Ruben Hoekstra 10557547
MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis dr. Murat Aydemir
15 June 2018 21.690 words
Developing a will to wonder
An analysis of Agora
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Contents
pp.
Introduction 4
1. Neoliberalism and emancipation in education 8
1.1 Introduction 8
1.2 Neoliberalism in education 9
1.2.1 ‘Afrekencultuur’ 9
1.2.2 Good education 10
1.2 Liquid modernity and education 11
1.3 Emancipation and education 14
1.4 Beautiful risk of education 16
1.5 Conclusion 18
2. Agora’s educational philosophy 19
2.1 Introduction 19
2.2 Agora Roermond 20
2.3 Dutch educational levels 21
2.4 Challenges 22 2.5 Coach 25 2.6 Coach group 28 2.6.1 Agorian master 29 2.7 Targetprocess 31 2.8 Examination 33 2.9 Role of parents 34 2.10 Conclusion 34 3. Agora’s building 36 3.1 Introduction 36 3.2 Facility centre 37 3.2.1 Outside 38 3.2.2 Inside 39 3.3 Agora base 40 3.4 Flexibility 43 3.5 Conclusion 44 Conclusion 45 Bibliography 49 Appendix 52
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Introduction
I have been going to school for more than 19 years now. I am 23. At first sight, this should mean that I know something about education and the role that is has in shaping individuals. Education should prepare for ‘the world’, right? In the Netherlands school attendance is, fortunately, compulsory for children between 5 and 16. Nevertheless, society expects that after graduating high school students continue educating themselves, in order to be able to get a job. Although I, of course, sporadically complained about going to school, I never questioned the necessity of my primary and high school education. Going to school was just something I had to do. I sometimes did wonder why I should learn how to set up an economic balance-sheet, but in general I believed that, because of the fact that school offered it as a subject, it had to be valuable in some sense. In other words, I saw education as a place where I could gain something that would eventually turn out to be useful. However, it is only since I attended university that I started to realise that my education was not so much only about helping me to answer the question what I wanted to be when I had grown up. Rather, education should help me answering the question who I want to be as a subject in the world as well.
Whereas some teachers and high school subjects still give me nightmares, my education has definitely shaped the subject I think I am today in a positive way. It is only that I was not often encouraged to think of my education in terms of ‘purpose’. Especially during my high school period it was mainly about getting good grades. I was lucky enough to be able to go to ‘vwo’, the Dutch pre-university level1. This meant that I was surrounded by people who (also) came from a privileged
background in the sense that most of us had high educated parents, often with well-paid jobs. Moreover, there was an atmosphere in which it was expected that you did your best and took your education seriously. On the other hand, my little brother did not have a high score for his CITO-toets, the test students take in the last year of primary school that will, together with the advice of the teacher, decide what kind of high school level students can go to. Although we went to the same high school, he was educated on a ‘vmbo-level’, the ‘preparatory middle-level applied’ form of education. He and his friends saw us, the vwo-students, as ‘nerds’, and, in turn, we considered them to be ‘less smart’. By this time I had never thought of the different ways in which an ‘intelligence’ can manifest itself, let alone that I realised that this educational system had political consequences since it
determined who were the ‘smart’ and the ‘stupid’ ones. In retrospect, I would not have been so black-and-white, but I reckon I luckily learnt something over the years.
5 The reason why I start with this introduction with my brother is that he also considered himself to be ‘less’ than those in the higher educational levels. He simply contended that he was ‘bad at school’. Although it is certainly not the one and only reason, I think that the traditional school system in which my brother and I were educated does stimulate this kind of self-images. Since almost everyone in my direct environment went to vwo, including the family members and friends of my friends, I always felt the need to ‘defend’ why my brother was not in a vwo class. Often I pointed to the fact that he is more skilled in things that are not offered and taught at high school. He is very a creative, musical, sportive, ad rem and, above all, extremely communicatively skilled. Luckily he now found his passion in teaching sport classes and making music, but his education definitely did not encourage him to become a self-confident subject. I do not say this to flatter my brother, but point to the phenomenon that the hierarchy in educational levels has an effect on how individuals relate to themselves and each other, which has in turn political consequences for a society as a whole.
It was therefore that I was glad to read about Agora, a high school in Roermond, in the very south of the Netherland. Sjef Drummen, a self-proclaimed ‘educational artist’ whose name will be recurrent throughout this thesis, is one of the founders of Agora and is almost always the
representative of Agora in the extensive media coverage. One of the reasons why the media coverage is so major is because this ‘school’ considerers itself an alternative to the traditional model. They got rid of a curriculum, class rooms, objectively measurable tests, and of teachers, who they instead call ‘coaches’. Moreover, students from 12-18 are all put together in the same ‘coach group’. And, much to my delight, students from all educational levels are mixed. The first time I read about Agora was in an article by Rutger Bregman, a journalist from De Correspondent, a journalistic platform that often inspires me for academic papers – and my life in general. It was here that I read that the mixture of children from different ages and with different educational levels resulted in solidarity:
Ik spreek een paar kinderen van wie ik zeker weet dat ze op mijn oude school zouden zijn afgemaakt. Maar op Agora wordt niet gepest, zo bevestigt iedereen die ik ernaar vraag. ‘Je corrigeert elkaar,’ vertelt Milou (14).
Misschien komt het doordat iedereen raar is op Agora. Raar is normaal. Alle niveaus en leeftijden lopen door elkaar. ‘Op mijn oude school zeiden ze dat je niet met vmbo’ers om moet gaan,’ zegt Brent. Maar dan vertellen hij en Joep (15) over die keer dat Noah (15, vmbo-kader) ze een college gaf over hoe je moet plannen – iets waar ze zelf niet goed in zijn. ‘Noah heeft de komende anderhalf jaar van zijn leven gepland, dus dat was dus erg leerzaam,’ aldus Joep.
6 Hoe langer ik op Agora rondloop, hoe meer ik besef dat het bizar is om kinderen van dezelfde leeftijd en hetzelfde niveau in hokken bij elkaar te zetten. In Nederland klagen we al jaren over de kloof tussen laag- en hoogopgeleid, maar waar begint het eigenlijk? Jolie (14): ‘Ik merk niks van de niveauverschillen. Mensen van het vmbo heb ik slimmere dingen horen zeggen dan mensen van vwo.’ (Bregman, “Waarom kinderen minder spelen” 21)
This passage was one of the motivations to start writing my thesis on the educational philosophy of Agora. Currently, there are a lot of discussions concerning segregation, polarisation, discrimination and the inability to embrace the uncertainty of the future in terms of labour. Subsequently, more and more people get burnouts. This is not to say that education is the one and only place where these problems are caused and could therefore be solved within education as well. However, I do believe that education has the potential to teach children to become critical subjects that are able to
democratically live together in peace.
