World-Centred Education - A Conversation with Prof. Gert Biesta

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

So when you ponder that question, what is the world asking of me, or what is this particular moment asking of me, then you come into play there. And that's very different from saying, what would I like to do here, or what do I desire, or what do I fancy, or what do I want?

Hi and welcome to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. My guest this week is Gert Biester, who has been a hero of mine for many years, so to get the chance to speak to him was an absolute joy. Gert is the Professor of Public Education at Maynooth University in Ireland and the Professor of Educational Theory and Pedagogy at Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh. He holds visiting professorships at the University of Agder in Norway and the University of the Arts Helsinki. Ghett is a prolific author and has written many books on the theory of education and educational and social research, and his work has appeared in 20 different languages. His latest book, World-Centered Education: A View for the Present, is a great summary of many of the ideas he's been developing over the last decades. A selection of his previous works are The Rediscovery of Teaching, Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future, and Complexity Theory and the Politics of Education. To find out more, you can have a look at Hart's website, hartbister.com. Hi, Gert.

Hi, nice to see you.

Nice to meet you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you. Taking the time for this.

My pleasure.

It's an absolute honor to be able to talk to you. And as I say, I've been loving your work for a long, long time. And one of the really interesting things, maybe an irony, as I was reading your latest book, World-Centered Education, you were kind of ticking off the Future Learning and Design parts of the podcast title. So, you know, this was quite funny, but also I appreciate the fact that you were willing to come on to a podcast called Future Learning Design to talk about some of these ideas. So that's good. But so first, I mean, if we can, I'd love to frame the conversation in that way. So if we start with future and then go through the other two, because I think in some ways they kind of frame a lot of your ideas that I'd love to get into. So yeah, I mean, the first one, the obvious one is, as you say, this is a very common trope in education, this idea of preparing students for the future and your book, which is A View for the Present, which I thought was really interesting subheading. So maybe if we could just start by asking you to talk a bit about why that idea of not focusing on the present and obsessing about the future sometimes maybe is a bit of a problematic thing in education.

So this subtitle has a background, and it's partly, I think, my dissatisfaction with all these reports I've been reading that all start in the same way. They say the world is changing fast and we no longer know what the future will look like. And therefore we need to radically change education. And then you get into things like we shouldn't trouble students with old knowledge because that will change, and we just need to give them the skills so that they can adapt to circumstances we do not yet know. And partly this, this sort of sounds even correct. There is a way of saying, yes, this is correct. But then what troubles me is that it also hides an awful lot. So you can say part of the world is changing very fast and we, we cannot predict where that will go. But that also hides the fact that there are other things that are not changing that fast, things that actually we know pretty well that they won't go away in 10 years or 30 years. So I often mention inequality, the ecological crisis, democracy as three really big challenges that as human beings we keep struggling with. And to simply say the future is this sort of black hole and we do not know what's going to happen is in that sense quite dangerous because it gives the impression that we cannot say anything and we begin to forget that there are big enduring challenges to engage with. So that's one concern I have. And you can also say for some the world is changing very fast and for others it isn't. So in that sense, it's also a quite selective picture. But then it also has to do with education. So quite quickly, this turns into a critique of a particular way to think what education has to do. So it dismisses knowledge as saying that's old knowledge, and it sort of supports the idea, give students just the skills to adapt to ever-changing circumstances. I think that idea itself is also a worry to say we should equip students to adapt to how environments are changing, because the first question for me is always: should we go with those changes or should we resist those changes? So just to say the best way to equip students that they can adapt, I think the best way to equip students is always to bring in this question of judgment. To say, can you really carefully look at what's going on and then come to some judgment about should you go with that or should you resist that? And that's already a different task for education, you can say. And then maybe the final little bit where you can say, on the one hand, education has a role to play towards the future, but I always like these two books that Neil Postman wrote. So in '71 he wrote this book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, but then 8 years later he writes another book Teaching as a Conserving Activity. And I think that's important also not to forget that, yeah, again with the beautiful title Hannah Arendt's book Between Past and Future. I think education is not just there to look at the future. But we also have a past that we shouldn't forget. And all that, I think, prompted me to say, let's make sure that when we talk about education, we actually have a good awareness of the present, also because that's where we need to make education, and then make sure that we keep one eye on the future but also an eye on the past. So there is some rhetorical play in that. Phrase, but it responds to quite a lot of issues.

