Page 81 - Looking_after_school

Chapter 3. Touchstones: school-
pedagogical articulations

Placing the learner at the centre is part of a larger discourse, and also
serves as an indication of a new organisation of education and of
learning. In this new educational organisation, considerations about
the best methods of learning are closely intertwined with societal
expectations of education. This probably explains (at least in part)
why the focus on the student is so convincing today: everybody seems
to have an interest in placing the learner at the centre. It is striking,
however, that in these discourses, hardly any attention is paid to the
actual meaning of the school. Of course, the school is mentioned, but
only in a functional or instrumental way. The school only comes up
in so far as it is a place for learning, and in so far as it serves society. In
this line of reasoning, optimal learning processes and relevant learn-
ing outcomes are the starting point, not the school. The school itself
is an empty box; it should adapt itself to avoid becoming redundant,
organise itself so that learning processes are optimised in every way
possible, and be held accountable for supporting learning outcomes
which are relevant for society. If the school fails to do so, it becomes
expendable - and for many critics today, that is indeed the case. In this
functional and instrumental reasoning there is hardly any attention
for what makes the school precisely a school, nor to what is typical for
the sort of learning which takes place in schools. In order to bring the
school itself into focus, we will attempt to articulate a ‘scholastic’ or
pedagogical perspective in this chapter. This perspective allows us to
formulate touchstones which can be used to scrutinise other perspec-
tives, but also to investigate the architecture of the learning environ-
ment and its power dynamics.

A (school-)pedagogical perspective
For the sake of convenience, we can say that the school occupies a
place in between family and society. In light of this simple image, it
is striking how often we understand the reasons for the school’s exis-

81