Herbart with Rancière on the Educational Significance of the ‘Third Thing’ in Teaching

ABSTRACT

This article highlights the educational and the aesthetic significance of the subject matter (i.e., “the third thing”) in the relationship between teacher and pupil. This, through a reading of two texts, one written by the 19^th century educationist and German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart, and one written by the contemporary philosopher and political theorist Jacques Rancière. By emphasizing the third thing between pupil and teacher, the article intends to reimagine both the educative and aesthetic values of those timeless things around us, such as objects of art and education, which give life a meaning beyond our limited socio-cultural desires, interests, concepts, and identities. Teaching, from this “fusion of the horizon” between Herbart and Rancière, is an activity created by the heterogeneity already integral to the “essence” of the subject matter. As such, the article also offers a fusion of the horizon between aesthetics and Didaktik.

KEYWORDS:

• Rancière
• herbart
• teaching
• hermeneutics
• aesthetics
• subject matter

Introduction

In this article, we present a reading of two texts, one written by the 19^th century educationist and German philosopher Johann Freidrich Herbart [1776–1841], and one written by the contemporary philosopher and political theorist Jacques Rancière [1940-]. Both texts deal with the significance of the ‘third thing,’ a thing in between, which appears in the relationship between a teacher and a pupil, or in Rancière’s case, in the relationship between an artist and a spectator. This third thing represents, in both texts respectively, the subject matter, as an object of interest, shared by the participants in a specific situation. The aim of the article is to highlight both the educational and the aesthetic significance of the subject matter in the didactic relationship between teacher and pupil. The theoretical framework of the article is rooted in a humanistic tradition in Nordic educational research (Kvarnbekk 2011), and the methodological design is inspired by philosophical hermeneutics (Kemp 2006). By reading Herbart together with Rancière on the significance of the ‘third thing’ in the didactic and aesthetic relationship, our hope is to highlight an educative dimension in Rancière’s philosophy of emancipation and an emancipatory and aesthetic dimension in Herbart’s didactical philosophy. In a hermeneutical fusion, in the Gadamerian sense, between the horizon of Herbart and that of Rancière, we believe that something important can be said about what it is that makes teaching educative in a radical and aesthetic sense.¹ By educative we mean in this context not a transmission of knowledge, skills, and norms from someone more knowledgeable to someone less knowledgeable. Instead, and in relation to ‘the third thing,’ i.e. the subject matter, educative signifies that which can open and transform the relationship between a teacher and a pupil into something unforeseen and transformative. We are for that reason also addressing the bigger philosophical question of what it is that makes teaching educative, and why education needs teaching. As this is a question that we as writers have often discussed, this article does not only offer a fusion of thoughts between Herbart and Rancière, but also between us as writers and philosophers of education. The article could therefore also be seen as a didactic experiment where we intend to explore and expose our shared interest in a specific subject and question. As such, the article explores what can happen when such an ‘inter-esse’ is used productively in, what Carl Anders Säfström (2005, 23) once described as, ‘the productive moment of teaching’ (our translation).

Didactics, and the triadic relationship

The late 19^th century educationist John Adams (1897, 16) once wrote that ‘Verbs of teaching govern two accusatives, one of the person, another of the thing; as, Magister Johannem Latinam docuit – the master taught John Latin.’ The book, from which the quote is taken, was titled The Herbartian Psychology Applied to Education. There, Adams tried to introduce both a Herbartian and German perspective on teaching for an Anglo-Saxon audience. Adams explained why this double accusative, or double knowledge as he also called it, is important:

Not so long ago it was considered enough to know Latin. Nobody denies that the master must know his subject. Nobody but Jacotot, that is, for he maintains that the master need not know even that. But while all the world agrees to treat the French educationist as a crack-brained theorist for his gallant attempt to free the master from the drudgery of learning what he has afterwards to teach, no outcry was raised at the neglect of John. To know Latin was regarded as all-sufficient. John was either taken for granted or held to be not worth knowing. (Adams 1897, 16)

