Page 49 - Looking_after_school

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

responsibility, ethical action, and being related to each other. In this
relationship, the student is ‘the Other’ that claims the care and atten-
tion of the teacher and faces them with the responsibility to do justice
to the unique person of the student.
This perspective - and we make abstraction from several varieties -
tries to explain that the student, as ‘the Other’, continuously reminds
teachers that they have a personal responsibility. Ethics here is mostly
understood as a form of doing justice to the other. The other is rep-
resented as a singularity that cannot be understood or encapsulated
by categories or standardised actions. In so far as education is associ-
ated with standardisation, normalisation, and categorisation, it is to
be expected that this ethical approach has a relatively strong voice in
debates over education. This perspective is used to bring attention to
the lack of space for inter-personal relationships in educational set-
tings as they are currently being organised.

Closely connected is the perspective in which the personal develop-
ment of the student is brought to the fore as a key aim of education,
and where focus is also placed on the personhood of the teacher.
‘Forming’ a person, it is said, is not merely the teaching of knowledge,
skills, and competencies, but also the development of values, norms,
identity, and ethical understanding. To realise this, every student has
to be addressed in his or her personhood. This also means that the per-
sonhood of the teacher must come to the fore. It is not only of impor-
tance what the teacher does, but also who they are as an individual
and what they embody. The interpersonal relationship is presented in
this perspective as a necessary condition for the education of character
or moral development as a person. The not-yet ‘formed’ but unique
person of the student is, in this perspective, both the beginning and
end of education.

The learning citizen

A last perspective which takes the student or (better) the learner as its
main concern is of a different order. It concerns the discourse of the
learning society and the learning citizen which questions the idea
that learning is limited to age (children and youth), and that learn-
ing ends when those learners leave dedicated institutions (school and

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