Introduction: The Accelerating Reality of Higher Education

Contemporary societies are increasingly confronted with problems of time-availability and the lack of it owing to what is labelled an acceleration process (Gibbs et al. 2014). Time and its supply have become urgent problems also in academic life as ‘the university is itself now a 24/7 setting and a speeded-up world’ (Gibbs et al. 2014, p.4). Criticism of this process has largely concentrated around neoliberalist higher education (HE) policies (e.g., Bennett & Burke, 2018; Clegg 2010; Gibbs et al. 2014; Meyerhoff et al. 2011; Mountz et al. 2015). Universities have been criticized for inhabiting an increasingly economic and market-based logic that risks them losing their intellectual purpose (e.g., Collini 2012), some central symptoms of which are the increased time-stress and time-poverty experienced in academia that is articulated in the need to perform better while having less time to do one’s work properly (Berg and Seeber 2016).

These efficiency-demanding time policies of HE have often been related to clock-time conceptions of temporality (e.g., Bennett & Burke, 2018; Clegg 2010; Gibbs et al. 2014). Clock-time is seen to relate to the Newtonian time-perspective, which presumes linearity, abstraction, rationality, and objectivity of time, and which stands in contradiction ‘to the contextual, irreversible temporalities of life and the multiple rhythmicities of nature’ (Adam 1998, p. 9). Clock time embodies Newtonian temporality, which serves as a means for commodification, compression, colonization, and control of time in politics, science, and economic life (Adam 2004). The future is conceived as an empty place to be colonized from the present (Adam 1998, 2004; Clegg 2010), leading to a situation in which the business of HE is to fill this future with research and degrees—the faster the better.

This Newtonian time has much to do with the conventional habit of equaling time with money (See Adam 1998; 2004; Pohjanen 2002), especially due to the argument that ‘only as an abstract, standardi[z]ed unit can time become a currency, a medium for exchange and a neutral value in the calculation of efficiency and profit’ (Adam 1998, p.65). This is evident in the economics viewpoint, according to which utility is not only a function of commodities but also of the time allocated to them: In addition to monetary constraints, individuals’ decisions are always subject to time constraints (DeSerpa 1971). Time’s value comes from its reducing nature which can be only rationed through time-savings but not by time-increments (Ibid). The narrative, so it goes, is that universities are in a process of acceleration, compelled by market-driven needs to make academic processes more time-efficient—an equation enabled by Newtonian (clock)time as an abstract duration convertible into a currency.

This development has met resistance especially in the form of popularity-gaining slow scholarship or slow science movements, which work to analyze, critique, and resist these cultures of speed in academia (e.g., Berg and Seeber 2016; Mountz et al. 2015; Stengers 2018). Whereas these discourses have generally been more prevalent in teaching and research work from an academic staff perspective, slow education is more about making time for proper studying and learning (e.g., Doghonadze 2016; Wear et al. 2015). The accelerative time politics of contemporary HE systems have been noted, for example, in degree durations becoming more restricted, with students being rewarded for faster completion of their studies and sanctioned for slower completions (Sarauw and Madsen 2020). Studying at a university has been criticized for becoming a game of increasingly competitive CV-building and earlier graduation as speed gains priority over all else (Mahon 2021). The problem becomes easily individualized into a personal problem of students, who tend to characterize their difficulties in managing these time demands as owing to a personal lack of time-management skills, diligence, or simply being lazy (Bennett & Burke, 2018). The study years are also intensified by other, competing aspects of student life, such as work and family, which can require heavy prioritization of one’s time during the study years.

In this paper, I re-address this problem of accelerating HE with a special emphasis on the Newtonian (clock)time and its relation to education. I will combine discussion concerning Newtonian temporality with educational theory and take on an integrative examination in terms of what kind of implications this temporal framework has on education. Briefly, I will define the subjective experience of time as change from uncertainty to evident and compare this experience to education, which I see as pedagogical influence to foster human growth. After addressing the problem of time in relation to education generally, I bring the problem to a more specific context of a teaching-studying-learning (TSL) process modeled by Uljens (1997). The rationale is that to understand education in its institutional contexts, we must first understand the basic underlying processes of human interaction which constitute these institutional processes. This insight forms the methodological principle applied in this paper.

With regards to the time pressures of HE, I share the concern of others that the efficiency-seeking HE policies can militate against what education is and could be. Biesta (2013) comments perceptively that the risk involved in the process of education should be accepted as belonging to it by nature and that attempts to make it ‘secure, predictable and risk-free’ signal a distinct impatience that risks losing sight of what education really is about. Biesta’s description reflects what Masschelein and Simons (2013; 2015) have previously called attempts to tame the school—one such attempt being to change schools into optimized production centers of faster accumulation of learning gains. Restricting degree times, piecing studies into time-based learning credits and introducing time-related incentives and sanctions to speed up studies are clear manifestations of policies that threaten the autonomy of education while translating it into a straightforward production process.

