Education Commons
= "a virtual community of academic systems users, designers and systems implementer sharing knowledge, experiences and best practices".
URL = http://www.educationcommons.org/
Description
"Education Commons is a virtual community of academic systems users, designers and systems implementer sharing knowledge, experiences and best practices.
The goal of the community is to create an open and transparent system of communication between diverse groups committed to advancing the state of education worldwide. It’s meant to be a virtual commons, where sharing and participation are key. We encourage you to contribute your thoughts, ideas, programs and projects."
(http://www.educationcommons.org/)
Discussion
Lukas Peter: From public education to an education commons
Lukas Peter:
"Having analyzed housing and health care as potential commons, now let me turn to my final example: education. In contrast to housing and health, however, it can generally be said that education is one of the most acknowledged public goods in Western countries. In this section I compare the notion of public education to an education commons. In order to do this, I firstly discuss arguments for and against education as a public good. Secondly, I argue that access to knowledge is a central aspect of public education. Here, I focus on the problem of the privatization of scientific knowledge in academic journals and argue that scientific knowledge must be organized as an open-access commons. In a third step, I discuss how public schooling can be organized as a commons.
The defense and critique of public education
The general conception of education as a universal public good is based on the critique of earlier social arrangements, most importantly of feudalism, in which only aristocrats could afford to educate their children, and the children of peasants and lower social classes learned only those skills necessary to fulfill their occupations. This conception is expressed quite clearly by Adam Smith, not so much because as in spite of his defense of private enterprise and a free and competitive market. As I have already pointed out, Smith argues that an increase in the division of labor leads to the problem that laborers become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human to become” (Smith 1994: 840). A Smith appreciates, the tragedy of an unregulated education commons makes state provision of mandatory public education necessary in order to overcome the problem of an entirely private education that leads to the exploitation of lower classes.
We will come across this problem again when discussing vocational education and the competitive market in the next chapter on markets. According to Smith, a “civilized and commercial society” therefore requires the “education of the common people […] more than that of people with rank and fortune” (ibid.: 841).
He continues,
- But though the common people cannot, in any civilized society, be so well instructed as people of some rank and fortune, the most essential parts of education, however, to read, write, and account, can be acquired at so early a period of life, that the greater part even of those who are to be bred to the lowest occupations, have time to acquire them before they can be employed in those occupations. For a very small expense the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education. The public can facilitate this acquisition by establishing in every parish or district a little school, where children may be taught for a reward so moderate, that even a common laborer may afford it […]. (ibid.: 842-3)
The aims of a public education are therefore, according to Smith, to educate people
in order to make them “more decent and orderly”, “more respectable” and “therefore
more disposed to respect […] superiors” (ibid.: 846). Although Smith concedes that
the state “derives no advantage” from public education, these qualities do, however,
provide for a more stable and orderly society. More generally, educated people are
“less liable […] to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition” and “more disposed
to examine, and more capable of seeing through, the interested complaints of faction and sedition” (ibid.). In turn, public education enables people of lower social classes to be “less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to
the measures of government” (ibid.). Here, we see the enlightened impetus that
has continued until today in which education is believed to create more reflective,
more critical citizens who, in turn, uphold an orderly and civilized society.
While this basic defense of public education has become widespread since the
18th century, its concept has been greatly expanded since then. Today, public education is not simply limited to the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, but includes general knowledge of history, politics and society and sometimes extends
to vocational training, university education and further, adult education. Here, education is not only provided to increase social stability or, in Rawls’ terminology, a “well-ordered society”, but, more importantly, in order to provide people with
“fair equality of opportunity” (JF: 139). Put somewhat more generally, public education should provide people with necessary intellectual resources in the form of the knowledge and the cognitive skills needed to enable them to develop and realize their capacities and to freely choose their occupation (TJ: 243, 374). Like Smith,
Rawls argues that resources in education should be allocated so “as to improve the
long-term expectation of the least favored” (TJ: 87). Here, educational and vocational training are defined as central aspects of a property-owning democracy that should be dispersed widely throughout society by the state (JF: 139).
