Below are the notes from the Centre's open conversations about the publicness of education.
The aim of these conversations is to explore and identify relevant issues concerning public education in Ireland and internationally. This acts as a basis for the development of a collaborative, dynamic research agenda for the centre. These conversations provide an opportunity for peple from across the university to become involved in the work of the centre and shape its future direction.
On Wednesday 25 September 2019 the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy organised the first of three open conversations about the publicness of education. The main aim of the conversations is to explore and identify relevant issues concerning public education in Ireland and elsewhere as the basis for the development of a collaborative, dynamic research agenda for the centre. An important reason for doing this in the form of a number of conversations is to provide an opportunity for people from across the university to become involved in the work of the centre and take part in shaping its future direction.
Carl Anders Säfström provided a brief introduction about the purpose of the meeting and the ambitions of the centre. He placed the question of the publicness of education in the context of the ongoing destruction of the social, which is eroding the fabric of democracy – for example visible in the rise of populism and fascism. With a reference to Dewey’s idea of the internal connection of education and democracy – education as a practice of democracy – he highlighted threats to the publicness of education, particularly in relation to the commercialisation of schools (e.g. in Sweden).
Gert Biesta briefly mentioned a recent research application to the NORFACE funding scheme, that seeks to understand different configurations of public education across Europe – highlighting that on the one hand the publicness of education seems to be under pressure yet on the other hand politicians continue to (re)turn to public education as a main vehicle for reinvigorating democracy and social cohesion. If we define public education as education funded by public means, democratically accountable to the public and accessible for all, it raises questions such as: Is this a realistic ideal? Are there democratic alternatives outside of public education? Who (safe)guards the publicness of education? What happens when ‘the public’ turns into ‘the people’ (populism)? And to what extent can the school be part of the ‘solution’ rather than being part of the ‘problem’?
From this we had a lively conversation that touched upon a range of topics. In what follows I will try to capture some of the main threads of the discussion.
One strand focused on the school and the question whether the school has ever been a ‘public’ institution, for example, a place of criticality. Has the school ever been democratic? This is a question that needs a contextual answer. For example, in Ireland the history of the school is tied up with colonialism and the role of the Catholic church – which not just raises the question how such forces define the ‘space’ of the school, but also how alternatives – like the hedge schools – were marginalised and pushed out. In Eastern Europe we may find a different configuration and when we see how ‘successful’ school are in producing a particular kind of citizen, it raises the question whether we can assume that public space is by definition political-democratic, or whether private spaces are actually the ‘location’ of democratic politics. This raises questions about how neo-liberalism has managed to ‘take hold’ of educational institutions – and why, in some countries, this has happened so ‘smoothly.’ But it also brings back the question what the definition of connotation of ‘publicness’ in our times can be and should be.
Another important question is what the opposite of ‘public’ actually is? Is it ‘private’? Or ‘non-public’? Or ‘religious’? Or ‘ideological’? Is the public school, for example, by definition secular? Or is such an opposition – between secular and non-secular – only meaningful within a particular historical configuration? And how does the idea of publicness relate to majorities and minorities? This also raises questions about civil society as a ‘location’ or ‘instantiation’ of publicness. Can we assume that civil society is where publicness happens? If so, what does that mean? Under what conditions? Where does civil society lose it’s public character? And what does this mean for traditions/practices of community education? Do they play a role in enhancing publicness? Are they a manifestation of publicness? How? When? When not/no longer?
If one of the characteristics of public education is its public accountability – accountable to the public – there are not just questions about what has happened with accountability (the rise of managerial forms of accountability) but also challenges about regaining the democratic ‘impetus’ of accountability, for example from the insight that the more accountable we/schools/educational institutions are to the more people, the more public we/schools/educational institutions become.
This raises questions about who are taking part in the conversation about publicness – not just this conversation but perhaps also whether there is a public conversation about education happening at all. It also connects to the theme of the publicness of teaching and the way teachers see their role and responsibility – and their possibilities – in relation to the question of publicness. Is/can/should teachers be (seen as) public intellectuals? Or is such an idea outdated? Or is it important to be/remain/become again utopian – continue to believe that things can be different?
