Why and How to Change Schooling: Insights from Biesta and Sahlberg

Abstract

In response to the increasingly dominant trend in international education policies toward standardization—primarily focused on measuring learning outcomes and transmitting skills geared to labor market integration—the two volumes propose alternative paradigms capable of countering these tendencies. Biesta, addressing the erosion of the ethical and existential dimensions of education in favor of measurable learning alone (which he defines as learnification), advances a world-centred vision of education that supports students in becoming subjects of their own lives, “in” and “with” the world. Sahlberg and Walker, by contrast, offer an analysis of concrete and effective school practices grounded in evidence from the Finnish education system, characterized by a strong culture of trust and by the promotion of students’ autonomy and responsible freedom. Despite their different perspectives, both volumes invite us to move beyond the idea of school as a factory of measurable performance and to rethink education as a complex and deeply human endeavor, capable of forming free, responsible, and critically minded individuals able to face the challenges of the world.