As Rawls explains:
- I assume […] that there is fair (as opposed to formal) equality of opportunity. This establishing a public school system. It also enforces and underwrites equality of opportunity in economic activities and in the free choice of occupation. (TJ: 243)
Not only should access to educational resources create a just background structure
for a free society, but it should also support the reproduction of the system over
time.
As Rawls explains:
- Their education should also prepare them to be fully cooperating members of society and enable them to be self-supporting; it should also encourage the political virtues so that they want to honor the fair terms of social cooperation in their relations with the rest of society. (JF: 156)
The role of public education is therefore both an institutional and a moral one:
institutional access to educational resources should support the social cooperation
necessary to uphold a just system. This is, at least, Rawls’ ideal theory of a public
education provided by the state. Although not always realized in this ideal form,the
widespread provision of public education by the state in many Western countries
can be understood as an extraordinary achievement.
Despite “the great aspiration” (Oelkers 1989) embodied in these ideals, which developed during the 19th and 20th centuries, public education has been accompanied by its critics since its beginning. As with most public institutions and services, a common ‘progressive’ criticism has always been that state education is bureaucratic, uniform and unresponsive to the needs of the children and the community (Oelkers 2010; Hayes 2007). Often, these criticisms focus on the disciplining techniques of educational practices and the overall aims of educational policies that produce subservient and diligent workers in the name of economic utility, productivity and growth, but not critical, creative, and free citizens for a democratic society (Illich 1972; Dewey 2008; Freire 2012). Furthermore, and in spite of the widespread expansion of public education since the Second World War, state provision of education has appeared unable to counter social inequalities.
In contrast, numerous studies have demonstrated how public schools merely reproduce the inequalities that already exist in society (Bernstein 1973; Willis 1981; Bourdieu/Passeron 1990; Lareau 2003).
Increasingly in Anglo-Saxon countries since the 1980s, this critique of public education has, however, been used by ‘conservatives’ to support an economic liberalization of the provision of education (House 1998; Apple 1996,2000,2006). Caught in the state-market dichotomy, the only alternative to the top-down state provision of education is therefore thought to be ‘free choice’, which is interpreted as the introduction of competitive market mechanisms and the privatization of public education (Friedman 1955, 2002; Murray 1984; Walberg/Bast 2003). With David Bollier, we can understand this process as an enclosure of state-provided educational commons (Bollier 2013; Björk 2017). At elementary and high school levels, means that in addition to maintaining the usual kinds of social overhead capital, the government tries to insure equal chances of education and culture for persons similarly endowed and motivated either by subsidizing private schools or this can occur through the influence of corporations on educational policy (including curricula and textbooks) and school campuses (Neumann 2014; House 1998).
More generally, a market-oriented public school system focuses on the output and comparison of grades (e.g. PISA), the competition between schools and, most importantly, the free choice of schools through voucher systems. At a higher level, this can be seen in decreases in public funding of college and university education, and higher tuition fees and student debt in Anglo-Saxon countries (Mortenson 2012; Goodnight/Hingstman 2013). Further effects include a general increase in the competitive acquisition of external, third-party funds for scientific research in Europe (Boer et al. 2007; Bolli/Somogyi 2010) and a boom in expensive, private academic journals (Tenopir/King 2000; Guédon 2001; Kranich 2007). We will discuss the problem of these journals shortly. Although not all of these reforms and developments can be declared to be simply wrong, the general tendency towards privatization of education brings us back to the problem we initially attempted to overcome through a widespread provision of public education: the inequality of access to educational resources. By declaring that the “government has not solved the problem[s] of education because government is the problem” (Maclaury 1990: ix),we end up in the same position we originally found ourselves in: a private provision of education is not interested in the needs and desires of those less well-off. As Adam Smith already argued from a utilitarian standpoint, this is problematic because it decreases society’s productive or, for us from a commons perspective, caring capabilities and threatens the social order. From Rawls’ normative perspective, this inequality denies the less well-off the opportunity to develop their capacities. Thus, the privatization of education appears to be something like an attempt to put out a fire with burning sticks.
