The Rediscovery of Teaching

Gert Biesta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317208112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Rediscovery of Teaching presents the innovative claim that teaching does not necessarily have to be perceived as an act of control but can be understood and configured as a way of activating possibilities for students to exist as subjects. By framing teaching as an act of dissensus, that is, as an interruption of egological ways of being, this book positions teaching at the progressive end of the educational spectrum, where it can be reconnected with the emancipatory ambitions of education. In conversation with the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Paulo Freire, Jacques Rancière, and other theorists, Gert Biesta shows how students' existence as subjects hinges on the creation of existential possibilities, through which students can assert their "grown-up" place in the world. Written for researchers and students in the areas of philosophy of education, educational theory, curriculum theory, teaching, and teacher education, The Rediscovery of Teaching demonstrates the important role of teachers and teaching in the project of education as emancipation towards grown-up ways of being in the world.

1

What Is the Educational Task?

In this chapter I explore a simple and in a sense very basic question, which I have phrased as the question “What is the educational task?” I am aware that the phrasing of this question is not ideal, particularly not where it concerns the word “task”. In a number of Germanic languages there are much more precise and much more interesting words to denote what I am after. In German there are the words “Aufgabe” and “Auftrag”, which are very close to the Dutch words “opgave” and “opdracht”. What these words try to hint at are things that need to be done, that are there for us to do when we find ourselves in a certain situation or position, such as the position of being a teacher or educator. This is less about a task that needs to be performed or a job that needs to be done, than it is about a responsibility we encounter. Interestingly, the words “Gabe” and “gave” actually mean gift, so that “Aufgabe” and “opgave” refer to a task given to us, a task that comes with the job, so to speak, or the responsibility that comes with the position. “Auftrag” and “opdracht” have the words “tragen” and “dragen” in them, which mean to carry – and that is what the task given to us is asking from us as well. That we carry this task. What I seek to express through the question of the educational task, therefore, is that education is not just anything we want it to be, but it comes with a particular “Aufgabe”, a particular responsibility, a particular imperative, we might even say.

The answer I will suggest in this chapter is that the educational task consists in making the grown-up existence of another human being in and with the world possible. Or, with an even more precise formulation: the educational task consists in arousing the desire in another human being for wanting to exist in and with the world in a grown-up way, that is as subject. There are at least two aspects to this answer that need further exploration. One is the idea of “grown-up-ness”, and the other the use of the word “existence”. To begin with the latter: to use the word existence means that I wish to focus on the ways in which human beings exist, that is, in short, on how they are, and not on the question of who they are. If the latter is the question of identity, the former is the question of subjectivity or, in slightly more accurate terms: it is the question of human subject-ness or of the human “condition” of being-subject. Both questions – the question of who I am and the question of how I am – are of course legitimate questions, also in the context of education. But they are very different questions and it is important not to conflate them, neither at the level of concepts – the concepts of “identity” and “subject-ness” are not interchangeable – nor at the level of what these concepts seek to express.

As I will discuss in more detail below, I approach “grown-up-ness” – admittedly a slightly awkward word – not as a developmental stage or the outcome of a developmental trajectory, but in existential terms, that is, as a particular “quality” or way of existing. What distinguishes a grown-up way of existing from a non-grown-up way is that the grown-up way acknowledges the alterity and integrity of what and who is other, whereas in the non-grown-up way this is not “on the radar”. The grown-up way acknowledges, in other words, that the world “out there” is indeed “out there”, and is neither a world of our own making nor a world that is just at our disposal, that is, a world with which we can do whatever we want or fancy. “The world” here refers both to the natural and to the social world, both to the world of things and to the world of beings. It refers, more concretely, both to our planet and everything on it, and to the other human beings we encounter on this planet. It refers, with an interesting word proposed by Alfonso Lingis (1994, p. 123), both to the earth and to the “earthlings” inhabiting the earth. To acknowledge the alterity and integrity of this world is not to be understood as an act of generosity on my side to let what and who is other exist. It is, in other words, not my decision to let the world exist or not. It rather is my decision to give the alterity and integrity of the world a place in my life – or not, of course.

