Page 105 - Looking_after_school

3. Touchstones: pedagogical articulations

Does the school limit the ‘schoolification’ of society?

Not only is the school confronted with the challenge of dealing with
external expectations in order to avoid subtle school-internal transla-
tions which make scholastic learning impossible; inversely, the school
also has to ensure that it does not ‘export’ its internal matters to society.
This especially bears a risk concerning the evaluation of students.

In the educational institution the (final) evaluation usually takes the
form of a normalising judgment. In the architecture of the learn-
ing environment, the (final) evaluation mostly takes the form of an
assessment of acquired competencies. The interpretation and the
importance of that evaluation is, in both cases, mostly determined by
expectations external to the school: selection, (re)orientation, certifi-
cation, and, more generally, qualification. What we want to point out
here is that in both architectures the evaluation will render differences
amongst students visible, be it differences in normality or degrees of
employability. The main challenge from a pedagogical perspective is
to avoid that differences which appear at school remain in operation
after school hours or outside the school gate. This means avoiding the
immediate ‘naturalisation’ or ‘socialisation’ of differences which come
to the surface through a school evaluation, and, in this way, allowing
students to begin to live their own lives outside of school.
When naturalising, the differences which appear in evaluations are
immediately understood as an indication or even as evidence for natu-
ral differences in intelligence or talent: ‘smarter’ and ‘dumber’ kids. In
this case, the school does not merely fix children in school, but often
also determines their future. The ‘natural’ interpretation of smart and
dumb which is given in school will then persist long after school is
over, and often even lasts a lifetime. When socialising, the evaluated
differences among children will immediately be seen as indications or
determinations of their future: ‘failing’ and ‘successful’ children. What
students do or do not do at school is interpreted as the immediate pre-
figuration of the adult life they will lead. In the personalised learning
environment, the risk of socialising school-internal differences is very
real, more so because the differences have to do with actual differences
in competencies among students, and constantly hold a mirror up to
the student to show them how they will perform later on.

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