Page 131 - Looking_after_school

4. Lessons learned

find a place in school education (i.e., not only in, for example, voca-
tional education). But giving work a place in school should not be done
primarily from the point of view of employment or employability, and
not merely as a practical part (alongside theory) or in subservience to
the creative process of making and fabricating. In at least two ways,
attention to work is important.
First and foremost, the school is perhaps the place where the coming
generation has the opportunity to relate to the world of work. Work
and working then are part of a worldly formation: what does it mean to
work, what does it mean to be working, what kind of engagement with
the world is established in forms of work, what is specific to working
power, what kind of attention is needed for work, but also, what kind
of attentiveness and engagement becomes possible through work, ...?
We seem to identify work too easily with practicing a particular pro-
fession or having a job. Work can also be approached as an essential
way of dealing with things of the world (material, earth, matter, ...),
as a specific involvement with those things and with each other. At
school, then, it is as much about relating to the world of work (its
grammar), just as it is about relating to the world of nature, language,
economics, ...

But in a second way, it is important to consider how work - and what
forms of work - can help to make freedom, equality, and education
possible. In this context, it is worthwhile to recall that the reform
movement in the first half of last century attached great formative
importance to work. Work, not in the first place as a preparation for a
profession, but as the shaping of a certain (collective) relation to the
world in which our dignity finds its expression as a love and atten-
tion to the world and its beauty (see for example the writings and
practices of Freinet, Montessori, Dewey). The challenge is actually
to develop forms of work - that is, interesting forms of work, relevant
schoolwork - that help to make school possible. After all, young people
work at school, and a relevant pedagogical method implies forms of
‘undefined’ work that make freedom, equality, and formation possible.
Defined activities which focus exclusively on producing, making, or
developing - even if they offer variety - are often insufficient for that
purpose. Inventing these pedagogical forms of work – new sorts of
schoolwork - seems to us a challenge for the future.

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