The discussion of the power of the teacher’s voice is raging again in light of the standardization of education and the emergence of testing as the new regime of truth and evaluation in educational processes. In confrontation with this paradigm, Jasinki and Lewis have recently raised pertinent questions about the role of language and the voice of the teacher. By highlighting what they coin the time of ritualized learning they expose how even when the teacher becomes almost surplus in the face of standardized curriculum and adaptive testing, there is a reproductive power being ‘cursed’ at our children. Through an invocation of Giorgio Agamben, they show how the teacher’s voice is central to the reproduction of the societal hegemony, and how the values of society are reproduced as ‘curses’ and ‘oaths’ in the teachers voice. 'Speak like the teacher and you will be saved' or 'do not and you will be cursed'. By introducing the notion of communities of infancy, Jasinski and Lewis point to another way of conceptualizing learning and education, where the teacher portrays love for the children and not the truth about the world. In this framework it becomes important not what is spoken, but that the teacher and the student CAN speak (Jasinski & Lewis, 2016, p. 5). The teacher then becomes the one who facilitates speaking not as incantations of truth, but as the ability to speak at all. This they coin 'speaking silence'. In this paper I will argue that even in their very enticing argumentation for speaking silence, something goes missing. What goes missing is the quintessential component of the school, namely the world as it is 'handed over' to our children in schools. By turning to a perhaps unlikely couple in the form of Hannah Arendt and Martin Wagenschein, I will attempt to complement the framework of Jasinski and Lewis, with a world that can be spoken about by teachers and students. The emphasis on not cursing the children by offering the truth, in Jasinski and Lewis’ framework overshadows the important element of having something to speak about in the classroom, and the fact that these things are part of a history and a texture of the subject matter (die Fach in Wagenscheins vocabulary). It overshadows the world as subject matter in schools and as the habitat, we are introducing our students to in schools. In an Arendtian framework what we are engaged with in schools is the human artifice and the subjects into which is has been divided or 'didactically reduced', in order to become subject matter. In Wagenschein’s framework, the subject matter is best presented to the children through the exemplary elements of a given subject, and through letting the students experience first-hand the objects and the discipline or 'the way of thinking' of the subject, be it physics, language or biology (Wagenschein, 1956, p. 6). This coupling of Arendt's focus on the commonality and worldliness of what is presented in schooling and Wagenschein’s exemplary didactics offers a perspective which can supplement the critical vantage point in Jasinski and Lewis' idea of speaking silence, where it become a matter of letting the subject matter speak and not of the teacher speaking curses and oaths.

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