Keywords

‘Interesting’ is a word replete with connotations, used by the polite to indicate a pretence of agreement alongside hidden respectful disagreement. Something can taste ‘interesting’, which does not mean delicious, look ‘interesting’, which does not mean attractive, or sound ‘interesting’, which does not mean tuneful. Žižek (2012) connects ‘interesting’ with crisis, where our ‘interesting’ irrational, fast, and often contradictory solutions are, as Norman notes, potentially destroying the planet. Is the role of curriculum to envisage the Anthropocene as the end? How can educators grapple with truth and crisis and reclaim genuinely interesting and creative solutions to global problems, as Norman suggests, with hope and possibility in a world of inequity and degradation?

We teach and lead education and pedagogy in interesting times. Most recently, interesting times in education might be considered as contradictory, such as opening up physical classroom walls alongside the boundarying and boxing of online learning or providing the necessary focus on wellbeing following COVID isolation, but narrowing being well to bandaid solutions that increase workload for educators and thus risk their wellbeing. Žižek (2012) invites us to slow down from all of this exhaustion. The crises of wellbeing, education, and the planet invite us to carefully consider philosophical solutions in practice, by reconsidering the civic purpose of education beyond citizenship. The role of education as an act of citizenship is important for stretching beyond the human endeavour of ourselves and our own academic performance, but citizenship curriculum could be a historic alternative to a contemporary problem. As global citizens, we have a civil responsibility to humanity—beyond our civic responsibility to our nation and other people groups and their biases that divide—towards each other. What this means as we wrestle with pedagogy is paramount.

Education is ultimately about conscience and that comes from our assumptions. It is important that I declare mine. I am an educator who has taught in Australia and overseas in government and non-government schools in the wealthiest and poorest of contexts. Throughout my career I have held leadership positions in curriculum, pastoral, and school management. I now research in the field of educational leadership, which often involves system-level leadership research. My pedagogy and research stem from dialogic theories that come from my views that we learn by thinking, talking, and listening made from our experiences, practices, and beliefs. Assumptions form our perspectives about self and society and cannot be separated, or we lose our own narratives, which form the paradoxes Žižek invites us to critique. Systems and ecologies are social logics we use for dealing with problems in interesting times, as Žižek writes, and these are understood through our assumptions and experiences. Systems are after all made up of individuals, and individuals are replete with paradoxes.

At best, educational leaders solve problems of practice that transform understanding and possibilities for education, but as Moller (2022) suggests, leaders today are often doing ‘the splits’ as they navigate compliance while attempting to imagine new possibilities for their students. This is an ‘interesting’ predicament that calls into question whether principals are leaders at all. They do not write curriculum or policy and lead with others by navigating choices about its enactment. In terms of curriculum, former Australian Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson lamented that in Australia today “education only covers what we did wrong” (2022). As ‘The Apology’ by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (2008) indicates, Australia has whitewashed education for a long time. The purpose of education is to uncover uncomfortable truths as it both celebrates success and humbles us in failure, and these truths should lead to action.

As we wrestle with the monsters of capitalism and neoliberalism, of wellbeing, vanity, and of ourselves we also wrestle with conscience and the other. The juxtaposition of individualism and universalism is an interesting conundrum for school leaders as they encourage individuals to be their best, alongside civic and civil responsibilities. Civic society is the realm of the state, and civil society is the realm of the citizen. Both are about the individual and the collective, but civil society supports and creates the conditions for the realisation of human rights. Ivan Illich led a civil-minded life following his study of history, crystallography, theology, and philosophy in Europe. In 1950 he came to New York and worked as a parish priest. In 1960 Illich moved to Mexico and learned that financial freedom and freedom of choice are less accessible to the poor. Illich began to understand that the citizen was more important than the state in building community and social equity. Žižek understands that democracy holds both promise and contradiction as it struggles with individualism and universalism concurrently where power-over is an inevitable part of structure and social relationships even as citizens. Illich (1971) argues that power relations pervade schooling and impose institutionalisation, limiting genuine relationships:

School prepares for the alienating institutionalisation of life, by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence, they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition. (p. 22)

Illich’s radical image of societal learning from civil freedom through interwebs—where the village is the place of learning, open with community—is a creative solution beyond the current limitations of school structures and systems that intend to build community, but concurrently limit its possibilities.

Žižek (2012) invites us to think, and Arendt (1985) agrees that thinking brings hope. Where Žižek (2012) is about refining our thinking, Arendt is about nascent action, for action is where hope exists. We have to think in order to know how to act, and this involves challenging taken-for-granted logics. Norman suggests student voice as a solution to climate change, where we can find teachable moments and act. However, voice is not enough. At the heart of education is pedagogy: How we think determines what we think. We need to get better at open-minded debate and grow through alternate perspectives. Rather than declaring victory, we need more inquiry, discovery, and shared understanding. Good pedagogy should discombobulate us and provide us with more questions than answers. Arendt, who famously wrote about totalitarianism given she survived the Holocaust, chose to dine with those she disagreed with, and of course with those with whom she loved, so that she could understand herself. This in itself is a pedagogical act. Arendt lamented that she was too busy being with students to waste time on coursework design. Pedagogy is relational and involves two-way dialogue, as Norman agrees. The question that lingers today is whether education helps us to think, and pedagogy provides us with answers. The loss of thinking time is a legitimate concern. The increased self-service labour of tertiary work affords less time for philosophy. It’s hard to do philosophy when you spend more time on administrative tasks than on the core purpose of your work, as Shahjahan (2014) also writes. Our philosophy group helped us to carve out the necessary time to grow and think. Not all of our work has a price tag, and yet neither can we hide from the contradictory fact that we work for an institution of privilege. Bono, lead singer of U2 (2022), in his autobiography, like Žižek, grapples with paradox and asks if it is the role of the artist to uncover paradox and wonders whether to resolve every contradiction is too much to ask of any human.

