Page 82 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

tence strictly from the vantage point of either the family or society.
Regarding the former, the school is often presented as an additional
place for raising children, by either expanding the reach of the family
or remedying its shortcomings; the latter can be seen whenever the
school is approached as the place where youths are prepared for full
participation in society as citizens and workers. What stands out is
that these approaches define the finality or the goal of school from the
outside, as if we can only describe the meaning of school as outsiders.
This is also true for both architectures that we have described above.
Whether the emphasis is on the social norm and normality, or on
employability and performance, in both cases the principles for the
(re)organisation of education are derived from society. Both the organ-
isation of the educational institution and that of the learning environ-
ment are functional or instrumental for the needs and expectations
of society. Also in the academic literature, we most often encounter
external perspectives to school education that try to grasp the school
from the outside. Examples are sociological, economic, cultural, or
psychological approaches to the school. Each of these approaches has
its own idea of what the school is or should be, and subsequently has
3
its own definitions of (school) education and learning.
First, there are distinctive sociological approaches to education in
schools. In line with Emile Durkheim, education is often seen as an
“organised and professionalised socialisation” (Peschar & Wesselingh,
1995, trans.). Education, from this point of view, is a goal-oriented, sys-
tematically organised, professional transmission of culture which is
needed to guarantee participation in society. The methods and the
contents of this socialisation change according to changes which
occur in society. The explicitly functional variant of this sociological
approach can be read, for instance, in the work of Talcott Parsons, who
understands the goal of education strictly from its functions. School,
as an institute of socialisation, is about the allocation of your posi-
tion in society according to your merits (Parsons, 1959). In the class-
room, this is translated through the following processes: emancipation
(detaching from the family), internalisation (of social norms), differen-

3 For a detailed elaboration of this perspective on the school, see Masschelein & Simons
(2010, 2013), and Simons & Masschelein (2015).
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