Stefan Hopmann
Rudolf Künzli
Stefan Hopmann is Professor of Education at the Institute for Educational Research, NTHU, Trondheim, 7055 Dragvoll, Norway. His research focuses on comparative curriculum research, teacher education and the history of education.
Rudolf Künzli is Professor and Rector of the Didaktikum, a teacher education college in Aarau, Switzerland. His research centres on curriculum theory and Didaktik and the philosophy of education.
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As lengthy debate has shown, the question of the school's task is wide. School is being sucked into a vortex of endless demands and reduced to a problem-solving institution at whose door the ills of society are laid. 'School shall open itself to whatever is going on outside or is socially in need. 'No doubt society has a right to expect something of its schools. But what, under close examination, can school actually achieve? Contrary to those expectations around us, we believe that school must assert its contours more forcefully and concentrate on those tasks which it, and it alone, can accomplish. And instead of reconceptualizing themselves again and again, school theory and curriculum research should move back into the field and actively support the school's own agenda.
The most important feature in the concert of opinions on the tasks, uses and opportunities of a publicly funded school system is dissonance. Harsh calls for a return to old-fashioned discipline, shrill demands to deal with acute problems and needs, and quavering cries for spending cuts and better results mix with murmured evocations of the idylls of progressive education to determine pitch and tone in random combinations. Schools and their teachers take on board almost everything demanded, regardless of personal and institutional capacity. Yet no fewer complaints or demands are made in consequence. Sporadic bugle calls, occasional bursts of school policy making are worse than useless. Instead we need a practical ideal, concrete enough to encourage teachers, parents and pupils equally, and convincing enough to make crudely reactionary calls for 'the good old days' obsolete. Are-orientation of the kind we envision could be served by taking seriously the character of school as 'playhouse', a proposal we outline in more detail below.
To clarify our viewpoint we have analyzed four basic dimensions of the social construction that is schooling -place, time, knowledge, and culture -from five different perspectives:
To encourage debate we have chosen
to make our arguments straightforwardly, without reviewing the
state-of-the-art or discussing theoretical viewpoints and empirical
material. Those who want more can refer to our other work where we
have documented the historical and empirical evidence and developed a
theoretical framework for discussion of and decision about
curriculum.
Observations
Whatever the issue -- environment, peace, tolerance, health, equal opportunities, new technologies, etc. -- school is expected to breach the gaps left by politics. Problems in society tend to become a focus for criticism of school. School is expected to defuse, integrate, prevent, compensate, in short to make good when problems remain unsolved elsewhere. Schools endeavour, constantly, to fulfill these expectations. There is hardly a social issue of any importance which is not immediately treated in school. And yet, like the hare in the fable, school is always too late. The next concern to draw public attention will give rise to yet more recriminations and, as usual, it will be school which is called upon to bale society out.
Whatever the problem, the proposals for a pedagogical solution are much the same: more openness, more contact with the real world, more topicality, more variety, more depth, etc. The whole range of standard demands can be run through, no matter what the issue at hand. This is all the more paradoxical because conventional educational theory and research, with its respected Pestalozzis and Montessoris, its Deweys and Kilpatricks, apparently seems to be an unworldly, timeless message. It is as if the theories of the past, from Froebel's kindergarten to progressive education with its deference to youth, its critique of civilization and its anti-rationalist, affective appeal, as if these could equally supply the answer to social tensions past, present and future with nothing to be learned from experience. No wonder therefore that many of the projects and proposals the different strands of curriculum studies and research on teaching have presented in recent years can be described as a reinvention of the tools, as remakes of projects and proposals of the pedagogy of the 18th and19th centuries.
Whatever is demanded, a closer look would reveal that schools are already doing what is being so vehemently asked for. Classical pedagogical demands and the social and cultural dynamics of the present converge. Most of what policymakers and educationists demand of schools is nothing more than a confirmation of what is already being done, though to what degree of success can be debated. This is evidenced by the great themes of school reform, such as 'individualization of learning', 'diversification and deformalization of the institution school', 'creativity', 'communication and co-operation', etc. In other words, schools today are quite in touch with the zeitgeist. If a group of industrial magnates were to be asked to name the imperatives in education, the chances are that the finished catalogues would largely correspond with those programmes drafted by our predecessors in pedagogy two hundred years ago.
