Liesbeth and the story of the Good Samaritan

(Official translation) The word that inevitably comes to mind every time we listen to the recording of Liesbeth telling her story, is ‘interruption’, an educational concept developed by G. Biesta, thereby leaning on the thinking of the great French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In De terugkeer van het lesgeven (2018) Biesta extensively elaborates the idea. The purpose of education, in his opinion (Biesta, 2015), is threefold. It should contribute, first, to the qualification of students by enabling them to acquire knowledge, skills, dispositions and understandings that qualify them to do certain things. A second function of education lies in the domain of socialization. By getting an education, students become part of traditions and practices. The third domain in which education has a role to play, is the domain of subjectification, which has to do with the way education contributes to how we can exist as human subjects. Biesta uses the ideas of E. Levinas to substantiate this educational domain of subjectification, in which ‘interruption’ is a central idea. To become a human subject, it is crucial that every youngster is pulled out of his own ego-centeredness. For Levinas (1971), this ego-centeredness is not an ethical, but an ontological concept. My primordial existence is a being at home in the world, (“chez soi”). One exists in the first place with and for oneself. Emancipation, or in terms of Biesta, becoming an adult, means being pulled out of this existence-with-and-for-oneself. This is what becoming a subject or being a self entails. It means not being the centre of the world, but living in connection with other human beings and with the world around you. Biesta articulates this as not following your every desire, but asking the question which of these desires contribute to living the good life, together with everyone else.

To be pulled out of this being at home with oneself, is an interruption of the existence of the “I”. It happens when the “I” meets the “Other”. Something outside myself confronts me and forces me out of the comfortable being at home with myself. It is there, in the meeting with the other-than-myself, that the possibility of becoming a human subject is created.

It is a beautiful and old idea, this notion of interruption. It is about those moments in life when our plans, our expectations, our judgments, our ideas, our goals, the rules by which we live, our way of life are shaken in their foundations and turned upside down. In those moments something happens that touches the core of our existence as human beings. The question is, can we open up ourselves to this experience? Do we have the courage to endure the inconvenience of this interruption in our comfortably being at home with ourselves?

It reminds us of the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10, 25-37), as it is read by R. Burggraeve (2000), among others. In the heart of the story, we find exactly this kind of interruption. Accidentally, something crosses the path of the priest and the Levite that thoroughly shakes their plans and ideas. "By chance”, most translations read. The event breaks their expectations and disrupts the course of things. However, the priest and the Levite are not prepared to risk the normal course of events and let go of control over what is happening. They are not leaving their predetermined path. At most, they “pass by on the other side” of the man. They make a little detour and walk around him. They do see him and indeed can't really ignore him. After all, he is lying there in the middle of the way. As soon as they can, though, they leave the disruption on their path behind and life goes on as it should: straight ahead, towards the predetermined and predictable goal, in alignment with everyone's shared expectations. The momentary discomfort is quickly swept under the rug.

Enter the Samaritan. He who, as a stranger, is not predisposed by the prevailing plans, laws and expectations. He is alien to them. That is exactly why he is being shunned. But it is precisely this man who becomes the neighbor of the wounded man. He does not ignore what happens unexpectedly on his journey. On the contrary, “he had compassion". He cares for the victim of the robbers, binds up the wounds and pays the innkeeper. He for one does get his hands dirty. It is reminiscent of what Jan Masschelein writes in De lichtheid van het opvoeden. The art of education, he says, has to do with finding a certain attitude towards life, or ‘ethos’. He describes exercises to work on that ethos as "practices in which one works on a certain attitude towards the world (images, words, things) and towards the other, an attitude in which one engages with that world and with the other" (2018, p. 16, own italics). Where does one find life, is the question in the story. Can it be found among the priest and the Levite, who on their way experience nothing else than what they themselves had foreseen already? Who deliver what is expected of them? Who close their eyes to what interrupts their path? Or is it with the Samaritan, who is touched by what is he encounters on his way ("he saw him and cared deeply for him"), willing to leave the path and become involved with what comes upon him?

It is exactly what happens in Ms. Liesbeth's story. At first she tries to stay on the path. Ok, she thinks, it will be all right, the children just need some more time. Let’s continue to do as I am used to. She tries, understandably, not to have to "see". Another way she could have made the detour, not to have to endure the inconvenience, would have been by making the obvious and tempting judgment: Wow! These are unusually energetic, difficult, naughty children. After all, the facts do lead to this conclusion: these children are indeed energetic and difficult and naughty. The most obvious reaction of a teacher to that judgment is one of sighing, growling, threatening and punishing. Is there a teacher who can deny that this reaction is a recognizable one?

What Ms. Liesbeth does, is a powerful thing. She heeds to the appeal of her children and her intern. She, the teacher all colleagues agree about: If Liesbeth doesn't know what to do..., says: "I don't know what to do anymore." The course of things is interrupted. Help is needed. This must not have been easy for her. She leaves the known path behind and ‘gets her hands dirty’. But this is exactly the moment where the story is born that, of all the moments in the classroom that year, stays with her the most. Precisely because it was an disruption, it managed to touch her deeply.

What makes the story of Ms. Liesbeth all the more impressive, is the way in which the lives of the children are also fundamentally interrupted. The project 'stay with the ball' closely reflects her inner core as a teacher. It seeps through the words she uses in telling her stories:

"You are worth it", "I know you can", "you deserve my confidence". With this disposition towards her eight ‘rascals’, she interrupts their basic reality. After all, their factual behaviour does not in any way give rise to trust. This is exactly how Biesta (2018) describes what 'dissensus’ is all about: it is the refusal to accept the flight in incapacity. Instead of an education that wants to proceed based on what is possible, what is visible, of what there is evidence for, he advocates an approach to children that is at odds with the available facts. He calls it an orientation towards the unforeseeable. Teaching is a way of doing things in which one asks of children to do what is impossible, he writes:

Provided that, following Derrida (1992b, p. 16), we do not understand the impossible as that which is not possible, but as that which cannot (yet) be seen as a possibility, which cannot (yet) be calculated as a possibility on the basis of all the information and all the evidence we have at our disposal at the moment. Teaching as dissensus, aimed at being an adult subject, is in this sense characterised by an orientation towards the unforeseeable (...), i.e. towards that which does not exist here and now, that which we can hope for and trust and believe in, but which can never be a matter of knowledge or certainty. (Biesta, 2018, pp.135-136, own translation)

According to Biesta, it is precisely in this disposition that what he calls the 'pedagogical gesture' can be found. Here, a possibility arises for young people to exist as a subject. It is this way of behaving towards them that does not lock children in and condemns them to an image based on the facts - you can imagine that children will eventually conform to the image presented to them time and again - but that really breaks through the existing situation and thus makes way for the possibility of entirely new futures to arise.

It is as Leonard Cohen sings in Anthem (1992, track 5): "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in". Light and life are not necessarily to be found in the moments that we are in control, that we can carry out our plans as foreseen and there is no disturbance on the horizon. It is when these plans are halted, the facts ruptured, our judgements suspended, it is when daily life goes wrong, things do not go the way we would like them to, when reality escapes our grasp, it is exactly then that - maybe – we are captured by moments of beauty, inspiration, intensity, connection.