Fractured identities: exploring engagement and disengagement in the process of lifelong learning

Abstract

The authors challenge the accepted wisdom that children’s academic success is enhanced when their parents engage with their schooling. Their research in Australia shows that such positive relationships assume and rely on children performing the role of ‘proper’ learners, while their parents engage in ‘proper’ ways with schools that are increasingly corporate and managerialist. The institution’s reaction to any ‘impropriety’ by the child-as-learner is likely to lead to the child disengaging from school, irrespective of their parents’ engagement with it; and as schools emphasize the centrality of ‘lifelong learning’ (in academic terms) to a child’s later success, for a disengaged child, ‘lifelong learning’ becomes lifelong failure.