According to Adams, a teacher is always in need of a double knowledge, as the teacher needs to know both their subject and their pupil to find a point of contact between them. This double knowledge could be seen as the foundation of both the Herbartian theory and German didactics as they identify the relationship between the pupil and the content as the key question in didactical thinking (Roth 2000). Michael Uljens (2017) has defined teaching as the practice of showing something as something to someone. However, when German didactics is translated into English this emphasis on the something showed to someone often becomes understood as part of the teacher’s knowledge and activity. This already happens when the German term Unterricht is translated into the English equivalents teaching or instruction. Teaching and instruction are terms connoting something that a teacher does or has, i.e. the activity and knowledge of the teacher. However, what the English terms lack in relation to the German term Unterricht is the prefix unter. This unter is the equivalent of inter in English and points towards an activity between the teacher and the pupil in relationship to a shared interest, question, or content. This could be the reason why there is a much stronger emphasis on the subject matter, and the pupils’ and teacher’s relationships towards it, in German didactics compared to its Anglo-Saxon counterparts. In German didactics, the triadic relationship, which consists of the teacher’s and the pupils’ interaction with the subject matter and with each other, is seen as the key element in teaching. This triadic relation has often been highlighted in discussions concerning the educative substance [Bildungsgehalt] of the content (Uljens 1997; Künzli 2002). The central task in a teacher’s lesson planning, or what Klafki (1995) also has called didactical analysis, is how the specific content of the lesson can have an educative value for the pupils. Otto Willman is often recognized as the one who made this the central task of a teacher’s didactical thinking (Uljens 1997). However, as Uljens (1997) explains, Willman’s ideas were criticized for over-emphasizing the subject matter and its educational value. Nohl and Weniger, and later Klafki, according to Uljens, emphasized the relationship between the content and the specific pupil’s own lifeworld, and claimed that the educational value was to be found within not only this relationship, but in the social aspects of the interaction between the participants of a lesson (see, e.g. Klafki 1995). Instead of placing the educative substance (or value) in the subject matter itself, it was now recognized in each pupil’s social and critical interest and reflection in relationship towards it (Månsson & Nordmark 2015). Such a shift of focus, from the subject to the pupil, from education to socialization, has similarities to John Dewey’s educational theories and his critique of both Herbart and the German tradition for its emphasis on, what he called, a recapitulation of traditional subjects, thought and ideas (Dewey 1913, 1931; see also, Hjulström 2020).

From teaching to social learning

These kinds of social ideals of education together with the emphasis on the different life-worlds of the pupils had a profound influence on 20^th century educational thinking (Dunkel 1970; Stormbom 1986). It especially changed the ideas on what should be seen as the most important relationship in the didactic triad between teacher, pupil, and the subject matter. Such a shift has, according to Michael Oakeshott (1989/2001, 84ff.), led to a substitution of ‘education’ to ‘socialization,’ where everything that should happen in a classroom is reduced to some specific instrument of political, democratic, economic, and/or ideological values. What seems to get lost in this shift, we claim, is the educational significance of the subject matter. But not in terms of a conservative recapitulation of some specific disciplinary knowledge, viewpoint or understanding. What is getting lost is the educational significance of the subject matter that is released in the relationships of teaching. This ‘essence’ or ontology of teaching as Vlieghe and Zamojski (2019) have described it, has nothing to do with knowledge-transmission and the adoption of the pupils’ life-worlds to the world of the adult generation (i.e., conservatism). Nor does it turn teaching into only an adaptation of the subject-matter to what for instance Gert Biesta (2017) has described as the pupil’s own ‘egological’ lifeworld, desires, and personal knowledge (i.e., constructivism). Rather, supported by our readings of Herbart and Rancière, we will show that teaching is a specific form of human co-existence, where ‘the third thing,’ i.e. the educative essence of the subject matter plays a crucial part.

