Marta Estellés
The Safetyfication of Education
Today we unpack the term “safey”, which pervades education debates world wide. My guest is Marta Estellés.
Marta Estellés is a senior lecturer in the school of education at the University of Waikato. Her new, open access book is entitled The Safetyfication of Education: Neoliberalism, Psychopolitics and the End of Critical Education.
Will Brehm 0:53
Marta Estellés, welcome to FreshEd.
Marta Estellés 0:55
Thank you, Will. Thank you for your invitation.
Will Brehm 0:58
So congratulations on your new book. It’s just fantastic. I love reading people who are bringing in Byung-Chul Han, for instance, into education. So really excellent. I’m looking forward to our conversation today. What your book does is it makes us think about how often the word safety is used and appears in education today. Safe spaces, safe conversations, cultural safety, digital safety, trauma informed teaching. I mean, it just seems like it’s everywhere. And yet it sort of almost never gets questioned. And that’s what your book does is to begin to question what safety is. So why isn’t it questioned?
Marta Estellés 1:32
Good question, Will. I think that, you know, in appearance it is a very benign looking word, right? Who is going to be against safety at schools, right? And perhaps because of that, you know, there’s been lots of different groups have advocated for, you know, or have invoked this idea to advocate for very different agendas. And you have, you know, many libertarian groups that are advocating for excluding political issues from the curriculum and using safety as their main reasoning behind it. But at the same time, you have also social justice activists that are using it to advocate for safe spaces, to have safer spaces for vulnerable groups. So the question, I guess, is why is safety so valued in our current societies? And I think in here I want to be precise that when I talk about, you know, societies, I’m talking about Anglo-Western societies because in other countries, in other cultures, and, you know, in other languages, this is not even a thing, you know, so it’s important that we… But still, you know, if we talk about this context, I think that safety has become such an important notion. It has been the result of a very slow process of development of a risk mentality, of a mentality of thinking about the future, of thinking about the management of risks and things like that, that has come together with the development of capitalism, basically. And in education, this has been translated as, you know, the need to provide safety for students. And these goals have been increasing over time, and it seems that we are now at the very peak, you know, so far.
Will Brehm 3:15
So does that mean, like, with the rise of risk and trying to analyze risk in sort of capitalistic or neoliberal terms, is that things like cost-benefit analysis, where you’re trying to measure the costs and the risks and then trying to weigh that against some reward that you might get, assuming those risks exist?
Marta Estellés 3:32
Yes, that is one part of it, but that is, like, the rational part of it. But there is also, you know, the emotional side of it or the psychological side of it, which has to do with, you know, the dispositions that you need to be able to make those rational calculations. You need to have a proud identity. You need to love yourself. You need to be able to, you know, have those emotional dispositions to be able to do that. So now safety is operating in those two dimensions.
Will Brehm 4:02
You use the term, and it’s in the title of your book, safetyfication. Unpack that for us. What does safetyfication mean to you?
Marta Estellés 4:10
I use the term safetyfication to describe a process or the process through which safety has become such a pervasive notion in education. Nowadays, as you said, well, you know, we are using it to describe all sorts of educational issues from, you know, road safety at schools through to, you know, emotional well-being, the teaching of controversial issues, the inclusion of students from minority groups and things like that. And this has not been a mere rhetorical addition, you know. It has implied a whole redefinition of crucial questions in education, like, for example, the aim of education. Now we increasingly understand it as providing safe learning environments or, you know, the role of teachers, for example, that we see them as safety providers, or even the kind of citizens that we want to shape through, you know, our pedagogical actions, which is, you know, a citizen that feels safe and that is not dangerous and so on. And this, you know, this reframing of crucial questions also has very important implications for teaching practice. And some of them are quite problematic as well. Sometimes, you know, we don’t talk about particular issues with our students because political issues or controversial issues because they might cause some sort of emotional harm. Or other times, we use therapeutic strategies to deal with their traumas, for example, or their mental health issues. So yeah, I think the concept of safetyfication aims to make sense of all these processes.
