In school they loaded me up with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but   which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: ‘I will understand this too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to’. (Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, p. 19)

Educational discourse today is dominated by notions of ‘what works’, ‘best practice’ and ‘evidence-based’ policy and practice (Ball, 2017; Biesta, 2010; Clarke, 2023). These notions reflect a technical view of education as a problem to be solved; they embody an instrumental reading of education practice as merely the formulaic means to achieve particular ends, typically conceived in terms of pre-defined outcomes such as exam performance, work readiness and productivity in labour markets (Rüsselbæk Hansen, 2025). Such perspectives foreclose other potential meanings of education, preventing us from seeing education as an end in itself. In this paper  – a sort of thought ‘experiment’ – we take the notion of ‘solutions’, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, to consider what it would mean to ‘dissolve’ the current technical and instrumental apparatus of education that so frequently limits and constrains the possibilities for educators to ‘distil’ another possible educational world (Magnusson et al., 2024) – one that would be open to engaging with the desires and dreams of those who are troubled by current closed ‘formulas’ for education. These formulas make it difficult to engage with existential and ethico-political questions, such as: What good and meaningful forms of life beyond the neoliberal order can be thought and cultivated in and through education? Why are non-productive forms of life not considered worth striving for within neoliberal education? What narrow understanding of what it means to live in the world with others does neoliberal education support? 

The prominence of the quest for formulas in policy and practice is based on the assumption that education can only ‘add value’ – and thereby escape its disrepute and evident lack of value, along with its unenviable status as object of discourses of derision (Ball, 1990; Kenway, 1990) – if it can offer specific solutions related to the advancement of the economy, employment and technology. Such formulas – based on their ‘palliative’ promises – are followed with the aim of revitalising education and postponing its death (Garcés, 2024). Against the background of the pervasive power of such formulaic framings of education, who would dare – or have the courage – to think in opposition to instrumentalism and solutionism and attach education to life itself and what it means to live in a world with others? Is this not a heresy, akin to professing a scepticism towards the importance of ‘standards’, ‘evidence’ or ‘quality’ in education? In this paper we willingly and wilfully embrace such scepticism. We do so through philosophical explorations of the work and ideas of three thinkers; Isabelle Stengers (2005), Marina Garcés (2024), and Primo Levi (1975). Together, they offer us a theoretical framework to explore and discuss: a) how education and its ties to instrumental-productive neoliberal objectives (e.g., test scores, usefulness and effectiveness) can be dissolved, and b) how by ‘dis-solving’ education – i.e. by severing links between education and its purported instrumental purposes, which, instead of enriching life, makes it ‘lifeless’ – we might create space to rethink today's education, without ignoring or overlooking its inherent aporia and antagonisms, in order to envisage other more expansive and meaningful renderings of education that don’t sever its connections to the passions of the lifeworld.

In this section, we will introduce our three philosophical thinkers and the thoughts they offer to dissolve education as a means to predetermined ends that prevents us being ‘in’ the midst of things or considering the ‘not yet’, i.e. things we have not thought about. Stengers (2005) helps us tackle both these challenges. Firstly, in relation to being ‘in’ something. She suggests we begin by looking not so much for cures but how the situations we foment demand ‘thought’ from us. Secondly, Stengers is arguing for a ‘slowing down’ of the rush to judgement about situations that we think we can see what is happening in. Such rushing is increasingly evident in the ways in which those who develop policy in education have already decided beforehand what forms of education matter and how; increasingly in routinised, ‘zombified’ forms that further feed the limitations of the educational milieu we exist in. It is such limitations that encourage us to continue with our thinking – as thinking is an unfinished matter (Garcés’ 2024). However, thinking in opposition to “the conditions of life we have imposed on ourselves”, allows us to reconsider what it means to educate in the neoliberal societies. That said, how can we ask questions that “matter to us, that move us … to transform the [neoliberal] societies in which we live”. Also, how do we avoid such questions being “crushed by the weight of profitable but powerless [and instrumental and technical] knowledge”? (p. 113). Following Garcés, we must allow ourselves to be shaken and displaced by something/someone that can tear us away from who we think we are and from what we think we know. Primo Levi’s (1975) The Periodic Table takes its title from Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev’s 1869 arrangement of chemical elements into a table’. Levi’s book is no scientific treatise, it is “the history of a trade and its defeats, victories and miseries, such a everyone wants to tell when he feels close to concluding the arc of his career, and art ceases to be long” (p. 188). Crucially for this paper, Levi’s work in The Periodic Table intertwines aesthetically-informed discussion of scientific knowledge and technological know-how with rich and compelling evocations of personal and community histories, thus serving as an alternative and a rebuke to the separation of the passions of the lifeworld from the instrumentalised business of neoliberal education.

We have argued in this paper that engaging with philosophical thoughts and ideas of Isabelle Stengers, Marina Garcés, and Primo Levi opens up critical potential for ‘dissolving’ the current grip of discourses and practices grounded in neoliberal notions of instrumentalism and productivity. Following Stengers, it is important to consider what it means to be ‘in’ something and how this can frame our thoughts and what we are open to address and problematise. By slowing things down and continuing to think and perceive thinking as an unfinished matter, we may avoid, according to Garcés, being crushed by the weight of instrumentalism, which can lead us to believe that no more thinking is necessary and that there is nothing more to think about. Indeed, instrumentalism can perhaps monetarily release us from the ‘unpleasant burden’ it may be to think too much and too radically about the world we take part in and what such partaking means and do to us and others. However, inspired by Levi’s work, if thinking in education is not separated from and captured by lifeless instrumental logics, it might not be an unpleasant act, even though it entails the risk of being placed on ‘risky grounds’. By dissolving the instrumentalisation that dominates much of today’s education, we may set the scene for enriching, passionate and desirable forms of thinking in education that allow both educators and students to engage with the world in ways that are not narrowed down to be about problem-solving and about risk management and minimisation.

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