Introduction

In his book School Blues French author Daniel Pennac (2010) describes how his work with so-called dunces – those unfit for schooling – has centred not on social or psychological problems but on the challenge of bringing them into the ‘present tense.’ Through rigorous work with grammar and spelling Pennac draws his students out from their immediate life world for a moment and into the world of the French language. In this way, he brings them into – and includes them in – the activity of schooling, an activity they see themselves as unfit for and excluded from. In this book, I attempt to follow Pennac’s lead by taking up an educational perspective on inclusive education in the sense of regarding schooling as an activity that is constituted by a form of being present in the moment. Building on a continental framework, I attempt to conceptualise education as a discipline with practical and theoretical concepts and criteria, which emanate from education, or, rather, from within the activity of schooling itself. The work is inspired by and, for the most part, engaged with the educational thinking of Hannah Arendt. I have tried to unfold and develop Arendt’s educational thinking and concepts in order to understand and create an educational theory of schooling, which gets to the heart of what kind of activity schooling is, and how this provides a starting point for how we might speak about inclusion in a new way. This has had the significant consequence that I will have to not speak about inclusion in order to be able to speak about inclusion – a mantra that is repeated a (hopefully) appropriate amount of times throughout this work. The reason for the repetition is that it underlines the main argument and because it makes the ideas presented here stand out somewhat from other investigations into inclusion and inclusive education. This also hints at the fact that the concept of inclusion I am working towards here is radically different from how the concept of inclusion is usually defined in political, disability studies and inclusive education discourses. The premise is that we are better off starting from an educational vantage point than from an inclusive one, or, rather, a politically defined notion of inclusion and inclusive education. As I try to substantiate, the calls for inclusion quite often come from political and ethical vantage points, and the arguments for inclusion are of a political nature. Rarely do the calls for inclusion emanate from educational vantage points, and 2perhaps more important, they are rarely based on educational arguments. Alternatively, to put it perhaps more precisely, the proponents of inclusion tend to fall into to what I will coin the instrumental fallacy of considering education to be an instrumental process and to consider the school an instrument for societal change. ¹ I believe that this instrumental view is not only conceptually faulty but also empirically and practically destructive for educational theory and, more important, for educational practice and educational processes in schools and elsewhere. More often than not, it results in a reproduction of the values of the dominant hegemony, and in modern society, this coincides with capitalism and consumerism. As Ivan Illich so succinctly put it by comparing traditional schooling to the dogmas of religious education,

[t]he school system today performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society’s myth, the institutionalization of that myth’s contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality.

(Illich, 1970, p. 37) In the modern school system, the myth that is perpetuated is that educational processes exist to enhance human capital and support the state in its continued competition with others states in a global economy. The myth is perpetuated primarily through the medium of the teacher. In schools, children learn to speak in the voice of the teacher and reproduce the truths that are imbedded in the teacher’s language. We make a promise to our students: “Speak like me and you will make it in the world.” The students reproduce the truths that emanate from the teacher’s voice and language, and if they do not align themselves with these, they become excluded from the community of the classroom. This conception of the school institution has become no less powerful in the age of standardisation and measurement. The individualisation of students, and the testing culture that permeates what has been coined a ‘learning revolution’ by the former Danish minister of education, has reinforced the reproductive forces of the school and the marketisation of education.