Page 137 - Looking_after_school

Outro

is difficult to remember. A second reason could be that acknowledging
the role of school learning implies acknowledging that who one has
become is the result of pedagogic contingencies and the scholastic
condition one has been exposed to. This reliance on school contin-
gency is probably not only difficult to accept – and even a scandal -
for philosophers, but for everyone else who wants to keep their state
of independency intact. One could say that school learning, in this
sense, comes close to the structure of the trauma and the logic of the
unconscious (that is, a disturbing experience that is ignored in some
way); but there is a fundamental difference: school learning is per-
haps not about painful remembering but about joyful forgetting, and
it probably does not need analysis and therapy, but celebration and
gratefulness.

But there is maybe a third, possible reason which could be related
to our present, which is that schools always organise a ‘fundamental
disorder’; arranging a middle without direction and accepting that
the coming generation can question and challenge the older genera-
tion. The deep ambiguity of societies which ‘decide’ to have schools is
related, one could say, to the fact that this is considered a generous act
towards the coming generation and the world. But this act is accom-
panied by a strong fear, and even up to a non-acceptance, that what is
valued and taken for granted by the elder becomes, indeed, actually
questioned or objected by the ‘immature’, even without reasons or
arguments. This would mean that the ridiculing, marginalisation and
instrumentalisation of ‘school’ is the result of a deep fear of the coming
generation actually becoming a new generation and starting to take
care of the world themselves. It would mean that personalisation can
also be approached as an adequate strategy to take the renewing, or
even revolutionary potential, out of education; to avoid the new gen-
eration and the world to go to school.

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