What is the justification for suggesting that the educational task is to make the grown-up existence of another human being in and with the world possible? In an absolute sense there is no justification for this and in this regard the suggestion is literally groundless. Yet this does not preclude that this suggestion may be meaningful, particularly when compared to alternative views about what the educational task might be. One point to highlight here is that it is actually only in the world that we can really exist, since when we withdraw ourselves from the world we end up existing only with and for ourselves – which is a rather poor and self-absorbed way of existing, if it is to exist at all. To exist in and with the world thus always raises the question of the relationship between my existence and the existence of the world. And here again, at least as a starting point, we can say that to exist in and with the world without making space for what exists there as well, is not really to exist in the world. The challenge, therefore, is to exist in the world without considering oneself as the centre, origin, or ground of the world – which is exactly how Philippe Meirieu describes the “student subject” (“élève-sujet”), namely as the one who is able to live in the world, without occupying the centre of the world¹ (see Meirieu 2007, p. 96).

But perhaps the even more difficult question is why we should think of this as an educational issue, rather than as something that each of us should figure out in our own lives. Why, in other words, should we even consider the suggestion that it would be the task – and hence the responsibility and perhaps even the duty – of one human being to make the grown-up existence of another human being possible? We could respond to this question by referring to the fact that this seems to be what educators have always been doing, that it is key to what it means to be a parent and that it is key to what it means to be a teacher, and that what I am trying to do is simply to explore what this might mean in our times. We could also say that the ambition to make the grown-up existence of another human being possible expresses an interest in freedom and, more specifically, an interest in the freedom of the other, and that this is key to what education ought to be about (see Biesta & Säfström 2011, p. 540). I do think that this is how we might articulate the educational interest and hence the educational task, but I do not think that this automatically amounts to a justification of it. After all, the promise of liberation has too often turned into another exercise of power (see, for example, Spivak 1988; see also Biesta 2010b and, for a wider discussion, Andreotti 2011), which means that in these matters we should proceed carefully and with not too many pretensions.

I will present my reflections on the educational task in five relatively brief steps, partly in connection to some ideas I have presented in more detail in earlier publications, and partly highlighting with more precision notions of “existence” and “grown-up-ness”. I will first look at the notion of subjectivity or subject-ness and will try to articulate what it means to exist as subject. I will pursue this a little further by arguing next that existential matters are ultimately first-person matters rather than matters of theory. I will explain this distinction and indicate what this means for the question of being-subject and more specifically the idea of uniqueness. From here I will turn to the question of what it means to exist in the world – a question I will seek to answer by highlighting what it means not to be in the world. This will allow me to say a bit more about the distinction between grown-up and non-grown-up ways of being in the world and the importance of the distinction between the desired and the desirable. In the fifth and final step I reflect on the educational “work” that might contribute to making the grown-up existence of another human being in and with the world possible. I conclude the chapter with a brief reflection on the role of power and authority in educational relationships and on what this means for teaching and the teacher.

The Subject Is Subject

Given that I have suggested that what we are talking about is the subject-ness of the human being and not its identity, the first question to ask is what it means to be a subject. We can answer this question in two ways, either by looking at the subject itself and then trying to find out what the subject is, or by looking away from the subject and then asking what it means for the subject to exist. Here I pursue the second option, taking inspiration from Sartre’s dictum that “existence precedes essence”, that is, that we first of all exist, that we “find” ourselves in existence, and that any answer to the question of who we are comes afterwards.² While attempts to answer the question of what the subject is are not necessarily meaningless, they come, in a sense, always too late in relation to our existence itself. This means that while they may help to clarify dimensions of the human condition, they are not able to ground it. If, taking inspiration from Heidegger, we take the idea of existence in a literal sense, we can already begin to see one aspect of the existence of the subject, namely that to exist as subject does not mean to be with oneself – to be identical with oneself – but rather to be “outside” of oneself, that is, in some way to “stand out” (“ek-sist”) towards the world and be “thrown” into it.

