Page 128 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

way, we can no longer speak of it as school. All these issues lack an
ideal solution or a blueprint that would show us how to deal with the
matter, and so they require careful, open-eyed, pedagogical pragma-
tism. This also plays its part in the design of (more) inclusive schools.
Often enough, attention is given to the major emphasis on caring and
individual guidance in special needs schools, and how this may be
useful within regular schools. This is, of course, viable. But a school
for special needs education is first a school, and they approach young
people first of all as students. Also, within these schools, there is a lot
of emphasis placed on ‘making school’ and on pedagogical exper-
tise concerning teaching methods which are based on freedom and
equality in challenging situations. Pedagogical pragmatism can also
be brought to the fore here. Yet, another aspect is the risk of confusing
pedagogical actions with care, which replaces formation with develop-
ment. Caretaking of young people in need can then become a sort of
compensation, even an excuse for the lack of necessary investments in
pedagogical support (hence, in teachers) which can turn these young
people into students. This focus on compensatory care and individual
development can then come at the expense of making school.
Resources need to be made available in order to make school and,
perhaps even more, to reinvent school. This might be the challenge
which is so made clear by the movement towards inclusive schools.
Too often, the inclusive school is projected as the dream image of an
inclusive society; too often it is claimed that within an inclusive school
students are socialised to deal with diversity in adult life. In so far
as these schools imply radical personalisation, they might realise a
strange form of socialisation: a society of unique persons who only
share that they are different. But as stated, schools which only socialise
or (re)produce societies as they are desired or dreamt by adults are no
longer schools. Maybe we should not appeal to socialisation to realise
our societal dreams (as adults), but should instead dream of a school,
which means dreaming of a time and place for sharing and renew-
ing the world. Maybe this is indeed the challenge today: how can we
shape a school of the future, what resources are available for this? But
this also means: how can we think about basic formation and about
forming a common world in the future? How can we offer children the
possibility to form a shared future, themselves?

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