e good morning and welcome to this event which invites musicians teachers students and everyone interested to think and discuss together musicians in society and society and musicians my name is thik G I am Academy research hello here at the celus Academy uni Arts Helsinki I teach and do research here we will have the first half of this event in English um until 12:00 and then after the lunch break we will continue here uh in Finnish however the interpretation in English is available on Zoom so
you can also join in Zoom with your phone and headphones and stay here here in the hall if you wish if you have any questions during the event you can ask me or my co- researcher T Kista who is sitting over there hosting the zoom participants and you the audience will also get a chance to participate today by asking questions from our guest speakers and also during the lunch break in the lower 4ye by participating in a little uh Community Workshop this event is the opening event of my Academy re
search Fellowship project performing the political public pedagogy in higher music education funded by the research Council of Finland this four-year project aims to expand the notion of the political in music professionalism by advancing ecological artistic imagination and transformative systems thinking within higher music education by addressing the need to consider the political ontology of Music performance the project aims to initiate and explore alternatives for future music professionals
to survive and thrive in today's uncertain complex societies the project also aims to challenge the hierarchical relationships between the artistic and social purposes of music and expand the ecological ethical and political boundaries of Music professionalism musicians often encounter different fixed dichotomies in their field including instrumental versus autonomous value of music socially impactful music versus performing music for knowledgeable audiences or socially engaged versus artistic
professional territories this project takes as its starting point that these dichotomies don't need to be viewed as competing priorities but as professional possibilities for combining artistic tradition creativity and Imagination with the ability to respond dynamically to rapidly changing societal needs we believe that this change of perspective in the mental models of Music professionalism cannot happen only through internal discussions within higher music education but demands that the musici
ans work position and social responsibility are brought into the public public sphere the border crossing between the depoliticized and the social responsible music professionalism takes place between the institution and the public sphere between the high culture and popular culture and between the political and the pedagogical aspirations therefore in this project we will generate and explore participatory public artistic pedagogical interventions with the celus Academy students teachers and ac
tors from other fields of society cellus Academy educates future performing artists in classical music jazz folk and Global Music and music technology in addition to teaching musical skills and knowledge music programs must also include educating about the social and ethical dimensions of musicianship that can be embraced for example through music making in different settings or experimenting with interdisciplinary work introducing different contexts and forms of collaboration opens up diverse p
ossibilities for bridging artistic imagination with societal needs and interests higher education programs can and should provide arenas for young musicians to explore these possibilities therefore while today's topic concerns all musicians as potential public professionals who can significantly impact Society the specific focus is on higher music education programs their future needs and transformative possibilities you European music Scholars have suggested a vision of the musician as a maker
in society this connects musical Artistry and practical experience with Community engagement on the one hand this Vision challenges the modernist ideal of a performer whose task is merely to communicate the music to his audience as a sufficient form of public engagement on the other hand this Vision also challenges the uncritical understandings of the social benefits of music making these taken for granted assumptions present a highly idealized vision of the so-called power of music music as a u
niversal language or music education as a source of salvation for disadvantaged groups therefore it is crucial to identify the potential of Music in Social transformation while simultaneously navigating the different Power hierarchies inequalities and political ambiguities within music practices some may associate the idea of musicians as as public professionals with activism there are several examples of how activism can take creative forms for social social change in and through the Arts unfor
tunately in our fastpaced digital age activism might also appear as non-strategic individualistic or as slacktivism which involves only minimal effort or commitment within social media consequently activism within higher education is considered not only an ambivalent concept but also unrelated to professional education leading to underestimating the potential of academic activism in strengthening the University's role in society this is not to say that all students and teachers should become act
ivists however as public performers all musicians can be seen as cic professionals who have responsibility to navigate the political in and through music performance hence it is Central to revisit and recapture the idea of the political as a basis for new music professionalism in a world in which both narrow perspectives on Artistry and nominal forms of activism are insufficient the political aspect of higher music education reaches beyond the questions of personal opinions or advocacy toward so
cietal engagement as part of institutional practices it can manifest through how political awareness and social ecological responsibility are considered as part of Music studies performance practices and so on the political in performance is not only limited to community art activism or creative struggles for social justice the political imp performance also manifests in how any performance May perpetuate hegemonies and power hierarchies in this way even when artwork or music performance is said
