261 Basic Attitude and the Art of Living Together 8 P2, in the quotation, juxtaposes desire with maintaining a grip and assessing. Nobody present in the meeting contradicted this juxtaposition. Instead, P3, P4, P5 and P6 followed up on it as if it were completely clear how this juxtaposition works. In the earlier quotation from the same minutes, as presented above in Section 8.1.1, a comparable juxtaposition is suggested by P4, with regard to task-oriented action, on the one hand, and real attention to each other, on the other. What is meant becomes clearer through a joint statement issued by the outsider group during the 15th meeting, when the conversational community elaborated on the topic of longing. The group stated that a pedagogy of longing ‘puts the accent on love, attention and respect’, which should not be forgotten when teachers ‘work in an action-oriented way to help children move forward’. This resulted in the conclusion on the part of the outsider group that, ‘for Christian teacher training, it seems important that students engage in conversation on these themes, asking inquisitive questions about systems’. The word ‘system’ appears 27 times in the minutes and transcripts, especially in meetings 15 and 16. The tenor of the usage of this word is initially neither positive nor negative. The education system being what it is, it should be considered a given that it structures one’s educational work, but one’s educational practice need not solely be directed by the system. This tenor starts, however, from the 15th to the 16th meeting onwards, to have a more negative connotation, with members of the conversational community realising that the system can be crippling in relation to their personal ideals and longing. Elements of the education system that are considered contrary to personal educational ideals and longing are ‘the child as a project that must succeed’, ‘children as entrepreneurs of themselves’, ‘the portfolios and coaches in education’, ‘the centrality of assessment that constantly compares children with the average child’, ‘the accent on rationality’, ‘the requirements that schools have to face’ and—again—the focus on measurable results. As one of the practitioners of multi-ethnic Christian education explained: I also have to say to parents who are not angry with us but sad about the system: Look, I don’t like the system either, but we have to work with it. I’m talking about a little boy who gave a wonderful speech about the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, for which we gave him a nine out of ten, which he really deserved, but he couldn’t do well on his CITO reading comprehension test (1) because it contains such complicated questions and 1 This refers at regular testing in the Netherlands by Centraal Instituut voor Toets Ontwikkeling (CITO).
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