Learning Beyond the School

International Perspectives on the Schooled Society

Julian Sefton-Green, Ola Erstad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138087712
• eBook ISBN: 9781351615686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Whilst learning is central to most understandings of what it is to be human, we now live in a knowledge society where being educated defines life chances more than ever before. Learning Beyond the School brings together accounts of learning from around the world in organisations, spaces and places that are schooled, but not school. Exploring examples of learning organisation, pedagogisation, informal learning and social education, the book shows not only how understandings of education are framed in terms of local versions of schooling, but what being educated could and should mean in very different social and political contexts.

With contributions from scholars based in Australia, Europe, the USA, Latin America and Asia, the book brings together accounts of learning outside of school. Chapters contain rich and detailed case studies of innovative projects, new kinds of learning institutions, youth, peer-driven and community-based activities and public pedagogies, as well as engaging with the dimensions of an argument about the place and nature of learning outside of the school. It challenges dominant versions of school around the world, whilst also critically discussing the value and place of non-institutionalised learning.

Learning Beyond the School should be of interest to academics, researchers, postgraduate scholars engaged in the study of comparative education, youth work, education systems, digital culture, sociology of education and youth development. It should also be essential reading for practitioners and policymakers who are interested in youth and education system reform.

1 Introduction

Learning beyond the school – international perspectives on the schooled society

Julian Sefton-Green

Introduction

The premise of this book is simple: that examining forms of out-of-school learning in different countries can help us make sense of school and schooling– and thus by extension the different ways that learning is framed and valued around the world. The reasons for using the comparative lens of out-of-school learning practices and organisations to examine schooling are fourfold: first, is the argument that we are living through an unprecedented period of “educationalisation” – the penetration of forms of school organisation in to everyday life outside of times and structures allocated to schooling in people’s lives – and thus examining such change as a global phenomenon might help us focus on what is at stake in such change. Second, out-of-school institutions, practices, organisational forms, personnel and curriculum reveal a great deal about perceived market failure in schooling itself: in other words, the success and growth of out-of-school as remediation, supplement or complement is a good way to understand the pressures, failures and success of local school systems. Third, the lens of out-of-school draws attention to forms of learning that evade or escape the way that education systems at a national level attempt to determine definitions of learning: any kind of alternative and resistance that exceeds or circumvents formal education points to important wider social values of learning. Finally, and as a fourth argument, the structure of this book, drawing on examples from nearly every continent, enables us to examine the persistence of schooling as a mode of social organisation through global comparison of out-of-school systems and institutions thus helping us avoid the kind of ethnocentric universalism that tends to accrue around studies of national school systems or local schooling.

The rest of this introduction is organised around these four key principles and introduces key terms and concepts that are used by the contributors to this volume. It begins with a brief overview of the out-of-school field and concludes with a description of the ways that the various chapters address key problems raised in the discussion.

A brief map of learning beyond the school

Philosophers and historians of education repeatedly distinguish between the three concepts of education, school (and/or schooling) and learning (Biesta 2011; Hamilton & Zufiaurre 2013). Tracing a series of distinctions back to the earliest accounts of any forms of organised teaching, scientific study or “knowledge transfer”, and frequently drawing on etymological derivations as a way of outlining the changing meaning of these key terms, the history of education is told through a series of readings of key philosophical texts, architectural and archaeological evidence, and explication of the very few empirical accounts (mainly biographical) that can be found. In these discussions, learning is now understood as something that individuals do whilst education tends to refer to systemic structural institutions and modes of organisation at a societal level. The historical emergence of school and schooling, first as an elite aristocratic project and subsequently as a feature of mass industrialised society, has meant both a continuity of meanings and a slow process of revision of what different societies at different times might mean by education (Williams 1961). Key terms in the vocabulary of the discussion around learning are pedagogy (and pedagogue) didactics, knowledge (epistemology), literacy (and increasingly, if only very recently, neuroscience). The philosophy of education traces a set of positions around what counts as knowledge, who does the counting and using what kinds of metric, the relationship of education to wisdom, culturally valued forms of knowledge, and of course the unequal distribution of power and social status (Dewey 1916; Bourdieu & Passeron 1990). How to theorise what it means to understand, and then transfer both the knowledge and the processes of understanding between people, relies on theories of mind, communication, behaviour and social practice.

Because schooling is a relatively recent intervention in the wider and longer history of education, the formulation of “out-of-school” reads as an historical anachronism. In reality, education has taken place through many kinds of social practices: the tutor the symposium, the book, the monastery, the madrassa, the Grand Tour, the pulpit and so forth and so, as many scholars have pointed out, privileging learning at school as the singular dominant mode of education is atavistic. Scholarship of pre-modern (industrialised) forms and modes of education tends to pay attention to ethical purposes (e.g. societal or individualistic good) and epistemological processes (e.g. probabilistic reasoning, empiricism) and whilst these concerns are sustained over time, they become framed by the development of the school and modes of schooling as that institution has spread around the world.