to be not political un intentional Dimensions may become visible when the performance is viewed critically and in broader sociocultural contexts therefore it is better to engage with the political contingencies in music professionalism already as part of the studies rather than try to maintain a pretended de political stance on music when we acknowledge and embrace the political ontology within music performance new questions emerge for higher music education should the students follow prescrip
ted institutional Norms of musicianship uh or per performance practices or should they proactively challenge them should the teachers support students who want to change these Norms as part of their artistic growth should the leaders protect the institution from critical sociopolitical issues or actively disturb the status quo within the institution in this project we will explore the ways in which all academic artistic and pedagogical thinking and action within higher music education programs u
navoidably intertwine with the ecological social and political events outside the university in the the world where the students live their everyday lives and where they will serve society as future professionals artists and citizens hence the task of higher music education is not only to provide the highest level of disciplinary tuition but also to connect education with societal political and Global dimensions and tensions hopefully today's presentation performances and discussions will suppor
t envisioning this endeavor together by asking questions and embracing possibilities towards new professionalism and next it is my great pleasure to introduce our first keynote speaker Professor Gert biesta Gert biesta is one of the most prominent education theorists of our time he's a professor of public education at the center of public education and pedagogy May North University Ireland and a professor of educational theory and pedagogy at the mor house school of education and Sport Universit
y of Edinburgh UK he's known for his philosophical work on the relationship between education and democracy and the public role of Education as well as the current positioning of teaching and teachers within Society a couple of years back we started a collaboration with a group of international music education researchers and ger biesta and the results of this collaboration will be out quite soon in the upcoming book The transformative politics of music education in today's talk Professor biesta
will discuss public pedagogy in music and music education as a way to find a middle ground in the spectrum of the considerations of music and aesthetic music as aesthetic and music as political welcome good thank [Applause] you um good morning it's a nice place to be but of course the light uh shines only on me uh for now it's it's lovely to be here uh thanks very much for the invitation um it's I think as with music you can have a brilliant career but each time you step on the stage you still
have to make it work in that moment so let's see uh what what we can do uh this morning [Music] um I've got a a long title public pedagogy and music music education on attention plurality and the fear of teaching and when I came up with that title I thought I I need to leave many options open and not yet decide what I will talk about and then of course when I started working on the presentation I was thinking how can I bring this all together um so I think it's also really good that this is the
start of a a four-year project um because there are some really big questions on the table um challenging questions how to understand the political nature of musicianship how much do educational programs make space for societal engagement within music education and what then is this whole idea of public pedagogy um so yeah it as I said it's good that we are at the start of a long exploration of these questions so I'll I'll share a few of my own U thoughts on this and hopefully they are helpful f
or the the f of work um I do work in education and see myself as an educationalist so I will pursue an educational angle and and see how far we get with that um it starts with the the question that toiki also refer to what is this relationship between music and and politics um and also in the book we I think I need to point there um we use a very helpful distinction between political music and politicized music uh I always forget which one is which but the the distinction is an important one um
because you can say one way in which to connect um music with politics is to use music to advance particular agenda um ideologies now when the agendas sound good you can say yeah that's worthwhile doing what can music contribute to social justice inclusion democracy but we know that that's not the only way in which music and and the political and values have been connected uh music also does great work for nationalism for exclusions xenophobia uh there is fascist Aesthetics that that also um doe
s very problematic things with music so you can say this is a way in which you politicize music but then music itself very quickly begins to disappear but taking music itself seriously and for me that has also been one of the important insights in in coming to Helsinki and and working with you to take music seriously doesn't mean that there is nothing political at stake and that's the other important term now when I was working on this I was summarizing that by saying don't forget that music is
not just aesthetic in the narrow sense but then I was thinking wait a minute actually music should be aesthetic because when I hear the word aesthetic I always also hear another word anesthetic and for me these two words indicate something where you can say if music is aesthetic it's it has a quality of Awakening the senses whereas if music is an static it just produces Slumber and disattention and for me here there is an important educational theme which is also political theme and what I want
to do in my talk is to pursue this educational theme and show how it also has political significance that's the plan but to see that the the idea of Aesthetics as opposite to anesthetic as a political and an educational theme very helpfully brings the idea of public pedagogy into the conversation because the the literature that uses the idea of public pedagogy is precisely intended to show interconnections between education and the political now when you look at that literature um there is a qui
