Leaders for Humanity

GOOD LEADERSHIP

REINVENTING EDUCATION:
A LIFE-LONG QUEST OF BECOMING TRULY HUMAN

Gert Biesta is a distinguished Dutch pedagogist and philosopher of education, and one of the most influential thought leaders in education today. In our interview, we journey to the philosophical roots of Gert's educational theory, drawing inspiration from pragmatism and post-structuralism and the teachings of Dewey, Derrida, Levinas, and Ranciere. Venturing towards the core of "good education", we untangle the distinctions between Bildung and Erziehung, and explore the profound differences between qualification, subjectification, and socialization. Gert passionately advocates a shift beyond "learnification", urging a holistic approach that revitalizes education as an ethical quest for self-realization. We examine the significance of civic education for democratic progress, while critically evaluating Dewey's democratic ideal. Lastly, we scrutinise the pivotal role of teachers, drawing intriguing parallels with leadership education. Don't miss this captivating dialogue challenging conventional wisdom and unveiling Gert's transformative ideas that have reshaped education!

Gert BIesta

Core Concepts: Philosophy of Education, Pragmatism, Post-structuralism, Structuralism
Unique Propositions: Subjectification, Socialisation, Learnification

BEHIND the interview

Why is the interview important? Who are we talking to?

DISCOVERING THE DIALOGUE WITH
gert biesta

Our decision to interview Gert was fueled by our eagerness to delve into the intricate intersections between educational philosophy and leadership education. We sought to harness Gert's unique insights, which drew from both the realms of political and moral philosophy, and pedagogics, to shed new light on leader and institutional development. In this context, three pivotal focus areas emerged, promising an enriching conversation.

Firstly, Gert's exploration of poststructuralism added a fresh insights to our understanding of leadership. Philosophers like Levinas, Ranciere, and Derrida, who Gert referenced, presented new and thought-provoking perspectives, underscoring the profound notion that individuals should evolve into responsible subjects of their own lives. While rekindling conversations about pragmatism in the realm of corporate responsibility, as explored with Ed Freeman, Gert directly addressed some of our concerns about the ethical robustness of pragmatism. For instance, Levinas' concept of ethics as the 'first philosophy,' emphasized existential responsibility for the 'Other,' akin to Buber's ideas, resonating with our initial thoughts about a "relational ontology."

Secondly, Gert's development of a distinct and compelling educational theory, deeply rooted in philosophical and ethical premises, captured our attention. His differentiation between "Bildung" and "Erziehung," and the distinction between "subjectification" as opposed to socialization or qualification, pointed to the core purpose of education - emancipating students to recognize their existential responsibility as humans in an interconnected world. We were eager to explore how such a purpose could be translated into practical pedagogy, building on Derrida's concept of "deconstruction", and whether this emancipative mission could extend to modern organizations. In this context, our inquiry also extended to the significance of civic and lifelong learning, as well as its integration into national curricula. We wondered whether a part of such ongoing education should be provided by and at work.

Lastly, we were intrigued by Gert's work on the role of teachers. We were keen to uncover how teachers could guide students towards subjectification, moving beyond mere socialization, and explore parallels between teaching and leadership. As Yeats once suggested, "education is not about filling a bucket but lighting a fire". We were convinced that leaders, like teachers, would need to provide space and support for individuals to develop themselves.

KEY LEARNING GOALS (click LIGHTBULB to see the INQUIRY MAP)

What is post-structuralism? How does it differ from structuralism? How does it relate to pragmatism, phenomenology, constructionism, and linguistic philosophy?
What is philosophy and purpose of education? How to define Bildung and Erziehung, and what are the differences between qualification, subjectification, and socialisation? How does this relate to, for example, the concept of professional competence in Dreyfuss?
What is the ethical responsibility of human beings, according to Levinas? How does it compare to the philosophy of Buber, and to what extent does it resonate with religious or revelatory doctrines? How does this support Biesta's development of subjectification?
What is good education? Why is civic education important for democracy? How does it link to political philosophy, e.g. Rousseau or Mills? How can modern organisations support both individual and civic education of employees? And should they?

