Trying to Be at Home in the World: An Argument for World-Centered Education

• In Event: 25.055 - Teaching as Meeting and Responding to Students in the Troubled World: Multiple Perspectives

Abstract

Ongoing attempts at reducing school education to the micro-managed production of a limited set of pre-specified ‘learning outcomes’ raise obvious questions about the position of the child and young person within the educational machinery. While many policy makers are still pursing a narrow approach, parents and students are increasingly asking for more humane and person-centered forms of education.
Such a desire is understandable, but is not without dangers. One danger is that the turn towards the student-as-person is simply another swing of the ongoing pendulum that, at least since Rousseau, has been moving back and forth between child-centered and curriculum-centered approaches, without ever reaching a resolution. Another danger is that person-centered education becomes caught up in the neo-liberal ‘economy of desires,’ an economy in which all individuals claim the right to having their desires fulfilled. The ecological crisis already shows what goes wrong if we never put limits on our material desires. A similar problem is emerging in the domain of democracy where claims about the right to having one’s desires fulfilled, most critically the desire for pure identity, is increasingly undermining our ability to live together in plurality.
This is not just a matter for society, but appears at the heart of contemporary schooling, partly through ways in which the desire for pure identity plays out in classrooms, and partly through more ‘benign’ but nonetheless problematic ideas such as that education should help children to realize their full potential and develop all their talents. What is often forgotten in such ‘expressivist’ conceptions of education is that the potential we have and the talents we bring are not necessarily or automatically conducive to sustainable and democratic forms of life and living together. The real task of education, therefore, is not to let all potential emerge and all talents flourish, but to create opportunities for children and young people to ‘encounter’ their potential and work on its transformation. Education thus emerges as interruptive and limiting, as a ‘rearrangement of desires’ (Spivak), that is neither student-centered nor curriculum-centered but thoroughly world-centered, focusing on how students can exist in and with the world rather than with and for themselves.
I focus on the philosophical underpinnings of world-centered education in conversation with Hannah Arendt, particularly here insistence on the need of ‘trying to be at home in the world’ and ‘reconciling ourselves to reality’ (Arendt 1994). This provides a background for an examination of the work of the teacher, particularly focusing on teaching as an interruption of desires in order to engage with the question whether what we desire is what we should be desiring. I will provide examples of what this work looks like in the practice of schooling, drawing from Homer Lane, A.S. Neill and Janusz Korczak.

Author

• Gert J. Biesta, Brunel University