te big literature on public pedagogy that uses this idea as an analytical category by pursuing this question how media culture Society function as educative forces um how they shape ways of thinking being and doing uh and a lot of the analysis here also highlights how a lot of this is happening behind our backs uh Henry shiru in in North America has done an awful lot of work here particularly analyzing popular culture and saying what actually are the messages that that are emerging here and how
are they in a sense teach people uh whether they know it or or not as an educator I'm interested in another dimension of public pedagogy public pedagogy as a programmatic idea you could say as a way of doing education but not doing education within educational institutions but you can say doing education on the street doing education in the public sphere and that raises the question that you also already introduced what does that mean for musicianship if you think of musicianship through public
pedagogy um and ask um how musicians you can say might do education in the public sphere how music can be a form of public pedagogy um and that's an interesting question I think it it gets at least in one way to the whole question of the the political and the political performative in relation to music but then the question is is it desirable to do education and here I want to play a little but also show some ideas about this whole question of how how desirable is it to to educate first of all t
o educate and then to educate in the public sphere and how possible is it and here when I look at the history of this discussion and it has quite a long history um I noticed something which here I call dctop phobia um which is just a funny word for the the fear of teaching and I think there is actually quite a long history where people have doubts about the educational gesture the teacherly gesture they have doubts about the possibility of that gesture and they have doubts about the desirability
of that gesture is it a good thing to do and can it be done and I want to to take that up a little bit um one big doubt in the history of education is Socrates who uh on the one hand is often referred to as as a very interesting teacher but then Socrates says I cannot teach anybody anything and he says I can only make them think and probably you've heard of Socratic teaching or you've known examples of that where Socrates is in a conversation and he asked all these kind of little questions ques
tions to the student and then at some point there is a conclusion now when you see how Socrates actually does that I think we shouldn't trust Socrates on his word because through this strategy of all these little questions he always gets the student where he wants the student to go so it's actually quite a a strange thing to say catric teaching is very open it's a very particular strategy but here already you can see some doubts and hesitations about is teaching actually possible but also is it
desirable what's happening here another really important voice in this discussion is Paulo frerin who is known for explicitly connecting education and the political his fear of teaching I would say is also a fear of the teacher or the position of the teacher his I think most influential book pedagogy of the oppressed is for example known of the critique of what he calls banking education where he says what is bad education that is where we simply sort of think that as teachers we can deposit kno
wledge or information in our students and that is all we should do uh just as he said says we put money in a bank we think that education is to put knowledge into students and he not only doubts whether that is possible but he also says as soon as we do that the student can only exist there as an object for us as teachers and therefore he makes quite a strong statement where he says education must be begin with the solution of the teacher student contradiction so he calls it a contradiction the
teachers and students are together but that the teacherly gesture seems to be one where the teacher is in control and the student disappears he says we should do that by reconciling the polls of the contradiction if you can sort of follow what he has in mind so that both are simultaneously teachers and students um how I understand far is that he says actually I feel very uncomfortable in the the teacher position in opposition to students and I think we should mix these roles but again you can se
e there is a fear of teaching here it can go even further in Germany in the 1960s a whole movement emerged called anti- pedagogic anti-education they were not only critical of teaching but they said the whole idea of education is f we need to get rid of it this is the famous book from eart from Brown students are uping their studies on the abolishment of Education um and these these people were really quite radical so they said we no longer want schools but of course we still have children and w
e need to do something with children so they actually started up in Berlin something called Kinder Laden children shops they call them where sort of children could go so that there weren't too much of a nuisance during the day um it's quite worrying when you read the um the stories of these children uh when they grew up and they they said this was not a very heal helpful way to to enter the the world this is a nice poster that says education should not happen here at shb um so this this fear of
teaching this fear of education is quite prominent now just as an aside to have a more complete picture there are also people who actually have no fear of education at all they go in the opposite direction and one recent example of that which I find quite stupid to be honest can I say that yeah um it's called direct instruction which is going through a number of countries at the moment in the Netherlands a lot of people are very excited about it and they just say if teachers just do their job an
