The Uncontrollability of the World

by Hartmut Rosa

As I have argued elsewhere in multiple publications,6 education is, at best, a semicontrollable process of establishing resonance between subject and world or between child and a certain segment of world. Education occurs not when a particular skill has been acquired, but when a socially relevant segment of world “begins to speak,” that is, when a child or an adolescent suddenly realizes: Oh! History—or politics, or physics, or music—says something to me. It concerns me in some way, and I can engage with it self-efficaciously. When exactly this “spark” occurs is effectively uncontrollable. Mostly it happens at unplanned, unexpected, often incidental moments, and just as uncontrollable is what a young person then makes of or does with the segment of world in question (a poem, the Thirty Years War, Kepler’s laws, etc.), what it says to him or her. Education is thus a process of continual transformation in which the subject develops into a person with his or her “own voice,” a voice that is itself also uncontrollable.