None of this is to say that our efforts to educate should be considered aimless or meaningless in themselves. Education, as I will argue, is an intentional, future-oriented process, and the fact that it is so should not be considered inimical to efforts to educate. Instead, while educating, the imperfection of an educator’s pedagogical interventions must first be accepted, since one can never be sure to what extent the students will achieve the intended aimsFootnote 1.

Where I differ from the previous critique is related to the ways in which many recent accounts have located the problem within the internal logic of the Newtonian-linear temporality. This criticism has often accompanied a list of alternative temporalities to save education from the accelerationist tendencies of HE. For example, Bennett and Burke (2018) apply a timescapeFootnote 2 perspective, arguing that students unable to meet the time demands of contemporary HE systems are not lacking ‘time-management skills’ but are instead inhabited by different, socially constructed timescapes which stand in gendered, racialized, and unequal relationships with the hegemonic timescapes of contemporary HE systems. Elsewhere, Meyerhoff and colleagues (2011) argue that the homogenous, empty time of capitalist logic should be changed into a more ‘eventful’ time in HE. The authors advocate for what they call the creative, expansive, and common Kairological time instead of chronos as the measurable time of capitalist accelerationist logic. In one more example, Westman and Alerby (2012) propose what they describe as a nonlinear, temporally ambiguous, and multi-layered ‘chiasmic be(com)ing’ time perspective for education, inspired by Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. In their view ‘…learning needs to be considered as a process of multiple and intertwined relationships within time and space, and children viewed as being involved in a chiasmic be(com)ing’ (Ibid., p.372).

This practice of re-theorizing time shown above and in other examples, cited later, continue to offer what are seen as alternatives to the dominant linear time consciousness in education. In doing so, they examine possibilities of reopening, scrutinizing, and countering the limitations of linear temporality in different educational contexts, often with good reason. However, an argument I outline in this paper is that instead of further re-theorizing and re-branding time, the initiatives of slowing down education from within the Newtonian-linear framework might turn out to be more successful in the long run for at least two important reasons. Firstly, I suggest that education as a process can be seen as implying linearity, without which the very idea of education is at risk of becoming inconceivable. Secondly, and building on the previous point, slowing down is a position easier to defend with respect to the accelerationist logic of contemporary HE systems because it operates from within the same temporal framework, recognizes the linear orientation of education and does not wholly discount its scarcity aspect.

To justify these statements, the current paper attempts to redefine the relationship between Newtonian (clock)time and education. It outlines possibilities for conceiving the relationship between linear temporality and education anew, obviating slippery-slope to an always more time-efficient production of research and diplomas. In the process, I will illustrate how a linear temporality can coexist with the rhythmicities, cyclicities, and uncertainties of human interaction characteristic of education, and that this might even be vital for sustaining a sensible idea of education and, furthermore, for making a difference in terms of the acceleration processes of contemporary HE. But first, let us begin with time.

Newtonian (Clock)time and the Experience of Past, Present, and Future

Though often connected with Isaac Newton (1623–1727 AD), the idea of linear temporality has been familiar in Western thinking already before his impact in natural philosophy. Perhaps the most notable example is Aristotle (384–322 BC), who defined time as ‘the number of motion in respect of ”before” and “after”’ (1991, p.70). Chronos, as he described it, was uniform, continuous, quantifiable, and measurable (Ibid.) and can therefore be regarded as an equivalent to the modern clock-time (Rämö 1999; See also Papastephanou, 2014). Thus, the logic of linear temporality was familiar in Western thinking already long before the publication of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687/2016) or the invention of the mechanical clock. The naturalistic conception of linear time was present also in the works of Newton’s mentor, Isaac Barrow (1630–1677 AD), who conceptualized time as a constant, quantitative continuance analogous to a line, relative to which motion is measured (See Barrow 1735). Newton later formalized this definition in Principia as the ‘[a]bsolute, true, and mathematical time,’ which exists ‘without reference to anything external’ and ‘flows uniformly and by another name is called duration’ (Newton, 1687/2016) , p. 54).

This naturalistic idea of time had prominent effects on different branches of European thinking throughout the next 200 years regardless of the school of thought. For example, when Immanuel Kant (1725–1804 AD) defined time as an a priori foundation to all intuitions, he presented it as a subjective, internal sense which enables us to locate phenomena in simultaneous and consecutive order (1781/2009). Though Kant emphasizes that this time is entirely subjective rather than something ‘absolute’ as the Newtonian conceptualization could lead one to presume, he retained time as a necessary precondition of temporal experience which we tend to represent as a dimensionally uniform linear continuum extending to eternity (See 1781/2009, p.91).

Speaking of analytical philosophy, perhaps the most influential example has been John McTaggart (1866–1925 AD), who proposed two possible qualities of time: Firstly, the dynamic A-series that implies the flow of time from past into future through the present and, secondly, the static B-series, which consists of relations between earlier and later that are in a permanent, non-changing distance from one another (McTaggart 1993). McTaggart insisted that time could only exist as an A-series, whereas the B-series is derivable from it (Ibid). McTaggart’s efforts to prove the internal contradictoriness and impossibility of time aside, his positioning of the problem is reminiscent of a Newtonian-linear framework.

