DEMOCRACY & NATURE: The International Journal of INCLUSIVE
DEMOCRACY
vol.9, no.1,
(March 2003)
From
(mis)education
to Paideia
Takis Fotopoulos
Abstract
The aim of this article is twofold. First, to discuss the
institutional preconditions of a democratic paideia, both at the social level
and the educational level itself. Second, to examine a transition strategy for
the move from present miseducation (as it evolved in modernity) to a democratic
paideia, through an emancipatory education process. A basic tenet of the
approach adopted by this paper is that education is intrinsically linked to politics as the very meaning of
education is assumed to be defined by the prevailing meaning of politics.
1. Democracy, Paideia and Education
Culture, the dominant social paradigm and the role of education
Education is
a basic component of the formation of culture,
as well as of the socialisation of the individual, i.e. the process through
which an individual internalises the core values of the dominant social
paradigm.
Therefore, culture in general and education in particular play a crucial role in
the determination of individual and collective values. This is because as long
as individuals live in a society, they are not just individuals but
social
individuals, subject to a process, which socialises them and induces them to
internalise the existing institutional framework and the dominant social
paradigm. In this sense, people are not completely free to create their world
but are conditioned by History, tradition and culture. Still, this socialisation
process is broken, at almost all times—as far as a minority of the population
is concerned—and in exceptional historical circumstances even with respect to
the majority itself. In the latter case, a process is set in motion that usually
ends with a change of the institutional structure of society and of the
corresponding social paradigm. Societies therefore are not just “collections
of individuals” but consist of social individuals, who are both free to create
their world, (in the sense that they can give birth to a new set of institutions
and a corresponding social paradigm), and are created by the world, (in the
sense that they have to break with the dominant social paradigm in order to
recreate the world).
A fundamental precondition for the reproduction of every kind of society
is the consistency between the dominant
beliefs,
ideas and values on the one hand and
the existing institutional framework on the other. In other words, unlike
culture
which has a broader scope and may express values and ideas that are not
necessarily consistent with the dominant institutions (this has frequently been
the case in arts and literature), the dominant social paradigm has to be in
consistence with the existing institutions for society to be reproducible. In
fact, institutions are reproduced mainly through the internalisation of the
values consistent with them rather than through violence by the elites which
benefit from them. This has always been the case. The values, for instance, of
the present system are the ones derived by its basic principles of organisation:
the principle of heteronomy and the principle of individualism which are
built-into the institutions of the market economy and representative
‘democracy’. Such values involve the values of inequity and effective
oligarchy (even if the system calls itself a democracy), competition and
aggressiveness.
Still,
what is wrong is not the very fact of the internalisation of some values but the
internalisation of such values that reproduce an heteronomous society and
consequently heteronomous individuals. Paideia will play a crucial role in a
future democratic society with respect to the internalisation of its values,
which would necessarlily be the ones derived by its basic principles of
organisation: the principle of autonomy and the principle of community, which
would be built into the institutions of an inclusive democracy.
Such values, as we shall see in the third section, would include the values of
equity and democracy, respect for the personality of each citizen, solidarity
and mutual aid, caring and sharing.
However,
the institutions alone are not sufficient to secure the non-emergence
of informal elites. It is here that the crucial importance of education,
which in a democratic society will take the form of Paideia, arises.
Paideia was of course at the centre of political philosophy in the past,
from Plato to Rousseau. Still, this tradition , as the late Castoriadis
pointed out, died in fact with the French Revolution. But, the need to revisit
paideia today in the context of the revival of democratic politics, after the
collapse of socialist statism, is
imperative .
Education, Paideia and Emancipatory
education
Education
is intrinsically linked to politics. In fact, the very meaning of education is
defined by the prevailing meaning of politics. If politics is meant in its
current usage, which is related to the present institutional framework of
representative ‘democracy’, then politics takes the form of statecraft,
which involves the administration of the state by an elite of professional
politicians who set the laws,
supposedly representing the will of the people. This is the case of a
heteronomous society in which the public space has been usurped by various
elites which concentrate political and economic power in their hands. In a
heteronomous society education has a double aim:
- First, to help
in the internalisation of the existing institutions and the values
consistent with it (the dominant social paradigm). This is the aim of
explicit school lessons like History, introduction to sociology, economics
etc but , even more significantly—and insidiously-- of schooling itself,
which involves the values of obeyance and discipline (rather than
self-discipline) and unquestioning of teaching .
- Second, to
produce ‘efficient’ citizens in the sense of citizens who have
accumulated enough ‘technical knowledge’
so that they could function competently in accordance with ‘society’s
aims, as laid down by the elites which control it..
On the other
hand, if politics is meant in its classical sense that is related to the
institutional framework of a direct democracy, in which people not only question
laws but are also able to make their own laws, then we talk about an autonomous
society.
This is a society in which the public space encompasses the entire citizen body
that in an inclusive democracy will take all effective decisions at the
‘macro’ level, i.e. not only with respect to the political process but also
with respect to the economic process, within an institutional framework of equal
distribution of political and economic power among citizens. In such a society
we do not talk about education anymore but about the much broader concept of
Paideia.
This is an all-round civic education that involves a life-long process of
character development, absorption of knowledge and skills and –more
significant—practicing a ‘participatory’ kind of active citizenship, that
is a citizenship in which political activity is not seen as a means to an end
but an end in itself. Paideia therefore has the overall aim of developing the
capacity of all its members to participate in its reflective and deliberative
activities, in other words, to educate
citizens as citizens so that the public space could acquire a substantive
content. In this sense, paideia involves the
specific aims of civic
schooling as well as personal training. Thus,
-
Paideia
as civic schooling involves
the development of citizens’ self-activity by using their very
self-activity as a means of
internalising the democratic institutions and the values consistent with
them. The aim therefore is to create responsible individuals that
have internalized both the necessity of laws and the possibility of putting
the laws into question, i.e. individuals capable of interrogation,
reflectiveness, and deliberation. This
process should start from am early age through the creation of
educational public spaces that will have nothing to do with present
schools, at which children will be brought up to internalize, and
therefore to accept fully, the democratic institutions and the values
implied by the fundamental principles of organisation of society: autonomy
and community.
-
Paideia
as personal training
involves the development of the capacity to learn rather than to teach
particular things, so that
individuals
become autonomous, that is, capable of self---reflective activity and
deliberation. A process of conveying knowledge is of course also involved
but this assumes more the form of
involvement
in actual life and the multitude of human activities related to it, as well
as a guided tour to scientific, industrial and practical knowledge rather
than teaching, as it is simply a step in the process of developing the
child's capacities for learning, discovering, and inventing.
Finally, we
may talk about emancipatory education as the link between present education and
Paideia. Emancipatory education is intrinsically linked to transitional
politics, i.e. the politics that will lead us from the heteronomous politics and
society of the present to the autonomous politics and society of the future. The
aim of emancipatory education is to give an answer to the ‘riddle of
politics’ described by Castoriadis,
i.e. how to produce autonomous (that is capable of self-reflective activity)
human beings within a heteronomous society, and beyond that, in the paradoxical
situation of educating human beings to accede to autonomy while--or in spite
of-- teaching them to absorb and internalize existing institutions. Not less
than the breaking of the socialisation process, which will open the way to an
autonomous society, is involved here. The proposed by this essay answer to this
riddle is to help the collectivity, within the context of the transitional
strategy, to create the institutions that, when internalized by the individuals,
will enhance their capacity for becoming autonomous.
Therefore,
autonomy politics, i.e. the kind of politics implied by a transitional strategy
towards a democratic society,
emancipatory education and
Paideia
form an inseparable whole through the internal dynamic that leads from
the politics of autonomy and emancipatory education to an autonomous society and
Paideia. It is therefore clear that as paideia is only feasible within the
framework of a genuine democracy, an emancipatory education is inconceivable
outside a democratic movement fighting for such a society, as we shall see in
the last section.
