A Question of Freedom - A Conversation with Gert Biesta

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The paradigm of his philosophy maybe misses this unique possibility we have as human beings, not just to interact and change as a result of that, but also at some point to say no, I no longer want to engage with this environment, I disconnect, I refuse.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan. This episode is out of our regular planned schedule and acts as a small contribution to the global response and solidarity with the people of Ukraine as they stand so strongly together facing down the tyranny of Putin's totalitarianism. This is my second conversation with Professor Gert Biester, in which we discuss what might be the appropriate educational response to the current crises, not only the situation in Ukraine, and specifically specifically the question of freedom. It's also happening in the context of the broader educational conversations about how we might bring more and deeper opportunities for student agency into our schools and classrooms. You can find further details about Gert's bio, his contact details, and the links to our previous conversation in the show notes.

Hi, Tim.

Hi, how are you?

Good, how are you?

Good, yeah, I'm doing okay. It's kind of a strange question to ask at these times, right?

Yeah, we don't really know.

We don't really know, exactly. It's a strange feeling, right?

Yeah, yeah.

But thank you for agreeing to do another part.

Yeah, let's see.

Yeah, it prompted some really interesting reactions, I thought, the first conversation. I mean, I really appreciate it because I think there is a lot of conversation about this idea of agency and freedom and education, but also the current horrendous situation in the Ukraine just really feels like these, again, these ideas may be under attack or, you know, this idea of freedom and certainly democracy and what that means. And it's been interesting, you know, you feel somewhat helpless or I do, you know, you just kind of watch and think, what, how can I contribute here? And I've been interestingly reading of the posts that some school heads and teachers and different people have put out about how we respond as educators to this type of a crisis. Obviously, partly engaging with young people about the issues is part of it, but I, I also felt that there was this kind of underlying layer of those big ideas of education and freedom and how they interact, how they're connected, and, and then with democracy as, as an associated idea. So I would love it if we maybe can talk to some of those things.

Yes. As I said, let's try because I don't think there are very easy or clear answers. But the questions have become even more urgent.

Exactly. Yeah. There's a definite resonance. But yeah, certainly not expecting any answers, but hopefully some interesting conversation. But one of the things maybe we can start with, but I know your background with Dewey is very highly familiar. You're old friends. I understand you did your PhD studying John Dewey, and obviously he has some things to say about freedom, but then also you have spent a lot of time with Hannah Arendt in your work. So just to kind of get going, what would you say you've learned there from Dewey first, maybe briefly, but also from Hannah Arendt?

Yes.