As a third example from the phenomenological thinking tradition, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938 AD) considered time a consciousness-based phenomenon, in which the phases of futurity, presentness, and pastness are simultaneously present in our time-consciousness, constituting a metaphorical flow of time (Husserl, 1928/1991). This ‘absolute flow of inner time-consciousness’ constructs temporal objects, for example by integrating different tones into a coherent melody when listening to music (Ibid.). Despite placing the nodes of futurity, presentness and pastness parallel to each other, the Husserlian flow of time-consciousness also becomes structured into a linear continuum passing through the consciousness.

These examples highlight how the linear idea of time was prevalent in Western thinking until the Newtonian time conception was eventually refuted by Albert Einstein (1879–1955), who not only proved the interconnectedness of time and space but also the relativity of time to the location and speed of the observer (See Einstein 1924). Despite this major Copernican turn in theoretical physics, it has been noted in the critical literature that the Newtonian conception has persisted as our taken-for-granted understanding of time (e.g., Adam 2004; Pohjanen 2002). One reason for the persistence of the Newtonian (clock)time conception, which I offer as my initial hypothesis, is that it resonates with the commonplace experience of temporal division between pastness, presentness and futurity. I agree with Adam (2004, p. 69) that in everyday life the relative temporality of pastness, presentness, and futurity and the objective clock-time ‘coexist, interpenetrate and mutually implicate’ rather than exclude each other. There is intuitiveness in conceiving time as a passage through which uncertain and potential states of affairs turn into evident and permanent – that is, into the non-changeable and non-repeatable as they transcend through the present, which mediates all change to occur. Before justifying this view and its implications further, some critique posited to the Newtonian (clock)time especially by social theory points of view must be considered.

Simply put, it has been stressed that the Newtonian time does not represent any natural time and that it is merely a human convention (e.g., Pohjanen 2002), spurred by the invention of the mechanical clock, which led in turn to the idea of defining time according to a standard, mechanistic movement (Adam 2004; Pohjanen 2002). This clock-time has become increasingly contrasted by alternative conceptualizations of time that usually conceive it as something more qualitative, heterogenous, and non-uniform (e.g., Adam 1998, 2004; Crystal 2002; Pohjanen 2002; Withrow, 1989/1999), a practice which has become widespread in educational contexts as well (e.g., Bennett & Burke, 2018; Clegg 2010; Hogstad 2020; Meyerhoff et al. 2011; Westmann & Alerby, 2012). Clock-time has even been posited as a new ‘tyranny’, forcing constraint and social dependency in synchronizing human interaction (Pohjanen 2002).

Notable examples of these alternative temporalities include biological, circular temporalities, like the circadian rhythms, approximately 24-hour physiological periods embedded into the DNA of almost any higher organism on the planet (Kyriacou 2002). It is easy to see how life on earth has formed around these natural rhythms and cycles by adapting to celestial motions and availability of solar light. These cyclicities of nature can be seen to form a basis of cyclical time conceptions of many cultures, which several authors (e.g., Adam 1998, 2004; Luhmann 2013; Pohjanen 2002; Thapar 2002) habitually place in comparison to linear ones. Time conceived as cyclical challenges the seeming naturalness of the future-present-past trichotomy, while encouraging to see life’s temporality from a different, less Newtonian-essentialist light.

For some authors, however, it remains unclear whether there has ever been a culture in which an understanding of time would have been exclusively cyclical (Luhmann 2013). For example, European scholars used to consider the early Indian conception of time exclusively cyclical, though it has since been shown that linear time conceptions were also used on the side (Thapar 2002). Another common argument in these debates has been to point out that there are communities for which time would not exist in the same sense as it does for us, evidence for which is the lack of temporal vocabulary in a given language (Pohjanen 2002; Withrow, 1989/1999). Popular examples for this idea are the Hopi people of Arizona, based on the findings of Benjamin Whorf (1950) and the Nuer people of Southern Sudan, as examined by Evans-Pritchard (1969).

Studies like these invite interpretations that the quality and development of language must be intimately connected with the ability to understand time (e.g., Withrow, 1989/1999), a misconception sometimes called ‘the Whorfian time-trap’ (Crystal 2002). This is to neglect the fact that despite lacking temporal vocabulary, humans are nevertheless able to distinguish between earlier and later and to locate events with respect to these, for example by reference to regular activities (Luhmann 2013). Whorf’s results were later shown to be misinformed in an exhaustive analysis of Hopi language which showed that Hopis were capable of both understanding and discussing their lives in temporal terms (See Malotki 1983). It should be remembered that in languages other than English, signaling temporal relations in parts of sentences other than the verb can be quite customary (Crystal 2002).

