Under (progressive) neoliberal reform, a form of “deschooling” is already manifest, albeit not of the liberatory form that Ivan Illich (1971) was envisioning in the early 1970s. The notion of “lifelong learning” too has similarly transformed from that prior historical moment (pace UNESCO, 1972). In this historical moment, according to UNESCO’s (2021) Reimagining our Futures Together: A new social contract for education, we need to double down and reinvest in strong, publicly funded systems of education as one part of the solution to the multiple global crises humanity faces. We agree. Admittedly tensions remain on the nationalistic agendas with regards to schooling, as well as with regards to the purview of schooling for broadening the family’s or cultural group’s ideological orientations. Indeed, these tensions and conflicts over national schooling indicate that forging a “new social contract” for education is a deeply political process rather than an educational one. We understand the “new” in UNESCO’s “new social contract for education” as collectively forging a present-day consensus on the importance and characteristics of education to more substantively face the old and new challenges, opportunities, and crises facing humanity. Our focus in this paper is on the meaning and purpose of education in the domain of schooling children and youth, on “upholding the educational in education”.

The report highlights (1) the lack of access to quality education for a significant proportion of children and youth, and (2) public schooling’s current tendency to advance, rather than intervene in, deepening global crises. Both of these problems, we argue, can be addressed by prioritizing education’s “function” as Hannah Arendt (2006) understands it in her prescient essay “The Crisis of Education”, written in the early 1950s. That purpose or function is “to teach children what the world is like” (p. 192) so that they develop the understandings, capacities, and commitments for informed political actions and judgements as citizens, so as to sustain and renew a world that is perpetually in need of repair. At the same time, we cannot (naively) expect education, particularly under the diminishment of the political (Topolski, 2008), to act as a strong force (like a hammer) for fixing complex global crises facing humanity.

We agree with educationalists who recognize that education as educational is inherently “weak” and existentially “risky” (Biesta, 2015; Di Paolantino, 2018; Tarc, 2007). Di Paolantino (2018) provides a caution against deploying “strong language” in educational discourse:

Believing that education miraculously will correct or offer the answer to problems which society itself has failed to properly remedy (such as ensuring economic prosperity for all, fixing unemployment, creating social justice), we quickly come to feel betrayed and turn away in disgust from education. Our “strong language” of education actually sets us up to judge education according to a language and set of criteria foreign to education, consequently impoverishing our thinking about the educational in education. (p. 55)

In rethinking and reorganizing schooling to align with the vision of “Reimagining our Futures Together” (UNESCO, 2021), it would be self-defeating to advance an “impoverished” understanding of “the educational in education”. Indeed, this impoverished understanding remains one of the great challenges of governing in the caring professions such as education. The rational and data-driven modes of governing educational systems are dramatically distinct from the (temporal) qualities of practices of caring (serving and teaching). While a “strong language” of education is rhetorically powerful and has its political uses, the “educational in education” has to work at the level of one-on-one relations that take time to build. Practices of educating children and youth transcend “covering the curriculum” and instrumental learning. Indeed, a new imaginary and “educational” sensibility is called for, given that our efforts as educators do not guarantee predictable outcomes.

We concur that without a new imaginary and social contract for education and indeed without a coming together around collective human and planetary goods to forge an agreement to take responsibility for children and for the world as adults (Arendt, 2006), it is difficult to challenge the neoliberal, instrumental, and politicized meanings and uses of schooling. Why would parents, for example, want their children’s schooling to be muddled by the state’s or special interests’ ideals and hopes that could diminish their children’s capacity to compete in the schooling-career trajectory? Without solidarity or a common hope, neoliberal performativity represents the lowest common bases for transactional uses of schooling (Tarc, 2012). Yes, teaching and curriculum can creatively and/or compellingly engage students so that their years of schooling are more interesting and individually empowering. Still, the hidden and informal curricula, which is tied to the social class filtering role of schooling/assessment, end up steering (the more privileged) students’ subjectivities toward being smart and caring consumers and competent future job seekers.

The priority and ubiquity of privileging learning over teaching and education (Biesta, 2010) lends itself to the individuated neoliberal regime. It ultimately leads to a diminishment of the essence of education and how it might play a role educationally in making a more just and sustainable world. Lifelong and lifewide and child-centered learning are certainly compelling elements of surviving and thriving in complex post-industrial societies. But these too have obscured the more expansive and generative sense that the educational can play in education. And indeed this obscurity risks neutralizing the timely and very significant call that UNESCO (2021) makes in the name of humanity proactively acting to steer our collective futures, via a “new social contract for education”.

Concerns for social, economic, and environmental justice are vital and overdue in debates on schooling and school curricula. Education should be motivated by the ethical imperative that schooling contribute to increased societal and planetary sustainability and justice. But the question of how education can contribute in schooling tends to collapse to the level of student learning and (misplaced) notions of “acting” (Tarc, 2015). Missing is attention to deliberation on the “educational” in education/schooling. As a loose term, education comes to mean almost anything and everything related to human interaction and change. In a context of a dominant “learnification” (Biesta, 2010) wholly translatable to “market preferences”, we lose significant attention on and study of the actual and desirable essence and qualities of educating children. On the one hand, rhizomatic, ubiquitous learning without an ethical mooring (soon to be—perhaps already—more efficiently organized by AI than human educators) has come to stand in for education. On the other, the heroic demands on education to “make a difference” also lose sight of the essence of education.