✿ ABOUT GERT BIESTA

Gert Biesta is a distinguished pedagogist and philosopher of education, celebrated for his profound contributions to the field. Currently holding dual roles as Professor of Public Education at Maynooth University in Ireland and as a Professor of Educational Theory and Pedagogy at the University of Edinburgh, he has also held visiting professorships at renowned institutions, including University of Agder and Bergen in Norway, Uniarts in Finland, Örebro University in Sweden, and ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in the Netherlands. He holds a PhD in Education from Leiden University, a PhD in Philosophy from Erasmus University Rotterdam, and honorary doctorates from Uppsala University, Örebro University, and Oulu University.

Biesta's imprint in academia extends to influential editorial roles, serving as Associate Editor of the journal Educational Theory, co-editor of the British Educational Research Journal (BERJ), and co-editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education. He formerly was the editor-in-chief of the journal Studies in Philosophy and Education for nearly fifteen years, and President of the Philosophy of Education Society USA in 2011-2012, marking the first time a non-American scholar held this position. Beyond academia, he has held significant roles in education policy, including membership in the Educational Council of the Netherlands and service on the scientific curriculum committee in the Netherlands. Additionally, Biesta chaired the Committee for the Evaluation of Teacher Education Reform in Flanders, Belgium.

Gert Biesta's research interests span the theory of education, the theory and philosophy of educational and social research, and policy research. His extensive publications, including books such as "Beyond Learning," "Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation," "The Beautiful Risk of Education," "Good Education in an Age of Measurement," and "Obstinate Education," challenge conventional educational paradigms, emphasize the democratic and emancipatory potential of learning, and advocate for reconnecting education with its fundamental purpose in society. His books have consistently garnered acclaim and recognition, with his works receiving prestigious awards such as the American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Book Award, the American Educational Research Association Outstanding Book Award, the AERA Outstanding Book Award, and the annual book award from the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA).

Biesta's illustrious career, spanning several decades, has left an indelible mark on contemporary educational discourse. His focus on the three fundamental aspects of education—qualification, socialization, and subjectification—underscores the pivotal role of teachers in guiding students towards moral and ethical development. His extensive body of work addressing themes including citizenship, curriculum theory, art, religious and adult education, and the societal role of schooling has made significant impact and was translated into nineteen languages.

Exploring the Critical concepts for this session

Philosophy of Education [Stanford]

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.).

Pragmatism [Stanford]

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that – very broadly – understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. This general idea has attracted a remarkably rich and at times contrary range of interpretations, including: that all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation, that a claim is true if and only if it is useful (relatedly: if a philosophical theory does not contribute directly to social progress then it is not worth much), that experience consists in transacting with rather than representing nature, that articulate language rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can never be fully ‘made explicit’.

Post-structuralism [Wikipedia]

Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power. Although post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-established, socially constructed structures.

Structuralism [Wikipedia]

Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is: "The belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure."

Socialization [Wikipedia]

In sociology, socialization or socialisation (see spelling differences) is the process of internalizing the norms and ideologies of society. Socialization encompasses both learning and teaching and is thus "the means by which social and cultural continuity are attained". Socialization is strongly connected to developmental psychology. Humans need social experiences to learn their culture and to survive.

Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification [Download]

In previous publications, Gert Biesta has suggested that education should be oriented toward three domains of purpose that he calls qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Many educators, policymakers, and scholars have found this suggestion helpful. Nonetheless, the discussion about the exact nature of each domain and about their relationships to each other has been ongoing, particularly with regard to the domain of subjectification. In this article, Biesta revisits the three domains and tries to provide further clarification with regard to the idea of subjectification. He highlights that subjectification has to do with the existence of the child or student as subject of her or his own life, not as object of educational interventions. Subjectification thus has to do with the question of freedom. Biesta explains that this is not the freedom to do what one wants to do, but the freedom to act in and with the world in a “grown‐up” way.

Learnification [Download]

The quickest way to express what is at stake here is to say that the point of education is never that children or students learn, but that they learn something, that they learn this for particular purposes, and that they learn this from someone. The problem with the language of learning and with the wider 'learnification' (Biesta, 2010a) of educational discourse is that it makes it far more difficult, if not impossible, to ask the crucial educational questions about content, purpose and relationships. Yet it is in relation to these dimensions, so I wish to suggest, that teaching matters and that teachers should teach and should be allowed to teach. And it is also in relation to these dimensions that the language of learning has eroded a meaningful understanding of teaching and the teacher. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to articulate the contours of a different—and as I will suggest: educational—understanding of teaching and the teacher, in order to be able, as I have put it in the title, to give teaching back to education, that is, to reclaim a proper place for teaching and the teacher in our educational endeavours.