Herbart on the ‘third something’ of teaching

Herbart is often recognized as being the founder of educational science (Hilgenheger 1993). Although he and his influence on educational theory have been criticized for depicting a too mechanistic view on educational practices, his extensive writing on the concepts Bildsamkeit, Tact and Erziehenden Unterricht has gained interest within contemporary educational philosophy, and since the 1990s there is a renewed interest in Herbart’s theory of education (English 2014; Uljens 1998; Siljander 2012). Of special interest in this article is primarily the latter concept, Erziehender Unterricht,² by German educationists recognized as Herbart’s most import and the only concept he himself invented (Herbart 1831/1893). Erziehender Unterricht is a concept that connects important aspects of didactics and pedagogy, teaching, and education (Hopmann 1997; Hopmann and Riquarts 2000). According to Norbert Hilgenheger (1993), the concept paved the way for a new paradigm in educational theory by making teaching the primary, instead of a secondary educational question. Before Herbart, questions of education and teaching were handled separately, and teaching [Unterricht] was seen as less important than education [Erziehung]. Herbart challenged this view. Instead, Herbart took an interest in what it is that makes teaching not only educative, but more educative than other educational relationships. In The Science of Education [Allgemeine Pädagogik] Herbart (1806/1908, 227ff.) explains this himself writing, ‘The concept of instruction has one conspicuous mark which will afford the simplest starting point for our course. In instruction [Unterricht] there is always a third something with which teacher and pupil are at the same time occupied.’ This ‘third something’ is what makes teaching more educative than other educational relationships, such as government, discipline, fostering and other dyadic relationships according to Herbart.

In every other function of education […] the pupil is immediately in the teacher’s mind, as the being upon whom he has to work, and who must maintain a passive attitude towards him. Thus, what causes the teacher’s labor on the one hand the knowledge to be imparted, on the other the restless boy supplies the basis of division between instruction and education proper. (Herbart 1806/1908, 228)

In the above quote, Herbart uses the difference of activity and passivity to make a distinction between teaching and other educational relationships. In teaching, ‘there is always a third something with which teacher and pupil are at the same time occupied’ (228). This third something is the specific subject matter. In Herbart’s didactics, the aim of teaching is not to transfer knowledge and skills to a passive pupil. Instead, ‘to create and develop […] interest is the task of instruction’ (Herbart 1841/1904, 120). To Herbart, this interest does not only mean an interest in a specific subject. Instead, the aim of teaching is the creation of what Herbart called a ‘many-sided interest.’ However, such an interest consists of an interest in a diversity of subjects and for that reason teaching must start with the creation of an interest in some specific subject. With such an emphasis on the creation of an interest in the subject matter, Herbart made another important shift in the theory of education and teaching. Herbart explains:

It is […] a familiar precept that the teacher must try to arouse the interest of his pupils in all that he teaches. However, this precept is generally meant and understood to denote the idea that learning is the end and interest the means to attain it. I wish to reverse that relationship. Learning must serve the purpose of creating interest. Learning is transient, but interest must be lifelong. (Quoted by Hilgenheger 1993, 657)

There is a crucial difference between interest and learning that Herbart uses in this quote. Learning, as Kant (1790/1989) described it in his Critique of judgment, can foremost be seen as a reproduction of someone else’s knowledge, ideas, and skills. Learning, for that reason, is always limited by a model and some specific, understanding, and socio-cultural horizon. From such a position, knowledge is also foremost understood as mere information and a collection of that which is known. According to Herbart (1841/1904, 44), such a view,

does not suffice; for this we think of as a supply or store of facts, which a person might possess or lack, and still remain the same being. But he who lays hold of his information and reaches out for more, takes an interest in it.

By stressing, this ‘more,’ and the will to go beyond not only what we know, but also what we are, Herbart emphasized interest in a subject matter as something different from learning as a reproduction of someone else’s knowledge. Interest is an interest in that which cannot be reproduced in a subject matter, it is an interest in its persistent questions. The essence of the subject could for that reason be understood as something that creates an ‘inter-esse,’ and a free play of imagination and understanding between those who share an interest in it. To Herbart, who took inspiration from Kant’s aesthetics (1790/1987; see also Beiser 2014), such an immediate interest in a subject matter is also an aesthetic interest, a disinterested interest in something other for its own sake. By such a disinterested interest, Herbart also emphasized the importance of other individuals who share such an interest but who still have their own understanding, interest and interpretations. A difference of understanding that, instead of being a didactical problem, becomes an educational asset. In other educational relationships the educator has an interest in the ‘educand’ and in their development as a person of good knowledge, values, and behavior. The educator then exercises their power over the educand by deciding what is worth knowing, how to behave and how to judge what is good. Such a relationship is governed by the educator’s own interest, norms, ideals, and socio-cultural history. In educative teaching, however, it is not the teacher’s interest and norms that govern the practice. Instead, it is their interest in the subject matter itself – the ‘inter-esse’ – that is the guide. The purpose of the teacher, as a creator of interest according to Herbart, is not to govern what to know, and how to behave because that would reduce teaching to discipline and fostering. Rather, it is to incite an interest that can transform the relation of who is a teacher and who is a pupil in their shared relation to the subject matter, and to each other. As such, teaching does not become a quest for a specific truth and agreement that would freeze the subject and its questions in time. It is an interest in that third something, placed between teacher and pupil. We now turn to Jacques Rancière and his writings on the significance of the third thing in the relationship between, not only teacher and pupil, but also between the artist and its spectators.

