Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited

In previous publications, Gert Biesta has suggested that education should be oriented toward three domains of purpose that he calls qualification, socialization, and subjectification. 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.


Introduction
Homer Lane (1875Lane ( -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 actually refers to Lane as "the most influential factor" in his life. 1 Being 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 literature about Lane and his school, 2 and 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 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)(160)(161)(162)(163)(164)(165)(166)(167)(168)(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 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, 4 but 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.

The Three Domains of Education
In a number of publications, going back as far as 2004, 5 I 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." 6 From 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 (see TPT, 169). 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 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.

Gert
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. 8 For this reason, in addition to qualification, there is always also socialization going onthe (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. 9 While many have found it helpful, and in a sense rather intuitive, to think about the point and purpose of education in 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 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? Subjectification: Be a Self! 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 resistand 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 freewealthy 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) 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). 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 predicament, expressed succinctly by Immanuel Kant as the so-called educational paradox: "How do I cultivate freedom through coercion?" 16 There is indeed something odd about education's interest promoting the freedom of children and young people, 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 important here, and they make up the very core of the modern educational traditionthat 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 formulation 18 -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 a self, 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 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). 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 incident" -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 freedomand 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

Freedom and Its Limits
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. 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 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

Education as Subjectification
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, 1930Understanding, -1954 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.

What Subjectification Is Not
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). 29. Janusz Korczack is another "champion" of suspended education.
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 development. Personality is a psychological construct that seeks to explain the tendencies that underly differences in behavior, often in terms of particular personality "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 explainable "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 personality 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 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 individual 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 understood 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 Encyclopedia 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?" 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, subjectification 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 Bauman 35 ), 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. 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). 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 qualificationnothing 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 something 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 knowledge or being knowledgeable cannot occur without a subject. This insight begins to suggest that the relationship between qualification, socialization, and subjectification 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 concentric 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.
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 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.