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89
RISKING OURSELVES IN EDUCATION: QUALIFICATION,
SOCIALIZATION, AND SUBJECTIFICATION REVISITED
Gert Biesta
Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy
Maynooth University
A. In previous publications, Gert Biesta has suggested that education should be oriented toward
three domains of purpose that he calls qualification,socialization,andsubjectification. 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.
K W. qualification; socialization; subjectification; freedom; Dietrich Benner; identity
I
Homer Lane (1875–1925) is one of the little-known figures in the history of
twentieth-century education. I had never heard of Lane until I came across him in
the writings of A. S. Neill, founder of Summerhill school. Interestingly, Neill actu-
ally refers to Lane as “the most influential factor” in his life.1Being a fan of Neill, I
became curious about Lane and his “Little Commonwealth,” the residential school
based on democratic principles of participation and self-governance which he set
up and ran in rural Dorset, England, from 1913 to 1918. There isn’t a lot of litera-
ture about Lane and his school,2and Lane himself also wrote very little. The only
account he gave of his educational ideas is in a short book called Talks to Parents
and Teachers, published in 1928.3
Lane set up his school in order to give young boys and girls with “difficult”
backgrounds (in most cases criminal convictions) a second, and sometimes third
or fourth chance. He did not do this through discipline, behavioral management,
or a strict regime of “re-education,” but through freedom. Instead of taking his
students’ freedom away, he actually returned their freedom to them, so to speak, in
the hope that they would reconnect with it and make it into their “own” freedom.
From a more conventional view of education, Lane took quite a lot of risks in his
1. A. S. Neill, quoted in Walter H. G. Armatyge, “Psychoanalysis and Teacher Education II,” British
Journal of Teacher Education 1, no. 1 (1975): 317– 334.
2. William David Wills, Homer Lane: A Biography (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964); and Elsie Theodora
Bazeley, Homer Lane and the Little Commonwealth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928).
3. Homer Lane, Talks to Parents and Teachers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928). This work will
be cited in the text as TPT for all subsequent references.
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90 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y V 70 N 1 2020
approach, and there are numerous stories of young people running away from the
school and getting into trouble in the nearby village. But there are also examples
of the opposite.
In one of the chapters of Talks to Teachers and Parents, titled “Misconceptions
of Power” (TPT, 159–169), Lane writes about an encounter over tea with a boy
of sixteen whom he calls Jason, a rather “rough” boy with a criminal record and
a history of running away from the Little Commonwealth. Jason is obviously
unhappy at the school, so Lane suggests that he get some of his friends together for
the next election of officers for the school, so as to be able to change things. When
Jason declares that he “would just like to run the place,” Lane asks him what he
would do first. Not immediately sure what to say, Jason, after some looking around
for clues, responds that he would like to “smash up those fussy tea-things” — the
cups and saucers — as they are “for women and la-di-da boys,” as he puts it, but
not for boys like him. Lane responds by saying that he wants Jason to be happy and
if smashing the cups and saucers would do so, he should smash them up.
In the sequence that follows, Lane describes how he provides Jason with the
poker from the hearth and that Jason does indeed smash up the cup and saucer,
and two more, put in front of him by Lane. Other boys in the room see what is
happening and, interestingly, begin to accuse Lane, saying that by daring Jason to
smash the cups, he is actually making him do it. Jason picks up on this by saying
that actually the problem “ain’t the dishes, but that you dared me to smash them”
(TPT, 166). The event unfolds further due to an observation made by one of the
other boys in the room that the cups and saucers actually aren’t Lane’s but belong
to the proprietors of the school, and that Lane therefore has no right offering them
to Jason for smashing up. Suddenly, then, Jason becomes the hero and Lane the
wrongdoer. Jason does indeed defend himself by saying that his main reason for
smashing the cups and saucers was that he always takes a dare because “I’m no
coward.”
At that point Lane takes his watch and puts it in Jason’s hand, saying: “Here’s
my watch, Jason. I dare you to smash it.” Lane continues:
The lad looked at the watch and glanced round at the anxious faces of his friends in indecision.
After a moment his expression changed to desperation. He raised the watch as to dash it into
the hearth, and glanced at me, hoping that I should at the last moment exercise authority,
and so leave him falsely victorious in the possession of his cherished attitude. The moment’s
hesitation brought the real Jason to the surface. He lowered his hand and placed the watch on
the table. “No, I won’t smash your watch,” he said, with an attempt at good-natured generosity
to cover his embarrassment. (TPT, 167 –168)
Eventually Jason leaves the room with his friends. When he returns the following
morning, he asks Lane if he can have work in the school’s carpentry shop. When
GERT BIESTA is Professor of Public Education at the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy,
Maynooth University, Ireland, and Professorial Fellow in Educational Theory and Pedagogy at Moray
House School of Education and Sport, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK; e-mail gert.biesta@mu.ie. His primary
areas of scholarship are the theory and philosophy of education and the theory and philosophy of
educational and social research.
