Page 104 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

into forms of learning which stand in the way of equality, freedom, and
formation. In more simple words: the challenge is to avoid that these
expectations are translated into learning which is only instrumental
for an externally, predetermined, or projected destination.
These matters are particularly challenging for the school when the
so-called basic formation is modelled on these functional forms of
learning. Formation, then, becomes a kind of personal development;
a building of identity or the acquisition of a unique set of social, cul-
tural, and civic competencies that render someone employable. The
result of formation, then, is defined beforehand. Understood in this
way, formation becomes a function of the school, and that formation
becomes a function alongside other functions (for instance socialisa-
tion and qualification) which is actually the case in the architectures of
both the educational institution and the learning environment. In so
far as formation is brought to the fore here, it carries the signature of
external expectations: the social norm (e.g., the socially well-adjusted
person) or societal employability (e.g., the person with adequate citi-
zen competencies). In both cases there is no place for scholastic learn-
ing under the sign of equality and freedom. Alongside or on a par with
qualification and socialisation, there is at most room for ‘functional
6
formation’ (e.g., the development of talent, of citizenship, of identity),
and the greatest tension the school faces in all these cases is that it is
being made responsible for something that it simply cannot (peda-
gogically) control. The school is unable to control the ultimate value
of qualifications, just as it is unable to make socialisation a deliberate
pedagogical task. Forming young people functionally to fit in the same
image is also a hopeless task, apart from the fact that it is undesirable.
What the school does have in its hands is preparation, and the ability
to offer materials and exercise for basic formation, and it may well be
called to account for this.

6 This is also why the distinction that is made by Biesta (2010, 2013) between the three
functions of education - socialisation, qualification, subjectification - is misleading
in our eyes.

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