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Homepage

Find books, articles, presentations and the CV of Gert on this excellent homepage.

the democratic deficit in educational research

IIn this essay, Gert Biesta provides a critical analysis of the idea of evidence-based practice and the ways in which it has been promoted and implemented in the field of education, focusing on the tension between scientific and democratic control over educational practice and research. Biesta examines three key assumptions of evidence-based education: first, the extent to which educational practice can be compared to the practice of medicine, the field in which evidence-based practice was first developed; second, the role of knowledge in professional actions, with special attention to what kind of epistemology is appropriate for professional practices that wish to be informed by the outcomes of research; and third, the expectations about the practical role of research implicit in the idea of evidence-based education. Biesta concludes that evidence-based practice provides a framework for understanding the role of research in educational practice that not only restricts the scope of decision making to questions about effectivity and effectiveness, but that also restricts the opportunities for participation in educational decision making.

Agency and learning in the lifecourse

This paper is a contribution to understanding the relationship between agency and learn ing in the lifecourse. The contribution is mainly of a theoretical and a conceptual nature in that a particular notion of agency is used that enables agency to be conceived
as something that is achieved, rather than possessed, through the active engagement of individuals with aspects of their contexts-for-action. We refer to this as an ecological understanding of agency. On the part of the actor, such engagements are characterised
by particular configurations of routine, purpose and judgement. The argument is made that learning about the particular composition of one’s agentic orientations and how they play out in one’s life can play an important role in the achievement of agency, and that life-narratives, stories about one’s life, can be an important vehicle for such learning.

What is education for?

Teaching and teachers have recently become the centre of attention of policy makers and researchers. The general idea here is that teaching matters. Yet the question that is either not asked or is only answered implicitly is why teaching matters. In this article, I engage with this question in the context of a wider discussion about the role, status and significance of the question of purpose in education. I suggest that this is the most fundamental question in all educational endeavours. It is a normative question which poses itself as a multi-dimensional question, since education always functions in relation to three domains of purpose: qualification, socialisation and subjectification.

Against Learning

This article provides a critical examination of the ‘new language of learning’ which has become dominant in educational
discourse over the past decades. It is argued that the new language of learning allows for an understanding of education as an
economic exchange between a provider and consumer. Such an understanding, exemplified in the idea of ‘meeting the needs of
the learner’, not only makes it difficult to represent the contributions educators and teachers make to the educational process; it also makes it very difficult to have an informed, democratic discussion about the content and purpose of education. It is argued, therefore, that we need to reclaim a language of and for education, a language which is able to understand what actually constitutes educational relationships. This article provides an outline of a possible language of and for education; one which focuses on trust, violence and responsibility as important constituents of relationships that are truly educational

Citizenship-as-practice

Over the last few years there has been a renewed interest in questions of citizenship and in particular its relation to young people. This has been allied to an educational discourse where the emphasis has been upon questions concerned with ‘outcome’ rather than with ‘process’– with the curriculum and methods of teaching rather than questions of understanding and learning. This paper seeks to describe and illuminate the linkages within and between these related discourses. It advocates an inclusive and relational view of citizenship-as-practice within a distinctive socio-economic and political, and cultural milieu. Drawing upon some empirical insights from our research we conclude that an appropriate educational programme would respect the claim to citizenship status of everyone in society, including children and young people.

Mouffe, Rancière, and democratic education

Much work in the field of education for democratic citizenship is based on the idea that it is possible to know what a good citizen is, so that the task of citizenship education becomes that of the production of the good citizen. In this paper I ask whether and to what extent we can and should understand democratic citizenship as a positive identity. I approach this question by means of an exploration of four dimensions of democratic politics—the political community, the borders of the political order, the dynamics of democratic processes and practices, and the status of the democratic subject—in order to explore whether and to what extent the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can and should be understood as a particular order. For this I engage with ideas from Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière.

Say you want a revolution

Critical pedagogies claim that education is not a natural, ahistorical phenomenon but that it should be understood in its sociohistorical and political context. [...]critical pedagogies are in one way or another committed to the imperative of transforming the larger social order in the interest of justice, equality, democracy, and human freedom. [...]the only consistent way for critical pedagogy to proceed - and at stake is not a theoretical consistency but a pedagogical and political one is by a perpetual challenge of all claims to authority including the claims to authority including the claims to authority of critical pedagogy itself. [...]the history of German critical pedagogy is closely related to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, drawing its main inspiration from the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.

