Page 19 - Looking_after_school

Chapter 1. Today’s discourse:
why should the student be at the

centre of education?

A discourse is much more than just language or vocabulary. It is a way
of speaking and of naming, of going through steps of argumentation
and moving through lines of reasoning, but it is also more: it is a way of
looking, of seeing things in a certain way. In a discourse we can always
unravel a number of perspectives that are used to envision the world
of education, and that enable us to speak about its past and future in
particular ways. It could easily be said, for example, that there is a mar-
ket or economical perspective on education, as well as a technological
perspective. Every perspective has its own specific definitions for the
challenges and the problems education faces, and each also suggests
(future) solutions through these definitions for the problems at hand.
This first chapter is an inventory of these perspectives, including their
respective definitions of problems, the solutions they offer, and how
each perspective understands the figure of the student. To be sure,
our inventory targets the domain of education and learning, but it
also extends beyond; these perspectives also apply, for instance, to the
domain of social work or policies on migration. We discern seven prob-
lem definitions for which giving central attention to the student is seen
as the solution (see table 1 at the end of this chapter for an overview).

Insufficiently utilising the talent of each student -
a socio-economic perspective
At the beginning of the 21st century, quite a number of countries and
regions grew concerned with both the quality of, and the equality
within, education. The No Child Left Behind Act (2001, NCLB) from the
United States of America is one well-known example. It was rooted
in the assumption that the standard of American schools was too low,
and that socially weaker students and minorities, especially, were
being left behind. The proposed solutions were to introduce stan-

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