Will Brehm 5:45
So what would be an example of something that can’t be talked about because we might worry about the well-being of the person hearing it?
Marta Estellés 5:53
One example, for example, that comes to my mind, I remember a teacher talking to me about this. She was a social studies teacher, and she wanted to talk about same-sex marriage in New Zealand. And, you know, some of her students were from religious backgrounds that, you know, were against homosexuality overall. So she talked to the cultural advisor of her school about this because she was worried about the cultural safety and the psychological safety of her students, and both of them decided that it was perhaps a better idea to give those students the option of opting out from those topics.
Will Brehm 6:31
It’s kind of, it’s just amazing in my mind, right? I guess because everything could be sensitive to anybody, right? Like it’s hard, like where do you draw the line around what is the topics and the content that need to be opt-in versus the content that is, you know, that’s compulsory, right? So like, you know, in your research, do you find where you draw that line to constantly be moving?
Marta Estellés 6:54
My research doesn’t really explore where that boundary is, you know, I don’t know, I don’t know where that boundary is, but yeah, but I have seen how in many instances, you know, things that are causing some sort of, yeah, distress or anxiety and things like that, they tend to be issues that are quite political, you know, and I am a social studies teacher, you know, for me, talking about political issues is really important to do that with our students, you know, how can we, you know, be prepared for democracy if we don’t talk about these things, right? So yeah, I am not sure if there is a line as to…
Will Brehm 7:30
Has it always been like this? Like, I mean, like, what’s the history of safety in schools? How has it changed over time?
Marta Estellés 7:37
Yeah, so this is one of the things that I explored in the book, and that has been quite illuminating because now, you know, what we were saying before, we apply it to very different meanings, and they seem to be all very entangled, sometimes they are contradictory and things like that. But actually, when you start looking at how it has evolved over time, it gives you way more conceptual clarity, right? And what I saw in my historical work was that, you know, from the 19th century up to the 60s or 70s, most of these Anglo-Western societies, the use of the word was mostly referring to incident prevention. And what does incident prevention mean? Yeah, I mean, it was a time of expansion of mass schooling, you know, lots of school buildings being built at that time. And you know, it means preventing hazards, preventing incidents of those kinds, you know, that will, you know, make sure that the buildings are safe and things like that, right? Or in case of fire and all these things. But there is a turn in the 70s that, you know, suddenly we start using it for other contexts and especially applied, you know, the 70s is a time with lots of social protests, lots of student protests, social movements, and so on. And particularly by conservative voices, there you start using this term of safer schools or this notion of safer schools to have like a call to order kind of thing, like, you know, to preserve the status quo. And you know, we start seeing the notion of danger, for example, being applied not so much to risks outside of, you know, buildings and things like that, but to people can be dangerous or vandals or criminals, some things like that. And then in the 90s, we also saw another change of the notion of safety and being applied to more to the emotional and psychological realm. And this was a period of consolidation of neoliberalism. And here, you know, safety was starting to be understood as an emotional experience, as a subjective experience, as something that is necessary for the individual to thrive. And this notion, you know, safety was very important. Well, it was a time where psychological sciences and psychological language was becoming really popular, you know, and applied to all sorts of contexts, including education. And suddenly, in education, safety began to be understood as a precondition for learning. People cannot learn without having psychological safety, which was something unexisting to before, that didn’t exist before. And then finally, you know, more recently in the 2010s, with the rise of what philosopher Nancy Fraser calls progressive neoliberalism, we have seen how this idea of psychological harm has been applied to the cultural realm and to the lack of cultural recognition. So safety has become to be understood as a means to address social injustice. So yeah, different, as you can see, very different understandings of the word. Now we use them in very intermingled ways.
Will Brehm 10:47
And I think this is where Byung-Chul Han comes in quite well, because, you know, a lot of social theory has focused on Foucault and notions of governmentality. And I think I’ve spoken about this on the podcast actually quite a few times, because it’s, Foucault is so common in education research. But of course, Foucault was writing in the 70s when this idea was coming up, and new scholars like Byung-Chul Han have sort of advanced notions of governmentality to something that Byung-Chul Han calls psychopolitics. So how do you understand psychopolitics, and how does that help you understand this sort of notion of safety and safetyfication in schools?