Malotki (1983) even concludes that time would be a domain universally experienced by the whole of mankind: everyone is able not only to conceptualize it but also to express it to an extent. Though Evans-Pritchard shows that Nuer time differs from its Newtonian counterpart in the Western world, an understanding of a temporal division of past experiences from future ones can be discerned from the Nuer example as wellFootnote 3. I would therefore be in support of the view that the ability to distinguish between relations of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ should be considered an inherited aspect of self-conscious beings. This awareness of temporal relations acts as a precondition of learning to relate one’s earlier experiences to the current ones and to anticipate those that are yet to come as a prerequisite of sensible, socially coordinated life.

I therefore consider time in the current analysis as the division between future–designated by uncertainty and possibility of what will be present–and past, implying recognition of what has become permanent and evident. ‘Present’ refers here to a mediator through which change from future into past happens as well as the mode of time self-conscious beings share with their spatial existence, meaning that change can only take place as present in space. Time’s passage occurs metaphorically from future into past, that is, from uncertain to evident, designating how events which have once occurred have done so permanently and cannot be revisedFootnote 4. The reason for this counter-intuitive claim is that a person living in time observes this flow from the point of the present, oriented towards the future, easily resulting in a sensation of forward-bearing movement.

This subjective experience of time is compatible with the Newtonian (clock)time perspective, which serves as a background framework of measurable durations against which each individual future–present–past perspective can be compared. The Newtonian (clock)time is the framework of reference which integrates the different, personal experiences of temporality into a whole that makes socially coordinated interaction possible. It must be emphasized that nothing said here works to undermine personal experiences of temporality or to exclude any of the cyclicities and altering rhythms designative to human life from the debate. Instead, these cyclicities and rhythmicities present in different forms of human activity can be seen to take place in relation to the Newtonian framework, as elaborated next in the context of education.

Temporality of Pedagogical Influence for Human Growth

To consider the concept of time in education, we first need to clarify our understanding of education. An important starting point is to make a deliberate demarcation between action and process concepts (Oelkers 1985), which is why I conceive education as a two-sided process of pedagogical influence (Erziehung), that is, as activity which works to foster the student’s personal process of human growth (Bildung). This process builds on the student’s individual potential and motivation to grow (Bildsamkeit) and encourages her to engage in it self-actively (Selbsttätigkeit). This idea, and especially the reciprocity and tension between the aspects of pedagogical influence and human growth rooted in the continental tradition of educational thinking, need specification before they can be adequately addressed with respect to time.

Firstly, whereas many controversies over education are sparked from its depiction as exclusively either external influence or as the student’s personal development (Oelkers 1994), my understanding is based on balancing these aspects in relation to pedagogical influence (Erziehung) and human growth (Bildung), which are often seen as constituting two central dimensions of pedagogical action (e.g., Benner 2015; Friesen 2014; Horlacher 2012; Mollenhauer, 1983/2014; Kivelä et al. 2012; Uljens 1997). Of these, the idea of pedagogical influence is used here in the sense of Erziehung, meaning ‘to draw out’ or ‘to help out of something’, which covers both formal education of pedagogical institutions and informal upbringing of non-school contexts (e.g., Friesen 2014). Though often translated as education, I apply the phrase pedagogical influence here to separate it from education as an umbrella concept and from Bildung as a process of human growth. By pedagogical influence I refer specifically to intentional, asymmetric interaction between the educator and the student with the aim to enhance the student’s self-activity (Siljander 2014) with respect to her growth.

Conceiving education merely as external influence to achieve certain predefined aims is inadequate, because it ignores the student’s autonomy and development (See Oelkers 1994). The idea of pedagogical influence therefore requires a counterpart to highlight what is aimed for in the process, for which purpose the idea of human growth is applied here in the sense of Bildung. In educational contexts, the concept is often used to describe how a student forms herself and becomes formed by others for the purpose of maturation (Friesen 2014). The metaphor of formation is typical in English-written contexts, for instance in Masschelein and Simons (2013), who describe it as a process of self-shaping that involves ‘constantly going outside of oneself or transcending oneself—going beyond one’s own life-world by means of practice and study’ (pp. 45–46). An important distinction to be made with pedagogical influence is that Erziehung refers to an activity, whereas human growth in the sense of Bildung is a process (See Oelkers 1985; Siljander 2014). Building on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s (1762–1814 AD) thinking, Kivelä (2012) outlines Bildung as an indefinite process of perfecting one’s human abilities. This process requires self-active effort, but instead of being merely an inner process of the individual, it takes place in a reciprocal, interactive relationship with the world (Ibid.). In its most general educational meaning Bildung can therefore be understood as becoming human (Kivelä et al. 2012; Siljander 2014).

