Pedagogic rights,public education and democracy

Abstract

In this paper, the argument that we make is that public education emerges from when democracy is put into practice in education. For the purposes of this paper we use pedagogic rights as proposed by Basil Bernstein as a way to frame and support this ‘putting into practice’. Democracy, we argue, has to be practiced in two senses: 1) it does not ‘exist’ but has to be continually renewed and brought to life between people, as such it is precarious and fleeting; 2) one might become better at democracy by trying to ‘do it’ more often and that education is where this ‘trying’ might occur. We draw on Rancière’s work on democracy that focusses on democratic acts or moments; on the ‘fracturing’ of sense (what is sayable, seeable, thinkable) – when people whose only part (including in education) is none, take one. A process of ‘becoming public’, we suggest, is instituted in these events. To this end, our proposal for public education is adversarial to contemporary formations of education. Conceptualising public education in this way shows that it is rare, and becoming rarer.

Introduction

In this paper, we argue that what is ‘public’ about public education emerges from when democracy is put into practice in education. For the purposes of this paper, we use pedagogic rights (PRs) as a way to frame and support this ‘putting democracy into practice’ in education. Underlying the argument is the idea that democracy has to be practised in two senses: 1) it does not ‘exist’ as such, but has to be continually renewed and brought to life between people – it is precarious and fleeting (see Rancière, 2010); 2) one might become better at democracy by trying to ‘do it’ more often and that education is one place where this ‘trying’ might occur. Our theoretical work here does not focus on the system features of democracy; voting, political representation, party electoral systems, and so on. We draw on Rancière’s work on democracy (Rancière, 2006) that pays attention to democratic acts or moments. In these acts there is a ‘fracturing’ of sense (what is sayable, seeable, thinkable, hearable) when people who have no part in how sense is made, take one. A process of ‘becoming public’ is instituted in these events. From this point of view, the democratic process is impossible to predetermine and is also difficult to control. Therefore, it goes against contemporary efforts of education to determine what education is and how it is to be done in ways that are increasingly standardised and centralised (via the promulgation and enforcement of teacher standards, national assessment and curriculum regimes). Also, the democratic process, as we outline it here, is antithetical to producing education as (a product for use in) a market. To this end, our proposal for public education is adversarial to contemporary formations of education. Public education in the version that we promulgate it here is non-marketable in both a temporal and spatial sense as its constitution emerges only during/after the fact. There is literally nothing to sell, not even the process, which is always ‘new’ in any case. Conceptualising public education in this way shows that it is rare, and becoming rarer. We also differentiate our work from debates about public versus private education. We suggest that reading Rancière (2006) shows that what is usually designated ‘public’ is already riven by private interests and so we think that it is important to go back to the ‘heart’ of democracy in order to rethink not just what (a) ‘public’ is, but how, and why to ‘do’ (practise) public education. We may be able then, perhaps, to make a case for this kind of ‘public’ as a bulwark against the forces of privatisation.

We make use of proposals that Basil Bernstein suggested with respect to PRs, noting that this is a much-underutilised resource from within his extensive oeuvre, to support our ideas about public education and democracy. We undertake an analysis of the PRs as detailed by Bernstein, but we do this, as noted above, aided by the thinking of Rancière, especially with respect to democracy. Basil Bernstein (2000) presented his ideas about PRs and democracy at a conference, also attended by Jacques Rancière in Santiago de Chile in 1986 just when Chile was in the throes of moving toward a democratic constitution and government change (Frandji and Vitale, 2016). The context for the first appearance of PRs at the Chilean conference is important – clearly Bernstein wanted to have something to say that would carry some weight in a situation where real political change was happening on the ground, there and then. The focus of the PRs paper, according to Frandji and Vitale (2016: 13) is the potential contribution of ‘the pedagogic device to the development of a democratic society.’ Bernstein (1990, 1996, 2000) developed an extensive theory of the pedagogic device and pedagogic discourse, building on Foucault’s concept of the device, dispositif, discourse and power/knowledge relations (Singh 2002, 2017), which is not the central focus of the current paper. As Frandji and Vitale (2016: 13) argue, the PR model is a ‘normative model in the sense that it defines how the pedagogic device could operate to fulfil its democratic function’. The PR paper attempted to articulate Bernstein’s theory of the social or social ontology and the relation between theory and methods in social scientific research.

