The Rise of the Individual Learner: Sociological Insights on the History of Student-Centred Learning

ABSTRACT Research on student-centred learning lacks analyses of sociohistorical developments. This article contributes to this niche by developing a sociologically designed draft of its major upheavals. Drawing on Foucault’s genesis of governmental rationalities, it links the emergence of educational subjectivations to processes of structural change. Within this scope, the transition from feudal to liberal and neoliberal principles led to problematisations and idealisations of heterogenous grouping in schools. As part of the differentiation of selective and integrative requirements, the school system became the central authority for the realisation of the objectives of different educational requirements. As flexibilisation paradigms gained widespread attention, personalised methods started to function as harmonisation mechanisms of competing demands. Tracing these paths provides important historical insights into the embeddedness of student-centred learning in structural power relations. In addition, these findings can clarify complex dimensions of current potentials of and challenges in individual education.


Introduction
In recent decades, the debate on personalised learning, and its promise to achieve performance-related and inclusive-oriented educational objectives at the same time, has gained decisive momentum.Despite a wealth of literature available and the omnipresence of this subject, little attention has been given to its historical background. 1 However, understanding the current idealisation of personalised learning requires determining and tracing the origins, components and trajectories of this discourse. 2hese aspects need to be interpreted in terms of theoretical concepts of power because the present positioning neglects analysis of related societal contradictions, conflicting goals and differing demands.While this article does not conduct a new empirical investigation, it does provide an analytical review and sociological classification of relevant literature to describe and reconstruct the interested coherences.
To this end, studies by Ball, Deacon and Fend provide important insights into the different conditions responsible for the rise and differentiation of educational systems and requirements. 3These findings are juxtaposed with emerging concepts of subjectivity and childhood and years of debate concerning the individualisation of learning processes. 4The analysis does not primarily reconstruct the chronology of related pedagogical ideas but subjects the idea's foundation in societal structures to make intelligible the genesis of corresponding practices and regulations.In this sense, the sociohistorical approach does not pursue a history of terms, ideas, persons or single events; the aim is to explain relevant aspects and general dimensions of structural change in society.
The establishment of a public school system has marked a significant upheaval.It has also raised the question of how to deal strategically with an increasing student population and heterogeneity.The objective of the following discussion is to trace the ambiguous developments associated with this problem, which did not develop linearly, implying variegated and discontinuous contexts.The studies cited in this article's literature review primarily refer to processes occurring in German, French and Anglo-Saxon language areas, as the institutions of the general and state-funded educational system first emerged in these regions and then spread across a significant part of the world. 5It should be noted that this paper's reconstruction of the ideal of student-centred learning does not constitute a cross-national comparative analysis.Instead, it shows general development trends in these nations' school institutionalisation processes.Therefore, the brief survey of different countries and eras should not be mistaken for an allencompassing historical analysis.Instead, it provides an overview of the origins and social conditions of the investigated discourse.
Against this background, this paper can answer the central research question concerning how different societal requirements for individualised learning settings have emerged on a typological level.The following section addresses the methodological and theoretical background for this objective.Richard Rorty's concept of rational reconstruction provides an appropriate research method to substantiate the stated aim to apply a social theoretical perspective on the history of personalised learning by conducting an analytical literature review. 6Furthermore, the integration of the Foucauldian perspective promises to be fruitful against the background of its theory on historical relationships of societal areas and how these produce certain phenomena through different forms of power relations. 7This approach corresponds with the ambition to highlight social structural developments and investigate how schools, curricula and learning methods respond to these developments.The main section of this article depicts this sociohistorical analysis.The proposition describes the development, from problematisation to idealisation, of heterogeneous settings within a multistage process.The transition from feudal to liberal societies made the differentiation of economic and social-integrative demands possible in the first place.However, since the post-Fordism era, personalised learning has been used as a strategy for the implementation of differing educational needs and the harmonisation of its constraints.The concluding section discusses how these findings can eventually generate new perspectives on the problems and chances of performanceand moral-oriented promises of student-centred methods.