d do it well explicit intensive focus on the material keep things going then everything will be fine and you can say yeah everything will be fine but what actually will be fine this only makes sense and only it makes a little bit of sense if we think that as teachers we already know where students should end up now if that's the only job of Education I think education itself becomes very trivial so what is happening in this whole discussion and I'm going into the discussion because my my questio
n is can musicianship be thought as an educational gesture and a political gesture the whole fear of teaching comes out of a a concern that teaching is a process of control and some people say yes that's a fantastic idea we need more control in educ ation we need more control in schools and I see that uh a lot where people make this case uh the whole neoliberal education machine to to put it quickly goes in that direction by saying we need to have clear learning outcomes and then we need to have
effective methods to go there and to measure everything but the people who I think understand education because they have been in classrooms and they know that education never works if we just make it into a an attempted control they say teaching as control is the very thing that education should not aim for because as Educators we should be interested in the freedom of our students to put it very blunt bluntly every teacher wants to get rid of their students in the good sense that they want th
eir students to lead their own life to do their own stuff they are temporarily there but then you have to say to students it's over to you um so this DCT ofilia this idea that we should think of teaching as control I think is only it occupies a very small area of Education I think for driving lessons it's fine that we work clearly toward towards a predefined outcome and we do that fast and quick that's fine but uh a cilia Academy is not a driving school it has a completely different quality or s
hould it should have it so dcto uh I think I've made my own mistake here so dctop phobia is the limit case of education and you can say DCT ofilia the fear of teaching is of course an understandable response to this idea of teaching as control but it is a a response that has problems because it gets in sort of a black and white or a a binary um and therefore something disappears you could say it throws out the baby with the bath water and this has something to do with the fact that the the big r
esponse to teaching as control is to say let's turn to learning and this has been going on a lot over the past decades I've coined a word for it the learn ification of Education which you can see at least at a level of the the change in language that students are called Learners schools learning environments classes learning communities teachers facilitators of learning adult education lifelong learning so this whole rise of of a a language and a and a logic of and a focus on learning has been o
ne response to the fear of teaching as control and what you see in that development is that teachers begin to to disappear uh there was a lot of critique of the the teacher as the sage on the stage which Rhymes nicely uh and then some people say now the teacher should become a guide at the side and then I heard a nice one who said now the teacher should become the peer at the rear so you see the teacher disappearing and you can begin to wonder also physically what kind of empty space that actual
ly leaves this move is based on the assumption that teaching can only be controll and that if we get rid of teaching that we will have learning and that learning is is freedom um and what I find remarkable and still these are steps to work towards this this point is that so quickly this opposition is created that teaching must be a matter of control and that therefore learning must be a matter of freedom but when I look at a lot of um how shall I call it leari education systems um schools that s
ay It's All About Learning I also don't see a lot of freedom because learning itself becomes a task and a demand for children and young people but for me the question is can teaching occupy a different position than just the position of control and that is important for the public pedagogy of music because if we can only think of pedagogy as a form of control then music becomes a a problem in that sphere um I mean these are all my questions so I just hope that you find them interesting but one b
ook I published a couple of years ago is precisely meant to to say there must be a third option in which we ReDiscover teaching differently so the question is is there a different teacherly gesture conceivable I think there is and one way to get into that is is with this little story um which comes from a a scholar in Germany D Benner who I rate very highly um and he has written an influential book algam pedagogic sort of a book an introduction to the whole field of education and at the beginnin
g of the book he asks a really fundamental question does education make a difference does the work we do as teachers and Educators does it add anything does it is is it of significance but he asks that question in a a very intriguing way um because he says we know that human beings are living beings natural beings so they are born with talents and capacities and and potential we also know that human beings grow up in Social and cultural environments that have a big impact on how they develop and
and grow and become so he says there is a nature part and there is a nurture part and then he asks and what about education what does the work of Education add to that and you can play with percentages or fractions and say what what percentage should we put on each of those you could say we should each have a fair share but that's not how it works in the universe and over time you see different views there are times when people are very optimistic about education so they would put a high percen
tage there there were times that people say actually the social environment is tremendously influential I think over the last decades a lot of literature pushes to the nature side and say it's a lot lot of it is already genetically preprogrammed and we can do a little but not that much so if you see what what Banner is asking um he comes up with a a really interesting answer and I want to show that in a minute um but I often use two little vignettes to to give it a a bit more depth um um the fir