However,
before we discuss the nature and content of a democratic paideia and the
transition to it through emancipatory education we have to examine the
nature of present miseducation, as it evolved in modernity—the topic of next
section.
2. Education in modernity
The shift to modernity
The rise of
the present system of education has its roots in the nation-state, which did not
start to develop until the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Τhe idea of a
‘nation’ was unknown in antiquity and even in the Middle Ages. Although in
the territorial regnum of the Middle Ages some monarchies did indeed have their
national territories and made claims to sovereign power within them, these
monarchies were just part of European Christendom, so that there was little of a
national state or indeed of any sort of state. In fact, it was not until the end
of the Middle Ages and specifically in the seventeenth century that the present
form of the nation-state emerged. The nation-state, even in its early absolutist
form, extended its control beyond the political and into the religious (with the
creation of the established church) and educational fields, as well as to almost
all other aspects of human life. As the state bureaucracy was expanding, the
need for well educated civil servants was significant and universities of the
time became more and more training institutions for higher civil servants
whereas, at the same time, elementary education for the middle classes developed
further, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. A basic distinguishing characteristic of premodern schools
and universities compared to modern ones was that whereas up to the 17th century
the aim of education was conceived as a religious one, in the 18th century the
ideas of secularism and progress, which constituted the fundamental components
of the emerging new dominant social paradigm ,
began to prevail.
As I attempted to show elsewhere,
the two main institutions which distinguish premodern society from modern
society are, first, the system of the market economy and, second, representative
"democracy", which are also the ultimate causes for the present
concentration of economic and political power and, consequently, for the present
multidimensional crisis. In this problematique, industrial production
constituted only the necessary condition for the shift to modern society. The
sufficient condition was the parallel introduction —through decisive state
help— of the system of the market economy that replaced the
(socially controlled) local markets that existed for thousands of years
before. In both cases, it was the emergence of the nation-state, which played a
crucial role in creating the conditions for the "nationalisation" of markets
(i.e. their de-localisation), as well as
in
freeing them from effective social control —the two essential preconditions of marketisation. Furthermore, it was the same development, i.e. the rise of the
nation-state that developed from its early absolutist form at the end of the
Middle Ages into the present ‘democratic’ form, which led to the
establishment of the political complement of the market economy: representative
‘democracy.
The shift to modernity therefore represented in more
than one ways a break with the past. The new economic and political institutions
in the form of the market economy and representative ‘democracy’, as well as
the parallel rise of industrialism marked a systemic change. This change was
inescapably accompanied by a corresponding change in the dominant social
paradigm. In premodern societies,
the "dominant social paradigms" were characterised by mainly religious ideas
and corresponding values about hierarchies, although of course there were
exceptions like the Athenian democracy. On the other hand, the dominant social
paradigm of modernity is dominated
by market values and the idea of Progress, growth and rational secularism. In
fact, the flourishing of science in modernity has played an important
ideological role in "objectively" justifying
the growth economy—a role that has been put under severe strain in neoliberal modernity by the credibility crisis of science. Thus, just as
religion played an important part in justifying feudal hierarchy, so has
science, particularly social "science", played a crucial role in justifying the
modern hierarchical society. In fact, from the moment science replaced religion
as the dominant worldview, it had `objectively' justified the growth economy,
both in its capitalist and ‘socialist’ forms.
However,
although the fundamental institutions which characterize modernity and the main
tenets of the dominant social paradigm have remained essentially unchanged since
the emergence of modernity more than two centuries ago (something that renders
as a myth the idea of postmodernity, into which humanity supposedly has entered
in the last three decades or so), there have, nevertheless, been some
significant nonsystemic changes within
this period that could usefully be classified as the three main phases of
modernity. We may distinguish three
forms that modernity took since the establishment of the system of the market
economy: liberal modernity (mid to end of nineteenth century) which, after the
first world war and the 1929 crash, led to
statist modernity (mid 1930’s to mid 1970s) and finally to today’s
neoliberal modernity (mid 1970s-to date).
The various
forms of modernity have created their own dominant social
paradigms which in effect constitute sub-paradigms of the main paradigm,
as they all share a fundamental characteristic: the idea of the separation of
society from the economy and polity, as expressed by the market economy and
representative "democracy" –with the exception of Soviet statism in which
this separation was effected through central planning and Soviet
"democracy". On top of this main characteristic, all forms of modernity
share, with some variations, the themes of reason, critical thought and economic
growth. As one could expect, the nonsystemic changes involved in the various
forms of modernity and the corresponding sub-paradigmatic changes had
significant repercussions on the nature, content and form of education, on which
I now turn.
Education in Liberal modernity
During the
period of liberal modernity, which barely lasted half a century between the
1830s and the 1880s, the grow-or-die dynamic of the market economy led to an
increasing internationalisation of it, which was accompanied by the first
systematic attempt of the economic elites to establish a purely liberal
internationalised market economy in the sense of free trade, a "flexible" labour market and a fixed exchange rates system (Gold Standard)—an attempt
that, as I tried to show elsewhere,
was bound to fail given the lack of the objective conditions for its success and
in particular the fact that markets were dominated by national-based capital, a
fact that led to two world wars with the main aim to redivide them.
The rise of the system of the market/growth economy in this period
created the need to expand the number of pupils/students in all stages of
education: at the primary level, because the factory system that flourished
after the Industrial Revolution required an elementary level of literacy; at the
secondary level, because the factory system led to the development of various
specialisations that required further specialised training; and, finally, at the
tertiary level, because the rapid scientific developments of the era required an
expansion of the role of universities to train not just civil servants, as
before, but also people who would be able to be involved in applied research on
new methods of production, both as regards its physical and its
administrative/organisational aspects.
All these
developments had significant repercussions on education, one of the most
significant ones being the gradual acceptance of the view that education ought
to be the responsibility of the state. Countries such as France and Germany
began the establishment of public educational systems early in the 19th century.
However, this trend was in contradiction to the dominant social (sub)paradigm of
liberal modernity. This paradigm was
characterised by the belief in a mechanistic model of science, objective truth,
as well as some themes from economic liberalism such as laissez faire and
minimisation of social controls over markets for the protection of labour. This
is why countries such as Great Britain and the United States, in which the
dominant social paradigm has been better internalised, hesitated longer before
allowing the government to intervene in educational affairs. The prevailing view
among the elites of these countries was that “free schools” were to be
provided only for the children of the lowest social groups, if at all, whereas
general taxation (which was the only adequate way to provide education for all)
was rejected. Still, when liberal modernity collapsed at the end of the
nineteenth century, for the reasons mentioned above, governments across Europe
and the US legislated to limit the workings of laissez-faire—first by
inspecting factories and offering minimal standards of education and later by
providing subsistence income for the old and out of work”.
As a result, by the beginning of the twentieth century, social legislation of
some sort was in place in almost every advanced market economy.
However, it
was not only the access to education that changed during the nineteenth century.
The nature of education changed as well, as the new social and economic changes
also called upon the schools, public and private, to broaden their aims and
curricula. Schools were expected not only to promote literacy, mental
discipline, and good moral character but also to help prepare children for
citizenship, for jobs, and for individual development and success. In other
words, schools and educational institutions in general were expected to help in the internalisation of the existing institutions and
the values consistent with it (i.e. the dominant social paradigm), on top of
producing ‘efficient’ citizens in the sense of citizens who have
accumulated enough technical knowledge so that they could function competently
in accordance with ‘society’s aims, as laid down by the elites which control
it. Similarly, the practice of dividing children into grades or classes
according to their ages—a practice that began in 18th-century Germany—was to
spread everywhere as schools grew larger. Massive schooling, which was to
characterize the rest of modernity up to date, was set in motion.
Statist modernity, education and social mobility
Statist
modernity took different forms in the East (namely the regimes of Eastern
Europe, China etc.) and the West. Thus, in the East, for the first time in modern times, a ‘systemic’ attempt
was made to reverse the marketisation process and create a completely different
form of modernity than the liberal
or the socialdemocratic one --in a sense, another version of liberal modernity.
