& Education in times of fast learning- the future of the school

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Notes

. Learning, it is stated, can take place anytime and anywhere. This means that the class as a communication technology is rendered obsolete.

Highlights

Schools, so they argue, rest on the false premise that we need them to learn, while we learn much better or faster outside school or outside the classroom (Illich 1970; Bentley 2000; Griffith 2010). Moreover, schools have been compared to prisons and camps (Gray 2013), they have been accused of being brutal colonisation machines. And all this seems to be based on sound observations and arguments. In today’s era of lifelong learning and (digital) learning environments, perhaps one is allowing the school to die a quiet death. One anticipates now really the school’s disappearance on the grounds of its redundancy as a painfully outdated institution. Indeed, besides the recurring charges and accusations levelled against the school (alienating and demotivating young people, corruption and abuse of its power, reproduction of inequality, lack of effectiveness and employability), we must take note of the recent development which states that the school, where learning is bound to time and space, is no longer needed in the digital era of online learning environments. A revolution fuelled mainly by new information and communication technologies makes it possible to focus learning squarely on the individual learner. (84)

In contrast to this view, it is very important to recall that the school is a specific (political and material) invention of the Greek polis, which implies that schools have not existed everywhere and always, and that schools might one day indeed also cease to exist (85)

Our educational morphology approaches the school as a particular scholastic

‘form of gathering’ i.e. a particular time – space – matter arrangement (including concrete architectures, technologies, practices and figures) that deals in a specific way with the new generation, allows for a particular relation to the world, and for a particular experience of potentiality and of commonality (of making things public 2021-11-02 4:43 PM

The school’s very existence has been called into question by radical deschoolers and unschoolers throughout the twentieth century. Schools, so they argue, rest on the false premise that we need them to learn, while we learn much better or faster outside school or outside the classroom (Illich 1970; Bentley 2000; Griffith 2010). Moreover, schools have been compared to prisons and camps (Gray 2013), they have been accused of being brutal colonisation machines. And all this seems to be based on sound observations and arguments. In today’s era of lifelong learning and (digital) learning environments, perhaps one is allowing the school to die a quiet death. 2021-11-02 4:44 PM

Wanting to drop out of university to pursue self-learning

The school and classical education become redundant according to their critics: the entire concept of curriculum and classification based on age is a product of outdated ways of distributing knowledge and expertise. 2021-11-02 4:44 PM

In person vs online

Is it not obvious that the school is essentially a place of learning? Is it not self-evident that the school is about an initiation into knowledge, practices and skills, and about a socialisation of young people in the culture of a society? 2021-11-02 4:46 PM

But how effective is it

The school one could say is the materialisation of the belief that humans have no natural destination 2021-11-02 4:48 PM

People need direction

What the school did was to establish a time and space that was in a sense detached and separated from the time and space of both society ( polis) and the household (oikos). The invention of the school constituted an emancipatory rupture and provided the ‘format’ for time-made-free, that is, the particular composition of time, space and matter that makes up the scholastic 2021-11-02 4:48 PM

Free time is separated from productive life, it is time where labour or work as economic or instrumental activities are put at a distance, and hence, study and exercise become possible. 2021-11-02 4:49 PM

School gives us free time from the demands of survival to learn

The school offers students for instance the opportunity to leave behind their past and family background, and indeed to become students like all the rest. 2021-11-02 4:49 PM

Providing an equal opportunity for learning

The school does not just offer the opportunity to learn mathematics, but to become interested in mathematics. School than is also a space of inter-esse – understood as an in-between and a making of a relation 2021-11-02 4:51 PM

Learn and connect with subjects, but not personally

The school is the materialisation of the decision of a society to offer a time and space for study, exercise and thinking in order to give the young generation the opportunity to renew society. 2021-11-02 4:53 PM

In other words, the absence of any destiny does not make (school) education impossible or meaningless, instead it makes school meaningful: school is about the time and space offered to find a destiny. 2021-11-02 4:55 PM

Finding a des

cholè, than, is not simply a time and space of passage ( from past to future), project-time or initiation-time ( from family to society). It is precisely an open event of

‘preparation as such’, that is, preparation without a pre-determined purpose other than to be prepared and ‘in form/shape’. Being prepared must therefore be distinguished from being competent or being able to perform (well), and from the claims of employability that are associated with this goals. In this respect, it is not surprising that the most basic role of the school is to impart basic knowledge and basic skills. These are part of the exercises and study that prepare us and help us to ‘come into shape’. 2021-11-02 4:55 PM

Shaping our character

the school is not an idea or ideal, but a form of gathering that is to be made. Education, or pedagogy if understood in its broadest sense, then could be regarded as being the art and technology to make school happen, that is, to spatialise and materialise free time 2021-11-02 4:55 PM

A community of students is a unique community; it is a community of people who have nothing (yet) in common, but by confronting what is brought to the table, its members can experience what it means to share something and activate their ability to renew the world. 2021-11-02 4:56 PM

Today, the school seems to be under attack more than ever before, because it concerns the very things that make a school to school. The attacks on the school today are lurking in the appealing calls to maximise learning gains and optimise well-being and pleasure in fast and personalised learning for each and all. Behind these calls lurks a strategy of neutralisation of the scholastic form, one that reduces the school to a service-providing institution for advancing learning, for satisfying individual learning needs and optimising individual learning outcomes. The focus on learning, which today seems so obvious to us, is actually implicated in the call to conceive of our individual and collective lives as an enterprise focused on the optimal and maximal satisfaction of needs 2021-11-02 4:57 PM

Learning becomes a personal business, a matter of productive and investment time, something that is open to endless acceleration. 2021-11-02 4:57 PM

Therefore, the space of a learning environment seems to be the perfect mirror of our hyperactive, accelerating society, aiming at returns on investment in a way which is as

Ethics and Education

effective and efficient as possible. The space of learning environments is no materialisation of free or public time, time of delay, but of time of investment and production. The school is no longer a place where society puts itself at a distance of itself.

It becomes a (public) service delivered to individuals and to society, the community or the economy itself in order to reproduce itself, to strengthen, grow or expand. 2021-11-02 4:58 PM

School actually supports individual accelerated learning?

the school is a historical invention, and can therefore disappear. But this also means that the school can be reinvented (and re-decided), and that is precisely what we see as our challenge and as our responsibility today. Reinventing the school comes down to finding concrete ways in today’s world to provide ‘free time’ and to gather young people around a common ‘thing’. 2021-11-02 4:59 PM

Innovating school

For us, the future of the school is a public issue, and our defence is meant to contribute to maintain it as a public issue. 2021-11-02 5:00 PM

The Greek word scholè means first of all free time, other related meanings are: delay, rest, study, school, and school building. Free time however is not so much relaxation time, but rather the time of play, study and exercise, the time separated from the time of production. Scholeás time to cultivate one self and others, to take care of the self, i.e. of one’s relation to self, others and the world. See Masschelein and Simons 2021-11-02 5:00 PM

Definition of schole

Ideas

Actionable

Thoughts/Questions

Created:: 2021-11-02 16:11

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