The future is the only proper object of education.
The gap between the present and future must not be governed through new public management.
The gap between the present and future must not be closed by anticipation and preemption.
In their various ways, neoliberalism (or new public management) and control (or anticipation and preemption), create needs and desires for educators as academic engineers.
The gap between the present and future is the place – time – time and place of experimentation.
This experimentation is the only proper object of education.
Academic engineering experiments towards outcomes of effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, and other measurable private goods. It is not experimentation in this sense at all, it is overcoding.
Experimentation is open in terms of outcome and contingent in terms of its material-discursive technologies. It is a located, rather than abstract, process.
Experimentation, undefinable through outcome, resists its own overcoding.
Technologies are extensions of ourselves.
Technologies carry the potential to extend our actions beyond what our habits would replicate.
Our habits are never just our habits.
Our habits, absent experimentation, recreate the present in the future with minor variations left to pure chance.
To experiment in the space between the present and the future, the space and time of what’s next, is to become ungovernable.
Agency in this system is both hard fought and ever present. There is always something we are doing to uphold current (and thus future) systems, therefore there is always something we can do to change them.
One way to wield technology and the self against habit is to practice parrhesia: speaking truth to power in a way that risks something of your self.
To use the technologies at hand to experiment towards a better future is to ethically educate.
Becoming ungovernable is the practice of education.
To educate is to change the future in the present.
Laura Smithers 