This form of statism, backed by Marxist ideology, attempted to minimise the role
of the market mechanism in the allocation of resources and replace it with a
central planning mechanism. On the other hand in the West,
statism took a social-democratic form and was backed by Keynesian
policies which involved active
state control of the economy and extensive interference with the self-regulating
mechanism of the market to secure full employment, a better distribution of
income and economic growth. A precursor of this form of statism emerged in the
inter-war period but it reached its peak in the period following the second
world war, when Keynesian policies were adopted by governing parties of all
persuasions in the era of the socialdemocratic consensus, up to the mid 1970s.
This was a consensus involving both conservative and socialdemocratic parties,
which were committed to active state intervention with the aim of determining
the overall level of economic activity, so that a number of socialdemocratic
objectives could be achieved (full employment, welfare state, educational
opportunities for all, better distribution of income etc)
However,
statist modernity, in both its socialdemocratic and Soviet versions, shared the
fundamental element of liberal modernity, namely, the formal separation
of society from the economy and the state. The basic
difference between the liberal and statist forms of modernity concerned
the means through which this separation was achieved. Thus, in liberal modernity
this was achieved through representative "democracy" and the market
mechanism, whereas in statist modernity this separation was achieved either
through representative "democracy" and a modified version of the market
mechanism (Western social democracy), or, alternatively, through soviet "democracy" and central planning (Soviet statism). Furthermore, both the
liberal and the statist forms of modernity shared a common growth ideology based
on the Enlightenment idea of progress—an idea that played a crucial role in
the development of the two types of "growth economy": the ‘capitalist’
and the ‘socialist’ growth economy.
It is therefore obvious that although the growth economy is the offspring
of the dynamic of the market economy, still, the two concepts are not identical
since it is possible to have a growth economy which is not also a market economy
― notably the case of
"actually existing socialism". However, the Western form
of statist modernity collapsed in the 1970s when the growing
internationalisation of the market economy, the inevitable result of its
grow-or-die dynamic, became incompatible with statism. The Eastern form of
statist modernity collapsed a decade or so later because of the growing
incompatibility between, on the one hand, the requirements of an ‘efficient’
growth economy and, on the other, the
institutional arrangements (particularly centralised planning and party
democracy) which had been introduced in the countries of "actually existing
socialism" in accordance with Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The dominant (sub)paradigm in the statist period still features the same
characteristics of liberal modernity involving a belief in objective truth and
(a less mechanistic) science, but includes also certain elements of the
socialist paradigm and particularly statism, in the form of Soviet statism based
on Marxism-Leninism in the East and a socialdemocratic statism based on
Keynesianism in the West. Both types of statism attempted to influence
the education process although Soviet governments, particularly in the early
days after the 1917 Revolution, had much wider aims than Western socialdemocrats
who mainly aimed at widening the access to education in order to improve social
mobility.
Thus, the
Soviets, immediately after the Revolution, introduced free and compulsory
general and polytechnical education up to the age of 17, pre-school education to
assist in the emancipation of women,
the
opening of the universities and other higher institutions to the working class,
even a form of student-self management. On top of this, a basic aim of education
was decreed to be the internalisation of the new regime’s values. No wonder
that, as soon as a year after the Revolution, the Soviet government had ordered
by decree the abolition of religious teaching in favour of atheistic education,
As regards the socialdemocrats, their main achievement was the welfare
state which represented a conscious effort to check the side effects of the
market economy, as far as covering basic needs (health, education, social
security) was concerned . An important characteristic of the ideology of the
welfare state was that its financing (including education) was supposed to come
from general taxation. Furthermore, the progressive nature of the tax system,
which was generalised during this period, secured that the higher income groups
will take the lion’s share of this financing, improving thereby the highly
unequal pattern of income distribution that a market economy creates. However,
the expansion of education opportunities was not simply necessitated by
ideological reasons. Even more important was the post-war economic boom that
required a vast expansion of the labour base, with women and, sometimes
immigrants, filling the gaps. On top of this, the incessant increase in the
division of labour, changes in production methods and organisation, as well as
revolutionary changes in information technology required a growing number of
highly skilled personnel, scientists, high-level professionals etc . As a result
of these trends, the number of universities in many countries doubled or trebled
between 1950 and 1970, whereas
technical colleges, as well as part-time and evening courses, spread rapidly
promoting adult education at all levels
Still, despite the fact that massive education flourished in this period,
the effects of this rapid growth of education opportunities on social
mobility has been insignificant. If we take as our example Britain, in which a
bold socialdemocratic experiment was pursued in the post-war period to change
social mobility through education--a policy pursued (in various degrees)
by both labour and conservative governments-- the results were minimal.
Thus, an extensive study by three prominent British academics concluded that the post-war
expansion of education opportunities brought Britain no nearer meritocracy or
equality of opportunity.
Another study, also carried out during the period of socialdemocratic consensus,
concluded that despite the "propitious" circumstances, ‘no significant
reduction in class inequality has in fact been achieved’ —a
situation that has worsened in today’s neoliberal modernity in which, as
Goldthorpe
showed, the chances of manual workers' sons not doing anything but manual work
have risen. But, if the results of socialdemocratic education policies on social
mobility and social change in general have been so meagre, one could easily imagine the effects of neoliberal policies
to which I now turn.
Neoliberal
modernity and the privatisation of education
The emergence of neoliberal internationalisation was
a monumental event which implied the end of the social democratic consensus that
marked the early post war period.
The
market economy’s grow-or-die dynamic and, in particular, the emergence and
continuous expansion of transnational corporations’ (TNC) and the parallel
development of the Euro-dollar market, which led to the present neoliberal form
of modernity, were the main developments which induced the economic elites to
open and liberalise the markets. In other words, these elites mostly
institutionalised (rather than created) the present form of the
internationalised market economy.
An
important characteristic of the neoliberal form of modernity is the emergence of
a new ‘transnational elite’
which draws its power (economic, political or generally social power) by
operating at the transnational level —a fact which implies that it does not
express, solely or even primarily, the interests of a particular nation-state.
This elite consists of the transnational economic elites (TNC executives and
their local affiliates), the transnational political elites, i.e. the
globalising bureaucrats and politicians, who may be based either in major
international organisations or in the state machines of the main market
economies, and, finally, the transnational professional elites, whose members
play a dominant role in the various international foundations, think tanks,
research departments of major international universities, the mass media etc.
The main aim of the transnational elite, which today controls the
internationalised market economy, is the maximisation of the role of the market
and the minimisation of any effective social controls over it for the protection
of labour or the environment, so that maximum ‘efficiency’ (defined in
narrow techno-economic terms) and profitability may be secured.
Neoliberal modernity is characterised by the emergence of a new social
(sub)paradigm which tends to become dominant, the so-called ‘post-modern’
paradigm The main elements of the neoliberal paradigm are, first, a critique of
progress (but not of growth itself), of mechanistic and deterministic science
(but usually not of science itself) and of objective truth, and , second, the
adoption of some neoliberal themes such as the minimisation of social controls
over markets, the replacement of the welfare state by safety nets and the
maximisation of the role of the private sector in the economy.
As regards
scientific research and education, neoliberal modernity implies the effectual
privatisation of them. As a result, the non–neutral character of science has
become more obvious than ever before, following the ‘privatisation’ of
scientific research and the scaling down the state sector in general and state
spending in particular.
As Stephanie Pain, an associate editor of New Scientist (not exactly a radical
journal) stresses, science and big business have developed ever closer links
lately:
Where research
was once mostly neutral, it now has an array of paymasters to please. In place
of impartiality, research results are being discreetly managed and massaged, or
even locked away if they don’t serve the right interests. Patronage rarely
comes without strings attached.
