“Order in Progress.

Everyday Education Practice in Primary Schools – Belgium, 1880-1970”

Marc Depaepe, Leuven University Press, Leuven, 2000.

Introduction

“Consecuently, educational historians have displayed a consistent blind spot towards pedagogical
reality at micro-level… For the most part, however, and certainly in Belgium, there has been no
historical analysis of educational practice in schools. The classroom remains something of a ‘black
box’ in the history of education, which has yet to give up its secrets”, pp. 9-10.

“The history of education displays greater continuity than discontinuity”, p. 11.

“Larry Cuban in one of the authors who have most successfully demonstrated the immense
stability of educational relationships. Together with David Tyack and William Tobin, he has used
the notion of the ‘grammar of schooling’, which occupies a central place in this study, although we
have interpreted it somewhat more broadly than Cuban and Tyack do. In our view, this ‘grammar’
embraces all the formal rules listed above [“the determinants of school culture, wich are rooted in
temporal and spatial environment factors and which comprise the ritual of school life: the
timetable, the division of day into lessons and play time, terms and holidays, the architecture of
the school, its furniture, classroom layouts, pupil numbers, the age and subject-based grade-
school system, the internal school hierarchy, the panoptic gaze, recurrent sanctions, such as
exams and prize days, and so on”], which all pedagogical practice instinctively seems to obey and
which are also emphasized by Tyack and Cuban. As a former teacher himself, Cuban asks the
questions that are genuinely important to the history of education: ‘How did tearchers teach?’ and
‘Wy they teach as they teach?’… According to Cuban [despite the political reforms which put
accent in the autonomy of the student] the dominant factor in the history of American education
has been teaching behaviour governed unilaterally by the teacher. The explanation for this ought
to be sought in the organisational and structural framework of pedagogical practice rather than
simply the cultural legacy and social function of education. Attempts at renewal seem to have run
into a wall of firmly established habits, while Reform Pedagogy allowed itself to be absorbed into
existing and dominant pedagogical forms. Cuban does not feel, however, that is necessarily grave
problem. It meant that centrally imposed reforms, which so often ignore teachers’ expertise, were
able to benefit from the practical experience built up day after day by generations of
professionals. As Tyack and Tobin originally pointed out, reformers believe that their instructions
will change schools, but it is important to recognize that schools change reforms”, p. 11.

“The goal of education is to instruct pupils. How much of this intention actually remains on the
classroom floor and what impact it has later, in ‘real life’, is, however, very much open question.
At first sight, pedagogical processes in the school space are characterized overwhelming by
disciplinary interventions. We find all manner of power interventions by which children are ‘kept
small’: punishment and rewards, threats, emotional blackmail, disparagement and so on…
Nevertheless, it is an equally firm element of the same pedagogical reality that children resisted
the imposition of discipline from above”, pp. 12-13.
“Taking as our point the arguments of Heinz-Elmar Tenorth and others, we intend to show that
research at the micro-level need no distract attention from structures and government strategies
in order to focus on issues of the individual and how he or she learns. This concentration on the
individual may readily be interpreted as a reaction against the structuralist interpretations of the
1970s and 80s, which, influenced by Foucault’s idea of ‘Great Confinement’, focused
disproportionately on the school as an institution of overwhelming power. However, going too far
the other way does no offer an appropiate solution either. We believe instead that more subtle
concepts need to be developed in dialogue with the source material, which eill allow the basic
mechanisms of education and instruction to be identified theoretically, without thereby
abandoning discipline as an aspirational interpretative framework”, p. 13.

Usefulness of notion ‘grammar of schooling’: “The implicit rules that governed life in the classroom
and in the school not only determined other educational settings, but were also linked to
progressively more school-like. To the extent that it coincided with the regulation of other
educational situations, this has been first and foremost a ‘grammar of educationalising’. The most
essential characteristic of the ‘educationalised’ or ‘schooled’ society is, for those who immerse
themselves in the sources, the desire for order and regularity, to which the title of this book
ultimately refers [it paraphrases the motto of Brasil]”, p. 14.

