Courage, Agency and Desire in Education Beyond Logics of Progress

the crucial question is not how to climb without fear-that's impossible-but how to deal with it when it creeps into your nerve endings."-Alex Honnold, free climber "understand the fall, rather than avoid it."-JohnnyDawes, UK climberThe logic of progress dominates western societies and has become an obstacle to the emancipatory potential linked to education.Positioning education as something we do for its emancipatory sake, to help people become and desire otherwise in relation to the world and others -delinked from the logic of progress -may be difficult but not impossible (Korsgaard, 2024).Following Lacan (1997), we must strive in education to abandon the recognition promised by this logic -the big Other in Lacanian terms.In doing so, education becomes a site of disruption.For example, when we encounter ourselves and others in the world beyond the big Other's constraints of our desires.Yet this reorientation carries risks.For example, a descent into individualism or nihilism.To counter this, we turn to the fertile space between subject and public, interiority and exteriority.It is into this space that this paper draws attention to agency, courage and desire.To exemplify, we draw on educational moments from outside classrooms and curricula steeped in the logic of progress: the example of recreational rock-climbing.Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt (1958Arendt ( , 1961)), subjective agency is explored as 'freedom' linked to action -including desire -in the public realm, reliant upon (and mediated by) plurality (we act amongst others) and natality (the capacity to start something anew or unpredictably).We argue that subjective-courage -with the meaningful presence, rather than absence of fear -is linked to a desire to appear in public, to speak and act when outcomes are unknown, to expose oneself to 'failure' within and beyond the existing order of things.Without courage and plural-natal agency required for such transformation of desire, the freedom to become a subject-amongst-others would be impossible.Changing one's desire through education beyond a logic of progress may unfold in concert with others, throughthe courage of beginning anew with others.