What everyone is already doing
does not open new horizon! The convergence of schools' programmes
and social development robs modern classical educational thinking of
its anticipatory and guiding force. Through its very success, not
through lack of everyday relevance, it has lost its future. Its ideas
on education and school models are losing credibility and conviction
inasmuch as the belief in the goodness of the industrial and
technical world and its programme of enlightenment is disappearing.
The undesired side-effects of successful enlightenment and, more so,
of industrial society can hardly be adequately cured by the very
means which have contributed to the visible shortcomings of the
present. Educational thinking which does not take adequate account of
the historical context itself contributes decisively to the very
syndromes which may be seen as the most powerful challenges to the
education system of the 1990s:counter-enlightenment, intolerance, New
Age and withdrawal from the world, together with the inevitable
recourse to superstition, violence and animosity towards
life.
Trends
School is diffusing spatially, merging into the physical backdrop of society. Schools are losing their architectural individuality, becoming increasingly difficult to recognize as places of learning. School is everywhere and nowhere. Old school buildings give rise to nostalgia in much the same way as the old monasteries upon which they were modeled. The schools' loss of place reveals a loss of identity, but at the same time indicates the extent to which society is provided with learning establishments of one form or another. Throughout our cities, towns and villages, education centres, training centres and conference centres are mobilizing the ever-widening circle of the learning society.
School is diffusing temporally, merging into the continuum of life. A person's 'time at school' is becoming increasingly difficult to define, as the borders between 'childhood', 'education' and 'work' as phases of life become obscured. School is losing its physiognomy as a distinct period of life. At the same time, its role as initiator in the dissemination of knowledge and its function as introduction to the generation, of evaluation and utilization of knowledge, are losing ground against the requirement to process (learning) experiences gained elsewhere.
School is diffusing thematically, merging into society's organization of knowledge. It is assuming any number of functions and themes, like a company diversifying on its way to becoming an industrial concern. The breaking-down of the institutional constraints upon organized learning, as school critique has demanded, has long since been achieved. Forms of learning more directly relevant to life have emerged through mass organization of school-based and school-like learning processes in the media and education industry. Thus school is simply one source of information among many, and usually not even the most significant.
School is diffusing culturally, merging into all areas of life. The realization that knowledge and skills are required for the future in ever-increasing quantities has led far beyond vocational training and continuing education to a point where almost anything and everything is presented as 'learning', as 'educational', from children's toys to leisure activities, magazines, radio and television programmes, package holidays, and even the most banal of quiz shows. There are hardly any niches of experience which have not been functionalized in this way, which still count as sheer enjoyment or pleasure in achievement for its own sake.
Implications
Whereas school teaching used to be able to refer to a manageable framework of common experience, with school's main task being to open up new horizons, school children today are surrounded by a complex framework of social relationships and information sources, encountering far more things through their families, their leisure activities, the media and travel, for example, than school could ever encompass. The so-called ëopening of schoolí only serves to multiply the variety instead of creating a place of collection and orientation, a place of individual and shared experience.
Whereas school used to mark a certain period of time in a person's life, its omnipresence and permanence threaten to subsume all of life's other activities. And the time which is not occupied by school is filled with an (at least)equally packed schedule: sports, youth clubs, dancing lessons, music lessons, private coaching in school subjects -- with perhaps three-quarters of an hour snatched for family conversation. And the pressure continues. A qualification is never secure, throughout life there are new things to learn, always more exams to be passed. The price we pay for variety is that school never finishes, there is never an end in sight. The open school creates the impression that school is everywhere and that everything can become school, instead of creating a time of experience complete in itself, of lasting value.
Whereas it used to be the task of school to introduce its charges to stable and ordered bodies of knowledge, the insignia of modern knowledge-production and organization are the synchronism of systematics and eclectics: interdisciplinary change, holistic access to the phenomena of world perception, syncretic treatment of experience, an ever-shorter' shelf-life' for new states of knowledge. All this invalidates the logic of consecutiveness, of systematic building, step by step. Instead it has become the most important task of learning to deal with synchronism and interdependence of knowledge. The demand to open the school blindly follows the new topography of knowledge and splinters learning into countless parts, countless routes of access, instead of drawing up a new framework, appropriate to present conditions, which encloses a clear coherently condensed context for experience which is transferable and conclusive.
