Page 23 - Looking_after_school

1. Today's discourse: why should the student be at the center of education?

ance of talent towards STEM education (science, technology, engineer-
ing, and mathematics) receives special attention in a lot of countries
around the world.
To summarise, from this socio-economic perspective, shifting the gaze
towards the student is first the consequence of the economic prob-
lematisation of education in terms of maximising output for the job
market and/or the development of the knowledge economy. This goes
hand in hand with a social problematisation, in so far as this maximi-
sation implies that every talent and thus all students are of importance.
Every student should be our main concern because they each repre-
sent raw material or an economic resource.

The need for open learning pathways - an
institutional perspective

The socio-economic approach to education is an approach aimed at
mobilising talents and competencies. As such, it is inseparable from
a concern with the effective and efficient organisation of education or,
perhaps better, with that of learning. Looking at the solutions which
are proposed at a European level, we find a relatively new approach
of the organisation of learning:

“Education and training can only contribute to growth and job-creation
if learning is focused on the knowledge, skills and competences to be
acquired by students (learning outcomes) through the learning process,
rather than on completing a specific stage or on time spent in school.”
(European Commission, 2012, p. 7)

In this plea for learning outcomes, a vision of education emerges in
which the institution is no longer the point of departure. What is of
interest here are learning outcomes, adequate systems of evaluation
and validation that ‘translate’ the learning outcomes of all learners
into qualifications. In traditional educational settings, learning, goal-
oriented teaching, evaluation, and the authority of qualification are
joined in time and space, which means that they are institutionalised.
In this discourse we can see a dismantling of these traditional educa-
tional institutions. This de-institutionalisation is clearly expressed in
the choice of words: it is about the learner (not the student), about the

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