This session takes the recent book by Gert Biesta titled World-Centred Education (2021) as a starting point for an exploration of a number of rather urgent educational issues. With the book, Biesta makes a rhetorical intervention in a longstanding but ultimately unproductive going 'back and forth' between the idea that education should either be curriculum- or content-centred and the idea that it should be child- or student-centred. Although these positions have been criticised before - John Dewey has called the idea of child-centred education 'really stupid' - they keep coming back, for example in recent discussions about 'powerful knowledge' and ongoing arguments for putting the student or, more commonly, the 'learner' in the centre of education. More than only a rhetorical intervention, the case for education that is world-centred - focused on the question how educators can equip and encourage students to live their lives 'in' and 'with' the world - entails a number of significant 'turns' in the educational conversation, which, in a sense,  can be seen as attempts to return to properly educational questions and concerns.

One is his argument that educational questions are ultimately existential questions, that is, questions about how we exist as human beings. They are about what we do with our knowledge, skills and identities, rather than assuming that the acquisition of knowledge, skills and identities is an aim in itself. The other is the argument that educational questions are first and foremost 'of the educator,' and thus about what educators do or refrain from doing in their interactions with students. While the latter argument goes against the ongoing 'learnification' of education, that is the ongoing attempt to reduce all educational matters to 'learners' and their 'learning,' the former argument goes against the ongoing reduction of education to the 'management of objects,' that is the ongoing attempt to think of education as the production of measurable learning outcomes, or of 'units' with particular character traits. This also includes the rise of the demand put on students to become managers of themselves and their learning - a tendency which may be characterised as the problematic demand for “self-objectification.” In working through the implications of these two main arguments, the significance of a question is highlighted that seems have become marginal if not obliterated in contemporary education, which is the question what the world (in all its manifestations) is asking of me, rather than what it is that I would want from the world. This question is not just relevant for education's sake, but also speaks to the environmental crisis and the crisis in contemporary democracy.

The main ambition of the symposium is not to discuss the book and its theses as such, but to take up some of the main themes, insights and intuitions presented in the book, particularly in order to see which 'turns' and 'returns' may be needed in contemporary education and what can be done for such turns and returns to occur. The ambition of the symposium, in other words, is to explore how and where these themes might matter in a number of different educational and scholarly contexts and settings. In the symposium, Gert Biesta will briefly introduce the session and the main themes of the book. There will then be three presentations by Stefano Oliverio, Laura Colucci-Gray and Elisabet Langmann, followed by a brief discussion of the papers by Gert Biesta and a conversation with the audience.

Biesta, G. (2021). World-centred education: A view for the present. New York/London: Routledge.