Thinking about education involves two broad frames of reference that in turn generate two approaches of study.
Part of education is intrinsic and oriented to the individual. To think about education starting with the student, we examine the process of conveying information and skills and developing talents in students. We ask what is the best way to educate students given the exigencies of what is taught, the attributes of students, and the abilities of teachers?
Nhưng một phần của giáo dục cũng mang tính bối cảnh và xã hội. Khi nghĩ về giáo dục bắt đầu từ xã hội, chúng ta xem xét quá trình chuyển giao thông tin, kỹ năng và phát triển tài năng từ quan điểm nhu cầu của xã hội. Chúng tôi hỏi, cách tốt nhất để giáo dục học sinh phù hợp với việc đạt được những gì xã hội tìm kiếm là gì?
Lý tưởng nhất là chúng ta sẽ nhận được cùng một câu trả lời từ một trong hai góc độ này. Lý tưởng nhất là lợi ích của xã hội và lợi ích của mỗi thế hệ sinh viên mới sẽ phù hợp. Nếu vậy, chúng ta sẽ có một chương trình nghị sự rõ ràng. Nếu không, chúng ta sẽ phải lựa chọn giữa việc phục vụ học sinh hoặc phục vụ cho mệnh lệnh của xã hội.
Hầu hết độc giả của bài tiểu luận này sống trong các xã hội có nền kinh tế tư bản với quyền sở hữu tư nhân về tài sản sản xuất, sự phân công lao động trong doanh nghiệp, ra quyết định độc đoán và phân bổ thị trường.
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 I call the coordinator class of empowered lawyers, doctors, engineers, managers, and so on, includes 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 coorindators 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 them 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. The corporate division of labor defines the coordinator class as monopolizing empowering work and access to daily decision making levers. The requisites of legitimation 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, 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 about implications for education?
If an economy has 2% ruling, about 18-20% administering and defining, and about 80% obeying, then each year’s new recruits from the educational system must be acclimated to occupy its designated slots. It must be prepared to exercise its functions, to pay attention to its 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 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, 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 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 rebelled. The solution, the commission reported, was to reduce the tendency for education to induce high expectations in most 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, authors and 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 actors. 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.
Vì vậy, để tương thích với phương pháp sư phạm xứng đáng được hình thành từ góc độ sinh viên, nền kinh tế cần kêu gọi mỗi người tham gia sử dụng tối đa năng lực và khuynh hướng của họ. Loại nền kinh tế nào, thay cho chủ nghĩa tư bản, có thể làm được điều này?
The alternative I propose I call participatory economics or parecon for short. In summary, parecon seeks to fulfill four key values (in addition to meeting needs and fulfilling potentials) via the use of four defining institutional commitments. The values are solidarity, diversity, equity, and self management. The institutions are workers and consumers councils with self managed decision making norms and methods, balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and participatory planning.
In summary, the first value is solidarity. Capitalism is a system in which to get ahead one must trample others. You must ignore the horrible pain suffered by those left below or literally step on them, pushing them farther down. In capitalism, as a famous baseball manager used to say’¦’nice guys finish last.’ Participatory economics, or Parecon, is in contrast intrinsically a solidarity economy. Its institutions for production, consumption, and allocation propel even antisocial people into having to address others well being. To get ahead in a Parecon you have to act on the basis of solidarity. And this first parecon value is entirely uncontroversial. Only a psychopath would argue that all other things equal, an economy is better if it produces hostility and anti-sociality.
The second value we want a good economy to advance is diversity. Capitalist markets homogenize options. They trumpet opportunity but in fact curtail most avenues of satisfaction and development by replacing everything human and caring with only what is most commercial, most profitable, and most in accord with existing hierarchies of power and wealth. In contrast, Parecon’s institutions for production, consumption, and allocation not only don’t reduce variety, they emphasize finding and respecting diverse solutions to problems. Parecon recognizes that we are finite beings who can benefit from enjoying what others do that we ourselves have no time to do, and also that we are fallible beings who should not vest all our hopes in single routes of advance, instead insuring against damage by exploring diverse avenues and options. And this value too is entirely uncontroversial. Only a perverse individual would argue that all other things equal, an economy is better if it reduces options.
The third value we want a good economy to advance is equity.
Capitalism overwhelmingly rewards property and bargaining power. It says that those who have a deed to productive property by virtue of having that piece of paper deserve profits. And it says that those who have great bargaining power based on anything from monopolizing knowledge or skills, to having better tools or organizational advantages, to being born with special talents, to being able to command brute force, are entitled to whatever they can take. But a participatory economy is an equity economy in that Parecon’s institutions for production, consumption, and allocation not only don’t destroy or obstruct equity, they propel it. But what do we mean by equity?
