Page 88 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

based on their top performances (often based thus on the outcomes
of their students). A lot more is needed to achieve peak performance;
even the wind has to blow in the right direction, as the athlete knows
very well. Not everything can possibly lay in the hands of the school or
of the student, but what does lay in the hand of the student at school
is the formation of oneself in order to be prepared.
So, what does it mean to be prepared? What is this basic shape? Some-
one who is prepared, on the one hand, is able to relate to things (lin-
guistic actions, physical actions, concrete matters, or problems) but
also keeps a certain distance (in order to be able to make proper use of
these actions in specific situations and circumstances). It is someone
who can take a step backwards, precisely in order to see what matters.
This combination of distance and involvement, of detachment and re-
attachment is what ‘being able to relate to’ is about: you are able to
relate to nature, to the digital world, to technology, to car mechanics…
Not to be determined by nature or technology, but also not to rise above
it; formation is about learning to relate to the worlds of, for example,
nature or technology. This means that formation always has a worldly
dimension. The subjects that are addressed at school always have a con-
nection to society: they disclose worlds. Contents in school are always
taken (how could it be otherwise?) from our daily world. But the school
is the place where young people are offered the opportunity to relate to
this worldly matter in a new way. If the finality of the school is forma-
tion, then it is about giving young people the opportunity to relate to
that which influences them or that which determines them (also see
Verbeek, 2011). In this context we can speak of a ‘worldly formation’, if
we consider that this formation always also contains a worldly involve-
ment, a formation of the self in relation to matters which matter. When
scholastic learning is understood as worldly formation, the ‘form’ or
‘shape’ is not given beforehand, in contrast to traditional approaches
to ‘personal formation’ which start from an ideal of the well-educated
subject and transforms or de-forms the school into a site for initiation,
socialisation, or (moral) development.
Often, we consider the school from the external perspective of the
family or the society. The internal, pedagogical perspective offers the
opportunity to turn this around: we can look at the family and at soci-
ety from within the school, and start from scholastic freedom, equality,

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