Methodological and Theoretical Background
On a methodological level, the outlined procedure follows a rational-reconstructive perspective, which reinterprets and synthesises existing theories and terms within the scope of an alternative research topic and generates new logical coherences concerning the rationale. 8To some degree, rational reconstruction methods self-consciously define themselves as anachronistic.They criticise historical reconstructions of ideas to contextualise the "arguments of great dead philosophers" solely. 9As a result, the approach abandons and exceeds a precise and meticulous classification of historical events in favour of new and comprehensive research interests.
This procedure involves systematically searching for research gaps in the relevant literature that can be filled with knowledge and insights from other works.In doing so, different arguments are reconceptualised in a new context.However, the reconceptualisations do not proceed chronologically.They also do not simply reconstruct terms and persons in the history of philosophy or social theory.This argumentation does not mean that sociohistorical paths cannot be outlined in correspondence with general knowledge of chronological historical research; rather, it implies a course of action in which the analysis of a phenomenon is not limited to these realms.However, as this article does not aim to reinterpret existing theories or philosophical approaches, it adopts the basic principles of this approach to a theoretically informed examination of empiricaloriented studies.The appropriated synthetisation pursues the strategy to generate new dimensions by connecting transdisciplinary literature within the unresearched context of a sociologically informed history of student-centred settings.
These remarks lead to the question of how the literature was chosen in this specific case.As mentioned in the introduction, the selection of literature was based primarily on studies dealing with the emergence of the western educational ideal in countries that first introduced public school systems.These public school systems turned out to be crucial for developing and disseminating different teaching and learning methods.A decisive factor is that some of these papers deal only with the history of student-centred learning in terms of ideas or terminological aspects but do not focus on societal power structures. 10In contrast, other studies including such concepts of power rather examine the history of educational systems or understandings of childhood in general, without focusing on learning methods per se. 11This article bridges this gap by combining these different factors to show the relationship between the formation of the individual learner and changing societal conditions.This methodological and empirical concept suggests integrating a theoretical position corresponding to such an understanding of historical analysis.Following Rorty, Foucault's genealogy is also designed in a way that does not proceed strictly chronologically.Instead, it focuses on a central problematisation and, from this starting point, classifies singular events and proceedings within the framework of a general nexus.In the context of this paper, Foucault's work on the rise and change of governmental rationalities especially seems a suitable approach for the operationalisation of the presented proposal.In his genealogy of modern states, Foucault detaches from an understanding of a government being limited to political power and focuses on a multiplicity of strategies, forces and objects that produce a specific logic of institutional principles.A first main idea suggests that the art of government also implies "governing a household, souls, children, a province, a convent, a religious order, and a family." 12In an allegorical description, Foucault used the term "pastoral power" as a Christian adaptation of the relationship between a flock and its shepherd.The latter can only operate and legitimise his leadership through a comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics and peculiarities of his livestock.In the pastoral context, such a functional generation of knowledge occurs through the compulsion to confess.Within this process, pastors create detailed information concerning the "individual -his soul, his thoughts, his hidden sins, his dark secrets, his purifications, in short, his inner truth." 13Subsequently, these aspects serve as a means to steer and affect such processes of individual construction of truths about the self.This is also why Foucault regards these techniques as a form of power that operates between individuality and totality.The crucial point is that this relation is decisive in the further historical course of secularised governmental mechanisms. 14owever, a far-reaching realisation of such modernised forms was hindered by a period of blockade.This era has roots in the seventeenth century and is characterised by armed and religious conflicts, peasant revolts, hunger and financial crises in absolutistic states. 