Why might the best way for schools to serve society be to ignore it? This chapter unravels the fundamental tension within modern schooling through Biesta’s concept of its ‘double history’. The first history positions schools as instrumental functions of economic modernization, responsible for efficiently producing qualified workers and socialised citizens. The second history preserves schools as halfway houses between home and work, spaces where children can practice being in the world without facing its full consequences. Contemporary education’s crisis emerges from the asymmetrical dominance of the instrumental demands of the first history over the protective resistance of the second one. The chapter traces Biesta’s critique of the quality discourse that masks deeper political anxieties about educational purpose, revealing how demands for 21st-century skills represent uncritical acceptance of global capitalism as education’s unquestioned framework. Against purely reactive responses that adapt education to economic imperatives, Biesta argues for schools that strengthen subjects capable of distinguishing between what is desired and what is desirable. This requires educational obstinacy - principled resistance to society’s immediate demands in service of its democratic future. The chapter concludes that such obstinate resistance, far from representing educational failure, offers society its best hope for renewal by demonstrating that not everything desired should be pursued as desirable.