Conference Agenda

We usually regard education as a matter of realizing the students’ potentials. The child, or the adult student, is observed as a medium to be formed through knowledge, and education is seen as a process in which the potentials of the student are realized. As Claudio Baraldi and Giancarlo Corsi (2017: 55) explain: “Paradoxical as it may sound, while the child is what it is, for the education system it is what it is not (yet). Teachers consider pupils as a potential that has to be developed”. In this paper, we suggest that we may currently be witnessing a fundamental discursive change when it comes to education.

This discursive change is particularly evident in a body of educational material produced by the Danish company Lego, and in this paper we will present an analysis of a case developed by Lego and First (an American company). In First Lego League, the children in the video ‘Teamwork Makes the Dream Work’ sing: “You can be anything, so just do it!” (First Lego League, 2019b). These lyrics indicate that children can become anything, that their potential is unlimited. They tell the child to unlock its unlimited potential: instead of sticking to a single track in life, you can become an astronaut, archaeologist, or engineer. The important thing is to dream and keep dreaming.

It is not surprising that the education system is interested in the potential of the child. To conceive of children as potential that should be realised through education can be seen already in the Aristotelian distinction between the actual and the potential, and between form and matter, seeing matter as something loaded with potential that strives for a form.
The surprising thing about Lego and the song above is that the child is not simply seen as a potential that needs to be shaped. Instead, the child is observed as a potential which must be potentialised. Rather than being a matter of realizing potentials, education is seen as a matter of potentialising potentials. The student is not asked to realize his/her potentials and learn mathematics and French (for instance) with a view to becoming a teacher or an engineer later on. The student is asked to become a force for change, constantly ready to look for new potentials in her/himself.

Paraphrasing Lewis 2014: 277), Lego wants to form the child as a potential in order to increase contingencies and potentiality. Sam Sellar (2015) observes in his work on “potential of ‘potential’” that potentiality, including the economic potential of education, emerges as a concept of interest and a site of intervention for the political system. Young people who do not get an education are observed as wasted potential. Where Sam Sellar talks about “the logic of realising potential”, we are more interested in the logic of potentialising the potential. This logic entails not simply observing children as a given resource, but constructing them as an undetermined resource and demanding that they consider and care for themselves as such. In this paper, we take a close look at this discursive figure and examine what it means to educate children (and others) to see themselves as a potential that has no limits.

In the paper presentation I will present some of the early findings from the research project The Children of Textiles. The purpose of the research project is to investigate the relationship between children's work, education and play within the history of textile work as recorded in the textile archives and testimonies. Child labor is a widespread reality in the textile industry and child labor was a major contributing factor of the early industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Humphries, 2013) My focus is not on whether or to what extent the children participated in the work, but rather in what way these children appear in the archive, also in relation to each other, to the mothers and fathers and the industries.

An interesting finding from my early archive work states that children took part in work, but they were also involved in other activities. One example of this is the sign post at Rydal’s Spinnery in Sweden (which today is a museum) that urge the children not to play or fight: "Don't play, don't fight – rule out play and fighting at work". (Rydals museum n.d.) Play is a central concept and phenomenon for childhood. It is a phenomenon that is philosophically interesting in order to understand different aspects in life and childhood, as well as in relation to education, politics, society and democracy (Koubová et al., 2021)

The call not to engage with play, in this specific Rydal’s Spinnery, tells us that it occurred, but it also tells us something about the place, the view of children and childhood within this industry and spinnery, and what it could mean to be a child in the textile industry. Drawing on this example of “Don't play, don't fight” I will explore and develop the relationship philosophically between children's work, education and play within the history of textile work and its archive. The question that I will focus on in the paper presentation is: How can the relationship between work, play and educational process related to the children be understood?