15oucault consequently marks the transition to new schemes of governmental rationalities amid the establishment of civic and liberal principles.Against this background, he defines the term governmentality as a combination of gouverner ("to govern") and mentalité ("way of thinking").This connection describes a new relation between different forces of a society.All institutions and practices that operate around political, economic and security-related issues constitute a power that affects the population in specific and yet diverse ways. 16The demographic expansion and liberalisation processes in the eighteenth century transformed the application of statistics from the context of sovereignty to measures of security.This led to a realisation that the population, in terms of death or illness rates, for example, must be regarded as a subject with its own logics.The governmental rationality of such biopolitics no longer consists of centralised control of the population.In this sense, legal and disciplinary normalisation processes are supplemented by technologies of security.While disciplinary techniques predefine "hierarchising separations" 17 the apparatuses of security "do not draw an absolute line between the permitted and the forbidden, but rather specify an optimal medium within the range of variations." 18ecurity-related normalisation is a response to liberalising forces; its extension in the late twentieth century can be understood as a reaction to neoliberalisation.In this context, Foucault states that the emerging "anarcho-liberalism" of the Chicago School proposes to extend economic paradigms to social forms. 19As the crisis of standardised organisational principles in economic, political and social fields increased, American liberalism was also established in Europe as a guiding maxim.A decisive turning point in this regard appears in the economic research field of human capital theory.According to this approach, the analysis no longer focuses on the interrelationship among production, investment and consumption processes.Its basic principle rather consists of exploring the rationality "through which one or more individuals decided to allot given scarce resources to this end rather than another." 20All disposed and acquired human skills and competencies are then used in the market as capital for future income.Consequently, organisational and singular actors can react to the changing needs of post-Fordist and dynamic knowledge-based societies in a self-responsible and flexible way.As institutional agents transfer responsibilities and securities to individual levels, external evaluation mechanisms need to maintain the lost functions of control.In this sense, the apparatus of security reorganises and enhances its core principles within the scope of neoliberal governmentality.At the organisational level, outsourced processes regain control over delegated competencies.In contrast, at the low-scale level, the uncertainty of future developments is reframed in terms of new and liberating possibilities for individual actors.

Formation of Pedagogical Subjectivation: From Problematisation to Idealisation of Heterogeneity
Against the background of this methodological and theoretical approach, sociohistorical representations are divided into four main sections.The first section begins by briefly reviewing the transition from theocentric to anthropocentric worldviews in the Age of the Renaissance. 21Reformatory movements play an important role during the emergence of autonomous subjectivity concepts (i.e. the assertion that humans are self-determined creators of their own history).The exemplifications connect these aspects with leading educational ideas and institutionalisation processes and analyse them in terms of secularised pastoral power technologies.The second section considers the increasing embeddedness of educational processes in economic, nationalised, demographic and democratic contexts.Within the scope of rising bourgeois societies, the discovery of schools as biopolitical resources for governmental rationalities eventually led to a problematisation of heterogeneity.The third section discusses the emerging crises of rational and material demands on modern subjectivity and their relation to romanticised counter-utopias.It shows how progressive educational movements constructed an idealised liberal understanding of childhood in which new pedagogical principles isolate themselves from its social conditions.Finally, the last section describes the further paths of the differentiation and amalgamation of selective, qualifying and social-integrative educational requirements.As the dysfunctional effects of standardised principles created a sociocultural and economic individualisation paradigm that harmonises its preceding constraints, student-centred settings are considered the ideal way to realise the competing educational objectives of a society. 22

Liberation and Exclusion of Educational Subjectivities in the Renaissance and the Reformation
