The Beautiful Risk Of Education

 This book is about what many teachers know but are increasingly being prevented from talking about: that education always involves a risk. The risk is not that teachers might fail because they are not sufficiently qualified. The risk is not that education might fail because it is not sufficiently based on scientific evidence. The risk is not that students might fail because they are not working hard enough or are lacking motivation. The risk is there because, as W. B. Yeats has put it, education is not about filling a bucket but about lighting a fire. The risk is there because education is not an interaction between robots but an encounter between human beings. The risk is there because students are not to be seen as objects to be molded and disciplined, but as subjects of action and responsibility. Yes, we do educate because we want results and because we want our students to learn and achieve. But that does not mean that an educational technology, that is, a situation in which there is a perfect match between “input” and “output,” is either possible or desirable. And the reason for this lies in the simple fact that if we take the risk out of education, there is a real chance that we take out education altogether.

Yet taking the risk out of education is exactly what teachers are increasingly being asked to do. It is what policy makers, politicians, the popular press, “the public,” and organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank increasingly seem to be expecting if not demanding from education. They want education to be strong, secure, and predictable, and want it to be risk-free at all levels. This is why the task of schooling is more and more being constructed as the effective production of pre-defined “learning outcomes” in a small number of subjects or with regard to a limited set of identities such as that of the good citizen or the effective lifelong learner. It is also why there is a more general push for making education into a safe and risk-free space (see Stengel and Weems 2010). What should have been a matter of degree—the question, after all, is not whether education should achieve something or not, or whether educational spaces should be safe or not, but what education should achieve and to what extent this can be pre-specified, and what kind of safety is desirable and at which point the desire for safety becomes uneducational—has turned into an “either-or” situation in which the opportunity for teachers to exercise judgment has virtually disappeared. (...)

To demand that education become strong, secure, predictable, and risk-free also misses the educational point in that it seems to assume that there are only two options available for education: either to give in to the desires of the child or to subject the child to the desires of society; either total freedom or total control. Yet the educational concern is not about taking sides with any of these options—which reflect the age-old opposition between educational progressivism and educational conservatism—or about finding a happy medium or compromise between the two. The educational concern rather lies in the transformation of what is desired into what is desirable (see Biesta 2010b). It lies in the transformation of what is de facto desired into what can justifiably be desired—a transformation that can never be driven from the perspective of the self and its desires, but always requires engagement with what or who is other (which makes the educational question also a question about democracy; see Biesta 2011b). It is therefore, again, a dialogical process. This makes the educational way the slow way, the difficult way, the frustrating way, and, so we might say, the weak way, as the outcome of this process can neither be guaranteed nor secured.

Yet we live in impatient times in which we constantly get the message that instant gratification of our desires is possible and that it is good. The call to make education strong, secure, predictable, and risk-free is an expression of this impatience. But it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what education is about and a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes education “work.” It sees the weakness of education—the fact that there will never be a perfect match between educational “input” and “output”—only as a defect, only as something that needs to be addressed and overcome, and not also as the very condition that makes education possible (see also Vanderstraeten and Biesta 2006). It is this misguided impatience that pushes education into a direction where teachers’ salaries and even their jobs are made dependent upon their alleged ability to increase their students’ exam scores. It is this misguided impatience that has resulted in the medicalization of education, where children are being made fit for the educational system, rather than that we ask where the causes of this misfit lie and who, therefore, needs treatment most: the child or society. The educational way, the slow, difficult, frustrating, and weak way, may therefore not be the most popular way in an impatient society. But in the long run it may well turn out to be the only sustainable way, since we all know that systems aimed at the total control of what human beings do and think eventually collapse under their own weight, if they have not already been cracked open from the inside before. (...)

Gert J. J. Biesta