Whereas it used to be the task of school to select certain bodies of knowledge and learning experiences from among the mass of possibilities and make them available to everyone, the universalization of school has led to anything and everything becoming school subject-matter. There is no purposeful selection of what school, and school alone, should be offering and achieving. The so-called opening of the school places the school alongside all the other places of learning at society's disposal, instead of creating a culture of exclusively school-specific experience.
Valedictions
It is time to take leave of certain images of school we have come to cherish: school as garden, living room, workshop, community centre, etc. It always was difficult to understand why an institution which came about as a reaction to the very fact that the garden, the living room, etc. were simply no longer adequate as places of learning should desperately try to obscure its difference by copying its predecessors. And the search for evidence in the life-world, for the link with everyday life, for the tangible relevance, makes just as little sense in a world where the most obvious is intangible, the most powerful invisible and outward appearances usually deceptive. On the contrary, it is time to highlight what school alone is capable of providing: a shared learning experience in a fully structured learning environment, closed and thus comprehensible in itself.
It is time to take leave of the attempt to couple schoolwork with all manner of out-of-school learning processes and experience. It always was difficult to understand why an institution whose main feature was its ability to organize learning processes within a defined chronological structure should become entrapped in courses of learning which it can hardly influence in the long-term, let alone control. On the contrary, it is time to highlight what school alone is capable of creating: a common foundation of shared experience for everyone which can be drawn upon later on amidst the wealth of possibilities life will still have to offer.
It is time to take leave of the anachronistic idea that knowledge is built up like an Egyptian pyramid or can be broken down in the manner of a production line. Old hierarchies of different levels of education (from the lowest to the highest level) are not only counterproductive in view of the fine differentiation of modern vocational qualifications, but unforgivable simplifications in view of the variety of human talent profiles. It always was difficult to understand why an institution whose strong tradition of achievement includes the development of a vast variety of ways of teaching, ways of learning and ways of knowing within and across subject-matters should continue to cling to a long superseded, monistically linear concept of ability. On the contrary, it is time to highlight what school in particular can offer: initiation into complexity which, according to situation, subject and abilities can open up complex access routes to multi-layered problem constellations.
It is time to take leave of the self-destructive urge constantly to adapt school learning so that it can be copied and continued anywhere. Where the requirement is merely for instructional aids, the functional mediation of knowledge or preparation for working and learning elsewhere, private 'suppliers' can match, if not surpass, school's capacity. Tutoring institutes, for example, demonstrate daily their greater flexibility in adapting to a variety of learning cultures. In view of the competence and variety of these and others, there are no grounds for clinging to the costly obligation to attend publicly regulated schools. It always was difficult to understand why an institution whose most significant achievements included the assertion of learning as a phase of life and a cultural form should renounce everything which allows its difference to be experienced. Any fan club today offers more opportunity for shared experience than even the most traditional of schools. On the contrary, if school is to make a difference, what school can and must be able to do more readily than others should be highlighted, that is to create a 'house of learning,' with a culture of its own.
School as playhouse
Let us not seek to 'open' school, but instead to recognize the nature of school as 'play', to distinguish more clearly between school and other areas of experience. A play in the theatre needs a stage so that the performance can be seen and experienced! Considering the omnipresence of teaching and the arbitrariness of learning locations and topics, the school should be transformed into an unambiguous space in which something unique can be expected, achieved, attained. The school's primary repertoire does not need borrowed themes, it already has them in plenty. With the right script and stage management, the grammar of communities becomes visible to the players, the logic of confrontation becomes explainable and transformable just as the consequences will be something which can no longer be assumed to exist as a natural phenomenon, namely the communal nature of learning. Let us juggle no longer with borrowed life-worlds, present or future. Let us be trapped no longer in an expression of emotional involvement in all kinds of problems and predicaments which engenders a paralyzing feeling of helplessness and changes nothing. Let us as adults no longer waste the emotionality of children on secondary matters. Instead the students need to acquire a sense of their own situation in all its seriousness. Themes such as peace, environment, equal rights will have their place here, but as visibly directed existential components of the learners' own situation and not as mere items on a fast-changing agenda of perceived moral requirements. The most important pedagogical principle here is still the demonstration, the performance of whatever is to be recognized and learned, not as illustration of examples external to school, but as on-the-spot experience, in and with the school itself. With respect to the holistic fantasies of progressive education we wish to stress that we are not proposing all-consuming life communities, but a form of school life which can be directed and experienced in a prescribed length of time. The performance, the play has an end, each day, each week, each year; the hours can be counted and then something else turned to, and it can be performed afresh from the beginning, time and time again.