So maybe to preface it a little, it's interesting that these big notions like freedom and responsibility, yeah, have gained a sense of urgency. And I think also in our previous conversation, I've been arguing, I think, that freedom should be education's concern. But then suddenly you see people who sort of take their freedom and do horrible things with it. Then you can say, well, what they do is irresponsible, but then you just put a moral judgment on it, but it doesn't do away with what people do with their freedom. So I think for me that sort of frames also why we have another conversation. Because you can easily say, well, look what bad things people are doing with their freedom, so let's get rid of freedom. Or look at how immoral people act, and we should have more moral education or more moralizing education. But those responses, you can say, they always miss the point in some way. At least that's what I would say. I have studied parts of Dewey really well and other parts less well, so you may also want to speak to other people who know more sort of about his work on freedom and his political thinking. I like Hannah Arendt better where it concerns freedom, because somewhere in Dewey— and maybe we just make that point quickly and then we we move on. Dewey is really good, I think, in understanding how living organisms learn and interact with their environments and change as a result of that. That can be done in reflective ways where language and thinking come in, and that's fine and in some respects helpful. But maybe the question that's really difficult to put in such a frame Or the issue, you can say, is the ability for learning organisms to say no. And maybe that's where I get stuck in Dewey's universe. Not in all his writings, because I think he also was a really good and perceptive commenter on political issues. But the paradigm of his philosophy, I think, maybe misses this unique possibility we have as human beings. Not just to interact and change as a result of that, but also at some point to say no, I no longer want to engage with this environment, I disconnect, I refuse, I stop. So there lies maybe my frustration with Dewey and the paradigm behind it. What I like about Arendt, and I think her writing has helped me much more to think about questions of freedom, I think she's a really good political thinker. Because she always starts in some way with the fact that our, our public life is a life of plurality, where we are not the same, not the same in who we are, and also not the same in, in what we value. That creates problems. You can say it makes life difficult, but you can also say that's life. And as soon as you begin to see that as a problem and say, let's let's solve that problem, then you say let's get rid of life. So for me, that's a really important intuition, I think, out of which Arendt writes and observes. And it's— it has to do with her analysis of what totalitarianism is, which is precisely the tendency to say we get a brilliant society if we just all become the same, or all adopt the same values, and that destroys life, you could say. But it also gives a very different understanding of freedom. She has a couple of things to say there. So she is critical of the idea of freedom as sovereignty, where we just each claim the right to do what we want to do, and then some maybe be a bit more concerned about the consequences of that. But— if that's your conception of freedom, it always comes back to, well, I do this because it's my freedom. And that's a very problematic, disconnected notion of freedom, you could say. But it's one that we are constantly being exposed to, I think, in the economic sphere, where we're being addressed as consumers and being told, you have the freedom to decide what you want to buy and go to the shop now and buy it. So it's a kind of pseudo-freedom, but it appeals to this idea that exercise of freedom is, yeah, the right to buy what you want to buy. So that message is a really strong one, and it spills over in all kinds of other domains.

Can I ask, is it— do you think that's also a kind of an enlightenment idea, just that separated— I mean, you used the word disconnected— that kind of disconnected rational self, which is subject-object, has the ability to just make choices and run amok wherever it likes, disconnected from the context, from the constraints?

So it may sound pedantic, but there is an important point here. I wouldn't call it an Enlightenment idea, but I would call it the modern idea.

Okay, and why, why is that? What's the distinction there?

Because I think modernity stands for— what is it— an attitude, but also a whole phase in history that thinks that life can be controlled, and that if we control things better, then things will become better. And for me, that's a modern gesture. It comes out of modern engineering modern science in some way, modern social engineering. And for me, that's a very different impulse than the impulse of enlightenment. So I partly go back to Kant's definition where he says enlightenment is sort of to, to step out of your immaturity. And then he says immaturity is the, the belief that you are unable to think for yourself. And then he says, interestingly, the motto of enlightenment is have the courage to think for yourself. Now that's that whole question. So he's not saying we should develop our rational capacity. He says it's a question of courage. And you can say it's, it's to be courageous enough to sometimes say no. Now for me, that's a very different discourse or yeah, even, what is it, sensitivity than modernity. And I've not invented this distinction, but it comes from Foucault, who has written a piece, sort of an echo piece of Kant's piece, where he also says the problem is with modernity, that we think that all the big problems can be solved with better techniques and more technological knowledge. And there he says that is what goes wrong. And you can say that sort of the, uh, the Second World War shows how much destructive things you can do with that approach. And but then Foucault also defines enlightenment with a very beautiful phrase. He says we, we need to keep working on the undefined work of freedom. But he, he says that should be disconnected from this control way of thinking about the world.

Interesting. I'd love to, I want to come back to Hannah Arendt in a minute, but do you know Iain McGilchrist's work, The Master and His Emissary?

No.

No. Okay. They're just, I've been reading and listening a lot to that because he's just recently released this new book, The Matter with Things, but it's that idea that the, it's the same kind of idea that the way that the left hemisphere of the brain attends to the world has become completely dominant in the modern age. It is, I mean, it's the same kind of idea that it's this kind of detached myopic focus on detail and control. And that way of attending to the world, as I say, has become completely dominant and has ignored and pushed out this other way of attending, which is the more right-hemispheric way of attending, which is much more about connection and intuition and, you know, and these other things. I just, I wondered, I wondered whether you were aware, it's, it's very resonant with what you're talking about.

