"The world asks something of us": Gert Biesta on democracy, education and learning to live with limits
Following his keynote at the Sixth Global Citizenship Education Symposium, Gert Biesta continued the discussion in a conversation with EDLAB research assistant Megheti Tashdjian, turning to a bigger question: What is the purpose of education in a democracy?
He presented democracy as a demanding and unfinished practice, pushed back against the idea of citizenship as a checklist of skills or competencies, and made case for a world-centred education that asks educators and students to engage ethically and politically in a digital world that does not simply revolve around them.
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Democracy and citizenship
Democratic education is often associated with voice, participation and agency, and frequently linked to the idea of preparing young people to become good citizens. Gert Biesta does not dismiss these aims, but he argues they tell only part of the story. In his view, democracy begins with limits.
“If we imagine a society where everyone can get everything they want, that is an illusion,” Biesta says. “What one person wants can prevent someone else from getting what they need or hope for." Democracy, for him, does not rest on unlimited freedom, but on the recognition that living together inevitably involves negotiation, restraint and loss.
This insight has direct consequences for education. If democracy is difficult by nature, then democratic education is not about creating harmony or certainty. It prepares students to live with tension, disagreement and responsibility.
Democracy cannot be produced
In education policy and practice, democracy often appears as an outcome. Students are educated in democratic citizenship through programmes, competencies and learning goals. The underlying assumption is that education can shape people into a desired form.
Biesta questions this logic. Education, he argues, cannot manufacture democratic citizens in the way systems produce measurable results. “You cannot make other human beings into what you want them to be,” he says. Attempts to do so risk creating an illusion of control that overlooks the unpredictability of human freedom.
Rather than producing citizens, education can help students become attentive to democratic life itself. “The aim is to encourage students to become more sensitive to what democratic life is, why it matters, and what it asks of all of us.”
For Biesta, democratic education concerns the quality of educational life. It asks whether education creates space for shared participation, whether disagreement is possible, and whether students encounter democracy as a lived practice rather than an abstract ideal.
Why democracy is difficult
Democracy is often framed in terms of inclusion and mutual respect. Biesta argues that this can miss something essential. Democracy is difficult precisely because desires collide and interests conflict. “I often use this beautiful Rolling Stones song title, ‘You can’t always get what you want’,” he says. The line captures a simple expression of democratic reality. Humans wants are not only potentially limitless, they are often incompatible. What one person wants may stand in the way of what another needs.
“Democracy asks something of us,” Biesta explains. “It runs against pure self-interest or simply doing whatever we want.” He describes this not as a flaw, but as a “valuable difficulty” that makes living together possible. Education, then, should not aim to remove this difficulty. It should help students recognise why it exists and why it matters.
When citizenship loses its edge
Biesta also questions how the concept of citizenship is used in education. Citizenship appears in many forms and contexts, often stretched to cover a wide range of practices. “People pull the idea in all sorts of directions… it may sound appealing, but it also starts to lose precision."
Digital citizenship is one example. In many policy contexts, it refers mainly to responsible use of online tools. Important as those skills are, Biesta argues that they do not amount to citizenship in a political sense. “We could simply describe it as ICT literacy.”
The risk is not semantic. “It is only in a democracy that there are citizens, in totalitarian states, there are no citizens, only subjects.” When citizenship is reduced to behaviour or skills, its historical and political meaning can fade from view.
Teaching, learning and attention
Biesta draws a distinction between learning and teaching. Contemporary education often emphasises learning as self-directed, personalised and efficient. Teaching receives less attention. Biesta sees this imbalance as significant. “We can only learn what is already on our own radar, even when we are curious, our questions… tend to follow our existing interests and concerns."
Teaching can do something else. “Teaching is about being given what you were not looking for, something you did not even know you could ask for.” Teaching can interrupt familiar paths, redirect attention, and introduce new questions.
In a digital environment where attention is constantly steered, this redirection becomes especially relevant. Education, in this sense, broadens what students are able to notice and consider.
Preserving uncertainty
Biesta also argues against the idea that education should eliminate uncertainty. Drawing on German educational scholar Klaus Mollenhauer, he notes that “people who are one hundred per cent certain of themselves can be very dangerous”. Moral action always involves judgement without guarantees. “If that small space of doubt disappears, then we are no longer acting as moral beings. We are acting like robots.”
This concern also shapes Biesta’s view of artificial intelligence. While AI can generate moral arguments, it cannot take responsibility. Producing reasoning is not the same as acting morally.
A world-centred education
Within Maastricht University’s Problem-Based Learning model based on the contextual, constructive, collaborative and self-directed learning principles, Biesta proposes adding a fifth principle: world-centred education.
Too much emphasis on constructivism and self-direction, he argues, can suggest that the world is something learners can shape entirely themselves. “The world is not simply something we construct,” he says. “The world asks something of us.”
Biesta also reflects on collaboration and worries that “a lot of it quickly turns into people talking, rushing to have opinions, and filling the space.” Slowing down, and allowing space for deeper reflection, even silence, can change the dynamics of learning and lead to unexpected insights.
Education and responsibility
Biesta’s perspective resists easy solutions. Democratic education, as he understands it, does not promise certainty or consensus. It invites educators and students to stay with difficulty, and to respond to the world they share.
“In the end,” Biesta says, “education is about trying to live well in a world that will always ask something of us."
By Megheti Tashdjian, EDLAB research assistant
Professor Gert Biesta’s ideas raises a relevant question for universities such as Maastricht University: are educators being adequately prepared for this work?
If students are to develop what he describes as “antennas for the real” – the capacity to recognise reality as it is and to stay with the difficulty of democracy rather than looking away –, then teachers need more than ready-made tools or pedagogical templates. They need formation: time and space to practise judgment, to interrupt “easy” learning, and to allow the world to speak back in the classroom. This, in turn, raises a broader issue: whether current educational practices, and the educators who carry them out, are equipped to handle these questions in everyday teaching.
At UM, such reflections are feeding into ongoing conversations about how inspiration can lead to concrete action. Biesta’s ideas are now part of discussion within the Education Innovation team’s agenda at EDLAB, where their practical implications for teaching are being explored.
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