SCHOOL IS SCHOOL AND WORK IS WORK
AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET, OR?
Gun Berglund
PhD student
Department of Education
Umeå universitet
2003
Paper presented at the ECER conference in Hamburg 18 September 2003
Network 23: Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Abstract
The background of this paper is the political action programme initiated by the Swedish government aiming at increasing the cooperation between school and working life. The idea of closer connections between school and working life is not uncontroversial. This paper presents two different perspectives on the subject. One perspective argues that the social context is vital for learning in order to create meaningful learning in real-life settings as learning is rooted in practice and social participation. From this perspective close connections between school and working life is desired. Seen from another perspective school is supposed to be a separate practice in order to acculturate learning to make it applicable in a variety of contexts. Closer connections with working life are therefore not needed. The political idea of closer connections between school and working life can be found within a neoliberal discourse talking about the role of schooling as fostering self-directed lifelong learners within the so-called knowledge society. That raises the question of what kind of learning and knowledge that is regarded as useful, both in society in general and in working life, today and for the future and whether a closer connection between school and working life will serve that purpose.
Keywords
lifelong learning, knowledge society, school-working life relations, social and cultural context, learning environment, community of practice, acculturation
Background
In the rhetoric in Sweden today, political as well as in general, it is often argued that we live in a society characterized by rapid changes where factors as new technology, globalisation, new organisational forms and contracts call for continuous updating of the qualifications needed within the working life. This “new” society is often called the knowledge society. Lifelong learning is argued to be the key tool to meet the requirements of this new society[1]. Lifelong learning is also seen as an important tool in the strategic development of a sustain-able society (Regeringens skrivelse: DS 2001/02:172),which is a political strategy that claims to include all dimensions of sustainable development in a global perspective, ecological as well as social, where issues concerning environment, health, life quality, working life, em-ployment, economic growth and welfare are of vital importance.
Lifelong learning is thus regarded as an important tool in every thinkable aspect of life and as such it is often argued that lifelong learning is a process that has to start early in life, already in preschool, as people’s attitudes and values are established in early years.
As peoples attitudes and life-styles are founded in early ages the task to increase the interest and knowledge about sustainable development starts already in preschool in Sweden. The learning is then accumulated through the whole educational system (Regeringens skrivelse: DS 2001/02:172, p. 51, my translation).
In the political visions of the future society, where knowledge and learning are central issues, the building of educational systems to support lifelong learning is a central idea. Political confidence in the school’s capability of producing successful “lifelong learners” seems almost unlimited. The role of the school as a producer of lifelong learners is a vital issue on the poli-tical agenda in Sweden today. The action programme initiated by the Government to increase the cooperation between school and working life is a manifestation of this concern (Skol-verket: U2000/4731/DK).
The idea that there should be closer connection and cooperation between school and working life is not uncontroversial. This paper will present two different perspectives on the subject. The first perspective argues that the social context is vital for learning in order to create meaningful learning in real-life settings as learning is rooted in practice and social parti-cipation. From this perspective it is important with close connections between school and working life. Seen from another perspective school should be a separate practice in order to acculturate learning to make it applicable in a variety of contexts. The main idea of schooling is therefore that there is a distance between school and working life. The different arguments concerning the role of the school raises the question of what kind of knowledge that is regarded as useful, both in the society in general and in working life, today and in the future.
Lifelong learning as a tool in the knowledge society
In the political rhetoric of our modern so-called knowledge society learning is supposed to happen for specific reasons.
Although learning can be assumed to take place, modern societies have come to see it as a topic of concern - in all sorts of ways and for a host of different reasons. We develop national curriculums, ambitious corporate training programs, complex schooling systems. We wish to cause learning, to take charge of it, direct it, accelerate it, demand it, or even simply stop getting in the way of it (Wenger, 1998, p. 8).
The arguments given in Sweden today for the specific reasons why learning is important often points out different levels of importance (See e.g. Regeringskansliet, 2001, (A), Regerings-kansliet, 2001, (B), Berglund, 2002). To nations, companies and organisations etc. lifelong learning is said to be important in order to maintain a high and up-to-date qualification level so that employees are able to compete in the (global) market. This is said to increase econom-ic growth and prosperity, which in turn will be the ground for public welfare and a better life for people. Lifelong learning is also argued to be important for employment on an individual level by having the required skills and competencies, but also for personal development.