Interesting. I would leave the brain out of that story, but that's, yeah, in a sense then still you, you try to locate it. Yeah. That I think is still a modern inclination.

Yeah. Interesting. I wonder whether Iain McGilchrist would actually leave the brain out of it as well, even though it started in that idea, but it's kind of a, it's a much larger myth that he actually talks about rather than a kind of neurobiological fact. It's very interesting. It spans philosophy and the humanities and all sorts of things. But I'm sorry, but back to what you were saying about Hannah Arendt.

Yeah, so maybe to finish this off, you, you could say control in itself is not bad, but it's not everything. So the real challenge is to see where, where control is important and where it misses the point. And you can say in, in human matters it misses the point, but in dentistry It's really important that it's done well. So it needs to have its place, and you can say the problem is— and that you can say sort of the modern problematic mindset— say all problems can be addressed through control. And then Arendt is really clear where she shows if you use a control mindset to engage with the questions of human existence and living together, you get devastating consequences. You end up with war and killing your enemies and the people you disagree with. So she then also begins to redefine freedom in an interesting way where she says freedom is not the right for you to control your own life. She partly has this idea which I think is very helpful also for education, where she says freedom has to do with beginning. She characterizes human beings as beginners, where she said, yeah, with each birth something new comes into the world that may not have existed before. And that's part of what she emphasizes, why she says that's where the question of freedom begins. But it's not enough. And that's the other thing I really value about her thinking, where she says for these beginnings to arrive in the world, to become public or political or even real, she says then they need to be taken up by other people. So I can have brilliant ideas, but if after this conversation you say, well, that was Gurdjieffista and now we go over to something really interesting, then my beginnings stop there. And there, yeah, Arendt says, so other people need to take up your beginnings. And then she says, and again that shows how political her thinking is, she says other people are beginners as well. So they also want to bring their beginnings into the world. And when these beginnings encounter each other, then you see what sort of public existence or political existence You can say that in very everyday terms. You can say that is therefore a matter of give and take, or a matter of compromise. And the, the thing it shows that— and again, she makes that point— if you really insist on that your beginnings are taken up by others in the way that you want them to be taken up, then you create a world in which one person has freedom and everyone else is followed. Yeah, and then she begins to say, so freedom as, as action, she calls it, is precisely where we, we all begin, but acknowledge that our beginnings can never remain pure. And to work through that is partly the political process of democracy, but I also think it's the, the educational process of grown-upness. Where you say my desires need to arrive in a world that will put limits and limitations on what I can desire and can want.

Yeah, interesting. So there's loads there. I'd love to pick up the idea of the role of the teacher and the educator in that moment, but just to kind of go back a step, that, that's essentially what you're talking about there is the dual dimensions of subjectification, right? It's like the process of becoming the subject as well as limits or the constraints that you are subjected to as you put your beginnings out into the world.

Yeah, it's exactly that. So it's why I keep coming back to notions of subject and subjectification.

Yeah.

And it comes straight from Arendt where she says we are subject in that we are all the, the beginners of our own action, but for those to become real public, we are subjected to what other people's doing. And to stay with that complexity, that's to try to exist as subject. And that's very different from being an individual or pursuing identity.

So for me, it's—

in the words you find this existential challenge we face as human beings.

And, and it's— I mean, we talked last time about the the importance of the present and that all those things happen in, in the present moment, as it were. But also I'd love maybe that idea you were saying, it's kind of a process of compromise, but I wonder, like, is dialogue an important part of that? Because I was reading one of your other papers about education and emancipation and looking at that monological, dialogical, and a bit kind of Paulo Freire and, you know, those ideas of critical pedagogy, is that process of compromise, of taking my beginnings and putting them next to your beginnings and trying to negotiate. I mean, for me, that feels like the process of dialogue, dialogos.

