The Beautiful Risk of Education (Gert Biesta)

Biesta's work in last two decades is of the kind that is too often lacking in philosophy of education discourses, or in foundations of education in general: examination that takes education itself, as a whole, as its "unit of analysis," and focuses on what education should mean.The Beautiful Risk of Education continues Biesta's efforts to articulate what in hindsight he refers to as a "theory of education" (p.xi), a theory not only in the descriptive sense but primarily in the normative one.This book is the latter in what can be seen as a series of three books by Gert Biesta.In Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future (2006) he develops subjectivity as a central dimension in education through a critique of the dominant discourse of learning in education and an exploration of the notion of "coming into presence."In Good Education in an Age of Measurement (2010) he introduces a broader education framework by adding two other dimensions, qualification and socialization.In The Beautiful Risk of Education (2014) Biesta "focuses on a theme that was implicit in the other two books" (p.x), namely the weakness of education.Biesta believes this theme deserves explicit examination since it has important implications that might assist in engaging with his ideas in practical settings.This review is a good opportunity to take a comprehensive look at Biesta's work, after completing the 'trilogy'.Biesta draws on philosophical texts from a broad range of areas, including ethics, politics, and theology, while at the same time he does not lose sight of his main interest: what is educationally desirable.This is a challenging attempt to combine two allegedly contradictory scholarly approaches: one that rests on other domains and another that seeks to define its own way.Indeed, as can be seen by reading this book in the context of Biesta's corpus, he faces the challenge by honestly engaging with both approaches in a search for a richer way of thinking about education.In The Beautiful Risk of Education Biesta characterizes and argues against "strong" perceptions and practices of education, and explains and exemplifies a "weak" view through seven "themes": creativity, communication, teaching, learning, emancipation, democracy, and what Biesta labels "virtuosity".He defines his idea of "weak education" against current dominant perceptions of education and a "desire to make education strong, secure, predictable, and risk-free" (p.2)."Strong" education is associated with "effective production of pre-defined 'learning outcomes'" and with "a limited set of identities" (ibid.).Biesta argues that this perception of education is a "fundamental misunderstanding of what education is about" (p. 3) since education "isn't a mechanism and shouldn't be turned into one" (p.4).Actually, the educational way is "the slow way, the difficult way, the frustrating way, and, so we might say, the weak way, as the outcome of this

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