No, I would completely agree. There's so much going on in that present. I know I'd love to dwell on it for a bit because I think, I mean, as you said, being obstinate and being subversive is all, you know, these are all themes in your work, right? And, you know, I'd love to get onto that, but obviously we're talking about the purpose that education gets put to, and maybe it's slightly simplistic, but the way, the 3 different ways that you've, you've framed that. I see it, the qualification element is preparing them for the future. The socialization element is, is inheriting the past or passing on, you know, a conversation between generations, passing on, you know, keeping things alive that we value. But then, and this is where I'd love to go, is the subjectification element is now, is this is, this is what happens in in the present. So perhaps could you just say a little bit about those three and then we'll spend, hopefully spend a bit more time on subjectification.

That's a very nice way to look at these three. So thanks for that. So the idea is quite simple where you say when you look at what we do in education and schools, colleges, and universities, there is a qualification job and that's to equip students, to give them access to knowledge, understanding, skills. I like the idea of equipping, where you say you get something so that you are equipped for what, what may come. Socialization is, I think, the task of orientation, and that does have a link with the past where you say, well, this is how the world has developed up to this point, and it's really important that we help our students to get a sense of where things are coming from, how they are working, the kind of values that play a role. I think, yeah, vocational and professional education need a good component of socialization so that you understand what is this job, what is this profession. But also more generally, I think that's an important task for education. And then there is this third component where you say, well, ultimately this is for human beings who have to live their own life. And living your own life is quite a challenge because it ultimately means that you have to make up your own mind, come to your own sense of what's worthwhile to do. Again, what makes sense to go with and what makes sense to resist. And that I think is really about you being in the present, you sort of existing there and saying, okay, I am equipped. I can do a lot of things. I have a lot of understanding. I have a sense of orientation, and then there is always the question, so what am I going to do? That, I think, is this question of subjectification.

One of the things I've always been fascinated by in education is this constant dialectic between— in a way, it's between the qualification element and the socialization element in terms of examinations and preparation, but also valuing certain things that we want to pass on. So there's, there's differences of opinion, I think, about what those things are that we should pass on. But also in all of those discussions, it's the, the present and this idea of subjectification gets lost and it's very rarely talked about. And that's one of the things I, I think is so valuable about your work is that you are shining a spotlight on that interaction. But at the same time, even now, even so far in this conversation, for people listening, if it's their first time attending to this, it's not the most tangible and obvious thing to grasp, right? Would you agree with that? It can sound a little bit abstract, even though actually when you've talked about it, it's incredibly practical. You know, it happens, for example, in a moment of saying no. You know, in my career teaching, I've always worked with particularly challenging, let's say, students have been the ones I've been most interested in working with, because they're so often saying no, you know, they, they don't really want to be in, in the classroom with, with you. And you're constantly faced with a barrage of, well, why, why should I do that? It's not interesting to me. I don't want to do that. But it's in that very practical moment where this subjectification kind of appears. So maybe it's useful to ask you this question. One of the things I was interested in what you've said is that subjectification is not a process. But it's a moment, right?

