The promise of education is Janus-faced. On one side it looks to the past and promises to reproduce it. Knowledge, practices and power are institutionalized through education in order to be passed from generation to generation. On the other side education looks to the future and promises to break with this reproduction. Through education, the future of privilege, insight and position is never certain (Säfström,2018). Even though political emphasis on reproducing yesterday’s growth pattern is still very much at the forefront in education, the growing number of sustainability issues show clearly education is, and must, be offering more than the stale reproduction of the problems that riddle our societies and planet. Her we focus on this inherent excess of education. Education always delivers something different than expected and this has become eminently clear with the emerging sustainability issues (Leicht, et al. 2018). First, we are to argue for excess to be the premise and limit of education. Second, this excess challenges current notions of temporality linked with the processes and outcomes of education. Third, this excess consequently haunts contemporary concepts used in order to conceive of education, that is reducing it to linear processes and determinable outcomes. Such conceptions need to be weak and vague given the inherent failure of education to function as a teleological mechanism. Thus we argue for the development of stronger concepts surrounding education in order to support the resilience of education in the face of challenges on three different levels: 1) subject/individual, 2) institutional, 3) societal. Our goal is to rethink education in order to forefront and grasp this inherent excess and how this relates directly to the inherent excess of sustainability issues. To conceive the beautiful risk of education in terms of its always lacking, messy, and gritty excess (Biesta, 2013). It is less of a linear process or journey, but an immanent condition of being a lacking and leaking human.

Biesta, G. (2013) The Beautiful risk of Education. Paradigm Publishers. Leicht, A, Heiss, J., Byun W. J. (2018) Issues and Trends in education for Sustainable Development. UNESCO. Säfström, C.A. (2018) Education as the Making of a World in Common Across Difference. Inaugural lecture. Maynooth University. April 12. 2018.