Attempting to explain the emergence of a humanistic, autonomous and secular understanding of subjectivity in comparison with the rise of school systems, Fend's thesis is an appropriate starting point.His research demonstrates that the early institutionalisation of educational systems in the occidental world developed through the strained relationship between faith and knowledge. 23Like Foucault, Fend argues that the Christian doctrine itself contains a fundamental potential for individualisation concepts.Although he does not specifically relate them to the practices of confession and pastoral power technologies, he describes these subjectivising elements as fundamental for later secularised developments.As such, the separation of this-worldly and other-worldly existences dramatises the possibilities to actively design one's life in the present. 24The Christian interpretation of ancient writings made it necessary for the church to create educational institutions for experts.These authorities sought to secure the changing dogma according to the canonisation of valid faith. 25oon afterwards, these circumstances themselves would lead to the transition to anthropocentric worldviews and a modern understanding of science.Expanding cities in northern Italy gained power due to long-distance trading and established new scholarly classes.The scholars engaged in competition with ruling estates of the clergy and developed a new humanistic conception of mankind.The invention of printing emerged as an essential production factor in strengthening the anthropocentric scheme as it enabled a radical spreading of these alternative knowledge cultures and a change within still-dominant religious power relations.In the course of the Protestant Reformation movement, facilitated access to sacred writings enabled a broader reflection of Christian knowledge structures.These processes were also accompanied by the aim to increase the literacy rate of the general population.The first plans for the integration of larger groups into educational institutions already show a consequential effect on the structure of instruction and learning methods.Figure 1 illustrates how children were divided into groups according to their age and knowledge level.To address differences among pupils, the reactive strategy was that of homogeneous grouping. 26 prominent argument in current public discourses and school reform programmes states that teacher-centred education with homogeneous grouping is an invention of the industrialised era. 27According to this theory, standardised methods should be used to teach pupils standardised working skills for the emerging factories.Against the background of the given example, the above thesis must be revised according to an educational-historical perspective.Homogeneous grouping emerged much earlier as a general problematisation of heterogeneity due to the integration of more pupils into schools.Education policy actors required efficient practical approaches for an increasing student population and the accompanying differences in achievement levels. 28Foucault defines problematisation as mechanisms of "how and why certain things (behavior, phenomena, processes) became a problem." 29Thus, the differentiation into groups can be interpreted as an early form of governmental practice that generates new information and knowledge about a phenomenon and attempts to find an efficient strategy for its problematisation.
In the further course of the seventeenth century, the conflict between Protestant and Catholic forces led to what Foucault called a period of blockage: the Thirty Years' War, peasant revolts and socioeconomic crises.Through the institutionalisation of absolutistbureaucratic state systems, further urbanisation and initial industrialisation processes, the medieval corporate society continued to dissolve.Within this framework, farreaching political and educational measures of restriction were installed, such as penitentiaries, mental institutions, prisons, hospitals and police facilities.The restoration of order was to be achieved through the confinement of social disorder.Such technologies of disciplinary power created exclusive subject-constructions that predefined and classified people as "the poor and the indigent, the idle and the debauched, the criminal and the dangerous, the sick and the insane." 30This negative natural state of mankind, in the sense of the Hobbesian theory, did not disappear until the Age of the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment and Bio-Politicisation of the Individual Learner
As concentrations of sovereign power, crises and exclusions of lower estates in absolutist states continued, a breeding ground for new social and political forces emerged.Based on existing humanistic approaches and scientific knowledge, famous thinkers of the Enlightenment created ideas concerning the reasonable and self-determined constitution of mankind.However, these new ideas still had to be institutionalised in the form of personal, political and economic rights and separation of powers.After long and discontinuous revolutionary processes, different social positions were no longer allocated based on birth status but rather on individual capability.These processes allowed educational systems to institutionalise independently of clerical responsibilities.Through the production of knowledge and skills, schools advanced to a central position in distributing individual opportunities and organising sociopolitical planning processes.
