In later years there has been a discursive shift of education. One common explanation for this shift is the marketization and standardization of public education, through which central educational concepts are emptied of meaning and politically appropriated in order to become policy-terms that manage, control and organize public education (see e.g., Pierce, 2013). However, the discursive shift is also connected to a tendency within the educational sciences themselves to focus on the process-characters of educational practices (Biesta, 2010, 2014). These political changes and interdisciplinary tendencies have led several educational to call for a revitalization and reclaiming of the very language of education. The main concern in their discussions is the importance of having an educational terminology that does not lose track of the ethical and existential aspects of educational practices, especially when the integrity of an irreplaceable other is at stake (Todd, 2003, 2009; Biesta, 2010, 2014; Säfström, 2005, 2011). The paper intends to take part in a discussion about a “language of education” and also to discuss the significance of language itself and its relation to educational practices.

While educational theory addresses the relation between humans and their world, the study of language addresses the relation between humans and their way of communicating this world. Specifically, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s discussions (Benjamin, 2009) on the relation between humans and language, I discuss how the term translation can be operationalized as an educational concept with inherent notions of both change and self-activity. While Benjamin takes an interest in language as a sharing of words, education can be said to concern the sharing of worlds. As such, both language and education constitute two relational and interconnected domains where events of being and becoming are under constant negotiation and investigation. An educator is both a mediator of and a representative for this world. Through her pedagogical actions, the students are invited to translate “her” world into “their” world. Translation, it is argued in the paper, alludes to the constitutive educational principles, proposed by Dietrich Benner (2005), summons to self-activity and Bildsamkeit.

Educational practices with an inherent ethical ethos, have as their point of departure the care of and responsibility for the newcomer. By showing and pointing towards the world through pedagogical gestures, the newcomer is called into her own subjectivity with the ability to self-actively take place in and change the existing order of things, i.e. the world. Two symbolic events that capture the relational and ethical aspects of education are the birth and the first day in school. These events also capture the close link between language and the educational domain of subjectification (Biesta, 2014). By being given a name the child is welcomed into this world. The process of naming, of assigning a semiotic figure to the child, links the human individual, i.e. the body/soul, with human discourse, i.e., the spirit. The first day in school is nothing less than the initiating ritual of becoming a public persona - the student, a symbolic orphan, is suddenly sharing a public sphere, summoned to being by the teacher’s pedagogical gestures. By entering the school the child is emancipated from her family but is also left alone to explore the world and the different constraints and challenges which must be overcome in order to conquer this world.

The paper consists of a theoretically driven argument and draws on contemporary educational philosophers as well as interpretations of some of Walter Benjamin's texts on language and translation.

In the conclusion section, I suggest that translation is a term that brings to the fore some important educational dimensions that address the relation between human uniqueness and public discourse. Translation, according to Benjamin, functions as a tangent that merely touches the original but in a way that affects the original as well as the translation. “A translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity of lingustic flux.” (Benjamin, 2009, p. 80). Educational events are brought about in the relational flux between students and teachers, and as such they are never predictable. In these events, the teacher works as a translator, lingering at the boarder of the forest of the linguistic order (c.f., Rancière, 1991). In the words of Walter Benjamin: “Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself at the centre of language forest but on the outside facing the wooden ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one” (Benjamin, 2009, p. 76). In a similar fashion, education is not about entering into the minds of the students. Rather it is about asking them to come forth as unique subjects and to speak their own language and with their own voices. The language of education is born in a disjunctive space between sound and thinking, touch and sensing - the distinguishing mark of the students’ responses to the vibrations of the surrounding world and a constant translation of meaning(s).

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