“The choice of the primary school as the object of study reflects not only the background to the
research project, but also the firm belief that the essence of educational intervention is most
clearly revealed at those levels at which educationalisation has penetred most effectively”, pp. 14-
15.

“We also attempted to capture the distinction between internal dynamism and external
development –between continuity and discontinuity, if you will- by using conceptual tools such as
‘hidden curriculum’ and ‘higher pedagogy’, which have unmistakably pushed the micro-history of
pedagogical behaviour in the direction of ‘schooling’”, p. 15.

Main sources: periodicals, reports from teachers’ conferences, interviews.

Important analysis: curriculum.

I.- Developing a theoretical framework for the history of educational reality in the classroom

“Educational objetives and results do not necessarily coincide –they can even be at odds with one
another”, p. 19.

“Researchers generally assume that the teacher loyally puts the curriculum into practice as the
‘servant’ of the government. There is little or no scope in classic educational historiography for any
kind of barrier between plan and effect… Explanatory models are borrowed crudely from the
mainstream of historiography, which borrowed in turn from sociology”, pp. 19-20.

“One possible answer to this failure of history oh education theory could be to place curricula and
strategy to one side and to concentrate instead on educational outcomes…. There is, however,
something simplistic in about such an answer. After all, if we are to see the full picture, we have to
look further than simply the ‘resistance of the oppressed’ alone. It was, in fact, the Catholic school
-the institution held responsible for the ideological pressure- that made such critical thinking and
resistance possible in the first place by helping its pupils to understand certain relationships”, p.
20.

“[See and analyses exclusively the classroom] This risks not only ignoring the socio-historical
context in which we can adequately measure educational effects. Before we can consider a study
of educational effects on individual people, we first have to focus on what actually happened in
the classroom during the educational process –on what was actually taught and learned in the
school. And if we are to understand that, what is required is not so much a social scientific theory
developed independently of the history of education, but one developed within the field itself”, p.
21.

“[These authors, according David Plank’s critique of the work by Tyack and Cuban] plainly view the
central focus on the child as a positive development. By acknowledging his or her individuality, the
child supposed feels more at home al school. Claims that education boils down purely to ‘ehat is
good for the child’ –a belief that is very widely held by educationalists in general and teachers in
particular- seems somewhat trivial. It is not especially important to the educational historian
whether the child felt happy and outgoing or fearful and introverted… It only becomes interesting
in pedagogical terms if the educator deliberately played on the child’s feelings in the hope of
discouraging or undermining certain behaviours or of guiding the child in a different direction. A
(micro) history of pedagogical reality is thus pointless unless it is presented in terms of continuum
of ‘intention, realization and consequence.

This is why the study of educational intentions cannot ultimately be considered separately from its
relationship with educational effects. We already have noted, moreover, that the emphasis on
external teaching coercion is often extremely one-sided. This may be attributed to, among other
things, the immense success of socialisation theories and more especially to the paradigms of
discipline of history of education. We note with some wry amusement that the that the obsessive
way in which sociologist like Pierre Bourdieu have described school as a place of all-embracing
order and coercion precisely matches the professional culture that those academics have
constructed through their own schooling”, p. 21.

“What we require, therefore, is not only adequate tools or concepts to enable us to gauge the
impact of the school on people’s behavior, but also theoretical frameworks in which we can
explore the implications of the pedagogical paradox at the social level from within”, p. 21.
“The beginnings of such a theory may be found in the ideas of Tenorth, who, drawing on an earlier
Kantian paradox, has identified the basic pattern of every day schooling situation in the linkage of
the freedom of the learning subject (‘Lerner’) and the necessary coercion of teaching (‘Erziehen’).
The school is not satisfied merely with providing information. It wishes to go further, to provide
pupils with interpretative frameworks and paradigms with wich to reorganize and transform the
multiplicity of information about reality in such a way that new connections may be established
between the individual identified elements, which will in turn allow the identified phenomena to
be understood and controlled. This is not merely a question of ideological brainwashing –it relates
to the fundamental intention of every pedagogical and didactic process. Schools may thus only be
programmed to a certain extent: thy have their own agenda and follow their own rules, which may
be formalized in their own kind of grammar.