Increasing institutional challenges for state actors have become apparent in the development of schools since the second half of the eighteenth century.These problematisations resulted from revolutionary enlightenment movements, population growth and further industrial-urbanised requirements.In this regard, the monitorial system developed by Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell can serve as an example.This instruction method promised an efficient organisation of the growing number of students and gained widespread acceptance on an international level. 31In large rooms, a single teacher should be able to teach up to a thousand children of different age groups (see Figures 2  and 3).In small semicircles by the side walls, older pupils instructed younger children.Afterwards, tasks were repeated at the school benches in the middle.Contrary to its actual intention, this teaching and learning method was extremely inefficient in practice.The reciprocal structure was purely instructive, and the room arrangement was too elaborate and complex to meet individual requirements adequately. 32ence, teacher-centred instruction with differentiated age clusters emerged as the more effective strategy.The conception of a central responsible teacher who is communicatively related to a smaller and better observable group of children proved more successful. 33Within the reorganisation of school classes, an individualising and totalising moment occurred at the same time.The categorical classification according to age, behaviour and achievement makes clear the transition to a bourgeois-liberal hierarchical system: Measures (standards), methods (examination), techniques of analysis (statistics), which latterly attached themselves to knowledge (psychology), provided a technical repertoire for the classification of learners and the population as a whole.That is, a nexus of power/ knowledge and a human science, which writes the history of education policy, as a record, a file, a rank, an individuality directly onto that bit of the body, we call the mind.Power/ knowledge relations operate here to produce the phenomenon to which they are addressedthe individual learner. 34e institutionalisation of the school class through homogeneous grouping represented the most powerful strategy to address fundamental changes at that time.As state responsibilities increased, the expanding population was increasingly problematised and recognised as a resource for efficient governance.The establishment of compulsory schooling was subsequently one of the most important biopolitical rationalities because it registered, ranked and educated individual subjects. 35ontrary to the exclusive disciplinary techniques used in the seventeenth century, a slow shift towards more corrective and inclusive forms of power relations can be observed. 36Normalisation mechanisms are thus no longer predefined but oriented to an empirically examined medium.With the measurement of "lateness, absences, interruptions" and performance, the apparatus of security produces extensive knowledge regarding the pupils, serving as a basis for institutional planning processes. 37Categorisation then takes place through more detailed binary mechanisms: top/underperforming, punctual/unpunctual, absent/present or problematic/remarkable behaviour.These processes therefore do not imply the end of educational exclusion mechanisms but rather a substantial and temporal shift. 38To make intelligible the transition to idealised understandings of heterogeneity, the next section explains how the crisis of bourgeois subjectivity enabled the rise of alternative learning and teaching concepts on a broader basis.

Crises of Bourgeois Subjectivity: Progressive Education as Romanticised Counter-Utopias
The critical side effects of the establishment of liberal societies increasingly became apparent towards the end of the nineteenth century.In a genealogic analysis of selfmanagement concepts in Germany, Senne and Hesse describe the rapid societal, economic and cultural change as the central causes of the de-legitimisation of bourgeois identity. 39Rapidly advancing processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and demographic expansions facilitated new forms of mobility on spatial and social levels. 40owever, gaining new rights also meant the loss of old securities, such as food and shelter. 41The differentiation of social classes was also connected to the emergence of new dependencies on wage labour, which led to consequential socialistic protests and movements.Independent of class struggle, many people confronted completely different activities and new forms of behaviour patterns.Simmel's famous essay on "The Metropolis and the Mental Life" explains the ambiguity of urbanised life based on instrumental rationality, individualised competition and anonymity. 42These developments laid the foundation for the broad emergence of the Romantic Movement whose multidimensional forces and positions criticised bourgeois virtues of rationalism and materialism.As the mechanised way of life and work in industrialised cities was perceived as alienating and dangerous, it was contrasted by an idealised conception of natural subjectivity.Within the scope of educational issues, progressive educational movements provided one of these momentous counter-utopias.
