Page 86 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

social or natural terms. Stated differently: the school starts from the
assumption that there is no presumed link between a body and its
capacities, that young people are not preordained in any way but must
be given the (free) time and space to find their own destiny.

School and equality

Besides freedom, school is also about equality. Scholastic equality
follows from the typical freedom of the school. If the future (social)
position of young people is not defined from the onset, this means
that everybody, regardless of where they are from, must have the
chance to give shape to their own life, and thus must be able to find
their own destiny. In contrast to other forms of learning, schooling is
based on the idea that it is not the family, nature, or employability - not
descent, origin, or defined future – which determine the content and
the direction of someone’s study and practice. In other words, we speak
of school where learning departs from equality and freedom. To again
borrow the words of Hannah Arendt (1958/2006): the school sees to it
that every generation can experience itself as a new generation. This
means that the future generation is given the opportunity to renew
society by giving itself a new destination in school. The consequence
is that school can always be a risk for the existing societal order. In so
far as the school allows everybody, independent of their origin and
their descent, to work on their own destination, the existing order, with
its social, cultural, and economic inequalities, is also always at stake.
It is then understandable that the old Greek elite already questioned
the school and wanted to limit access to ‘free time’ or force people in
a certain direction based on their descent, origin, or determined posi-
tions. Not everybody, they reasoned, deserves this freedom. We want
to emphasise here that the school is seen as a potential threat for the
existing order, and thus also for the ruling elite who has a vested inter-
est in maintaining that order and being selective in school equality.
There is a striking analogy here to another Greek invention: namely,
democracy. As Jacques Rancière (2007) shows, democracy was a kind
of scandal when it came into existence. Democracy, in principle, gave
power to everybody, regardless of competency, qualification, or exper-
tise. According to Rancière, this gives rise to a certain hatred against
democracy, or, at least, to the ambivalent attitude that we see even

86