Bernstein’s three PRs – enhancement, inclusion and participation – ‘operate’ as a normative backdrop to his other more well-known and extensive theoretical work. They constitute an attempt to link education to broader political questions about democracy and provide a basis for thinking about Bernstein’s ‘foundational theory of social phenomena – specifically, the relationships between the individual and the collective, social and symbolic control and the possibility of social and historical change’ (Frandji and Vitale, 2016: 13).

The rights themselves – enhancement, inclusion and participation – are all quite familiar to educators and none of them are controversial. Though, one reason we have written this paper is that we think that perhaps all these rights have had their political edge blunted. Partly this is connected, we think, to the insistence in contemporary education discourses of a focus on the importance of achievement, performance and outputs, which are linked to the putative goals of competitive globalising ‘productivity’. Such a focus is at the expense of how education connects to broader goals for education and questions about democracy that are outside, perhaps even against, ‘productivity’. In effect, the widespread apparent acceptance of marketised education has led to its depoliticisation – the consensus is that the market is both solution and goal, at least in the Anglosphere.

But also, the rights have been depoliticised in and by ‘education’ itself. We (educators) have become entranced with the possibility of education being just about ‘learning’ (and ‘improving’ learning), and nothing else. Biesta (2014) has shown the limiting effects of the ‘discourse of learning’ in education. In his terms, what he calls ‘learnification’ (Biesta, 2014) reduces education to purposes connected to ‘qualification’ and ‘socialisation’ at the expense of ‘subjectification’. This reduction means that education loses its connection to questions about emancipation and the possibilities for freedom that arise therein. This is a key insight because qualification and socialisation both link into processes of depoliticisation and marketisation well. Subjectification, on the other hand, offers the possibility for re-politicising education – for rethinking the reductivity of ‘education as market’ (and, therefore, also marketised and depoliticised, neo-liberal freedom). What Biesta’s work shows us is that education as it is currently configured, as reduced to ‘learning’, limits how education might be conceived of politically and then with respect to questions about the relations between education and democracy (see Biesta, 2009).

So, we go back to Bernstein’s thinking, as, we argue, that we can reclaim the potential for the ‘rights’ to create meaningful links for putting public education into practice as democracy. We note that Bernstein was less convincing in his thinking about democracy than about education per se, so there is space to do work to try to explore how the connections between education and democracy might be teased out in more detail. We are particularly interested in working on these connections against the incursions of ‘integrated world capitalism’ (see Guattari, 1996) into education. As educators, we are attracted to the possibility of making a claim for education; in fact, for education that does not just accept its place in the current ‘integrated world capitalism’ ordering of things, but can put that ordering into question. The case we make is that education revolves around making judgements (Biesta, 2014) but that these judgments are always made from within an unhealthy milieu (Stengers et al., 2009).

We draw on Rancière’s work to think about education–democracy connections that are not neutral nor positive – instead, they are likely to be adversarial, and they will challenge the ‘common sense’ of democracy as capitalism. We think through, with Rancière’s support, both the ‘effective’ point that Bernstein is making and also a way to conceptualise democracy that extends Bernstein’s work. From Rancière, we also note that his analytical starting point is ‘equality’ – not as a fact, nor as ‘truth’, or a ‘goal’, but as an opinion! He says that one must hold the opinion of equality in order that it be verified in practice. The point of this reorientation from equality as a goal (in the critical tradition) to presupposing equality is that it allows one to take a different angle on questions about education, emancipation and knowledge. Rancière’s thinking does not deny the importance of knowledge but it does not place the acquisition of knowledge as either the goal of equality or the requirement for emancipation. Instead, what emerges is a critique of these relations as they are currently assumed to operate – where education remains in its place, that is, and where freedom is conditional on the acquisition of knowledge and where equality develops in the process (see Biesta, 2017 for a critique of developmentalism as an almost implicit assumption about how education ‘works’). In fact, Rancière argues that working on inequality leads to consequences that do little to ‘undo’ inequality, and work to the advantage of those who already have most power, privilege, and so on.

We can also note, finally, by way of introduction, that the discourse of rights is not unproblematic, and we explore some of these problems in the next section of the paper, where we discuss ‘democracy as event’, as opposed to thinking about democracy as (a form of) government, before the main section of the paper where we analyse Bernstein’s take on PRs.

