Page 85 - Looking_after_school

3. Touchstones: pedagogical articulations

School and freedom

We start from the point that schooling is a form of learning which
revolves around freedom. There are, of course, numerous forms of
learning. In the words of Hannah Arendt (1958/2006), every society has
the responsibility to come to terms with the future generation. Taking
on this responsibility can lead to many different educational forms.
Some societies will emphasise initiation and install a sort of learning
process which everybody must go through in order to be accepted into
a certain group or community; in other societies, the emphasis might
be on training by master-apprentice systems (or modes of on-the-job
learning in today’s vocabulary); the family, as well, can house its own
pedagogical form related to child rearing. What most of these forms
of learning have in common is that they take place in service of repro-
ducing the social order. In other words, these forms of learning have
a sort of pre-determination, a predefined outcome. The future genera-
tion, often based on careful selection or on natural predisposition, is
engaged in the existing society or brought into it (into a certain social
rank, order, class, or profession). For these forms of learning, the future
is, in a way, already set or predefined.
The scholastic form of learning breaks away from this idea of pre-
determination. This principle was already given in the old Greek
meaning of scholé, from which our conception of school is derived.
Scholé means free time (see also Kohan & Kennedy 2014). It refers to
the concrete and tangible spacetime outside of the productive order of
both economy and politics, of both the oikos and the polis. It involves
freedom in both the positive and negative sense. On the one hand, it
means to be free from productivity, to be detached from productivity,
which is a suspension of the logic of economic or social profit; on the
other hand, it means to be free for activities of study and practice. This
means that the time is freed for ‘formation’, which can be understood
in its literal sense as working on ‘your own form’, on your being in
form or in (good) ‘shape’. This double freedom implies that what
young people have to learn or become is not predefined by nature
or heritage, but that study and exercise through the school makes it
possible to give oneself an own destination in life, in contrast to other
educational forms which assume some sort of pre-determination in

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