As school has become the norm, so its shadow has split most discussion of education into a form of binarism. It is probably impossible to pinpoint the first use of terms like “out-of-school” but there is now a significant literature examining “after-school”, “extended school” (Cole & The Distributed Literacy Consortium 2006; Hirsch 2005; Noam 2004), or even “not-school” (Sefton-Green 2013). In all of these studies, forms of organised learning which have emerged around the school system, and which in their different ways either seek to replicate or provide alternatives to its institutional form, have become the object of study.

Similarly, and in some ways acting as a linguistic variant to the notion of “out-of-school”, is the prevalence of concepts which work as alternate or dialogical versions of learning: as in “informal learning”, “non-formal learning” or “semi-formal learning”. Just like the idea of out-of-school being the construct which only works in relationship to its presumed other, so any modifier of learning assumes a norm. In this literature, the notion of the formal is taken for granted but as much of this literature (Colley, Hodkinson & Malcolm 2003; Drotner, Jensen & Schroder 2009; Rogers 2005; Sefton-Green 2004) makes clear, the qualities of the formal are as much to do with form (shape and structure) as they are to do with the idea of tradition, performance and ritual. Sociocultural theory, which in essence explores learning as a social practice in context, has found these distinctions confusing, suggesting that such forensic discussion of formality runs the risk of missing the point about how learning works altogether even if it helps clarify the specifics of individual contexts (Rogoff et al. 2016) and see also Chapter 3. Chapter 2 contains an extended discussion of these terms.

However, sociocultural approaches to analysis of learning have contributed significantly to the literature about learning beyond the school in the ways that they have opened up discussion of educational transactions across many different kinds of social contexts – especially where we might not expect to approach the social practice as a learning event (Salen 2008). In particular, studies of literacy in the new literacies tradition (Street 1985, 2001) have explored the ways that forms of literacy proscribed by the school can be validated and theorised as complex learning practices. In turn, the seeming paradox of an understanding of literacy that might exist outside of formal definitions of literacy raises the spectre of kinds of learning that are in conflict with contemporary cultural narratives of what it is to be educated (Levinson, Foley & Holland 1996). Here, the empirical studies of modes of learning show how defining education has become a site of social conflict in the ways that the older philosophical tradition might not have imagined.

Educationalisation

A number of different scholars have explored the persistence and resilience of the school around the world, arguing that schooling is the key determining institution shaping modern societies (Baker 2014; Meyer et al. 1997). From this perspective, schooling determines social order, employment, class and labour stratification, authority, culture, compliance and indeed all the ways in which modern societies cohere and are organised. A key facet of the dominance of schooling is how its way of organising the transmission of knowledge, the hierarchy and dominance of some kinds of knowledge and performance above others, as well as its control over forms of accreditation and evaluation, its way of organising power relations between teachers and taught and the compliance of large groups of people in learning activities, all as modes of social practice have spread beyond the school walls into other hitherto more private domains. This process of “educationalisation” (Davies & Mehta 2013) suggests that schooling as a recognised institutional form that legitimates some values while proscribing others, has found ways to extend its power by colonising other social institutions such as family life, and even shopping malls or doctors’ waiting rooms (Nixon 1998): David Buckingham has spoken of the “curricularisation of leisure” as part of this process (Buckingham & Scanlon 2002). In such research, attention focuses on the use of written materials (school literacy), the mode of address, the nature of sanctified authorities, and indeed the kinds of routines and practices that constitute socially approved behaviour.

As Davies and Mehta (2013) suggest, not only are we living through a period where school organises other kinds of social life but schooling itself is held to be pre-eminently responsible for a whole range of other social outcomes. Thus, unemployment, economic growth and delinquency are three of the most common societal problems laid at schooling’s door with a concomitant policy gaze being levelled at education systems as a way of rectifying these other social problems. There is, for example, now considerable research looking at the wider long-term outcomes of education (Schuller & Desjardins 2007) even if such analyses are making the case about correlations rather than causalities. Education (and frequently teachers) is often seen to be the cause for widespread systemic problems however frequently academics like to argue that education systems can just as much be seen as the symptoms rather than the causes of these wider difficulties. The ins and outs of that argument are not germane here, what is important is the ways that many countries now often analyse their performance and even happiness in relationship to the input provided by schooling, thus signalling the acceptance of that institution as pre-eminent (see Chapter 2).

