World-Centred Education

A View for the Present

Gert Biesta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000410693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book makes an intervention in a long-standing discussion by arguing that education should be world-centred rather than child-centred or curriculum-centred. This is not just because education should provide students with the knowledge and skills to act effectively in the world, but is first and foremost because the world is the place where our existence as human beings takes place.

In the seven chapters in this book Gert Biesta explores in detail what an existential orientation to education entails and why this should be an urgent concern for education today. He highlights the importance of teaching, not understood as the transmission of knowledge and skills but as an act of (re)directing the attention of students to the world, so that they may encounter what the world is asking from them. The book thus shows why teaching matters for education. It also highlights the unique position of the school as the place where the new generation is given the time to meet the world and meet themselves in relation to the world. The extent to which society is still willing to make this time available, is an important indicator of its democratic quality.

This important text demonstrates, not only to academics, but also to students, teachers, school administrators, and teacher educators, the urgency of a world-centred orientation for education today.

1
What Shall We Do with the Children?

This is a book about education. It is not the first book ever written about education, and it will definitely not be the last. One may well wonder, therefore, whether there is still anything to add to the ever-increasing stream of publications, and, more importantly, whether there is still anything new to say about education. The ambitions I have with this book are, however, relatively modest. I am not presenting revolutionary new insights about education, nor am I providing a new agenda for education policy, or a new model or approach for educational practice. I actually tend to think that one of the main problems in contemporary education is that there are too many models and approaches on offer, and that so many of them come with the promise that they will be able to “fix” education once and for all. Research from a wide range of disciplines continues to make a significant contribution to the proliferation of such “solutions.” But the global education measurement industry (Biesta 2015a) may well have become the strongest voice in the discussion about what education is and what it is supposed to be for.

In light of this, it is rather disappointing to see that so many policy makers and politicians are unable to put findings from PISA and similar systems in a meaningful perspective. Their knee-jerk responses – either taking pride in being at “the top,” or acknowledging that there are “serious problems” that need “urgent attention” – do little in challenging the “educational order” (D’Agnese 2017) which the global educational measurement industry seem to have managed to establish (see also Derwin 2016). And while policy makers and politicians may have room for manoeuvre, albeit within the complex dynamics of politics and policy making, this is far less so at the level of schools, colleges, and universities. Here teachers and administrators are often simply subjected to ongoing policy directives that provide little opportunity for their own judgement and agency ( see Priestley, Biesta & Robinson 2015). This is particularly problematic when their jobs are being made dependent upon producing an ongoing increase in student test-scores or securing constant student progress along predefined trajectories (see, e.g., Baker et al. 2010; Ravitch 2011).

One rather curious aspect of many of these developments is that they all stem from good intentions, particularly the promise to make education better. In my rather long career in education I have actually never met anyone who was deliberately trying to make education worse. Everyone seems to be committed to educational improvement, although ideas about what counts as improvement and what meaningful ways of achieving it are, vary widely (see also Biesta 2016a). And there are, of course, also elitist agendas that focus on improvement for the few, but not for the many. All this, plus the sheer size of the educational “enterprise” around the world, helps to explain why the field seems to be moving in so many different and even opposite directions. With so many “pushes” and “pulls” it has become increasingly difficult to maintain or even establish a sense of direction. And this is a problem for policy makers and politicians as much as it is for teachers and administrators, and even for pupils and students themselves.

All this is further exacerbated by two developments. One is the rather poor quality of the educational discourse itself, which, as I have argued extensively in previous publications (see particularly Biesta 2006a, 2010a, 2018b), has become dominated by the rather bland and educationally unhelpful language of learning, and the proliferation of this language has been going on and on. The other is the fact that educational problems, including the problem of how to improve education, are predominantly seen as matters of control. Not only are there huge sums of money being invested in research that seeks to find out which educational “interventions” are most effective in generating particular “outcomes.” Also, students themselves are increasingly being made complicit in this ambition, for example when they are called to become “self-regulated learners” who should take “ownership” of their own learning – a strategy that may sound liberating but actually is a demand for what I tend to see as forms of self-objectification (see also Vassallo 2013; Ball & Olmedo 2013).

Existing as Subject

What seems to be forgotten in all this – and some might say: what is conveniently forgotten in all this – is that pupils and students are not simply objects of educational “interventions,” effective or otherwise, but that they are subjects in their own right. What seems to be forgotten, in other words, is that the whole point of education can never be that of subjecting students to ongoing external control, but that education should always be aimed at enhancing the ability of pupils and students to “enact” their own “subject-ness,” to use an awkward formulation. This is perhaps the main problem with the language of learning, because as soon as we claim that education is “all about learning,” we quickly forget that what really matters is what pupils and students will do with everything they have learned. We are too quickly drawn into monitoring and measuring the learning itself, looking for the interventions that produce the desired learning outcomes, trying to control the whole machinery, and thus easily lose sight of the fact that children and young people are human beings who face the challenge of living their own life, and of trying to live it well.

