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Welcome to the new books network. Hello everybody and welcome back to the new books network. I'm Kai Votman, working on philosophy of education at the University of Dubian in Germany. And I'm here today with Kert Pestam, who is professor of public education at the Minus University in Ireland and professor of educational theory and pedagogy at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
We want to talk about his new book, Upsynet Education, Reconnecting School and Society. In this book, Kert argues that education has the duty to resist in order to contribute to immense patient and democratization. The book brings together papers written over the last 15 years by a prolific and outstanding writer, so that the book won the annual book award from the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia last year. Upsynet Education contests of nine chapters packed with various lines of arguments, which are always a pleasure to follow.
So I'm really happy to have the author here. Kert, welcome to the new book network. Thank you very much, Kai. Before talking about the book, can you maybe start off by telling us what brought you into educational theory?
Yeah, I can do. I've always been interested in education already as a child, which some people might find weird, but I come across other people also. I've had this fascination for a long time. I ended up through interesting turns in my own life as a teacher of physics in health education, which I did for about 10 years, and then I went to evening university to study.
Well, in German, it's better go to pedagogy. And I thought I would specialize in theory of, or what is it, curriculum and instruction. But I found that so superficial that I ended up actually focusing on the theory and philosophy in history of education, simply because there was much more depth in the discussions in that area. So that's how I ended up in educational theory.
And I still enjoyed the theoretical questions, but after the years I found that they also are really relevant for educational practice. So I always try to connect as much as I can with people who work in schools or in curriculum development or in policy. And there I see that theoretical work actually makes sense and makes a difference. But that's probably the story so far.
Maybe we can begin with the title of your book. What does it mean for education to be obstinate? I thought long about that title, and I also checked with colleagues here in Britain what sort of the feeling around this work, is because it can be perceived as a bit of a negative work. We say someone is obstinate when they say no to everything or don't want to cooperate.
And still I felt that that was an important message for the book. And what I do some in the book is to say I'm not saying that education should just be unoperative or say no to everything. I say what education needs is a kind of informed optimism. And what I mean by that is that education or educators should think about the questions that come to them.
And of course society wants all kinds of things from schools. And should never simply say well if that's what you want we will do it, but should always consider this possibility to say no, to say well this is actually something you shouldn't be asking from us. And I'm making that point and it's one of the bigger points of the book because it has to do with how we think of this relationship between school and society. That's a title where I say reconnecting school and society.
And I see that a lot of developments around schools in many countries have good schools in a difficult position where societies keep saying we want a lot from schools, we want high performance, we want to create good citizens, inclusive society, anything almost you can think of. And schools are constantly put on the pressure to do all that. And I see schools suffering from that teacher suffering from it, students suffering from it. So the book is an attempt to say at what point should we actually say stop this is going too far.
But also what kind of arguments can we use there? And that is sort of what I try to express in the title of the book. And in which ways can school and society be reconnected? I use an image in one of the chapters where I say schools should be closed towards society and open towards the world.
So close towards society and open towards the world. And you can say well that's displaying words, but what I try to say there is that if we, if we only think of the school as a kind of instrument for all kind of things that society, governments, students, parents want from the school. And we forget that the school you can say is actually quite a special place. So if we only have pressure from one side, then I think we are burdening the school with too much.
In other work, I talk a bit more about this by saying the school actually comes out of two histories and that may be helpful here. On the one hand you see, you can read many history books about that, but when societies become more complex, complicated, that the new generation children and young people cannot pick up everything they need to know and be able to do by just hanging around. So if the society is just agricultural, you grow up on the farm and you just go with the daily work there and you become a farmer and you don't need official schooling for them. But when work moves to factories or to offices, then you can say society becomes a bit disconnected and then when you grow up as a child, you can no longer simply experience all that.
And that is one reason where schools begin to emerge, where societies say okay, we need to make sure that we have institutions that prepare children and young people for the future. Now in that history you can say the school is there to do a job for society, to qualify young people to give them orientation. And that also gives society the right to look at the school and say schools are you doing this job well. So that's entirely legitimate that society asks that question to the school.
