Page 12 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

now been strengthened by the digital home delivery of learning, is
actually de-schooling school.
This report describes how the tendency to personalisation – the focus
on the person of the student - which took over from the former ten-
dency towards normalisation, actually removes the elements of free-
dom, equality, and formation from school learning. By this, we do
not mean that our report was prophetic - in illo tempore. At most, it
indicates that when the book appeared in Dutch in the pre-COVID
period it was contemporary, that it was indeed a report, and that today’s
crisis developments which have been growing for some time are now
clearly manifesting themselves. We think, thus, that we were already
writing the book in tempore suspecto, or rather, that we were reporting
on already ‘suspect times’; therefore, we hope the book has its mean-
ing today and might find a public audience. It is also the reason why
we have not taken the opportunity with this translation to rework the
book thoroughly or extensively.
Our thinking did not stand still in recent years, so a light reworking
has taken place in some of the chapters; however, there was no inten-
tion of adding COVID-19 references simply to make the book more
‘relevant’. In fact, we think it is relevant as it is, now maybe even more
than when first published in Dutch. Hopefully, this claim will not be
read as a form of arrogance or self-aggrandisement, because our belief
is exactly the opposite: to claim to know now the impact of the COVID-
19 crisis would only show a lack of intellectual modesty and honesty.
What we do think, is that we should be a little more reluctant to look
(out) to the future in terms of normality - in a new form or again as that
‘old normal’. We believe that even before the health crisis, ‘normality’
was already disappearing as a reference for our (educational) thinking
and acting, or at least was being overshadowed by something else: the
glorification of the figure of the unique person and the mass profiling
drive required to do so. The understandable yearning and urge for
normality can make this development away from normalisation and
towards personalisation disappear from view. Since in this book we
report precisely on the transition from normalisation to personalisa-
tion, and the limits of both, the book may yet have a post-COVID rel-
evance: the re-discovery of a pedagogical optimism that wants children
and the world to go back to school.

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