B Risking Ourselves in Education 91
Lane asks why, he says, with a smile: “Oh, I’ve just got to earn extra money to pay
for them dishes you busted last night” (TPT, 168).
I recount Homer Lane’s story — which he himself refers to as a “complicated
and unusual incident” (TPT, 169) — not because of its apparent success in “turning
around” a difficult youth,4but because Lane’s actions provide a vivid and rather
precise example of what in my own work I have referred to as education as
subjectification. Now let me take one step back in order to explain why Lane’s
story is such a telling case of this.
T T D E
In a number of publications, going back as far as 2004,5I have expressed
concerns about what eventually I termed the “learnification” of education. This
concerns the shift in educational discourse, policy, and practice toward learners
and their learning. This shift is often presented as a response to top-down practices
of education that focus on teaching, the curriculum, and the input side of education
more generally. The turn toward learning is also presented as a response to
authoritarian practices, where education is seen as an act of control — not unlike
Paulo Freire’s notion of “banking education.”6From that perspective, the turn
toward learning is seen as a progressive move where, instead of teachers and the
curriculum, learners and their learning are at the center. This way of viewing and
doing education is supported by constructivist theories of learning in which it is
argued that, at the end of the day, learners have to make up their own minds and
come to their own understandings — something which teachers obviously cannot
do for them.
One important aspect of my critique of the rise of the “new language of
learning” and the more general “learnification” of education had to do with the
fact that the term “learning” is a rather empty process-term that doesn’t say much
— if anything at all — about what the learning is supposed to be about and for.Yet
these questions are crucial for education, because the point of education is never
that students simply learn — they can do that anywhere, including, nowadays,
on the Internet — but that they learn something, that they learn it for a reason,
and that they learn it from someone. A key problem with the language of learning
is that it tends to make these questions — about educational content, purpose,
and relationships — invisible, or that it assumes the answer to these questions is
already clear and decided upon.7
4. Lane mentions that Jason became “the best carpenter in the community,” was elected judge of the
school’s Citizens’ Court, eventually joined the army, and, sadly, was killed in France during World War
I(seeTPT, 169).
5. Gert Biesta, “Against Learning: Reclaiming a Language for Education in an Age of Learning,” Nordisk
Pedagogik 23, no. 1 (2004): 70– 82.
6. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New, Revised Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York:
Continuum, 1993).
7. One of the problems with the current “age of measurement” is that the question of the purpose of
education is often answered in terms of the production of measurable “learning outcomes.” See Gert
92 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y V 70 N 1 2020
One point that has gained considerable attention in the discussion about the
learnification of education has to do with the question of the purpose of education.
Here, I have suggested that what is special and most likely unique about education
is that it is not oriented toward one purpose — such as medicine’s orientation
toward (the promotion of) health or the legal profession’s orientation toward (the
pursuit of) justice — but is actually oriented toward three purposes or, as I prefer
to call it, three domains of purpose. The argument for this starts from a simple
analysis of the way in which much education functions.
Many would probably agree that one of the key functions of education has to
do with the transmission — or, in less directive terms, the making available of
— knowledge and skills. This qualification function of education is an important
task and provides an important justification for schooling. Whereas some would
argue that this is all schools should do, it is not too difficult to see that even
the simplest provision of knowledge and skills already provides a certain way of
(re)presenting the world and presenting what is considered to be of value.8For this
reason, in addition to qualification, there is always also socialization going on —
the (re)presentation of cultures, traditions, and practices, either explicitly but often
also implicitly, as the research on the hidden curriculum has shown. Further to
qualification and socialization, it can be argued that education always also impacts
on the student as individual, either by enhancing or by restricting capacities
and capabilities, for example. This third function can be called individuation,
although in my own work — for reasons outlined below — I have referred to it
as subjectification.
From the observation that education always functions in relation to three
domains, it can be argued that those involved in the design and enactment of
education — including policymakers and teachers — should always engage with
the question of what their efforts seek to bring about in each domain. In this,
the three functions of education turn into three purposes of education or, if it is
acknowledged that under each “heading” more concrete decisions still need to be
made, three domains of educational purpose.9While many have found it helpful,
and in a sense rather intuitive, to think about the point and purpose of education in
Biesta, Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm,
2010).
8. Klaus Mollenhauer, Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing (London: Routledge, 2013).
9. There are other authors who have argued for the multifaceted nature of educational purpose. Kieran
Egan, for example, has suggested that education should focus on socialization, the acquisition of
(academic) knowledge, and the promotion of individual development, and has argued that it should
be possible to give all three a place in education. Zvi Lamm makes a similar distinction between
socialization, acculturation, and individuation as three possible aims of education, although he tends
to think that they cannot be united within one system. Jerome Bruner, discussing “the complexity of
educational aims,” identifies three unresolvable tensions regarding the aims of education: the tension
between individual development and cultural reproduction; the tension between the development of
talents and the acquisition of tools; and the tension between the particular and the universal. See
Kieran Egan, The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2008), chap. 2; Zvi Lamm, Conflicting Theories of Instruction: Conceptual
B Risking Ourselves in Education 93
this threefold way, it is particularly the third domain, that of subjectification, that
has remained difficult to grasp — and I have to say that I probably did not appreciate
the complexity of this idea when I first presented it.10 So what is entailed in the
idea of subjectification, and what is at stake in it? Why, in other words, does it
matter for education?
