Page 107 - Looking_after_school

3. Touchstones: pedagogical articulations

Can the school and the teachers reconcile their orientation
to formation with student-centrism?

For this touchstone we would like to bring in mind that there are two
basic motives for understanding the student as the main concern of
education. First, there is the societal rationale for ensuring the optimal
employability of everyone to realise social and economic equality; this
necessitates having an efficient and effective system of education that
gets the most out of everyone, or that provides the highest amount of
input for economic growth. The student that takes centre stage is, in
this case, positioned from the very beginning as a means to an end.
In other words: everyone matters, get the most out of everyone. The sec-
ond motive comes from within education and argues that we cannot
assume the existence of a ‘norm(al) student’, when we want to realise
the best possible learning processes, outcomes, and choices. In this
context, the student that is put in the centre, is always the starting point.
This means: everything can contribute to learning gain, so take all specific
individual differences into account.

But also, in the pedagogical perspective that we propose, there is a
motive that considers every student of importance, or, better, wants
to give all children the opportunity to become students. Briefly sum-
marised, the pedagogical assumption is that everybody is offered the pos-
sibility to become someone; no one’s future is determined. We are well aware
7
that this is an idealistic or even utopian idea. But, before we criticise
this pedagogical motive and ask for some realism, it is important to
note that the aforementioned societal and educational motives are
no strangers to idealism either. Their assumptions are also idealistic,
in so far as their assumptions about realising employability through
learning and the rational modelling of learning gain are concerned.
Anyhow, this pedagogical touchstone asks whether an architecture
of learning and education which takes the person of the students as
its starting point or as a means can be reconciled with an architecture
that wants to enable formation. Or, applied to the teacher: can the
teacher enable formation for all students while simultaneously taking

7 For an elaboration of the utopian dimension of the school: Verburgh et al., 2016.
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