So there is definitely a dialogical quality there. But I would begin again by saying it means that the challenge for each of us is to stay in dialogue with who we are not, what we are not. And that means that we never position ourselves just as sovereign or as in control of everything outside of us or everyone outside of us. There is, of course, the dialogue also has the log, the logos, and the talk in it. And talk can be important, but I think there are more ways in which we can be in dialogue and can experience what it means to try to be in dialogue, just than talking. And I'm saying this because I think that the democratic classroom is not necessarily a classroom where people do a lot of talking about what do you want, how do you feel about it. I think there are other dialogical experiences that maybe even are more important to education.

Interesting. What? And can you say a bit more? That's— I'm intrigued.

So yeah, I have some favorite examples. Gardening.

Okay, so we talked about gardening last time. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, so gardening is to be in dialogue with something that is immune for your thinking and immune for your capacity to reason and to argue. So there you meet the democratic challenge in a much more extreme and urgent way than when you sit together and talk. Or yeah, work with— there is this English phrase in the curriculum of resistant materials: clay, metal, wood. And again, you can say that is an encounter where you can experience very concretely that what you want, that what you imagine, is not necessarily possible in that particular material. So you need to come into dialogue. I did some interesting work with clay recently, and that's beautiful to see. That's a really dialogical process because you start with an idea and you begin to work with the clay, and the clay just pulls. Yeah, it's nice. So that's why I'm a fan of clay and not so much of 3D printers, because 3D printers bring it all back to Thinking and ideas and a 3D printer can do anything you want to do if you're clever enough, but the 3D printer will not offer the resistance that you'll find with clay or wood or animals or a garden.

It's like a meeting, you're meeting reality at that point when you're touching the clay, right? And the reality is telling you something about what is possible and what's not possible with that material. Yeah, interesting.

It shows you limitations that you need to take into account. And yeah, if you've never encountered that in your entire life or have only encountered it in discourse, in arguments, where some people are very clever in winning arguments, then that's quite a poor educational experience. Yeah.

It also makes me think of, I mean, we've used different words to describe it, right? In terms of limits or, but constraints is another way of framing it and like enabling and selective constraints or governing constraints. And that's something that I've been thinking about reading about, for example, John Vervaeke talks about it from Alicia Ciararo's work, just about how It's almost like we have this Newtonian cause and effect understanding of how change happens in the world, right? Which is, which is a product of, you know, and of course in some ways it does happen like that. In some situations you do something to, to cause an effect and the causation of that thing is very clear. But I think in a way what it doesn't describe is all of the other constraints, both enabling and selective constraints, which either allow or prevent you from doing that thing. So, I mean, John Verveke gives the example of, you know, just rolling a pen on a table. The cause, the kind of linear idea about that is just, I push the pen, it rolls, you know, that's me causing an event, cause and effect. But actually there are so many other enabling constraints and selective constraints allowing that thing to happen or not, like the friction of the table or the shape of the pen, or— and that's maybe some kind of— that's giving a description to the materials that you're working with, the context that you're in, the clay, you know, the reality of the clay that sometimes we just don't take into consideration, I think, when we talk about these ideas. And maybe it does relate to freedom because it's about how do I— how do I begin something? I can only begin something if the constraints around me are sufficient to enable that beginning.

Yeah, so there's something interesting— without wanting to give Newton a bad name, because of course the Newtonian gesture is that you set something in motion and you push it away from yourself, whereas a dialogic gesture is you also set something in motion but something comes back. So in that sense, I think that's the difference between the Newtonian one direction, also where you have an idea and you build it or you materialize it, but to encounter material that doesn't allow you to do anything, where I would say you meet the integrity of the material You have to come into relationship with that integrity. That's very different from, I think, the, the Newtonian, where you are also— yeah, you set something in motion, but it goes away from you rather than that you engage in the dialogue.