st is this one this is Rosa Parks who uh in 1953 or 54 boarded a bus in Lincoln Alabama and in the bus were these signs I don't know whether you can read it white forward colored rear uh and the story is that when she was asked as a color person to move to the back of the bus that she refused to do so now I do quite a lot of policy work in education and big policy discussions in many countries are very much influenced by Pisa and Finland also has a troubled history with with Pisa I think and out
of that frame we often hear the first task of all education is to make sure that children can read and they you can say this is very odd because there is a very clear message in in the bus but Rosa Parks doesn't pick up the message so something must have gone wrong here Rosa Parks cannot read so she must be a case of educational failure that would be the pizza way of thinking about it and this is my other little vignette this is AD of Amman who was responsible for the logistics of the concentra
tion camps very bizarre job if you think of it he fled to South America and then was caught by the mosat and brought to Jerusalem and put on trial and one interesting thing about amman's Trial is that when he was asked Amman are you responsible for the consequences of your work he said no I'm not responsible because I was only following the orders of the people above me and I was acting according to the values of the Society of was living and there you can say here we have the perfect citizen th
is is educational success someone who obeys all the rules and lives to the values of society and again when you look at big discussions about citizenship education it often says this we need to teach young people the values of our society and the the rules and regulations now these two fettes are interesting in light of what Banner is is saying to his own question the question what is the contribution of education does education make a difference um AB gives a remarkable answer where he says we
can disagree about the percentages but nature and nurture together are always 100% um you can say that's true for Rosa Parks and for out ofma they are the outcome of a particular mix of Nature and nurture and there is something odd about this the first time I read it I was confused because I thought he is a professor of Education writing a book on education but where is education but the Brilliance of uh of Ben's answer is that he says as Educators we are interested in a different question not a
question of this mix of Nature and nurture which of course exists is deniable but our question is how out of that mix that works differently in each of us an I can be called forward and he says the question of education is therefore of a different order and I find that helpful in also to to see that teaching can exist in a very different terrain from control of or just letting everything go so here Banner is pointing at teaching a teacherly gesture a pedagogical gesture that sort of cuts throug
h all the discussions about development and growth and cultivation he uses again a very nice German phrase where he says teaching is an an act of what he calls Al gu which literally translates as a summoning to self action that is not to say to students just be yourself and be happy with that but it's to to say be a self be a subject not an object be a person or in very simple language the teacherly gesture that is is talking about is one where we knock on the door of our students and we ask is
anyone there and that question is anyone there that suddenly flips how we can look at ihon and Parks because the most remarkable thing I still find about ihon is that when he was asked you carry responsibility he said no because there is no one here I am just a function of my Society I'm just a function of the orders I get but I occupy no place in it and parks in a sense did the opposite by saying look I understand how this Society works I know where they want me to go I know that if I stay put
I will get arrested but here here am I and I no longer want to be part of such an order um and here you can begin to see that if you you have another sense of the educational question then suddenly it gains a a very important political significance I would say someone else who understands this well it's a beautiful quote I came across is seninsky who in an interview um early in the war he was offered the opportunity to to leave the Ukraine and then he says if I left Ukraine I would be alive but
I would no longer be a person and to to work with that distinction to say of course yeah I I can be alive but when I walk away from this this question that has been thrown into my my life and I walk away from that I deny my own personhood my own existence as subject so the fact that the word person appears here is interesting because a person is very different from an individual in the the literature in education person is defined as the way in which the individual tries to exist and then you ca
n say if we are only concerned about this mix of nature and nurture we are only interested in how students become individuals with their talents with their skills but if we bring in this other educational question there is still the further question what will each individual do with how they have become how will they try to exist so this for me is the the different teacherly gesture that does something different in education than just to say either teaching is control or teaching is something we
um should leave behind and just turn everything to learning now it is important to see that precisely this question of what our students will do with their lives what the students will do with all the knowledge in the skills and the things they have acquired that is a question for them that's not the work we can do for them so the teacherly gesture here is never one that can produce the personhood or the subjectness of students German scholar says this very nicely the self is the work of the se
lf and that both sounds very simple but I think also very profound that's the work for each of us to to figure out so the question is is there anything we can do in this domain you can say do we have possibilities as Educators to bring this question into play to bring it to the attention of our students and here again another little idea is that you can think of should we develop very particular curricula or activities but it starts at a much more simple level because it has something to do that