In this thesis I will therefore focus on Agora as a school. I will try to analyse to what extent this kind of education is somehow better preparing for the future, and, subsequently, if this is what a school as an institution should be concerned with in the first place. I first outline the current state of Dutch education that is plagued by increasing marketisation. Neoliberal policies force schools to function like a market in which everything has to be measurable in order to be able to judge whether schools are ‘efficient’ enough. Subsequently, I will criticise this neoliberal tendencies by pointing to the resulting disappearance of the question of purpose and what constitutes good education. Although Agora claims to be an alternative to the holy grails of neoliberalism like controllability, measurability, quantifiability and the urge to ban all risks, there are some strong indications that Agora
simultaneously, and, in a sense, quite awkwardly, seems to perfectly prepare for precisely such a neoliberal world in which individualism, responsibility, competitiveness and flexibility are key. In order to also give analytic space to this more pessimistic account of Agora, I introduce the British-Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid modernity’. With this term he points to an era characterised by the diminishing of certainty, universality, strong bonds and solidity, and
consequently, the increase of the reverse of these notions. To give a more hopeful account of Agora as being able to nevertheless be a place where good education can take place I turn to the French
philosopher Jacques Rancière. Rancière contends that education should be concerned with the emancipation of students (29). In addition, the work of the Dutch philosopher and pedagogue Gert Biesta enables me to show what constitutes good education and how education can allow students to become subjects in the world.
In the second chapter I use these theories to consider how they resonate with the educational philosophy of Agora. On the basis of several key aspects of their philosophy – ‘the challenge’, ‘the coach’, ‘the coach group’, etcetera – I try to analyse how their education works in practice and to what extent their ‘innovative’ idea of education is indeed an improvement in comparison to the traditional
7 model. In order to give a more holistic account of how Agorian education is actually pursued I also describe the building in which Agora is housed. The word Agora is Greek for ‘gathering place’ and functioned as a space in which the people from ancient Athens would come together to buy their goods and discuss politics. In the third chapter I therefore attempt to give an account of the extent to which Agora’s both commercial and social character resonates with their idea of what constitutes good education. In the conclusion I will try to consider if Agora is indeed an innovative school that is a critical alternative to neoliberal policies that are enforcing the traditional educational model, or, rather, that Agora is in itself the manifestation of this greater development.
Ruben Meile Hoekstra Amsterdam, June 2018.
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1.
Neoliberalism and emancipation in education
1.1 Introduction
In this first chapter I will lay out the theoretical framework through which I try to analyse both the educational philosophy and the building of Agora. In order to understand what kind of world Agora claims to be educating for, I first outline the current era in which educators and students find themselves. In this chapter I therefore pay close attention to the relation between education and the concept of neoliberalism. I explain how neoliberalism has resulted in the marketisation of education and what this means for the role that high school education has in society. In this part I will elaborate on Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity as well, to examine to what extent education is able to succeed in coping with this change of era characterised by its uncertainties and increasing need for flexibility. Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity is not only relevant in relation to education; it also gives a description of the kind of society – and market – schools are preparing children for. In the analysis of Agora’s philosophy I therefore also draw on Bauman to consider if Agora better succeeds in preparing children for this liquid future than the traditional school model, and I question if this the right question to be asked in the first place.
Subsequently, I introduce the work of Jacques Rancière concerning the role and nature of the teacher in pedagogical situations. Rancière focusses extensively on the notion of emancipation, since once a student is emancipated, or more conspicuously, emancipates him or herself, the student can develop his or her own will to start learning. Further, I draw on his conviction that one should depart from the presumption that all intelligences are equal (Rancière 46) and look at how this resonates with Agora’s presumptions.
Thereupon, I present specific ideas by the Dutch philosopher of education Gert Biesta.
Although I also refer to him in relation to the first part about the increasing marketisation of education, and in the section on Rancière, by whom Biesta is explicitly inspired, he has some unique ideas on education that combine both the criticism on neoliberal educational practices and Rancière’s philosophy. Biesta proposes to embrace, as he calls it, the beautiful risk of education. Shifting away from the inclination to strip away all risks from education, he suggests one should be open to the uncertainties and unpredictabilities that are involved in teaching children, who are human beings, not objects to be disciplined (Beautiful Risk 1). Moreover, Biesta distinguishes three different function of education that have become prominent in literature on education: qualification, socialisation and subjectification. These three sometimes conflicting and overlapping functions of education will be a common thread throughout the rest of this thesis.
I end this chapter by reflecting on how these different elements of education can function as a theoretical foundation for good education in an age of measurement. This might enable me to answer
9 the question to what extent Agora is either confirmative or innovative in relation to this neoliberal and liquid-modern era.
1.2 Neoliberalism in education
In this part I will elaborate on the effect that neoliberal thinking has had on the way in which
educational policies, and, consequently, the relationship between teacher and student have changed. In order to understand what I am referring to when I use the term neoliberalism, the following quote by Mark Olssen in his article “In Defense of the Welfare State and of Publicly Provided Education” (1996) is very clear:
Whereas classical liberalism represents a negative conception of state power in that the individual was to be taken as an object to be freed from the interventions of the state, neoliberalism has come to represent a positive conception of the state’s role in creating the appropriate market by providing the conditions, laws and institutions necessary for its operation. In classical liberalism, the individual is characterized as having an autonomous human nature and can practice freedom. In neoliberalism the state seeks to create an individual who is an enterprising and competitive entrepreneur. (Olssen 340)
Seeing that education more and more has become a market with conditions that are created by top-down policies, it becomes clear that even the individual learner has acquired the role of an
“enterprising and competitive entrepreneur” (Olssen 340). As a consequence, this applies to schools as institutions as well: they are expected to function like competitors on a market.
First I will discuss the ‘afrekencultuur’ in current Dutch educational society, focussing on the problems that have arisen from a neoliberal way of thinking. Secondly, in line with this marketisation of education I elaborate on Gert Biesta’s notion of a ‘new language of learning’ in which the purpose of learning seems to be forgotten.
1.2.1 ‘Afrekencultuur’
In their book Het Alternatief: Weg met de afrekencultuur in het onderwijs (2013) René Kneyber and Jelmer Evers criticise the ‘afrekencultuur’ in current Dutch educational culture. In Dutch the verb ‘afrekenen’ means ‘to pay’, ‘to draw a line under’ and it also connotes ‘getting rid of someone or something’. The ‘afrekencultuur’ is, in other words, a culture that is a product of efficiency and neoliberal thinking. They remark that everything that happens in schools needs to be quantifiable according to the Dutch government. This results in rankings: schools are ranked, students are ranked, teachers are ranked and even parents are ranked. It seems as if there is no longer room for the intuition, knowledge, experience and common sense of teachers (7). The neoliberal ideology of the Dutch government results in the idea that education is a market.
This is in line with the introduction of New Public Management (NPM), a market philosophy that was aimed to make the public sector, including educational policy, more effective and efficient.