Yeah, no, that's interesting. And one of the things I've been trying to grapple with is how would we bring that understanding more clearly into the educational experience. And as you, as you say, gardening, or get, you know, getting kids in a garden to experience reality, or getting them with, to work with materials to understand more than just cognitively what it means to feel and experience those constraints, the resistance. And yeah, it's an interesting question about how education responds to enable that understanding in young people, I think, because I've, for me, I feel like it's a recent insight that I've had. I never understood I never realized that before. You know, I've been alive 4 decades, I should have known this earlier. It's kind of how I feel.

Yeah, yeah. But there you can say as a culture we may have forgotten a lot of that.

Yeah.

Because, um, yeah, coming back to the economy, um, a lot of money is made out of this idea that there are no limits. Yeah. So if that's constantly being fed to us, yeah, then it's It can become very different to think otherwise.

Yeah, maybe that's a nice segue into that question I wanted to ask you, because you do talk about the impulse society, and it's interesting as well. I think that is part of the conversation around what's going on at the moment. It's not just about democracy, it's not this pure idea of democracy, but it's also linked with, of course, capitalism and consumerism and all of the things that perhaps disliked by some people, you know, the excesses of capitalism or whatever. So the question really is, how does the impulse society perhaps undermine freedom or that possibility to exist as a subject? And then maybe, I don't know whether you believe that that's also undermining our democracy in some ways as well, as a connected question.

So the idea of the impulse society comes from a book by Robert, and I keep forgetting what his Peter or Paul, but it's P. Roberts. And the subtitle of the English edition is What's Wrong with Getting What We Want? And that's a brilliant summary of the message of the book, because he shows that there is an awful lot wrong if we just organize our collective lives on the idea of trying to get as much of what we want. And he shows that that has become the dominant economic model. His analysis, yeah, is really interesting, where he says we have this idea that the economy needs to grow in order to exist. And for a long time, we could grow in space. That's sort of colonialism, where we say, yeah, we travel to a new world because we can sell more stuff. But at some point, with the global economy, that's no longer possible. Then you can say we can still make money out of time, and that's the stock market. So as long as I'm a bit quicker than you in selling and buying, I can make money out of that. But if that all becomes the same fast computer algorithm, then that stops. And I think that's the 2008 financial crisis, that there was no more time to make money out. And then sort of Robert says there was one trick not yet used, namely to say the economy can grow if we can keep growing people's desires. And I demonstrate that by saying Apple doesn't sell mobile phones, they sell the desire for a new mobile phone. And that's a brilliant marketing model because of course these phones, they keep working perfectly well,. But if you keep pushing and saying, no, you need the latest model, and at some point your old iPhone just stops working because that new model is there. So to sell that desire, there Robert says, as soon as the economy gets into multiplying desires, it can grow actually without limits. Although, yeah, we see all the problems with that as well. And that's sort of his analysis why he says we have an impulse economy. Where we make money by constantly feeding people with impulses and saying, act on your impulse. And then he begins to show that that is not just an economic model, but that that has become a societal model, constantly to say, just go for what you want and don't hesitate, don't think. And I think that's undermining freedom because you can say, what kind of freedom is this, just to act on your impulse? That's the freedom of, you can say that, yeah, the worst child, and some children are even better at not acting on their impulse. But it's also a freedom that is impossible in the world if you just run for your impulses. So it's, yeah, you can say it's a very immature freedom. And as educator, you can say it's quite worrying to see that in this impulse society, there is no longer an interest in, and definitely no money to be made in, people to grow up, to come into relationship with their desires, rather than to shortcut that. And yeah, there we go back to the big problems of our time. How can we sort of create a gap in between what we desire and how we act? That is maybe the question of enlightenment, to have the courage to stop yourself. But you see that if that gap disappears, yeah, people and maybe the world becomes quite dangerous very quickly.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's Because it's when you said at the beginning about saying no to something, often that's, that can sound quite a negative thing, right? You know, you are actively negating something that you have an opportunity to do and you're saying no to it. Or in an educational context, you think of children saying, no, I'm not doing that to the teacher. It has this negative framing. But actually, in the relation to what you've just said about the impulse society, saying no, it's not necessarily an act of blocking something. It's an act of freedom. It's an act of beginning something else rather than just stopping somebody else's beginning. Yeah. And, and the other thing that it makes me think is it's like we can't run away from the constraints. They're gonna catch us up at some point. Right. It's like, it's like if we act like there aren't constraints on our ability to act and we just act on impulse, it's almost like we, we just push off the, the meeting reality and it comes back later as a pandemic or as a, as a climate emergency or as a, as a war.

