Page 98 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

Pedagogical touchstones

In this pedagogical or scholastic perspective, we brought the school
back into prominence. The term ‘school’ does not refer here to this typ-
ical building that we are all familiar with, nor to the well-known organ-
isation of learning into groups and years. With the term ‘school’ we
refer in the first place to a very specific form of learning that revolves
around freedom, equality, and formation. Based on this idea, we would
like to formulate a number of touchstones which allow for the evalu-
ation of current student-centred discourse and the architecture of the
learning environment. We will formulate these touchstones as short
questions with a brief explanation.

Is the school relatively autonomous in respect to society?

In so far as school education is first and foremost about formation, it
requires a relative autonomy from society. This autonomy implies that
the school should prepare young people through grammatisations and
literacies for societal life, but that it is not responsible for whether or
not young people successfully function or perform in society. This is
however the case (at least as ambition) in the architecture of the mod-
ern educational institution, which aims for social normalisation, as
well as in the architecture of the learning environment which is based
on the principle of employability. To contrast with this, our first touch-
stone is that the goals to be attained at school should not coincide with
concretely defined societal requirements (e.g., for employment, for
citizenship). School is about preparing oneself in terms of working
on one’s basic condition, and in that sense the school is clearly related
to societal life, but school education is not about deciding, selecting,
and controlling what one has to become. Schooled students acquire a
basic condition that in a sense allows them to be able to do anything.

Is the school providing preparation for societal life?

The autonomy of the school is always relative because the school’s mis-
sion of formation has indeed always a worldly orientation. This is only
possible in so far as society takes responsibility, reflects upon itself, and
investigates its basics in view of the school curriculum. Not reflecting

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