Yeah, so maybe the first thing to say, I don't think it's, it's bad that it's difficult. People always want education to be very simple, but then when you have a professor of astrophysics, when they do things that are incomprehensible, people think, oh, that's fine. But in education, you're not supposed to do that. And I think that really means that you don't take education seriously because it is quite complicated. So I think a notion like subjectification, although it sounds very theoretical, it's important to have if it helps to say something important about education. And then of course, I've also in my work been struggling and trying to figure out what's the best way to say what that notion is about. And one quick way, because there is a lot of talk in education about learning, also a lot of talk in some countries about development, and you can say that's all fine, but if we only talk about learning and development, we miss something. And that's the question what each of our students will do with what they have learned and how they have developed. And that question, what will you do with all your knowledge? What will you do with how you have become? That's the question of how we exist as subject of our own life. And it's that question that I think is really important in education, because the question what you will do is, is a question for you. And if you never encounter that question, if you never have a sense even of that question, then before you know it, you're just running behind the latest fashion or the powerful leaders or the promising futures, and you forget yourself. And I think we have all kind of historical examples where that has happened, where whole nations have forgotten themselves. And we need to learn from that past and keep helping each other and keep helping the new generation not to forget ourselves. And that for me is this question of subjectification. So it's not about student voice, you could say. It's not about putting the student in the center, or it's all about the learner, all these things. It's about a very particular question. You can say the question: where are you and what are you gonna do with everything you have acquired?

Maybe it is useful actually then to move on to the learning part, because as you, as you've brought it in there, in some ways it's a little bit— the word learning can be a little bit like the word adapting, as you mentioned before, is the idea that what are you adapting to? And even more than that, why? Maybe you shouldn't, maybe what are the values behind that? And it's the same with learning. I mean, there's all sorts of things you can learn for good, for bad, for indifferent, aside from the fact that, as you've said, the word learning is quite problematic itself. And I would like— I'd love to talk about that in a moment, but the idea of perhaps It sounds very attractive. We're obsessed with these ideas of learning and learners, but what they do with that, why they are learning, is then where it perhaps it doesn't illuminate anything and we need a different language to talk about that.

Yeah, it's somewhere there. That's part of where learning, I think, is not enough. There are all kinds of other questions where you can say, well, you can learn anywhere, but if we have a school or educators or bring time and resources together, then there is already the question, so what are we gonna do there? But you can say the other thing that is absent in, in talking about learning is precisely the question, so what are you gonna do with what you learn? Which also raises the question, what should you actually be learning? That's another way of putting it.

Yeah, it's not only about yourself either, because you've also said It's not about being yourself, it's about becoming a self.

Yeah.

And I think that idea of learning my path, my development, my learning, and that is quite a common narrative that we have. And in, in generally, you know, it's meant well.

Yeah.

Good intentions. But a, as you say, it's, it's more individually focused rather than looking outwards and saying, and another thing you've said, what is the world asking of me? Not what I can take from the world. So it's not about me and my experience as an atomistic individual, but it's about me in this moment in the world. What is the world asking of me? Again, maybe it's somewhere there. We're dancing around this.

Yes. Yeah. So it's interesting that there are so many interconnections there.

Yeah.

For me, that latter question is, again, you can say subjectifying. So when you ponder that question, what is the world asking of me, or what is this particular moment asking of me? Then you come into play there. And that's very different from saying, what would I like to do here? Or what do I desire? Or what do I fancy? Or what do I want? That's all from me. And then you can say, well, you can then look at the world and say, where can I do that? And then the world, yeah, sort of becomes an object or a resource for what you want. And this This other question actually goes in the opposite direction by saying, I can ask a different question here, what is the world asking of me? And then the world becomes a partner in that and is not simply a resource. And I'm saying this for all kinds of reasons because again, I think all the environmental problems all stem from this idea that we just think the world is a resource and we can use it to our own advantage.. And we, well, we are, we've been seeing the limitations of that already for a long time, but it takes an awfully long time for that to really land and become an issue. But it's also the question of democracy. If you think, well, democracy is just to shout what you want, and then the people who shout loudest or the biggest group, they get what they want. That's a very problematic way to think about democracy because democracy is figuring out how we can manage to live together. Knowing that we do not all value the same things. And again, you can say that means that the question is not for democracy, what do I want, or what does this group want? You can actually say that's populism if you just have a fight over getting what you want. Democracy is precisely, so what is this plural world asking of each of us?