S: B S
Put simply, what is at stake in the idea of subjectification is our freedom as
human beings and, more specifically, our freedom to act or to refrain from action.11
This is not about freedom as a theoretical construct or complicated philosophical
concept, but concerns the much more mundane experience that in many — perhaps
even all — situations we encounter in our lives, we always have a possibility to
say yes or to say no, to stay or to walk away, to go with the flow or to resist —
and encountering this possibility in one’s own life, particularly encountering it for
the first time, is a very significant experience.12 Freedom viewed in this way is
fundamentally an existential matter; it is about how we exist, how we lead our
own lives, which of course no one else can do for us.13 Put differently, freedom is
a first-person matter. It is about how I exist as the subject of my own life, not as
the object of what other people want from me.
Education has not always had an interest in freedom, or, to be more precise, it
has not always had an interest in the promotion of freedom (and we could even
say that is still the case in many places today). For a long time in the history
of the West, education’s interest was, as Werner Jaeger has put it, “aristocratic”
rather than “democratic.”14 It was there to provide those who were already free —
wealthy men, in most cases — with the cultural resources to work on their own
perfection.
Perhaps the first author who put freedom explicitly on the educational agenda
was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Émile, or On Education (1762), Rousseau not only
Dimensions (Berkeley, CA: McCutchan, 1976); and Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 66– 85.
10. In this regard, both understandings and misunderstandings of the idea of subjectification have been
helpful in clarifying my own thoughts.
11. I am thinking here of the “category” of “intentional nonaction” — that is, the unique human capacity
to decide not to act or to refrain from action.
12. I am not just thinking of children here. There are societal and political conditions that can easily
make people “forget” that this is an option for them at all. See, for example, the discussion of this in
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
13. If this sounds too abstract, think of it this way: it is like walking, which is also something that we
have to do ourselves — no one else can walk for us (see the interesting section on walking in Mollenhauer,
Forgotten Connections).
14. Werner Jaeger, Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens, vol. 1 of Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture,
trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965); see also Carl-Anders Säfström, “Paideia
and the Search for Freedom in the Public of Today,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 54, no. 3 (2019):
607– 618.
94 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y V 70 N 1 2020
argued that the work of the educator is to protect Émile (and children more
generally) from too strong influences from the outside — as indicated in the famous
opening sentence: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things;
everything degenerates in the hands of man.”15 He also argues that Émile should
not be overwhelmed by forces from the “inside” — his passions, as Rousseau calls
them. Seen in this way, the key theme of the book can be understood as that of how
education can help children and young people to obtain “sovereignty” in light of
the societal and natural forces they are subjected to.
The interest in the promotion of freedom presents educators with a predica-
ment, expressed succinctly by Immanuel Kant as the so-called educational para-
dox: “How do I cultivate freedom through coercion?”16 There is indeed something
odd about education’s interest promoting the freedom of children and young peo-
ple, particularly if one starts from the (correct) assumption that the freedom to act
is part of the human condition: we simply cannot not act. Two things are impor-
tant here, and they make up the very core of the modern educational tradition —
that is, the tradition from Rousseau onward. The first has to do with the particular
“quality” of educational action; the second with what this action is aimed at.
A helpful and quite apt phrase in this context is Dietrich Benner’s suggestion
to understand education as “Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit.”17 “Aufforderung”
is not the cultivation of an object — which is a problem with Kant’s formulation18
— but can better be understood as a summoning, as encouragement, one might
say, that speaks to the child or young person as subject.19 “Selbsttätigkeit,” which
literally means self-action, is not the injunction to be active but to be(come)
self-active. In more everyday language, this is not about becoming yourself, and
particularly not about “being yourself” in the simplistic sense of just doing what
you want to do, but about being aself, being a subject of your own life.
“Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit,” summoning the child or young person to
be a self (Benner), arousing a desire in children and young people to exist as the
15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979),
37.
16. In German, it reads: “Wie kultiviere Ich die Freiheit bei dem Zwange?” Immanuel Kant, “Über Päd-
agogik” [On Education], in Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik
(Frankfurt, Germany: Insel Verlag, 1982), 711.
17. Dietrich Benner, Allgemeine Pädagogik [General Theory of Education], 8th ed. (Weinheim &
München, Germany: Juventa, 2015).
18. Gert Biesta, “Can the Prevailing Description of Educational Reality Be Considered Complete? On
the Parks-Eichmann Paradox, Spooky Action at a Distance, and a Missing Dimension in the Theory of
Education,” Policy Futures in Education, March 17, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210320910312.
