63 Fragmentation and Subjectification 1 more urgent need to adapt. The stable home situation that the traditional family provided for started to disappear, to a certain extent, with traditional family itself (CBS, 2017; OECD, 2011). The supporting role of churches and religious social groups in the educational process declined with lowering church affiliation and the process of secularisation (Pew Research Center, 2018, 2019). Society itself became more diverse and pluralistic. As a consequence, central governments, preoccupied with rapidly diminishing social cohesion, started imposing additional rules. In the modern context, where school results were increasingly measured and monitored, school teams found themselves confronted with ever increasing demands: to maintain existing scores, to help children with problems and backlogs, to handle cultural, ethnic and religious diversity, to include citizenship education, to foster social cohesion, et cetera. An early but nevertheless clear and practical example of this dynamic is found in a booklet published by the American scholar John I. Goodlad, titled What Schools Are For (1979). In it, Goodlad highlighted the growing difference between what schools were asked, expected or called upon to do (goals); what schools were actually doing or used for (functions); and what schools should do (aims). According to Goodlad (1979), a very common error was the tendency to increasingly focus on superficial qualification methods. By doing so amidst all the identified changes, schools sought to keep up with standardised levels for the 3R (reading, writing and arithmetic) subjects. They were also required to comply with detailed government instructions for the socialisation of students. ‘Thus education is corrupted, becoming indoctrination or training’, complained Goodlad (1979, p. 104). Schools should invest, above all, in personhood formation in direct relation to their educational task, Goodlad (1979) recommended, ‘to do the educating not done or not done easily elsewhere in culture’ (p. 106). In terms of the future, Goodlad (1979) foresaw ‘reductionism with respect to educational goals and practices, preoccupation with minimum competencies, excessive testing, and measured outcomes as the sole criteria of school and student performance’ (p. 118). When viewed from the fragmentation perspective elaborated in this chapter, it is no wonder that Goodlad’s (1979) words came true. The next chapter, Chapter 2, will describe how WCD emerged from 2005 as a growing movement in education seeking a new and radically more integrative approach—an approach that Goodlad (1979) already advocated as holistic (p. 75). However, when the consequences of fragmentation were felt on the societal level, and when schools were looked at to help resolve at least part of the problem, policymakers did not dig deep enough. Schools were, in and of themselves, part of the problem they were supposed to resolve. They
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