So yeah, the pandemic in that sense is, is also an interesting example because you can say, well, this is just something unexpected that we couldn't have foreseen. But yeah, when you begin to look into it, you can also say, well, it's also a matter of neglect. We have been neglecting questions of health and sustainability of our health. We've benefited from very fragile global networks. And then you can say a virus, the tiniest of tiny things, can just make that whole system collapse. And then you can say, well, maybe we, we have neglected the need to do something that's more sustainable and more robust. But of course The neglect, yeah, is the short-term thinking that probably generates short-term benefits but not the longer-term benefits.

So maybe then if we just finish by bringing it back to education in a way, you know, this is an educational podcast. It's turned into a bit of a philosophical podcast recently, but, you know, there is a genuine question, I think, from, as I said at the beginning, kind of at multiple levels for educators right now is how do we— what is the educational response to this moment that we're in? And when I say moment, I mean very acutely, specifically with, you know, the atrocities in Ukraine, but also more broadly the moment of this meta-crisis, right? That we have these overlaying crises that can some days make you not want to get out of bed. If you think about them too much. So what is the educational response? And by asking you that question, I'm not expecting you to tell everybody what they should do, but I mean, that language is yours of what's the world asking of us? What is the educational response to this moment?

So partly I think that there is a need for all of us to look very carefully at the kind of educational cultures we have been creating, because I think some of these problems are part of the cultures that we are replicating. So if we think that the task of education is to be a big competition where we push individuals to acquire a level of skill and competency that we measure at an individual level and at a national level and just put up everyone against each other. You can see that that's an educational culture that doesn't really promote reflectiveness, collaboration, a sense of the questions that come to us rather than what we all think we should pursue in, in fast ways. So I think it raises those bigger questions that we need to have an honest look at the kind of education we promote and pursue and ask to what extent that's part of the same problem. So if we are telling children, yeah, your first job is to perform well and perform well on the basics, and if we promise them if you do that then your future will be wonderful, which of course is a big lie because education cannot guarantee and cannot solve that. So some honesty there at a very high level of what are the educational cultures we are pushing is important. So I don't— still don't understand why an education minister in Australia, but it happens in other countries as well, says our first priority is to bring Australia back in the top 5 of highest performing education countries in the world. That for me is a scandal that an education minister has that as a priority. Then you can say, well, give up on education. Then that education is not speaking to the most urgent questions of our time.. And I'm just singling out Australia because that's the latest policy document where this was mentioned, but it happens in other countries as well. So that's the response at a large scale. It's really difficult to figure out what is needed at that large scale, but to keep also in these kind of conversations I have a naive optimism that even the small things can make a difference. Because if we give up and say the conversation between you and me doesn't matter, then we are saying it's someone else's problem. So even if this just stays between you and me, that's already something.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And if I could just reflect on what you said about how it's just so hard to see outside of it, it just reminds me again, just to bring Ian McGilchrist back in, he talks about the hall of mirrors. That we've set up because of this dominant left hemispheric kind of way of attending. We've set up this hall of mirrors. So everything we look at reflects back the same logic.

Yeah.

And, and that's my, you know, that's my fear. So thinking about competencies now, you know, complex competencies, you mentioned collaboration, for example, you know, the same logic will take that complex competency and break it down into fragmented parts in order to be able to measure it and show progress to allow us to compare performance of different children, adolescents on that. And it, it's just a hall of mirrors. It's again, it's, it's the self-referential logic that allows— it makes it difficult to think in a different way about the task at hand. Yes, I agree. I've got a naive optimism with you as well. But it's phenomenally difficult to see outside of that hall of mirrors.