In this book I will argue that it is this existential question – the question how we, as human beings, exist “in” and “with” the world, natural and social – that is the central, fundamental and, if one wishes, ultimate educational concern. It is also the reason for suggesting that education should be world-centred, that is, focused on equipping and encouraging the next generation to exist “in” and “with” the world, and do so in their own right. This is not to suggest, of course, that existing in one’s own right is the same as “just doing what one wants to do.” On the contrary, to exist as subject “in” and “with” the world is about acknowledging that the world, natural and social, puts limits and limitations on what we can desire from it and can do with it – which is both the question of democracy and the question of ecology. This is one of the main reasons why I continue to favour the word “subject,” as it highlights at the very same time that we are originators of our own actions and that we are subjected to what the world, natural and social, “does” with our “beginnings,” to use an Arendtian term (see Arendt 1958, p. 184). “Subject” – or, to use another awkward word: subject-ness (see also Biesta 2017a, chapter 1) therefore does not refer to individuals but to how individuals exist (see also Böhm 1997).

The existential orientation put forward in this book is not meant as a denial of the fact that children develop and learn. But as John Dewey already has helpfully noted, “pure” child-centred education that only takes its direction from how children learn and develop is actually “really stupid” (Dewey 1984, p. 59). As educators we should at the very least be interested in the direction in which children develop and in the substance of what they might learn, since learning and development can go in so many directions, and not all of them are helpful for engaging with the challenge of trying to lead one’s life well. Pure curriculum-centred education, however, is equally “stupid,” because just trying to get curriculum content into children and monitor retention and reproduction, without any concern for who they are and for what they might do with all the content they are acquiring, misses the existential point of education as well, and would, in my view, therefore miss the point of education altogether.

“Education”

A complicating factor in all this has to do with the word “education,” and even more so with the fact that the English language only has one word to speak “in” and “about” education, whereas other languages, such as German and Dutch or the Scandinavian languages, have a more diverse and, in a sense, more nuanced vocabulary. There is, of course, something nice about the openness of the word “education,” as it is sufficiently vague to allow for a range of different interpretations and definitions. Yet this can also be confusing, particularly when people think that they are speaking about the same “reality” but are actually referring to rather different phenomena or agendas. The solution for this is not to end up in a fight over the “right” definition of the word or over who actually “owns” the meaning of “education.” The challenge rather is to develop ways of speaking that allow for a sufficient degree of precision in articulating what matters and what should matter in “education.” This is the reason why I continue to argue that language really matters for education (see Biesta 2004), and why I continue to develop new and hopefully more precise and more meaningful ways of speaking “in” and “about” education.

One thing I should clarify at the outset, therefore, is that when I use the word “education,” I tend to think of it as a verb and not as a noun. For me, “education” refers to an activity, that is, to something educators do. In more formal language I would say that education is a form of intentional action, that is, something educators do deliberately, albeit that for me this includes the perhaps slightly odd but educationally important category of intentional non-action. After all, sometimes the best thing to do as educators in a particular situation is precisely not to act, not to intervene, not to say anything, not to rub it in, but to bite our lip, because “rubbing it in” may have the opposite effect of what we hope to achieve. For me, then, “education” does not refer to more or less “amorph” processes that in some way may or may not have an influence on children. I am not denying that such processes take place and that they may have an impact, but I am suggesting that we retain the word “education” for the more specific category of intentional action or, if that works, of intentional educational action.

What Shall We Do with the Children?

This immediately raises a number of further questions, such as why such action actually exists, what such action seeks to achieve, and how such action can be justified (on the latter question see, for example, Flitner 1989[1979]; Prange 2010). With regard to the first question we could follow the German educationalist Siegfried Bernfeld (1973, p. 51) in his suggestion that education is society’s response to the “fact of development,” although I tend to prefer Hannah Arendt’s formulation that education has to do with “our attitude toward the fact of natality,” that is, “toward the fact that we have all come into the world by being born and that this world is constantly renewed through birth” (Arendt 1977, p. 196). In more everyday language we could say, therefore, that education starts with this simple question: “What shall we do with the children?”

While this question may sound simple, it actually brings us quickly to some of the main predicaments and enduring questions of education. The question first of all highlights the existence of a “we,” and thus raises the question of who this “we” is, that is, what the identity of being an educator is, and also what gives this “we” the right of even wanting to “do” something with “the children” in the first place. The question also highlights the existence of a category called “children,” which raises further questions about who is included in this category, what our notion of the child in the context of education actually is, and why “we” would assume that “the children” actu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Chapter 1: What Shall We Do with the Children?
• Chapter 2: What Kind of Society Does the School Need?
• Chapter 3: The Parks–Eichmann Paradox and the Two Paradigms of Education
• Chapter 4: Subjectification Revisited
• Chapter 5: Learnification, Givenness, and the Gifts of Teaching
• Chapter 6: Form Matters: On the Point(ing) of Education
• Chapter 7: World-Centred Education
• Bibliography
• Index