by Steffen Hamborg
Keynote lecture at the conference "Social Transformation and Political Education" of the Society for Political Didactics and Political Youth and Adult Education (GPJE) at the Foundation University of Hildesheim, 04 March 2022
War in the Ukraine
The current events in Ukraine and beyond do not - I dare assume - leave us all cold. They don't exactly make everyday life any easier, which continues unabated and, according to the external claim, must continue, even though many things are fundamentally changing and being called into question. At least that's how I feel and the preparation for this lecture took place under less than ideal circumstances.
But then again, what kind of sensitivities are these in view of what is currently happening? The Russian state is waging a war of aggression in Ukraine under the reign of Vladimir Putin; Germany - along with many other countries - has long since become possibly more than just an indirect party to the conflict through direct arms deliveries to Ukraine and unprecedented economic sanctions. Almost overnight, a decision was also made to provide the Bundeswehr with a special fund of 100 billion euros and to significantly increase defence spending in the future.
As we speak, people in Ukraine are dying in the war, being physically and emotionally wounded. Over a million people are on the run, others are stuck in underground stations, bunkers and cellars - some without water, food, electricity or heat. All of this is happening just over a thousand kilometres away from us, about a day's journey by car. And the concern that the current regionally limited fighting could escalate, possibly even leading to the use of nuclear weapons, does not seem entirely unfounded. Compared to the situation before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the risk of this happening has at least become much greater.
In light of these events, what does it mean to address the question of what role (political) education can, may and should play in social change, as stated in the programme announcement? For me, it initially meant that I would not be able to organise the lecture as I had originally planned. "Turning a blind eye" - as Annalena Baerbock put it in her speech to the United Nations General Assembly - looking away and pretending nothing was wrong was not an option.
So what then? In the following, I would like to try to develop an argument based on and in light of current events as to what education can and cannot achieve with regard to social crises and to what extent it could be dangerous to rely on or hope that it is capable of achieving functionalistically effective, utilisable or calculable results. At first glance, some of the ideas may seem bizarre and we are welcome to discuss the extent to which inappropriate analogies are not being drawn here. However, my assumption driving the lecture is that it is precisely this harsh and irrefutable reality of the war in Ukraine that allows us to take a more humble and yet ultimately not pessimistic look at the opportunities and limits of education in the face of crises, change and transformation.
Beyond intervening and looking away
So where to start? I suggest here and now, at our conference for young academics, which is part of the education sector not only in terms of the subject of political education, but also institutionally in the hybrid of education and research, doctoral studies and science. It is obvious: This conference will not have any direct impact on the war in Ukraine or Germany's policy in relation to it. This conference is not an aid convoy, an international brigade or an institution that will impose sanctions or promote negotiations, or even take a public stance and issue statements. But why is this actually the case? Why is our gathering so disconnected from current geopolitical events? After all, all sorts of people gather here who - I assume - would describe themselves as political and are driven by an interest in working towards social change for the better, towards working towards a better world.
My thesis, which I would like to develop in more detail below, is that this is not so much due to the people, their values, interests and intentions, but to the form in which we come together here; a form which - I believe - has a number of characteristics that can be attributed to educational matters as a whole and which can give us some information about the connection between education and transformation.
What is central to this form - and here I refer again to the German Foreign Minister Baerbock - is that it is precisely not limited to the opposition of "taking action and turning a blind eye". Rather, the form in which education processes itself as a reality of realisation is constitutively referenced to a third party that moves beyond intervention and looking away. Whether in the acquisition of knowledge, the practising of a skill or the development and change of one's own attitudes and positioning - education is not looking away, but an active engagement, a 'putting oneself in relation' with the world. However, it is not an intervention in itself, but as an individual process, as self-construction in interaction with the world, it rather forms the preconditions, the conditionality of future action.
In terms of our conference, we could say: We come together to show each other something and to learn from each other. The basic form in which our meeting takes place is not decision-making as the operative basis for the use of rights of disposal - such as the adoption of sanctions - or public demonstrations as the operative basis for protest - such as against the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops - but rather demonstrating with regard to learning, which can be understood as the operative basis of pedagogy with Klaus Prange. Seen in this way, this conference is only ostensibly about the objects we are focussing on. From an operational point of view, from the practical realisation and the question of 'who is addressing whom here and in what way', it is much more about ourselves. It is our relationships to ourselves, to others and to the world, our knowledge, skills and will that we have in our sights when we consciously show each other what we think needs to be communicated or when we listen with interest to what others have to say.