Also,
as regards education in general, as Castoriadis pointed out,
for most educators it has become a bread-winning chore, and, for those at the
other end of education, a question of obtaining a piece of paper (a diploma)
that will allow one to exercise a profession (if one finds work)
― the royal
road of privatization, which one may enrich by indulging in one or several
personal crazes.
The effects of the neoliberal privatisation of education on access to
education in general and social
mobility in particular are predictable. Thus, as regards the former, it is not
surprising that, as a result of increasing poverty and inequality in neoliberal
modernity, the reading and writing skills of Britain's young people are worse
than they were before the First World War. Thus, a recent study found that 15 per cent of people aged 15 to 21 are
'functionally illiterate', whereas in 1912, school inspectors reported that only
2 per cent of young people were unable to read or write.
Similarly, as regards the access to higher education, the UK General Household
Survey of 1993 showed that, as the education editor of the London Times pointed
out, ‘although the number of youngsters obtaining qualifications is growing
rapidly, the statistics show that a child’s socio-economic background is still
the most important factor in deciding who obtains the best higher education.
Thus, according to these data, the son of a professional man was even more
likely to go to university in the early 90s than one from the same background in
the early 60s (33 percent versus 29 percent). Finally, an indication of the
marginal improvement to access to education achieved by social democracy is the
fact that whereas at the end of the 1950s the percent of the sons of unskilled
workers going to university was too small to register, by the early 90s this
percentage has gone up to 4%!
Needless to add that the situation has worsened further since then. The
difference between the proportion of professionals and unskilled going to
university has widened 10 points during the nineties and by the end of this
decade fewer than one in six children from the bottom rung were going to
university compared to nearly
three-quarters of the top.
No wonder therefore that social mobility in Britain has declined in
neoliberal modernity. This is because, although the working class has declined
in size following neoliberal globalisation, the middle classes have not been
displaced. As a result, over the 20th century, the trapdoor beneath the upper
social groups became less and less the worry it was in the 19th - Victorian
society and as sociologist Peter Saunders put it, the safeguards
against failure enjoyed by dull middle-class children are presently
strengthening. Despite therefore a small increase in social mobility for
children from lower social strata, at the same time, as a team led by Stephen
Machin of University College London has found, more children from higher-class
backgrounds have remained in the same social class as their parents. This could
explain the paradox that the amount of "equality of opportunity" may
actually have fallen in recent years, despite the expansion of educational
opportunity.
Another study by Abigail McKnight
of the University of Warwick's confirms this. Thus, whereas between 1977 and
1983, a full 39 per cent of workers in the bottom quarter of the earnings
distribution had progressed into the top half by 1983, in the period between
1991 and 1997, that had dropped to 26 per cent.
Similar trends are noted everywhere, given the universalisation of
neoliberal modernity. Predictably, the effects are even worse in the South where
education was seen by the newly liberated from their colonial ties nations as
both an instrument of national development and a means of crossing national and
cultural barriers. No wonder that, worldwide, 125m children are not attending
school today (two-thirds of them girls) despite a decade of promises at UN
conferences to get every child in the world into a classroom. Thus, as
cash-strapped governments have cut education budgets, forcing schools to charge
fees, ‘schools have become little more than child minding centres’.
3. The preconditions of
Paideia
As I attempted to show in the first section, Paideia in a democratic
society is seen both as civic schooling and as
personal
training. In the first sense, Paideia is intrinsically linked with a set of
institutional preconditions at society’s level whereas in the second sense it
is linked with the institutional preconditions at the educational level itself.
Apart, however, from the institutional preconditions it is clear that Paideia
presupposes a radical change in value systems—the main aim of emancipatory
education—which would lead to a new dominant social paradigm.
This conception of paideia clearly differentiates it from the stand on
education usually adopted by liberals, but also by some Marxists and many more
libertarians, who separate education from the system of market economy
and representative ‘democracy’ and suggest that an alternative education is
feasible even in the existing system. Thus, in contrast to the fathers of
anarchism like Bakunin who insisted that a libertarian education is impossible
in existing society,
supporters of Stirner’s
individualistic tendency within anarchism like Ivan Illich, adherents to
the ‘anarchy in action‘ current like Colin Ward and others propose various schemes
of libertarian education within the existing system of capitalist market
economy. No wonder that a recent article published in
Social
Anarchism does not hesitate to adopt the neoliberal arguments of cost
effectiveness in attacking state schools
[‘of
the two forms (public and private) ... public school is by far the most
expensive in direct cost’]
in order to support a simplistic case for deschooling! At the other end, many
Marxists, as well as anarchists and supporters of autonomy like Castoriadis,
talk only about paideia after the
revolutionary change in society, ignoring the crucial stage of the transitional
period and the need to develop an emancipatory education for it.
In this
section, I will attempt to describe the institutional preconditions of paideia
whereas in the next section the issue of emancipatory education (i.e. the
transition from present modernity education to a democratic Paideia) will be
discussed in an effort to show that any attempt to create an alternative
education within the existing system is doomed, unless it is implemented at a
significant social scale and is an integral part of an antisystemic project
.
Institutional preconditions at society’s level
The
institutional preconditions of paideia at society’s level are summarised by
the inclusive democracy (ID) conception, described in detail elsewhere,
so I will only attempt here to briefly describe the main elements of this
conception that are relevant to the question of paideia.
The
conception of inclusive democracy, using as a starting point the classical
definition of it, expresses democracy in terms of direct political
democracy, economic democracy (beyond the confines of the market economy and
state planning), as well as democracy in the social realm and ecological
democracy. In short, inclusive
democracy is a form of social organisation which re-integrates society with
economy, polity and nature. In this sense, democracy is seen as irreconcilable
with any form of inequity in the distribution of power, that is, with any
concentration of power, political, social or economic. Consequently, democracy
is incompatible with commodity and property relations, which inevitably lead to
concentration of power. Similarly, it is incompatible with hierarchical
structures implying domination, either institutionalised (e.g., domination by
men, educators and so on), or "objective" (e.g., domination of the
South by the North in the framework of the market division of labour), and the
implied notion of dominating the natural world
The ID conception draws a fundamental distinction between public and
private, which is particularly important with respect to the paideia issue.
The
public realm, contrary to the
practice of many supporters of the republican or democratic project (Arendt,
Castoriadis, Bookchin
et al) includes not just the political
realm, but any area of human activity where decisions can be taken collectively
and democratically. So, the public realm includes the political realm which is
defined as the sphere of political
decision-taking, the area where political power is exercised; the economic realm
which is defined as the sphere of economic decision-taking, the area where
economic power is exercised with respect to the broad economic choices that any
scarcity society has to make; the social realm which is defined as the sphere of
decision-taking in the workplace,
the education place and any other economic or cultural institution that is a
constituent element of a democratic society; and, finally, the "ecological
realm” which is defined as the sphere of the relations between the natural and
the social worlds.
Correspondingly, we may therefore
distinguish between four main types of democracy that constitute the fundamental
elements of an inclusive democracy: political, economic, ecological and
‘democracy in the social realm’. Political, economic and democracy in the
social realm may be defined, briefly, as the institutional framework that aims
at the equal distribution of political, economic and social power respectively,
in other words, as the
system
which aims at the effective
elimination of the domination of human being over human being. Similarly, we may
define ecological democracy as the institutional framework that aims at the
elimination of any human attempt to dominate the natural world, in other words,
as the system which aims to
reintegrate humans and nature.
In the political realm there can
only be one form of democracy, what we may call political or
direct democracy, where political power is shared equally among all citizens.