19. Such speaking can be counterfactual — it can go against all the evidence we have in front of us.
Consider, for example, when parents speak to their newborn baby, where there is as yet little evidence
that this baby is a subject, let alone a subject capable of understanding the meaning of what his or her
parents are saying. Yet it is the very approaching of the baby as if it were a subject that opens up the
possibility for future existence as subject. On the dynamics of this “gesture,” see chapter 5 in Gert Biesta,
The Rediscovery of Teaching (London: Routledge, 2017).
B Risking Ourselves in Education 95
subject of their own life (Biesta), denying children and young people the comfort
of not being a subject (Rancière), is what education as subjectification is about.
It is, therefore, not about the educational production of the subject — in which
the subject would be reduced to an object — but is instead about bringing the
subject-ness of the child or young person “into play,” so to speak; helping the child
or young person not to forget that they can exist as subject.20
What I particularly like about Homer Lane’s “complicated and unusual inci-
dent” — which was not preplanned but was an educational opportunity that Lane
was able to spot and seize — is that it provides such a clear example of both the
dynamics and the orientation of education as subjectification. What Lane does,
almost literally, is to put Jason’s freedom in Jason’s hands. Lane doesn’t condemn
Jason; he doesn’t say, for example, that Jason is pretty irresponsible and should
become responsible. He is not saying that Jason has the wrong character traits and
should work on his character or receive some character education. He is not saying
that Jason lacks something and is in need of learning.
Lane is doing nothing more — but also nothing less — than confronting Jason
with his freedom — reminding him that it is his freedom, not Lane’s freedom —
and the whole point of having this freedom is that it is up to Jason what to do
with it. Lane is, in other words, “reminding” Jason of his possibility to exist as the
subject of his own life, rather than as the object of all the forces that “come” at
Jason, both from the “outside” and from the “inside.” The story is perhaps a little
sugar-coated — in a sense, as mentioned, it is presented as a success story — but
the dynamics are real, and Jason was, of course, entirely free to smash the watch
as well, had he decided to do so.21
F I L
Although freedom is at the very heart of education as subjectification, it is
important to see that this is not the freedom to just do what you want to do; it is, in
other words, not the neoliberal “freedom of shopping.”22 Subjectification rather is
about “qualified” freedom, that is, freedom integrally connected to our existence
as subject. This is never an existence just with and for ourselves, but always an
existence in and with the world. An existence with human beings and other living
creatures and “in” a physical environment that is not a simple backdrop, a context
20. This shows that the educational gesture here is fundamentally non-affirmative — another helpful
phrase from Benner — because the educator is not telling the child or young person how they should
become, what they should do with their freedom, which “template” or “image” they should adopt and
aspire to, all of which would be instances of affirmative education. See Dietrich Benner, “Bildsamkeit
und Bestimmung. Zu Fragestellung und Ansatz nicht-affirmativer Bildungstheorie” [Educability and
Purpose: On the Question and Approach of Non-affirmative Education Theory], in Studien zur Theorie
der Erziehung und Bildung, Bd. 2 (Weinheim, Germany: Juventa, 1995), 141–159.
21. On several occasions, when I’ve presented Lane’s story, teachers in attendance have guessed that
some of their students would go for the watch as well!
22. Gert Biesta, “Schools in an Age of Shopping: Democratic Education Beyond Learning,” in Schools of
Tomorrow, ed. Silvia Fehrmann (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2019).
96 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y V 70 N 1 2020
in which we act, but rather a complex network through which we act; a network,
moreover, that sustains and nurtures us. This world is real and puts real limits
on our actions, albeit that one important aspect of trying to exist as subject is to
figure out what these limits are, which limits should be taken into consideration,
which limits are real, and which limits are the effect of arbitrary (ab)use of power.
The question of democracy has everything to do with the limits that our living
together poses to our own freedom. The ecological crisis shows us in a very forceful
manner that our engagement with the living and the physical world also cannot be
limitless.
Hannah Arendt’s reflections on action and freedom are actually quite helpful
here, because she suggests a more precise definition of human action that amounts
to a more precise understanding of human freedom. Arendt distinguishes between
the human capacity to begin, to take initiative, and what it means for those
initiatives to become real, to arrive in the world. Her key insight is that for the
latter to happen, our initiatives need to be taken up by others, and it is only when
this happens that Arendt speaks about action. “Action” for Arendt thus refers
to our beginnings plus the ways they are taken up by others. This helps us to
understand why Arendt claims that we can never act in isolation — “to be isolated
is to be deprived of the capacity to act”23 — as we are entirely dependent upon the
ways in which others take up our beginnings (or fail to do so).
