Page 103 - Looking_after_school

3. Touchstones: pedagogical articulations

Can the school’s role in formation be reconciled
with societal functions?

Next to its assignment of formation, the school is expected to take
on specific societal functions. We believe it is crucial to attempt to
formulate this complex relation between the task of formation and
those social functions as precisely as possible. From a pedagogical
perspective, school learning coincides with basic formation: to form
or bring into shape oneself is the characteristic scholastic method of
learning. Critically, however, this formation is not functional to society.
Of course, basic formation or preparation is relevant and very mean-
ingful, but by its very definition it cannot be functional to society. After
all, society itself is always at stake, and even at risk, in this process of
basic formation. School education involves the possibility to renew
society, and thus disturbs society and its social order as it is.
As we said earlier, we should sharply distinguish between the char-
acteristically scholastic form of learning and reproductive forms of
learning, such as socialisation and qualification. These latter forms of
learning have a function or an external finality; they introduce ruling
values, norms, or acquiring competencies which give access to (for
instance) the job market or continued education. It is clear that we
cannot see qualification and socialisation as two functions appropriate
for the school. These are actually (at most) societal, hence external,
expectations, vis-à-vis the school and thus vis-à-vis scholastic learn-
ing. These external expectations can be very diverse. For instance,
they can include the development of citizenship, but they can also be
about very practical matters such as expectations about the opening
hours of the school (e.g., holiday planning, day care, flexibility towards
planned family vacation, or expectations about the use of the spaces
in school). All these societal expectations, similar to the externally
imposed functions of socialisation and qualification, occupy or appro-
priate the school in a certain way. The question that we should then
ask is how the school should relate to these external expectations. The
challenge is consequently to avoid that these expectations which come
from outside of school - the expectations of socialisation (e.g., an orien-
tation towards social norms) and of qualification (e.g. an orientation on
employable competences) – are translated within the school (internally)

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