What, then, is the alternative to a top-down provision of education by the state and a more private provision based on competitive market mechanisms? Here, we must again bring in the notion of commons as an alternative to the state-market dichotomy. For education, this generally implies a democratization of governance processes, institutions, and educational practices and resources. A commons interpretation of education builds on some of these critiques, yet places democracy at the core of its arrangements. To understand what this could mean in more concrete terms, let us begin with higher education and the informational resources on which it depends, and then turn to the governance, institutions and contents of elementary and high school education."
(https://www.transcript-verlag.de/shopMedia/openaccess/pdf/oa9783839454244.pdf)
Schools and schooling in an education commons
Lukas Peters:
"Having discussed information commons in higher education, let us now turn to the more general question of how public schooling can be organized as a commons. On the institutional level, this implies, first and foremost, that the people affected by public education should have the right to codetermine its arrangements. Democratic participation must be understood as the answer to top-down uniform state provision of education and as an alternative to market mechanisms and privatization that cater to the well-off.
By understanding public education as a common, welfare recipients and market consumers are, ideally, transformed into active, participating citizens or, in my vocabulary, commoners.
This principle of democratic codetermination can be applied to numerous levels of decision-making: educational policy at national, state and municipal levels, the administration of schooling districts and the management of individual schools. Because it is often believed that political participation is more difficult on the national level, political participation in educational affairs is most commonly achieved through organizational bodies such as local school councils, parent-teacher associations and inter-school student councils. Another type of organizational body could be a Local Education Forum as discussed by Richard Hatcher, which “would be a body open to all with an interest in education, including of course teachers and other school workers, school governors, parents and school students”, enabling these people to “discuss and take positions on all key policy issues” (Hatcher 2012: 37). The general aims of these organizations and instruments are to increase the effectiveness and accountability in the provision of education according to the needs and desires of the affected people. Despite the importance of this idea for the provision of education by the state, I will not focus on these issues because the ideas are not new and there is already a rather large body of international literature on this topic (Golarz/Golarz 1995; Brehony/Deem 1995; Fung 2003a; Lewis/Naidoo 2006; Arvind 2009; Smit/Oosthuizen 2011; Long 2014; Jung et al. 2016). However, it is important to note that despite this emphasis on local, democratic control of education, a national government is necessary to mitigate substantial inequalities between different school districts. Decentralized democratic bodies are incapable of dealing with this problem, which arises at a higher level between districts. The question, then, is how democratic participation can be strengthened not only on the local level, but also on the national or even at supranational levels of educational politics and policy-making. In general terms, democratic participation should hopefully transform a top-down provision of public education into an education commons structured as a multilayered and polycentric governance system.
Aside from policymaking and the management of schools, it is also necessary to discuss the notion of an education commons in relation to schooling. In very general terms, I would like to emphasize the importance of democratic and ecological knowledge and values for schooling in an education commons. The reason for this should hopefully be rather clear from the preceding discussions. Nevertheless, let me briefly summarize my reasons again. In general terms, democracy should enable people to co-create and codetermine their socio-ecological conditions. The importance of democracy in educational matters lies not only in its instrumental value for overcoming social dilemmas and tragedies, but also in the intrinsic value of collective action and convivial modes of living. When school education focuses on democracy, it should emphasize the importance of individual freedom in relation to the freedom of others. This is what I have defined as ecological freedom: the freedom in, through and against others. The underlying value that a democracy should cultivate is thus the recognition of and respect for oneself and the other. This reciprocity lays the foundation for the deliberation and negotiation over other social values and the organization of interdependent individual lives in a shared reality. As I mentioned in my discussion of democracy, the principle of autonomy should, however, be integrated in a larger framework that includes not only the human world but also the non-human world. This, in turn, leads us to the importance of ecology in educational matters. Essentially, ecology is a principle that should enable people to recognize environmental limits, understand the relational functioning of eco-systems and negotiate the intrinsic and instrumental value of other interdependent living beings. In terms of norms, ecology should cultivate the values of diversity, reciprocal interdependence, care and sustainability. This is what Capra, Mattei and others have called eco-literacy (Capra/Mattei 2015: 174-8; Kahn 2010; Peacock 2004). As we see, however, ecology and democracy should not be seen as two separate entities, but rather as complementary means to realize a just and sustainable evolution of life.Thus,the principles of ecology should be combined with those of democracy, ultimately fostering an understanding for ecological democracy in education (Houser 2009).
