Page 84 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

and development in young children and adolescents (see for instance
Kohlberg & Mayer, 1972). This is an external perspective in so far that
understanding what takes place within education (or expressions of
what should take place within the confines of the school) is derived
from processes, laws, or (natural) stages taken from learning, devel-
opmental, and (more recently) neurological psychology. We are not
claiming that these psychological insights have nothing to say about
education or cannot play a role in education; we are saying, however,
that they provide an external approach to school education and deal
with the school as just a place or context of learning, understood solely
through the concepts of growth and development.

These sociological, cultural, economic, or psychological approaches
do more than simply provide a reason for the school’s existence from
an outside perspective. Each perspective also introduces its own vision
about learning at school: learning as socialisation, learning as initiation,
learning as investment and production, learning as growth, development,
and identification. Each of these concepts has come to belong to the
vocabulary that we use daily to speak about education and its goals,
even though an explicit reference to the underlying approaches is
often absent. We do not want to question this vocabulary in any fun-
damental way, nor do we want to abolish these external perspectives;
this would be presumptuous on our accord. What we would like to try,
instead, is to articulate the school from within.

What we propose is a school-pedagogical perspective that we believe
cannot be traced to a sociological, cultural, economic, or psychological
perspective. In our attempt to formulate this school-pedagogical per-
spective, we assume there is something typical or specific about forms
of learning that take place in schools, which we could call scholastic
learning. This concerns characteristics of the school which cannot be
explained by the family or societal functions. We would like to stress
that this perspective from within, from the inside of the school, is not
just a theoretical exercise; it has an important consequence, namely
that this perspective can provide an indication on which points the
family and society should take the particularity of the school into
account, thus providing a reversal of the dominant view.
The basis of our school-pedagogical perspective is made up of three
assumptions: freedom, equality, and formation.

84