IIn this paper we try to move beyond a prevailing educational discourse that demands that all activities undertaken in school should contribute to the constant and maximal development of individual capacities. The thought of Agamben is most instructive here, as he offers a vocabulary to speak and think about education as a time and place where the radically new is allowed to come, i.e. as a time and place that allows for possibilities that have nothing to do with the strengthening of one’s own position in life, nor with the realization of one’s (deeper) self, but rather with the suspension of all existing order. We will elaborate this idea by means of an analysis a concrete school practice, viz.: rehearsing and exercising, such as learning by heart the tables of multiplication, practising scales on the pianoforte or performing basic calisthenics. These practices are generally considered to be either superseded or to have merely a functional or instrumental significance. We will argue, on the contrary, that they can have an intrinsically educational meaning, precisely because they grant the possibility to experience existence as no longer determined by fixed identities or positions.