Ellen Key's proclamation of "The Century of the Child" marks a historical upheaval in the perception and construction of childhood. 43Apart from Key's anti-Christian and ethnic understanding of education, numerous further approaches were established based on scientific-theosophical (Montessori), anthroposophical (Steiner), socialistic (Freinet, Neill) or democratic-pragmatic (Dewey) influences. 44This multiplicity of different fields reflected the parallelism of national, scientific, political, religious and spiritual-esoteric schemes at that time.Despite diversity, a central common factor can legitimise the description of these different forces as a comprehensive movement.All accounts share a natural and pure understanding of childhood and pursue the dissolution of hierarchical educational relationships between older and younger generations. 45These objectives imply a rejection of teacher-centred instruction and advocate personalised learning methods.In such settings, all children should be able to develop their skills naturally at their own pace and will.Although initial demands for self-regulated learning and progressive education can be found much earlier, 46 the outlined concepts can be interpreted as the first broader movements in that regard and represent "the Romantic Movement's insistence on growth from within." 47n light of a sociological perspective, another central common element is the neglect of institutional requirements.Each confrontational and negotiable relationship between autonomy and adaptation is one-sidedly dissolved at the classroom level.Even with Rousseau, who is often mistakenly regarded as the initiator of student-centred concepts, a natural development of children still took place through the strict guidance of a tutor. 48In other words, pedagogical counter-utopias reacted to the excessive demands of rationalised subjectivity with a romanticised negation of these requirements.Tenorth states that progressive education subsequently holds back from the radical consequences of its own principles. 49These consequences are expected to fulfil general aims to subvert existing systemic principles in a society.Conversely, the "personal reform . . .takes precedence over any reform of societal conditions." 50Pongratz regards these aspects in progressive education as an establishment of self-regulated control techniques that later became dominant within neoliberal governance. 51Against the background of the institutional blind spot, it is not surprising that these alternative school concepts did not take a leading role in national educational systems.However, because of the problem of efficiency in teacher-centred settings, personalised learning gained a fundamental revitalisation in the further course of the twentieth century.This problematisation emanates from the fact that synchronised learning processes either slow down high-achieving students or overexert pupils with learning difficulties. 52Within the scope of the Dalton and Winnetka Plan in 1917 and 1919, the consideration of individualised settings in terms of efficiency occurred relatively early in the United States.This development can be understood in the context of more pragmatic, technological and liberal backgrounds compared with stronger idealistic, humanistic and socialistic influences in Central Europe. 53The next section demonstrates that the neglect of systemic conditions allowed progressive education concepts to integrate unproblematically into current harmonised narratives.Furthermore, the section briefly reconstructs the amalgamation of social-integrative and economic demands through the emergence of the individualisation paradigm.

Glorification of the Learning Self: Triumph of the Individualisation Ideal
Tracing the genesis and symbiosis of differing educational requirements, the transition from standardisation to flexibilisation principles demonstrates a central turning point.Developed in the 1920s, scientific management became the leading form of production after the Second World War.The implications of this approach are based on mass production and mass consumption of goods and steered by Keynesian state interventions. 54In the context of the research subject, these aspects make intelligible the emergence of individualised settings within issues of efficiency.Starting from the United States, personalised or mastery learning originated in close connection with technological innovations and applied psychology.Test and learning machines developed by Pressey and Skinner were based on Fordist and behaviourist understandings of learning as a "deliverable unit." 55Other approaches of applied psychology defined the purpose of their research as "systematically to be placed at the service of commerce and industry." 56Given this understanding, educational processes should serve to select the most suitable persons for the requirements of industrial societies.
However, in the later course of the twentieth century, the promotion of qualifying functions increasingly aimed to replace selective mechanisms and outsource them to external institutions.In this sense, the dominant evaluation system in schools shifts from terminal to elective mechanisms.While elective systems like those in the United States, United Kingdom or Japan aim to prepare pupils for external selection processes, terminal systems like those in Germany or Austria constantly allocate credentials for them to enter further educational levels and paths. 57Gelhard regards this development as a transition from achieving societies to competence societies. 58Within this scope, the broader metacognitive concept of competence gradually enhanced the unidimensional intelligence quotient (IQ) developed by William Stern.Instead of solely evaluating students based on school grades, the aim is to provide wider criteria for problem-solving skills that are needed for actual challenges in a society.The expansion of theoretical learning approaches to emotional, social and personal fields was finally facilitated by emotional intelligence, a concept made famous by Daniel Goleman.As behaviouristic models could not deliver the promised and desired output, they faced rejection amid these developments.
From a more structural point of view, the problematisations of mechanical models already described can be viewed as symbolic manifestations of deeper crises in the economic, political, social and cultural fields.The rigidity of Fordist control principles showed a lack of flexibility on various levels.Economically and politically, these principles were unable to react adequately to changing production requirements, technological conditions, consumer desires or real wage levels. 59Socially and culturally, they also led to a general suppression of individual responsibility and maturity.Theoreticians of the Frankfurt School in particular criticised the standardisation of thought processes oriented towards the rationalities of mass consumption. 60Within the scope of these circumstances, a broad base of multidimensional reformatory forces emerged.Each of these movements pursued different agendas, ranging from efficiency enhancement of economic production factors to sociopolitical demands for the integration of marginalised groups.Nonetheless, they found common ground in their paradigms on individuality and flexibility.