The main insight I wish to highlight about the existence of the subject and our existence as subject is that, to a large degree, our subject-ness is not in our own hands, which may even mean that it is not in our hands at all. The author whom I have found most helpful in making sense of this aspect of our subject-ness is Hannah Arendt, particularly her ideas on action (which, in Arendt’s work, is a technical term with a very precise definition). Action – which for Arendt is one of the three modalities of the active life, the vita activa (Arendt 1958) – first of all means to take initiative, that is, to begin something. Unlike many philosophers who emphasise the mortality of the human being, Arendt looks in the opposite direction, that is, towards the capacity of the human to be a beginning and a beginner. Arendt compares action to the fact of birth, since with each birth something “uniquely new” comes into the world (Arendt 1958, p. 178). But it is not just at the moment of birth that this happens. Through our “words and deeds” we continuously bring new beginnings into the world.

Beginning is, however, only half of what action is about, because whether our beginnings will be of any consequence, whether our beginnings will “come into the world” (see Biesta 2006), depends entirely on whether and how others will take up our beginnings – and “taking up” needs to be understood in the broadest possible sense, so as to include responding to such beginnings, repeating such beginnings, taking such beginnings as a cue for further initiatives, and so on. This is why Arendt writes that the “agent” is not an author or a producer, but a subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely as the one who began an action and the one who suffers from and is literally sub-jected to its consequences (see Arendt 1958, p. 184). The upshot of this is that our “capacity” for action – which in this sense is precisely not a capacity we have or possess – crucially depends on the ways in which others take up our beginnings. In this sense we can say that our subject-ness is not in our own hands, which we might indeed summarise, as Simon Critchley (1999, p. 63) has done, by saying that “the subject is subject”.

Although the uptake by others of our initiatives frustrates our beginnings, Arendt emphasises again and again that the “impossibility to remain unique masters of what [we] do” is the very condition and the only condition under which our beginnings can become real, that is, can come into the world (see Arendt 1958, p. 244). It is therefore also the only condition under which we can come into the world, that is, can exist as subjects. While it might be tempting to want to control the ways in which others take up our beginnings, the problem is that as soon as we do so we begin to deprive others of their opportunities for action, their opportunities to begin and to exist as subjects. We would then be after a world where one person can act – can be a subject – and everyone else is just a follower – and hence an object of the one who is subject. Arendt concludes therefore that action is never possible in isolation – which also means that we can never exist as subject in isolation. Arendt goes even as far as to argue that “to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act” (p. 188). This, in turn, leads her to the simple but profound statement that “Plurality is the condition of human action” (p. 8), that is, that it is only under the condition of plurality that action for all – and hence subject-ness for all – is possible. It is important not to read this as an empirical statement, but rather as the normative “core” of Arendt’s work, which is explicitly committed to a world in which everyone has the opportunity to act and exist as subject (see also Biesta 2010d).

Uniqueness as Irreplaceability

While Arendt helps us to give meaning to the idea that our subject-ness is not in our hands but to a large degree dependent on what others do with our initiatives, there are still two limitations to her approach – limitations that in a sense are connected. One limitation is that Arendt provides us with a theory about human subject-ness, and thus approaches the question of subject-ness from what we might call a third-person perspective. While her insights are illuminating, they nonetheless try to give a description of the condition of being-subject from the “outside”, so to speak, rather than from the point of view of the existence of the subject itself – which we might refer to as a first-person perspective. The second limitation is that Arendt provides a general account of the condition of human subject-ness rather than an account of each human subject in its uniqueness. To put it a bit crudely: while Arendt gets us closer to understanding what it means for subjects to exist, she does not provide us with an argument for why it might matter that each individual human subject exists. Perhaps these observations sound vague and strange when made in this abstract way. But they are precisely what is at stake in the way in which Emmanuel Levinas approaches the question of human subject-ness, in that he tries to give an “account” of subject-ness not in the form of a theory but from a first-person perspective. Here subject-ness appears as something I have to “figure out”, that no one else can figure out for me, and that I cannot figure out for anyone else. And the key term in Levinas’s account is “uniqueness”.