Receiving the gift of teaching

This paper is an enquiry into the meaning of teaching. I argue that as a result of the influence of constructivist ideas about learning on education, teaching has become increasingly understood as the facilitation of learning rather than as a process where teachers have something to give to their students. The idea that teaching is immanent to learning goes back to the Socratic idea of teaching as a maieutic process, that is, as bringing out what is already there. Against the maieutic conception of teaching I argue for an understanding of teaching in terms of transcendence, where teaching brings something radically new to the student. I explore the meaning of the idea of transcendence through a discussion of Kierkegaard and Levinas, who both criticise the maieutic understanding of teaching and, instead, argue for a transcendent understanding of teaching

The future of teacher education

In recent years policymakers and politicians in many countries have become increasingly interested in teacher education. In most cases, however, the interest in teacher education is not informed by a desire to enhance the professionalism of teachers but rather is part of ongoing attempts to control the educational 'enterprise.' In this chapter I analyse these developments, particularly with regard to a focus on the alleged need for 'evidence' to form the basis for teaching or the idea that teaching can be adequalty captured in terms of competences. Against these tendencies I argue for the important role teacher judgement plays in education, make clear why such judgement is needed, and what this would require for teacher education.

Further essays and materials from other authors

Being Taught by Biesta

What are we to do with the writing of Biesta? Raising the same question in relation to Jacques Rancière, in a 2010 study co-authored with Charles Bingham, Gert J. J. Biesta takes the writer of ‘a short, disparaging review of … The Ignorant Schoolmaster’ to task for ‘schooling’ Rancière on the inadequacies of the book reviewed (Biesta and Bingham 2010, 145–148). Readers of Biesta cheering on from the sidelines at this point are placed in an uncomfortable double bind if they are to take this suggestion seriously when reviewing his own work.

Emancipation as subjectification. A critical realist reading

Subjectification', the cornerstone concept of Biesta's philosophy of education, refers to how autonomy should be realized in educational settings and to the fact that explanation is irrelevant to emancipation. In this article a critical realist reading is provided of how Biesta links narrative learning to emancipation and of the shortcomings that spring from this connection. The central thesis of my argument is that truth and values should take center stage in an educational philosophy of emancipation and that these two concepts are left out of Biesta's conception of emancipation

Studien zur Zeigestruktur der Erziehung

Der leitende Gedanke ist: Pädagogik ist als Praxis und als Reflexion auf diese Praxis von der Eigenart des erzieherischen Handelns her zu verstehen. Sie besteht in der Operation des Zeigens in Hinsicht auf Lernen. Das Erziehen ist ein Handwerk im wörtlichen Verstande und in dem erweiterten Sinne eines beredten Handwerks.

Selected published works

TOP 100 BEST LEADERSHIP BOOKS

Interested in Leadership? Here is our Top 100 selection of the most important books for professional leaders of all times.

The socratic dialogue

Live video recording and podcasts

Explanations, artefacts and references from the interview

Emmanuel Levinas [Stanford]

Emmanuel Levinas’ (1905–1995) intellectual project was to develop a first philosophy. Whereas traditionally first philosophy denoted either metaphysics or theology, only to be reconceived by Heidegger as fundamental ontology, Levinas argued that it is ethics that should be so conceived. But rather than formulating an ethical theory, Levinas developed his philosophy in opposition to both these aforementioned approaches. It takes the form of a description and interpretation of the event of encountering another person. Giving rise to spontaneous acts of responsibility for others, the encounter unfolds, according to Levinas, at a precognitive level, thanks to what he called our embodied “sensibility”. That is why a phenomenology of intersubjective responsibility would be ‘first’ philosophy; viz., in the sense of interpretively reconstructing a level of experience precursive to both reflective activity and practical interests.

Jacques Derrida [Stanford]

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was the founder of “deconstruction,” a way of criticizing not only both literary and philosophical texts but also political institutions. Although Derrida at times expressed regret concerning the fate of the word “deconstruction,” its popularity indicates the wide-ranging influence of his thought, in philosophy, in literary criticism and theory, in art and, in particular, architectural theory, and in political theory. Indeed, Derrida’s fame nearly reached the status of a media star, with hundreds of people filling auditoriums to hear him speak, with films and televisions programs devoted to him, with countless books and articles devoted to his thinking. Beside critique, Derridean deconstruction consists in an attempt to re-conceive the difference that divides self-consciousness (the difference of the “of” in consciousness of oneself). But even more than the re-conception of difference, and perhaps more importantly, deconstruction attempts to render justice. Indeed, deconstruction is relentless in this pursuit since justice is impossible to achieve.