So, political democracy is founded on the equal sharing of political power among
all citizens, the self-instituting of society. This means that certain
conditions have to be satisfied for a society to be characterised as a political
democracy, i.e. that democracy is grounded on the conscious choice
of its citizens for individual and collective autonomy and not on any divine or
mystical dogmas and preconceptions, or any closed theoretical systems involving
social/natural "laws", or tendencies determining social change; that no institutionalised political
processes of an oligarchic nature
exist so that all political decisions (including those relating to the formation
and execution of laws) are taken by the citizen body collectively and without
representation; that no institutionalised political structures
embodying unequal power relations exist which implies specificity of delegation,
rotation of delegates who are reacallable by the citizen body etc; and that all
residents of a particular geographical area
and of a viable population size beyond a certain age of maturity (to be
defined by the citizen body itself) and irrespective of gender, race, ethnic or
cultural identity, are members of the citizen body and are directly involved in
the decision-taking process.
The above conditions
instutionalise a public space in which all significant political decisions are
taken by the entire citizen body. However, one should clearly distinguish
between democratic institutions and democratic
practice
which may still be non-democratic, even if the institutions themselves
are democratic. It is therefore clear that the
institutionalisation of direct democracy is only the necessary condition for the
establishment of democracy. As Castoriadis
puts it: “the existence of a public space (i.e. of a political domain which
belongs to all’) is not just a matter of legal provisions guaranteeing rights
of free speech etc. Such conditions are but conditions for a public space to
exist”.
Citizens in Athens, for instance, before and after deliberating in the assemblies, talked to each other in the
agora
about politics. The role of paideia in
the education of individuals as citizens is therefore crucial since it is only
paideia that can “give valuable, substantive content to the ‘public
space’. As Hansen
points out on the crucial role of paideia:
[T]o
the Greek way of thinking , it was the political institutions that shaped the
"democratic man" and the "democratic life", not vice versa: the
institutions of the polis educated and moulded the lives of the citizens,
and to have the best life you must have the best institutions and a system of
education conforming with the institutions.
The
basic unit of decision making in a confederal Inclusive Democracy is the demotic
assembly, i.e. the assembly of demos,
the citizen body in a given geographical area, which delegates power to
demotic courts, demotic militias etcetera. However, apart from the decisions to
be taken at the local level, there are a lot of important decisions
to be taken at the regional or confederal level, as well as at the
workplace or the educational place to which we will come next.
So, confederal democracy is based on
a
network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from
popular face-to-face democratic assemblies in the various demoi, which,
geographically may
encompass a town and the surrounding villages or even neighbourhoods of large
cities. The members of these confederal councils are strictly mandated,
recallable, and responsible to the assemblies that choose them for the purpose
of co-ordinating and administering the policies formulated by the assemblies
themselves. Their function is thus a purely administrative and practical one,
not a policy-making one like the
function of representatives in representative "democracy".
Therefore, the institutional preconditions described create only the
preconditions for freedom. In the last instance, Individual and collective
autonomy depends on the internalisation of democratic values by each citizen.
This is why paideia plays such a crucial role in the democratic process.
It is paideia, together with the high level of civic consciousness that
participation in a democratic society is expected to create, which will
decisively help in the establishment of a new moral code determining human
behaviour in a democratic society. It is not difficult to be shown, as I
attempted to do elsewhere,
that the moral values which are consistent with individual and collective
autonomy in a demos
―based society are those that are based on
co-operation, mutual aid and solidarity. The adoption of such moral values will
therefore be a conscious choice by autonomous individuals living in an
autonomous society, as a result of the fundamental choice for autonomy, and not
the outcome of some divine, natural or social ‘laws’, or tendencies.
However, political democracy does not make sense, particularly in a
society based on a market economy, until it is supplemented by economic
democracy. Given the definition of political
democracy as the authority of the people (demos) in the political
sphere—which implies the existence of political equality in the sense of equal
distribution of political power—we may correspondingly define economic
democracy as the authority of demos in the economic sphere —which
implies the existence of economic equality in the sense of equal distribution of
economic power. Economic democracy therefore relates to a social system which
institutionalises the integration of society and the economy and may be defined
as an economic structure and a process which, through
direct citizen participation in the economic decision-taking and
decision-implementing process, secures an equal distribution of economic power
among citizens. This means that,
ultimately, the demos controls the economic process, within an institutional
framework of demotic ownership of the means of production. Therefore, for
a society to be characterised as an economic democracy there should be no institutionalised
economic processes of an oligarchic nature, which implies that all
‘macro’ economic decisions, namely, decisions concerning the running of the
economy as a whole (overall level of production, consumption and investment,
amounts of work and leisure implied, technologies to be used, etc.) are taken by
the citizen body collectively and without representation, although
"micro" economic decisions at the workplace or the household level may
be taken by the individual production or consumption unit. Also, there should be
no institutionalised economic structures embodying unequal economic power
relations, which implies that the means of production and distribution are
collectively owned and directly controlled by the demos so that any
inequality of income is therefore the
result of additional voluntary work at the individual level. Thus, demotic
ownership of the economy provides the economic structure for
democratic ownership, whereas direct citizen participation in economic decisions
provides the framework for a comprehensively democratic control process
of the economy. The demos, therefore, becomes the authentic unit of
economic life, since economic democracy is not feasible today unless both the
ownership and control of productive resources are organised at the local level.
Briefly, the main characteristic
of the proposed model, which also differentiates it from socialist planning
models, is that it explicitly presupposes a stateless, moneyless and marketless
economy that precludes the institutionalisation of privileges for some sections
of society and private accumulation of wealth, without having to rely on a
mythical post-scarcity state of abundance, or having to sacrifice freedom of
choice.
The satisfaction of the above conditions for political and economic
democracy would represent the re-conquering of the political and economic realms
by the public realm, that is, the re-conquering of a true social individuality,
the creation of the conditions of freedom and self-determination, both at the
political and the economic levels. But, political and economic power are not the
only forms of power and therefore political and economic democracy do not, by
themselves, secure an inclusive democracy. In other words, an inclusive
democracy is inconceivable unless it
extends to the broader social realm to embrace the workplace, the household, the
educational place and indeed any economic or cultural institution which
constitutes an element of this realm.
A crucial issue that arises with respect to democracy in the social realm
in general and paideia in particular refers to relations in the household.
Women's social and economic status has been enhanced during, particularly, the
statist and neoliberal phases of modernity, as a result of the expanding labour
needs of the growth economy on the one hand and the activity of women's
movements on the other. Still, gender relations
at the household level are mostly hierarchical, especially in the South
where most of the world population lives. However, although the household shares
with the public realm a fundamental common characteristic, inequality and power
relations, the household has always been classified in the private realm.
Therefore, the problem that arises here is how the ‘democratisation’ of the
household may be achieved.
One possible solution is the dissolution of the household/public realm
divide. Thus, some feminist writers, particularly of the eco-feminist variety,
glorify the oikos and its values as a substitute for the polis and
its politics, something that, as Janet Biehl observes, "can easily be read
as an attempt to dissolve the political into the domestic, the civil into the
familial, the public into the private".
Similarly, some green thinkers attempt
to reduce the public realm into an extended household model of a small-scale,
co-operative community.
At the other end, some Marxist feminists
attempt to remove the public/private dualism by dissolving all private
space into a singular public, a socialised or fraternal state sphere.
However, as Val Plumwood points out, the feminists who argue for the
elimination of household privacy are today a minority although most feminists
stress the way in which the concept of household privacy has been misused to put
beyond challenge the subordination of women.Another
possible solution is, taking for granted that the household belongs to the
private realm, to define its meaning in terms of the freedom of all its members.
As Val Plumwood points out this means that “household relationships themselves
should take on the characteristics of democratic relationships , and that the
household should take a form which
is consistent with the freedom of all its members.
To my mind, the issue is not the dissolution of the private/public realm
divide. The real issue is how, maintaining and enhancing the autonomy of the two
realms, such institutional arrangements are adopted
that introduce democracy at the household and the social realm in general
(workplace, educational establishment etcetera) and at the same time enhance the
institutional arrangements of political and economic democracy. In fact, an
effective democracy is inconceivable unless free time is equally distributed
among all citizens, and this condition can never be satisfied as long as the
present hierarchical conditions in the household, the workplace and elsewhere
continue. Furthermore, democracy in the social realm, particularly in the
household, is impossible, unless such institutional arrangements are introduced
which recognise the character of the household as a needs-satisfier and
integrate the care and services provided within its framework into
the general scheme of needs satisfaction .