But uniqueness is a tricky term, as the first inclination we might have is to understand it from a third-person perspective, that is, as the question concerning the characteristics and capacities each of us has that make each of us different from everyone else. This we might refer to as the idea of uniqueness-as-difference, which would bring us immediately back to questions of identity and identification and to a perspective on uniqueness from the outside – where, from an abstract point, we can make clear how each human being is in some respect different from every other human being. As I read his work, Levinas hints at the need for asking a different question about uniqueness, which is not the question “What makes me unique?” – the question about what I have that makes me different from everyone else – but the question “When does it matter that I am I?” The latter question precisely does not ask about everything I have or possess that would distinguish me from others, but looks for situations, for existential events, where my uniqueness is “at stake” and where I am therefore at stake. The situations Levinas has in mind are those where someone calls upon me in such a way that the call is addressed at me and no one else. These are situations where the call comes to me, and where it is only I who can respond. They are, in other words, situations where we encounter a responsibility, which is the reason why Levinas suggests that responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity” (Levinas 1985, p. 95).

Alfonso Lingis (1994) provides the helpful example of a case where a friend who is dying asks to see you. Such a question, Lingis argues, is a question that only addresses you, as the friend is not interested in just seeing someone – she wants to see you and no one else. This is a question, therefore, that literally singles you out. It is a question that burdens you with a responsibility. It is for you to take up this responsibility or walk away from it. When Zygmunt Bauman summarises Levinas’s insights by writing that for Levinas responsibility is “the first reality of the self” (Bauman 1993, p. 13), he captures what is going on here extremely well, as we could say that it is only in encounters where there is a responsibility for me that my uniqueness begins to matter, that my uniqueness is “at stake”, that I am at stake. Here uniqueness is not a matter of difference – a third-person perspective – but a matter of irreplaceability – a first-person perspective. Uniqueness, as Levinas puts it, is about doing “what nobody else can do in my place” (Levinas 1989, p. 202). There is of course no one who can force us to take on the responsibility we encounter. In that regard it is important to see that Levinas is not describing this as a duty, as something we must do. Nor does he see it as a biological fact, that is, as something we cannot not do. On the contrary, we could say that in a rather strange sense human freedom also means that we have the possibility to walk away from the responsibility we find ourselves in – and this is entirely up to each of us individually. We cannot take on this responsibility for another human being, nor can we force another human being to act in a particular way if, that is, we respect their subject-ness, if, that is, we encounter them as subjects in their own right, and not as objects of our actions and intentions. (This has important implications for education, to which I will return below.)

A final thing to mention here is that the responsibility in relation to which my uniqueness begins to matter always and structurally comes from the outside rather than that it is generated by me. It does not start from a feeling or a need to be responsible for the other or to care for the other. The responsibility in the face of which my uniqueness begins to matter and in response to which I might realise, in that particular, singular moment, my subject-ness, therefore always appears as an interruption of my “immanence”, an interruption of my being with and for myself. Levinas in some cases describes human subject-ness as “the very fracturing of immanence” (Levinas 1989, p. 204), or in slightly less “strong” language, as the moment where “the Same – drowsy in his identity” is awakened by the other (p. 209; emphasis in original).

Both Arendt and Levinas thus try to show how our subject-ness is not in our own hands. But whereas Arendt’s account ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: The Need for a Re(dis)covery of Teaching
• 1. What Is the Educational Task?
• 2. Freeing Teaching from Learning
• 3. The Rediscovery of Teaching
• 4. Don’t Be Fooled by Ignorant Schoolmasters
• 5. Asking the Impossible: Teaching as Dissensus
• Epilogue: Giving Teaching Back to Education
• About the Author
• References
• Index