It is important to avoid confusion with what is meant by “becoming”: At birth, a person is already a human in the natural sense, but to be able to participate in human activity and culture she needs to become human once more (Pikkarainen 2018). This reflects Kant’s (1803/1991) insistence that education is a necessary pre-condition to becoming human. This becoming is easily seen to posit the student in an unfair ‘not-yet-complete’ position with respect to the educator, which can be seen to endorse attempts to neutralize this asymmetry via concepts like the chiasmic be(com)ing (Westman and Alerby 2012). To avoid this load of becoming and the easy misunderstandings resulting from it, I have chosen to advocate an interpretation of Bildung as human growth rather than becoming. This is to emphasize that the person, once born, should be considered no less ‘human’ in the sense of a creature who possesses the same human rights as her grown contemporaries, but that education introduces the necessary fulfillment of her abilities and potentialities in the social world she is brought into.

Two initial points about time important for the latter analysis can be derived here: Firstly, education is temporally restricted in the sense of pedagogical influence, for we want it to come to an end once the student can guide her life herself. Hence, pedagogical influence as an aim-oriented, temporally-restricted, time and effort-consuming process oriented towards the future of the student presumes and necessitates time. Secondly, and by contrast, human growth is a lifelong process as continual realization of the self as a human being. Once education as external pedagogical influence has ended, the student may continue this process independently. This process of self-education is temporally open in the sense that it is only limited by the student’s mortal existence.

Mention of pedagogical influence as a means to fostering one’s human growth should not be taken as a mechanistic process according to which a right quality of pedagogical interventions alone are sufficient to result in this growth. To avoid such a mechanistic logic, the notion of educability (Bildsamkeit) must be taken to account, which here refers to an innate human ability to develop, an openness to learning and new experiences (Mollenhauer, 1983/2014) which in turn assigns the student’s possibility to participate in pedagogical interaction (Benner 2015). It not only implicates a potential that makes education possible but is also unique to the student. Educability varies in quality and does not necessarily conform to the educator’s aims, despite thoroughly thought-out pedagogical interventions.

However, educability accepted as the one constitutive principle of pedagogical practice would turn education, (in the sense of pedagogical influence) into a lifelong process (Benner 2015), which is inadequate in terms of how education represents a type of human interaction that aims to make itself unnecessary (Ibid.; Friesen 2014; Siljander 2014). Consequently, fostering self-activity (Selbsttätigkeit), which refers to ways in which the student participates in the process of forming herself (Mollenhauer, 1983/2014), becomes important. Demanding self-activity is a necessary precondition and justification for education: Education is needed when one needs help for achieving self-activity and it stops once it has been authentically established—until, that is, a new need emerges (Benner 2015). Thus, education works to make the student autonomous from external guidance, but a need for re-education can emerge throughout life. Together, educability and self-activity are central for understanding why students cannot be considered some raw material to be molded via standardized, uniform educational-technical procedures. They constitute the potential and activity of the student and hence make possible her reciprocal participation in the educative process.

This idea of education has several important implications in terms of temporality. Firstly, education is a process of overcoming the difference between the educator’s present being and capabilities and those of the student. Because society has grown too complex to be delivered to students directly, forms of representing it to the younger generations have been established through institutionalized schooling (e.g., Mollenhauer, 1983/2014). Education thus becomes a means for diminishing the gap between child and adult realities, and this difference actualizes itself temporally: One can only overcome it through the chronologically-ordered process of pedagogical influence (See also Oelkers 1994, p.102). The educator continuously intervenes in the student’s lifeworld in meaningful ways with respect to her future but also adjusts her actions so that the autonomy and self-activity of the student would gradually increase. To phrase it differently, the student is continuously invited to move from her previously uncertain and potential states of being into more permanent and evident, self-actively determined ways of being in the world.

This account of education presumes chronos, a linear temporality, in that it presupposes the possibility of education being gradually executed by building on earlier experiences of the student as well as on the possibility of anticipating future ones. This, however, is far from a straightforward and accelerative process, but one of trying to accumulate the student’s lifeworld, adding value and insight to her life history in a way that would encourage her to engage in this process herself. Hence, education in the form of self-activity becomes a matter of understanding one’s past in relation to the present while considering where one wants to be in the future. The reciprocity of this process between the educator and the student constitutes cyclical interaction, which nevertheless builds on their previous life-history while having an intentional orientation towards the student’s aimed and potential future.

As with the critical literature cited earlier, the linear-temporal structure inherent to the Bildung tradition has not gone unchallenged. Hogstad (2020) has connected the linear logic of Bildung with the Christian roots of the concept, proposing that Bildung is a captive of a Christian messianic account of time, meaning that it ‘depends on a starting point and direction which was decided in the past, executed in the present and has its goal in the future’—a goal conceived as longing for some divine ideal, or eternity (Ibid., p. 597). Finding this problematically Western, and in order to escape these linear-temporal restrictions while opening a possibility to ‘move beyond messianic thinking’, he proposes an alternative for Bildung: namely, the plastic time of Crockett and Malabou. This plastic time is depicted as ‘an active, receptive and destructive branching, which provides time itself with creative power’ that Hogstad considers having the potential to ‘flip our conception of education altogether on its head’ (Ibid, p.601–602).

