In this contribution I develop a new perspective on the interconnectedness of education and corporeality, and focus on a dimension that is often forgotten, viz. that certain embodied practices imply the impossibility of expressing clear and definite meanings that we, as intentional subjects, might appropriate. However, as Giorgio Agamben has argued, these practices might precisely grant an experience of potentiality, i.e. a sense of capability that is related to the possibility of a transformation of individual and collective existence. Therefore, they might have an intrinsically educational value. To make this clear I turn to the experiments in ‘automatic writing’ the avant-garde novelist Gertrude Stein performed and her comments on this practice. In isolating the technical art of writing from meaning-formation, one might relate to one’s actions in a way that surpasses a logic of expressivity and appropriation. Elaborating this point of view, I investigate particular school activities, and more precisely practising and exercising, which are typically repetitive, embodied and collective practices. Instead of dealing with them as pedagogical tools that should be evaluated in terms of effectiveness, I show that they are intrinsically significant activities. In view of this analysis I reconceptualize what ‘schooling’ the new generation is all about.