Jacques Rancière [Wikipedia]

Jacques Rancière (born 10 June 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis. After co-authoring Reading Capital (1965) with the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and others, and after witnessing the 1968 political uprisings his work turned against Althusserian Marxism, he later came to develop an original body of work focused on aesthetics.

Michel Foucault [Wikipedia]

Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

Gilles Deleuze [Wikipedia]

Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.

John Dewey [Stanford]

John Dewey (1859–1952) was one of American pragmatism’s early founders, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, and arguably the most prominent American intellectual for the first half of the twentieth century. Dewey’s educational theories and experiments had a global reach, his psychological theories had a sizable influence in that growing science, and his writings about democratic theory and practice deeply influenced debates in academic and practical quarters for decades. In addition, Dewey developed extensive and often systematic views in ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. Because Dewey typically took a genealogical approach that couched his own view within the larger history of philosophy, one may also find a fully developed metaphilosophy in his work.

George Herbert Mead [Stanford]

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), American philosopher and social theorist, is often classed with William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey as one of the most significant figures in classical American pragmatism. Dewey referred to Mead as “a seminal mind of the very first order” (Dewey, 1932, xl). Yet by the middle of the twentieth-century, Mead’s prestige was greatest outside of professional philosophical circles. He is considered by many to be the father of the school of Symbolic Interactionism in sociology and social psychology, although he did not use this nomenclature. Perhaps Mead’s principal influence in philosophical circles occurred as a result of his friendship with John Dewey. There is little question that Mead and Dewey had an enduring influence on each other, with Mead contributing an original theory of the development of the self through communication. This theory has in recent years played a central role in the work of Jürgen Habermas. While Mead is best known for his work on the nature of the self and intersubjectivity, he also developed a theory of action, and a metaphysics or philosophy of nature that emphasizes emergence and temporality, in which the past and future are viewed through the lens of the present. His most famous work, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, was published after his death and is a compilation of student notes and selections from unpublished manuscripts.

What have we learned? Our "Best Bit" takeaways from the Interview

KEY INSIGHTS FROM THE INTERVIEW FOR OUR INQUIRY

Here you can find the most memorable insights from our interview, related to our three inquiry questions. Simply select from the drop down menu on the right -->

1. WHAT IS GOOD?

The importance of questions

One thing that has really stayed with me from pragmatism is (...) as soon as you encounter an answer, you ask, what's the question to which this answer is an answer? For me the basic lesson from pragmatism is that it all starts with questions. If you forget that, philosophy becomes very quickly just a taking of positions where some people say, I believe in this answer, and others believe in that answer. What is forgotten is what was the question.
The other thing that pragmatism did, and Dewey has developed it in most detail for me, is to bring the question of time into our understanding of knowledge and truth. (...) In Aristotle, you have this distinction between the eternal and the variable. So, Aristotle says some things will never change. (...) But then Aristotle says most of our lives take place in this reality of the variable, where we act, and our actions have consequences. (...) Dewey takes that idea and he says we only live in a world of change. As long as some scientists or philosophers keep believing in this idea of the eternal, they will keep reproducing this idea of objective truth. But if we acknowledge that we are thrown into the world, we act in the world and those actions have consequences, we can gain a lot. If we look carefully what the consequences of our actions are, then we gain knowledge in a very different way.