10 NPM was initially introduced to make education cheaper, but it was also seen as something good that schools received more autonomy and had more elbow room to decide how they wanted to design their educational programmes, as long as they met the criteria formulated by the Department of Education, Culture and Science. This caused a gap between the sometimes conflicting national educational goals and the interests and values of individual schools (Van der Sluis et al. 304). What should have been a great collaboration turned out to be the worst of both worlds. While the Department stimulated the self-governance of schools, they also created rules that are hindering the possibility for schools to actually use and prosper their autonomy (324). In general, the Department is mostly focussed on the output of schools, basing the quality of schools for example on how many early school leavers every school has. Although this can be indicative, it does not cover the way in which schools are manifesting themselves as being good schools. Yet, schools have to come up with their own quality norms while they are judged on the norms indicated by the Department.
Due to this inconsistency, that is not effective and efficient as such, schools have become rivals, and so they need to be creative and innovative in order to substantiate and improve their ‘market position’ (Kneyber and Evers 8). They assert very accurately that it becomes less important what a school can mean for a child than a child can mean for a school (9). Seeing children as a ‘product’ on the educational market results in treating children as ‘product’ that should produce as much (economic) value as possible for the school (the company). However, schools should be suiting the needs of children, not the other way around. As a consequence, parents want to get most out of the school of their child, and so they support the neoliberal character of schools. Hence, because high educated parents often have ‘better’ material, cognitive and social positions, societal inequality increases (9). Due to this inequality one speaks of a ‘bijlesgeneratie’: those with who can afford it have better chances to ‘succeed’ in the educational system. This problem is also reflected in the fact that the Dutch school system is one of the most segregated and segregating ones in in the world (Vogelzang 5).
1.2.2 Good education
In order to deal with this neoliberal shift in Dutch education, Gert Biesta is of great importance. His recurrent claim is that the question of what constitutes good education should return to the debate. According to him efficiency is seen as a goal in itself, whereas efficiency can only be seen as an instrumental value to achieve something else – which is, ideally, good education (“Good Education” 35). In his article “Good Education in the Age of Measurement: On the Need to Reconnect with the Question of Purpose in Education” (2009), he rhetorically wonders “whether we are indeed measuring what we value, or whether we are just measuring what we can easily measure and thus end up valuing what we (can) measure” (35). Biesta emphasises that he is not against measuring per se, but he makes a clear distinction between measuring in education and the phenomenon of a measuring culture. Measuring provides insight in the achievements of children, which is important for both the outer
11 world and the children themselves. However, while measuring is commonly associated with numbers, Biesta remarks that there are also non-quantitative ways of measuring. Measuring with numbers seems to be objective, but because these measurements are commonly focused on short-term effects, it is often forgotten that many aspects of good education and good educating only become visible in the long run and are per definition not quantifiably measurable.
The measuring culture in education lacks pedagogical patience and trust. Moreover, measuring can also work counterproductively because teachers and institutions always have to judge whether measuring something will have a positive or a negative effect. The most problematic aspect of the measuring culture is that measuring – and the results of those measurements – have become a goal instead of a means (Biesta, Het Alternatief 72-73). By focussing on measuring as an end in itself, international rankings are made significant, whereas, especially on an international level, it is impossible to quantitavely compare different schools. Hence, Biesta signals that international comparison systems like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) create the illusion that different educational practices are comparable. Institutes like PISA discourage critical thinking and, consequently (the possibility to ask) the question of what is the purpose of education seems to lose importance (Beautiful Risk 122). This is a recurrent example of the urge to measure and innovate schools top-down, whereas good education happens on a local, even individual, level. Educational innovation therefore seems to have more chance at succeeding when happening in a bottom-up manner.
1.2 Liquid modernity and education
Education in the past took many forms and proved able to adjust itself to changing
circumstances, setting itself new goals and designing new strategies. But let me repeat – the present change is not like the past changes. At no turning-points of human history did
educators face a challenge strictly comparable to the one the contemporary watershed presents. Simply, we have not been in such a situation ever before. The art of living in a world over-saturated with information has still to be learned. And so has the even more difficult art of grooming humans for such a living. (Bauman, “Education in the Liquid-Modern Setting” 163) In this section I introduce Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), a Polish-British sociologist and philosopher who wrote several books on modernity, especially on the liquid character of this modernity. His work – that, as the abovementioned quote shows, is rather pessimistic – enables me to show how his observations of liquid modernity are in line with neoliberal shifts in education as described in the previous section. The concept of modernity signifies an era in the Western world in which progress was conducting a brighter future (Bauman, Liquid Modernity 9). However, we now live in a world in which the universal is no longer leading the way to a certain and clear future. Things have become liquid and uncertain. Bauman is not at all enthusiastic about the shift he is known for explicating: he
12 identifies the fragility of today’s society, the crumbling of social cohesion, the falling apart of the family as cornerstone of society, consumerism as resulting in the avoidance of people to consciously live their lives, and he eventually asserts that freedom people experience is in fact illusionary (Liquid
Modernity 183).
This increasing individualism is both characteristic of neoliberalism as of liquid modernity. Just like on the neoliberal market, the individual is expected to take responsibility to make something of his or her life (Liquid Modernity 29). There are no foundations the individual can fall back on, that is, “society is being transformed by the passage from the ‘solid’ to ‘liquid’ phase of modernity, in which all forms melt faster than new one can be cast” (“Education in Liquid Modernity” 303). As a result of the abandonment by state and the shift toward privatisation and individualisation, functions that used to be in hands of the state have now become “a playground for notoriously capricious and inherently unpredictable market forces” (304). Rather cynically, he states that in the case of education this means that knowledge has become something that is “eminently disposable, good until further notice and of only temporary usefulness” (On Education 18). This means that education in a liquid modern era stimulates personal progress, while collaboration and teamwork are merely seen as a means than as an end in itself (“Education in Liquid Modernity” 304).
As another consequence Bauman points to the “collapse of long-term thinking” and the “weakening of social structures in which thinking, planning and acting could be inscribed for a long time to come” (304). Seeing the school as such a social structure, this poses a problem of what education should look like in liquid modernity. Hence, in changing circumstances Bauman even wonders whether it might be more useful to forget outdated information than to memorise information that is a product of a method of the past that might prove useless. In all of this the individual is
responsible for the consequences of the choices s/he makes (305).