And it makes me think also then, just perhaps to make it a little bit more practical, what's the role of, of the educator in that? Because, you know, as you said, you've got this interaction between me and the world in this present moment.

Yep.

And I think, I mean, for me in itself, that is so powerful, but it's still quite abstract. But then in this moment, you've also got the world, you've got me, but you've got an educator there. And that's what we do. We are in classrooms with students in the world. Trying to kind of show them the world, introduce them to the world in all sorts of ways. What's the role of the educator there in that interaction?

It's a great question.

It's a big question.

So yes, it's very simple, and at the same time it's quite complicated. So probably to begin by saying, this is another difference between learning and education. So learning, you can say, is between me and my environment. So that's a relationship of two. What's special about education is that it's a relationship of three. It's me, it's the environment, and there is an educator or a teacher. So that's a different relationship from the learning relationship. And then you can say, why is the teacher there? Well, in a very basic way, in order to say to the student, have a look here, have a look there, engage with this, spend time on that. So in the book, I summarize this with the idea of attention and say, actually, what we can do as teachers is to focus the attention of our students. Now we do that often very specific. So we say, here is a task for you and you have an hour to complete the task. And I'm gonna examine you after 60 minutes.. But the basic structure there is still that we as educators say, here is something for you, and I'd like you to focus your attention and your energy and your activity on that. And we, we do that with expectations. So we also, after students have done some work, we come back to that and say, let's talk about what you have encountered there. But the interesting thing is that we can never totally control what students do there.

Yeah.

And that makes education special as well, that in that relationship of these three elements, it's ultimately up to the students. But part of what we do as educators is to focus the attention, and we do that, for example, for qualification, where we say, well, if we start with Einstein then no one is able to focus their attention on that. So we need a curriculum to do that in little steps. Or if we start with reading the newspaper without a history curriculum, then it's impossible to bring anything into focus. And then you can also say, but as educators, we're always there to remind students that they have to pay their own attention to that so that they are part of the picture as well.

Yeah, but the beautiful risk is that they might say, "I'm not interested." Yeah. In what you think is interesting. Yes.

And there we should be careful because if we just accept that and say, "Oh, wonderful, here is a student who makes up his or her own mind," then we are doing something that's also uneducational. That, you can say, is the problem with too extreme learner-centered education or too extreme student-centered education. And I think as educators we always have a task to keep pushing a little, probing a little, and not to simply say, oh, if the student doesn't want to do it, we cannot force them to do it. And of course we cannot force them in the strong sense,. But if we just say all the students have the right just to walk away and not to do anything at all, then you could even say, as the existing generation, we are not taking our educational responsibility serious.

Yeah. And even I, I see there's, there's a bigger move, not just to say to that individual student, fine, if you don't wanna learn, it's up to you, but also to then say in a much larger dynamic of for example, mass personalization, which we see happening through technology and AI everywhere, is to then say each individual will be presented a slightly different version of the world to them, you know, based on the algorithms that present, that have understood where they're at and what they need. And, you know, you can clearly see there are really strong arguments for why that would be highly efficient and desirable in some ways. But perhaps, I don't know what your opinion is there on, is that a compromise, as you say, of our more kind of generational educational responsibility?

Uh, yeah, I think there is a risk there because what I see is that most of these systems try to get each individual student in the best way from A to B. And there is something good about that, but one limitation is that it starts with specifying what the B is and sees it as the only task to get the student from where they are to B. And that's part of what education needs to do. So students who want to become car mechanics really need to get to all the detail of becoming a good car mechanic, but that you can say is only the, the qualification bit of education. And with personalization, quite often the student also gets into a position where they have to say where they want to go. And you can say the thing that begins to disappear from that picture is precisely the things that we as educators may not know that are going to happen, but also things that students may not know they can go towards.

You don't know what you don't know.

Yeah, yeah.

And you need, you need some invitations to go to places that you, you aren't aware that exist, because you might find something of significant value there, right?