In the presentation I will philosophically develop these children’s life through the lens of play. In Agamben’s work, play has a function in the act of profaning things, in order to understand politics, capitalism and consumption. Profanation means to treat something (or someone) as worldly and as something “that can be played with”. It is an act that separates the thing from its context (from the sacred) and makes it free. (Agamben, 2007; Removed for peer review) Agamben write:

“Children, who play with whatever old thing falls into their hands, make toys out of things that also belong to the spheres of economics, war, law, and other activities that we are used to thinking of as serious. All of a sudden, a car, a firearm, or a legal contract becomes a toy.” (Agamben, 2007, p. 76)

Children’s use of things – sticks, cars, pots, chairs – shall neither be understood as sloppy nor negligent. Rather, the children have the capacity to make something new of the old thing. “It should be understood as a new usage that children give to humanity.” (Sundal and Øksnes, in Koubová et al., 2021, p. 215) Drawing on Agamben, one can regard play as freeing things from its normal use. Play is characterized by its changing and transforming of both actions and things into something new. It is not about restoring an original state. (Sundal and Øksnes, in: Koubová et al., 2021, p. 216) This thing or action can also be related to time (cf. Masschelein & Simons, 2013; Lewis, 2013), a free time that is not productive.

Building on fieldwork carried out in schools in Belgium and in the DR Congo, this presentation aims to empirically and theoretically explore some of the characteristics of scholastic presentations of the lifeworld. At schools, the lifeworld (understood with Stiegler (2010) as the world as it appears during its disappearing) is presented to students in a new form: through a particular operation, the everyday lifeworld is transformed and re-presented at school so that it becomes ‘fit for teaching’ (the literal translation of the Greek word didactikos). This contribution focusses on the relationship between scholastic presentations and their ‘worldly counterparts’ and it will do so by exploring two movements.

First movement: from world to classroom. Different scholars have written about the ‘gap’ between everyday lifeworld and scholastic (re)presentation. Mollenhauer (2014: 20-21), when discussing Comenius’ Orbis Pictus, observed that through the educational sphere of the school, cultures ‘filter’ and ‘slow down’ the full force of adult realities by artificially re-presenting the world to children: the seamless lifeworld is cut into different topics and themes in order to turn (an aspect of) the world into a topic that can be discussed. Related, Masschelein and Simons (2019: 21) have discussed the artificial and hyperfunctionalized nature of scholastic (re)presentations of life world actions, activities, and practices and they have conceptualized school material as ‘suspended’ and ‘profanated’ (see Masschelein and Simons 2013). And drawing on Auroux (1994) and Stiegler (2010), Vlieghe and Zamojski (2019: 138) observe that at schools, the world is ‘grammatized’ and introduced in the form of discrete elements that in themselves have no meaning. This presentation empirically examines how (i.e., through what gestures, images, words, ways of speaking) the world is presented in the classroom, and by doing so, it provides an insight in how the lifeworld is transformed in order to be made ‘fit for teaching’.

Second movement: from classroom to world. If we can indeed observe an artificial gap between scholastic (re)presentations and their ‘worldly counterparts’, how to conceive of the connection between the two? Mollenhauer, for example, has argued that cultural objects (like scholastic (re)presentations) are encoded depictions of a particular worldview. Children, then, should acquire an ‘aesthetic literacy’ (Weiss 2018): an ability to decode and situate cultural objects within a (historically/socially) determined field of meaning and students should become aware that the world presented at school is not the ‘real world’ but only a perspective on that world (see Masschelein 2014 for a response to this). A second perspective considers scholastic (re)presentations of the (life)world as useful tools to adequately prepare students for participation in the labor market. The most recent policy document of the Flemish minister of education, for example, states that the didactic material used in the classroom should be attuned to the material and equipment used in the labor market. Accordingly, efforts should be made to decrease the artificial gap between scholastic (re)presentation and the ‘real world’.

Instead of urging children to become aware of the situated nature of scholastic (re)presentations, or instead of criticizing them for being too far removed from the ‘real world’, this contribution explores a third perspective and pays attention to those aspects that are meaningful and valuable about the gap between world and scholastic (re)presentation. Drawing on the work of Agamben (1993) and Fink (2016), it will approach scholastic presentations of the world as play-things, that is: not as tools that serve an external end goal (an acquired literacy, or participation on the labor market), but as miniaturized and essentialized materials that allow for students to establish a new relationship with the world.