Page 14 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

system of instruction. Another example arose in the 1960’s, namely the
anti-authoritarian educational movement. This movement goes back
to the Summerhill School of Alexander Neill, which originated in the
beginning of the 20th century and, in line with the more general social
and intellectual movements of those days, questioned the ways author-
ity takes shape within educational and other institutions. Another
well-known example is Ivan Illich’s plea for “deschooling society”, and
for concentrating on the child instead of following the institutional
logic of the school (Illich, 1970). At the beginning of the 1980’s, the term
‘personalised education’ was finally introduced by Victor Garcia Hoz,
the Spanish catholic educator and Opus-Dei adept (Roith, 2015, p. 177).

From this brief historical review, we might conclude that there is noth-
ing new going on today. Some even claim that these developments are
merely affirming the presence of a single swinging pendulum which
has long characterised the “grammar of schooling”: an increase in
attention for the student eventually takes turn for an increase in atten-
tion for the teacher; attention for concrete experiences alternates with
attention for the curriculum; more freedom relieves more authority
(Tyack & Tobin, 1994). According to this line of reasoning, this gram-
mar (understood as organisational structures and rules) took shape
in the middle of the 18th century and continues to be the foundation
onto which our educational institutions are built to this day (Depaepe,
1999). This implies that the grammar of schooling – which elevates the
holy trinity of student, teacher, and curriculum - has in itself never
been questioned during the past century. What has taken place is a
shift in the centre of gravitation, due to one of the corners of the trin-
ity (student, teacher, curriculum) reclaiming attention. The message
is clear: due to the grammar of schooling, there are no fundamental
changes, everything remains the same. It seems, then, as if this per-
spective on the grammar of schooling allows for only two trains of
thought. The first is the almost cynical conclusion that the current plea
to centre the place of the student is nothing more than empty rhetoric
and may disappear as swiftly as it appeared. The second is the more
extreme viewpoint that today’s pleas for student centred education
indicate that the so-called grammar of schooling is finally being fun-
damentally questioned. According to us, both trains of thought jump
to conclusions. When arguments such as these impose themselves

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