Marta Estellés 11:25
I think Byung-Chul Han is really powerful at explaining these two redefinitions of safety that I was talking about before, the psychological and the cultural one. To put it briefly, for Foucault, you know, the transition from agrarian to industrial societies or, you know, the transition from sovereign power to disciplinary power required the, there was a need to discipline the bodies, to align them with production processes. And, you know, there was a need to deploy general formulas of domination, what he calls biopolitics. And I think that these disciplinary mechanisms are very explanatory for the first two redefinitions of safety. So this idea of safety as incident prevention, and also safety as a call to order. But they don’t explain that much, the other two sides, the psychological and the cultural. And this is where Byung-Chul Han brings the argument that, you know, the move from industrial to post-industrial societies, you know, the discipline of the body is not that important as the management of the mind. And this is where he brings that concept of psychopolitics. And for him, you know, in post-industrial societies, individuals, to be productive, they must know themselves, they must manage themselves, and they must overall love themselves. And you know, what I argue is that in education that has translated as, you know, as a new emphasis on safety, to have psychological safety and also a proud identity and things like that. And also one very important contribution that Byung-Chul Han does is that, you know, psychopolitics is a kind of power that is not repressive. It is a power that is friendly. It is not like disciplinary power that, you know, is very clearly focused on punishment.
Will Brehm 13:18
It’s positive power.
Marta Estellés 13:18
Yes, positive power, exactly. It is what he, you know, he uses the example of bosses today, right? They are not expected to punish you, they are expected to encourage you, to motivate you so you can be as productive as possible, basically. But because it’s positive power, it’s friendly power, it manages not to be seen at all, right? And that’s perhaps why safety has become so unquestioned as well, right, nowadays.
Will Brehm 13:45
Like where do you see psychopolitics in practice? So you know, you did a big case study, a lot of your work was looking at New Zealand. So give us some examples of what this looks like in practice.
Marta Estellés 13:56
It was very clear to me that there was a very clear connection between the well-being of the students and their academic achievement, basically, you know. And there was a sense that, you know, for students to have good academic results, they needed to be well psychologically or, you know, mentally well. And you know, therefore, they need to deploy, you know, therapeutic means, some things like that to be able to get that. In practice, it doesn’t happen that linear or, you know, that clean, but, you know, that was underneath the rationale behind, or it was the rationale behind introducing many programs for well-being programs or safety programs at the schools, basically.
Will Brehm 14:40
And so what does a safety program and a well-being program look like in some of the schools you went into?
Marta Estellés 14:46
Can I give a little bit of context about the New Zealand? I’m saying this because it’s quite important to understand what happens, right? New Zealand education system is a very, it’s a highly decentralized education system. And that means that schools are mostly self-managed in most of the things, and they operate in conditions of market competition. So that means that, you know, things like to receive funds, it depends on student numbers and student numbers depend on, you know, reputation of the school. So anything that’s going to be damaging your reputation will have a big impact on the school. And at the same time, schools are really overloaded with lots of tasks. So when I was talking to headteachers, to senior leaders and things like that about safety at the schools, for them, they were really seeing it as a big pressure, right? It is something that it was putting a lot of pressure. You don’t want to have your school in the media, you know, tomorrow with a headline saying that there’s been a case of bullying at your schools, because that’s going to have a big impact. So there was that pressure of dealing with this, but at the same time, a constraint, a time constraint that was very obvious. Often there was, you know, some programs like, for example, drug consumption programs, which were, you know, one hour lessons during the week to talk about drugs, you know, or to talk about online safety or to talk about healthy relationships or, you know, mental health issues and how to deal with them. And they had, you know, students had one hour per week to talk about this.
Will Brehm 16:24
What did teachers and students say about this?
