This is a draft of a possible chapter, giving a broad idea of what they might be like…again, only a draft.
Parecon e Educación
Parte da educación é intrínseca e orientada ao individuo. Para pensar a educación comezando polo alumno, examinamos o proceso de transmisión de información e habilidades e desenvolvemento de talentos nos alumnos. Preguntámonos cal é a mellor forma de educar ao alumnado dadas as esixencias do que se ensina, os atributos do alumnado e as capacidades do profesorado.
Pero parte da educación tamén é contextual e social. Para pensar a educación comezando pola sociedade, examinamos o proceso de transferencia de información e habilidades e desenvolvemento de talentos dende o punto de vista das necesidades da sociedade. Preguntámonos, cal é a mellor forma de educar ao alumnado coherente co logro do que a sociedade busca?
O ideal sería obter a mesma resposta desde calquera destes ángulos. O ideal é que coincidan os intereses da sociedade e os de cada nova xeración de estudantes. Se é así, teremos unha axenda clara. Se non, teremos que escoller entre atender aos estudantes ou atender aos ditados da sociedade.
Most readers of this book live in societies that have capitalist economies with private ownership of productive assets, corporate divisions of labor, authoritarian decision-making, and market allocation.
Because of these institutions, capitalism has huge disparities in wealth and income. About two percent of the population, called capitalists, own productive property and accrue the benefits. What parecon’s advocates call the coordinator class of empowered lawyers, doctors, engineers, managers, and so on, including roughly 20% of the population, largely monopolizes empowering work and the daily levers of control over their own and other people’s economic lives. The coordinators enjoy high incomes, great personal and group influence over economic outcomes, and great status. Finally, the bottom 80% do largely rote work, take orders from those above, barely influence economic outcomes, and receive low income. This is the working class.
This threefold class division is brought into being by the key institutions of capitalism. First, private ownership of productive property demarcates the dominant capitalist class. Markets structurally impose on owners a need to accumulate profits. The corporate decision-making structure gives owners their ultimate power to dispose over their property.
Second, the low number of owners and large requirements of control propel creation of an intermediate coordinator class. Owners can’t oversee their wide reaching properties without assistance. The corporate division of labor defines the coordinator class as those monopolizing empowering work and access to daily decision making levers. The requisites of legitimating the authority of managers and other coordinator class members ensure that this class will also monopolize training, skills, and knowledge – as well as the confidence that accompany these.
Third, all these features ensure that the largest portion of citizens are left with little or no individual bargaining power, having to work for low wages at rote, tedious, and overwhelmingly obedient jobs.
These features will vary in the suffering they impose as well as the options they permit, depending on the relative bargaining power of the three classes. But in every instance of capitalism, the broad scaffolding of the economy’s defining institutions will be the same. What are the implications for education?
If an economy has 2% ruling by owning, about 18-20% administering and defining, and about 80% obeying, then each year’s new recruit from the educational system must be acclimated to occupy his or her designated slot. Recruits must be prepared to exercise assigned functions, to pay attention to designated responsibilities, to ignore distractions. This is true for those who will rule, for those who will have great but less than ruling power, and for those who will overwhelmingly obey.
A useful word for all this is channeling. Each new generation is dived into segments each of which is in turn channeled into its appropriate destination. The educational system takes the incoming population and processes it so that for about 80% of its members the inclination to impact events is reduced to nearly nil, confidence is nearly obliterated, knowledge is kept minimal and narrow, and the main skills learned are to obey and to endure boredom. Another 20 percent are channeled to expect to have a say over their own lives and other people’s as well, to have confidence, to have a monopoly on various skills and insights, and so on. The elite learn at the major societal “finishing schools” such as Harvard and Oxford how to have dinner with one another, and otherwise comport themselves in accord with their lofty station.
The point is simple. If a society requires its populace to have three broad patterns of hopes, expectations, and capacities, its educational system will divide its populace and provide precisely those differentiated outcomes. In that context, any effort to look at education from the perspective of each individual maximally developing their potentials and pursuing their interests will either be mere rhetoric or limited by presuppositions that most people have no serious potentials or interests, or will try to attain outcomes against the economy’s needs. Indeed, these are precisely the attitudes regarding education we see in our societies.