Although therefore nobody disputes the fact that the family plays a
crucial role in the socialisation of an individual in early age, still, the
usual libertarian discussion of the 1960s and 1970s on whether family should be
abolished raises the issue in simplistic, if not Manichaic terms. It is obvious
today that living in a family is an individual choice which strictly belongs to
the private realm. The crucial issue therefore is how democratic relations are
created at the household or the educational place to support and enhance the
democratic institutions created at society’s level.
Finally, coming to ecological democracy the issue here is how we may
envisage an environmentally-friendly institutional framework that would not
serve as the basis of a Nature-dominating ideology. Clearly, if we see democracy
as a process of social self-institution where there is no divinely or
‘objectively’ defined code of human conduct, there are no guarantees that an
inclusive democracy will also be an ecological one. The
replacement of the market economy by a new institutional framework of
inclusive democracy constitutes only the necessary condition for a
harmonious relation between the natural and social worlds. The sufficient
condition refers to the citizens’ level of ecological consciousness. Still,
the radical change in the dominant social paradigm that will follow the
institution of an inclusive democracy, combined with the decisive role that
paideia
will play in an environmentally-friendly institutional framework, could
reasonably be expected to lead to a radical change in the human attitude towards
Nature. In other words, a democratic
ecological problematique cannot go beyond the institutional preconditions that
offer the best hope for a better human relationship to Nature. However, there
are strong grounds to believe that the relationship between an inclusive
democracy and Nature would be much more harmonious than could ever be achieved
in a market economy, or one based on socialist statism, as a result of the new
structures and relations that will follow the establishment
of: political, economic and democracy in the social realm.
The above conditions for democracy imply a new conception of citizenship:
economic, political, social and cultural citizenship which involves new
political and economic structures and relations,
self-management structures at the workplace, democracy in the household
and the educational place, as well as new democratic structures of dissemination
and control of information and culture (mass media, art, etc.) that allow every
member of the demos to take part in the process and at the same time develop
his/her intellectual and cultural potential. The conception of citizenship
adopted here, which could be called a democratic conception,
is based on the above definition of inclusive democracy and presupposes a
‘participatory’ conception of active citizenship, like the one implied by
the work of Hannah Arendt.
In this conception, “political activity is not a means to an end, but an end
in itself; one does not engage in political action simply to promote one’s
welfare but to realise the principles intrinsic to political life, such as
freedom, equality, justice, solidarity, courage and excellence”.
It is therefore obvious that this conception of citizenship is qualitatively
different from the liberal and social-democratic conceptions which adopt an
‘instrumentalist’ view of citizenship, i.e. a view which implies that
citizenship entitles citizens with certain rights that they can exercise as
means to the end of individual welfare.
In conclusion, as it was stated above, the institutional conditions
described are just necessary conditions for democracy. The sufficient condition
so that democracy will not degenerate into some kind of “demago-cracy”,
where the demos is manipulated by a new breed of professional politicians, is
crucially determined by the citizens’ level of democratic consciousness which,
in turn, is conditioned by paideia.
Therefore, there is a continuous interaction between paideia and
democracy which both should be seen as dynamic processes rather than as simply
static structures. The institutional preconditions of paideia at the social
level secure the institutional framework for paideia, as they provide the public
space for the education of individuals as citizens. In other words, these
conditions are the necessary conditions for an
autonomous paideia which presupposes autonomous individuals (in
contrast to libertarians who talk about a moral paideia instead of an autonomous
one) . At the same time, a democratic paideia is the necessary condition for the
reproduction of democracy itself so that it does not degenerate in practice into
a new kind of oligocracy.
Change in values as a precondition and consequence
of Paideia
An Inclusive Democracy does not simply presuppose a set of institutional
conditions that secure social and individual autonomy. It also assumes a set of
values that are compatible with the democratic organisation of society.
Therefore, the democratic project is incompatible with irrationalism because,
democracy, as a process of social self-institution, implies a society which is
open ideologically, namely, which is not grounded on any closed system of
beliefs, dogmas or ideas. “Democracy,” as Castoriadis
puts it, “is the project of
breaking the closure at the collective level.”
In a democratic society, dogmas and closed systems of ideas cannot constitute
parts of the dominant social paradigm, although, of course, individuals can have
whatever beliefs they wish, as long as they are committed to uphold the
democratic principle, namely the principle according to which society is
autonomous, institutionalised as inclusive democracy.
So, the democratic project cannot be grounded on any divine, natural or
social ‘laws’ or tendencies, but on our own conscious and self-reflective
choice between the two main historical traditions: the tradition of heteronomy
which has been historically dominant, and the tradition of autonomy. The choice
of autonomy implies that the institution of society is not based on any kind of
irrationalism (faith in God, mystical beliefs, etc.), as well as on ‘objective
truths’ about social evolution grounded on social or natural ‘laws’. This
is so because any system of religious or mystical beliefs (as well as any closed
system of ideas), by definition, excludes the questioning of some fundamental
beliefs or ideas and, therefore, is incompatible with citizens setting their own
laws. In fact, the principle of ‘non-questioning’ some fundamental beliefs
is common in every religion or set of metaphysical and mystical beliefs, from
Christianism up to Taoism. This is important if we take particularly into
account the fact that today’s influence of irrationalist trends on libertarian
currents has resulted in the silly picture of
scores of libertarian communes organised democratically and inspired by
various kinds of irrationalism (not unlike similar religious sects in the past,
e.g. the Christian Catharist movement extolled by libertarians as democratic!).
Classical anarchists like Bakunin on tne other hand were explicit in their
hostility towards religious or other dogmas:
Education of
children and their upbringing must be founded wholly upon the scientific
development of reason and not that of faith; upon the development of
personal dignity
and
independence, not upon piety and-obedience; on the cult of truth and justice at
any cost; and above all, upon respect for humanity, which
must replace in everything the e divine cult (...) All rational education is
at bottom nothing but the progressive immolation of authority for the benefit of
freedom, the final aim of education necessarily being the development of free
men imbued with a feeling of respect and love for the liberty of others.
The
fundamental element of autonomy is the creation of our own truth,
something that social individuals can only achieve through direct democracy,
that is, the process through which they continually question any institution,
tradition, or ‘truth’. In a democracy, there are simply no given truths. The
practice of individual and social autonomy presupposes autonomy in thought, in
other words, the constant questioning of institutions and truths. Democracy is
therefore seen not just as a
structure
institutionalising the equal sharing of power, but, also, as a
process
of social self-institution, in the context of which politics constitutes an
expression of both social and individual autonomy. Thus, as an expression of
social autonomy, politics takes the form of calling into question the existing
institutions and of changing them through deliberate collective action. Also, as
an expression of individual autonomy, “the polis secures more than
human survival. Politics makes possible man’s development as a creature
capable of genuine autonomy, freedom and excellence”, as
Cynthia Farrar
points out referring
to the thought of the sophist philosopher Protagoras. Therefore, a
democratic society will be a social creation, which can only be grounded on our
own conscious selection of those forms of social organisation that are conducive
to individual and social autonomy.