The “educational” in education cannot be instrumentalized into a blunt object that can smash injustice or ecologically destructive capitalism. Educationally speaking, there is no shortcut to cultivating students as “change agents” for just futures, without their first developing a deep understanding of our shared histories, knowledges, and traditions, compelling and catastrophic as they are. Similarly, it is unlikely that students can become critical thinkers and committed to thinking via pedagogies that deny their autonomy for dissent, exploration, understanding, and even lingering and waiting for the time it takes to think something through. With Arendt, we understand schooling as a place of education, ideally buffered from politicization and the short-term flipping of political parties, to “prepare [students] in advance for the task of renewing a common world” (p. 193).

Society-wide commitments and investments must singly prioritize education over learning as a way to recalibrate the investments and resources to foster local, national, and global citizenship for (future) world making. Optimizing individual learning (and family class making) for all will always be beyond the state’s purview and capacity to realize. Trying to reduce the “learning gap” will continually fail as those with greater access to more resources will outcompete others in learning races or performances, as well as wield greater influence over the rules and metrics used to assess winners. Rancière’s (1991) critique is instructive; he explains how an assumption of (class) inequality constituting critical educational interventions to “reduce the gap” only re-instantiates that gap. Rather, the state must deliberatively invest in schools as places where an “education of the whole person” happens in an acknowledged socio-historical context. Adults as parents, community members, and school leaders need to work together to forge schools and curricula and pedagogies not as ends but as means to an education vested in the educational. This responsibility is an agonistic political process which involves conflict, dissensus, and ongoing dialogue, particularly on the ongoing question of what is worth learning to know to be educated.

However, the processes of becoming educated ought not to be conflated with politics. Adults are responsible for preserving the educational in education by taking responsibility for the world and not projecting their political projects (nor cynicism) onto the young. As Arendt states:

[The teacher’s] authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world [that they themselves did not make and may wish was other than it is]. Vis-à-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world. (p. 186)

Of course, education cannot happen without learning. As Arendt qualifies, “an education without learning is empty and therefore degenerates with great ease into moral-emotional rhetoric. But one can easily teach without educating…” (p. 192). Prioritizing the aim of schooling as educating over learning transforms the uses of learning from competition and capital accumulation to the (debated) requisite knowledge and skills required to study, understand, and debate pasts, presents, and human and planetary futures.

To educate requires that educators protect those places that afford the giving and spending time with children, passing on the collective and cultural stories and truths that become a basis to orient children’s literacies in a complex and troubled historically structured world. Teachers in real time mediate the relations of students to each other and to the shared curriculum. They introduce children to the world, beyond the institution of the family, so that they will have the knowledge, skills, and commitments to take responsibility for the world, and the next generation, when their time comes.

Further, we resonate with UNESCO’s (2021) acknowledgment of the fundamental importance of the teacher and their emphasis on collaborative teacher praxis. In the “Transformative Work of Teachers” chapter, the report states:

Teachers’ work as knowledge producers and pedagogical pioneers must be recognized and supported, assisting them to document, share, and discuss relevant research and experience with their fellow educators and schools in formal and informal ways. (p. 150)

The starting point for fostering the educational of education in schooling is teacher autonomy and eliminating the pattern of working in isolation. “It takes a village” to teach a class; it is a plural-singular activity. Further, if schooling is to “make a difference” as aligned with the discursive commitments, but in its actual and slow way, the “knowledge production”, “pioneering”, and collaboration also need to be oriented by the aim of educating over delivering the curriculum or techniques of pedagogy as ends. Beyond collaborating on the techniques, teachers need to inquire into and collaborate into their ways of building relations in the classroom, of engendering truth telling and truth searching and indeed of examining curricular connections to existential questions of reading, expressing, and living in our beautiful but deeply troubled world.

A new social contract needs to be clear on purpose. Governments will have to invest significantly in teachers and in teacher education. Beyond this necessary piece, schooling cannot be dependent upon the latest (expensive) technology, an uninterrupted global supply chain, and the next novelty (as panacea). Education requires building relations between adults and children in physical sites through caring rituals of being and studying together, with teachers attentive to the emotional lives of their students and their/our existential and spiritual singular-plural significance. It requires that teachers take responsibility to be worldly and knowledgeable (across all levels, from local community and families to multilateral networks like UNESCO) so as to have the capacity to lead students to understand and make their lives in communion with local as well as more distant others.

Education ultimately provides the young with the existential calibrators to shape and use their “learning” (pre-curricular, curricular, extracurricular), as they so choose, for world-making activities that can advance social, economic, and environmental justice. So, while human learning proliferates in multiple directions independent of existential mooring and will continue to be unevenly optimized by technological innovation and digital connectivity, education ultimately requires committed teachers who can spend time with and socio-emotionally support children’s coming into an understanding of the world and their relations with others, which can give meaning and significance to their lives as part of larger collectives attempting to sustain and renew a common world.