Page 89 - Looking_after_school

3. Touchstones: pedagogical articulations

and formation in order to formulate expectations for the family and
for society. Furthermore, it is possible to look also at the teacher from
within the school. We will discuss these three issues in the following
sections.

The family as seen from within the school

The school makes it possible to take children out of the family, out
of its warmth and protective values, but also out of its inequalities.
Sons and daughters suddenly become students, and that means that
they always receive a collective mark that makes them both free and
equal (and Rancière (1988) would add that this is a democratic mark).
Even though it does not always coincide with the experiences that
we have today, it is this mark that can be freeing and equalising as
soon as young people walk through the school gates: ‘I, like everybody
else here, am given the space and the time for learning’. No matter
how different, at school everybody is first a student. We do not mean
to romanticise or to idealise, but we do want to point to the simplic-
ity, and, perhaps because of it, the often-forgotten pragmatism of the
school: it frees and equalises. You leave the family and you are no lon-
ger first of all a son or a daughter, nor are you immediately absorbed or
merged into society as a citizen or an employee. As a student, you are
somebody who can give shape or form to yourself through exercising
and practicing. It is important to emphasise that this concerns a peda-
gogical freedom, and not the kind of entrepreneurial freedom or the
freedom of choice that we see in some political doctrines. The short-
est description of this freedom – in exercises and practices - is prob-
ably the experience of ‘being able to’ (do something), being capable
of something. The learning child can very strongly live through this
experience: something new becomes possible, becomes meaningful.
Of course, this experience can turn into an experience of ‘not being
able to’ (do something), and school education is unfortunately often
associated with this negative experience. We often forget, however,
that school education’s first movement, in so far as the school works
as a school, is to put young people in the situation of ‘being able to’
(do something), and thus it gives them all – disregarding past or future
- the experience of ‘I can…’. And the pedagogical challenge is pre-
cisely to put and keep young people in the position of being able to

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