Rubenson (1996) argues that the idea of lifelong learning has moved from being closely connected to the German Bildung ideal in the 1960s to embrace rational economic values emerging in the 80s as neoliberal values washed over the western industrialised world. Em-bedded in the neoliberal discourse lies rational ideas of utility. In the case of schooling the knowledge taught in school has to be useful in society, especially economically. As money is mainly generated in the working life the working life itself is central within the neoliberal ideology. Following neoliberal logic the purpose of schooling is to foster lifelong learners with know-ledge adapted to the working life. The school system is supposed to be the seedbed where pupils acquire useful knowledge about the world outside the school, the working life and other parts of the society, in order to work and live there now and later.
Questions asked in this paper
This paper raises three main questions based on the governmental directives to increase the cooperation between school and working life as part of the general political rhetoric concern-ing lifelong learning as a key-tool in the so-called knowledge society:
- What is schooling about?
- Focusing on learning for working life: what kind of knowledge and learning will today’s children need to be taught in school to be successful in a future (knowledge) society?
- Should there be a closer connection between school and working life? Why/why not?
The question about the purpose(s) of schooling is of course too wide to be answered in this paper. Schooling deals with learning for life in so many different ways, e.g. the fostering of democratic and ethical values shared within a society (see e.g. Skollag 1985:1100 and Lpo 94). This paper will mainly deal with the question of learning for working life.
Political guidelines in Sweden
According to the curriculum for the Swedish compulsory school, the preschool class and leisure-time centre (Lpo94: 2.6) the school is commissioned to prepare the children for a future working life:
Pupils should receive an education of high quality and be provided with the foundation for choosing their further education. This presupposes that the compulsory school works closely with the upper secondary education programmes in the school they will later attend. This also presupposes co-operation between working life and the local community.
Goals to strive towards:
Acquire sufficient knowledge and experience in order to:
Be able to examine different options and make decisions on questions concerning their own futures,
Gain insight into their immediate society, its working and cultural life as well as its organisational activities and
Be informed about opportunities for further education in Sweden and in other countries.
Although the schools connection with the working life is acknowledged in the curriculum this connection has become weaker in recent years. Therefore the government commissioned the National Agency for Education to come up with an action programme to increase the com-pulsory school’s co-operation with the working life (Skolverket: U2000/4731/DK). The government based its remit on the report Co-operation between school and working life (Regeringens skrivelse: Ds 2000:62,my translation). In this report the co-operation between school and working life is justified against the changes of the labour market and the new competence requirements of working life, which are argued to require individuals focused on lifelong learning.
For the compulsory school the contacts mainly concern working life orientation as a part of the society orientation needed by children and young people and to use working life as material for the education in the different subjects. Contacts with the working life also contribute to the development of knowledge and experiences that every young person need for further study- and occupational choices (Regeringens skrivelse: Ds 2000:62, p. 68-69, my translation).
On the municipality level the school plan is the document in which the local council expresses it visions and guidelines for the local schools to follow. In the municipality of Umeå, which is relevant for the study at hand, lifelong learning is emphasized in the first sentences in the school plan:
The municipal council wishes Umeå’s schools to be safe and stimulating environments which every child and pupil wish to attend and acquire the knowledge and skills that they will have benefit and pleasure from as a base for a lifelong learning (Umeå kommun: The school plan for Umeå municipality: A safe school with knowledge for everyone, my translation).
In its school plan (p. 8) Umeå municipality also emphasizes the value-base and the knowledge areas of language, communication, mathematics and nature sciences as especially important for the individual’s possibilities in the future society.
School as a specific learning environment
The theoretical screen used in this paper concerns different ways of regarding school as a specific learning environment separated from other learning environments outside school, i.e., the environments that the school is supposed to prepare its pupils for. The different approaches to this issue that I will develop in this paper has both to do with different ways of regarding the purpose of schooling and the meaning and importance one gives the social context where learning is taking place.
Lindensjö and Lundgren (2000) discuss the relationship between school and other societal practices as a separation of production and reproduction. They claim that production is going on within practices outside school and school therefore has to reproduce, and thereby make models of, these practices. In doing so, the knowledge has to be identified, or named, in order to be communicated. In this naming-process of things going on in one practice to be used and understood in other practices, the “true” meaning of the situation is likely to get lost as it will be de-contextualised, according to the authors. In this sense the school can be regarded as a special practice separated from other practices in the society.
Society has different, and sometimes contradictory, demands on school. On the one hand there are demands concerning the utility of school learning, e.g. that the knowledge taught in school is to be adapted to the demands of- and considered to be useful in the working life.
As long as the education is doing what is perceived as its duty, it has societal legitimacy, credibility. The base for credibility in the modern educational system has been its link to the society- and working life, its utility (Lindensjö & Lundgren, 2000, p. 132. my translation).
