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."

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