The French Philosophers

I take a pragmatic lesson from the French philosophers you mentioned. They all tried to say life comes before theory. And if we mistake life for theory, then we're no longer taking life seriously. That is one way to read Foucault. Who shows how theories interfere with life. It is how I read Derrida, who always says this ambition to go back to the foundations is an impossible ambition. Because it's a theoretical gesture, but it's impossible in life. Life goes on. And we should be mindful of what we're doing there. That's not to be anti-theoretical, but almost in a pragmatic way to say theories are answers to questions, but we ask the questions. And don't think that when we do that, we can jump over our own shadow or find our foundation.
Derrida is sort of radicalising Heidegger by saying it's never possible to go back to the origin. Before that, we have to accept that we are in the middle of that. Heidegger then moves in the direction where he says we are the ones who should be open to the world and should receive the world as it comes. And there is something important about that insight. But receptivity cannot be without criterion. And here we come to the question of the good. So if you follow Heidegger, you should say our job is to be open to everything. But we know that there's a lot of shit that comes in our direction. And the question is what do we do there? And here Levinas comes in, but Hannah Arendt as well. Levinas says we are not in control of what comes to us. But what comes to us should not just be welcomed because it comes to us. What comes to us doesn't appeal to me. So it certainly puts me in the picture. You can say, my responsibility. Suddenly it will meet your own freedom there. And for me, that's an important difference from Heidegger, who struggles to identify that moment of encountering your freedom. Your freedom to say yes or no to what arrives.
I have a particular reading of Levinas that only some agree with. But too many readings of Levinas are moralising or even sentimental where he says, I have to be responsible for the other. To me, that sounds very sentimental. In a sense, it misses the point. I come back to the sentence from Zygmunt Bauman, who summarises Levinas by saying responsibility is the first reality of the self. And that, for me, is the key message in Levinas. He says I'm not telling people that they shouldn't be responsible. I'm trying to figure out in what kind of situation we as human beings suddenly realise that I have freedom of action. But for me, that's also a very important educational question, where and how that moment arrives? And I would say ethics and moral philosophy come after that because those are all attempts to help each other to deal with that moment where you suddenly realise, I have the freedom to act; I can say yes or no here. And that puts a burden on me. And then you can say, can we help each other to do that well? But ethics only come sort of after that.

Hannah Arendt

I turned to Arendt quite a lot. (...) What I take from Arendt is that life with others is inevitable. There is no alternative. Life doesn't exist if it's in isolation. In isolation, you'll have survival or biological processes, but human life, and she does that under the heading of action, is to say, that's to exist with others. And that's not a theoretical choice it's our existential condition. And Arendt, in nuanced but also very clever ways, says it’s always tempting to want to be in control of people. But as soon as we act on that, we begin to undermine the possibility for other people to be beginners. (...) If I want to bring my beginnings into the world, I have to understand that other people are doing that as well and that other people take up my beginnings in all kinds of other ways. But that is what it means to live in the world.
I very often refer to trust as an important educational gesture. As soon as you say to a student, you first need to give me proof that I can trust you, then nothing will happen. The whole point of trust is that you take the risk of saying I trust you, and then for the student to step into that trust. (...) In education systems but also in societal systems, people constantly try to replace trust with something else. But that destroys the education and probably some of the things in society as well. But trust is, of course, risky because you open the door.

Theory of Education

For me, education is a practice. And it centres on what educators do. (...) When you look at situations, there are always encounters between generations, between newcomers and old-timers. In some way, the oldtimers or the existing generation are doing something with the new generation. That is what education is about.
Insertion, understanding, and learning is going on all the time. If you want to understand education, learning is not a helpful notion. Because education is an intentional purpose for action by educators, that raises all kinds of questions. Why is it there? Why is it needed? How can it be justified? What does it look like? What are the dangers of doing that? For me, those are the proper educational questions.
What frustrates me in English is that there's only the word education. What I like about German is that you have several different words, Bildung, Erziehung, and Ausbildung, which highlights that there are differences that matter. And very quickly, Bildung is very much about how as human beings in interaction with culture, mediated by other human beings, we become cultivated and enculturated. So we become speakers of language, practitioners of practices, members of traditions, and part of communities; all that you can say are processes of Bildung. But for me, Erziehung is something different because that is always the moment when an educator arrives on the scene to do something. (...) Just to say that role of the teacher is to facilitate learning doesn't touch upon what educational dynamics and educational relationships are. And that's partly because learning is a process term.
My quick way is always to say, to become a good criminal you need to learn as well. So we cannot simply say the school is a place for learning because we do care about the learning that goes on. We also know that many students learn horrible lessons in schools, for example, that they are not worthy or that they are stupid or that they are not the right kind of person. So all that shows why learning is very unhelpful as the language for education.)

