The Future of Education

In The Beautiful Risk of Education (2013) Gert J.J. Biesta describes how Western educational systems are increasingly becoming a landscape of control and assessment; a development produced by “a desire to make education strong, secure, predictable and risk-free”. Against this strong view, Biesta argues for “weak” one, focusing the unpredictable, the unknown – i.e. “the risk” – as primary feature of an education worthy of its name. Education, Biesta emphasizes, isn’t only qualification and socialization, but also subjectification, defined as a social event of recognition and responsibility in relation to the Other. Such events, which according to Biesta are crucial to the creation of real citizenship and a functional democratic society, are suppressed in the dominant strong views and practices of the learning industry on the rise, where teaching is, explicitly and implicitly, conceptualized as a process aimed at producing something given beforehand. The key to break the trend, Biesta declares, is a weaker attitude, where the risk of education is embraced as a beautiful one, and where teaching, in this sense, is set forth as “the giving of a gift the teacher doesn’t possess”. What part, then, can the reading of fictional narratives in education play, if you accept Biesta’s argument? On the basis of an identification of some distinctive characteristics of the Otherness of fictional narratives, we will discuss the question of why and how reading and discussing such stories can make room for events of recognition and responsibility in the classroom, and thus counterbalance current tendencies of harsh instrumentalization. To this end, our ambition is to outline didactic perspectives and teaching practices consciously oriented towards a beautiful, riskful future of literary education.