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This IdeasLAB blog is part of a series leading up to the launch of a publication on the theme of “renewing the social contract for education.” The theme of the series is based on the call from the report . See , and look for the full special issue in to be released in 2024. 

By 
Paul Tarc, Associate Professor 
Aparna Mishra Tarc, Associate Professor 
Mario Di Paolantonio, Associate Professor 

As demands grow for education to directly ‘make a difference’ in a world facing multiple crises, it remains important to consider how the educational in education can contribute to making a better world. A case in point is UNESCO’s (2021) recent publication, Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education. UNESCO’s “visionary” (Klees, 2022 ) intervention emphasizes education’s significant role as a force for change amidst global crises. As the report states in its preface: “the Futures of Education acknowledges the power of education to bring about profound change.” (UNESCO, 2021, p. iii). We resonate with the motivations of UNESCO’s call to reimagine education amidst global crises and opportunities, and appreciate the progressive and critical insights the report lays out. In particular we resonate with the report’s emphasis on the generative role of educational innovation within teachers’ collaborative practices and university-school partnerships. It casts teachers as “pedagogical pioneers” and “knowledge producers,” emphasizing the essential import of the teacher as an autonomous on-the-ground practitioner (p. 150-151). 

The report has also drawn some critique (for example, Klees, 2022). Klees, in alignment with our perspective, suggests that UNESCO may be overstating the ‘power of education’ and how it may lend itself to depoliticization. In another critical response, Elena Toukan (2023) problematizes the notion of a ‘social contract,’ engaging “concerns about the Eurocentric legacy and transactional nature of historical social contract relationships”. To recuperate the term, or the idea it points to, Toukan argues for a paradigmatic shift from the “transactional” to the “relational.” We agree with Toukan, that the (legacy of the) ‘social contract’ is in need of scrutiny and we appreciate her intervention. 

In contrast, our intervention aims to scrutinize the much more common notion—�Ęeducation.’ We uphold Hannah Arendt’s (2006) conception of education’s purpose to ‘sustain and renew a common world’ and her categorical distinctions between education and learning, and adults and children. This perspective is necessarily ‘conservationist,’ prioritizing a care-taking engagement with the resources of the past, rather than being of an activist or politicized orientation. While democratic politics necessitates contestation, protest and, at times, revolutionary action, the work of educating children and youth involves an intergenerational duty of ‘passing on’ a common, human-constructed world. This requires providing a somewhat protected (sheltered) space for students’ epistemic engagement and singular becoming. 

In current educational discourse, the idea of education suffers from both ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, education is considered self-evident, especially when equated with K-12 schooling, and thus seems to need no definition. On the other hand, education is complex, historically contingent, and a technologically-mediated process, making it challenging to provide a basic definition. We contend with Arendt (2006) that education is a human-centred, transgenerational process of ‘passing on’ a common world. In recent decades, it seems as though education has come to be conflated with (lifelong) learning. Indeed, our concern with UNESCO’s visionary projection for education is a lack of engagement with the aims and elemental qualities of what is educational in education, and particularly so in the domain of K-12 schooling, where adults take responsibility for children. The disregard for the significance of what is educational in education is particularly noteworthy, especially given the predominant focus on the learner and their individual learning within the hyper-individualized context of neoliberal capitalism (Biesta, 2010). 

In ‘acknowledging the power of education to bring about profound change,’ have we come to demand something of education that is beyond its purview? Does our emphasis on the rhetoric of the ‘strong language’ in education (Di Paolantonio, 2018) divert us from understanding what education can accomplish and could potentially achieve in pursuit of more just and sustainable human and planetary futures? The productive question, therefore, is not whether or not education can build a better world; nor is it useful to pit different levels or modes of engaging global crises against one another, to place yet further demands on schools. Instead, the question is how education - in its true essence, that is as educational, makes - and can make, a difference?  

Considering the educational aspect of education as a pause and interruption in time is an initial step towards appreciating its unique essence. This interruption necessitates a thorough consideration of the elemental qualities of education, including its phenomenal, intergenerational, existential, embodied, temporally ritualized, relational, ecological, world-oriented, and world-sustaining aspects. Indeed, we suggest that these preliminary ‘elemental qualities’ need (decolonial) scholarly analyses and empirically grounded research. With our plans to document and examine a small set of secondary school teachers’ praxis, our research team has begun one such project, entitled: Translating and Mobilizing 'A New Social Contract for Education:' Illuminating and supporting teachers' worldly and critical pedagogies.  

By distinguishing education from the ubiquitous, lifelong, lifewide, learning that is largely individualized and utilized predominantly for social mobility within classist political economies, we can begin to prioritize how public funding can be allocated to educate the new generation within an old and increasingly precarious world. 

A primary concern of a new social contract should be to disentangle education’s purpose, whether intended or latent, as a filter for an idealized meritocratic society edging towards the cliff, as it were. Equity should not merely aim to minimize discrimination for minoritized families so that they, in turn, can more fairly compete for an ever-smaller sliver of a decent schooling-career trajectory. At present, the process of learning (devoid of the educational) is driving the direction of education; thus, the tail (learning) is wagging the dog (education). Simply improving how the ‘tail wags the dog,’ in this sense, through a new social contract, aimed at fostering more just and sustainable planetary futures, will be ineffectual in terms of optimizing how the educational in education can uniquely contribute to a better world. This is because, to continue with our analogy, the tail (learning) is itself embedded within competitive, market, accumulative logics that are inherently world-defying rather than world-making (Biesta, 2015; Di Paolantonio, 2023). 

Rather education, namely K-12 schooling, is challenged to develop children’s and youth’s capacities for world-making, by engaging in material and existential questions of human “survivance,” significance, meaning making and the possibility of solidarities toward historical agency (beyond powerful acts of destruction by oligarchs). This re-orienting attention to the qualities and (normative) aims of the ‘educational’ of education, we believe, is fundamental to realizing our collective goal that education contributes to conserving and renewing inter-generational possibilities for a better world to come.