From here our conversation returned to the school and its limitations and possibilities, acknowledging that there are many forces that structure the school and its space of operation to the degree that schools – singularly or as institution (or perhaps ‘state apparatus’) – enact structural violence. This, once more, raises the question where publicness can occur in education, and whether this should be seen as an empirical question (private initiatives achieving more publicness than publicly funded institutions, for example). Viewed in this way ‘publicness’ may be better understood as a potential quality of education rather than as a sociological notion (i.e., the, mistaken, assumption that public schools would by definition display a public quality).
This brought us to considerations about the funding of education – Who ‘owns’ the school? – and the question of agenda setting – Who has a voice in deciding what the school should and should not do? This moved the discussion to the recent focus on well-being in Irish schools. While, on the one hand, this can be seen as a positive development as it moves the ‘agenda’ for the school beyond narrow definitions of achievement, there is a real risk that it just becomes another task on which students should ‘perform’ and ‘achieve.’
Another theme in the conversation concerns the question of the publicness of our teaching and our educational practices more widely, including the question what is lost when (our) teaching loses its public quality. This may have something to do with solidarity and the ways in which particular educational ‘cultures’ – driven by performance and competition – erode solidarity within (and across) education, and thus open the door for (the expansion of spaces for) authoritarianism. This connects to the bigger theme of the destruction of the social, highlighting that in addition to the destructive impact from neo-liberal approaches, the social – publicness; solidarity – is also undermined through the rise of (authoritarian) populism.
In a final step we turned the discussion to ourselves – as university and as academics – asking not just whether the university can (still) be a public institution, an institution which ‘enacts’ publicness or, more modestly, still makes instances of publicness possible. But also asking what it would take to make the university – including our own practices within it – more public. This is not just a question about what needs to be developed, maintained and regained/reclaimed, but also a question about what needs to be kept out (also in relation to what was said earlier about solidarity and how this is undermined when particular ‘logics’ take over). This also has to do with the role of teaching, particularly when the gesture of teaching is understood as a matter of giving what wasn’t asked for – which might provide an ‘opening’ in discourses that think that the best education is the one that gives students/parents/society just what they asked for, without every asking difficult questions about the desires of all parties.
This brought us back to questions about educational institutions, including the university, and particularly the question how/whether/to what extent educational institutions can ‘enact’ publicness, i.e., whether publicness is a matter of structures, cultures, or practices – and probably there is potential at all three ‘levels.’
main themes to take forward, therefore, are:
1 the school as public institution: Has the school ever been a public institution? Where? When? Under what conditions? When not? What are possibilities and limitations of the school?
2 notions of publicness; definitions of publicness; What is the opposite of ‘public’?
3 Where does publicness take place? – civil society? private sphere? How does it take place?
4 public accountability, past, present and future
5 Is there a public conversation about education happening at all? If so, who takes part? Who owns it?
6 the funding of public education – ownership and governance
7 the publicness of (our) teaching and (our) educational practices
8 the university, a public institution? what would it take to make it (more) public?
9 the question of institutions – structures, cultures, practices
On Wednesday 13 November 2019 the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy held the second of three open conversations about the publicness of education. The main aim of the conversations is to explore and identify relevant issues concerning public education in Ireland and elsewhere as the basis for the development of a collaborative, dynamic research agenda for the centre. An important reason for doing this in the form of a number of conversations is to provide an opportunity for people from across the university to become involved in the work of the centre and take part in shaping its future direction.
We started with a brief look at the notes from the first conversation, highlighting the main themes to take forward:
1. the school as public institution: Has the school ever been a public institution? Where? When? Under what conditions? When not? What are possibilities and limitations of the school?
2. notions of publicness; definitions of publicness; What is the opposite of ‘public’?
3. Where does publicness take place? – civil society? private sphere? How does it take place?
4. public accountability, past, present and future
5. Is there a public conversation about education happening at all? If so, who takes part? Who owns it?
6. the funding of public education – ownership and governance
7. the publicness of (our) teaching and (our) educational practices
8. the university, a public institution? what would it take to make it (more) public?
9. the question of institutions – structures, cultures, practices
In the second conversation we had a further exploration of the notion of ‘publicness,’ for example around questions of transparency, surveillance and digitisation, which has to do with the public visibility of education and to what extent this is a quality of its publicness – which it partially is – or (also) a threat to this quality, particularly where the ‘demand’ for transparency and the use of data and algorithms connects education, willingly or unwillingly, to private agendas and interests, rather than to the (question of the) public good. This does link back to a theme from the first conversation about the relationship between publicness and accountability and the question of the ownership of education. What was highlighted in the discussion is the role of (digital) technology in all this, including the question whether political questions about technology are raised in education or are left out.