It is clear that democratic Paideia needs a new kind of rationalism,
beyond both the 'objectivist' type of rationalism we inherited from the
Enlightenment and the generalised relativism of postmodernism. We need a democratic
rationalism, i.e. a rationalism founded on democracy, as a structure and a
process of social self-institution. Within the context of democratic
rationalism, democracy is not justified
by
an appeal to objective tendencies with respect to natural or social
evolution, but by an appeal to reason in terms of
logon
didonai, (rendering account and reason), which explicitly denies the idea of
any ‘directionality’ as regards social change. Therefore, as I tried to show
elsewhere, what is needed today is
not to jettison science, let alone rationalism altogether, in the interpretation
of social phenomena, but to transcend 'objective' rationalism (i.e., the
rationalism which is grounded on ‘objective laws’ of natural or social
evolution) and develop a new kind of democratic rationalism
All this has very important implications directly on technoscience and
indirectly on Paideia. As regards technoscience, as I tried to show elsewhere
modern technoscience is neither ‘neutral’ in the sense that it is merely a
‘means’ which can be used for the attainment of whatever end, nor autonomous
in the sense that it is the sole or the most important factor determining social
structures, relations and values. Instead, it is argued that technoscience is
conditioned by the power relations implied by the specific set of social,
political and economic institutions characterising the growth economy and the
dominant
social paradigm. What is therefore needed is the reconstitution of both our
science and technology in a way that puts at the centre of every stage in the
process, in every single technique, human personality and its needs rather than,
as at present, the values and needs of those controlling the market/growth
economy. This presupposes a new form of socio–economic organisation in which
citizens, both as producers and as consumers, do control effectively the types
of technologies adopted, expressing the general rather than, as at present, the
partial interest. In other words, it presupposes first, a political democracy,
so that effective citizen control on scientific research and technological
innovation can be established; economic democracy, so that the general economic
interest of the confederated communities, rather than the partial interests of
economic elites, could be effectively expressed in research and technological
development; ecological democracy, so that the environmental implications of
science and technology are really taken into account in scientific research and
technological development; and last, but not least, democracy in the social
realm, that is, equal sharing in the decision–taking process at the factory,
the office, the household, the laboratory and so on, so that the abolition of
hierarchical structures in production, research and technological development
would secure not only the democratic content of science and technology but also
democratic procedures in scientific and technological development and collective
control by scientists and technologists
It
should be clear, however, that the democratisation of science and technology
should not be related to a utopian abolition of division of labour and
specialisation as, for instance, Thomas Simon suggests who argues that
democratising technology means abolishing professionals and experts: “the
extent to which a professional/expert is no longer needed is partially the
extent to which a process has become democratised. It is the extent to which we
are able to make the professional terrain a deliberative assembly.” But, although it is true
that the present extreme specialisation and division of labour has been
necessitated by the needs of ‘efficiency’, which are imposed by the dynamics
of the growth economy, still, there are certain definite limits on the degree of
reduction in specialisation which is feasible and desirable, if we do not wish
to see the re–emergence of problems that have been solved long ago (medical
problems, problems of sanitation, etc.). The nature of the technology to be
adopted by a democratic society does not just depend on who owns it, or even who
controls it. Not only, as History has shown, it is perfectly possible that
‘socialist’ bureaucrats may adopt techniques which are as environmentally
destructive and life–damaging (if not more) as those adopted by their
capitalist counterparts, but also the possibility can not be ruled out
that citizens’ assemblies may
adopt
similar techniques. So, the abolition of oligarchic ownership and control over
technology, which would come about in a marketless, moneyless, stateless economy
based on an inclusive democracy, is only the necessary institutional condition
for an alternative pro–life and pro–nature technology. The sufficient
condition depends, as always, on the value system that a democratic society
would develop and the level of consciousness of its citizens. One therefore can
only hope that the change in the institutional framework together with a
democratic paideia would play a crucial role in the formation of this new
system of values and the raising of the level of consciousness.
In
conclusion, a democratic paideia should promote the values consistent with the
new democratic institutions and particularly the principles of autonomy and
community on which they are based. Thus, out of the fundamental principle of
autonomy one may derive a set of moral values involving equity and democracy,
respect for the personality of every citizen (irrespective of gender, race,
ethnic identity etc) and of course respect for human life itself which, as
Castoriadis puts it, ‘ought to be posited as an absolute because the
injunction of autonomy is categorical, and there is no autonomy without life.
Also, out of the same fundamental principle of autonomy, we may derive values
involving the protection of the quality of life of each individual citizen--
something that would imply a relationship of harmony with nature and the need to
re-integrate society with nature. Similarly, out of the fundamental principle of
community we may derive a set of
values involving not only equity but also solidarity and mutual aid,
altruism/self-sacrifice (beyond concern for kin and reciprocity), caring and sharing.
Institutional preconditions at the educational level
As therefore
the discussion of the institutional preconditions for Paideia at society’s
level hopefully has made clear, the establishment of a democratic Paideia is
impossible within the existing system of capitalist market economy and
representative ‘democracy’. The next crucial issue is how we see the
educational institutions of the future and the nature of education in general .
Paideia in a
democratic society is seen
as a means of
achieving equal distribution of power, rather than, as at present
and in any heteronomous society, as a means of maintaining and
reproducing the concentration of power at the hands of privileged social groups.
If paideia is seen as a means of achieving equal distribution of power it
complements the institutions of political and economic democracy, which aim at
an equal distribution of political and economic power respectively, so that a
genuine classless society could be achieved.
As I
mentioned in the first section, paideia in a democratic society should play the
double role of civic schooling
and personal training. The
concrete forms that a democratic Paideia will take is of course a matter for
the democratic assemblies of the future to decide and all we can do is outline
some proposals that, in our view, would better implement these two fundamental
aims. However, these two fundamental aims about the role of paideia in a
democratic society have some definite implications on the nature, content and
methodology of the education process, which are helpful in formulating some
concrete proposals on the matter. On the basis of these aims the following
should be basic features of a democratic paideia:
-
Public
spaces in Education. The
education process should create new public spaces in which students (who up
to a certain age of maturity to be decided by demotic assemblies will not be
able to be members of them) will experience and live democracy in running
the educational process, as far as it affects them. This will involve
educational assemblies for each area of study (general knowledge and
specific areas of study/training), under the general guidance of demotic
assemblies. Students in these assemblies will decide collectively, on an
equal basis with their educators, the curriculum, the place/form of
education/training and so on.
-
Free
Generalised and Integral education for life.
This means that the education process for all children
starts at an early age (to be decided individually within a
reasonable age range) and continues for life. Furthermore, it is a process
which does not distinguish in principle between intellectual and manual work
that enjoy an equal social status. This however should not prevent an
individual citizen from
concentrating his/her training in a particular area of intellectual or
manual work at some stage in
his/her life, although all citizens should be able to do both types of work,
so that they could effectively participate in the collective effort to meet
the basic needs of the community.
The aim therefore will be to provide citizens with the general knowledge to
understand the world, as well as the
tools
to carry out any activity they select to do in covering their basic and
non-basic needs.
-
Individual
and social autonomy. The
education methods used and the content of education itself should aim to
promote freedom in the sense of individual and social autonomy both in the
everyday educational practice as well as in the knowledge transmitted to
students. The former should involve non-hierarchical relations in education
(see below) whereas the latter should involve a systematic effort to create
free self-reflective minds who would reject any dogmas and closed systems of
thought and particularly any irrational belief systems, i.e. systems
whose core beliefs are not derived by rational methods (i.e. reason and/or
an appeal to ‘facts’) but by intuition, instinct, feeling, mystical
experience, revelation etc. In this
sense, education is seen as the principal means of encouraging the
growth of the creative and autonomous person.
-
Non-hierarchical
relations. Paideia is a
double-edged process in which students learn from educators and vice versa.
Educators do not enjoy any hierarchical status as a result of their position
and, therefore, their authority
over students is grounded on temporary differences in knowledge. In
the democratic paideia which characterises an autonomous society, the
instituted equality in the distribution of power at society’s level rules
out any hierarchical authority; so,
the
only kind of discipline that exists is the self-discipline created by
freedom and activity themselves, which, in turn,
enhance the creative spontaneity of the individual. This is in
contrast to the hierarchical paideia which characterises any heteronomous
society in which the authority of the educator is based on power
relationships and is imposed through coercive discipline that does not
recognise the right and ability to dissent. An implication of the
non-hierarchical character of democratic paideia is
that
grades,
diplomas and credentials have no place in it since they simply cultivate
competition and create new hierarchies between trainees. The ‘authority’
of a person in his/her activity is confirmed by his/her knowledge and
experience rather than by grades and diplomas.