Let us not seek to tie school into lifelong learning, creating an uncontrollable mesh of learning processes, but instead to define precisely what can only be accomplished within school time and cannot therefore be postponed for other learning contexts. The advantage that almost anything can be learned later or elsewhere relieves school of any need to be exhaustive (a misguided demand!) and leaves scope for learning objectives and themes to be mapped out according to individual needs. Thus all students during their time at school can experience that they are capable of successful learning and shared achievement, can experience persistent application, with interest growing as they progress, until success is finally achieved. It would be conceivable, for example, for a curriculum or syllabus not to contain compulsory learning objects for all, as these are mostly interchangeable and can be made up later, but school-specific learning arrangements requiring and allowing a high proportion of individual and shared reflection on learning method and process organization: complex projects, time-intensive group work, collective research and learning processes, all planned, decided, implemented and completed in school.
Let us argue no longer over models of differentiation dictated by simplistic concepts of ability and linear organization of knowledge. Let us seek no longer to create homogeneous learning groups dictated by simplistic criteria, but instead to organize school in such a way that adequate justice is done to the multiplicity of abilities and talents and the complexity of individual forms of knowledge. The most eminently suitable model in this case is still Humboldt's universitas with its faculties and its idea of research-through-learning and teaching-through-research. As forms of learning have percolated down from higher education, it would be time to take the next step and transpose this model to school. A school system would be conceivable in which a primary school providing elementary knowledge and securing the basics would be followed by a secondary school organized in faculties with subject-specific courses and sophisticated forms of teaching and learning. There is no child who would not find at least one area here where it could be a high achiever, gaining the confidence necessary to find other routes of access to the real world. The programmes of the other faculties would serve as subsidiaries, enabling general education, general knowledge to develop again as general understanding. The clearly structured faculties would eliminate the need for the arbitrary division into years or grades with their pointless leveling of different learning speeds. And, following the university idea, school would live off the quality of its teachers, who would wish to demonstrate the impact of their specific contribution to the solving of common problems in a climate of competition between the faculties.
Let us not seek to make school one faceless learning location among many, but instead a place which invites us to stay, a place we are glad to visit, a place where we meet people who matter to us, with whom we can be active, with whom we are glad to identify and show that we identify, a place where we can learn new things about ourselves and the world. A school of this kind searches for its own culture of visible and experienced togetherness. By its specific design of explicit community, of learning spaces, of learning forms and the variety and range of skills among the teachers, school could create for itself an unmistakable profile. And through public assertion of this profile, through demonstration of its unique role of achievement, school can gain its own identity. There are traditional channels for this assertion, such as competitions, exhibitions, performances, celebrations, school uniforms and school magazines, as well as the production of textbooks and learning programmes, as certain particularly successful schools and universities have shown. But there is also a great deal still to be explored, such as developing the culture of classroom life or community services and public projects, which would be conceivable as long as the character of the demonstration, the setting of the playhouse, is maintained.
Afterword
We do not wish our criticism to be misinterpreted as an invective against any particular authors or reform proposals. The school as it is now deserves much of the critique progressive and traditional educators, politicians, businessmen and parents have put forward in recent years. We do, however, wish to oppose a widespread disposition towards overblown configurations of progressive education on the one hand and 'liberal' market models on the other. Whereas the main ciphers and metaphors of the former showed themselves largely non-resistant to political and pedagogical totalitarianism and today once again attract both well-meaning and perniciously domineering holistic ideologies, the standard bearers of education-as-commodity paper over the social contradictions of schooling and betray the very substance of school and its mission to look beyond and, if necessary, resist present conditions. Our polemic is directed against the advocates of a deinstitutionalization of the school, against the vociferous proponents of educational life-world idylls, and against the glib promises of a school system, state-run or private, operated in line with the latest management strategies for the market-place. Our plea is for school teaching and school learning within an organizational framework which does justice to the school's intrinsic needs in terms of logic, dignity and rights, and for a new agenda in school theory and curriculum studies with focus on the advantages and abilities of school as school, of subject-matter as school subject-matter, and of learning as learning within the school house. The school has wasted enough time either imitating lost life-worlds as learning worlds or copying the latest production theories in overhasty obedience to its perceived function. School is not life and life is by no means always fit to be school.