What I find problematic in this account is, firstly, that it treats linear temporality as solely a feature of Western-Christian thinking, a position which I have challenged earlier in this paper. It also reiterates the structure of previously-cited temporality critiques since Bildung, which is the educational substance of Hogstad’s argument, is at risk of losing its educational potential if it cannot be defined by non-linear means. In my interpretation, Bildung should be taken more universally as a secular principle of human growth and, thus, distinct from its religious load. Secondly, I see that sustaining the temporal orientation from past to future is precisely what makes education educational, and the linear logic that undergirds this structure is not in need of active refutation.

A problem central to the time pressures in education, however, is present in the way educability, as the student’s future-oriented tendency for autonomously determined ways of being in the world, becomes easily smothered by the time-compressed routines of contemporary formalized education. The fact that school does not exist in some societal vacuum must, however, be accepted, as education takes place in relation to other forms of human practice, including economics and politics (See Benner 2015). It is the business of education to interpret and turn the societal demands of these other forms of human practice into educationally-legitimized ones, so that no single societal sphere of life dominates the rest (Ibid). In simple terms, the substance of society must be represented to students in a meaningful form and manner. Instead of being wholly isolated from society, school takes its subject matter from society and transforms this content so that it can be studied as an end in itself, without immediate societal pressure or utility (Masschelein and Simons 2013).

To sum up, I propose that education can be adequately conceived as reciprocal, uncertain, and cyclical interaction between the educator and the student and which employs an aim orientation that extends temporally from the evident past to the uncertain future. In doing so, I recognize a need to justify in more detail how this can be understood in educational practice. To complete the argument, I next apply the logic of education introduced above to the context of teaching, studying, and learning.

The Cyclicity of Teaching, Studying, and Learning within a Linear Temporal Framework

To elaborate how the temporal structure of education introduced above can be understood in a practical pedagogical context, I will next apply the teaching-studying-learning (TSL) process originally introduced by Uljens (1997). In brief, the TSL process consists of teaching acts that aim to foster learning through the student’s studying acts, which are presumed to lead to the formation of competenceFootnote 5 (Ibid). Learning is taken broadly as a process of change in the learner’s skill, knowledge, thinking or action (e.g., Siljander 2014). These changes can be summed up under the concept of competence, understood broadly as a property of the subject enabling it to act in a given way (Greimas and Courtés 1982). Learning is therefore simply changes in the competences of a subject, which can only be perceived indirectly, articulated through actions or performance (Pikkarainen 2018). The important aspect of Uljen’s theory is that it does not draw a straightforward connection from teaching to learning but recognizes the student’s self-activity (in the form of studying) as a mediating factor within the process.

These concepts should be understood as subordinate and operative to the general process of education. They are of vital importance, because proper education can hardly take place without them, but we should refrain from treating teaching, studying, learning, or competence as constituting the whole of education in themselves. For example, the concept of learning has been criticized for becoming increasingly dominating and all-encompassing in educational discourses, and at risk of subsuming the whole of education below an individualized and naturalized process of ever-more learning (e.g., Biesta 2006; 2013) Similarly, the concept of competence has been recognized as a potential rival and replacement for Bildung in educational vocabulary (Horlacher 2012). I propose that in the formula of TSL, these concepts should be considered in an operative relationship with respect to the general process of education as constituted by the tension of pedagogical influence (Erziehung) and human growth (Bildung). Teaching is a form of pedagogical influence, as it involves the intentional pedagogical activity of the educator. Learning that leads to development of competences, on the other hand, belongs to the process of human growth. Studying is a mediating factor that overlaps both spheres of influence and of growth: It takes place as a reciprocal, intentional activity between the teacher and the student that can result in learning. Simply put, learning a new language (a process leading to a competence) is presumed to be a result of teacher-guided study (reciprocal and intentional activity aimed towards a future goal).

Educability is the basis which constitutes the student’s learning potential, while the building of competences can be regarded as a precondition for achieving authentic self-activity in terms of one’s life. Students learn to speak new languages by different rates and means, but in any scenario, gaining more competence in the language expands their self-activity and autonomy in terms of communicating with it and opens possibilities for future learning and growth.

A feature that we might find ourselves worried about with regards to the Newtonian (clock)time and Uljen’s account of the TSL process is its linear formula. In the TSL process, teaching is depicted as leading straightforwardly from studying to learning and, eventually, to a change in competence (See Uljens 1997, esp. p.39). Thus, linear temporality is applied to simplify the TSL to a process of phases which are presumed to be easily separable and to follow a rigid, chronological order. Instead, in education, the reciprocity between teaching and studying acts must be recognized, with the activities evaluated against the results to be redirected and corrected throughout the process. If we realize that our teaching acts are misplaced or the student is having trouble with her efforts in learning new vocabulary or grammatical rules, we adjust our teaching accordingly by changing approach, taking a couple of steps back, or even starting over. The TSL process can occur at rates that are slower or faster, with uncertainty over success, delineated by the possibilities of the educability of each student. Hence, the process that takes place in a linear temporal framework is not simple, straightforward, or linear, but rather resembles linearity in the sense of building on the past while working to unfold the future.