Purpose of education

It is about arousing the desire in other human beings to exist in the world in a grown-up way. And that has this idea of existing; it has the idea that existence can only happen in the world. It has this quality of grown-upness, which very quickly means that you can never take your own desires as a criterion for your life. Because if you try to exist in the world, you will meet other people who have their desires, and you meet a world that puts limitations on our desires. (...) So to try to exist in a grown-up way is to always be in a relationship with your desires rather than be driven by your desires. And then what can we do as educators? We cannot produce that way of existing. But we can try to arouse the new generation's desire to want to exist in that strange way. (...)This is what I see as sort of the purpose of the work of the educator. That doesn't mean that I'm saying knowledge doesn't matter or skills are trivial. On the contrary, it's a question of priority. What always irritates me is when politicians or researchers say knowledge and skills are the only thing that matters. And if we measure that, then we can push our country to the top of the league table. That’s not taking knowledge and skills seriously.
To exist in a grown-up way means that you always carry some doubt about your desires. And when the doubt disappears, then you're lost, then you've handed over your subjectness to other forces. (…) German scholar Klaus Mollenhauer beautifully says what education should aim for with everyone is a degree of what he calls Selbstungewissheit. He says it becomes dangerous when people are 100% certain of themselves. So, to keep even a small degree of uncertainty about yourself is really important. And for me, that's to try to exist in a grown-up way.

Interruptions of desires

There are indeed no recipes here. This is an important aspect of how to understand teaching. I like this idea of the artistry of teaching. Teachers constantly need to create. And that happens in the moment. If you just run a preprogrammed script, then you're not teaching. But to be able to create education in the moment, you need to have signposts; you need to have orientation, and that's what theory can do. It can give you questions and the ability to see and perceive and be sensitive. In terms of interruption, as a teacher you understand that there is a particular kind of interruption that's important, namely, those interruptions that help students to disconnect from their desires, to come into a relationship with their desires, or the moments that help students to disconnect from looking for the certainty about themselves. So if you get that as a teacher, that's important.
Then you look for opportunities in your practice to do something with those interruptions. And I don't write a lot about my teaching, but I recently wrote a paper in which I disclose some of my own things that I did. One interesting programme I developed with colleagues in higher education was where we took out all assessments. It was really interesting because it interrupted the security that the assessment gives to students, so the students were quite concerned. They said you won't judge us or tell us when we've done things right? We said no. And that's precisely a little interruption (...). It also became visible how we've created education systems where everyone has become addicted to assessment. And that addiction takes a degree of responsibility away. I do it in other ways as well. For example, by not giving my students a choice. Many people think it's desirable to have a choice of what to do. If you interrupt that, then you also interrupt a particular desire. And you ask when is choice a good thing to desire and when is it an uneducational or even a problematic thing? These interruptions can do these kinds of things, but you have to invent them in a moment of your teaching practice.
It has something to do with interruption of identity, interruption of desire. And that's connected again to grown-upness. To exist in a grown-up way means that you're not striving for pure identity. That you're not taking your desires as they arrive as the criterion for the good. And it goes back to Arendt’s motive that when we exist in the world, we are there together.

2. HOW TO CRAFT GOOD ORGANISATIONS?

Learning democracy and universities

In the past, I've used this idea of learning democracy (...). It begins with helping each other to stay awake for the questions. And I think that's an important educative gesture. It's exactly what the teacher does by constantly saying to the student, pay attention, don't fall asleep, don't forget yourself. (...) In society, we can also help each other to keep paying attention, to keep asking the questions that maybe are uncomfortable but that need to be asked. (...) I would say an organisation that understands that puts something educational at its heart. But that's also something democratic. We have to stay awake together for what we're trying to do.
From my own experience, it begins with asking questions. Universities, for example, constantly distract everyone who works there and doing all kinds of other things, and forgetting to ask the big question; why are we here? I worry about that. (...) Sometimes I'm quite frustrated because you see organisations like higher education become so good at being distracted from what they should be. Perfectly operating and all that but forgetting what's the point of being a university. To raise those questions and then take time for them, that's one strategy.
The other strategy is to act based on beliefs about what the university should do. And that's what I also do in my teaching. I tend to do quite a lot of things that go against the rules. And I always say I am accountable for that. So, if you want to know why I'm doing this, just ask me and I will tell you. The problem is that the administrators don't have time to even get into such a conversation.
You cannot change the whole institution single-handedly. The other thing is also to be obstinate in your practice, but it's informed obstinacy. Know that you're working under pressures that distort what the practice should be about. And there is something in Macintyre to say each practice is there for a reason. And it's our task, our Aufgabe in German, to stand in relation to the reason, the telos of that practice. And if we forget that, then we become bureaucrats or effective administrators. And I worry about that a lot. Sometimes I think what I hear from the business world, they are much ahead of the education world. So that gives me optimism. And I think universities run on very outdated business models.