Marta Estellés 16:27
Well, you know, many of them saw them as quite superficial and, you know, well, some of them saw them as directly a complete waste of time. But, you know, also I could see how for many teachers, you know, especially after COVID, mental health issues and concerns were much more forefront in their daily lives, you know, and they were actually way more conscious of decisions that they were making in their daily lives. For example, you know, the sort of things that they were talking about in the class or making sure that the language that they were using was not going to be offensive for the students. Also checking in with the students and having private conversations with them. Yeah, so I remember some English teachers as well telling me how since COVID they were not, for example, talking that much about depressive sort of topics because, you know, they didn’t want their students to feel even more depressed, right? So yeah, it permeates quite a few things, both, you know, school life and classroom life as well.
Will Brehm 17:28
So what would be the consequences of what you’ve been describing in New Zealand for schools, for instance?
Marta Estellés 17:34
I talked about some of the consequences like, you know, resorting to programs that are, you know, kind of well-being washing practices almost. But another side of this that is very important as well is how concerns about safety are also serving as an entry point for privatization at the schools, again, because the schools are under so much pressure to keep students safe. But realistically, cannot deal with that or deal with that with the other many things that they have to deal with. That means very often externalizing those services, and there are lots of private companies or, you know, foundations, NGOs, and things like that that are offering services to the schools and that are also very embedded, of course, in the reproduction of the safety discourses. And we see that quite often in New Zealand, quite clearly in New Zealand, that they have been some of the ones that are promoting the safety discourses the most.
Will Brehm 18:32
In that range of how it permeates, you know, like some of that seems pretty good, right? Like students learning how not to speak offensively seems like a very good social lesson to be part of a community, right? But like are there, like, you know, what else are students learning that you might find more problematic within this sort of safetyfication of schools?
Marta Estellés 18:53
A number of things. One of them is that, you know, safety problems are individual problems, individual psychological problems that need to be treated with counseling, with therapeutic means, you know, with private conversations, with things like that, rather than looking at, you know, the roots of those problems that are very often, you know, school violence, discrimination, mental health issues. They often have social roots behind them, and those remain completely unquestioned and unchallenged. Also, another thing that became very clear was how conflict is avoided, you know, whatever is going to cause any sort of harm, psychological harm or something like that, we don’t deal with it, we avoid it. And that’s a very important lesson because human societies are, you know, inherently conflicted, you know, and especially things like politics as well. So it’s clearly a move away from that and a form of depoliticization of education and the curriculum.
Will Brehm 19:50
To go back to your example of, you know, the idea of talking about homosexuality in a classroom and how some students opt out because they don’t feel safe having that conversation, you could sort of rephrase that by saying having these difficult conversations as a collective is a form of democratic education that is really valuable for all children, right? Like, you could go the other direction than what safetyfication is individualizing sort of these ideas, these concepts, these behaviors that then get managed individually rather than getting managed sort of as a collective. Yeah, the thing is that’s not the path that safetyfication leads you to, right? You know, in education studies, and we are sitting here in San Francisco at the Comparative and International Education Society, and there’s always a lot of conversations around UNESCO and sort of global education policy and governance. Has that sort of global level of education policy been promoting ideas of safety as well? Like, how are they implicated in this narrative that you’re telling us today?