But then I suggest that there is a second history of the school and you can actually find it in the Greek word for school, which actually means free time, where you can say unproductive time or time that is not yet claimed by someone. And I find that a really interesting idea as well, where you say well in order to grow up, in order to meet yourself, in order to meet the world, you need time. And you don't need a lot of pressure and constant survey. And you can say that's the other history of the school, where we actually give time to the new generation to come into the world.
What I see is that education is currently out of balance. It pushes far too much on that first history, says the school is just there to do what society needs. And it forgets the importance of this second history, where we say we need to slow down, we need to give time, we shouldn't constantly be monitoring young people. But in order so that they can arrive in the world, you can say.
And in response to those two histories, and I think the imbalance that we're experiencing a lot, I'm saying actually schools should be a bit close towards society, not simply accept all these requests and desires and expectations, a bit of a distance. So that actually we can open the world for students in that time. So that's how I try to look at this way of reconnecting school and society. And the term obstinate then also refers to saying no to the requests of too many requests from the first history, and trying to be passionate also about the second and bring this to the forefront.
Okay. So it's indeed saying no to too much from that first history. So that first history is entirely justified and legitimate, right? Let's become too big.
And then you say to say no, there is because you say yes to this other thing that schools also need to do to give children and young people time to arrive in the world. Right. You also write that there are attempts to domesticate education. Whereas you also argue for a kind of public education.
Does this also have to do with these two stories? Yes. So again, you can say to domesticate that is to try to bring the school under control. And I see that a lot.
I see many countries that suffer from these statistics. And they don't think, oh, our country is too low in the league table and we need to go up in the league table. It completely makes people forget what school is also about. So I forgot the line of your question.
Sorry. The term public. What if you say no to parts of the request from society, how then would you perceive of public education? Yes.
So again, an image I use also in the book is to say all these expectations about the school run the risk of turning the school into a shop where you say, okay, the school has customers, parents, students themselves, business, government, anything you can think of. And I just go to the shop and say, we want this from you and we want this from you. And if you begin to think about the school in that way, as a economic transaction, the school becomes a private institution or it becomes an institution that just needs to serve private interests. Or in the economic interest.
Yes. They can become economic, but there are also parents who say we want the school that gives hard children exactly the values that we find important. Okay. So it's also in terms of values.
You see that some parents say we don't want school to raise any difficult questions about identity or culture or religion or whatever. So it very much then becomes that people say we have our interests or our things we want in the school should do that and nothing more. And there the question with sort of public education comes in public education, not just schools paid by public money, but also schools that understand that they have a bigger job to do than just satisfy them. And it's a bigger job again is to spend time with a new generation to look around in the world and to figure out what's going on there, what's possible there, what's going well, what's not going well.
And for children to find their own relationship to that. You can say that is a public task because it's not simply saying, let's just give what people ask from the school. But it's to say as a society, we need to have this opportunity, we need to create this opportunity for the generation to look at the world to meet themselves in relation to that. And yeah, even if parents say just make sure that my child can read and write and that's enough as a society we should say, now all children deserve war.
And there you can say the public dimension comes in and this is, yeah, I think it has to be connected to questions about democracy. So in a totalitarian state, the state will just control the school and the school will try to control the student. But in a democratic society where we believe that it's valuable to have a degree of morality and difference, the school has a public responsibility, you could say, precisely to make future democratic living possible. One notion you develop in the book is the notion of becoming world wise.
And this reminds me of what you just say, but also it seems to me that the term has a more technical meaning in opposition to the notion of becoming symbol wise. And you'll have a bit on this. So the discussion itself is a very, what is it, particular discussion that comes out of ideas that say language symbols, frames of inspiration are really important. And people who work in thinking about that, they say we should not just give students of the knowledge to look at the world or at situations from different perspectives.
But we should also help them to see what perspectives actually are. And this is the idea that that education should help students to become symbol wise to understand that when you look from say a Western perspective, the world looks very different than when you look from an Eastern perspective, or that when you engage with the world from a secular perspective, things turn out very different than when you look from a religious perspective. And the idea of simple wisdom is that you also understand what these perspectives do. And the discussion I try to get into in that chapter is to say that's fine, but maybe it's still not enough.