When we explore the publicness of education, there is also the question whether and or how this publicness is different from publicness in and of political life. Can it be argued – a point found in the work of Hannah Arendt – that there is a need to ‘protect’ the school from the dynamics of political life? Is the school a different ‘sphere’ than the political ‘sphere,’ and, if so, what does this mean for [1] the public quality of education itself and [2] the relationship between ‘school’ and ‘society’? This also has to do with the important difference between the school as a public institution (e.g., funded by public means) and ‘publicness’ as a quality of the process and practices that take place (or not) within this institution. What, in other words, are the possibilities for ‘publicness’ in educational settings and practices? What are the conditions for this to occur? But also: what would such publicness look like?
A third line in our conversation had to do with the role of ‘publics’ in relation to ‘publicness.’ Whereas ‘publicness’ may be understood as a political ideal – for example the ambition of existing-in-plurality – the link with ‘publics’ runs the risk of reducing ‘publicness’ to the dynamics of interest groups which may undermine the public character of education (or the idea of ‘publicness’ altogether). The question here is whether the public quality of education has something to do with meeting demands of different ‘publics’ or whether the ‘publicness’ of education always requires that such demands are ‘translated’ in relation to (understandings and articulations of) a/the public good. This also means, then, that the public good, or particular articulations of it, can never be ‘owned’ by any particular group. How this positions the school, individual actors within the school, and education as institution, are important question for further
exploration. And it connects back to the question what is special or distinctive about the publicness of education in relation to other societal spheres, processes and practices.
A fourth theme in our conversation focused on the university and, more specifically, our own university, raising the question how, where, in what degree, through what kind of manifestations, and for whom this university can be said to have a public quality. This includes the question for whom this might matter and also where and how this may be under pressure, for example in light of the need for universities to (also) operate within a global higher education ‘market.’ Where would such developments undermine the public quality of the university? How would that become visible? What would be lost if this quality disappeared or became marginal? We acknowledged that these are empirical questions that need further exploration, also with regard to the curriculum – or better: curricula – and the presence or absence of ‘publicness’ in it. Are the curricula we work ‘with’ and ‘in’ a manifestation of publicness? Can they be? Should they be? What would be(come) different if we would make this central? Would this be important across the whole university curriculum?
This led us to a discussion about education itself as an ‘act’ of ‘making public,’ for example in terms of the distinction between ‘esoteric’ and ‘public’ knowledge, between the sacred and the profane, between an ‘aristocratic’ and a ‘democratic’ understanding of education, and the question of access: who has access to which knowledge and understanding, and how is this ‘managed’ and ‘policed’? The ‘publicness’ of education, viewed in this way, is therefore not so much a quality to ‘add’ to education, but education itself may, at least in some of its manifestations, be a thoroughly public ‘project’ from the start.
A final observation has to do with the question of ownership, where we shouldn’t forget that the publicness of education is not a matter of the absence of ownership, but perhaps more about who is willing to take ownership of the public quality of education, that is, education as public good. This needs ownership as well, but of a different kind.
main themes to take forward from the second conversation
1. the public visibility of education and to what extent this ‘helps’ or ‘hinders’
2. the difference between the publicness of education and the publicness of politics
3. the unique ‘position’ of the school vis-à-vis the question of publicness
4. the role of publics in/around education and the question of ownership
5. the publicness of the curriculum/curricula
6. how does the publicness of the university matter and for whom?
7. what does the absence of publicness in education look like?
8. education itself as an ‘act’ of making public
9. the question who can/should/will take ownership of the publicness of education
On Wednesday 11 December 2019 the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy held the third of three open conversations about the publicness of education. The main aim of the conversations is to explore and identify relevant issues concerning public education in Ireland and elsewhere as the basis for the development of a collaborative, dynamic research agenda for the centre. An important reason for doing this in the form of a number of conversations is to provide an opportunity for people from across the university to become involved in the work of the centre and take part in shaping its future direction.
We started with a brief look at the notes from the second conversation, highlighting the main themes to take forward:
1. the public visibility of education and to what extent this ‘helps’ or ‘hinders’
2. the difference between the publicness of education and the publicness of politics
3. the unique ‘position’ of the school vis-à-vis the question of publicness
4. the role of publics in/around education and the question of ownership
5. the publicness of the curriculum/curricula
6. how does the publicness of the university matter and for whom?
