We usually regard education as a matter of realizing the students’ potentials. The child, or the adult student, is observed as a medium to be formed through knowledge, and education is seen as a process in which the potentials of the student are realized. As Claudio Baraldi and Giancarlo Corsi (2017: 55) explain: “Paradoxical as it may sound, while the child is what it is, for the education system it is what it is not (yet). Teachers consider pupils as a potential that has to be developed”. In this paper, we suggest that we may currently be witnessing a fundamental discursive change when it comes to education.

This discursive change is particularly evident in a body of educational material produced by the Danish company Lego, and in this paper we will present an analysis of a case developed by Lego and First (an American company). In First Lego League, the children in the video ‘Teamwork Makes the Dream Work’ sing: “You can be anything, so just do it!” (First Lego League, 2019b). These lyrics indicate that children can become anything, that their potential is unlimited. They tell the child to unlock its unlimited potential: instead of sticking to a single track in life, you can become an astronaut, archaeologist, or engineer. The important thing is to dream and keep dreaming.

It is not surprising that the education system is interested in the potential of the child. To conceive of children as potential that should be realised through education can be seen already in the Aristotelian distinction between the actual and the potential, and between form and matter, seeing matter as something loaded with potential that strives for a form.
The surprising thing about Lego and the song above is that the child is not simply seen as a potential that needs to be shaped. Instead, the child is observed as a potential which must be potentialised. Rather than being a matter of realizing potentials, education is seen as a matter of potentialising potentials. The student is not asked to realize his/her potentials and learn mathematics and French (for instance) with a view to becoming a teacher or an engineer later on. The student is asked to become a force for change, constantly ready to look for new potentials in her/himself.

Paraphrasing Lewis 2014: 277), Lego wants to form the child as a potential in order to increase contingencies and potentiality. Sam Sellar (2015) observes in his work on “potential of ‘potential’” that potentiality, including the economic potential of education, emerges as a concept of interest and a site of intervention for the political system. Young people who do not get an education are observed as wasted potential. Where Sam Sellar talks about “the logic of realising potential”, we are more interested in the logic of potentialising the potential. This logic entails not simply observing children as a given resource, but constructing them as an undetermined resource and demanding that they consider and care for themselves as such. In this paper, we take a close look at this discursive figure and examine what it means to educate children (and others) to see themselves as a potential that has no limits.

We draw on Fritz Heider and Niklas Luhmann and their concepts form and medium. The form/medium distinction is analytically equivalent to distinctions like actual/potential, form/matter and negentropy/entropy in other traditions, and part of the method is to develop analytical concepts that can grasp how the discourse on education may currently be changing. We analyse the case FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge (which also includes the song ‘Teamwork Makes the Dream Work’). We see the case as extreme (Flyvbjerg 2006) and as symptomatic of the emerging discourse on play and learning. First Lego League (2021) is an annual education-oriented play event that runs over a period of eight weeks and is aimed at students between the ages of 4 and 16. The programme aims to engage children “in playful and meaningful learning while helping them discover the fun in science and technology” (First Lego League, 2021). The First Lego League Challenge integrates a wide range of activities within the framework of the game, including innovation projects, robot competitions, cheering choirs and dancing. The event is arranged in the form of a tournament in which the winning teams from different schools, regions and countries meet and compete. In the various stages of the tournament, the students’ innovation projects are presented to panels of referees, and the teams compete based on whose robot and project is awarded the most points. Our analysis is based on two sets of empirical data. The first set stems from fieldwork carried out at the regional First Lego League finals in 2019. This fieldwork comprises observations of the various activities and reactions to the activities of the final, as well as a small number of interviews with participants who took on different roles at the event: judges, educational leaders, students and parents. The second set of empirical data consists of strategy and policy papers in which First and Lego present their ambitions with initiatives such as First Lego League. First Lego League concepts are described and the accompanying materials are introduced, including videos, songs and instructions for the events. This data has the character of what Niklas Luhmann calls ‘cared semantics’, i.e. productions in which concepts, distinctions, symbols and images are carefully composed (Luhmann, 1993: 19).

First Lego League attempts to shape the child as a force for change and, in this shaping, First Lego League forms a transition medium that consists of non-representative presentational symbols such as play, fun, innovation, dance and discovery. The case represents some fundamental changes in both form and media of education, and in the conclusion we’ll discuss if the case is best understood as a break from education containing no intention to change people’s life course or it should be understood as education with other means. We also point to three possible discursive effects of this new form/medium relationship for the education system. First, a negation of negativity. The transition medium works best if it only offers a positive atmosphere of change. Second, a movement from knowledge to meta-knowledge, because knowledge indicates limitations. Finally, a possible discursive effect in the form of decoupled self-narratives. Expecting the pupil and the student in any choice and any consideration of their own future to open more possibilities can very easily create great uncertainty of expectations.

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