On the other hand there are demands for autonomy within the educational systems to increase creativity and new thinking in order to avoid conformity (Lindensjö & Lundgren, 2000). Hamilton (1990) argues that schooling is a separate practice where the pupils come in contact with many different ideas and learn to reflect on them on a meta level in order to be able to implement their knowledge in many different, often unforeseen, situations.
Within social theories of learning the context where the learning activity is taking place is central (Wenger 1998, p. 14). According to this thinking, learning is rooted in practice and social participation in and together with a community of practice (See e.g. Lave & Wenger, 1991, Wenger, 1998, Engeström et al., 1999). Learning is hence to be understood as an object-related activity within a social community.
Learning takes part in communities of practice that serve as carriers of routines, rituals, arte-facts, symbols, conventions, stories etc. (Wenger, 1998). The separation of learning from real-life settings could therefore be seen as problematic. Miettinen (1999) refers to school learning, or what he calls school-going activity, as a specific type of learning where he identifies school learning as characterised by memorisation and reproduction of school texts. The school texts are by their nature de-contextualised artefacts, but in school-going they take the role of the object (Engeström, 1987).
…knowledge acquired in school helps one to progress in school, but its relation to life outside the school is not well understood by the student, and perhaps even by the teacher. The credentials provided by the school may bear little relevance to the demands made by the outside community (Gardner, 1990, p. 93).
School learning is a historical result of the separation of knowledge from its movement, from its context and use, according to Miettinen (1999). He argues that finding new kinds of objects and societal activities to use knowledge in networks of experimentation learning in collaboration with practitioners could be a possible solution to this problem.
Hamilton (1990) rejects this way of regarding context-based learning. He argues that the role of the school is to expand the pupils’ social world and make them familiar with different social contexts, to be acculturated.
Human beings become socialized through their communication with other members of the human species; and they become acculturated because the content and form of the communication varies from one social context to another (Hamilton, 1990, pp. 9-10).
In order for a newcomer to understand and feel at home in a culture he or she must decode its deeper meanings. Schooling is supposed to help the pupils to gain access to new cultures by providing different tools of decoding different cultures and cultural artefacts. This can e.g. be achieved through the sharing of mental pictures, telling how, which calls for the creation of rehearsal rooms inside the heads of the pupils, and play or simulation (Hamilton, 1990).
Learning for working life
So far children from traditional Swedish schools have been able to fit in to the working life after school and being able to use the kind of knowledge they have learned in school. Is that likely to still be the case in the future? According to the rhetoric mentioned in this paper we are now entering a new kind of society, the knowledge society, which is claimed to raise new demands on the individuals to be “lifelong learners”. In the same (political) rhetoric, or even paradigm of the western world, the basic values are rational economic in the sense that the kind of knowledge that counts in the “new knowledge society” is that which is useful in an economical sense, mainly for the production in the working life (see e.g. Rubenson & Xu, 1997). What kind of knowledge and learning will today’s children need to be taught in school to be successful in a future working life?
One of the keywords in the rhetoric speaking of the future is change. In a traditional society built on relative stability it is rather easy to foresee the needs in the working life and provide it with skillful employees suited for specific job descriptions. But in a continuously changing world the needs are not as easy to predict. According to Höghielm (2000) there is a “utility paradox” on the labor market between the demands for specific skills and generic skills. He argues that the changing labor market needs more generic skills. Generic skills are, according to Höghielm, categorized in three main areas: Cognitive skills (learning, planning, reasoning, problem solving), communicative skills (reading, writing, listening), social and interpersonal relations (group work) skills. Höghielm refers to these skills as key qualifications in the postmodern society. The role of the school could, accordingly, be argued to be educating, or fostering, “lifelong learners” whose main competence is non-specific knowledge on the meta level. Since the working life is continuously changing it could be argued to be a waste of time spending years in school learning specific knowledge to be used in specific contexts outside school.
In many of the Swedish political documents today the lifewide[2] dimension is mentioned. This principle tells us that learning is taking place in many different settings in every thinkable aspect of life. In that aspect it is assumed that it is the responsibility of the school to, besides educating lifelong learners, also educate lifewide learners. After leaving school the students are supposed to be able to function in various situations and cultural contexts. Lifewide learning will then require common, or meta knowledge, rather than specific and context based knowledge.
Cropley (1980) states that lifelong and lifewide learning are to be carried out by self-directed individual learners. This principle stresses the individual and thereby the individual’s re-sponsibility for his/her own learning. In order for the individual to make educational choices throughout the whole lifespan, in a variety of situations and in a variety of cultural contexts, he or she will need a “knowledge toolbox” filled with both mental and practical transformable multi-tools. A toolbox only containing highly specialised tools to be used in specific contexts will, accordingly, narrowing the possibilities and thinkable choices of the individual.