This paper reports on research that investigates the tensions between the purposes of education and the purposes of schooling. In light of this tension I also discuss my research in relation to ‘educational encounters’ in the context of schooling. I include an investigation into 1. the historical purposes of education including traditional Aristotelian/Platonion purposes and how Sophistical practice (Säfström, 2023) altered the educational landscape in Ancient Greece and the  relevance of this distinction today (between the Sophists and Aristotle/Plato), and 2. the purpose of education in relation to aesthetics, specifically teaching literature and the arts in schools.

I will discuss an existential understanding of educational encounters (Todd, 2023), which relate to the subjectification domain of educational purpose as articulated by Biesta, (2013). I also outline how the instrumentalisation of schooling to ‘improve’ results not only shifts the focus in schooling onto the qualification domain of education, (Biesta, 2013), but also shows how schools, in all international contexts, are compelled to deal with an ever-growing list of society’s problems.

Todd (2023) and Säfström (2023) have augmented Biesta’s (2021) call for education to orient more towards subjectification and educational encounters, despite differences in approaches to what subjectification entails. All agree that schools need to encourage a desire to think beyond individualistic desires, which is vital for democratic thinking. Biesta’s (2021) interrogation of ‘what makes education ‘educational?’ has dominated his recent writing, particularly considering ‘education in the present’ rather than education as preparation for an unknown future (Biesta, 2015).

The education policy mantra on school improvement (see Biesta, 2022) has precipitated my broader question of “What is the school actually for?” Researchers such as Masschelein and Simons (2013) have defended the place of the school in society, and have argued that school “provides a place forventuring outside one’s own life- world” (p.138). While others such as Collet-Sabé and Ball (2023) have labelled the school system as ‘irreparable’. Biesta (2021, 2023) asks the important ‘inverted’ question of ‘what type of society does a school need’, raising further questions about school purpose, particularly in relation to the contemporary precarity of democratic thinking and acting.

Todd (2023) articulates the ‘educational encounter’ as creating different ways of “seeing, experiencing, being with others” (p. 3). I discuss here my investigation of how aesthetic education, particularly literature and the arts, holds importance in providing a space for encountering the present, for the emergence of the subject as something ‘new’ into the existing order, and for ‘being human today’ (Biesta, 2024). Aesthetic experiences in schools, such as literature and the arts, are worryingly expendable in a ‘skills for the future’ and instrumental approach (see Biesta, 2017).

In the research that I discuss in this paper I present parts of my autoethnographic PhD study drawing on 30 years of teaching and leadership experience. I witness in this research the reduction in time and space for educational encounters; school assessment, socialisation activities and information transmission have usurped the drama and virtuosityof classroom improvisation and teacher situational judgement. I offer an analysis that seeks to convey a teacher and leader’s perspective in critiquing the contemporary cultural and social practices of schooling.

The shift in understanding of authority, representation, voice and method in the last three decades has seen the growth in acceptance of arts-based methodologies and the value of personal stories (Leavy, 2016). There is an enhanced appetite for non-representational research that “aims to rupture, unsettle, animate, and reverberate rather than report and represent” (Vannini, 2015, p. 5). My writing as research attempts to animate experience in order to rupture positivist approaches and focuses instead on stories of educational encounters within the domain of subjectification. Although my experience is in the Anglosphere, this research is not context specific, reflected in my use of predominantly European educational research literature. In researching the aesthetic educational encounter and its relationship to subjectification as a purpose of education, I have drawn on a ‘minor key’ approach (Ingold, 2018). To highlight the complexity of classroom experience, I use ‘writing as research’, specifically autoethnography and narrative writing, which interweaves theoretical analysis. Leavy (2020) categorises this method under the umbrella term of ‘arts-based research’, while Laurel Richardson (2022) refers to ‘CAP’ ethnography, a creative-analytical process. Autoethnography incorporates the researcher’s insights and experiences, and is a form of writing as inquiry that “puts questions and ‘issues of being’ into circulation and dialogue” (Adams et al., 2013, p. 38) Autoethnography relates to the Greek philosophical ideas of mimesis - a mirroring, poiesis - a creation of something that didn’t exist before, and kinesis - the possibility of change (Adams et al., 2013). Richardson (1997) writes that “narrative allows us to express and comprehend individuals, cultures, societies and historical periods in their wholeness” (p. 27), eschewing fragmentation and duality. My narratives of classroom encounters, intertwined with theoretical analysis, illuminate: 1. the diminishing spaces for teacher judgement and what potentially might be lost as we move towards a worrying devaluing of humanities and the arts, and 2. the role of aesthetic education in educational encounters that interrupt ‘learning’ and create possibilities for student subjectification.

My research is written with the intention of pursuing the integrity of education as a discipline in itself (Biesta, 2023), rather than an applied field being driven by external agendas. Education needs to “find and articulate its own voice” (Biesta & Säfström, 2023, p. 1) “to speak back against instrumentalism” and promote an existential understanding of school education for all. Säfström (2023) shows the historical influence of the Sophists (who were teachers) in disrupting the Aristotelian/Platonion purposes of education, which were inherently concerned with maintaining an aristocratic and elite view of education producing a particular type of student (Säfström, 2023). This mirrors the contemporary neoliberalisation of schooling practices. The research that I discuss in this paper reveals the complexity of human experience and the diminishing educational spaces in schools for subjectification and educational encounters. If we are to take education seriously (Biesta, 2024), then education needs to “open pathways different from those that students would be exposed to in their everyday lives” (p. 6). I will show that schools cannot just be for qualification and socialisation, and that teachers have an important role in pointing (Biesta, 2022) students to the world outside of their individualised lives. In doing this, my research reveals that there is an “inherent democratic potential of education itself” (Biesta & Säfström, 2023, p. 3). My writing as research highlights how literature and the arts may arouse desire in students to be ‘in and with the world’ (Biesta, 2017) and can interrupt existing ways of being and thinking, which links to the educational purpose of subjectification (following Biesta’s 2013, proposals about this).

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