can be found in the form of teaching and again someone uh recently commented on my work and and said you always refer to Germans um so here is another scholar from Germany but I think in Germany they they get something of these these questions um class BR who has written really important work in which he says everything in education starts with the form of teaching and the most basic form of teaching is that teaching is an act of pointing the German word is saon which you can translate both as
pointing and showing but you can say in pointing to something you try to show something he even says very nicely that therefore teaching is manual labor in German hunt Weare you need a hand you need a finger to point so he says if you don't like the finger you shouldn't become a teacher and of course we have this finger but we also have this finger so what is in the act of pointing you can say it has something to do with attention with trying to capture the attention of of students and we have a
lot of technology to capture attention this room is a wonderful example of an attention machine you could say because it's very uncomfortable to turn around and sit in the other way in your chair so it all goes here we also have a a system called PowerPoint where we have the word Point as well so it's interesting that we have all that to capture the attention now of course we are all free human beings so we can take care of our own attention but the only thing that we cannot do ourselves is to
to move our attention in a way in which we're not going and that's another way to think about what is teaching that's the art to redirect someone's attention to say to a student yes you're you're going wonderfully in that direction but wait a minute have you ever thought of taking some steps in that direction have you ever thought of paying some attention to that that you can say is the form of teaching um and there was always a double gesture in it because it's never just to say look there but
it also goes back and say you look there you look there you go there you spend time with this so pointing that sense points both to the world outside of the student and back to the student so of course we can fill this with curricula with activities with with programs but at the heart of it lies this form of teaching as a matter of redirecting someone's attention now P says teaching focuses attention and you can see teachers are really good at that he is a bit more strict and says teaching also
demands attention and you could say yeah we shouldn't waste our time when we get together in education so there is a demand but p is also absolutely clear that as teachers we can never enforce the attention of our students and we can never control their attention so even is if everyone is sort of looking at the same screen what you're doing with that I have no idea and I also am not interested in that in a very fundamental sense because if we want to go that close then very quickly teaching come
s back and becomes an enactment of control um because yeah if you want to control the attention you need to begin by fixing the head of the student for example which already looks awful there are also researchers who do eye tracking research and they say we need to track where the eyes of the students are going and I think that that is unethical to begin with and therefore you can say pointing is a weak technology an open technology and that matters because it means that in the gesture of pointi
ng there is already a concern for the freedom of the student and again this is beautiful about what P does that he says freedom is not some kind of value that we need to put on education to say it matters he says just look when teaching happens there is always this this openness and that's really important there now freedom is a big word um used and abused a lot so what kind of Freedom are we talking about not I think the freedom to just do what you want to do that would be odd to to say as a te
acher yes I I try to catch your attention onto something and then I don't care that would be just a step too far you can say in the this teacherly gesture there is an invitation to to use your freedom to attend to the world that comes to your attention and then you can say what is this world well that world is not just a set of opinion what happens in the world matters and may ask something of us and for me to to bring that question at the heart of education is quite important as well so this is
not an easy Freedom that comes into play leinas uh calls it a difficult freedom because it's the the freedom to do what only I can do and I find that a Fant fantastic phrase um if you want to remember anything from this morning maybe that's a good one but is this freedom to do what only I can do in all this and that's I think my my final point it really matters that we understand that education has a triadic or triangular structure that are always three elements um needed a teacher a student an
d you can say something that is in the attention and this for me helps to explain what the problem is with with the the fear of teaching and the turn towards learning because that always thinks that education is a dietic staging with only two partners in the room a teacher and a student now if that's the staging then of course either the teacher and s in this control position where FR also says I I don't want to be there as a teacher or the other option is that you say remove the teacher and let
's just learn together but you can say the beauty of of not forgetting that education has these three elements is that teacher and student attend to something and the something that comes to the attention that you could say is what really matters you could say if there is any Authority in a classroom it's never the authority of the teacher because that ends up in power and in big problems but it's the authority of the thing that is on the table the thing that asks for our attention if you want t
o read a book about that um I've developed these ideas in a book called World centered education where I say that's where the center of Education should be in that what we try to to bring to our attention so that then brings me back to public pigor and I I hope you can sort of see the odway in which I try to move to uh back to the question where I started because if if we ask is there a a performative politics in in music is the work of music not just music but has it got an an educational poten