Let us briefly discuss what that implies for schools and teaching. On the one hand, it would imply that democracy and ecology would be taught at schools as subjects. In many schools, this is already the case: democracy is a theme in what is called civic or citizenship education, which is sometimes subsumed into history or some other subject; ecology, in turn, is normally taught in geography or biology class. Here, democracy and ecology are treated solely as educational contents or as objects that exist ‘out there’ in the world. I believe this to be the traditional approach to these topics. Although sometimes pedagogically necessary, this approach is somewhat problematic since it reproduces the Cartesian divide between res cogitans and res extensa or subject and object that underlies the false dichotomy that divides our common ecological reality into human being on the one side and nature on the other. For this reason, an education commons would interpret democracy and ecology not merely as educational contents, but also as educational forms, as ways of learning. This would imply, on the other hand, that learners not only acquire knowledge of democracy and ecology, but also experience and practice these principles in an interactive and systemic manner. As John Dewey already argued over 100 years ago, this means that democracy is not simply taught, but that it is also a way of learning and, more generally, a way of life (Dewey 2008). Similarly, we could say that ecology is not merely something to be learned about, but also a way of learning.
A democratic and ecological education would thus attempt to recognize the necessity and importance of each person in collaborative learning processes. Learning would not simply occur as independent self -organization, but rather as an interactive and interdependent cooperative process that is negotiated between the pupils and teachers in a way that recognizes their real diversity. Admittedly, this notion of cooperative learning is not new (Slavin 1996; Gillies 2007; Johnson/Johnson 2009). An ecological twist to this approach, however, would integrate one’s environment into these interactive processes. For elementary school children, this could imply co-designing and helping to build a playground that fulfills their needs and desires – and, possibly, integrates ecological niches for plants and animals (Lozanovska/Xu 2013). For high school students, cooperative, ecological learning could involve projects in which the school itself is altered to become more sustainable. Pupils could, for example, plan and organize the installation of solar panels on the school’s roof – possibly they could even learn how to assemble solar panels themselves.
In this sense, the aim of a democratic and ecological approach to educational praxis would be to foster engaged citizens who can collaborate with others and develop skills in order to actively co-create and transform their common reality in a sustainable manner.
In sum, an education commons would differ from public education in two significant ways. As we saw in the discussion of information and knowledge, an open access information commons would provide the wider public with access to academic research that is, in turn, managed by the researchers and institutions that generate this information. Secondly, I have argued that an education commons would imply the democratization of educational policymaking and the management of schools. This would expand the opportunities given to the wider public to organize their education according to their needs and desires. Furthermore, I have contended that democratic and ecological knowledge and values should be integrated into schooling. This should provide children and young adults the chance to learn in an individualized yet cooperative manner in interaction with their environment. At all levels, the aim of education in an education commons is thus to empower people to become commoners for a commons-creating society."
(https://www.transcript-verlag.de/shopMedia/openaccess/pdf/oa9783839454244.pdf)
Source:
- Chapter 7. The Role of the State in a Commons-Creating Society. By Lukas Peter. In: Democracy, Markets and the Commons
URL = https://www.transcript-verlag.de/shopMedia/openaccess/pdf/oa9783839454244.pdf