The growth of lifelong learning, a particular policy imperative across the European Union, exemplifies the third trend of educationalisation: responsibilising individuals as active learners carrying the burden for their life trajectory (Edwards 1997; Field 2006; Field, Gallacher & Ingram 2009; Glastra, Hake & Schedler 2004). In the context of the social and economic restructuring brought about by the “knowledge society” (Baldwin 2016), learning has become uncoupled from schooling and individual learners have to manage their continuous education as part of their capacity to remain fit and competitive workers in an ever-changing labour marketplace. Yet in effect, the lifelong learning agenda is not a return to a philosophical tradition that values wisdom through age but far more the internalisation of the imperative to sustain an edge in increasingly precarious workplaces. Individuals have become pedagogicised subjects (see Chapter 2) constantly and continuously subject to forms of scrutiny, self-improvement, always on the treadmill of further accreditation where failure to learn how to learn has dramatic negative economic, personal and social consequences.

The world schooling and educationalisation approach to analysing the discourses, practices and social institutions and systems has strong links with the concept of the “totally pedagogicised society” advanced by Basil Bernstein (Bernstein 2000; Moore et al. 2009). Bernstein describes a conflict between casual everyday knowledge and disciplined controlled and arcane expressions of “formal knowledge”. He emphasised how school “re-contextualises” knowledge seeking to impose disciplinarity and exclusivity on new and emerging domains especially with regard to the use of specialised academic language (Moore et al. 2009; Tyler 2004). Approaching the challenge of making sense of the persistence and penetration of forms of schooling beyond the school, Bernstein sought a theory of pedagogy that could explain class-bound relations of power and argued that modes of pedagogy held the key to understanding both how control was exerted, regulated and internalised (Depaepe et al. 2008). Bernstein suggests that we are living through a wider pedagogicisation of society involving the spread of school-like forms of organisation and subjectivity beyond the boundaries of traditional learning institutions. The “totally pedagogicised society” (Bernstein 2001) has emerged as part of a reclassification of traditional knowledge boundaries brought about as a result of the knowledge society and the economic imperative of lifelong learning. As Chapter 2 discusses in more detail, pedagogicisation differs from educationalisation in its attention to the internalised governance of the self (Rose 1999).

The chapters in this book examining out-of-school learning institutions and forms of informal learning contribute to this sociological tradition by exploring comparative international aspects of the “schoolification” of society. Whilst the educationalisation thesis tends to stress elements of systemic power, many of the contributions here also want to open up the ways that pedagogicisation can also bring into question dominant school-like values and, equally, make forms of learning accessible to wider sections of society in countries where the effects of schooling are not uniform. Thus, educationalisation or variants of the “totally pedagogicised society” comprise only one element in the ways that out-of-school and informal learning might help us reflect on education systems more generally: and we now examine the relationship of out-of-school to school from the perspective of internal education markets.¹

Not-school and the shadow education system

Although the attention of governments around the world focuses on the formal educational institutions from kindergartens through schools to universities, there exists, of course, a huge raft of organisations dedicated to remediating, complementing and supplementing formal institutional provision. In a 2009 book, Mark Bray recounted the history and analysis of what he and others have termed the “shadow education system” (Bray 2009). This study is devoted to the role of supplementary privately funded tutoring which supports children and young people in different ways in different countries around the world. Bray analyses the different roles private tutoring plays particularly in relationship to economic inequalities where equal access to schools is not available to all. The differential economic, social and educational impact of access to private tutoring can be seen as both a threat and/or a complement to state (national) funded educational systems.

This sphere of activity is important for the analysis of out-of-school learning in this book because it suggests that in addition to the metaphor of the shadow, we can analyse the mode, variation and intensity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Contributor
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Learning Beyond the School – International Perspectives on the Schooled Society
• 2 Learning Keywords – A Cultural Studies Approach to Schooling and Pedagogy
• 3 Can We De-Pedagogicise Society? Between “Native” Learning and Pedagogy in Complex Societies
• 4 Accountability in Epistemic Practice on a Micronesian Island
• 5 Ubuntu and Bildung in Olso and Zanzibar: Communities of Learning Lives
• 6 Mapping the Promise of Non-Schooled Learning
• 7 Walking the City: A Method for Exploring Everyday Public Pedagogies
• 8 Taking Part in the City: Rethinking “Wumenda Chengshi (Our Cities)” in Shanghai
• 9 Digital Media Production Outside the School: Youth Knowledge and Cultural Participation in Argentina and Mexico
• 10 Remixing Meanings, Tools, Texts, and Contexts: Digital Literacy Goes to School
• 11 Literacy Practices and Popular Media Culture in the “Over-Schooled” Society
• 12 Outing the “Out” in Out-of-School: A Comparative International Perspective
• 13 The Personal and Pedagogical in the 21st Century: Experiments in Learning About Marriage
• 14 Beyond the Totally Pedagogicised Society: Final Reflections
• Index