Page 57 - Looking_after_school

Chapter 2. The architecture:
from the educational institution

to the learning environment

In many countries, the increased focus on the individual student has
been, and still is, a high priority for several educational policies. This
policy focus, however, can also be understood as an indication of a
new organisation of education and of learning. What comes up for
discussion here is truly a transformation of the architecture of educa-
tion and of learning. Our argument goes as follows: there has been a
shift from the architecture of the modern educational institution to the
current-day learning environment. As we will show, this shift means that
we are gradually moving away from an educational organisation that
is based on the ‘normality’ of the student (without claiming that this
has disappeared completely), and that there are clear indications of an
organisation of education and of learning in which the ‘employability’
of the learner is now of central importance. In other words: it is no lon-
ger the individuality of the student that is of importance, but instead it
is the personhood and the uniqueness (or unicity) of the learner. It is
important to stress that this uniqueness does not automatically appear
once all normalising barriers have been lifted. This unicity – ‘I, as a
person with my own unique needs’ – is not something waiting to be
discovered but is itself also a construction. It appears as part of what
we could call a new diagram of power, or a new configuration of power.
Before going into this power diagram, we will sketch the architecture
based on two aspects: the building blocks (or the raw material), and
the principles of organisation (for an overview, see table 2 at the end
of this section).

The architecture of the educational institution
Examination is the first important building block of educational insti-
tutions. The exam determines the normality of a student with respect
to a certain norm (Foucault, 1975). Thus, a level of knowledge or skill
is usually standardised for specific age groups and subsequently

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