And then I play with the difference between you can say, yeah, symbol wisdom and world wisdom. Where we become world wise, I'm trying to say, look, living a human life is not just a matter of having all kinds of perspectives and understanding how all these perspectives work. Because that kind of, yeah, discussion is never ending. But you can say at the same time, the world goes on and irrespective of our perspectives, we find things in our life, questions, situations, appeals that we need to respond to.
And I think to be open to that as well, and probably also to see that living a human life is not just a question of finding a perspective on the world, actually to engage with what I would say the world throws at you, that still requires something else. And that's what I try to hint at with saying it's wonderful if people are symbol wise, if they understand that people have very different perspectives and outlooks on the world. But beyond that, there is still the ongoing challenge to engage with what the world throws at us. And that has something to do with being world wise.
Can you maybe offer an example for what the world could throw at us and what then world wisdom would consist in? Yeah. Maybe an example from education. It's a lovely story I came across a couple of years ago in a project that looked at the collaboration between teachers, special education, people, educational psychologists.
And that was in the description of a conversation that three people, a teacher, I think a special needs educator and an educational psychologist had about a particular boy in a primary school. And the educational psychologist had done all kinds of tests in order to find what was wrong with the boy or what the problems were. The special needs teacher also had done all kinds of things. And they were talking about this.
And then the psychologist said, I think that sort of the diagnosis with this boy is this, this, and this. So he came with psychological symptoms, you could say. Probably it had something to do with attention deficit because that was quite popular at the time. The special needs teacher said, yeah, when I look at it from my perspective, I work with the boy and did some tasks and can do that.
And there he has some problems. And yeah, the teacher also spoke about what she saw in the classroom. And you can say this is an interesting example of then three different perspectives on the same boy. So that already shows that we can have very different perspectives on the same reality.
In this case, it's psychological, a special needs, a teacher perspective. What was also interesting in that conversation is that at some point they said, yeah, this diagnosis looks right from the psychologist and that the special needs teacher that they also agreed. Yeah, these are things the boy needs to work on. And then here things are fine, but that's really an area of concern.
And then almost towards the end of that conversation, I think the psychologist said, okay, so we agreed that this is a good thing. So we agreed that this boy needs to be taken out of the classroom and needs to get a special treatment. And at that point the teacher said, no, not at all. He's just a lovely boy to have in the group and I don't want him to leave.
And for me, that's a nice example that on the one hand shows that we can have these different perspectives, that these perspectives make sense. But that's the question what we do doesn't follow from a particular perspective. So these people agreed that what the psychology said was right and what the special needs teacher said was also correct. And still the teacher said, the conclusion is not to take this boy out of the classroom and start sort of treating him with all kinds of special interventions.
She said, he's a lovely boy in the group and he's really important for what is possible in the group. And that's where we will continue to work with him. So you can say there, there were three people who were first of all simple wise. They really understood different ways of looking at the boy.
But I would say the teacher was well wise to say all of these diagnoses are true. But still my responsibility is for this boy to just be seen as a normal boy in a normal classroom and not become a special case that me, treatment. So that's one way to say that's where being worldwide and meeting that situation really shone through, I would say. One way to look at the story would also be that, well, that was just the symbol wisdom of the teacher, right?
There were three different symbol wisdoms and I still don't quite get the difference between the specific perspective of the three. And then your judgment or interpretation that one of this is something else, what worked with world wisdom, not just symbol wisdom. Yeah, you're right. And you can say that's probably what I find frustrating about talking even in terms of symbol wisdom because you can say, yeah, that's still another perspective.
And talking about perspectives and probably what I saw in the teacher is that she said, all that comes out of these perspectives is true. But I feel that this boy needs something else, so he shouldn't become, you can say, an object of all these interventions. And I felt that I would read the situation by saying the teacher responded to something else. But you can say that makes this teacher into a good teacher because this teacher sort of gets it that we should never reduce students to a particular diagnosis.
But I felt that, yeah, quite powerfully she said to these specialists, look, what you say is true, but still I feel that the implications we draw from that have been different. But I agree it's a subtle difference. But for me it's somewhere there. So I found several big lines or themes in your book.
As I said, the book collects papers written for all kinds of purposes in books and journals and so on. But I felt that at least two themes run through them, apart from what I already touched upon. One was the idea of network and relationality. How would you relate this notion to the two stories or the overall aim of the book of reconnecting school and society?
