Page 99 - Looking_after_school

3. Touchstones: pedagogical articulations

upon itself, and not determining nor offering ‘school content’ (that is,
grammars), deprives the young generation of its possibility to relate
to what influences them and work on this form of life. The school can
only function as a school as long as it offers the basics in terms of litera-
cies and grammars. Only then can the young generation prepare itself
freely and equally. Formation in school has, in other words, always a
worldly orientation. This orientation, however, should not be situated
at the level of the use value of competencies, the practical relevance of
school knowledge and skills, or the compelling vision about human-
ity and society, but in the ‘formative’ potential of the school materials
and methods.

Is the school relatively autonomous in respect to the family?

The societal role of the school implies an independent position vis-
à-vis the family. In a way, the school has to be unrelated to whatever
children have or have not received from their home, neighbourhood,
or the community in which they grew up. Children are born in dif-
ferent places and are unequal in so far as their origins and descent
are concerned; this inequality can obstruct their freedom to find and
shape their own destination. The school does not act as if these dif-
ferences do not exist, but instead chooses not to see these as starting
points. The school thus requires a certain level of autonomy, so that it
can guarantee that these differences in descent or origin do not deter-
mine the future of young people. The school makes these inequalities
irrelevant within the confines of its operations, which is something
completely different from denying them. This means that, in school,
children are addressed as students. The school can thus only function
as a school, and students can only be students, in so far as they are not
continuously confronted with what makes them different (through
birth or through the environment in which they grew up). The school
should then see to it that their young people are not addressed by, or
identified with, what they can’t control, on their impossibilities, or on
what they can’t do. The school has in this sense an enormous respon-
sibility: to make sure that children are not addressed on their familial,
economic, social, or cultural background, but that they are addressed
as (equal) students. Becoming a student then is not so much about
acquiring a new social identity but refers to the continuous pedagogi-

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