In general, Bauman points to the unpredictability, the irregularity and uncertainly that this liquid modern era brings along. In order to be able to respond well to this changing era, Bauman proposes the metaphor of a surfer:
Surfing benefits from the lightness and sprightliness of the surfer; it also helps if the surfer is not choosy about the waves coming their way and is always ready to cast their former preferences aside. All that goes against the grain of everything that learning and education stood for through most of their history. (Bauman, “Education in the Liquid-Modern Setting” 160)”
Education was supposed to teach how to deal with the quite predictable future. One was taught to get a certain job and learn the skills to be able to manage the world. In this liquid-modern times uncertainty causes the problem that education can only seem to teach how to embrace the uncertainty of the future. The true virtue of the individual in liquid modernity therefore seems to be that of the surfer. Thus, what is needed is flexibility, the “readiness to change tactics and style at short notice, to abandon
13 commitments and loyalties without regret, and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability rather than following one’s own established preferences” (“Education in Liquid
Modernity” 305). Hence, if the surfer does not want to drown, s/he has to keep surfing. Liquid-modern times covet individuals with innovative ideas, exceptional projects no one ever thought of before. These are virtues that cannot be learnt from textbooks and “ought to be developed ‘from inside’, through letting free and expanding the ‘inner forces’ presumably hidden in the personality and waiting to be awoken and set to work” (“Education in the Liquid-Modern Setting” 161-162). He then speaks of counsellors, instead of teachers, who can learn the individual the trick of how to teach the ‘how to’ kind of knowledge, as opposed to the ‘know that’ kind of knowledge (162).
Eventually, Bauman asks himself: “so where does this leave education and its practioners?” (“Education in Liquid Modernity” 312). In order to answer this question he quotes Italo Cavino’s Le
Città Invisible. The quote speaks of the inferno of the living. According to the quote there are two
ways to escape the inferno: “the first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space” (Calvino 164). At first sight this quote appears to be somewhat off as the first answer one can give to the question what education can do in liquid modernity. However, the inferno appears to be a metaphor for ‘the system’ in which all individuals are caught. In this sense Bauman is not at all hopeful of the potentiality of education as site for emancipation. He notes that in this liquid era people no longer know how liberation of this kind of inferno will be different than the already existing state they are in. To liberate means “to start feeling free to move or act. To ‘feel free’ means to experience no hindrance” (Liquid Modernity 16). People experience freedom as long as their imagination is not bigger than their desires (17). In this neoliberal era schools are trying to ban all risks in order to make everything controllable. The problem is that “little, if anything,” can meet the requirements of surviving in a liquid-modern era “by the reform, however ingenious and thorough, of educational strategies alone” (“Education in the Liquid-Modern Setting, 161). Hence, in the light of Bauman’s thinking there seem hardly any room for schools to teach (with) the “vigilance” and
“apprehension” that is demanded if one wants to escape the inferno that Bauman education takes to be. However, Bauman’s conviction of liquid modernity could consider education as having the potential to “the hope of redefining the public space in terms of new forms of communitarian politics that can emerge, allowing people some control over the consequences of liquefaction” (Best 205). Although Bauman is not all explicit about what such a school form should look like, it appears that a school able to teach children that they can indeed have control over their space, that there is agency for them to act and be critical – to be emancipated – is theoretically possible.
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1.3 Emancipation and education
Here I introduce the pedagogical ideas of Jacques Rancière (1940), a French philosophy professor who tries to overcome, and move between, different disciplines. Although he is mostly concerned with aesthetics, education and politics, he would be the first one to point out the entanglement of those three fields. Central to his work is the presumption that all intelligences are equal; there is no hierarchy in the capacity of intelligences, there is just inequality in the manifestations of those intelligences (Rancière 27). He is relevant for my thesis because of his quite ‘simple’ conviction that, in contrast with the pessimistic view of Bauman, everyone with a will can be emancipated, even by an ignorant person.
In his most well-known book on education The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in
Intellectual Emancipation (1991), he discusses the French lecturer Joseph Jacotot, who taught French
literature at the University of Louvain in 1818. By way of an intellectual adventure, Jacotot enacted an experiment with his Flemish students who knew no French while Jacotot knew no Flemish. He gave them a bilingual version of the novel Télémaque and asked them to learn the French language solely through the translation. When he asked them to write, in French, what they thought they had read, he was overwhelmed by the astonishingly well-informed quality of their work. This experiment seemed to suggest that a master explicator is not necessary if the students have a will to learn something new (Rancière 2).
This new form of ‘teaching’, that Jacotot called ‘universal education’, stands against the traditional pedagogical idea that there is an intellectual inequality between the master and the student. Although ‘universal teaching’ seems to indicate that Jocotot’s method should be the new and only ‘right’ form of education, Rancière’s use of Jacotot’s story should be understood as “an argument about emancipation and the role of the teacher in emancipatory education, and not a general theory of education or schooling or the dynamics of instruction” (Biesta, “Fooled by Ignorant Schoolmasters” 63).
In the ‘traditional model’ the master has to transmit his/her knowledge to the student with the ultimate goal of helping the student reach the same level of expertise as the master. In this light, the task of the master is to explicate, that is, to make explicit knowledge that used to be implicit for students. According to Rancière, “before being the act of the pedagogue, explication is the myth of pedagogy” (6). This ‘myth of pedagogy’ supposes a world that is “divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid” (6). It is, then, the task of the explicator to prescribe the starting point of learning, and to lift the “veil of ignorance [that is thrown] over everything that is to be learned” (6-7). Because this pedagogical myth divides the world into ‘ignorant’ and ‘accomplished’ intelligences, this has a stultifying effect: “the child who is explained to will devote his intelligence to the work of grieving: to understanding, that is to say, to understanding that he doesn’t understand unless he is explained to” (8). Rancière criticises this ‘traditional’ form of pedagogy and points to the role of chance and will in
15 Jacotot’s story.
Jacotot noted that many people have learnt things without anyone explaining something to them, by chance. For example, it was by chance that Rancière came across Jacotot’s ideas, that would become the basis of most of Rancière later work. Rancière even calls universal education ‘”the method of chance”, pointing to the need to facilitate an openness to what chance can bring, as long as one has a will to learn, “propelled by one’s own desire or by the constraint of the situation” (12). These constraint can namely, by chance, open up unexpected occurrences, like Jacotot’s ‘invention’.
Hence, the Flemish children did not learn the French language by turning the pages and comparing the one page with the translated other page. Rather, they developed “the capacity to say what one thinks in the words of others” (Rancière 10). In the traditional schooling system in which the pedagogical myth is still the norm, language seems the only intellectual capacity through which children can be taught and educated to learn. However – tautologically – everyone who can speak her mother tongue has experienced that it is possible to learn without having a language to structure what one learns. This form of intellectual capacity, that is, of “observing and retaining, repeating and verifying, by relating what they were trying to know to what they already knew, by doing and reflecting about what they had done” (10), is not commonly used or seen as a possibility to pay attention to in current pedagogical situations. One of the reasons for this is that neoliberal practices in education force the school system to design ‘teaching’ in a pre-defined way that is ‘efficient’,
therefore leaving not much room for the risky – because uncontrollable – enterprise Rancière is suggesting to learn something.