Marta Estellés 20:54
Yeah, very implicated. One of the things that I examine in the book is the discourses of safety from UNESCO, for example. And yeah, I’m not questioning here, you know, the intentions of UNESCO. You know, I think many people in UNESCO have pretty genuine intentions of protecting children and things like that. But I see that is quite problematic, this discourse, because it’s framing safety issues, again, no matter which ones we are talking about, school violence, discrimination, whatever, they are framing them as educational issues that can be solved by teachers and schools, you know, with the so-called whole-school approaches. And this is very problematic, because, you know, schools cannot do everything, you know. They can do some parts, but, you know. And I think that it not only puts, you know, unrealistic expectations or a non-realistic burden on teachers and schools to provide safety for children, but they also derive attention away from other kind of policies. For example, you know, if we want to protect children, why don’t we have more economic redistribution policies that will provide better public services, you know, like health care or, you know, housing and things like that, and that would also contribute to protect children, you know. Or we have policies to decrease urban segregation that will very likely protect our most vulnerable children, you know. So yeah, I think that this international organization, in particular UNESCO, has been very involved in the spread of the safety discourses that are very problematic. And one of the things that I am currently exploring with Chilean colleagues, for example, is how these notions that international organizations, again, not only UNESCO, also the World Bank and the OECD and so on, have been promoting, is that they are also being applied in contexts where this wasn’t even a thing. You know, in Spanish we don’t have a word for safety. We have the direct translation is seguridad, which is security, but we don’t have a word for safety. So over the last decade or so, we have seen how in education policy the term is increasingly adopting the connotations that it has in English, but they didn’t used to have this. So I am exploring with some colleagues in Chile how current education policies in this country are adopting the new connotations of the term more aligned with the Anglophone. And partly this has been because of the influence of international organizations like UNESCO or other foundations that are very, yeah, related to the Anglophone.
Will Brehm 23:22
That’s an amazing example about how the language and what these ideas mean, how they can sort of spread to different languages that don’t have the same words, but the meaning gets changed and warped to look similar. That’s incredibly fascinating. I guess, you know, by way of conclusion, what would an alternative look like, right? Because there’s clearly some examples where you clearly need to make children feel safe in a school. I think the sort of occupational health and safety issues, like, you know, you don’t want a building to fall on a student when they’re there, right? Like to me, that’s kind of a no brainer. So you don’t want a building to fall on anybody, but there’s other risks that you kind of, you want students to take, right? Like part of learning is to take risk and make mistakes and feel uncomfortable. And so how do we do it, right? Like what’s an alternative to this sort of move towards safetyfication as you’ve been outlining?
Marta Estellés 24:12
I think that, you know, the safetyfication of education is really reducing our imagination about what should education be about. You know, it is telling us that that is about providing safe learning environments, that is about providing spaces for the free expression of emotions maybe, or, you know, for the preservation of the psychological integrity of our students or cultural celebrations and so on. And I think that, you know, all critical education projects should take into consideration some of these aspects. You know, like we cannot ignore the importance of individuality, of emotions, of the dignity of our students and, you know, their cultural backgrounds and things like that. But I think that we need to move beyond that. And by this I mean, you know, encouraging also our students to analyze the structures, political, economic, social, cultural, that affect their lives and the lives of others in the planet. And also it implies, you know, be ready to subject our identities or selves, you know, our emotions to criticism, even if that implies some pain sometimes, you know. And also the importance of embracing conflict rather than avoiding it. You know, this idea that conflict is not only inherent to human societies, but it can also be a beautiful opportunity for learning, right? So yeah, why don’t we? And there are lots of philosophers who have explored this central move or, you know, have remarks from very different perspectives, but can offer lots of paths for this. And also I think it implies one very important risk that Gert Biesta talks about, and it’s, you know, the idea of taking the question of democracy seriously in education. And that means, you know, accepting that the other, that the student, you know, might take a very different path from the one that we are encouraging them to take. And you know, that’s part of the beautiful, what he calls the beautiful risk of education. And without that, it wouldn’t be education, it would be just instruction, right? What also this Chilean, Humberto Maturana calls, you know, or accepting the other as a legitimate other, right, these ideas. So yeah, I think there are lots of things that we can do as educators to challenge this discourse of safety. And that I know many teachers are already doing this, of course.
Will Brehm 26:35
Well, Marta Estellés, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Congratulations on your new book. It really is fantastic. And I’m just so happy that we got to connect at a conference that’s all about peace, education and conflict. But they’re not talking like the way you are.
Marta Estellés 26:50
Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.
Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com
Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
The Beautiful Risk of Education
The End of Progressive Neoliberalism
A Dangerous Turn: The Confluence of Safety and Citizenship Discourses in Educational Scholarship
Mental Health(ism) Education and the Neoliberal Imaginary
Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com
