the time to prioritize them. But Thompson also speaks about context by suggesting that under "the realities of schooling" — which he defines with reference to the work of Ian Hunter31 — it would simply be impossible to pay any attention to the domain of subjectification precisely because, if I understand his argument correctly, the logic of schooling is the logic of qualification and socialization, but never the logic of subjectification. For Thompson, subjectification is therefore "madness" (my term) because it falls outside of what schools can be. One question this raises for me is whether we should agree with Hunter so quickly and simply accept that the school is what Hunter says it is. I am not yet convinced because I am not sure what the argument actually is: if it is about "the realities of schooling," I can think of many examples of these realities in which subjectification has a real place, precisely as a concern about how teachers teach and how they "do" curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. The key distinction here is whether curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment are simply seen as avenues or technologies for bringing about predefined "outcomes," behaviors, and identities, or whether curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment can also provide openings for students. By "openings," I mean cases where curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment can raise questions that do not seek from students a response of learning, producing measurable outcomes, or providing "closure" more generally, but instead raise questions for students themselves, such as "What am I to do here?" The German educational scholar Klaus Prange has written about the importance of animals in the school in relation to this, because animals do not present a learning task for students; rather, they need care and attention, and thus "present" the world to students in quite a different way.32 The interesting question Thompson raises with Hunter is whether these possibilities are indeed real or whether we would just be fooling ourselves if we think that education can be anything other than "pastoral discipline." In response to Thompson's considerations and his particular reconstruction of my writings, I would like to say that much of what I have been trying to do theoretically is to explore whether this alternative, that is, education "beyond" or "outside" pastoral discipline, is possible. Unlike what I think Thompson is often seeing in my writings, namely that I take particular positions or standpoints, I see my work as an ongoing exploration, an ongoing attempt to see if there are ways in which we can think and do education outside of the logic of pastoral discipline, which, I would agree, is a logic that would deny the possibility for subjectification. That is why I am interested in Levinas, for example, but not because I would use him to say that human beings should be responsible to or obey the demand of the other — far from it. I find such interpretations troubling and trivial. I value Levinas because he helps me to see that in the encounter with responsibility — which in itself simply exists or, as I would put it, is objective — we meet ourselves, not as individuated, acculturated organisms, but as beings who have freedom and therefore, in any such encounter, always need to figure out whether to say "yes" or "no." It is in the encounter with responsibility that we can (suddenly) realize, that we exist as subjects of our own life, not as objects of forces outside of us. Similarly, Jean-Luc Marion's work — which I would not describe as a theological philosophy,33 as that phrase seems to suggest that there is something wrong with it — is helpful because it explores, in the most serious way, whether teaching is actually possible, that is, whether something can come to us from the outside, or whether everything is just a matter of my learning, my interpretation, my sense-making, or my appropriation. This is an important question because if we come to the conclusion that nothing can enter our lives from the "outside," then we should probably just stop teaching, whether teaching with emancipatory ambitions or teaching as pastoral discipline. Perhaps, then, what I would encourage Thompson to do is read my work through the questions I am asking rather than seeing it as a set of answers or, even worse, a set of prescriptions and commands. In that spirit, I actually think that Thompson raises a really fundamental question: whether in education we should strive for a "space" for subjectification, or should rather devote our energies to doing good, progressive, democratic, and responsible pastoral discipline and doing it as best as we can. We could indeed say that it is better to be open about our socializing intentions and to pursue them well than to be embarrassed about our ambitions in the domain of socialization and therefore get nowhere. For me, this is the important question Thompson raises in his paper, and it helps to keep the discussion sharp and real. My response here is that I tend to agree that socialization can achieve a lot and needs to be done well. But if socialization is our only "tool," so to speak, it relies entirely on the good intentions of educators and education policymakers and society as a whole. So long as there is a general democratic "will," socialization can achieve wonderful things. But we know from history that once this democratic will disappears, socialization can quickly become a hugely problematic and dangerous tool, as can be seen, for example, in the educational history of Nazi Germany.34 Perhaps my enthusiasm for subjectification — for the "madness" of subjectification, as it is an idea that is impossible to pin down and impossible to give a perfect "fit" — comes from the need to have a different "tool" in our educational toolkit, not necessarily one that should be "full on" all the time, but definitely one that is available when the logic of socialization shows its dark side or gets stuck. So far, I have focused exclusively on the papers by Thompson and by Juvonen and colleagues, mainly because the comparison between the two papers and the "strategies" of their authors is helpful in highlighting a number of points about education itself, so to speak — an issue that I have mainly approached through the idea of the three domains of educational purpose and the strange but nonetheless necessary "presence" of the idea of subjectification. While at one level the paper by Sæther is about a very different question, namely how can we ensure that educational psychology becomes more educational in its orientation, I would like to argue that the key issue in this discussion is also the notion of subjectification and, along these lines, the three papers do belong together. Let me begin by applauding Sæther's ambition, as we both seem to agree that where psychology has "entered" the field of education, it has often done so in its own terms and on its own terms, thus forgetting that the field of education is not an empty terrain in which anyone can just enter and do what they want to do — which would be a case of colonialism. Education has an integrity (my term),35 so if psychology that understands itself as "educational" wishes to make a contribution, it needs, in some way, to take