Yeah. And there you can say the— in the book World-Centered Education, I talk a bit about this gift of teaching. Yeah. Where you say, well, if we only start with giving students what they ask for, one thing we are already not doing is to give them the things they didn't know they could ask for. That's a very basic educational gesture where you say, okay, you are here, but actually the world is bigger than that, and let's look at things you didn't even know you could be looking at. And the problem with a lot of personalized sort of algorithms and, and curricula is that that begins to disappear. And very, yeah, even the whole idea that you sit together with students and say, well, let's work, let's pay attention together, but I as a teacher actually do not know where we are going to end up in an hour from now or in 3 months from now. So it also begins to confine the curriculum to the, yeah, the learning outcomes, to use that phrase, that we can already specify. And not to say, well, education also has this open quality where actually if we take the subject matter and our students seriously and start to engage with that, more things may emerge than we can now see.

Yeah, yeah. But it is also a question, a significant question of power in that as well. And I've heard you talk about this in relation to, as a teacher, you know, they haven't asked for this, right? The students haven't asked for this. And it's like there's a relationship of power there because we are making the decision about the things that we see as valuable or important, at least as starting points for that kind of inquiry that's happening.

And so this is indeed a very basic thing that educators should never forget, that students mainly haven't asked for what we're doing there. So to establish those kind of relationships takes time. What I like again about this idea of world-centered education is that the power should ultimately come from the world. So if we forget that we are in a triangle and if we forget that the work we do as educators is to say, look, there is something there that is asking something from you, and if you take that question seriously, then you can say that question has some power. And ultimately as teachers we need to step back and say, well, it's over to you and the world. So if we tried to be as teachers the center of power then education, yeah, I think always ends up in tragedy. But if we say, well, you're not doing it for me, but you're doing it for the sake of the world in a very big sense, or you're doing it for the sake of, of becoming a good car mechanic or becoming a good nurse, or yeah, becoming a, a good employee in an office, then there is a demand there that if you take that seriously That's where the power really lies.

And just as a very, very practical example, getting your hands dirty in the soil. I've also heard you talk about gardening as a really tangible example of that idea that the world is asking something of the learner. You know, there's an interaction between the world, the learner, and the teacher.

Yeah, I like the example of gardening because, yeah, what I often say is you can think as hard and as long about a plant as you want, but it's not going to impact on the flourishing of the plant. So there you meet reality, and that asks something of you, namely that you take care, that you give it water, make sure not too much, not too little light, everything. But it's, it's immune to your thinking. And I think that's a really important experience because so much education starts from the assumption, well, you understand and you think about it and that's the way to engage with the world. And gardening is one example where actually all that thinking doesn't affect the world itself. So you need to bring yourself into play and say, okay, there is something I need to do here. And of course you need to understand what you need to do. So it's not that it's without understanding, but it starts with a question that you need to take seriously.

It's a really simple example, but actually it's got so much power in that because, as you say, it's meeting reality. And we often want to empower— it's a problematic term in a way— but we kind of empower students with the knowledge and the understanding of something. But then actually sometimes the real learning comes when they meet reality and they realize that that knowledge and understanding or skill isn't sufficient because they're now meeting a constraint that they've got to work with and within. Yeah. Yeah. No, very interesting. We, we've kind of, you know, gone down many rabbit holes and it is totally gone off my plan of, of questions, which is totally fine. And I'm really happy, but I just, there's just one thing about learning I'd just love to ask you briefly is which, where you said, when you zoom in on the word learning, it evaporates. And I think for me this is really fascinating because in my work so many schools now are kind of using this learner-centered idea and a lot of schools are really trying to define learning as a core strategic goal. So if we define learning in this situation, in this school, then helps us to define the learning experience that we're going to create for the learners and then it also helps us to evaluate ourselves as to whether we're doing that in terms of what what outcomes we're getting at the other end. But that's a really problematic whole kind of thing to do if learning is undefinable. And as you say, it evaporates when you look at it. Can you just say a little bit more about why you think learning is such a problematic term?

