The collage that begins this chapter (Fig. 2.1) depicts a class of children receiving instruction on how to look—at a painting that appears to have trapped a child behind its glass, who struggles to get free. The apple functions as a ‘dead metaphor’, a blinkered signifier of learning that obliterates teacher’s faces and persona, rendering educationalists blind to what could be seen, as with Jan Steen’s painting A School for Boys and Girls (ca. 1670) (Fig. 2.2) in which a boy offers a pair of glasses up to an owl, illustrating the Dutch proverb: ‘What use are spectacles or a candle if the owl doesn’t want to see?’ The metaphor of the eye and the apple are reminders of what count as knowledge but are bound (and sometimes blinded) by educational principles, theories and methods—such as behaviourism—that are alive and kicking in far too many education systems today, consequently suggesting a radical change of direction for education’s first principles. As a framework piecing together several concurrent understandings, collage—by its very process—is a messy layering of theoretical, artistic and intersubjective knowledges. Materialist philosopher Karen Barad reminds us that no-one can stand apart from the assemblages of their study as we are all embedded and implicated in what is produced, causing what she terms ‘agential cuts’ (Barad, 2003). This collage’s cuts are clearly visible: down the centre of the group of children, around the fruit and the frame on the wall, exemplifying how ‘collage threatens at any moment to dematerialize along its outer edges, which themselves appear to be only thresholds rather than fixed, reliable frames’ (de Rijke, 2023:303).