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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.
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.
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.
Lonka presents learning as an active, emotionally charged process in which insight emerges when prior knowledge, curiosity, motivation, collaboration, and reflection are coordinated. Drawing on educational psychology, she explains memory, conceptions, metacognition, interest, emotion, creativity, and social interaction, then connects them to activating and inquiry-oriented teaching.
Learners do not simply receive information: they interpret it through existing beliefs, construct and revise explanations, test ideas, and regulate effort. Productive teaching therefore surfaces prior conceptions, poses meaningful problems, creates cognitive conflict without overwhelming students, and provides feedback and support for reflection. Stories, cases, phenomena, and collaborative tasks can stimulate curiosity, while technology is valuable when it expands inquiry, participation, and knowledge construction rather than digitizing passive transmission. The book also attends to wellbeing and the reciprocal influence of emotion and cognition.
Its practical message is that durable learning combines disciplined knowledge building with wonder, agency, and creativity, and that teachers should design environments in which students can become aware of and increasingly regulate their own learning.
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