Parecon of course rejects rewarding property ownership. And it of course also rejects rewarding power. But what about output? Should people get back from the social product an amount equal to what they produce as part of the social product? It seems equitable’¦but is it?
Supposing in each case they do the same work for the same length of time at the same intensity, why should someone who has better tools get more income than someone with worse tools? Why should someone who happens to produce something highly valued be rewarded more than someone who produces something less valued, but still socially desired? Why should someone who was lucky in the genetic lottery, perhaps getting genes for big size or for musical talent ‘¦get rewarded more than someone who was less lucky genetically?
In a participatory economy for those who can work, remuneration is for effort and sacrifice. If you work longer, you get more reward. If you work harder, you get more reward. If you work in worse conditions and at more onerous tasks, you get more reward. But you do not get more reward for having better tools, or for producing something that happens to be more valued, or even for having innate highly productive talents.
Rewarding only the effort and sacrifice that people expend in their work is controversial. Some anti-capitalists think that people should be rewarded for output, so that a great athlete should earn fortunes, and a quality doctor should earn way more than a hard working farmer or short order cook. Parecon rejects that norm. In fact, rewarding according to effort and sacrifice, if one person had a nice, comfortable, pleasant, highly productive job, and another person had an onerous, debilitating, and less productive but still socially valuable job, the later person would earn more per hour, not the former.
So, we have our third value, a controversial one. We want a good economy to remunerate effort and sacrifice, and, of course, when people can’t work, to provide full income anyway.
The fourth and final value on which parecon is built has to do with decisions and is called self-management. In capitalism owners or capitalists have tremendous say. Managers, and high level intellectual workers who monopolize daily decision-making levers like lawyers, engineers, financial officers, and doctors, have substantial say. And people doing rote and obedient labor rarely even know what decisions are being made, much less impact them.
In contrast, a participatory economy is a democratic economy. People control their own lives to appropriate degrees. Each person has a level of say that doesn’t impinge on other people having the same level of say. We impact decision in proportion as we are affected by them. This is called self management.
Imagine a worker wants to place a picture of a daughter on his or her workstation. Who should make that decision? Should some owner decide? Should a manager decide? Should all the workers decide? Obviously, none of that makes sense. The one worker whose child it is should decide, alone, with full authority. He or she should be literally a dictator in this particular case.
Now suppose instead that the same worker wants to put a radio on his or her desk, and to play it very loud, listening to raucous rock and roll. Now who should decide? We all intuitively know that the answer is that those who will hear the radio should have a say. And that those who will be more bothered ‘or more benefited ‘should have more say.
And at this point, we have already arrived at a value vis-Ã -vis decision making. We don’t need a Phd philosopher. We don’t need incomprehensible language. We simply realize that we don’t want one person one vote and 50% rules all the time. Nor do we always want one person one vote and some other percentage required for agreement. Nor do we always want one person to decide authoritatively, as a dictator. Nor do we always want consensus. Nor do we always want any other single approach. All these methods of making decisions make sense in some cases but are horrible in other cases.
Điều chúng ta hy vọng đạt được khi chọn một phương thức ra quyết định và quá trình thảo luận các vấn đề, thiết lập chương trình nghị sự, v.v., là mỗi chủ thể sẽ có ảnh hưởng đến các quyết định tương ứng với mức độ mà chúng bị ảnh hưởng bởi chúng.
Participatory Economics is built on a few centrally defining institutional choices.
Workers and consumers need a place to express and pursue their preferences. Historically these have been workers and consumers councils. In a parecon, within councils, there is an additional commitment to using decision making procedures and modes of communication that apportions to each actor about each decision, a degree of say proportionate to the degree he or she is affected. Votes could be majority rule, three quarters, two-thirds, consensus, or other possibilities. They are taken at different levels, with fewer or more participants, and using different procedures, depending on the particular implications of the decisions in question. Sometimes a team or individual makes a decision pretty much on its own. Sometimes a whole workplace or even an industry would be the decision body. Different voting and tallying methods would be employed as needed for different decisions.
The next institutional commitment is to remunerate for effort and sacrifice, not for property, power, or even output. Who decides how hard we have worked? Our workers councils in context of the broad economic setting established by other institutions. If you work longer, you are entitled to more of the social product. If you work more intensely, again you are entitled to more income. If you work at more onerous or dangerous or boring tasks, again, you are entitled to more income. But you aren’t entitled to more income due to owning productive property because no one owns productive property ‘it is all socially owned. And you aren’t entitled to more income due to working with better tools, or producing something more valued, or even having personal traits that make you more productive, because these don’t involve effort or sacrifice, but luck or endowment. Greater output is appreciated, of course’¦but there is no extra pay for it. Both morally and in terms of incentives parecon does precisely what makes sense. The extra pay we get is for what we deserve to have rewarded ‘our sacrifice at work. And elicits what we can in fact generate more of–our effort.
