Educating Safety
Merely having an experience, therefore, of school or anything else, is not to learn. Something must happen that moves us to give the experience meaning and to seek continuity with other experiences. It must be given meaning in a thematized, experiential context.
Thus learners-in-the-world are drawn to phenomena that enable them to complete their projects, to clarify meaning, to put things in order by making sense of their implicit themes or plots.
There may be absorption of material, but learning without reconstruction is empty because it is meaningless.
So much of the semiotics of safety has an emphasis on the mechanical, efficient and reprogramming of systems. Even when the word ‘learning’ is used, it most means ‘training’. This is often accompanied by images and symbols of brains, not persons, objects (like hard hats and PPE) not people in social relationship.
So much of what happens in many of the so called ‘new view’ approaches to safety are entertaining, reinforce the assumptions of traditional safety and safety philosophy but, don’t offer anything new to learn.
Once the conference is over, the bank balance is lower, the entertainment is forgotten and the slogans are dim, there is nothing new. The return is to the same systems, same methodology (mechanistic behaviourism) and with some idea that greater attention to making better systems, is the purpose of safety.
The idea that persons are learners-in-the-world is not the approach to learning by these so called ‘safety differently’ approaches. People are viewed as objects (people harness) to fill and that learning is something some guru does to you because they know what you need to know.
The pedagogy (method of teaching) is one of instruction and narrative by some lord or guru, not about the agency of the other and their experience. This is why the HOP 4D’s start with ‘dumb’. If only you could have better systems rather than dumb systems, everything in safety would be better. Sound condescending to you? Sound like judgment and superiority? In this HOP world where brains are the dominant symbol, the key discourse is about rational knowing NOT embodied experience. It’s the same behaviourist in and out models that has been traditional safety for 70 years.
Hopkins states:
… without thinking too much about it, systematically disembody their subjects by limiting individual control over basic bodily functions—eating, eliminative processes, looking, seeing, moving about, and talking—thereby restricting learning to a passive exercise. They are the agents in this case of a purposeful alienation, based on a psychologistic sense of how learning occurs.
The phenomenological perspective is sceptical that we can understand human phenomena, especially inter subjective phenomena, from a purely scientific stance.
In SPoR, we have very little interest in so called ‘safety science’ indeed, we see no evidence that it exists.
Most of what we see in so called ‘safety science’ is faith in the assumptions and methodology of safety, that remain unquestioned and necessary for compliance. How strange that in safety science, there is no open enquiry into other worldviews about how other discipline’s view risk.
Hopkins comments (p. 49):
When an aspect of the human condition Is viewed as pathological or immoral, those who are “afflicted” are set aside as “organisms” subject to treatment or punishment, as the case may be.
They are objectified, which means that it becomes legitimate (perhaps even obligatory) to manipulate them on behalf of their mental health or their moral rectitude, as the Soviet Union did in Stalinist days with political dissidents, and as we too often do in the schools with hyperactive children, or with those who ask uncomfortable questions, or with troublesome elders in nursing homes.
In the end, it becomes a question of power and authority, what one determines others should know about being safe.
Often the agency of the other is not respected in safety but rather people are treated as objects because somehow anything done in the name of safety is automatically moral (https://safetyrisk.net/the-morality-of-safety/). It becomes the task of safety to fill brains with the right programming because safety knows that decision making is brain directed and therefore, un-safety is simply a problem of the mind-brain. Therefore, reprogramming with right information and data will lead to better safety.
In SPoR, we have a completely opposite view of personhood, education, learning and enactivism (https://safetyrisk.net/guide-enactivism-risk/). In Enactivism, the brain is NOT a directing organ but a receiving and mediating organ. This changes the whole way one approaches learning and education. People are no longer objects to fill with ‘better data’ but rather unique learners-in-the-world who direct and participate in learning in their world. They are no longer objects in safety but subjects in risk.
Prof. Robert Long
Latest posts by Prof. Robert Long (see all)
- Sloganeering, Indoctrination and Propaganda in Safety - October 17, 2026
- What No Blame Enculturates - October 17, 2026
- Book Launch: Following-Leading in Risk, A Supplement - October 16, 2026
- Fragility in Risk and Blame as a Wicked Problem - October 13, 2026
- Ultra-Safety is Un-Safety - October 12, 2026