Page 133 - Looking_after_school

4. Lessons learned

Indeed, from a pedagogical perspective, the focus on the student is
achieved by focusing on the world. And in order to find out what this
means, it may be relevant to reinvigorate certain traditional reform
educators, and the way in which they have experimented with the
school. They were not simply interested in freeing the student, but
always meant to bring the world back into focus. Only when we find
new ways to disclose the world through grammars, to allow the world
to go to the school and to awaken interest for the world, we give young
people the chance to forge their own future. This is also the way in
which we avoid young people shaping themselves according to our
image, and in which we give them the time and space to learn how to
relate to what influences them. Putting the school at the centre of our
concern means putting the world at the centre, and this means doing
justice to the coming generation in a pedagogical way: to make it pos-
sible for young people to become students and make it possible for
the world to be taken care of.

The responsibility that the school places on us is to put the care of
living together in our shared world at the centre. Does this mean that
the student is not central in school? Of course not: the student is at
centre, but not alone, and most importantly, not as a bearer of unique
needs but as a student who can relate to the world or as someone to
whom the world can speak to (again). Only if we find new ways to
also put the world at the centre, to make it speak, and to awaken an
interest in the world, will we give young people the chance of a future
of their own. Only in this way do we avoid shaping young people in
our image and give young people the chance to learn to relate to what
influences them. Perhaps we should explicitly mention here that this
also means allowing the world (of language, mathematics, code, etc.)
to speak, and to inscribe itself. We like to recall here the dangers Plato
pointed out when writing was invented, namely that it would make
us lazy (‘we do not have to remember anything, it is in the books any-
way, we do not have to know, as long as we can find it’) and, above all,
that it would mean that the words we are confronted with in writing,
unlike the spoken word, could no longer inscribe themselves in our
lives (physically, emotionally and mentally), but remain external and
abstract. So, these dangers demand that we develop pedagogical prac-

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