However, according to Rancière, the goal of education is not necessarily to gain knowledge, but to emancipate students. Students need to learn that their intelligence is equal to that of others. Once they understand this, they are encouraged to become more self-confident and more ambitious. Traditional education emancipates students as well, but only on the condition that they submit to the authority of the teacher. Rancière shows that this can also be done by an ignorant schoolmaster, who has to do two things: “he interrogates, he demands speech, that is to say, the manifestation of an intelligence that wasn’t aware of itself or that had given up. And he verifies that the work of the intelligence is done with attention, that the words don’t say just anything in order to escape from the constraint” (29). With this, Rancière explains that an ignorant master is able to emancipate a student as well. In fact, one could argue that Rancières work is less about pedagogy than it is about existing class hierarchies. Nevertheless, his point is not necessarily that even ignorant schoolmasters can emancipate students, implicating that the pedagogical and intellectual capacities of a teacher are wholly irrelevant. Rather, he problematises the idea that emancipation is concerned with a matter of transferring a specific kind of knowledge. In this sense the schoolmaster is ignorant, since s/he departs from the presumption of equal intelligences, and not of an awareness of a supposed incapacity of the student (Biesta, “Fooled by Ignorant Schoolmasters” 69).
16 equality if we try to overcome inequality by certain interventions or actions that focus on a presumed existing inequality. The only way is to act on the presumption that all human intelligences are equal. So for him it is not about proving that all intelligences are equal, but it is about what can be done based on the presumption that all intelligences are indeed equal (Rancière 46). Moreover, this important aspect of Rancière’s philosophy is relevant to current global issues. In a lot of sectors and disciplines people want to reach equality, seeing that there is an existing inequality. But seeing this existing inequality is exactly what is reconfirming the current power hierarchy. Moreover, Gert Biesta accurately remarks that Rancière is able to show that “what is done under and in the name of equality, democracy, and emancipation often results in its opposite in that it reproduces inequality and keeps people in their place” (Beautiful Risk 96). Hence, it is not so much about that we commit to equality, democracy and emancipation, but how we work with this commitment on the presumption of equality.
1.4 Beautiful risk of education
In this section I outline the educational philosophy of Gert Biesta (1957). Biesta’s earlier mentioned ideas about education all trace back to his conviction that one should embrace, as he calls it, the beautiful risk of education. The risk is there because “students are not to be seen as objects to be moulded and disciplined, but as subjects of action and responsibility” (Beautiful Risk 1). Biesta therefore points to the ‘weakness of education’, “the acknowledgement that education isn’t a
mechanism and shouldn’t be tuned into one” (Beautiful Risk 4). Biesta’s recurring emphasis is on the idea that the question “is not whether education should achieve something or not, or whether
educational spaces should be safe or not, but what education should achieve and to what extent this can be pre-specified” (Beautiful Risk 2).
Biesta signals that the discussion about education is not enough concerned with what
constitutes good education. He therefore proposes to be explicit about the aims of education, because otherwise “we run the risk that statistics and league tables will make these decisions for us” (Good
Education 44). The three domains to which these aims of education refer are: qualification,
socialisation and subjectification. Qualification is about providing students with “the knowledge, skills and understanding and often also with the dispositions and forms of judgement that allow them to ‘do something’ (“Good Education” 39). This function is connected to the role that education has in providing the right skills for eventual work, and thus contributing to the economic growth of the society students might enter. Biesta notes that one often refers to a ‘skills gap’ since current education somehow does not always succeed in providing the ‘right’ skills for the job. Besides, Biesta links qualification to political and cultural literacy as well since it educates for how students should function as a citizen – though he notes that it is debatable to what extent such skills can be pre-specified
(“Good Education” 40).
Socialisation is at play when it comes to how students become part of a social, cultural and political order. Schools are always embedded in a certain culture with normative ways of being and
17 doing. Hence, the socialisation function is an important part of the perpetuation of both desirable and undesirable aspects of specific traditions and cultures (“Good Education” 40). Biesta describes the third function of becoming a subject, subjectification, as the opposite of socialisation. That is,
subjectification concerns educating students not to obediently enter existing orders, but to emancipate themselves and enable them to be independently critical of those existing orders (“Good Education” 40).
Problematic about the division between socialisation and subjectification is the question whether it is at all possible to “occupy a position that is ‘beyond’ tradition” (“Good Education” 41). Biesta notes that postmodern critics have pointed to the impossibility of such a position claiming that “education for (rational) autonomy is just one more form of (modern, Western) socialisation” (41). While this seems in line with Zygmunt Bauman’s earlier mentioned ideas of liquid modernity and his account of the inferno, Biesta argues that is precisely with postmodern theory and philosophy that socialisation and subjectification can be differentiated (41). Whereas this distinction still seems to rely on the Kantian freedom of rational autonomy – which Biesta contemplates as a tradition itself – he proposes an orientation towards an ‘undefined freedom’ and a “world of ‘new beginnings’ and ‘new beginners’”, “that needs to be realised again and again” (“Who is afraid of education” 32).
Socialisation restricts the individual as the rational self-determined human being, not taking into account the children that do not meet this specific definition, e.g. children with disabilities. Talking about subjectification Biesta asserts that “we should not try to specify what students and children and newcomers should be before they arrive. We should let them arrive first, and only then engage in judgement” (34). Only then education can create unique individuals that are able to gain a more autonomous relationship to existing orders. With other words, Biesta suggests that precisely that which makes education more than just the socialisation of children is the need to take the openness and unpredictability, the impossibility to produce emancipation and democracy in a machine-like manner, that is, the beautiful risk of education, more seriously (Beautiful Risk 140).
Moreover, in line with the marketisation of education as discussed in the first part of this chapter, Biesta observes a new language of learning, something he coined the ‘learnification’ of education. Students have become ‘learners’, schools ‘learning environments’ or ‘places for learning’ and teachers have become ‘facilitators of learning’ (Beautiful Risk 62). Biesta therefore distinguishes between ‘learning from’ and the experience of being ‘taught by’. In a constructivist idea of learning “students have to construct their own insights, understandings, and knowledge, [presuming] that teachers cannot do this for them” (Beautiful Risk 45). But according to Biesta the student always remains an object in such a situation. In order for a student to rather appear as a subject, the teacher is necessary (“Rediscovery of Teaching” 387). For Biesta the act of teaching is concerned with a notion of transcendence. In order to understand his rather ingenious philosophical understanding of what this means, he explains:
18 When we think, just at the level of ‘everyday phenomenology,’ of experiences where we were taught something – where we would say, always in hindsight, that ‘this person has really taught me something’ – we more often than not refer to experiences where someone showed us something or made us realize something that really entered our being from the outside. Such teachings often provide insights about ourselves and our ways of doing and being – insights that we were not aware of or rather did not want to be aware of. (Beautiful Risk 53) Thus, for Biesta it is only a good teacher who is able to do this. Here he points to the fact that
‘innovative’ forms of learning through YouTube video’s, TED talks and Massive Open Online Courses are in fact not at all innovative in the sense that it resembles the constructivist idea of education – that Rancière criticised as well – in which a stultifying master explicates based on the presumption of an
inequality of intelligences. Accordingly, as for Rancière, Biesta contends that the purpose of education
is – next to qualification and socialisation – to emancipate students, to ‘subjectify’ them in order to become critical subjects. For Biesta this kind of subjectification cannot be achieved if education is seen in terms of ‘learners’ who ‘learn from’ ‘facilitators of learning’ in ‘learning environments’. The sometimes transcendental role of the teacher is therefore fundamentally mandatory in order to let good education happen.
