Page 132 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

Allowing the world to go to school

If we want to put the school back into the spotlight, perhaps the biggest
challenge today is to discern what the world is that we want to prepare
young people for. This does not mean speculating about competencies
which should be required, but instead to find out which grammars
(including the algorithms, code, image culture, ecological footprint,…)
determine our lives and our society. We should dare to leave aside the
assumption that there are no contents of formation which can keep
up with a continuously changing society where everything ages rap-
idly. At best, this discourse about change shows that school - when it
operates as school - indeed never is and never was (merely) about the
transmission of knowledge. If there is one thing that digitisation is
making clear, it is that we do not need the school to acquire knowledge.
Reverting to the rhetoric of permanent change and lifelong learning
is a way of ignoring the responsibility that the school imposes on us,
the responsibility of daring to undertake a collective inquiry of our-
selves. This is not about formulating and projecting expectations of
education, as many initiatives have attempted to write down the goals
and scenarios of education for the decennia to come but is instead
about finding which basic grammars make it possible to live together.
A collective inquiry into ourselves is not a debate or a poll through
which we create a collective image of an ideal citizen or society, to
subsequently mobilise the school to realise this image through the
coming generation; it is an inquiry into our contemporary ways of
living together with the ambition to arrive at the ‘basic forces’ or ‘a
shared base’, which means to arrive at the contents of basic forma-
tion. Today this demands at least an inquiry into the basic grammar
of the internet and of the social relations as mediated by digital tools,
as well as the grammar of sharing and inhabiting a planet. This kind
of inquiry is the only way in which we can present these grammars
and offer the youth the opportunity to relate to them. The means or
contents of that basic formation are in this sense perhaps even more
important than its goals. The responsibility that is given to us by the
school also entails that we put the care of living together and sharing
a world at the heart of our concerns.

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