7. what does the absence of publicness in education look like
8. education itself as an ‘act’ of making public
9. the question who can/should/will take ownership of the publicness of education
And a brief look at the main themes emerging from the first conversation:
In the third conversation we focused particularly on the question what the centre can and should priorities, what meaningful and feasible ways of moving forward might be, and how, through this, the centre can create momentum around questions concerning the publicness of education, broadly conceived.
One interesting theme that (re)emerged in the conversation was the question who the publics of the centre might be, and what that implies vis-à-vis the fact that the centre is a university-based centre. After all, some of the publics that would matter for the whole question of the publicness of education may not see the university as a place or institution they would engage with or even would want to engage with. Whereas, on the one hand, the university is indeed a place of privilege, we noted that it is also important to see what can be done from that place – the university not just as a powerful institution but also as a defender of publicness, including the publicness of knowledge and knowledge as a public good. The centre could play a role in reminding the university – and ourselves – of the complexity of its position and its responsibility in constantly connecting its activities back to publics and the wider ‘ideal’ of publicness.
Bringing these questions back to the Irish context, we wondered, for example, what has happened to community education as a ‘place’ and ‘practice’ of public education; what happens when funding for community education decreases, not just in terms of the provision itself, but also with regard to the question which other forces or what kind of other players step into the vacuum. More generally this raises the question where and how publicness and public education can exist in Ireland, and perhaps one of the priorities of the centre could be to explore the presence or absence or degree of higher education in Ireland – maybe as an exploration of different configurations of higher education vis-à-vis the idea(l) of publicness. This could be a kind of meta research question around which the centre invites scholars and others to share their insights.
Another meta question that emerged in the conversation was about how different individuals and groups make sense of the Irish situation today in relation to publicness. For example, is the only relevant account one where in the history of Irish education the church took over from the state and became the key-player and we’re now in a situation where the state, or the public sphere, is trying to ‘reclaim’ education? Or are there other accounts? Other stories? Other reconstructions? Who is speaking about this? Which voices are perhaps absent in giving account of this? Are there progressive histories in this as well? What was, for example, the role of liberation theology in Irish education? And what are the historical dynamics within Ireland itself around education, its ownership, it’s relation with the common good – or absence of such an orientation? How much is a social justice agenda orientated towards ‘doing good for others,’ and how much is such an agenda ‘allowed’ to raise uncomfortable questions about our own practices?
This also raise the bigger – historical – question about the presence or absence or the particular configuration of a public sphere in Ireland. Did Ireland ever establish such a sphere? Or where key players so powerful or present that any attempt for public sphere to emerge was immediately ‘squeezed out’ – which connects back to an earlier discussion about ‘official’ and ‘marginal’ public spaces, places and practices.
In all this we also discussed questions of gender – the genderedness of which voices are heard and which are not heard; the genderedness of actors who can act and actors who can’t act, and even the question about the genderedness of ‘the public’ itself. And this is not just a general question but something with a specific significance in the Irish context. Thus the need for the centre to bring the discussion back to the question how Ireland is making sense of itself (and who, in this question, is part of the Ireland making sense of itself).
We concluded the conversation with suggesting that working on a (small) number of meta questions around which we can invited people to speak to the question from their own expertise, experience and research, could be a meaningful and feasible way for the centre to move forward over the coming 18 months or so, building up an ‘archive’ of insights and understandings to deepen the conversation about the publicness of education, and broaden the circle of those involved in it.
At this point Carl Anders thanked the participants for their input. Based on the insights and observations from the three conversations we will develop a proposal for a research programme for the next stage of the centre.
Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy Highlights 2019
We are delighted to provide you with a summary of the activities of the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy during 2019. It has been a productive year and the activities of the Centre have steadily increased in scope and reach as well as in intellectual depth. The national and international reputation, visibility and presence of the Centre has grown significantly, with an encouraging number of request from foreign scholars and doctoral students to become connected to the Centre or spend time as a visiting researcher. Gert Biesta joined the centre in January 2019 as 0.4 Professor of Public Education, thus enhancing the Centre’s core capacity. Researchers connected to the Centre has been successful in securing grants for research projects and international research networks. The Centre’s website is fully functioning and is contributing to the visibility of the Centre and its activities. We developed and taught a PhD course for the Department of Education which will be offered again in the autumn of 2020 and will be open to students from across the University and beyond. And we are looking to moving into a permanent allocated space early in 2020. The following activities and events have been particularly important for the Centre.