1.5 Conclusion
In this chapter I have outlined the current neoliberal era in which education finds itself. In the first part I have pointed to the mostly negative effects that the increasing marketisation of education has had in practice. Combining this with the observations made by Zygmunt Bauman on liquid modernity and its consequences for education, I have depicted the future of education in an era of change not rosy at all. Most criticism I have mentioned is focussed on top-down policies that are forcing schools and teachers to decrease their elbow room.
However, Rancière and Biesta can function as fertile soil for positive change. Whereas Rancière is positive of the possibility for education to emancipate and suggests to give chance more room, Biesta calls for embracing the risks that are involved in education. While chance and risk are commonly words that are not associated with a neoliberal ideology, it might be argued that the potential for education lies precisely in an openness to these counter-intuitive practices. Although Bauman was not hopeful of schools to create individuals that can be taught how to surf, the next chapter will be concerned with the educational philosophy of Agora, a school that is characterised by its wavy flexibility.
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2.
Agora’s educational philosophy
2.1 Introduction
This chapter is concerned with the educational philosophy of Agora. The reason Agora came into being in the first place is because the school leaders wanted to create an alternative to, as I will call it in the rest of this thesis, the ‘traditional model’ of education. I therefore start with a short description of the history of Agora. Even though the previous chapter dealt with the current state of education in more political terms, I furthermore briefly outline what the traditional model looks like in practical terms. To contrast ‘Agorian education’ with the common educational model, I will give a quick explanation of the educational levels that exist in traditional Dutch education. I continue to describe how Agora education works, based on six elements: challenges, the coach, coach groups, Targetprocess, examination and the role of
parents. After demonstrating how Agora relates to these aspects, I will, referring back to the
theories set-out in the previous chapter, try to analyse in what way or to what extent Agora can be seen as either critical in their mission or as the product of the neoliberal ideology it claims to be an alternative to. While criticising the traditional model, that, as I have demonstrated in the previous chapter, is to a great extent revolving around measurable neoliberal values, they seem to consider their kind of education as a ‘solution’ for that model. Simultaneously, Agora borrows a lot of values of its philosophy to ideas that are part and parcel of neoliberalism. In this chapter I will therefore try to examine to what extent Agora is either educating students to become critical emancipated subjects, or that their education is precisely educating students who will efficiently, though obediently, flourish in a neoliberal society in which they might end up.
In order to scrutinise the educational philosophy of Agora I use multiple objects of analysis. One of those is a leaflet that was written by the four founders of Agora in 2014 by way of a manifest, in which they set forth the basic ideas of Agora education. Next to this leaflet I closely look at the transcribed text of a video that is to be found on Agora’s website, meant for prospective Agora students, in which the basics of Agora education are explained in a language understandable and preferably attractive to children in the last year of primary school. I will further make use of the words spoken by co-founder Sjef Drummen and several Agorian coaches in “De onderwijzer aan de macht”, an episode of VPRO Tegenlicht (2014), a Dutch investigative journalism programme, that dealt with the future of education. Because of the exhaustive (media) attention Agora has had, I use interviews, talks, blogs and articles in which, almost always, founder and self-proclaimed ‘educational artist’ Sjef Drummen
passionately talks about Agora. And to top it all, I refer to the agile interview I personally had with Drummen. The chapter will be rounded off by a small conclusion.
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2.2 Agora Roermond
In 2003 Sjef Drummen and three other school leaders were asked to found a new school in Limburg, a province in the south of the Netherlands. They agreed this new school had to be fundamentally different from the current configurations of most Dutch high schools. In a seemingly authoritarian way – as it seems evident to consider the ideas of employees and ‘experts’ when renewing a system – the founders refused to consult teachers how a new school should be designed. Drummen: “Het ging tegen alle managementboekjes in. Maar wij zeiden: als je met honderd leraren gaat praten over hoe de school eruit moet zien, dan krijg je het gemiddelde van de honderd leraren. Dan krijg je dus altijd een zesje” (qtd. in Bregman, “Pedagogisch Cadeautje” 6). This school became Niekée, a school on ‘vmbo level’2. At
Niekée they already erased 40% of the traditional Dutch educational model, but for Drummen and his fellow pioneers, this was not revolutionary enough. They wanted to start over and create “onderwijs dat ontdaan is van alle institutionele onzin die in de loop van de afgelopen driehonderd jaar het model is binnengeslopen. Geen klassen, geen huiswerk, geen lokalen, geen toetsen – weg ermee. Wij zijn allergisch voor systemen” (8). They called this kind of education ‘Agora’, now a school under the same organisation as Niekée.
Since it takes courage to overthrow a school in which a lot of people work, all with their different opinions, not many schools dare to try to do the same as Agora. Of course, my thesis will try to consider whether that is either problematic of desirable. Nevertheless, as of September 2018 there are five Dutch schools – in Culemborg, Nijmegen, Groesbeek, Zevenaar and Zevenbergen – that will be offering an ‘Agora route’ within an already existing school system. In order to make sure that these schools will be functioning following the same philosophy and core values, Sjef Drummen told me in our interview that they are now creating an Agora Vereniging in which they are going to record their philosophy formally.
Unfortunately, the document in still in the making and was not yet finished at the time I was writing this thesis.
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2.3 Dutch education levels
In order to understand how Agora fundamentally differs from the traditional model, it is important to know to what kind of education Agora claims to be an alternative to. At Agora children of all ‘educational levels’ are put together. This is in contrast with the common course of events in which Dutch children leave elementary school around the age of twelve and are obliged to be educated on separated educational levels. In general there are three different levels: ‘voorbereidend middelbaar beroepsonderwijs’ (vmbo), ‘hoger algemeen voortgezet onderwijs’ (havo) and ‘voorbereid wetenschappelijk onderwijs’ (vwo). The translation of vmbo would be something like ‘preparatory middle-level applied education’ and consists of certain sublevels focusing either on a more theoretical or a more practical education. Havo can be translated as ‘higher general continued education’ and vwo as ‘preparatory scholarly education’. During the last five years around roughly 20% of Dutch children went to the vmbo, another 20% to havo and 20% to vwo. The other 40% was in a combination class – vmbo/havo or havo/vwo (“Leerlingen, deelnemers en studenten”).