At the institutional level of schools, issues regarding technocratic concepts first became apparent as part of the "realistic turn" in educational science. 61As school pilot projects expanded, more and more flexible and autonomous control concepts were applied and scientifically evaluated. 62At the same time, progressive educational concepts underwent an important revitalisation.Against the background of the anti-authoritarian spirit of the emancipation movement, alternative types of schools with individualised learning methods gained widespread attention. 63Bürgi's analysis of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) as a growing policy actor demonstrates how these aspects relate to the critique of the economic backwardness of European states in the late 1960s. 64Within the scope of a new socioeconomic alliance, investment in education was increasingly considered as a resource for economic development.Because sociocultural factors should not waste individual potential and human capital accumulation, educational policy processes became healing forces solving formerly opposing objectives. 65his new coalition gathered further momentum during globalisation, neoliberalisation, dynamisation and pluralisation tendencies in postmodern service societies.The outsourcing, fragmentation and flexibilisation of production processes and the constant technological progress led to rapid changes in professional requirements.The perpetually changing demands of a knowledge-based economy made it necessary to generate learning skills on an individual, self-regulated basis to react to these processes flexibly. 66owever, the regaining of planning security at the entrepreneurial level also resulted in the casualisation of employment, abatement of social security systems and expansion of individualised competition. 67Accordingly, the delegation of economic and integrative demands onto educational institutions increased and schools became the central agency for the realisation of efficient and moral implications.The latter supported personalised learning to deconstruct institutional segregation mechanisms that prevent the inclusion and promotion of all children regardless of origin, language, gender or disability; 68 hence, consideration of the individual needs of pupils can only be fulfilled through heterogeneous grouping. 69ontextualising these remarks in Foucault's theory, the rationality of neoliberal techniques becomes apparent.While the core element of liberal governmentality consisted of generating empirically oriented knowledge and means for institutional planning concepts, the outlined processes of neoliberalism radicalised its implications.Due to the economic and sociocultural delegation of responsibilities to individual schools and learners, the apparatus of security needs to reorganise its normalisation and control mechanisms.On a small-scale level, power technologies operate by reframing insecurity to freedom and individual human capital investment.Binary normalisation therefore modifies its evaluation to categories of self-responsible/not-self-responsible or autonomous/dependent students. 70On a large-scale level, outsourced evaluation processes similar to international comparative studies of the OECD regain institutional control over delegated responsibilities.While educational goals remain standardised, only the processes in achieving these aims are individualised.Within the scope of political economy as the "major form of knowledge," governmental rationalities continue to integrate more and more elements to replace the selection residuals of origins with measures of performance and competition. 71All these aspects reveal a "multiplicity of force relations" within the individualisation ideal. 72To finally stress the essential aspects of this multiplicity, the amalgamation of economic and integrative educational requirements can be outlined through the following three dimensions.
(1) Equity and efficiency.In current fields of educational policy, moral implications of justice and equality combine with performance-oriented objectives of enhanced efficiency.Following the logic that educational systems are educationally and socially "divisive, unjust and wasteful," 73 the demand for the inclusion of disadvantaged students emerges within achievement-related criteria.It is in this spirit that international comparative studies examine the socioeconomic influences on the performance level of pupils.Therefore, "improving the educational attainment of the disadvantaged can pay over the long run . . .through long-term savings in income transfer, public social programmes, and public health." 74The above-mentioned tendency towards competenceoriented elective evaluation systems and inclusive security mechanisms promotes socialintegrative demands that optimise the cost-benefit ratio of educational investments.In this context, the question arises of how the installation of inclusive and moral principles emerged as accidental side effects of economic requirements rather than as ends in themselves.