Figure 1 below seeks to clarify this cyclical, multi-level nature of the TSL process while placing it into a more adequate relationship to the Newtonian (clock)time framework. The basic logic of the TSL is visible in the way the educator works in a reciprocal pedagogical relationship with the student to foster learning that will lead to a formulation of competences. The educator can only get indirect signals of learning by observing the formed competences manifested in some form of activity—for example, by testing her vocabulary in the language being studied. Even then, the educator cannot know for certain to what extent the competences result from teaching or from the student’s studying efforts. Of great importance is to see that teaching is depicted as temporally restricted: As a form of pedagogical influence, it strives to make itself unnecessary once the student can guide her studying efforts herself. As the future is defined by uncertainty and potentiality, positioning the aims, and navigating the TSL remains problematic instead of a stable progress towards predetermined learning achievements. Despite the forward-headed orientation, the educator and the student are continuously faced with the challenges of navigating the future horizon in a way that the process remains meaningful for the student in terms of reaching a more autonomous, self-active form of life.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The model of cyclical teaching-studying-learning (TSL) process in relation to a linearly ordered temporality as changes from future into past. (Note: I am indebted to docent Eetu Pikkarainen for an early version of this figure (personal communication 21.3.2021))

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Potential limitations of the model include its seeming inability to depict the faster and slower paces or the disturbances which might occur in the TSL process. However, it is important to remember that the duration of teaching acts or the frequency of reciprocal teaching-studying acts have not been determined in the model, nor are they presumed to occur in standard intervals. Education does not necessarily proceed at a standard pace and order, even if time would. Instead, my point with the model is to demonstrate how education is a temporally-extended process and, as such, conceivable via Newtonian linear time as changes occurring from uncertain to evident. This process is guided by future-oriented aims and can progress cumulatively, building on the student’s earlier experiences, while also recognizing the cyclicity of human interaction. We may next bring these insights into the context of time pressures of higher education.

Conclusion: More (and Enough) Time for Slow Education?

As pointed out earlier, I support the view that education as a form of human activity does not return to a one-size-fits-all formula that could be easily transformed into an economic production function of faster learning or faster degrees. In this sense, the preliminary conclusion of this paper remains the same as for much of the previous critical literature (e.g., Bennett & Burke, 2018; Biesta 2013; Clegg 2010; Masschelein and Simons 2013; 2015; Meyerhoff et al. 2011). The second and more critical point to what has already been argued before is, however, that education is nevertheless (1) an aim-oriented, intentional form of reciprocal pedagogical interaction between the educator and the student (2) that the aim of this interaction is to foster her growth and (3) that this inherent logic of education does not stand in contradiction to the Newtonian-linear temporal framework. Instead, I believe that it might be just this framework which remains of importance in sustaining a sensible idea of education: as something that builds on an evident past while unfolding an uncertain future for the student in the present. That is, through education, the student’s present being becomes re-identified based on her past experiences and with respect to what she can become in the future. The cyclical and uncertain process of education, based on reciprocal interaction, hence extends across a temporal continuum in which each activity and its consequences are irreversible.

The practical implication of this conclusion is that education does not need to be saved from Newtonian (clock)time in the form of, say, alternative timescapes, chiasmic be(com)ings, plastic times, or by rendering education timeless. Nor does it necessitate an acceptance of the accelerating ethos of contemporary HE systems, since the basic problem remains very real in terms that ‘[d]eveloping self-activity requires time—much more time than today’s educational institutions are willing to spend’ (Mollenhauer, 1983/2014, p.113). Here we come to the question of slowing education. For example, some authors have argued for timeless time as an ‘internally motivated use of time in which clock time loses its significance’ involving an experience of flow in one’s work (Ylijoki & Mäntylä, 2003, p.62). Berg and Seeber (2016) interpret this time as periods of ‘escape from time’ that is of crucial importance to thinking and creative activities vital to academic work. Even though it might first sound like another rebranding of time, this timelessness is of a metaphorical sense: Timelessness and the clock ‘losing its significance’ imply having more—and most importantly—enough time to teach, study and make research in an unhurried and considered manner. The notions of reserving enough time for timeless time and for recovery in a temporal framework limited to 24 h a day (See Ibid., p.28–32) support this interpretation, to the extent that timelessness does not necessitate presuming another ontology of time but is rather a question of having more and enough of it.