Is there any alternative? Will society’s hierarchies always trump pedagogy aimed at the development of each student’s potentials and aspirations? Will significant gains for students only arrive as a result of struggle, and only persist while they are steadfastly defended, being periodically obliterated by economic dictates whenever vigilance diminishes?
When the Carnegie Commission on Education considered the state of U.S. education as part of a governmental effort to understand what “went wrong” in the 1960s, it decided that the problem was too much education. The population, the commission reported, expected to have too much say in society, too much income, too much job fulfillment, too much dignity and respect — and upon getting ready to enter the economy many members of the population had their expectations trashed and as a result they rebelled. The solution, the commission reported, was to reduce the tendency for education to induce high expectations in too large a proportion of the population. It was necessary to cut back higher education and make lower education more rote and mechanical – save for those who were destined to rule, of course.
If we look at education from the angle of the person to be educated, readers of this book may have differences or open questions about exact methodologies, but I suspect we would all agree on broad aims.
Students should be assisted to discover their capacities and potentials, to explore them, and to fulfill those they wish to elaborate while simultaneously becoming broadly confident and able to think and reason and argue and assess in the ways needed to be one among many socially equal and caring adults. Others might formulate this mandate a bit differently, but one thing is quite clear. For this type education to happen, society must need this type of incoming adult. It must not want wage slaves who are obedient and passive, for example.
Polo tanto, para ser compatible cunha digna pedagoxía concibida dende o punto de vista do estudantado, a economía precisa chamar a cada participante ao máximo aproveitamento das súas capacidades e inclinacións. Que tipo de economía, en lugar do capitalismo, podería facer isto?
O oitenta por cento de nós ensínanos actualmente nas escolas a soportar o aburrimento e a recibir ordes porque iso é o que o capitalismo necesita para os seus traballadores. O outro vinte por cento son insensibles ás condicións dos de abaixo e ignoran a súa propia insensibilidade, agás os que están na parte superior, que simplemente son feitos crueis.
In a parecon, education also must be compatible with society’s broad defining institutions. Indeed, that will be true in every society, always. But in a society with a parecon — assuming that other spheres of social life are comparably just and equitable – society will need us to be as capable, creative, and productive as we can be, and to participate as full citizens.
Participatory economics is a solidarity economy, a diversity economy, an equity economy, and a self-managing economy. It is a classless economy. In this respect, its educational system would be based on and generate, also, solidarity, diversity, equity, and self management — as well as rich and diverse capacities of comprehension and creativity. It benefits all that each of society’s citizens be as confident, as educated, as possible.
A cuestión é que baixo o capitalismo falar de pedagoxía desexable ten dúas lóxicas posibles. Por unha banda, pode tratarse dunha pedagoxía coherente coa reprodución das xerarquías da sociedade. Nese caso, trátase máis de control e canalización que do que a maioría de nós entendemos por educación, como a edificación e a realización. Por outra banda, podería tratarse de edificación e cumprimento, pero logo é oposición. Está tentando establecer resultados contrarios á lóxica do mercado, a propiedade privada, a remuneración pola propiedade e o poder e as divisións corporativas do traballo.
With participatory economics, good education isn’t something we win and then perpetually defend or lose because the underlying institutions of society are at odds with it. Good education is part and parcel of the logic of economic and social life.
Existen implicacións para a estrutura e os procedementos reais da escolarización e da educación que están implícitas na lóxica e estruturas do parecon? Supoño que a resposta é si, non menos importante pero non limitada ao feito de que, por suposto, as institucións educativas serían autoxestionadas, interactuarían coa planificación participativa, incorporarían complexos laborais equilibrados, etc.
Schools, universities, training centers, would have actors who fulfill balanced jobs, not some who teach, some who administrate, and some who clean up, etc. But the specific meaning of all that regarding pedagogy and more detailed and specific matters of actual methodology of training, learning, sharing, etc., will no doubt emerge only from the actual experience of teaching and learning in a new society, and will no doubt also have a myriad of shapes and forms.
The point is, capitalism annihilates aspirations for worthy education, save for a very few and even there if we include a moral component. Parecon actualizes educational aspirations, and does so for all.
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