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- Vol 4 RE: Chapter 24
student agencysubjectificationstudent freedomrelational autonomyeducational responsibilityqualificationsocialisationlearner subjectivityJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Lee examines student freedom and agency through subjectification: becoming a person who can respond as a unique subject rather than merely acquire competencies or exercise consumer choice. Policy often celebrates agency as the capacity to set goals, act strategically, and shape learning.
Key ideas
Lee argues that this can reduce freedom to measurable self-management, achievement, or choice among options structured by institutions. Drawing on educational philosophy, the article distinguishes acting from existing as a subject who encounters limits, other people, resistance, and responsibility. Freedom is relational and uncertain; it includes interrupting one’s desires and responding to what or whom is encountered. Education cannot manufacture subjectivity as a predictable outcome, but teachers can create spaces where students meet the world, speak, act, and bear consequences without being abandoned to themselves.
Why it matters
The argument is philosophical rather than an empirical test of agency interventions. Its practical challenge is to balance qualification and socialisation with opportunities for students to appear as subjects, avoiding both controlling instruction and an individualistic rhetoric that makes learners solely responsible for navigating conditions they did not choose.
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- TE
- Teacher Edition
- PE
- Practice Edition
- RE
- Research Edition
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