Framing our argument

Working with ‘rights’ is paradoxical, which as we see it is a kind of ‘good’, as the paradox opens up space for further work. For example, rights can serve, on the one hand, as important normative markers pointing to the need to change current unjust, unfair or unequal conditions or situations. On the other hand, rights can institute restricting, regulative regimes and reconfirm, or leave untouched, existing social orders that build power around the ‘rights makers’ themselves – especially for those with the power to make and ‘exercise’ rights on behalf of others. Rights then are already enjoyed by some who need no more and so become the ‘producers and policers’ of rights on behalf of others. Furthermore, Foucault (1997, 1976) suggests that any attempt to ground human rights within a conception of humanity, or ascribe attributes to the human rights bearer always inevitably constitutes boundaries between who is human, and who is non- or not-yet human. In addition, ‘rights are necessarily undetermined and unfinished, always remaining to be expanded, enforced and contingently occupied by a political subject’ (Golder, 2015: 90). It is this semantic openness of rights discourse that harbours a democratic potential (Golder, 2015), which we hope to explore via thinking about PRs.

As stated, Bernstein (2000) developed the PRs at a conference in Santiago de Chile in 1986. The rights are framed in ways that go well beyond an everyday reading/understanding of the words taken at face value. An everyday reading of the PRs conforms to the usual and quite widespread agreements about enhancement, inclusion and participation. Contemporary agreements about the suggestions that teachers and schools need to improve (that could be linked on a superficial level to Bernstein’s ‘enhancement’), that all students should be included and that everyone should have the right to participate in education, workplaces and the broader polity, are now well understood and constitute the dominant and familiar narrative of schooling, democracy and publics. These positions are established and what once may have been radical about these ideas, including how disagreements about them are framed, has become mainstream (at least in Anglophone nation-states). One way to characterise this might be to say that a weak, rhetorical version of these rights has become dominant – part of the mainstream of education – and that the radical element (that we are interested in here), contained in them, has been residualised (suppressed, pushed to the sidelines). In contrast to the residualising version of rights discourses in schooling, and possible interpretation of Bernstein’s PRs, we propose an alternative, radical reading. If we take each of Bernstein’s PRs in turn, we can get a sense of the breadth of his thinking. He links each right to a ‘level’ (individual, communitas, society) and to an attribute. What we are looking for in this article is a way to reclaim a political version of public education through these rights.

To this end, it is important to highlight the difference between dissent and dissensus here. ‘Dissensus’ as we are using it, drawing on Rancière, links to democracy – for Rancière, democracy is ‘rare’, because it involves the reordering of sensible orders (what can be ‘seen’, heard and makes ‘sense’) by those who are outside the constitution of sense, when they act on the basis of their ‘equality of intelligence’ and in this act reveal the ‘wrong’ in any given ‘sensible arrangement’. We might say that this involves a right to disagreement about the ways that the grounds for dis/agreement about what makes sense have been articulated, understood and acted upon. This highlights one of the important contributions that Rancière makes in his work on democracy – that is, to shift the analytical focus from the ways in which democracy is systematised or institutionalised (for example, by voting and bureaucracy) to democratic ‘acts’. Rancière’s identification of the ‘invention of democracy’ (2004: 5) underpins our focus in this paper;

It [democracy] was invented not by democrats as a rallying cry but by their adversaries as a term of abuse. Democracy meant the power of the people with nothing, the speech of those who should not be speaking, those who were not really speaking beings. The first significant occurrences of the term ‘demos’ are to be found in Homer and always appear in speech situations. Greek and Trojan leaders alike denounced the same scandal: that men of the demos – men who were part of the indistinct collection of people ‘beyond count’ – took the liberty of speaking.

For us then, as educators, we need to think about who, but also where, is ‘beyond the count’? There is no straightforward answer though there may be some ways to begin thinking about this. Rancière’s definition of the ‘police’ is useful as it shows that it is not just governments which create sense but interconnections of other actors, and crucially, of course, ‘private’ actors (and transnational ones), who create what becomes thinkable and sayable and by whom, where, and so on. The ‘police’ are those who ‘make sense’, in the distribution of sense (where capacities and roles align, and the arbitrariness of their creation is obfuscated). Opposing the police then are those who ‘take the liberty of speech’ – a group that is not constituted before its appearance, those whose only part in making sense hitherto is ‘none’. How, to put it plainly, might education be democratic, through the disruption of ‘sense’? We take Rancière’s work now to think through Bernstein’s thinking about PRs and to try to extend them and discuss how they might support the emergence of democracy as ‘public education’.