Rancière on the ‘third thing’ of both teaching and the theater

In the book The Ignorant Schoolmaster – Five Lectures in Intellectual Emancipation (1991), Jacques Rancière, recounts the story of how Joseph Jacotot, uses a bilingual version of the book Télémaque as an educational device for his Flemish speaking students to study the French language (something that they also did with an unexpected success, according to Jacotot himself). Through the pedagogical adventures of Jacotot, Rancière starts to question the very foundation of educational practices and their explanatory logic. Even if the book could be read as an allegory of how society’s institutions reproduce societal inequalities, its pedagogical insights gained interest in unexpected audiences, especially among artists and people with an interest in aesthetics. Consequently, Rancière was invited to art-schools to discuss the book and started himself to think about the relation between intellectual emancipation and the role of being a spectator. In his text The Emancipated Spectator, one finds an elaborate discussion on the democratic pitfalls and potentials of spectatorship. There, Rancière (2009) begins by questioning the distinction between activity and passivity, a distinction that always has created problems for artists who address the role of spectatorship, thus, developing his own thoughts on intellectual emancipation, especially in relation to what it means to share a common interest in a specific play, poem, or other objects of art, and how a democratic community can take shape through the activity of sharing this interest in such objects.

Spectatorship is in fact an implicit theme in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, to be found in Rancière’s intricate elaborations on the prerequisites of intellectual emancipation – work, will and attention. To Rancière (1991), the key to intellectual emancipation is to be found in what he calls ‘the reasonable will,’ which is the activity of paying attention to a radical exteriority of the linguistic order. It is through the disciplined activity of paying attention one becomes an active spectator and thus becomes aware of and can work with this exteriority, in close relationship with a teacher who verifies this work (Rancière 1991; Rytzler 2017). In The Emancipated Spectator (2009), Rancière develops this democratic notion of the spectator by placing them at the heart of the discussion of the relation between art and politics. For the accusers of theatre, being a spectator was bad for the following reasons: a spectator is ignorant and passive and is separated from the capacity to know and the power to act. This means that theatre is bad by definition since it enacts scenes of illusion. Rancière describes how the reformers of the theatre tried to address this problem in two different ways, both as attempts to transform the passivity of the spectator into activity. In the first attempt, the spectator is a scientific observer, put in front of a mystery where a certain distance was needed for the spectator to refine their gaze. In the second attempt, the spectator is drawn into the magical circle of theatrical action, reducing the distance, and thus making them abolish the position of the viewer. Here, Rancière starts to question the network of equalities (audience/community, gaze/passivity, exteriority/separation, mediation/simulacrum) and oppositions (collective/individual, image/reality, activity/passivity) that underpin the principles of the spectacle as separation. The theatrical spectacle tries to teach the spectators how to cease being spectators and to become agents of a collective practice, very much like teachers wanting their pupils and students to be self-active learners (Rytzler 2017). Here, Plato is one of the earliest and perhaps most famous accusers of both theatre and teaching and their pacification of spectators and pupils. However, even his attempts to emancipate them were doomed to fail. This pedagogical paradox, imaginatively explored in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, is that in teaching practice the distance between teacher and pupil will always be reinstated in each effort to reduce it. Thus, even Socrates becomes a stultifier when he cannot hide his own teaching superiority in the Menon-dialogue (Rancière 1991; Todd 2003). To avoid this paradox, or rather by using it productively, Rancière focuses on the relationship between spectatorship and the event of intellectual emancipation, through his critique of different attempts to reform the theatre. The problem with these attempts was their way of abolishing the distance between spectacle and spectator, as this distance is based on the definition of a certain distribution of the sensible that sets out false logical oppositions between viewing/knowing, appearance/reality, activity/passivity, i.e. oppositions between capacities and incapacities. Pupils, as spectators, are discredited in advance by this a-priori definition. However, Rancière finds a way out of this vicious circle of stultification in formulating the central thesis of The Emancipated Spectator:

Emancipating begins when the opposition between viewing and acting is challenged, when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relation between saying, seeing, and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection. (Rancière 2009, 13)

Viewing becomes active if we see it as a transformation of this distribution of positions. It is possible to be at the same time a distant spectator and active interpreter. Spectators can therefore create their own poem, through that which has been presented to them. In emancipative teaching, teachers make it possible for the student to learn something that they themselves might not know about that which they teach. The fundamental problem for artists and teachers is that, even if they want to abolish the distance between the spectator/student and the teaching content, they also claim to know and define what distance that should be abolished and how the pupil should learn to think, interpret, and become active in relation to this content (conservatism) or to themselves and their own social-cultural backgrounds (constructivism). However, in an emancipative relation, both the aim and the content of the lesson, as well as the intention of the play or the poem is recognized as something that is not just a question of transmission of an intended meaning, or that the real truth lies in each spectator’s own interpretation. Instead, there is, in a genuine subject matter as well as in a play or poem, that which Rancière describes as a third thing, something that appears in between those who try to understand what it is. Rancière explains,

[T]here is […] the distance inherent in the performance itself, in so far as it subsists, as a spectacle, an autonomous thing, between the idea of the artist and the sensation or comprehension of the spectator. In the logic of emancipation, between the ignorant schoolmaster and the emancipated novice there is always a third thing - a book or some other piece of writing - alien to both and to which they can refer to verify in common what the pupil has seen, what she says about it and what she thinks of it. The same applies to performance. It is not the transmission of the artist’s knowledge or inspiration to the spectator. It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect. (Rancère 2009, 14ff.)

In the quote, Rancière identifies ‘the third thing’ as that which challenges the opposition between an artist and the spectator that is created in the theater. In the theater, and in all other situations where at least two people share something significant to them both, everyone becomes a translator of that which is being shared. This is because the third thing, even if it is created by someone with some specific intention and purpose, also has something which escapes its ability to be reduced to some specific interpretation. It is, on the one hand, ‘unfamiliar to both’ and ‘owned by no one’ and, on the other hand, owned by everyone as an object of attention and interest. It is in this shared ownership of, and attention to, the third thing between them that it is possible to ‘verify together that which the pupil has seen, what she has to say about it, and what she thinks about it.’ (Rancère 2009, 15). What Rancière’s discussions on emancipated spectatorship add to his notion of intellectual emancipation, is an aesthetic understanding of the democratic element in teaching practice. He detects a communal power in the relationship between the people on stage/the teacher and the people in the audience/the pupils. However, this power is not a product of them sharing the same event. Rather, it is the power of equality of intelligence that turns it into an event of subjectification. This event is possible because the emancipated spectatorship involves both an acknowledgement of the essence of the third thing and a recognition of everybody’s capacity to engage with and to speak of this thing. Here we find an extension of the notion of ‘the democracy of the book,’ something Rancière (1991) introduces in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (see also, Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019). By gathering around an educative object, such as e.g. a book, a certain communal power is unleashed. This through the capacity of the anonymous, the power of associating and dissociating, and everything else in relation to that third thing which is shared between teachers and students (Rancère 2009). The individual student is always a spectator but every spectator, especially if we understand this democracy of the book in a radical sense, is already a unique (i.e. irreplaceable) spectator, allowing the book, the poem, or the mathematical theorem to exist regardless of any pre-conceived cultural context or tradition. Emancipation is the blurring of the boundary between those who speak and those who listen, between the individuals and the community. An emancipated community, to Rancière, is a democratic community of narrators and translators, trying to make sense of the third thing, the truth of which never can be spoken, only felt (Rancière 1991). It is also in this aesthetic event of intellectual emancipation/spectatorship we find the point of contact between Rancière and Herbart.