tial can there be an educational gesture that is also a political gesture you can now begin to see that that maybe public pedagogy can can speak to that in work I've done in the past I've made a distinction between three different sort of forms of public pedagogy or three ways in which you can interpret public pedagogy so I want to contribute that as well just to put it on the table and see is that useful one form of public pedagogy is what I call pedagogy for the public and I would say this is
bad public pedagogy so I've already given it away that is to think that the the Public Act of pedagogy should be a matter of instruction and control it's telling the public how it should be how it should think how it should act um and of course we see that a lot I see a lot in in in schools is citizenship education that says we need to teach these young children how to be and to think and and to act but it's always a gesture of control politicians do that as well in the direction of society acti
vists can do that in all kind of of ways but it always comes with a too strong message that says it should be like this or you should be like that and what it does immediately it it erases plurality it says there's only one way to go it therefore erases The public's fear because it says you don't need this fear to be in conversation just follow the the message and therefore it undermines Democratic politics so if this is public pedagogy you can say there is nothing pedagogical in nothing public
in it now you can go to a different modality which I called pedagogy of the public and I see palera moving here for example and other people who say yes let's base it on communities and collective learning processes um and you see a lot of this also happening in relation to questions of plurality and diversity and differ to say these are learning questions we need to learn about the other we need to learn from the other what you see happening there and it's not entirely bad but still I I worry a
bout this um you see that that democracy is brought under a a regime of of learning so it begins to say in order to to act and exist democratically and politically there is a learning task for you to do one problem here is that it gives up on pedagogy it says actually pedagogy has no role it's just the public that learns to get I also wonder whether all Democratic problems are actually learning problems so there is a discussion to be had there and hopefully in the project you will explore some o
f this uh as well and you can even say does learning actually lead to democratic action or Democratic being uh because there is quite a lot of literature on learning about the other learning from the other um but some of that learning has has no effect in the domain of politics so therefore the the idea of public pedagogy that I self find most attractive is to say it's not instruction it's not learning but it's it's work that's interested in publicness there you can say it takes py seriously but
precisely not as an act of control but what I've tried to do my talk is to say there is a different pedagogical gesture a different teacherly gesture precisely this Al TOA this Al this invitation this summoning to attend to the world and to keep coming back to the question okay if if we manage to focus our attention what's the question we're facing there that for me is what I had in mind when on the second slide I said we should take Aesthetics seriously because Aesthetics in opposition ition t
o anesthetics is first of all an educational move our job is to to keep our students awake you could say it's also a democratic move because democracy requires that we don't fall asleep and I think it's an artistic move if we understand the power of the art in this kind of aesthetic way and then I keep coming back to another little sentence I carry with me it's from an essay by marber Martin bber on education where he says what's the task of education and he's not saying it's to make sure that y
our country scores high in pza it's he says to to maintain the pain and to arouse the desire and again this is quite mysterious it's a little symtoms that as a I said I carry it with me that's been carry with me for years to maintain the pain is is is one way precisely to work in the domain of Aesthetics to say yes life can be hard existence can be painful but that's the whole point of existing and if we take that pain away then in a sense we take the existence out of Education out of the classr
oom out of the world and at the same same time he says our work is also that of arousing a desire for wanting to be there to wanting to live our lives together in this complex and and messy world and for me this this gives much more layers to this rather strict notion of Al for the summoning to to be a s to not forget yourself so there are all kind of of qualities that need to come into play um BR bre also understands something from it so I finish with a quote from him where he says the modern t
heater mustn't be judged by its success in satisfying the AUD audience's Habits by by its success in transforming them and I would say the same about the modern School the modern school should not be a place where we just satisfy students as customers the the key question for education is always whether the the desires and the habits that students have whether they are worth pursuing or whether they need to be reconsidered and transformed and the same with this it needs to be questions not about
whether it manages to interest The Spectator in buying a ticket just to have an interest in the performance but it must be questions about what it manages to interest The Spectator in the world and for me this goes back to the idea that ultimately the center of our attention is there and I think that there is a teacherly gesture a pedagogy a public pedagogy that can do that and therefore can cut through this unhelpful either we fear teaching or we love teaching there is a third option that's as
far as I got with my own Reflections so I hope they are a bit helpful but again I have uh great confidence in the next four years in order to deepen and broaden and and get Precision in this uh complicated but I think really important discussion so thanks for paying your attention to all this for now thank [Applause] you
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