The PRs

Bernstein was interested in understanding the evolution of schooling systems, the construction and distribution of official school knowledge, and the role of schooling systems in the formation of social orders, including social inequalities. Bernstein was also interested, as a kind of normative background to his detailed theoretical and empirical work, in how education might contribute to ‘democracy’, and he made suggestions about PRs linking education and democracy. The link for him was the way that education could support democracy and the formation of ‘democratic society’. We use his work to create a different link, where democracy is ‘internal’ to education and constitutes its publicness, so the rights take on a different function, moving from arguing how education might be constituted as a preparation for ‘effective democracy’ to come (in the future), to a resource for supporting what is public in education through democracy.

We will now discuss, in turn, each of the rights that Bernstein proposed: enhancement, inclusion and participation. First of all, with respect to enhancement, Bernstein is not concerned with the goal of individual or self-improvement that links into the acquisition or exploitation of material goods or services. The individual level, at which this right operates, is not that which is vested in each individual, but understood from ‘a relational perspective’ where, ‘. . .without confidence neither students nor teachers can act’ (Frandji and Vitale, 2016: 15). In Bernstein’s thinking, the possibility of ‘movement’ is important; enhancement is about pushing against boundaries, experiencing ‘tension points condensing the past and opening possible futures’ and exploring them and having the confidence to do so (Bernstein, 2000: xx). Rancière’s thinking about dissensus, which he suggests is ‘to think the lines according to which boundaries and passages are constructed, according to which they are conceivable and modifiable’ (Rancière, 2010 218), is very similar. We might say that, for Bernstein, ‘enhancement’ is about having (the right to have) the confidence to see/feel/hear/live where boundaries are and to put them into question: where can one go, what can one think, what is unallowable and unthinkable, and how is one positioned in light of these boundaries in relation to others (which in the process one learns is/are arbitrary)? Yet, taking a cue from Rancière, through dissensus a group subject can begin to form and take on, invent, a name (that was previously unseeable, or of no account, in the making of sense). Such an emergent grouping contrasts with the individuating tactics of integrated world capitalism. If a fracturing of sense does occur it will be beyond and different from what individualised subjects might desire and seek to put into action, as subjectivisation (the formation and new sensemaking of previously uncounted groups) occurs (Rancière, 2010).

Here, it is important to note that Bernstein’s position on the trustworthiness of formal systems, such as educational institutions, remains ambiguous. In the PRs writing, he clearly states that these systems could have ‘institutionalised’ the PRs (2000: xx). However, his earlier writings seem to imply an ambivalent attitude towards institutions.

It has always seemed to me that educational institutions at secondary or primary levels are likely to absorb ideas, and try them out on a fairly large scale, provided that those subject to them are either the very young children or the so-called less able working-class children, before the ideas are sufficiently worked through to be useful. (Bernstein, [1971] 2003, p.14)

We might explore then the possibility of having confidence in the system. Confidence in the system might mean that one could expect the system of pedagogic relations to operate in ways that are trustworthy and reliable; that systems, if we take seriously the way we have theorised enhancement above, would reliably create possibilities for unimaginable material–social infrastructures; that such infrastructures might form from emergent, indeterminate, spatial–temporal/ities, and that those people, whose only part in the system is none, might be able to (envisage) taking ‘part’. So, from the perspective that we are taking here, there is a systemic requirement that ‘it’ becomes and remains ‘emergent’; we see this as one goal for the institutionalisation of education – that the system develops the capacity for dissensual ‘listening’, the capacity to be self-disruptive.

We think, therefore, that it may be important to keep ‘confidence’ as a central feature of how one might mobilise ‘rights’ thinking. Confidence, for us, must also involve being able to reject/amend/augment what/when/how educational systems expect ‘confidence’ to appear. This understanding of confidence may enable ‘individuals’ to enter into pedagogic relations with trust. Confidence is important because trust is ‘without ground’ (Biesta, 2014). Trust is fragile and fleeting, fluid and ‘open’. The way that confidence might operate in this case is toward the demand for the system to produce, and foster, confidence that pedagogic or social relations (at the individual level of engagement) will enable change in the system.