Pedagogical hubris in the short circuit of politics, pedagogy and utopia
So what can and cannot such an event achieve with regard to social crises? And why would it be dangerous to assume that educational work could achieve this? I will address these questions from the back and start with the dangers that I see in particular in connection with pedagogical feasibility and availability thinking. What does that mean?
According to its inherent logic, the pedagogical is inescapably based on anticipating the future. If it were not for the experience and idea that we could influence people's development with pedagogical means, all professional educational work would be obsolete. Educational work is thus necessarily a poiesis, a manufacturing, producing activity of influencing development, which has its purpose in the creation of something ongoing and effective outside itself.
However, what is already anything but certain in the individual ultimately becomes pedagogical hubris par excellence when transferred to the species and history, i.e. to humanity and society as a whole. The idea - and here I am referring to Micha Brumlik - that pedagogical means can be used to produce a breed of people that will enable the establishment of a new political order or the creation of a better world is a short-circuiting of politics, pedagogy and utopia that is deeply contrary to knowledge and experience.
Corresponding ideas that world peace and the overcoming of power relations could be brought about by means of emancipative liberation pedagogy seem like anachronistic products of an educational dream factory, and not just under the current impression of the war in Ukraine - not to mention the possibilities of acute influence in the current war situation. What seems absurd here, however, is a serious programme in the cosmologies of sustainability and socio-ecological transformation. For example, the Berlin Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development states, to cite just one example among many:
"We are confident that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) [...], as a precursor to all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, provides the basis for the necessary change by equipping everyone with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes needed to help shape the transformation towards sustainable development."
The universal claim formulated here can hardly be surpassed. Not only does Education for Sustainable Development create the basis for achieving all (!) sustainability goals; it also imagines successful access to the whole of humanity. We won't do anything less than saving the world and what it takes to do so is a causal chain, the statement could be added somewhat polemically.
The problems that go hand in hand with this - I will only briefly name the points here - range from a depoliticising unification of the world, an exploitation-logical functionalisation of education and an objectifying making available of people, to an intellectual enslavement of future generations for current political projects, an intragenerational self-distancing of those hoping and working for future generations, to a diffusion of responsibility through the misrecognition of paid educational work as political work for a better world and a blinding of the generative temporality of education and upbringing.
Thinking of education as a social form of transport
Karl Marx, of all people, already had a corresponding sense of the problems of pedagogical hubris at a central point in his Feuerbach Theses and at the same time an approach to how the whole thing could be thought of differently. I quote:
"The materialist doctrine that people are products of circumstances and education, that changed people are therefore products of other circumstances and changed education, forgets that the circumstances are changed by the people and that the educator himself must be educated. It therefore necessarily comes to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to the other. The coincidence of the change of circumstances and of human activity can only be conceived and rationally understood as revolutionary practice [in the version not revised by Engels it is called revolutionary practice; S.H.]. and understood rationally."
What does this mean for us? What Marx is clearly pointing out here is the following: Anyone who attempts to change society with educational work as an activity that changes people in a targeted way, lifts themselves out of society and positions themselves as above it. I would add: and thus places themselves on the sidelines. The educational processes of others are then only a reified mass of movement in one's own calculations. For Cornelius Castoriadis, this form of political education would presumably be politics in a bad sense, understood as - quote - "the manipulative treatment of people as things according to their characteristics and their reactions assumed to be known".
Whether a revolutionary practice could be the way out and what exactly that would mean, I would like to leave open. Rather, I would like to take up the practice-theoretical accusation that is being prepared here. This brings us back to the formal concept of education, which I emphasised at the beginning, and to the question: What can education achieve in the face of social crises? What remains when the imaginary of a formative influence on individual becoming, which is so central to pedagogical thinking, is suspended?
If we look at the form, the operative events, the practical realisation of educational work, then certain forms of social interaction come into view that are characteristic of educational spaces: the joint reflection on the world, freed from the immediate pressure to act, which in this sense creates shared worlds; exchange and discussion, which do not have to come to a result and yet, or precisely because of this, can be particularly productive; and so on and so forth. Education provides time and space for these and other forms of dialogue in the truest sense of the word; it is undoubtedly of great social relevance and has a direct performative effect, especially in times of social crisis. The fact that we come together in this form today therefore makes a difference, even if the world out there has not already become a different and better one as a result.
Steffen Hamborg, Dr phil., is a research associate and coordinator of the joint project "Transformation through Community. Processes of Collective Subjectivisation in the Context of Sustainable Development (TransGem)" at the University of Oldenburg.
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