A similar plea is heard when Masschelein and Simons (2013; 2015) argue for school to be a time and place partially detached from those of society and home: The school should be seen neither as an extension of the family nor as a direct subordinate to society’s (often economic and political) needs, but something that employs its own, unproductive, and free timeFootnote 6. Rather than leisure, this ‘free time’ refers to time freed from immediate, external demands and which is instead reserved for study, thought and the subject matter for its own sake (Ibid.). Even though I believe that this free time can be valuable also in academic contexts, what is problematic in this account are notions of free time as a ‘breach’ in linear time, something that draws students into the present and temporarily ‘defers the past and the future’ (Ibid., p.35–36). This idea of the present tense and drawing students to the educational moment partially detached from time can also be found from Biesta and Säfström (2011), who argue for saving the freedom of education by atemporalizing it into the educational momentFootnote 7. I think Yun (2014) justly objects that this cannot be the way, but proposes that saving education should be seen, instead, as possible through temporality, as education is inconceivable without time, involving a projection towards a future as possibility. I find resonance in the statement that the time of education should be the time free from the immediate demands of other fields of societal and private activity, but I reiterate that this does not require seizing education’s temporal dimension for the present but to accept its orientation from past to future, as pointed out in the pedagogical model outlined in the previous section.

The many attempts to reformulate education’s temporal dimension by decoupling it from Newtonian (clock)time seem to base themselves on the logic that if education itself cannot resemble Newtonian-linear temporality, the economistic production logic would become inapplicable to it at once. However, the temporal structure of education outlined in this paper presumes that education cannot be fully detached from society or operate solely on its own rules, because its autonomy is always relative to other forms of societal activity (See Benner 2015). It has even been suggested that Newtonian (clock)time has become so inherent to coordinating social activity that giving it up today would necessarily lead to chaos (e.g., Pohjanen 2002). In this sense, realism is present in the critical educational literature as well:

True, no matter how critical we are regarding the clock time paradigm, we expect students to be attentive to issues of chronos. We expect them to arrive to their university classes on time, to hand in their assignments when they are due and to utilize their time in and out of the university in a productive way that allows them to accomplish required tasks. I suppose we expect all this even when we become the fiercest critics of chronos and performativity. (Papastephanou, 2014, p.176).

Instead of trying to completely exclude linear time from contemporary time consciousness, a better option might be to understand it as one temporality among others (See e.g., Adam 2004; Clegg 2010; Papastephanou 2014). In her analysis, Papastephanou (2014) even suggests that chronos is rather a victimized than a privileged temporality of neoliberalist reality. The existence of the clock itself does not necessitate its utilization for endless acceleration of any form of human activity. Nor should its absence suggest that education become an aimless wandering in a societal, spatial, or temporal (that is, clockless) vacuum. When students hope for a possibility to study properly, without the immediate pressures of performing for their next deadline, they will either ask or arrange for more time rather than appealing to timelessness. Though some authors consider simply requiring more time insufficient (e.g., Meyerhoff et al. 2011), we do not resort to timelessness, alternative timescapes, or to living in the present tense when addressing the problem of acceleration or time poverty. Instead, authors like Mountz and colleagues (2015) have suggested very practical time-political actions from closing one’s e-mail for the evenings and to learning to say ‘no’ and for making time for both reading and writing. In a similar vein, Berg & Seeber (2016) encourage one to get offline, to do less, to reserve time for ‘timeless’ time and for recovery, and, most of all, to start changing the adverse patterns of how we usually discuss time.

These manifestos for slow scholarship and science align philosophically and politically with those of the slower education promoted here. Holt (2002) argued already two decades ago the need for a slow school movement, an equivalent of the slow food thinking, to challenge the standardized production logic of contemporary education. I prefer here the broader concept of slow education to cover HE perspective and education in general. Philosophically, in slow education ‘students have time to discuss, argue, and reflect upon knowledge and ideas, and so come to understand themselves and the culture they will inherit’ (Smith. 2017, p.21). Though I believe that the resource aspect of time must be recognized in slow education as well, that is, in terms of reserving sufficient time for adequate education, Wear and colleagues (2015) have also pointed out that slow education does not necessarily imply a need for extending curricula. Instead, they highlight in their context of time-intensive medical education that embracing slowness involves recognizing opportunities for slowness, be it slow reading, writing or unhurried interaction with patients, while recognizing that in clinical training there will always be situations where speed has its warranted place (Ibid). Whereas efficiency and speed in the academia are suggested as ‘com[ing] into direct conflict with opposing ideals of thoughtfulness, reflection, dissent, and responsive attunement’, slowing down, resisting academic marketisation and demanding less instead of always more from students has been encouraged (Mahon 2021, p.457–458).

In sum, I consider that slow education might be what is needed to reclaim time for education instead of creating new time for education. This involves both philosophical-theoretical work that enables challenging the cultures of speed in the academia as well as political and practical activity to counter these cultures in our everyday work. However, neutralizing time in its Newtonian-linear form or blaming the clock for the speed it is employed with might be a counterproductive strategy, where we commit ourselves to desiring something that cannot be achieved. Though I agree that alternative time theories can be helpful in challenging today’s often Newtonian-dominated time consciousness, I see reclaiming sufficient time for education as an active defense of ‘the educational way, the slow, difficult, frustrating, and weak way’ (Biesta 2013, p.4) which, with respect to everything said above, takes place in a reciprocal pedagogical action within the time of future, present and past and in an education system that operates in relation to other forms of societal activity.