Yes. So one thing I've said many times is that it's not an educational word. So if you say the point of the school or the point of education is to make students learn, then you are not saying anything about what's special about the school, because you can learn anywhere, you could say. I sometimes make this, this silly comparison where I say if you want to know what it means to run a restaurant, you shouldn't study eating because you can eat anywhere. But at least to understand what a restaurant is, you need to figure out what does it mean to eat in a restaurant and not at home or on the street or whatever. But more importantly for educators, what does it actually mean to run a restaurant? Why should we have restaurants? Why do we not let people eat anywhere they want? You can say the same about learning. You can learn anywhere. So the school is already something more special than that. That then means that if you say the point of the school is, is to support the learning of students, then I think you're not precise enough because again, A, students can learn all kinds of things within school and there is a lot of literature that says the main thing students learn in being in a school is how to survive school or how to do schooling. So they learn a lot of strategic things to figure out how to be successful in that particular institution.. But then when you begin to zoom in on the word learning, you can see that the same word refers to many different realities. So again, I often very quickly say learning to ride a bike, learning that 2 and 2 equals 4, learning the second law of thermodynamics, learning to be patient, learning that you're not good at something. They are all legitimate, yeah, uses of the word learning, but they refer to very different processes. And that for me is already a reason for saying there is not one process that we can call learning, and if we just understand that process, then we know how to do schooling. So that's what worries me about, say, the learning sciences. That when I look at that, they often say, well, we study intelligent adaptive systems. But that for me is not enough for what happens in education, partly because the point is not just to adapt intelligently to something. And there it becomes educational because I do think it's important as educators that we think about what do we hope for our students or what do we want from our students. Or when do we think that our students have been successful in encountering education? But then the real question is, how do we then help our students to get from where they are to that other point? And there learning is actually not very helpful because these are questions about curriculum, about pedagogy, about assessment, about being in interaction. About putting stuff in front of our students, focusing their attention. So then you suddenly are in a very different discourse where the word learning is almost meaningless. And that's what I mean by saying it evaporates, because if you really want to precise about what you do as educators, the word learning is so unhelpful.

I mean, as I said, there's a lot of good intentions about that, use of the word learning and the switch to the word learning. And it feels it has a lot of face validity somehow. It feels like it's a good thing to do. But actually there's an interesting, you know, same as you've just articulated so many interesting repercussions of doing that, like the depoliticization, for example, or, you know, all sorts of different impacts. And perhaps the power in the word is that it is quite vague and, you know, that so therefore That's why it's become so pervasive because people get to use it in all sorts of different ways. Fascinating. And then just to then move lastly onto the idea of design, and this isn't such an explicit thing that you talk about, but it, but what it makes me think about is the idea of intentionality in a way, particularly the idea that education is seen to be an efficient production process, as you said, of certain outcomes. And we've, we've spoken a little bit about the purpose question already, but I think there's something really interesting in that idea that perhaps we haven't quite gone into is the idea of the integrity of an education itself versus the way that it's used to produce something else. We put education to use a lot for all sorts of reasons, but it's always to engineer an idealized future. And I've sometimes used this comparison between, and I talked, I don't know whether you know Valerie Hannan, but I talked about these, the difference between engineering as metaphor in education and choreography as a metaphor, because it's the idea that we're obsessed, I think, often in education with engineering an idealized end product, whether we want ethical students or we want, you know, we want X in terms of these outputs of our students. So we write graduate profiles of them. We have this idealized future, but we remove the emergent possibilities or the integrity? And where do you see the biggest kind of issue there in relation to the way we put education to work in that sense?