1.Conversations about the Publicness of Education
During the autumn of 2019 we organised three open conversations about the publicness of education, which were attended by colleagues and students from different departments in the university. The aim of the conversations was to explore and identify relevant issues concerning public education in Ireland and abroad and, through this, generate building blocks for the Centre’s research programme for the coming years. Notes from the conversations have been published on the Centre’s website. A first research programme, based on insights from the conversations, will be available early in 2020.
2.Public Lecture Series
During 2019 we started a series of public lectures under the title Public Education Revisited: On the Past, Present and Future of an Educational Ideal. Dr. Glenn Loughran, Lecturer in Fine Art DSCA, TU Dublin, gave a lecture on “Evental Education” (April); Dr. Ian Mundy, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Education, School of Education, NUI Galway gave a lecture on “Language, Democracy and Public Education” (June); Professor Hana Cervinkova, Department of Anthropology, Maynooth University gave a lecture on “Historical Memory and Democratic Citizenship Education in Poland” (October), and; Dr Bernie Grummell, Departments of Education and Adult & Community Education, Maynooth University gave a lecture on “Enhancing collaborative, transformative and democratic possibilities for the future” (November). Further lectures will be given in January and February 2020
In the Centre’s Visiting Scholars Presentations Series, Dr Tony Carusi, Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Education, Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand gave a talk titled Failure is not an option: A topology of education’s impossibility (November)
3.Externally Funded Projects
Three new research projects gained financial support in 2019:
We are awaiting the results of our submission to the NORFACE programme: “Configurations of Public Education Across Europe: The Common School, Governance and the Future of Democracy”, a collaboration between the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy (PI), the University of Gdansk, Poland, and the Autonomous University of Madrid.
4.Conferences
The First Doctoral Winter Conference on Public Education will be held in January 2020. This conference is the first of a series of annual winter conferences aimed at doctoral students from Ireland and abroad.
Members of the Centre have been giving a number of keynote presentations during 2019:
Invited keynote by Carl Anders Säfström: “Are we living the end of democracy? A defence of the ‘free’ time of the university and school in an era of authoritarian capitalism” delivered at the 5th International Seminar on Philosophy of Education: Considering Alternative Political Perspectives, 27-28 June, at PUCRS University, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Invited keynote by Sharon Todd: ”Facing Conflict Educationally: Democracy, Subjectification and The Senses” delivered at the 5th International Seminar on Philosophy of Education: Considering Alternative Political Perspectives, 27-28 June, at PUCRS University, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Gert Biesta gave an invited keynote presentation at the annual conference of the World Educational Research Association in Tokyo (5-8 August 2019) under the title: “What kind of society does the school need? On democracy and education in impatient times”.
Participation at European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) 2019, 3-6 September, Hamburg:
Carl Anders Säfström was respondent on two symposia:
2. “Public education and sustainability” arranged by the international research network WOK, Ghent University. Säfström will also be co-editor of the resulting special issue in EERJ that follows.
3. Gert Biesta gave a presentation under the title “Public Education between Innovation and Conservation” in the ECER network on Social Innovation in Education.
5.Visiting scholars
The Centre was visited by Dr Tony Carusi, Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Education, Massey University Aotearoa New Zealand 12-17 November.
The Centre was also co-hosting Professor Stefan Ramaekers, Laboratory for Education and Society, KU Leuven, together with Maynooth University Social Science Institute, MU SSI. Stefan was here on a visiting fellowship during November and gave a talk within the Fellowship Talk Series in cooperation with the Visiting Scholars Presentations Series within CPEP. The talk was titled: Parenting Apps and the Parent as a Pedagogical Figure: From Politization to Depolitization.
6.Publications (selection)
Biesta, G.J.J. (2019). Obstinate education: Reconnecting school and society. Leiden: Brill | Sense.