Yeah, there is the theme of network, indeed, is there with a number of levels and in a number of ways. I think one thing I try to do in some of the chapters is to show how networks work. And this goes back to a more theoretical philosophical discussion that has been very helpful in my own thinking. And it goes back to the work of Bruno Latour, who people who listen to this podcast may know or may not know or they may know Latour from a different phase in his career.
But quite early on, what Latour wrote about is the question, what is science and how has science become so important? Or are dominant in modern societies? Now, this question is quite old. And when you look at the discussion around this, I think for good, 100 years, almost, many people have tried to answer that question, what is science or what is special about science by saying science produces a particular kind of knowledge.
People use the word scientific knowledge, but then that often comes with the idea of this must be a special kind of knowledge. Some people say, yeah, scientific knowledge is the true knowledge, the real knowledge, or the best knowledge. And when Latour sort of tried to engage with that question, he did something interesting. He first looked at a lot of literature that tried to make that point, tried to find what is special about science by saying it must have something to do with knowledge.
And he just showed that all those attempts actually never managed to say in what way scientific knowledge is a better or different kind of. And then Latour said something else must come in to explain that. And then he started to look at networks and ways in which networks are established. And he developed a kind of theory where he said the reason that science is so omnipresent and looks like it's so important has much more to do with all the networks that scientists or people who work on that label are managing to establish.
But also how they are able to connect networks to other networks. And then at some point you get very big networks that because they are everywhere, it looks like they are special. And I find this a really interesting way, for example, to look at science and people's beliefs in science. But there is one other important thing as well there because this idea to say science is just very powerful, that often doesn't take what science can do seriously.
And Latour says I'm not concussing that we can fly people to the moon or we have aircrafts in the sky or we have the worldwide web working or we have facsends that do their work. But Latour said I am interested in how at some point those stories around that or those technologies become sort of the only show in town which you can see in English and begin to push into the margins other ways of thinking. And that is partly how the whole thing of networks sort of figures in the book where I also try to say for example in relation to curriculum, the knowledge that ends up in school. They are not concussing that knowledge is irrelevant but that it's important to see why some knowledge ends up in schools and other knowledge doesn't end up in school.
Or why some histories end up in history books and others don't. And for me that way of beginning to look at all these networks and also what they do with us and almost you can say the kind of illusions they can create that for me helps to remain sort of critical or at least awake if we constantly only hear that science is special because it is a special kind of knowledge. I don't think it's a special kind of knowledge. I do think it's an interesting practice but we shouldn't make claims in terms of knowledge I would say.
And for me this also has to do with, again you can say the title of the book. The whole question you can say of margins and centers of what is big and what is small. And then when you look again at these two histories of the school you can say this first history where the school is there to do jobs for what society wants. That has become part of a really big global network.
So it's not just an idea but it's for example connected to a lot of measurement and statistics about schools. I already mentioned BISA, the OECD, OECD is a very strange organization. It's the organization for economic cooperation and development. So you can even wonder what do they know about education.
It's not democratically controlled so it hangs in between countries but they have been very successful in the world. In creating a particular story about schools and their performance. And that is so omnipresent that many people think that that is the only story you can tell. You can see an example of how this first history of the school becomes connected to the OECD and they have a lot of money and a lot of networks themselves.
That becomes connected to the particular tradition in educational research that says we need to conduct large-scale randomized control trials. And then we can find out what works and how teachers should teach and they should only be teaching in those ways proven by science. And that network becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. And I understand where it's coming from but my worry is that even more creates an imbalance and a very unhelpful situation.
So what I do in the book is to provide arguments to push back to that and say of course it's interesting to know how students perform. But then think that the test that you do at the age of 15 in a sample of students can tell the whole story about education. So there is roughly the connection back from looking at networks and how the building of a particular network around contemporary education is really creating an unhealthy imbalance. So the other theme that runs through the book I think is the question of critique.
And it is almost present in every chapter but one focuses on the question of critique explicitly. And you offer three ways of thinking about critique which you call critical dogmatism transcendental critique and then deconstruction. Can you offer the listeners what kind of ideas of critique you mean by that? I will try but you've read the chapter and it's quite a technical discussion as well.