This is an important reason why Arendt prefers the word “subject” over
notions such as “individual,” because in action we are subjects in the twofold
sense of the word: we are the subjects of our own initiatives and are subjected to
how others take up and continue our beginnings. Arendt emphasizes that others
are beginners as well and therefore have the freedom to take up our beginnings
in their own way rather than how we may have wanted them to handle our
beginnings. Although it is tempting to want to control what other people do with
our beginnings, in doing so we would actually block their opportunities for bringing
their beginnings into the world. We would end up in a world in which only I can
act, and everyone else would end up as follower.
A slightly different way of making the point that our freedom is not unlimited,
has to do with the fact that we exist, that we live our lives, in a world that is not
of our own making, but that exists independent from us. We live, in other words,
in a real world, not a fantasy (and this real world includes “our” body as well).
We encounter this reality when our initiatives meet resistance — first of all, the
resistance of the material world but also, of course, the resistance of the social
world, the resistance of other human beings who, if they take up our beginnings at
all, may do so in very different and unexpected ways.
From the perspective of our intentions and initiatives, the encounter with
resistance generates a degree of frustration. Out of such frustration we could try to
push harder in order to overcome the resistance we encounter. This is sometimes
23. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 188.
B Risking Ourselves in Education 97
important for our initiatives to arrive in the world, but there is always the danger
that if we push too hard, we may destroy the very world in which we seek to arrive.
If, then, at one end of the spectrum we encounter the risk of world-destruction, at
the other end we find the existential risk of self-destruction: when confronted with
this double-bind, out of frustration, we step back and withdraw ourselves from the
situation. This suggests that the existential challenge — which is lifelong — is that
of trying to stay in the difficult “middle ground” in between world-destruction and
self-destruction. This is the place — physically and metaphorically — where we
try to be “at home in the world,” try to “reconcile ourselves to reality.”24
The difference between fantasy and reality maps onto an important distinction
in the educational literature between an “infantile” and a “grown-up” way of trying
to live one’s life.25 If the infantile way of leading one’s life is characterized by a
disregard for what is real — just pursuing one’s own desires, just doing what one
wants to do — the grown-up way of trying to lead one’s life is characterized by
the desire to give one’s desires a “reality check,” so to speak, so as to come into a
relationship with what and who is other, not simply overrule it.
The terms “infantile” and “grown-up” are rather stark, particularly because
they seem to suggest that the difference has something to do with age. It seems to
suggest that once we have reached a certain age, we have resolved the difficulty of
engaging with what is real, and have resolved it for the rest of our lives, whereas
up to a certain age we are supposed to be unable to do this. We all know, however,
that reconciling ourselves to reality is a lifelong challenge. And we also know
that children are sometimes perfectly able to stay in the middle ground, whereas
many adults keep pursuing fantasies. A slightly better set of terms, inspired by
Emmanuel Levinas, is therefore to see it as the difference between an egological
and a non-egological way of trying to exist, trying to lead one’s life.26
E S
Education as subjectification, education as “Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit,”
is therefore clearly oriented toward grown-up ways of existing, grown-up ways of
trying to lead one’s life. But it doesn’t think of grown-upness as the outcome of a
developmental trajectory or a trajectory of cultivation or socialization, but rather
as a never-resolved existential challenge: the challenge of trying to live one’s life
in the difficult “middle ground.” Education as subjectification is not about forcing
children and young people to stay there, but is better described as encouraging an
“appetite” for trying to live one’s life in the world, so to speak; it is about arousing
24. Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in Essays in
Understanding, 1930– 1954, ed. Hannah Arendt and Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994),
307– 308.
25. See particularly, Philippe Meirieu, Pédagogie: Le devoir de Résister [Education: The Duty to Resist]
(Issy-les-Moulineaux, France: ESF éditeur, 2007).
26. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
University Press, 1969), 35.
98 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y V 70 N 1 2020
a desire for wanting to try to live one’s life in the world, without thinking oneself
in the center of the world, as Philippe Meirieu has put it.27
Unlike what some may think, this suggests a rather concrete set of educational
“parameters.” One thing it asks from education is that it make an encounter with
the real possible — an encounter that allows for a “reality check.” This requires,
among other things, that education not remain merely conceptual but that there is
something real at stake in it; that the world, in its materiality and its sociality, can
be encountered. An encounter with what is real manifests itself in most cases as
an interruption — an interruption of the flow of intentions and initiatives, which
means that education for subjectification has an interruptive quality.
Meeting the real, and meeting one’s desires in relation to what is real, is not
a “quick fix” but actually requires time. That is why education as subjectification
needs to work with the principle of “suspension” — of slowing down, of giving
time, so that students can meet the world, meet themselves in relation to the
world, and “work through” all this. The reminder that the Greek word schole
actually means “free time,”28 time that is not yet made productive, is very helpful
here, as it suggests that school needs to provide this possibility for slowing down,
for trying, failing, trying again, and failing better, as Samuel Beckett has formulated
it so nicely.