Biesta, G.J.J. (2019). Teaching for the possibility of being taught: World-centred education in an age of learning. English E-Journal of the Philosophy of Education 4: 55-69. http://pesj.sakura.ne.jp/english/englishjournal.html
Biesta,G.J.J. (2019). What kind of society does the school need? Redefining the democratic work of education in impatient times. Studies in Philosophy and Education 38(6), 657-668. DOI: 10.1007/s11217-019-09675-y
Biesta, G.J.J. (2019). Should teaching be re(dis)covered? Introduction to a symposium. Studies in Philosophy and Education 38(5), 549-553. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-019-09667-y
Biesta, G.J.J. & Säfström, C.A. (2019). Menntaávarpið. (Icelandic translation of: A manifesto for education.) Netla – Veftímarit um uppeldi og menntun. Menntavísindasvið Háskóla Íslands. (Netla – Online Journal on Pedagogy and Education. University of Iceland – School of Education).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24270/netla.2019.5 http://netla.hi.is/greinar/2019/ryn/05
Säfström, C.A. (2019). Paideia and the search for freedom in the educational formation of the public of today. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 53(4), 607-618.
Biesta, G.J.J. (2019). Schools in an age of shopping. Democratic education beyond learning. In Silvia Fehrmann (Ed), Schools of tomorrow. Berlin:Matthes & Seitz.
7.Activities planned for 2020
The first Doctoral Winter Conference on Public Education will take place from 20-24 January 2020 with participants from 10 different countries and invited presentations from Professor Simone Galea, University of Malta, and Professor Leif Östman, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Dr. Suzanne O’Keeffe, Froebel Department of Primary and Early Childhood Education, Maynooth University, and, Dr Leah O’Toole, Froebel Department of Primary and Early Childhood Education will give a presentation in January in our lecture series.
Prof Kris Rutten, Ghent University, Belgium, will give a presentation in our lecture series in February.
We are aiming to move to permanent premises in the spring of 2020 and there will be an opening event.
We will organise a book seminar on Gert Biesta’s 2019 book Obstinate Education. Reconnecting School and Society, published by Brill-Sense.
We are collaborating with Dr Tony Carusi, Massey University, on teacher education.
We are planning an international symposium on public education at the ECER conference in Glasgow, August 2020.
We are planning an international symposium in the fall of 2020 within the newly founded research network The Public Role of Education in Democratic Sustainability Transitions.
We anticipate the publication of the following books in 2020:
Säfström, C.A. (in press). A pedagogy of equality in a time of unrest. Strategies for an ambiguous future. New York: Routledge. (summer/fall 2019)
Biesta, G.J.J. (in press). Educational research: An unorthodox introduction. London: Bloomsbury.
With best Wishes,
Carl Anders Säfström & Gert Biesta
THE PUBLICNESS OF EDUCATION: THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF AN EDUCATIONAL IDEAL
INVITATION FOR A ONE-DAT SYMPOSIUM AT THE CENTRE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND PEDAGOGY, MAYNOOTH UNIVERSITY
Public education as education funded by public means, accountable to the public, and accessible to everyone, is a key institution of modern democracies. On the one hand, public education is the expression of the democratic values of liberty, equality, and solidarity. On the other hand, public education plays a key role in promoting and sustaining these values.
Today there are signs that this configuration of public education is in decline and that other priorities have taken over. The rise of school choice, privatisation and commercialisation has eroded the democratic governance of public education and has led to new patterns of educational segregation and inequality. New public management has caused a shift from democratic to technocratic forms of accountability, with a strong focus on meeting the needs of ‘customers’ rather than being oriented towards the common good. It has thus also challenged the role of the state as a key actor in serving and securing the common good.
The question this raises is what the future for public education, in schools, colleges and universities, may look like. But rather than only focusing on the future, there is also the question of the past: How ‘public’ has education been so far? And there is the question of the present: How ‘public’ is education today? What are the pressures? And where are the possibilities?
The Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University is organising a one-day seminar to reflect on these issues, with a focus on the state of public education and the publicness of education in Ireland.
Opening Speech from the Symposium:
We were honoured to have Professor Carl-Anders Säfström deliver the opening speech at our symposium. Please read the opening speech below:
1 May 9th, The Publicness of Education: The Past, Present, and Future of an Educational Ideal
"Thank you, Eeva Leinonen, President of Maynooth University, for an inspiring address to open this day of conversations on Public education and its publicness.
My name is Carl-Anders Säfström. I am a Professor of Education Research and Director of the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy (CPEP) at Maynooth University, where we are arranging this symposium.
I am happy to see such interest in this symposium and its topic arranged by the Centre and the Department of Education here at Maynooth University. The symposium was made possible with the support of the Dean of Social Sciences (Peter Mc Namara) and some funding from the Research Development ONice. We are most grateful for the support.