I wrote that chapter. It's the oldest chapter in the book actually but I still feel that there is something important there. I wrote it at a time when there was quite a big movement around critical thinking in education. And I think the idea of critical thinking is still there.
I encountered an awful lot in higher education for example where it's constantly said here we need to help students to think critically but also in school education. And that sounds nice but then when you begin to ask what actually is it to think critically it quickly becomes more complicated. And what I do in this chapter is partly to analyze discussions around critical thinking but also to show that there are three different ways to engage with that question of what it means to be critical. One I call critical dogmatism and it's not a term I've invented so it comes out of the literature.
I find it very helpful because you can say well one way in which you can be critical is to say I have certain values, certain beliefs. And I use that as a standard or yardstick to look at things I encounter and then I can say I don't agree with that. I think that is bad because it doesn't meet my values or beliefs. And of course that's not unimportant because we can say in the kind of societies in which we live that these are democratic societies.
We can have all kind of reasons for value and democracy and then we can look at other societies and say I don't think that society is really democratic. And that is a judgment you can make where you say we have the value of democracy and some societies really do not live up to that idea. What we now know I think even better than when I wrote this text and here I'm referring to what happened around Trump in the United States. People can simply turn back and say well those are Europe values we have other values so too bad for you.
That makes critical dogmatism you can say film room. And again in philosophy that's known. So you can say one way to be critical is to start from a venue and you use that venue to judge. But people can always turn back and say well I don't agree with your values or I have different values so your critique doesn't hold.
On the global scale this is also I think happening around China and the whole question of democracy. Which I think in Hong Kong is becoming very visible and very urgent. Well where China simply says yeah Western democracy is one idea but it's not our idea. So if any democracy is emerging in Hong Kong we suppress it because we have to get back.
So that makes critical dogmatism vulnerable although I do want to emphasize there is also something important about it. We shouldn't simply say it's impossible to make any judgment. We should be clear about what the values are upon which we make judgment. A different way to do this is to say to be critical is not to just have a value and judge things in relation to that value.
But it has to do with being consistent. And this is what in the chapter I call transcendental critique and that sort of philosophical description behind it. It says if you criticize something you can only do that if you do not contradict yourself in doing that. And you can be thinking hard about what would be a good example of that.
And maybe it's even there in the chapter. So if you say to a child like well we say things like you should never do this or you should never do that. What children are really good at and are particularly teenagers in secondary school. They will always look back at the teacher and will say but you just did that or you say that to us but it looks like there are other rules for teachers.
When I was in secondary school smoking was a really big issue. We were told that students in school cannot smoke and then when you looked at the room where all the teachers had a coffee and lunch it was always full of smoke. So they can say teachers have no ground to stand on because they cannot say you shouldn't smoke and then they go through the room and they smoke. So this is a maybe a small example.
But this actually says where can we find a standard for critique? Not by just saying these are our values but by making sure that we do not contradict in how we say something what we're actually saying. This is more interesting way to look at this at critique and maybe it's a little less vulnerable because at least we can sort of get each other and say when someone is critical or criticized as something we can always say but what are you doing there? Are you living up to your own standards?
You're applying. Now this and again the discussion is very technical maybe also for listeners. This has something to do with the relationship between the critical comments you make and sort of the conditions of possibility upon which you rely there. And then I go into the next step of the philosophical discussion and say actually as human beings we can never have total understanding or control over these conditions of possibility.
That looks a bit like the story of Baron from Munchhausen who somewhere says that he drew himself out of what is it to pull. He was some kind of hit to. And of course what we cannot do is even be extra cannot pull ourselves up. We cannot step over our own shadow.
And out of that and a different way to look at the whole question of critique sort of emerges and this comes out of French philosophy in Jacques Derrida and the idea of deconstruction that actually says we can't do that. That actually says we can have a sort of the internal control of what we are criticizing. There is always a gap and always an opening and then what Derrida is saying that's actually not bad because that little gap or that little opening or the thing that we cannot get under control that precisely allows for the possibility for something to come in that we couldn't sort of predict or foresee that would come in. And then Derrida says to always keep the door open you could say for what we cannot imagine that may happen.
