null Gert Biesta guest lecture "Trying to be at home in the world"



 

Time: Monday, the 28th January 2019, at 5 PM
Place: National Museum, Auditorium (Mannerheimintie 33, Helsinki)


Trying to be at home in the world: Education, equality and the arts ‘beyond learning’

Professor Gert Biesta: "Policy makers all around the world are keen to put education under pressure so that it can produce the measurable learning outcomes needed to prove which education systems perform ‘best.’ While somewhere in this there is a social justice agenda that aims to provide everyone with the best education possible, this original intention appears to have been lost and has, in many instances, made education more cynical rather than more meaningful. The way to counter this, perhaps, is not with more policy, more measurement and more pressure, but through a return to the questions that do not go away – questions that have to do with how we try to live together well on a planet that is rapidly becoming exhausted, questions about how we can try to be ‘at home in the world,’ as the political thinker Hannah Arendt has put. In my presentation I will return to this existential challenge, and will ask what it mean for education and the arts ‘beyond learning.’"
 
Gert Biesta is Professor of Public Education at the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy of Maynooth University Ireland and Professor for Education at the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands. His work focuses on the theory of education, with a specific interest in questions of democracy and democratisation. Recent books include The Rediscovery of Teaching (Routledge 2017) and Letting Art Teach (ArtEZ Press 2017).