To summarise with respect to enhancement and dissensus, clearly without the experiencing of boundaries, without knowing the features and struggles to map out the onto-epistemological terrain on which they are built, change is difficult. This implies, we think, that there is a right to dissensus (which we explore more fully below) in education that might 1) enable people to recognise boundaries (discursive, material), that 2) should become modifiable with others, and 3) that the boundaries themselves are able, and have the capacity to ‘listen’ dissensually – that is, they can remain open to change. There is a clear role for education here in a move from the ‘knowing’ that point one implies, to the formation of new entities (an ontological imperative), to a systemic capacity for generating change (onto-epistemic-political imperative).

The second ‘right’, ‘inclusion’, operates, according to Bernstein (2000), at the level of the ‘social’ and involves communitas. Now communitas is an important concept as it refers, at least historically, to the possibility of groups of people coming together as equals – it concerns communities of people who both recognise and act on the basis of the presupposition of equality. So, for Bernstein, the right to be included is underpinned by the right to autonomy – one might be included, but on terms that are not pre-given, where, with whom and how one might be included is subject to change in the process of ‘inclusion’. So, as we read it, the right to inclusion includes the right to change spatial, temporal and conceptual boundaries, and to do this while being included in, and with, a community of equals.

Clearly this way of thinking about inclusion concerns being together with others yet apart from, and different from them, so there is a strong link here to enhancement, but now we begin to see the possibility, in Rancière’s terms, of subjectivisation, which is the politics of the verification of the equality of anyone – a politics which disrupts the ‘sensible’ arrangement of what is sayable, seeable and hearable as group subjectivities emerge thereby revealing the wrong of the given ‘partitioning’ out of sense (where the picture looks complete, unperturbable and without the need for change). We might also link here to Guattari’s work on emergent subject groups who undertake, in the process of their self-formation, an analysis of institutions and their desires (see Goffey, 2016). The right to dissent, by way of inclusion, demands that the right to difference (to speaking against the rationality of the normativising operations of ‘inclusion’ – ‘we’ are all the same) and autonomy are sacrosanct.

What might ‘a community of equals’ look like from a ‘system’ point of view? Certainly, it stands in stark contrast to the current dominant narrative of bureaucratic education and schooling institutions, and perhaps gives us a way ‘in’ to thinking about the realities of schooling. We might look to the formation of the first Greek schools that involved three processes – separation, suspension and profanation – for some clues on how a community of equals might be constituted. Separation signalled a strong boundary between the school and other daily occupations, so that school activity is freed from the rigours and rituals of work, family, religious and other worlds. The separation of the school was typically expressed in the form of suspension – that is, ‘economic, social, cultural, political or private time is suspended, as are the tasks and roles connected to specific places’ (Masschelein and Simons, 2011: 157). Suspension then was regarded as an act of ‘de-privatization, de-socialisation or de-appropriation; it sets something free. The term “free”, however, not only has the negative meaning of suspension (free from), but also a positive meaning, that is, free to’ (Masschelein and Simons, 2011: 157). The term profanation then referred to this kind of freedom – that is, the freedom to induce a space of ‘play’ in the social order, ‘the place where knowledge and practices can be released and “set free” with modes of thought/inquiry, so that time is forgotten’ (Masschelein and Simons, 2011: 157).

A condition of profane time, space and matter is not a place of emptiness, therefore, but a condition in which time, space and things are disconnected from their regular use (in the family, society . . .) and hence it refers to a condition in which something of the world is open for common use. (Masschelein and Simons, 2011: 157)

Consequently, the separation of the school from other worlds (worlds of work, family, church) not only enabled a space/time for the emergence of a community of equals, but, in so doing, constituted a public space.