The educative, aesthetic, and political value of the ‘third thing’ in Herbart and Rancière

As we have interpreted the texts by Herbart and Rancière, there is an interesting resonance and similarity between Herbart’s quote about the third ‘something’ between the teacher and pupil, and Rancière’s quote about the third thing between the artist and the spectator. More accurately, by reading the two quotes together, we can detect a fusion of horizons between Herbart and Rancière as well as between aesthetics and Didactics. What these different horizons share is an acknowledgment of the educative and aesthetic potential of that third thing, which in teaching lies between the teacher and the pupil, and which in art lies between the artist and the spectator. Rancière describes this third thing as something that is owned by neither the artist nor the spectator and something that mediates an interest of which no one is in full control. Herbart describes the third thing as something with which the teacher and the pupil are at the same time occupied, and he claims that this shared activity is something that distinguishes teaching from other educational relationships. Objects of art and teaching, such as a play, a novel, a poem, or a specific subject matter are always part of some specific socio-cultural context, which give them a specific meaning and value (c.f., Popkewitz 2004). Neither the teacher nor the artist can avoid filling the content with some specific meaning and intention, something that is part of their own horizons. Vlieghe and Zamojski (2019, 55) describes this closure of a subject-matter as its ‘pedagogical content,’ and such a reduction of the subject to its specific content is a crucial part of school-teaching and forms the basic functions of didactical discourses (e.g. the transmission of some specific meaning or understanding). However, the objects of art and teaching, in both their aesthetic and truly educative sense, should always be seen as carriers of something more than that. Vlieghe and Zamojski (2019) use Heidegger to describe this ‘more’ as that thing which transcends some specific meaning, interpretation, or horizon. This thing is what we interpret as the ‘third thing,’ addressed in the texts by both Herbart and Rancière. It is the heterogeneous essence, or timelessness that gives ‘the objects’ of art and teaching their educative and aesthetic values. Even if there is a possibility to reconstruct and find some specific artist’s or teacher’s meaning, intention, and own interpretation, there is still to be found, in these types of objects, something – a third thing – that transcends the possibility to give them a final and ‘true’ meaning. In educative teaching, that is the thing to be ‘put on the table,’ as Masschelein and Simons (2013) have described it, and thus makes a specific ‘pedagogic subjectification’ possible. This subjectification works as a verification of the equality of the participants, through that ‘thing’ in the subject matter which disrupts both the institutional relationships between teacher and student, and the didactic discourse which reduces a subject matter to something transferable (Simons and Masschelein 2010). This is what makes teaching, and the third thing of the subject matter educative, at least if we by teaching understand it as an educative unterricht, as something pointing at this between – the inter esse – which goes beyond the socio-cultural limits and horizons of the participants. As such, a play, a novel, a poem, or a specific subject matter become shared objects of interest, but not in the form of some specific knowledge and understanding aimed at being transmitted from the one who knows and understands to those who lack true knowledge and understanding.

The thing

Objects of art, and subjects of teaching, in their educative and aesthetic sense, are not foremost intended as transmitters of knowledge and experiences to passive onlookers. They are instead intended for active ‘at-lookers’ [Anschauung] in the Kantian sense, who are not passively just looking, but who are interpreting and creating meaning from their own imagination and understanding. It is important to acknowledge that it is for that reason all the constituents of the didactic relationship become equally important, not only the pupil’s activity as a self-directed learner or the teacher as a model, and inspiring enthusiast. Teaching is about the activity created by the heterogeneity already integral to the essence of the subject matter, and which always creates situations of disputes and dissensus among those who share an interest in it (Rancière 1999). This is also what we want to acknowledge by using Gadamer’s concept fusion of horizons, i.e. not to argue for a specific agreement between different perspectives, or between the constituents of some specific didactic or aesthetic relationship. As Gadamer (2013, 317) himself explained; ‘ … the hermeneutic task consists in not covering up this tension [between horizons] by attempting a naive assimilation of the two but in consciously bringing it out.’ Following these ideas, our interest lies in situations when both teacher and student realize, through their shared relationship to the third thing, that there is something more to it than they themselves thought and believed. Furthermore, this ‘more’ is only possible to acknowledge through their different ways of looking, interpreting and understanding. In his Science of Education, Herbart (1806/1908) highlights an example of such a situation, when a teacher suddenly loses his thread and does not know how to go on with the lesson. In Herbart’s words: ‘the teacher retires into himself, tears himself free by force as from a false relationship, which seems to mock him’ (105). Then, a pupil comes to the teacher’s aid:

The pupil sees the torn threads lying; ‘looking before and after’ the right principle or the true means begin to appear indistinctly before him; and when he is ready to seize and restore them, the teacher hastens to meet him, dissipates the darkness, helps to unite what is severed, to smooth difficulties, and to strengthen the wavering. (105)

One of the myths of pedagogy, according to Rancière (1991), is that pupils need teachers to be able to understand, and that school teaching becomes a manifestation of this myth by forcing a pupil into a position where he understands that ‘he doesn’t understand unless he is explained to’ (8). In Herbart’s quote, the positions are not only reversed but the pupil and the relation to the teacher are emancipated from such confines of school teaching. This is possible because the pupil, through their own interest in the subject-matter and from their own position as an attentive listener and ‘atlooker’ has access to the subject-matter in a way that is different from the way of the teacher. This makes it possible for the pupil to know when a teacher loses their thread, and also to offer their own thoughts about the subject-matter, thus producing a fusion of the horizon between the pupil’s and the teacher’s different, yet shared, interest in looking at and interpreting the gap(s) in the subject matter. For many teachers, such a situation, where they lose their thread, and a pupil comes to their aid, sometimes even with a ‘better understanding’³ might be experienced as embarrassing. However, an ignorant teacher, in Rancière’s (1991) words, would see such a situation as that which emancipates the pedagogical relationship from its stultifying logic. Furthermore, Herbart’s educative teacher would consider the pupil’s aid and perspective as a validation of the pupil’s own interest and something from which their shared interest in the subject matter would benefit. This position offers an alternative to constructivist theories and their emphasis on learning as an autopoietic process (c.f., Biesta 2017; Siljander 2012). Furthermore, it differs from the interpretation of Rancière as criticizing the hermeneutics of teaching (Biesta 2017) neglecting, as it seems, Rancière’s emphasis on the intelligence of the book in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and ‘the third thing’ in his Emancipated Spectator. Following both Vlieghe and Zamojski (2019), and Masschelein and Simons (2013), but also the German didactic tradition stemming back to Herbart, it is the thing of the subject-matter which matters in both teaching and education. The third thing which in both the didactic and aesthetic relationship is connected to the inter of an ‘esse,’ of that thing that is part of no one, and thus open for everyone. This does not mean that the teacher’s and the pupil’s activities need to be the same, or that their knowledge and interest are the same. Teachers, as well as artist and writers, are important as mediators of the will to interpret, to imagine, to discuss and to dispute the things that they present to the world. By putting things on the table, they make it possible to create openings in that which seems closed. Such a teacher is not an assessor of the pupil’s understanding and knowledge, but rather someone who invites someone else to share their interest and will to investigate some specific subject matter. This sharing is not about who knows, and who does not, but about a relation between two wills where one will, the teacher’s, demands that the pupil uses their own will in an ‘act of an intelligence obeying only itself even while the will obeys another will’ (Rancière 1991, 13). Rancière calls this act emancipation and the will that the pupil obeys is the will of the teacher, but only as a will that wills the pupil’s own use of its intelligence in relation to the subject matter.⁴ To create an interest, which Herbart sees as the purpose of teaching, is to create such a will to use its own intelligence and ability to translate and engage in the intergenerational dialogue of the subject matter, illustrated by the above quote from Herbart. Teaching through the third thing between teacher and pupil is what creates freedom and equality in relation to the subject matter, this by being a shared adventure in the will to go beyond what we know about that which we share an interest in. When sharing such an interest, the traditional opposition of knowledge between a teacher and a pupil is challenged, as this interest cannot be measured as a difference between teacher and pupil. Instead, the relationship between them becomes a relationship between individuals who share an equal interest in something other than themselves. A thing in or of the world which speaks to, and calls, both teacher and pupil into awareness and action.

