Page 136 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

ence of being engaged in school learning. This is not the experience
of a condition where someone is not (yet) being able to, for instance,
write or count, but is also not the experience of (already) being able
to write or count. The school experience refers to what is experienced
at the unique moment that writing or counting becomes a possibility;
the experience while learning, before actually being able to write or
count, yet not just the experience of (simply) not being able to write
or count. Think about the little child who learns to write, about the
image of the child to which Jorge Larrosa (2002, 2003) refers time and
again, the image of the child with the tongue slightly out of mouth,
between the lips, while trying to shape the letters on paper. Before
being able to write, the child experiences (probably) not being able,
but does not experience learning. When being able to write, perhaps
the student remembers themself learning, but does not experience
themself learning. The school experience is the experience at the very
moment that the ability to write (and hence, not to write) is experi-
enced as such. Perhaps Michel Serres (1997) did attempt to describe
exactly these school experiences when he referred to the experience
of being-in-the-middle (of things), the experience of an interrupted
course of life where new courses become possible. Serres describes
how learning is about leaving the house, to become exposed and “to
split off from the so-called natural direction”, which means arriving at
a condition where there is no fixed or predefined direction, and there-
fore the experience of all directions becomes possible. The experience
of school learning, then, would be about experiencing a new world of
possibilities in relation to, for instance, language, nature, history, one’s
own body, our planet etc.

The second issue we should further explore concerns the reasons for
the ambivalence, (if not straightforward ridiculing), marginalising or
ignoring of the scholastic condition. A first reason for this could be:
if school learning in the strong sense is indeed about (trans)forming
oneself, and hence, always also about becoming someone else, it is
very difficult to remember who one was before (implying also that
there is no stable ‘one’ that would experience the change). Or to put
this in another way: it is always from the perspective of who one has
become that one returns to one’s past. There is a kind of irreversibility
at stake, and hence, therefore, the school experience and process itself

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