The third right, ‘participation’, ‘operates’, according to Bernstein, politically, and at the level of ‘civic discourse’. Again, as we read Bernstein, participation is not just about ‘joining in’, but it is ‘the right to participate in procedures whereby [political] order is constructed, maintained and changed’ (Bernstein, 2000: xxi). This is what might be called a ‘strong’ version of participation, where, if we took a game metaphor, it is not just about being invited in to play, but being invited in to play and change the rules of the game as well; the terms, of who might participate and how, are also open to dispute in this case. Participation (again, this is on our reading of Bernstein through Rancière) involves much more than having the right to be a part of something; it involves the right to create change and for this change to be meaningful. Thinking with Rancière here allows us to give participation a radical edge, for participation fractures sense for Rancière; where/when and how ‘the part of the no part’ of any given polity take one. As we noted above with respect to inclusion, this kind of participation reveals a ‘wrong’. This wrong is the always arbitrary division between ‘sense’ and ‘noise’, between those whose presupposed capacities are linked to their roles and positions, where they can make sense. Revealing the wrong in any configuration of sense demonstrates its absolute contingency and the borders around which what is thinkable, sayable and doable become clarified, and, hence, potentially modifiable. In the conversion from having only the part of the ‘no part’ to taking one, the how and who of participation emerges. ‘New sense’ forms from what might only have been counted previously as noise. This conversion is a sensible fracture where the ‘wrong’ of given configurations are exposed and challenged. New subjects, collective subjects, self-naming, move from being mere vessels for description to ‘inscripting entities’, writing new realities into existence.

In summary, it will be recalled that Bernstein’s concept of communitas is also based on the idea of the presupposition of equality, which, if we draw on Rancière, in its verification, is the ‘operation’ whereby the ‘no part’ take one. This then forces us to think about the operationalisation of equality and how education institutions can constitute a ‘democratic invention, an invention of a site of equality and as primordially a public space’ (Masschelein and Simons, 2011: 151), where the ‘education-as-public-space’ creates the ‘time and space that opens up an experience of new beginnings in confrontation with something free for use’ (Masschelein and Simons, 2011: 157).

Rancière says that he wants to hold the ‘opinion’ of equality and to see what happens next, to allow for the possibility of the verification of equality in practice. So, in one move he forces us to remove the idea that people do not know what they are doing nor why. And then in a connected claim, he argues that what is important is how ‘sense’ is distributed; to whom it falls possible for this sense to be made (who can make sense, as opposed to noise); and who is to be ‘heard’ or ‘seen’. Rancière illuminates the alignments of presupposed capacities, roles and positions that produce distributions of sense (what is seeable, sayable, thinkable) with the result that, in spite of our shared human equality, only some people have a part in the production and distribution of sense while there are those whose only part is to have none. Politics for Rancière, and this links also to the process of ‘subjectivisation’ that undergirds the possibility for democracy (as Rancière describes it), arises when those whose only part is none, take one. They/we, acting on the basis of equality, reveal thereby the ‘wrong’ in the given distribution of sense. Participation becomes political when the part whose only one is to have none takes one. This ‘no part’ is not pre-given, and the process of participation involves ‘naming’ an emerging collectivising subjectivity – the sense-fracturing participation of the part whose only part is to have none. Democracy, then, is ‘not as a political or governmental regime (of equal participation or representation)’ (Simons and Masschelein, 2011: 5). Rather, democracy or the mark of democracy is a school (or education institution) based on an ‘an assumption or opinion of equality in placing students anew time and again in an equal position to begin with’ (Simons and Masschelein, 2011: 163). Democratic moments can arise ‘where teachers and students are exposed to each other as equals in relation to a book, a text, a thing’ (Simons and Masschelein, 2011: 163). The point is that democracy and the publicness of education is never ‘done’ or achieved at once; that the presupposition of equality has to be practiced and that the sparks of invention created in the disjunctive operations between equals might be supported by thinking and acting dissensually about and through enhancement, inclusion and participation.

Discussion

We might conclude by making a claim for a paradoxical right to dissensus. It will be a right without content and only begins to (literally) make (produce) sense as it is operationalised. In one way, Bernstein was trying to outline through these PR suggestions what education had to do or become in order to support or ‘(im)prove’ the possibilities of/for democracy. What we have attempted here is to push democracy back into education itself, to open education up to ‘becoming public(s)’, against the now widespread exogenous and endogenous privatisations that education currently endures (see Ball and Youdell, 2007).