The Centre was established to concentrate knowledge and research concerning the publicness of education and thereby to support conversations about the central role of public education in building a decent, democratic and prosperous society for all in that society. The starting point for the Centre is that those conversations are not only about what a particular political strata wants from education but also about what education as a proper tradition of intellectual life can contribute without losing its meaning altogether. What we have learned through our collective research eNorts so far is that there is a tendency in educational policies all over Europe to understand education as a solution to problems and issues having nothing to do with education as such but rather belongs to Governments and the political sphere to solve, or at least take full responsibility for. Education in those policies is often used as an escape from responsibility. When this is the case, the logic is something like this: We have a problem with poverty, social unrest, youth violence, productivity, racism, or almost any situation ranging from climate emergency to war, and if we just find the right education, we will solve those problems in the future.
The problem with this logic is that those problems hardly can be reduced to educational problems but instead have to be understood concerning social and political inequalities, the distribution of power in a society and the way capitalism works, not the least in the neo-liberal age: An age marked by the marketisation of education and the turning of citizens with political rights and duties into ‘consumers’ with the right to choose between diNerent things and services. (George Ritzler, 1993, called the McDonaldization of society a society led by predictability, calculability, eNiciency and control).
Also, thinking that coming generations will solve what we ourselves cannot is not only naïve but also transfers the burden to coming generations rather than taking responsibility for those issues here and now.
The Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy is about taking responsibility for education here and now. Education, in the form of schooling, helps diNuse and neutralise political problems and issues rather than solve them—it puts them on hold. Of course, the advantage for Governments is that if inequality, unrest, and other unpleasantries prevail, education is to blame, not their lack of competence or willingness to solve those problems.
To say, which is quite common today, that teachers are the most critical people in schools to help produce a better society (whatever we mean by better) is both right and wrong. It is right that teachers can change a person's life, and many examples exist. Still, it is also wrong because if it all comes down to the teachers themselves, then the teachers are to blame if things are not ‘solved’ or going the right way, as governments want them to go (EXAMPLE: the blaming and shaming of teachers that took place in Norway, Sweden, England, Germany, Poland, Denmark and many more countries in the first decade of this century; were this blame preceded and made possible, among other things, the ongoing privatisations and marketisation of school systems in those countries).
What is essential, therefore, is to make a distinction when discussing public education between education and schooling. The latter is an expression of a managerial function 3 of the state in reproducing itself so it can stay in power and form its citizens in line with its world views. Education, on the other hand, is an intellectual tradition of thought and practice that emerged in Ancient Greece, a tradition of thought defined as such by pointing out that culture and the making of society are not given by blood, position, or by developing ‘inner natural abilities’, and is not inherited as such, but taught, in principle to anyone in every new generation.
As such, in ancient times, education both preceded and made democracy possible; that is, it gave birth to the idea that a society's destiny is not provided or dictated by a particular class of people but is open for change and direction by the will of anyone in that society (regulated by a democratic political system, and not a market). For the first educational theorists and practitioners, the Sophists, who were teachers, not philosophers, it meant that anyone equally could be carrying the culture in which one live and that the state needed to be forming itself as a democratic state. The point here is that education cannot separate from those characteristics; education implies change, equality and emancipation, and democracy by necessity. Suppose a school system cannot harbour or express change, equality, and emancipatory energies. In that case, it can be many things, but it cannot be education, and such a school system does not support education as a force of democratisation.
While ‘schooling’refers to the managerial functions of the state and, therefore, relies primarily on the political and historical situation in which it finds itself, education, on the other hand, concerns change, emancipation, and responsibility for the society in which one lives, together with a diversity of other people in that society. Public education expands the space and place where diverse people can appear and diNerent voices can be heard.
Therefore, it is important to clearly distinguish between education and schooling when we talk about public education and ask ourselves: How much education is (still) possible in and beyond our school systems today, precisely this time?
While this is a foundational question for the work of the Centre, it is a question that has informed our research projects, our teachings, and our many publications. It is also a question framing the edited book we celebrate today with this symposium, as well as the many conversations we have had in the collective writing of this book.
The book results from conversations and research among the authors from seven departments within Maynooth University. It also follows our extended discussions with colleagues at South Australia University over the web during the pandemic years. What we wanted to do today, rather than only launch the book, was to invite more people like yourselves into this conversation to see and understand where we need to go now. I am sure we all have many things to learn from today, and I am looking forward to whatever this day will give. Thank you! And over to Gert Biesta, Professor of Public Education at the Centre."