His applies, for instance, to schooling content. As recent French research into educational history
has shown, such contents are not simply imposed by society and culture. They are often individual
creations and pedagogical inventions that derive their significance from a particular school
subject…

We might also add that didactic principles are no neutral or passive. From within their relationship
with the culture of the school, they can also begin to lead a life of their own. Exampless include
the conviction that children have to learn to think for themselves. This lead to the domination of
the Socratically inspired didactic technique of the ‘learning conversation’… It was assumed that
pupils would absorb their subject matter more effectively if they discovered it themselves. They
were thus assisted by the posing of all kinds of questions. Although this assistance was primarily
intended to retain a grip on pupils’ thinking, it could not prevent the schooling knowledge
obtained in this way from entering into manner of alliances with ideas of the place of the
individual in society”, p. 23.

“The impact of the educational process does not, however, lend itself readily to measurement.
The first requirement when seeking to determine how educational intentions have been filtered
through everyday school practice into educational outcomes is to study the school environment
itself. The physical environment is not the only important factor, the mental environment –the
culture, as it were, of the school- is paramount. It is part of the pedagogical mentality, for instance,
that there ought to be silence in clss. Otherwise the children are unable to concentrate
adequately. The peremptory conclusion that school thus limits personal freedom is, however,
unjustified. While some children have a problem with the imposition of silence, there are
undoubtedly other who are happy to be left in peace. In other words, a study of the environment
alone is not sufficient. The liveness of the classroom tells us nothing, after all, about the
experiences of the pupils in it.

However, given the difficulty of getting directly into heads of former pupils, we will have to seek
the answers to our questions chiefly through the social significance granted to the pedagogical
mentality and reality. More specifically, we can attempt to ascertain the social effects that
socialisation has produced through education –not so much in the individual, psychological sense
as socio-culturally. What, for instance, is the social significance of the pedagogical habituation to
sitting quietly in the school? This is clearly of value to society: if people lose the ability to sit still,
keep quiet and concentrate on a task that they may not enjoy of find interesting, there is a danger
that the social order will collapse… That counts in social terms is that people do their jobs, not
whether thay believe in them or not. Such belief represents at best a social surplus –a
commitment from which a higher economic return may [Go to the next page] flow.

We ought to concentrate, therefore, on investigating the links between education and society and
identifying the social and cultural significance of pedagogical and didactic behavior and practices,
rather than focusing in the deeply held beliefs that accompany them. We will attempts to examine
these behaviours in two ways. Firstly: where do they come from? And secondly: what is their
social effect? As we have noted, the social effect can vary considerably from the original
intentions, while still being logically deducible from the pedagogical action, provided at least that
we do not get bogged down with testimony of the experience alone. Once again, however, a
degree of caution is in order. The school (or class) as an agent of education never exists in
isolation. It would be wrong, therefore, to consider it straightforwardly as the single missing link
between intention and effect in education. Even if a congruence can be detected between
intention and effect and if classroom practice accords with this, we still cannot be sure whether
the effects ought to be attributed wholly or largely to pedagogical behavior in the school or
classroom” .

People’s behaviour is not only –and probably not even primarily- determined by the results of the
education they receive. What we are ultimately able to show is merely the possible effects of the
person’s schooling. What we are able to investigate is not so much the social function of
‘education’ as such, as that of the dialogue between school and society. It is assumed in the
process that both entities follow not only their own rules, but some extent the other partner´s as
well, in the manner of overlapping circles… Anthropology tells us how dialogue between school
and society may be approached at the level of everyday interaction. We believe, for instance, that
Clifford Geertz’s distinction (following on from Gilbert Ryle) between ‘thin’ and ‘thick description’
may be instructive to the pursuit of classroom history”, p. 26-27.