Interestingly, I think that what Neill tried to do at Summerhill was precisely
to give young people time, particularly the time to encounter their own freedom,
because only once they had encountered that “point” would more formal education
become possible and meaningful for them.29 If education as subjectification keeps
referring students “back” to the middle ground, so to speak, it must also provide
them with support and sustenance so that it is possible for them to stay with the
difficulty. Interruption, suspension, and sustenance are therefore three important
and, in a sense, very concrete components of what is required of an education
that takes subjectification seriously. Although it is also not difficult to see that
these components go against the grain of much contemporary education, which is
characterized by a rather single-minded focus on qualification and socialization:
fast and furious rather than slow and with a degree of patience.
W S I N
If the foregoing sheds some further light on what subjectification is about and
what education as subjectification aims for and looks like, I now wish to make a
few observations about what subjectification is not, particularly in order to identify
interpretations of the idea of subjectification that seem to miss the point, either
partially or completely.
27. In French, this reads: “Un élève-sujet est capable de vivre dans le monde sans occuper le centre du
monde” (Meirieu, Pédagogie, 96).
28. Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, In Defence of the School: A Public Issue, trans. Jack McMartin
(Leuven, Belgium: E-ducation, Culture & Society, 2013).
29. Janusz Korczack is another “champion” of suspended education.
B Risking Ourselves in Education 99
One suggestion that is often made is that the idea of subjectification, of existing
as subject, is the same as the idea of identity. Although the notion of identity is
complex and discussions about its meaning and status are ongoing,30 it seems safe
to say that identity concerns the question of who I am, both in terms of what I
identify with and how I can be identified by others and by myself. The question of
subject-ness, however, is not the question of who I am but the question of how I
am, that is to say, the question of how I exist, how I try to lead my life, how I try
respond to and engage with what I encounter in my life. It therefore includes the
question regarding what I will “do” with my identity — and with everything I have
learned, my capacities and competences, but also my blind spots, my inabilities,
and incompetence — in any given situation, particularly those situations in which
I am called upon or, to put it differently, in which my “I” is called upon. This
also means that the “work” of identity actually takes place in the domain of
socialization. It is, after all, in that domain that education seeks to provide students
with access to traditions and practices, with the invitation to “locate” oneself in
some way in such traditions and practices (bearing in mind that this is not a process
over which we have total control, also because our self-identifications may be quite
different from how others identify us).
Subjectification also has nothing to do with personality and personality devel-
opment. Personality is a psychological construct that seeks to explain the ten-
dencies that underly differences in behavior, often in terms of particular person-
ality “traits.” It is not just that personality is a psychological concept whereas
subject-ness is an educational one. Much more important for the line of thought in
this article is the fact that personality is an explanatory concept. It is an attempt to
explain why people act how they act. In doing so, it looks at individuals as explain-
able “objects” (or, to use a slightly “softer” word, “entities”) from the outside, from
a third-person perspective. Subject-ness, on the other hand, is not an explanation
or explanatory concept, but refers to how individuals exist, from the inside-out, so
to speak. It is therefore a first-person perspective — it is the perspective from the
individual who acts (or decides not to act). Seeing the different “status” of person-
ality and subject-ness — that is, the one being, in perspectival terms, a third-person
concept and the other a first-person concept — is also important in order to make
sure that personality tests, such as the currently rather popular Big Five Inventory,
don’t enter the existential domain of subjectification (and, preferably, that they
don’t enter the domain of education altogether). Subjectification, in other words,
is not another thing that students must achieve and should be tested on.
Subject-ness is also not about the subjective or the personal. In a sense,
we could even say that subject-ness is the opposite of the subjective or the
personal, because it is about our existence in and with the world, rather than
one’s own personal or subjective opinions, thoughts, and beliefs. This also means
that subjectification is not about expressing one’s personal opinion or inner
30. See, for example, Seth J. Schwartz, Koen Luyckx, and Vivian L. Vignoles, eds., Handbook of Identity
Theory and Research (New York: Springer, 2013).
100 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y V 70 N 1 2020
feelings, but, as I have tried to outline above, about how such opinions and
feelings “encounter” the world. Education as subjectification is therefore not about
asking students for their opinions or providing them with opportunities to express
themselves “without limits.” This doesn’t mean that subjectification is about
forbidding students to express themselves. It is rather about making sure that what
students express can “meet” the world so that a reality check, as I have put it,
becomes possible. After all, while students may express wonderful things, they
may also express very problematic ideas and convictions, so to simply “accept”
any expression because it comes from the student is not just uneducational, but it
can actually be problematic and even dangerous.31
It is perhaps not too difficult to see now, that subjectification should also
be distinguished from individuation. It is, again, one thing to become an indi-
vidual through one’s interaction with “culture” in the widest sense possible, yet
still another to exist as subject in relation to one’s individuality, in relation to
and “with” everything one has gained, learned, acquired, and developed. This also
means — and this is important as well — that subjectification should not be under-
stood as a process of becoming, as a development toward being a subject. Rather,
we might say that subjectification is what always interrupts our becoming.32 It is
an event that occurs in the here and now.
