(inspired by my work at Tampere University of Applied Sciences MBA course)
One part I LOVE about my later in life education is having my mind blown. And this is what Professor Biesta did for me in his filmed session that I wrote about in a previous post as well. I listened to some parts of his video twice and sometimes even three times to make sure I got everything. The Professor’s ideas are seemingly so “common sense” and yet not really taken into consideration by the powers that be and they showed the professor to be a thinker in the true sense of the word: digging as deep as the shovel of the mind will go.
The first idea I took down was the one about education as an “encounter between student / child and the world.” This reminded me of a quote I had come across in my studies earlier this week, from Hannah Arendt, namely the one describing education as “the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” Education thus becomes, in Arendt’s opinion, offering youth the tools for taking care of this world. I felt this was very much in line with the conclusion Prof. Biesta reached. I would have liked to hear Prof. Biesta view on this: when we look at education as the encounter between our students and the world, what is the process through which we establish what our students already bring to that encounter? I am thinking of the foundation established by Loris Malaguzzi, in his Reggio Emilia philosophy: “We can never think of the child in the abstract. When we think about a child, when we pull out a child to look at, that child is already tightly connected and linked to a certain reality of the world — she has relationships and experiences. We cannot separate this child from a particular reality. She brings theseexperiences, feelings, and relationships into school with her. ”
I also noted the considerations about students and teachers in terms of how they relate to each other in the process of education. Prof. Biesta warns against looking at students as customers who must be provided “what they desire” and who know what they want. It made me think about a concept that is being pushed into IB education (and maybe not just there), of student “agency”. At times this is taken to extremes, I feel, taking away from students a very useful amount of teacher guidance and assuming that “agency” is always good, when in fact it is the same situation as with potential (as described by Prof. Biesta): we all have the potential to do good and bad. It goes the same way, I believe, with agency.
I truly appreciated Prof. Biesta taking on the limitations of seeing “learning” as the sole purpose of education and explaining how this process must be three dimensional: qualification, socialization and subjectification. It made me think of how very important the work of teachers was (not that I did not know, as the daughter of one, but still). This idea that when we engage in educational activities we never influence our students in only one area of their lives could be daunting for a teacher, I think. One aspect that I kept questioning though, both in conversation with my MBA colleagues and then later at the beginning of Mark Smith’s article, is whether education is always a deliberate process. I am so happy I kept reading because Martin Buber truly put words behind what I felt: “the real teacher teaches most successfully when he is not consciously trying to teach at all, but when he acts spontaneously out of his own life.” It made me think of the teachers most influential in my life who many times were not the ones I met in the classroom. At times they were my life partner, my son, people from minorities I engaged with or even my dogs.
The part that I was most excited about was hearing Prof. Biesta’s conclusions about what education should be about. It brought me back to Dr. Brene Brown’s newest book, Strong Ground. Among other things, this book talks about “straddling paradoxes.” Dr. Brown starts from Jung’s explanation that “only paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life,” and this was the frame that for me encompassed what Prof. Biesta was saying: realize the advances and the struggles, understand the unknowns of the future and the things that will remain relevant, shed irrelevant knowledge and pay attention to what keeps coming up. I believe that the very hard task education has is to teach us all how to be able to live with paradox, to see it as liberation, as inspired by Jim Collins when he talks about the tyranny of the OR and the genius of the AND.
At the intersection of what these amazing thinkers predict about education and the future, what stood out for me was the idea of respect in education. Smith’s idea that educators should display respect for the expertise they hold on their subject (meaning exploring all aspects and staying connected to reality as much as possible), respect for others and the environment, are in line with the future Prof. Biesta attempted to predict. Just as Smith outlines community, the natural world and spiritual values as the ways through which one finds meaning and purpose in life, so assumes Prof. Biesta that the way we will engage in democratic discourse when we value different things and disagree so much, the way we care for our planet and for each other will continue to be the relevant things to be educated about and in even five decades from now.
And one added connection that sparked in my mind: I would really like to see Prof. Biesta in conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. Especially when I think about Harari’s article on what kids need to learn to succeed in 2050 and his conclusion that they need to know themselves before algorithms know them better, I think it would make for a very interesting conversation. This is linked directly to the Greek root of the word “education”: “educere”- to bring out. We can therefore look at this process as one that is helping us bring to the fore what we already have in ourselves, to know ourselves and our capabilities better than anyone does.
References:
Brown, B. (2025). Strong ground: The lessons of daring leadership, the tenacity of paradox, and the wisdom of the human spirit. Random House.
Collins, J. C., & Porras, J. I. (1994). Built to last: Successful habits of visionary companies. HarperBusiness.
Harari, Y. N. (2018, September 13). What kids need to learn to succeed in 2050: The art of reinvention will be the most critical skill of this century. Forge. https://forge.medium.com/yuval-noah-harari-21-lessons-21st-century-what-kids-need-to-learn-now-to-succeed-in-2050-1b72a3fb4bcf
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
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