As noted above, Rancière’s writing about democracy is linked to his thinking about both an ‘axiom of equality’ and dissensus (see Rancière, 2004). Rancière’s democracy work does not adhere to the usual problems of democracy being concerned with (what is institutionalised in government as) voting rights and representation by political parties in a process of competition and the selection by election of those who become governors/rulers. For Rancière, democracy concerns an ‘irruption’ of ‘sensible orders’. This is the process whereby anyone acting on the basis of their equality reveals the ‘wrong’ in any given distribution of sense. This involves the conversion of what did not count as sense, by those who were not able to make sense, at a time and place where sense has not been made before, into something thinkable, visible, hearable; in short, ‘dissensus. . .the manifestation of a gap in the sensible itself’, the very ‘essence of politics’ (Rancière, 2010: 38). His argument is that there are those people whose only part in making sense is none – the part of the ‘no part’. This emergent part/no part, the changing of boundaries therein and the ‘moment’ of their conversion from noise makers to sense makers is the core of the dissensual element that we seek to highlight in Bernstein’s PR, as, at least for Rancière, this is the start of a process of subjectivisation, the formation of newly self-naming/ed groups of people, that underpins democracy.

The point we need to make here is that the right to dissensus is what we might call a practical right – it gives us a place from which to act with others as equals as a group or collective, a ‘becoming public’. This ‘collectivising’ work is what, in part, ‘makes’ education. To locate this ‘education’ in schooling we can turn to what Meirieu (2020) has recently called ‘classing’ – creating a group entity or public through education:

classing is to articulate the common and singular. . .. The pedagogical act. . .is a construction, material and symbolic at the same time, of the School in its very principle; learning together thanks to the tutelary figure of the master who, at the same time, creates something common and supports everyone in their uniqueness. This dialectic between the collective and the individual, the discovery of what unites the students and what specifies each of them is, in fact, what ‘makes school’. No matter what my name is, and what is my appearance, I am there as I am, with my difficulties and my resources, in a group where we gradually discover, thanks to the master, that we can share knowledge and values, where what I bring to others, is as important as what they bring me, where we learn, simultaneously, to say ‘I’, and to make ‘we’. (Meirieu, 2020)

Classing, then, is uniquely educational – when/how/where a kind of pedagogical public is sparked into existence in the process of working together with a teacher whose work it is to bring this ‘sparking’ about. ‘Classing’ rejects the individuating, privatising tactics of contemporary institutional formations. Such classings instantiate the nascent ‘beyond the count’ – at once a group greater than its individual parts and also unforeseeable in its formation, indeterminable, invisible in the contemporary sense of education.

To this end, as we see it, the right to dissensus is that which makes possible what is unthinkable and unimaginable at any given time and place which, when operationalised, is perhaps one possibility through which democratic publics might emerge in education. Perhaps the right to dissensus is a practical democratic resource for the analysis and enactment of public education. This kind of right is less about what might be mandated or called for on behalf of others, but is a vehicle through which the other (more normative) ‘rights’ might be mobilised.

Conclusion

Rancière’s key insertion into the debates he has become involved in is around the ‘axiom of equality’. This axiom, then, is about holding the opinion of equality and seeing what happens next as a result. It concerns not just the ‘truth’ of equality but the operationalisation of this truth – this means that equality has to be put into the problematics and unforesee-abilities of practice. This reversal of the presupposition of equality from an aim to current fact in operation creates many difficulties for scholars and teachers and this is why the right to dissensus may be generative.

The right to dissensus does create problems for researchers. First, one must assume that rather than trying to reveal the conditions of others (people or entities) that they might instead reveal something interesting about our (or my) current conditions. There may well be bi- or multidirectional revelation – this is what Stengers (as cited in Latour, 2004) discusses with respect to putting the questions we pose about/on behalf of other entities at risk, to allow those entities to reframe or reject these questions. This may be important with respect to thinking about enhancement where the boundaries around who is able to produce knowledge about whom may be tested out – or at least made more obvious – so that participation in the generation of knowledge may afford people (and from a cosmopolitical point of view, posthuman, non-human entities) an educational right realised through an educational methodology (which, inter alia, is public and democratic). Clearly, one may also, under the presupposition of equality, decide to remain autonomous and yet demand inclusion and to take part in change as an equal partner in the process (to link to the third right – participation).

Lastly, Bernstein talks about a horizon for the operation of PRs, pointing to temporal and spatial dimensions, to the ways in which these rights may be realised (or analysed), toward a ‘better’ future, though one that is clearly visible from current standpoints. How the horizon works, as we see it, is to set up a gap between the rights and the various possibilities for their realisation into, and through, the opening space/times of dissensus. So, it is in this gap that various options might arise – options to act against, adversarially, and within, current privatised/ing educational arrangements. This would be to upset the ‘police orders’ (education policy) of education in each public educational act.