What do we do with such educational privilege as we work in the academy? Bono acknowledges his rock star privilege and the opportunities he has taken from fame to be a modern philosopher and activist. Unable to provide a solution to rebooting capitalism (p. 478), whilst acutely aware of his earning capacity alongside a lifetime of global charity work and awareness raising of global inequity, Bono concludes that the answers to changing the world do rest in what we seek to change through our work, through action and advocacy that he refers to as ‘actualism’ (p. 482), where pragmatism and idealism connect. Bono knows this is the outworking of something spiritual. Changing the world starts with surrendering our ego to the Big Other, an idea that stretches beyond the super ego of Freud (1978) or Lacan’s Big Other of language and ego as object whilst knowing the paradoxical limitations, even of self-work. Lacan (1955) sees the mirror as an object that alienates us from how we see ourselves, towards how others perceive us, helping us to develop own alter-ego of empathy, a nod to Žižek’s other: the mirror. Bono’s Big Other is his own encounter with God.

As we look into the mirror, Žižek invites us to ask what masks we wear and to consider our own integrity as Norman also suggests. Civil society invites relational authenticity where civic society invites masks wrought by structure and titles. In my first week as an academic I interviewed a school Deputy Head and Principal. Prior to the interview recording, the Deputy Head asked me about my background in education. I explained that I had started my career as a primary teacher, and then had moved into school leadership, and as a PhD candidate had worked in the tertiary sector alongside a school middle leadership role. He quickly quipped that primary teachers are all about the children, secondary teachers are all about the curriculum, and academics are all about themselves. We laughed, and my role in establishing a warm interview rapport was achieved. But those words never left me. What is my academic identity? Was I to be entering the academy to be all about myself? Does the intellectual work of the academy have any practical use? Our inaction is the opposite of praxis, of morally formed action. And yet rearticulating problems to transform understandings and possibilities is essential to moral formation. Thinking and action are connected. Whilst we navigate these interesting contradictions as academics, we wear masks. Our social media and published identities cultivate and collate what we choose to share of ourselves. Masks reveal more than they obscure about our desires as Žižek (2012) claims.

How do we use our educational privilege for the benefit of others? We assume that we will promote social equity. Illich smashed this assumption decades ago arguing that worshipping universal education makes false promises to the poor. Illich (1971) argues that our attempts to do schooling are futile in their current state, unless we recreate education through community:

Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education and also to those who seek alternatives. (p. 2)

Illich captures the tensions between democracy, capitalism, and social equity that Žižek (2012) is questioning. Norman invites relational, dialogical, and emancipatory solutions that White et al. (2022) invite us to reimagine. The answers are in relationships, as Žižek and Illich concur. “The key to actual freedom rather resides in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations” (Žižek, 2012, p. 37). Žižek invites us to imagine a new universal ‘we’ of the human species (Žižek, 2011, p. 332) in order to get beyond ourselves. Norman grapples with this by acknowledging that unsustainable consumption actually consumes us. It divides us as social beings. He proposes that we recognise climate change as a universal struggle that transcends ideological lines. Žižek suggests this vast problem is a collective responsibility, a “universal project shared by all” (Žižek, 2012, p. 39) beyond the individual. The importance of collective responsibility has been shown during COVID through mandated mask wearing to protect others, and the loss of collective responsibility when governments no longer mandated masks as they were forced to decide whether zero cases of COVID and fewer deaths were more or less important than mental health and wellbeing. These political decisions were seen as economic necessity as Žižek reminds us, and yet the heart of the problem was our loss of relationship, and this was particularly felt by educators because pedagogy is relationship.

There is increased global dissatisfaction and mistrust in government that is impacting government education, which is in turn disrupting community. O’Neill (2002), a British philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords, writes in the BBC Reith lectures about how loss of trust and increased suspicion comes from deception. Parents understand the capitalist machine and are asserting their control through school choice, even in the poorest of countries. What should our expectations of government be for education? Does government regulation of education bring equity or mere curriculum compliance? With increased numbers of home schooling, further exacerbated by COVID, what is the role of parent and community in education? If democracy is about independent choice and freedom, does this come at the cost of equity? These are interesting times where civil and civic society have crossed lines in education. If “School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is” (Illich, 1971), it is no longer working for us and the ways we imagine education need to change, both from within and from outside. Illich chose to live frugally and, despite feeling crippled by overthinking, opened his doors to collaborators and drop-ins with generosity, running non-stop educational learning which was celebratory, spiritual, open-ended, and egalitarian. This is hope in action that comes from choosing relationships and humanity first for a higher purpose, choosing pedagogy as embodied diplomacy (Sarson et al., 2019). We too have a choice between settling for good manners in interesting times in our schools and classrooms or to think more carefully about the value of diplomacy as “the art of restraining power” as Kissinger (1995) advised and redistributing it. Language matters.

At its heart, education is the hope of regeneration. Pedagogy enables that power through shared voice, dialogue, listening, wisdom, and deep respect for humanity through relationship. Only when we are humble enough to suspect that we can be wrong can we accept that embodied diplomacy learned through pedagogy can invite peace. Žižek invites us to reimagine, and the academy invites us to disrupt, and this is our privilege, enabled through our global networks that we must harness wisely to unearth possibilities for new relationships and discover unheard voices that create new art and new songs.