Summary: The significance of the ‘third thing’ in teaching

The aim of our article was to highlight both the educational and the aesthetic significance of the subject matter in the didactic relationship between teachers and pupils. In relation to this discussion, it is important to make a distinction between a subject matter in the aesthetic sense, as both Herbart and Rancière highlight, and a subject matter as a school subject. As a school subject, a subject is framed by some specific disciplinary knowledge and as a specific idea of the distribution of ways of knowing, doing, and acting, formulated in a syllabus or through specific learning objectives. As such, the school subject is transformed into a hierarchy of different both quantitative and qualitative measures that can be used to assess a pupil´s performance in relationship to such a hierarchy. The school subject is for that reason often used as a tool for something else than the subject’s intrinsic educational and aesthetic value. Teaching is, according to Herbart (1841/1904), only educative when it is the subject matter, and the dialogue around it for its own sake, that is governing the situation. This function of the subject matter is due to what we understand as its aesthetic dimension, a dimension that separates the subject from its instrumental value, and its limited socio-cultural understanding. With Rancière, and his aesthetic interpretation of intellectual emancipation, we can further understand the educational significance of the subject matter. By introducing the subject matter as that third thing, to which no one can claim ownership, it is freed from its role in reinstating a hierarchy of intelligences. Instead, it cuts through the domain of senses, and deconstructs its own role as a school subject and calls for attention and action. Although such events – educative events, to speak with Herbart and emancipative events, to speak with Rancière – can and do happen in schools, it is not what schooling seems to be intended for today, and it is not what is understood to be the purpose of either school teaching or the schoolteacher. It is within this context the need for a rediscovery of the third thing in teaching, beyond the confines of what Biesta (2016) has described as the aims of qualification and socialization, we think our reading of Herbart together with Rancière is important. Both writers bring insights that help us understand teaching practice as something beyond its function for socialization, qualification, learning and development. By emphasizing that third thing between the pupil and the teacher, it is possible to reimagine both the educative and aesthetic values of those timeless things around us, such as objects of art and education, that give life a meaning beyond our limited socio-cultural desires, interests, concepts, and identities. Teaching and art, and especially teaching as ‘the art of arts,’ then can become specific forms of human co-existence through their forming of a collective and shared interest. Instead of being limited by our own horizons, the third thing between the constituents of the relationship and in the midst of their different interpretations can help us acknowledge the importance of sharing an interest in something other than ourselves. At the same time, this third thing addresses the importance of each individual’s own perspective in order to expand the horizon of a specific object of art or teaching as a creative disagreement (i.e. a pedagogical dissensus of sorts) within such a collective interest.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We are aware that Gadamer’s (1971/2013) concept ‘fusion of horizon’ is often, at least in education, understood as a model for a shared understanding between pupil and teacher, and that the purpose of the dialogue between teacher and pupil is ‘consensus’, as a situation when the pupil reaches the same understanding as the teacher. We are also aware of Biesta’s (2017) critique of hermeneutics and the hermeneutic way of highlighting teaching as a quest for understanding, and the anthropological worldview contained in such an idea. However, we do not understand the concept of fusion of horizon as a fusion of understanding. Instead, we are inspired by the Brazilian-Swedish philosopher Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s (2006) interpretation of both the concept of the fusion of horizons, and the task of hermeneutics. In her writing, the concept fusion is rather a fusion or sharing of the lack of understanding. As such, the fusion is the situation in which both teacher and student, as well as a writer and its interpreter, realize that there is something more to the text, the object, or the specific subject-matter than what they already believed that they understood. The fusion is thus not a closure of understanding, but an opening, and this opening of understanding in the midst of what was thought to be understood, is the basic theme of this article (see also Vessey 2009).

2. Erziehender Unterricht is often translated as ‘educative teaching’ (Hilgenheger 1993).

3. The reason for the quotation marks is that we intentionally are using an expression from Gadamer’s Truth and Method, where Gadamer (2013) discusses Schleiermacher’s assertion that the aim of hermeneutics is ‘to understand a writer better than he understood himself’ (198). Gadamer criticizes this idea by writing: ‘ … understanding is not, in fact, understanding better, either in the sense of superior knowledge of the subject because of clearer ideas or in the sense of fundamental superiority of conscious over unconscious production. It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all.’ (307).

4. Here, Rancière refers to what he calls the reasonable will, a will that pays attention to the radical exteriority of the linguistic order. This will is distinguished from the perverted will, which Rancière refers to as the will that, through rhetorical manipulation, wants to maintain the hierarchy of intelligences (Rancière 1991).