This study takes as its starting point a tragic student death that occurred during a school field trip in 2022 and the subsequent court ruling, in order to reconstruct—within a philosophy of education framework—the question of how school field tri...
This study takes as its starting point a tragic student death that occurred during a school field trip in 2022 and the subsequent court ruling, in order to reconstruct—within a philosophy of education framework—the question of how school field trips can be promoted while simultaneously protecting teachers’ professional authority. The reduction and suspension of field trips, strong opposition from teachers’ unions, and conflicts among teachers, parents, and students that followed the incident are interpreted not merely as temporary reactions, but as symptoms revealing structural limits in the way risk and responsibility are organized in school settings. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concepts of vulnerability and precarity and Gert Biesta’s notion of educational subjectification, this paper critically examines dominant discourses of risk and responsibility surrounding school field trips. From Butler’s perspective, vulnerability is a universal human condition that is nonetheless unequally distributed through institutions and power relations, with the result that teachers are positioned as excessively precarious subjects who are held singularly responsible for safety incidents. From Biesta’s perspective, accountability discourses that narrow the purposes of education to qualification and socialization are criticized, and school field trips are reinterpreted as educational spaces in which students encounter the world and the other and may come into presence as subjects. On the basis of this theoretical examination, the study proposes that school field trips should be reconstructed not as mere objects of risk management, but as key educational arenas in which the educational meaning of risk and the principles for distributing responsibility are publicly negotiated on the ground of shared vulnerability. It concludes that, once relational responsibility governance is designed beyond the individualizing frame that concentrates responsibility on teachers, and risk is reconceptualized as an educational resource to be carefully configured and mediated rather than eliminated, the normalization of school field trips, the protection of teachers’ professional authority, and student safety can become mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive tasks.