Despite its talismanic insistence that ‘everyone can be a winner’ and persistent protestations that ‘failure is not an option’, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, when evaluated against its own criteria, the project of Education is a failure. Education’s commitment to delivering shared prosperity is undermined by widespread and growing levels of economic inequality; its dream of social reconciliation is exposed as a fantasy by political polarization and authoritarian forms of populism; and its promise of emancipating individual potential is belied by un-/under-employed university graduates with debilitating levels of debt. Education's failings provides the starting point for our symposium.

Yet failure, released from its tethering to, and reliance upon, success, ceases to be something abject to be avoided at all costs and offers scope for reconfiguring Education in more generative and creative ways. It is critical to our argument that failure in Education is not contingent, though its particular manifestations may be. Failure is not simply a consequence of misguided policies, half-hearted commitment or insufficient effort – but constitutive, reflecting the ‘ontological bad news’ of the failure of the subject (Thomas, 2013, p. 121) and the impossibility of society (F T Carusi & Skudlarek, 2020; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). In this reading, education becomes a sublime object (Clarke, 2014; Žižek, 1989), an anchoring point for the ideological cover-ups that serve to mask the gaps, contradictions and dislocations that characterize both individual and society.

However, this ‘bad news’ is precisely what education, with its characteristic commitment to hope (Halpin, 2002), cannot admit. Rather than relinquish their object’s sublime status, education policymakers and practitioners cast around for targets for blame – the un-aspirational student, the feckless parent, the unprofessional teacher, the poor leader the under-performing school – who can carry the burden of responsibility for Education’s failures; and like Freud’s ‘borrowed kettle’ (2010, pp. 143-144), these ‘excuses’ for Education’s poor performance are logically disparate, united only by their drive to deny and disavow the inability of Education to realise the fantasmatic expectations invested in it. Yet this refusal – this disavowal of failure as constitutive and its subsequent transposition into the register of contingency – is not without its effects. The failure of policy to obtain its ends is generative of policy reform. Further still, these effects are premised on the disavowal of educational failure, foreclosing the constitutive role of failure for the subject and dismissing educational theories that attend to failure as a feature of education. Drawing on a range of social, political, philosophical and psychoanalytic theories the papers in this symposium focus on the diverse failures that comprise education, from its disavowal to its constitutive character. These papers collectively seek to reorient failure in its educational aspects to return to the idiom that failure is not an option but an irreducible condition of what education is.

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