Hence, already at the age of twelve Dutch children are divided into different levels, resulting in gaps between so-called the ‘low-educated’ and the ‘high-educated’ children. Although Rancière would argue that all intelligences are of equal capacity, there is – as I have also mentioned in my introduction – a strong hierarchy between the different educational levels – as if vwo is somehow superior to vmbo. This hierarchy of levels of education results in vmbo students who are seen as, and often also consider themselves as, indeed, inferior to the vwo students, who subsequently are told that they are prepared to become the intellectual future (Drummen, “Personal interview” 1). Although there is no hard evidence that this is one of the reasons why the Netherlands is experiencing greater political polarisation lately, it seems safe to say that is does not help that children with different cognitive manifestations of their intellectual capacity – with their subsequent corresponding sociocultural backgrounds – are already separated at the age of twelve. This causes bubbles with gaps that appear to be hard to bridge.
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2.4 Challenges
Students at Agora do not work with traditional school subjects, but with their own
‘challenges’. Based on their personal curiosity, characteristics, skills and motivation they are encouraged to formulate a challenge. The goal of a challenge can be a subject the student wants to know more about or for instance a product s/he wants to design. Even though the object of analysis starts with the individual wonder of the student, the pathway of the
challenges are clearly structured in four phases: preparation, support, execution and footprint. In the preparation phase children are demanded to carefully formulate why they genuinely want to know more about a certain subject. Subsequently, they specify what their end-result will be going to look like. What steps are needed to get to this result, and when are what steps going to be taken? As formulated in the introduction video these steps include steps children consider to be nice and steps that are needed to fulfil their quest. “Vooral bij de stappen die je nodig vindt, is je motivatie niet altijd even hoog. Dan kijk je even terug naar waarom je deze challenge wilde gaan doen” (“Dit is Agora!”). By focusing on looking back to why the students wanted to do the challenge is the first place, intrinsic motivation is directly linked to the purpose of learning something new. Students are not obliged to do something just
because they have to – as common in traditional pedagogical situations. Rather, they are
encouraged to think of the not necessarily nice steps as unavoidable for reaching their goal. The second phase is that of support, in which the coach asks questions, inspires and directs the journey of the student. The third is called the ‘execution’ phase. Now the students are expected to follow their pre-defined steps. This means that they will have to gather information, but also – and this is something most high schools do not regularly allow – visit companies, interview experts, and follow workshops, within but also outside the school building. The flexibility of the students’ work spaces is analysed in the next chapter.
Moreover, the students are expected to constantly keep record of what they are doing through Targetprocess, a software programme I will elaborate on in paragraph 2.7.
Lastly, there is the phase called the footprint. Once the student has the skills and knowledge to visualise what s/he has learnt, s/he is ready to show and share this with the coaches and peers (and the developers from Targetprocess). They can do this through showing an end-product, for example a robot that they built. Or give a presentation on for example the knowledge they gathered concerning the French Revolution. This footprint is not only an end-result of the things that an individual – or a group, because children can also do a challenge together – has learnt, it can be interesting and inspiring for other students as well.
Hence, the challenges have ‘the world’ as object of analysis, as point of departure. In the VPRO Tegenlicht (2014) episode Drummen explains: “We zeggen: we hebben de wereld, we gaan de wereld onderzoeken, en doordat leerlingen die wereld onderzoeken, komen die leerlingen de kennis tegen die ze nodig hebben om de wereld te snappen” (“De onderwijzer
23 aan de macht”). The curriculum of Agora is, thus, not divided in subjects with teachers who
are skilled in that specific subject. To nevertheless teach students that objects can be analysed from different angles, they employ their so-called ‘five worlds’: the spiritual, the social-ethical, the scientific, the artistic and the societal world. When students want to do a challenge relating to for example football, the coaches are there to point them to the different lenses through which they can engage with football. This resonates with the ‘method’ of Cultural Analysis: start with an object and let is speak to you by close-reading it. This stems from the contention that the world was not constructed to be studied within disciplines or high school subjects. Rather, everything is in some way connected and should therefore not be encountered and understood in isolation. The critical role of the coach in directing this journey will be elaborated in the next paragraph.
Moreover, learning by encountering the world resonates with Bauman’s contention that in order to survive in a liquid-modern world individual should learn how to be adaptive, how to surf on the waves that come their way. In this sense, the education Agora indeed learns children how to deal with available opportunities. Although Bauman sees this as a ‘solution’ to survive in a liquid-modern world, he is pessimistic about the emancipatory potentiality that such a flexible kind of education offers. He points to the nearly impossible task of education
alone to overcome the restrictions of the existing liquid era (“Education in the Liquid-Modern
Setting” 161). According to Bauman schools might not be equipped well enough to teach how to surf the liquid-modern waves of neoliberalism. This seems to be in line with the observation that Agora less and less seems to be function as a ‘school’, but more as a start-up that
formulates their ‘challenges’ in the form of ‘daily scrums’, in which the employees – the students – reflect and discuss if the goals set earlier are achieved and how they can better reach their destination.
Subsequently, formulating ‘learning’ in terms of challenges forces the student and coaches to think in figure of the purpose of education. What is it that what they learn intends? In this respect, the form of the challenge is in line with Biesta’s call for the comeback of the aims of education, rather than just learning in order to be able to pass a test. In the language of Agora this means that they work ‘demand-based’ instead of ‘supply-based’ (“Q&A” 71), pointing to how universities (of applied sciences) also tend to work ‘demand-based’, that is, departing from the interest of a student. (I would never have written about education within a master’s in Cultural Analysis if I were not extremely interested and therefore motivated to dive into the world of the philosophy of education.) Whereas Agora sees this preference of ‘demand’ over ‘supply’ as something positive, it resonates with the critical observations in the first chapter that dealt with the problematics of the marketisation of education. While the students might be better flourish in a neoliberal world when they are educated ‘demand-based’ instead of ‘supply-based’, this is indisputably an example of the new language of learning that
24 Biesta points to in relation to the marketisation of education; thinking in terms of demand and
supply (Beautiful Risk 63). One could also wonder whether it is desirable to move away from the role of the teacher as gatekeeper of knowledge and justified authority on a pedagogical level.