(2) Structural reform.The socioeconomic coalition finds further central common ground in its progressive positioning.Accordingly, economic, progressive and inclusive education criticise technocratic and hierarchical control concepts, mechanical learning approaches and overloaded state school curricula and demand school autonomy, projectoriented teaching concepts and competence-based, individualised learning plans. 75This reformatory character is accompanied by a mixture of integrative-neoliberal ideas with "camouflaged social language." 76However, the different implementation strategies and backgrounds are not addressed.Opposing objectives of institutional or individualised responsibility, formal and standardised or informally and de-standardised evaluation systems give reason to expect conflict-laden areas.
(3) Individualisation as ideal way.In contrast to these expectable controversies, personalised learning functions as a strategic vehicle to disregard antagonistic educational requirements and to position itself as a magic formula.Economic stakeholders underline the need for self-responsible settings due to rapidly changing occupational demands in dynamic societies.Similarly, heterogeneous grouping and student-centred methods should meet the needs of all children regardless of origin, gender, disability or religion.Within this win-win situation, there are no more contradictions, conflicts, disadvantages or other negative outcomes to address. 77Dammer describes this symbiotic relationship as a worship of individualisation processes.Sharing a reductionist and utopian social monism, the hybrid combines economic self-management concepts with moral imperatives of heterogeneity. 78As a result, individualised learning becomes the central interface between neoliberal rationalities and inclusive normativity.Economic narratives can subsequently continue to promote their objectives within empathic-moral dimensions, while social-integrative demands obtain quantified legitimisations for their programmes.

Conclusion
The foregoing discussions are intended to provide an overview of the sociohistorical developments in student-centred learning.The rational reconstructive literature review shows that the centuries-old problematisation of heterogeneity in schools generates questions about centralised or decentralised learning settings.With the transition to liberal governmental rationale, the expanding school population required institutions and practices to produce comprehensive knowledge about its inner coherences.In the course of different attempts and approaches, teacher-centred settings with homogeneous grouping seemed to be the most effective and dominant strategy.The first crises of rationalised demands on bourgeois subjectivities made possible the romanticised counter-utopias of autonomous and self-responsible learning individuals.However, it was only through the multidimensional critique on Fordist standardisation principles that integrative and economic educational objections could form a broad alliance.The problematised aspects of homogeneous and teacher-centred settings occurred on levels of efficiency and equality at the same time.Consequently, individualised learning became the missing link in harmonising opposing educational demands.
These findings are not only relevant for sociohistorical classification; they also provide important perspectives on modest or negative evaluation results of student-centred learning. 79Regarding the large number of investments, present results fall short of expectations concerning performance-related aspects. 80At the same time, studies point out that new self-regulation standards have led to an increase in educational inequalities. 81Accordingly, tendencies of overburdening occur, as self-responsibility is a virtue explicitly promoted by the educated middle and upper classes. 82In addition, the resulting issue of isolated students hinders a democratic negotiation of truth and justice and can thus intensify post-factual conflicts of knowledge and cultural values. 83The sociohistorical analysis reveals that the ideal of the individual learner has emerged from conflicting contentions and that disregarding the risks and conflicting goals of personalised learning co-creates contemporary problems.As a result, this article addresses the need for further research to be conducted to analyse the possibilities for a more public discourse concerning how to tackle competing educational needs at the classroom level.Such knowledge might give insights into the macro-and microstructural conditions under which student-centred and teacher-centred learning methods serve as productive, dysfunctional, integrative or exclusionary instruments of different requirements.
Finally, a reference to transnational and postcolonial perspectives exposes the emerging problems that occur when an ideal originating in western countries is exported globally without being tied to local contexts and path dependencies. 84Global performance and inclusion norms need more profound insights into cross-national historical conditions.In this way, well-intentioned development goals could be adopted in a more life-world-oriented and decolonised way tailored to regional structures and cultures.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1."Class in the 16th century, divided into groups of age and level of knowledge."Legend of St Ruprecht, Jakob Köbel, Oppenheim, 1524, copyright akg-images.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. "Inner view of a boys' school of the British and Foreign School Society."1818, copyright Pictura Paedagogica.