Được rồi, nhưng giả sử chúng ta có hội đồng công nhân và người tiêu dùng. Giả sử chúng ta tin vào sự tham gia, dân chủ và thậm chí cả quyền tự quản. Và cũng giả sử nơi làm việc của chúng ta có sự phân công lao động điển hình của công ty. Chuyện gì sẽ xảy ra?
Khoảng 20% lực lượng lao động độc quyền thông qua các vị trí của họ trong bộ phận lao động của công ty này, các vị trí ra quyết định hàng ngày và kiến thức cần thiết để biết điều gì đang xảy ra và những lựa chọn tồn tại cũng như đánh giá chúng, sẽ đặt ra các chương trình nghị sự. Những tuyên bố của họ sẽ có thẩm quyền. Ngay cả khi những người lao động khác có quyền biểu quyết, thì việc biểu quyết về các kế hoạch và phương án chỉ được đưa ra bởi lớp điều phối viên này. Chính ý chí của giai cấp này sẽ quyết định kết quả. Theo thời gian, tầng lớp ưu tú này cũng sẽ quyết định rằng họ xứng đáng được trả nhiều tiền hơn để nuôi dưỡng trí tuệ tuyệt vời của mình. Nó sẽ tự tách biệt không chỉ về quyền lực mà còn về thu nhập và địa vị.
Vậy thay thế bằng cái gì?
Participatory economics utilizes balanced job complexes. Instead of combining tasks so that some jobs are highly empowering and other jobs are horribly stultifying, so that some jobs convey knowledge and have authority while other jobs rob mentality and only obey orders ‘parecon says let’s make each job comparable to all others in its quality of life effects and in its empowerment effects.
Each person has a job. Each job involves many tasks. In a parecon, of course each job is suited to the talents and capacities and energies of the person doing it. But each job is a mix of tasks and responsibilities such that the overall quality of life and especially the overall empowerment effects of the work are comparable for all.
A parecon doesn’t have someone who does only surgery, but instead has people who do some surgery and some cleaning of the hospital, and some other tasks ‘such that the sum of all that they do incorporates a fair mix of tasks. A parecon doesn’t have managers and workers. It doesn’t have lawyers and short order cooks. It doesn’t have engineers and assembly line workers ‘though all the associated tasks get done. A parecon has people who all do a mix of things in their work such that each person’s mix accords with their abilities and also conveys a fair share of rote and tedious and interesting and empowering conditions and responsibilities.
Công việc của chúng ta không chuẩn bị cho một số người trong chúng ta cai trị và những người còn lại phải tuân theo. Nó chuẩn bị cho tất cả chúng ta tham gia vào các hội đồng người lao động và người tiêu dùng tự quản lý. Nó giúp tất cả chúng ta sẵn sàng tham gia một cách hợp lý và hiệu quả vào việc tự quản lý cuộc sống và thể chế của mình.
But what if we have a new economy with workers and consumers councils, with self-managing decision making rules, with remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and with balanced job complexes ‘but we combine all this with markets or central planning for allocation? Would that work?
Markets destroy the remuneration scheme and create a competitive context in which workplaces have to cut costs and seek market share. To do this they virtually have no choice but to insulate some people from the discomfort that cost-cutting imposes, precisely the people who are earmarked to figure out what costs to cut and how to generate more output at the expense of fulfillment-and so emerges, again, the coordinator class, located above workers, violating our preferred norms of remuneration, accruing power and obliterating the self-management we desire.
Và điều tương tự cũng xảy ra với kế hoạch hóa tập trung. Nó cũng sẽ ngay lập tức nâng cao trình độ của các nhà lập kế hoạch, và ngay sau đó là nâng cao các cơ quan quản lý của các nhà lập kế hoạch ở mỗi nơi làm việc, và sau đó là tất cả những tác nhân trong nền kinh tế có cùng loại thông tin xác thực. Kế hoạch hóa tập trung cũng sẽ áp đặt sự phân chia giai cấp điều phối viên và quy tắc điều phối viên đối với người lao động, những người sẽ trở thành cấp dưới.
The problem is that markets and central planning each subvert the values and associated structures we have deemed worthy. Suppose in place of top-down imposition of centrally planned choices and in place of competitive market exchange by atomized buyers and sellers, we opt for cooperative, informed self managed negotiation of allocation by socially entwined actors who each have a say in proportion as choices impact them and who are each able to access accurate information and valuations, and who each have appropriate training and confidence to develop and communicate their preferences. That would compatibly advance council centered participatory self-management, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and balanced job complexes, and it would also provide proper valuations of personal, social, and ecological impacts, and promote classlessness.