3. HOW TO DEVELOP GOOD LEADERSHIP AND TRANSFORMATION?

Teaching and Leadership

Character education just says these are the desirable character traits and asks how we can get there. And then, you are looking for effective interventions. Immediately, the subject is out of the picture again. That's why I'm careful in operating there. And I look partly for different languages. The question of how we hold ourselves in our existence is another way to put that and you can also read that in quite an Aristotelian way. It's about finding a way not just to exist but also to hold yourself in that existence.
Teaching is a technical activity for which you need technical knowledge (...). Some people (...) say we can tell teachers exactly what they need to do, what kind of intervention to use. I've never denied that you need to know how to do it and that grows over the years but you always need to have a sense of why you're doing it, what is desirable to do.
All these ideas of teachers will have these fantastic toolkits. The real question is, which tool do you take out of the box to use in this situation? And with what kind of purpose and intention?
Without teachers, there's no education, no learning or Bildung. Then the question is, what is the teacher doing? One idea that I find helpful here comes from a German scholar, Klaus Pranger, who says, if we want to get an answer to that question, we need to look at the form of teaching. Not at the values or the ideas, but it starts with the form. (...) The basic form of teaching in German is "zeigen", which is both, pointing and showing. And that is helpful. Because immediately, you see that for education, there are always three in the room, there is the teacher, the student, and something. And what teachers do is nothing more than say to the student pay attention to that something, which can be a textbook, a piece of clay, the world, or history. And in that gesture of pointing, you're not just saying, there is your task, but you're also saying there is your task. And so in the pointing, they do two things at the same time. You try to focus the attention of the student to the world, but you also hope that the world speaks to the student. And that's the Levinasian moment where you say, ultimately, as teachers, you hope that the students will meet a question.
So the interesting thing about the teacher is that they stand in this triadic relationship. (...) What you keep doing as a teacher is constantly turning the student back to the world. Now, some students get that, but a lot of students constantly look back to the teacher and say, but what do you want from me? If you step into that you always end up with problems of authority. Because then you say, well actually, I want something from you and I'm going to judge you on whether you have done that well. Then there is no longer freedom for the student. But also there is no freedom for the teacher because the teacher then is caught in an authority position.

The robot vacuum cleaner

Someone who worked in the learning sciences and heard me criticising learning asked, what's the problem? Because aren't we intelligent adaptive systems, and the whole point is that we create learning environments in which children can develop a whole set of skills and understandings and habits as well. And then I was thinking, what's the best example of that, and that's the robot vacuum cleaner, which is an intelligent adaptive machine you put it in a room, and it begins to move. And then suddenly, there is a chair in the room, or a plant and it bumps into it the first time and the second time, it moves around. If that is the image of education, we facilitate learning by creating learning environments and putting our students into that, but there is something hugely missing. These intelligent adaptive systems, one thing they cannot do they cannot say no. They cannot refuse to clean the carpet in Hitler's office. And there, the whole idea that we can understand education and even our humanity by saying we are intelligent adaptive organisms break down. Because what you take out of the equation is human freedom, but that freedom is crucial at the moment where we refuse.

Democracy and civic education

Plurality is not the problem that needs to be solved, but that's the whole point of our existence. You can say that means that liberty and equality is important. But that's precisely not the neoliberal liberty of just doing what you want to do. That's precisely to try to be subjected to this web of plurality. And then when you ask, what is the democratic question for me, that goes back to desire. We have individual desires, but the challenge is always which of those desires are possible in our common life. And therefore, also in democracy, we need the question of coming into a relationship with our desires, rather than just taking our desires for what they are.
If you then ask what we can do in education, some people say do lessons in citizenship, tell the new generation what the values of our society are and before you know it, you are in what is nationalistic propaganda rather than civic education. I would rather say what you need to work on is constantly helping young people to meet their desires. Often desires are very hidden or not clear. And then begin to see that not all desires can or should be pursued.
Roncière very helpful says, let's never think that we can achieve perfect equality in a society. (...) And then he says, what is democratisation as a process? It is when someone stands up and not says, I also want the equality that you have, but says, there should be the possibility for different equality. That's this idea of transclusion. If you just say, I'm a woman, and I want the right to vote, then you're saying I am a woman, I would like to become a man. Because the right to vote means that you are a man. And there he says, the whole point of a woman who has the right to vote means that we need to completely change how we think about what it means to be a citizen with the right to vote.

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