There are two more points I wish to make here. One relatively minor point
is that subjectification should not be conflated with what I suggest referring to as
“self-objectification.” In many countries, students are now encouraged to — or are
simply being told that they should — take ownership of and responsibility for their
own learning, and detailed strategies, including learning contracts, are increasing
being used in an effort to make this happen. Although this may at first sight appear
to be an empowering gesture of surrendering ownership to students, it is actually
a means by which students are forced into modes of self-management where they
need to monitor and regulate themselves and their behavior, thus basically turning
themselves into an object of their own control and management. This is where
self-objectification takes place, resulting in a remarkable split between the self that
manages and the self that is being managed. Rather than empowering students,
these strategies instead offload the responsibility of teachers onto students. And in
most cases the empowerment they claim to offer is actually pseudo-empowerment.
Consider, for example, a case in which students take ownership by saying that
they would rather not learn or would rather leave the school altogether. The
response to such an assertion will most likely be that the students will be
told that this is not an option, demonstrating that their “empowerment” is a
pretense.
31. Gert Biesta, “What If? Art Education Beyond Expression and Creativity,” in International Encyclo-
pedia of Art and Design Education, ed. Richard Hickman, John Baldacchino, Kerry Freedman, Emese
Hall, and Nigel Meager (London: Taylor & Francis, 2019).
32. See also the discussion on Rosa Parks and Adolf Eichmann in Biesta, “Can the Prevailing Description
of Educational Reality Be Considered Complete?”
B Risking Ourselves in Education 101
The final point I wish to emphasize is that subjectification should not be
understood in terms of being responsible or, more specifically, in terms of taking
one’s responsibility. Subjectification, in other words, is not a moral category,
just as education as subjectification should not be understood as a form of moral
education, and definitely not as a form of moralizing education.33 Put simply, sub-
jectification is not about responsibility but about freedom, including the freedom
not to be responsible, the freedom to walk away from one’s responsibility, so to
speak. This is not to suggest that subjectification and responsibility have nothing
to do with each other, but the relationship is of a different sort, and it is important
to bear this in mind, partly in order to avoid thinking that subjectification is
entirely or automatically positive and happy. Human freedom can, after all, lead
to the most wonderful, but also to the most disastrous, things we can imagine.
Responsibility — and here I follow Levinas — is not something we choose
but is instead something we encounter. And it is in such encounters — when a
responsibility comes to me, so to speak — that my subject-ness, my existence as
subject, actually begins to matter or comes into play. Zygmunt Bauman captured
this wonderfully when he wrote that “responsibility is the first reality of the
self.”34 This means that the self does not first exist and then decide whether or not
he or she wishes to become responsible. It is actually in situations of responsibility
that the whole question of the self, of “me,” begins to matter, as responsibility
always calls me. But whether I “take” responsibility for the responsibility I
encounter (another formulation from Bauman35), or whether I walk away from
the responsibility I encounter, is entirely up to me. That is the exercise of my
freedom and the event of my existing-as-subject. The encounter with responsibility
is therefore the “moment” when I encounter my freedom and thus my unique
existence as subject — unique in the sense that it is up to me to determine what
to do, which no one can do for me.36 This is uniqueness-as-irreplaceability, which
is very different from the idea of uniqueness-as-difference that characterizes the
phenomenon of identity.
T B R E
I have paid considerable attention to the domain of subjectification, not just
because it is the most difficult of the three domains to conceive of and perhaps the
33. If it is part of any form of education at all, it is first and foremost a form of existential education. On
this point, see Herner Sæverot, Indirect Pedagogy: Some Lessons in Indirect Education (Rotterdam, The
Netherlands: Sense, 2012).
34. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993), 13.
35. Zygmunt Bauman, Leven met Veranderlijkheid, Verscheidenheid en Onderzekerheid [Living with
Change, Diversity, and Uncertainty] (Amsterdam: Boom, 1998).
36. The best example of encountering this situation, and encountering oneself in such a situation, comes
from Alfonso Lingis who refers to the situation where one of your friends asks to see you. This is a
question just for you — a question that literally “singles you out” — but you are, of course, still free not
to respond to your friend’s question. See Alfonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing
in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
102 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y V 70 N 1 2020
one that has been most misunderstood. I also tend to think that it is the most
important of the three domains, not because knowledge, skills, and traditions
are not important, but because it is only when subjectification enters the scene
that we are in the domain of education, whereas when there is no a place for
subjectification, we are in the domain of training that, as John Dewey already
noted, is something we do to others, thus approaching them as things or objects, not
with them, which would be approaching them as subjects. This does not suggest,
however, that qualification, socialization, and subjectification can be separated,
and even less does it suggest that it is possible for education to focus on only one
dimension. Although it may sometimes look as if this is happening — particularly
in the context of the contemporary obsession with the domain of qualification —
nothing would happen unless the student actively decided to “invest,” if that word
makes sense.