Yeah, but that also means that part of the— what is it— the intellectual work or the political work is to keep developing alternatives. Again, Sigmund Bauman points at the big problem with Thatcher's phrase, "There is no alternative." He says, as soon as you believe in that, then you're lost. So to say there is always an alternative, there is always another way of doing, I think is, is really important to start with. And sometimes it's difficult to, to see that, but it's only when there are alternatives, when we can sort of say that what's happening right now is not the only way to do it, then you can begin to, to judge and, and see maybe what you are doing now So, and that comes back to the ability to say no, because the ability to say no also goes against sort of an empirical worldview that says the only thing we have are data, the things we can see. Well, as human beings, we have this strange capacity to see possibilities that are not yet there. That's, as educators, that's— we need to see possibilities in our students for which there is no evidence at all. We have to believe that the most difficult students in our classrooms may become wonderful human beings, and that's unempirical. There are no data for it, but out of that belief you can educate. Otherwise, you're just managing objects.

But it's not— I would say that's not just, again, naive optimism. 'Oh, well, you know, Johnny's going to be all right.' There's— I think there's something else going on. It's a human interaction, and I think there's something intuitive going on there about, as you say, it's difficult to put data on, but there's something— there's— it's the intuition element that comes in. And it's not just saying, 'Oh, everything will be fine,' but it's being intuitive and then also acting, choosing to act. To kind of co-create that possibility.

And I think that's— there is this big question, what's wrong with our educational cultures and policy? But I think at the very micro level of what we do in our own classrooms, in our own educational settings, that question is really important as well. And that, yeah, in a sense makes it very concrete. So if in your work with students you never raise this question of encountering a world of limits and limitations. You never say that choice is not the only value. All these little things, I think, are important experiences that, yeah, I think students should have a right to. Not that it can solve the problems, but yeah, when you look at Putin and Trump, it makes you wonder what has not happened in their lives, what has been absent, what are the things that they have never encountered that makes it possible for them to act without any sense of reality, you could say. That, that's a worry. And as educators, we cannot fix people, but we can at least try to open some doors. Yeah, more than just the doors of performance and test scores, which are important in themselves, but are never the whole picture.

Yeah. I think just as a side note, I think it's also really fascinating and scary to look at the potential of the evolution of the technology and the metaverse. I was having a conversation on an upcoming episode of the podcast with Teddy Paglia, who works in the metaverse, and you just, that whole, whatever that is, it's not even really a thing at the moment, but it's an idea. That is coming that will just, well, it is already blurring the lines between reality and surreality, or maybe it's not, maybe a reality is just being extended into a different kind of reality. And it, that's a really scary prospect that I think we are vastly underprepared for because we can't even get a handle on engaging with reality. Yeah. In our world as it, as it is minus disappearing off into, this augmented or virtual reality.

Yeah, I think that's the kind of antenna with all these new developments. For me, there is always the question, are there any limits, or are we being sold another promise that there are no limits? And as soon as there are no limits, I get very nervous because I think that that denies the possibility of real difficult political freedom that Arendt understood was so very important and so very difficult to achieve and can disappear so very quickly. That's probably the other lesson there.

Well, thank you. It's— I just feel that these are really important ideas, and so it's just great to be able to talk through them. And as you say, maybe us having a conversation, it does something. It certainly does something for me. It's a kind of transformative experience for me, but Let's hope the ripples go wider because it is, it's an important issue right now.

Yes, even at this small level we shouldn't give up because, yeah, we should try— well, these are big words— but to have a sense of courage and keep encouraging each other.

Yeah, we'll begin something.

Even in the very comfortable parts of the world we are currently still in. So in that sense, yeah, there are people in really bad situations at the moment. So yeah, okay, good.

Got them. Thank you so much.

All the best.

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