That is a question of justice. And then Derrida says this is an important and different way to think about what being critical means precisely not to say to be critical is to think that we can sort of get everything in control. But with this image of saying actually to be critical also means to always leave the door open because other things may arrive and emerge that we can not yet foresee. And that's that's sort of what I try to do in that chapter to start with saying critique can be very powerful and very strong.
But actually when you look at the position out of which we do that that position is quite vulnerable. And in a sense turn that on its head and say that vulnerability means that we should always be open to be surprised because these surprises the things that escape our control could actually be very good and worthwhile. And just to finish on that, this is a very abstract philosophical discussion, which I think is really important in the discussion about critical thinking. And this is also an educational point in it, because this image of leaving the door open to something new that may arrive.
For me that is also about children being born in the world. That's actually quite a miracle that constantly nudging beings arrive in this world and we have no idea how their lives will unfold. But also as a teacher the moment I like best but also find very scary is always the start of the school year where you walk into the classroom and suddenly there is a new group of students there. And that is also that same moment where you don't know who these people are, they don't know how their life will unfold.
And to be open to that that newness for me also speaks to this whole question of critique. That's a long answer, but that's roughly what I try to do. For me I always thought while you were explaining this about the second story because the second story of the school of course also needs a claim that there is the potential of something new and unforeseen which cannot be controlled and requested from outside but just can emerge within the school if you give children and teacher free time. And then I always sort of add to that so I think you're absolutely right I'm making that connection.
It is really important that we give time and provide opportunities for things to emerge and for human beings to emerge. That doesn't mean that everything that emerges there is simply fine. That I would say is a romantic idea of education where you just say, oh because it comes from the child it must be good. There is still important work to do you can say on the one hand to let things emerge to allow students to express themselves but then there is also the hard work to look honestly at what students express.
What is the value of that is that going to help you in your life or not. So it doesn't stop by just saying the best school is the one where all talents can emerge and all expressions can be done. And then the difficult educational work is to look at all that and say, okay what do we think of that. So there is a moment of judgment and there are forms of extreme child centered education that just say everything that comes from children is good.
That's an educational disaster as well. You also distinguish between ideas and education that put the child in the center and then the teacher or the curriculum whereas you argue for a well centered education. This is also connected with this. Yep.
So, yeah education that's only top down that only says teacher should be in control and students should do what teachers say and they should follow the curriculum. That's not real education because that gives no opportunity for voices of students at all. But the solution for that is not to say let's just all these voices emerge and let's make that into one big sort of expression. That's why I really don't like schools that say if you sent your child here we will make sure that all their talents will develop.
And this is this idea of world centered education because of course children come with new talents with new ideas with new initiatives. And to figure out what's of value there these initiatives need to meet the world you could say. And therefore I would argue that the real orientation for education should always be this encounter with the world, with the material world, with the living world, with the social world in order to see of all these new things that the new generation brings into the world. Which ones are of value and which are not of value.
And that's difficult educational work but I feel that they're precisely we need education. Well, we've taken up a lot of your time. My last question is what are you currently working on? Yes.
Next month from when we are recording this so that's in July. Another book will come out which indeed has the title world centered education. Oh, what a coincidence. Maybe we need to have another conversation that's a point of defeat.
So that's where I what I've tried to do is to to make this point about the importance of the world in education in the best way I can. And yeah, so I'm still quite full of that book because it's all quite fresh and new and I'm just curious to see what readers will think of that. And for me that idea of world centered education is also really to move beyond all these strong voices that say education should be curriculum centered. It's just about getting the curriculum in the students and we need a lot of cognitive science or neuroscience to do that for me.
That's just too limited. But as I said before, I also remain worried about two romantic sort of child or student centers, conceptions of education that forget sort of the reality check as I call it. With that book, I try to do that. And interestingly, that also brings me back again to the whole fascinating question of teaching and teachers.
And I think that's where I currently am trying to get as closely as possible to, yeah, what the special nature of the work of teachers is and why we really need to do that. And why we really need to support that. So that's where my current work is and I'm doing that in theoretical explorations, but also as closely as I can to teacher education, which I think is an important field. So that's roughly where I am today.
That sounds very fascinating and it sounds like a continuation of many topics we touched upon today. Thank you very much for joining me on the new books network. You're very welcome. Thanks very much for the opportunity.