There is a further relationship between the three domains, which has some-
thing to do with the fact that talking about education in terms of the acquisition
of knowledge and skills is actually misleading, because skills — to focus on this for
a moment — never exist in a vacuum; they do not just hang “in the air,” because
there is always an individual who actually “has” these or other skills. Therefore,
having skills or being skillful cannot occur without a subject, just as having knowl-
edge or being knowledgeable cannot occur without a subject. This insight begins
to suggest that the relationship between qualification, socialization, and subjec-
tification is more complicated, and also more interconnected, than indicated by
my initial suggestion that this relation could be depicted as a Venn-diagram with
three domains that partially overlap. Perhaps it’s better to think of it as three con-
centric circles, where subjectification is either at the center, because it is “core,”
or it is the outer “ring,” because it encompasses the other two domains. The issue
here, however, is particularly an educational one, as it raises the question of what it
actually means to teach knowledge or skills — and perhaps also of what it “takes,”
especially in terms of what it does to and requires from the student as subject.37
This brings me to what I alluded to in the title of this article, namely the
question of risk in education or, more precisely, the question of the risks of
education, and why it is appropriate to refer to them as beautiful risks. At one level,
the risks of education are simple and clear. We as educators have intentions, such
as giving students knowledge, skills, and understanding, but also values, attitudes,
ways of doing and ways of being, and what is important here is that students “get
it” and that they get it “right.” The point is, of course, that most students do not
immediately “get it,” let alone get it “right,” and one could say that the whole
educational endeavor is geared toward getting students closer to getting it right.
This is an open process precisely because there are students in the room, so to
speak, and in this way education always entails a risk, specifically the risk that
students won’t get it or won’t get it sufficiently right.
37. In Continental terms, this is the discussion about the didactical implications of the idea of the three
domains of educational purpose — an issue I hope to explore in more detail in the future.
B Risking Ourselves in Education 103
A huge part of educational research and policy nowadays is aimed at reducing
this risk, and at one level this emphasis is entirely justified, because getting it
right matters. But there is a tipping point in the ambition to reduce this particular
risk. This is the point where education becomes nothing but perfect reproduction
and thus turns into indoctrination. It is the point where there is no longer an
opportunity for the student to exist as subject. This partly is the “big” question
as to whether there is space for students to exist within educational situations
and settings. But it is also a very practical question, in that in education we should
make room for students’ sense-making — which teachers indeed cannot do for their
students — and for exploring the unknown or the not-yet-known. Even within the
context of sound curriculum thinking, squeezing the risk out of education is simply
uneducational. In this regard, risk is important and relevant for education’s sake,
even if our first interest is in good and meaningful qualification and socialization.
But as soon as we acknowledge that education is also about subjectification,
then the subject-ness of the student is not a problem that needs to be overcome
in order to make the educational machine more predictable and effective, but
it is actually the very point of our endeavors. This means, however, that there
always is a possibility, and there always should be a possibility, that our students
take their freedom and then turn back to us and say that they don’t want — or,
perhaps more importantly, don’t need — our intentions. This risk is always there
in education as well, and if we see this as a risk that needs to be overcome, a
problem that needs to be “solved,” we actually eradicate education itself. Klaus
Mollenhauer has captured this idea very well by arguing that although education
always needs intentions, such intentions have to be understood as structurally
broken intentions.38
These risks, therefore, are proper to education; they belong to education
if, that is, education takes its broad remit of qualification, socialization, and
subjectification seriously. The reason to refer to these risks with an aesthetic term
— beauty — is because the reason for “allowing” these risks in education has
everything to do with the possibility for the student to appear, and to appear as
subject. “Allowing” this risk to “take place” is not just a matter of allowing a risk
to occur “outside” of us; it is actually the point where we also risk ourselves as
educators. This is the third (beautiful) risk of education.
The reason that we risk ourselves in education has to do with the simple
fact that education always comes to the student as an act of power, even if it
is well-intended and even if what is at the heart of this intention is interest in
the student’s freedom, in his or her existence as subject in and with the world.
We should not hide this fact by suggesting, for example, that, as teacher, we are
“just” a facilitator, or “just” a coach, or “just” a fellow learner. In all cases, we give
something that students didn’t ask for. Our hope is that, at some point, students
may turn back to us and tell us that what we tried to give them was actually quite
38. Klaus Mollenhauer, Theorien zum Erziehungsprozess [Theories on the Process of Education]
(Munich, Germany: Juventa, 1972), 15.
104 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y V 70 N 1 2020
helpful, meaningful, even if, initially, it was difficult to receive. At that point we
can say that the exercise of power transforms into a relationship of authority, where
what intervened from the outside is authorized by the student — is “allowed” to
be an author, is “allowed” to speak and have a voice. But students may, of course,
decide not to do so, or they may only do so long after they have left school, so
that their authorization never reaches us, as teachers. The possibility that our acts
of power remain “unresolved,” so to speak, is therefore a risk that we should be
willing to carry as well.