Furthermore, although there is evidently no pre-defined curriculum, students can almost every day follow workshops. Sometimes there are for example journalist talking about fake news. In other instances there are parents who give workshops. Moreover, all the students get a tablet for which they do not have to pay extra. About the role of digital media at Agora the website states: “personal digital devices zijn de verbindingsapparaten met de kennis van de wereld (cloud) en verbinding met anderen. Onmisbaar dus (“Q&A” 11). So while the students can choose the goal of their challenge, the coaches inspire them by letting them come in contact with different ‘worlds’ though digital devices. Nevertheless, Agora does not seem to question or problematise social and ideological consequences of the individual use of digital media. In another interview Drummen said: “Er is een speciaal potje voor ICT-voorzieningen. Wij willen state-of-the-art zijn. Zodra er iets nieuws op de markt komt, schaffen wij dit direct aan en maken we het toegankelijk voor onze leerlingen” (“Werkplek in beeld”). Both quotes seem to categorically claim that because digital media are omnipresent in the current era, they are therefore indispensable. Although access to the online world seems rather innocent – students are, indeed, always surrounded by digital media nowadays – Bauman points the fundamental (educational) problem with the online world. He points to the fact that online “surely there must be somewhere, in that awesome mass of information, an answer to the haunting problems and so if the solutions fail to be found, self-deprecation and self-derision immediately and matter-of-factly follow” (163). Leaving the student with the online world in order to find his or her answers, gives the students the idea that they are responsible for what they (do not) find. While the coaches do guide them, Agora contends that the actual learning takes place in the moments where children encounter knowledge themselves, e.g. in the form of information on the internet.
Yet, it has to be noted that everyday there is half an hour of silence in which students are not permitted to use any digital device and often go reading, indicating that Agora does stimulate their students to understand that the constant availability of digital devices is not unproblematic. Nevertheless, Agora’s technological ‘innovative’ use of digital media in terms of ‘learning’ does not seem to be concerned with the question of desirability. Gaining
knowledge from the cloud resonates with what Biesta calls ‘learning from’, whereas in order to critically engage with the ideological and social consequences of the use of personal digital devices as ‘the connection to knowledge and other people’ students would need to be, in the words of Biesta, ‘taught by’ a teacher. Hence, the forms of innovation at play at Agora seem to overlap and sometimes seemingly uncritically conflict with each other. Wanting to be
25 innovative on a technological level, and, then, seeing digital devices as the way to learning,
seems to conflict with their aim to emancipate their students as well. Because in order to emancipate students, there needs to be a presumption of the equality of intelligences (Rancière 46), something that might be harder in an alleged stultifying situation in which a student is ‘learning from’ a resource on the internet.
2.5 Coach
Instead of a teacher in the traditional sense of the word – an expert on a specific subject who transfers his or her knowledge to the student – the children at Agora have coaches. These coaches are still certified teachers with an expertise in a certain school subject. However, since there are no subjects at Agora, these teachers most of the times do not function in a classroom-bound sense. They are rather, in Rancièrian terms, the facilitators or the environment in which the children can develop a will to learn. Rancière speaks of ignorant schoolmasters being able to emancipate students without having to be master explicators of a specific subject. In this sense, the adjective ‘ignorant’ seems out of place; the coaches at Agora are necessarily experts on a specific subject. However, as I have outlined in the first chapter, this does not mean that the coaches do not need to be good teachers. Rather, in order to emancipate their students, teachers should not depart from knowledge of an incapacity of the student, but presume the equality of all intelligences. As I have described in my introduction this is what makes Agora unique: children from all ages and educational levels are put together. In this sense, their intelligences appear to be presumed equal. Hence, the coaches at Agora can, even on the subjects they do not master, be of help to students in asking the right questions, leading them to for example other coaches with other areas of expertise.
Since the students all follow a personalised learning path, the role of the coach differs per child. At Agora there are different phases students can be in. When children first arrive at Agora, they either just left primary school or switched from another high school. In any way, those children are probably quite used to a traditional form of education. Agora therefore introduced a ‘detox’ phase, in which they are forced to unlearn what they were used to. Asked how hard it is for children to be de-schooled, Drummen answered that teachers have more problems with detoxing from the traditional model than children. This may be, however, a slightly limited and somewhat sugarcoated answer because he later explains that, while the detox period in principal takes seven weeks, some children need two years of detoxing (“Personal interview” 11). Then again, this is exactly the aspect in which Agora differs from the traditional model: at Agora there is space and time to give an individual two years to develop a motivation, or, in more Rancièrian terms, a will to learn. If a child for example has had a traumatic experience or when the s/he does not have a stimulating home situation, this
influences his or her progress and development. Such extreme cases are however not even ‘necessary’ to argue that children should be educated in a personalised manner. That is to say, because of the different educational levels there is already a problematic hierarchy between the ‘smart’ children and
26 the ‘stupid’ children, who consequently respectively think about themselves in such a way.
In such cases it is the role of the coach to first give those children the self-confidence that they can start to learn to at all. Because once children believe they count, that they have an intellect with which they can learn something, they can start to develop a will to learn. Once children have left the detox phase, and thus have developed will to learn based on ‘intrinsic motivation’, they enter the phase of, what Drummen calls, ‘external motivation’. In this phase students are encouraged to create a project in the form of a challenge with a ‘greater goal’, that is, for example, ‘I want to become an astronaut’. Whereas that might sound like a highly implausible and naïve enterprise, this is precisely how Agora tries to work. When a student wants to become an astronaut, the coach will direct the student in his/her quest by asking questions and be of inspiration. With the help of the coach the students will find out that in order to become an astronaut one has to be accepted at a technical university and consequently has to know physics, maths and astronomy. But thinking about the stars can also lead the coach to inspire a student to take a look at Greek philosophy or metaphysics. Further, going into space raises questions about pollution and environmental ethics, and it might also be of importance to know how to work together and give presentations, etc.
After experiencing problems in the first year with too much freedom – there were children that were gaming, passive and generally hard to motivate – the coaches and school leaders formulated the limits of personalised learning:
De coach bepaalt het speelveld waarbinnen de leerling zich kan ontplooien; leerlingen bepalen het reisdoel, maar de docent bepaalt de reis ernaartoe; leerlingen zitten niet achter het stuur; leerlingen mogen keuzes maken in hun ontwikkeling, maar geen mens kan zonder structuur; uiteraard zijn coaches altijd eindverantwoordelijk. In de woorden van een van de coaches: ‘Agora is de vrijheid om te leren wat je wilt, maar geen vrijblijvendheid om te doen wat je wilt’. (Claesen 36)
In the words of Biesta Agora thus employs a language of learning as well, in which the coach is the facilitator of learning. However, they do emphasise that it is about ‘ontplooien’, which resonates with Agora’s contention that the coaches first and foremost should be concerned with getting the students motivated. Rather than to ‘facilitate the environment in which students learn’, the more Rancièrian phrasing would be that coaches ‘facilitate the environment in which students can develop a will to learn’. So the coaches are held responsible for the creation of a will with students.
Moreover, the function of the coach seems to be twofold: on the one hand, the coach is the inspiring facilitator or the environment in which the children will become motivated to learn
something new. On the other hand, the coaches can be used by any student to make use of in content-related questions. They are then called ‘expert coaches’. Without having measured it exactly, Sjef Drummen said in our interview: “in die vier jaar tijd dat Agora nu bestaat, hebben we het nog eens nagevraagd: ‘Als ik er nou eens even een natte vinger in steek, hoeveel procent van jouw taak is dat