Participatory planning is a system in which worker and consumer councils propose their work activities and their consumption preferences in light of accurate knowledge of local and global implications and true valuations of the full social benefits and costs of their choices. The system utilizes a back and forth cooperative communication of mutually informed preferences via a variety of simple communicative and organizing principles and tools including what are called indicative prices, facilitation boards, rounds of accommodation to new information, and other features-all of which permit actors to express their desires and to mediate and refine them in light of feedback about other’s desires, arriving at compatible choices consistent with advancing the values we have highlighted.
Actors indicate their preferences. They learn what others have indicated. They alter their preferences in an effort to move toward a viable plan. At each new step in the cooperative negotiation each actor is seeking well being and development, but each can get ahead only in accord with social advance, not by exploiting others. It is impossible to describe this whole system and all its features, and to show how they are both viable and worthy in a short essay like this. I’d like to recommend the website www.parecon.org which has all kinds of material about parecon, and here provide only a brief summary of the situation’¦
Kinh tế học có sự tham gia tạo ra bối cảnh vô giai cấp. Tôi có thể có được điều kiện làm việc tốt hơn nếu tổ hợp công việc trung bình trong toàn bộ parecon được cải thiện. Tôi có thể có được thu nhập cao hơn nếu tôi làm việc chăm chỉ hơn hoặc lâu hơn với đồng nghiệp của mình hoặc nếu thu nhập trung bình của toàn xã hội tăng lên. Tôi không chỉ thúc đẩy tinh thần đoàn kết với các chủ thể kinh tế khác mà còn tác động đến tất cả các quyết định kinh tế, bao gồm cả những quyết định ở nơi làm việc của tôi và những quyết định trên toàn bộ phần còn lại của nền kinh tế, ở mức độ tương xứng với tác động của những quyết định đó đối với tôi.
Parecon không chỉ xóa bỏ sự chênh lệch bất bình đẳng về tài sản và thu nhập mà còn đạt được sự phân phối công bằng. Nó không những không buộc các thành viên xâm phạm đời sống của nhau mà còn tạo ra sự đoàn kết. Nó không những không đồng nhất hóa kết quả mà còn tạo ra sự đa dạng. Nó không những không mang lại cho một tầng lớp thống trị nhỏ quyền lực to lớn trong khi khiến phần lớn dân chúng phải chịu gánh nặng bất lực mà còn tạo ra ảnh hưởng thích hợp cho tất cả mọi người.
And so, we arrive back at education.
80% chúng ta hiện được dạy ở trường cách chịu đựng sự buồn chán và tuân theo mệnh lệnh vì đó là những gì chủ nghĩa tư bản cần cho công nhân của nó. Hai mươi phần trăm còn lại trở nên nhẫn tâm với hoàn cảnh của những người ở tầng dưới và không biết gì về sự nhẫn tâm của chính họ, ngoại trừ những người ở cấp cao nhất, những người đơn giản bị coi là tàn nhẫn.
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 and creative and productive as we can, 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.
Vấn đề là trong chủ nghĩa tư bản, việc nói về phương pháp sư phạm mong muốn có thể có hai logic. Một mặt, đó có thể là phương pháp sư phạm phù hợp với việc tái tạo các hệ thống phân cấp của xã hội. Trong trường hợp đó, nó liên quan nhiều đến việc kiểm soát và điều hướng hơn là những gì hầu hết chúng ta gọi là giáo dục, chẳng hạn như sự gây dựng và sự hoàn thành. Mặt khác, nó có thể nói về sự gây dựng và hoàn thành, nhưng sau đó nó lại mang tính đối lập. Nó đang cố gắng thiết lập những kết quả trái ngược với logic của thị trường, quyền sở hữu tư nhân, thù lao cho tài sản và quyền lực cũng như sự phân công lao động của công ty.
My point in this essay is that if we ultimately want really worthy education — like really worthy health care, or art, or sports, or production, or consumption, — we will need a new economy with a new logic and structure, and I would argue that this new economy ought to be what I have called participatory economics.
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 society.
Có ý nghĩa nào đối với cấu trúc và quy trình thực tế của việc học tập và giáo dục tiềm ẩn trong logic và cấu trúc của parecon không? Tôi đoán rằng câu trả lời là có, không kém phần quan trọng nhưng không giới hạn ở thực tế là tất nhiên các cơ sở giáo dục sẽ tự quản lý, sẽ tương tác với việc lập kế hoạch có sự tham gia, sẽ kết hợp các tổ hợp công việc cân bằng, v.v.
For the specific meaning of all that regarding pedagogy, though, and for related issues regarding more detailed and specific matters of actual methodology of training, learning, sharing, etc., I am not equipped to offer even suggestions. I’d rather stop at this stage. I have made the one broad point about the economic context of education, both as we endure it now and as we might enjoy it in a better future, that I feel secure in asserting. Capitalism annihilates aspirations for worthy education. Parecon actualizes them..
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