Page 120 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

This chapter summarises our main arguments, and also further elabo-
rates on some of the implications.

Making students believe it is about their freedom

Our argument goes as follows: it is no longer the architecture of the
educational institution that forms the guideline or the blueprint for
education, but the architecture of the learning environment. This
does not entail the – often claimed - liberation of the student, but
instead a change of regime which the student is subjected to. The
architecture of the educational institution is in all respects directed
at a social norm: not only do the goals and contents of education refer
to a social norm, but also the development of the student and what
teachers do revolve around normalisation. Typical, recurring ques-
tions in this architecture are then: ‘am I developing normally?’ and ‘do
I meet the norm?’. Instead of social normality, the new architecture is
about societal employability. The learning environment wants students
to acquire the learning outcomes (competencies) which make them
proficient and thus employable in all sorts of domains of societal life.
Stated differently: the starting point is that society asks for employable
people, and not so much people that comply with social norms. This
means that the orientation towards goals of the educational institu-
tion (of which the exams judge whether and to what degree the goals
have been achieved) is replaced by an orientation towards outcomes
of the learning environment (where the exam finds whether learning
outcomes have been acquired by a learner). Typical questions here are:
‘does my learning lead to outcomes?’ and ‘am I employable?’. A degree
which is ascribed by the institution is also based on examined results,
but it does not contain a list of individually acquired and inventoried
learning outcomes as established in the learning environment. In the
architecture of the learning environment, the learner learns with the
aim of gaining or profiting (and thus also becomes someone who aims
at gain), which means that learning gain is an important indicator
of quality. Customised education, or its variants of personalised edu-
cation, are then mostly aiming for an increase in learning gain and
employability.

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