So you can say there is a kind of instrumentality of education that is inevitable, and in a sense it's also good because, yeah, education takes time and time is precious. So we shouldn't think that if we just hang around everything will be fine. So it's important to think about why are we here with our students and what are we working towards. And if that's the instrumentality of education then I think it's fine. The question first of all is what is this towards? So how do we think about what we put on the horizon?. And if we only put on the horizon what we as educators want, then there is the risk that our students disappear in that process. So you can say there is something about good qualification that can be quite precise and that we need to take seriously and that our students need to take seriously. So if you want to study physics, you don't want to be too creative because it's not that any idea is just fine. Things matter, and I would say that's part of the, the importance of what we do in education, to help our students to see what, what matters. So I don't want teaching in that sense to be too creative and just to say students construct their own knowledge and their own understanding. Before you know it, you forget that actually there are limits to what what proper knowledge is. And that's where I think it comes back to the qualification, socialization, and subjectification. So you can say for qualification we can put things on the horizon that are pretty specific. For socialization we can do that as well. But we should never forget that we are educating human beings for their own life. And we can put that ambition on the horizon,. But there, that in itself is never an outcome we can work towards. It's more a question we have to keep alive in all kinds of ways. And that's one point where to think of education just as an instrument to move from A to B, yeah, reaches a limit. So if, if we're only talking about qualification and strong socialization, then let's go for it and do it in the most effective and efficient manner. But you can see that when you begin to drive education in that way, students actually get destroyed. I often refer to South Korea and countries where there's a huge pressure on being successful, where there is a culture where not being successful is, is not an option, and it literally kills young people.. So there you see in a, in a big sense what goes wrong if we push the instrumental side too, too hard. And then we not just need other metaphors. So choreography is an interesting one where you say choreography is not a pure prescription of what is allowed to do and what isn't allowed to do, but it's a way to put constraints around the process so that a process can happen.. And in that process, students can always stay as, yeah, subjects of their own life. And that's very different from the engineering language or the learning outcomes language. So it's a difficult one for education that there is a future. We have ambitions, our students have ambitions, we go somewhere, but we should never understand it as just a machine you could say. And this has also something to do with the integrity of education. And that's also a, yeah, a theme in, in the book where you can say it's never enough just to say what we want, all these aims, and, and some are very narrow and some are, are beautiful. But there is always the question, what's the educational way to get there? And there I think this triangle and this idea that The best we can do is to focus our students' attention, but we cannot totally sort of get our students in a grip. That begins to show what the educational way is. And the educational way is different from— what is it— brainwashing. We have all kinds of techniques where we can get human beings from A to B, but the educational way will always respect the student as a subject of their own life. And that's, you can say, the integrity of education, and that puts a limit on the instrumentalization.

It's almost like the subjectification, if it's not there, that's what maintains that integrity, is the subjectification. Because I mean, if we talk about complexity, the idea of qualification or some— or socialization, to some extent it becomes like the fast food restaurant where you reduce the complexity down to as the bare minimum so that you can just produce a really efficient process of producing these outputs. Whereas the subjectification retains, it kind of polices the fact that there needs to be subjectness or possibility of grown-upness is another one that you use sometimes, I know. And, and that complexity and that possibility for the emergence of unpredictable outcomes. But we don't like unpredictability, right? We don't like risk. We don't like unpredictability.

So, but you, you can I would say it's to make sure that students never forget themselves. That for me is maybe the best way to put it. That's what we need to have in our mind as educators, that in all the ambitions, that students never forget themselves. And as I do in the book, I go back to historical examples, as I said before, where societies were created, where people were just encouraged again and again— I'm talking about Nazi Germany— to forget themselves and just go with the leader and go with the ideology. And to not forget yourself doesn't then tell you what to do there. The only thing it says is keep thinking, keep awake, you could say. Yeah, and that's important for historical reasons.

Yeah, amazing. Thank you, Gert. That's just—

yeah.

Fascinating conversation. I really appreciate your time and so many insights. There's a lot in there. I'd encourage everybody to go and read a lot of your work, but I think your latest book, World-Centered Education, is a really nice summary of a lot of those things. Yes. Of a lot of your work over the last decade. So no, amazing. Thank you for taking the time to talk about it.

I really appreciate it. You're welcome. My pleasure.

Thank you. Bye. All right. Bye-bye. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with us on social media with the hashtag #futurelearningdesign and on the Intrepid Ed News website, intrepidednews.com.