-
Balance
between science and the aesthetic sensibility.
Students should be encouraged in
all areas of study and particularly in the general knowledge area to
appreciate all forms of art and to be actively involved in practising
creative art so that a meaningful
balance could be achieved between scientific/practical knowledge on the one
hand and aesthetic sensibility/creativity
on the other; this will be a crucial step in developing balanced
personalities .
The
final critical issue refers to the form Paideia will take and in particular
whether it will take the form of formal schooling in specifically designated
educational institutions as today or whether instead it will take the form of
‘de-schooling’, as many libertarians of the individualistic trend
within the anarchist movement suggest. It should be stressed at the outset that
Marxists and classical anarchists like Bakunin did not reject schooling but
adopted the view that a socialist
‘schooling’ is impossible within the capitalist system. The
resolution adopted by the First International in its Congress of Brussels in
1867 explicitly stated the need for the organisation of the ‘schooling’ of
workers:
Recognizing
that for the moment it is impossible to organize a rational system of education,
the Congress urges its various sections to organize study courses which would
follow a program of scientific, professional, and industrial education, that is,
a program of integral instruction, in order to remedy as much as possible the
present-day lack of education among workers. It is well understood that a
reduction of working hours is to be considered an indispensable preliminary
condition.
Although the system of massive
state education, which was organised everywhere during modernity, supposedly
provided education to all as we saw in the second section
of this paper, the type of education provided had very different aims from the
aims of socialist education, or of the democratic paideia discussed above. In
fact, we may call the present form of education ‘miseducation’ to
distinguish it from emancipatory education and paideia. However, the
authoritarian type of education that developed particularly
during the statist phase of modernity both in the East and the West gave
rise to the counter-culture of the 1960s and an attack against not only the
content but also the form of education. Authoritarian schooling carried out by
professional teachers, using fixed curricula determined ‘from above’ rather
than through any democratic decision-taking process, were particular targets of
this attack. Paul Goodman’s ideas on libertarian education and particularly
Ivan Illich’s ‘deschooling’ thesis were especially influential and it
seems that they still inspire ‘life-style’ anarchists today.
Thus, Matt
Hern
stresses that ‘what is needed is a vast, asystematically organized fabric of
innumerable kinds of places for kids to spend their time‘ on the grounds that
‘compulsory schooling is a culture that reifies the centralized control and
monitoring of our daily lives’. However, this statement makes clear that the
author, throwing away the baby with the bath-water, confuses control and
organisation of education (which of course do not have to be centralised) with
education itself. Next, he confuses the content with the form of schooling when
he states, for instance, that ‘schools are institutions with their own
particular ideologies and pedagogical approaches, and they are devoted to
schooling, or imparting a certain set of values, beliefs and practises upon
their clients’. Still, as I tried to show above, in a democratic system of
education, the values taught could be decided democratically rather than by
elites as today. Furthermore, the individualistic trend which the article
expresses (a trend which today seems to be dominant among ‘anarchists’ –a
clear illustration of the degradation of this movement)
is evident in the following statement by the same author:
The
deschooling argument I want to make here presumes that each and every individual
is best able to define their own interests, needs and desires. Schools and
education assume that children need to be taught what is good, what is
important to understand I refuse to accept this. Kids do not need to be
taught. (...) Deschooling suggests the renunciation of not only schooling, but education as
well, in favour of a culture of self-reliance, self-directed learning, and
voluntary, non-coercive learning institutions
Thus, according to this passage,
‘each and every individual’ is best able to define the content and form of
education in accordance with its own interests, needs and desires. Clearly,
there is no society in this scheme, as the guru of neoliberalism Mrs Thatcher,
has declared twenty years earlier! There are no social individuals but simply
self-reliant individuals of the
Robinson Crusoe type--the typical example used by orthodox neoclassical
economists to justify the market system. Finally, the author, in an obvious
confusion of what a direct democracy means, he stresses that a directly
democratic agenda has to include an explicit renunciation of the
other-controlled mentality of compulsory schooling because:
If we want and
expect our kids to grow up to be responsible creatures capable of directing
their own lives, we have to give them practise at making decisions. To allow
authority to continually rob our kids of basic decisions about where and how to
play is to set our kids up for dependence and incompetence on a wide scale. If
we are to truly counter the disabling effect of schools, this is indeed our
fate. A genuine democracy, a society of self-reliant people and communities, has
to begin by allowing children and adults to shape themselves, to control their
own destinies free of authoritarian manipulation.
It is clear
that direct democracy is distorted here to mean individual rather
than collective decision-taking by assemblies of educators and trainees. The
distortion attempted here becomes even more obvious when it is made clear that
the author confuses also the form and content of learning with learning itself,
as for instance when he declares that ‘Learning is like breathing. It is a
natural human activity: it is part of being alive (...) Our ability to learn,
like our ability to breathe, does not need to be tampered with. It is utter
nonsense, not to mention deeply insulting to say that people need to be taught how to learn or how to think’.
However, although nobody would deny that learning is a natural ability this does
not mean that a dentist, a pilot, or a pianist do not have to be taught how to
learn (i.e. to be given a curriculum) dentistry, flying or playing the piano!
The issue therefore is who determines the curriculum, i.e. the program of study
, and this clearly can neither be left to the individual student to decide, as
proposed by libertarian supporters of deschooling, nor of course to the elites,
as it happens today, but to the
democratic assemblies of educators and pupils/students.
So, given the
fundamental aims of democratic paideia and their implications we considered
above and given the objections to the deschooling thesis, as far as it rejects
the very idea of a curriculum, how do we see the education ‘institutions’ of
a democratic society? To my mind, the best way out of the present strictly
structured miseducation, which aims to produce career people who have
internalised the values of the heteronomous society, is the creation of
‘education groups’ as the basic units within which the education process
will take place. I would propose three categories of such groups which I will
call ‘primary’, secondary’ and ‘tertiary’ groups although, as we shall
see, their relationship to today’s three grades of education under similar
names is almost nil.
‘Primary’
education groups consist of pupils of an early age (to be determined by the
demotic assemblies, e.g. 6-15) and educators. Every child of this age has to
join one of these groups, as this represents the only compulsory stage in the
education process. The reason for this compulsory element is that, given the
accumulated knowledge of the 21st century, a minimum of knowledge is
required for all citizens to be able to participate in the production of the
‘basic’ goods and services (i.e. the ones covering basic needs) which secure
the survival of their self-reliant communities and themselves. Therefore the
basic aim of primary educational groups is to provide the minimum knowledge
required for this purpose, which would include industrial skills, if group
assemblies decide so, as well of course as the general knowledge and aesthetic
sensibility we described above. Furthermore, the knowledge provided by these
primary educational groups would provide a sufficient background for
attending secondary or tertiary groups. The curriculum, as mentioned
above, would be decided by each educational group democratically.
‘Educators’ would consist not only of trained educators but also of citizens
involved in every kind of activity who could offer their knowledge and
experience. There would be no fixed time-tables neither specifically designed
‘schools’ since education would take place in the actual areas of activity,
linking knowledge and learning to real-life processes. Still, specially designed
public buildings with various facilities would be available to these educational
groups for their assembly meetings, in which the curriculum, the planning of
their activity in implementing their curriculum etc would be determined.
Therefore, much of the group’s activity would take place in laboratories,
science centres, factories, farms, offices, shops,
as well as in museums, libraries, theatres, cinemas, etc. Pupils, who
would not be able during this education stage to participate in the production
of the basic goods and services necessary for the survival of the community,
would be allocated ‘basic vouchers’,
in exactly the same way as any other citizen, for the satisfaction of their
basic needs and, on top of them, any ‘non-basic vouchers allocated to them by
the confederal assembly on the basis of the resources available to the
confederal democracy.
Citizens who
have finished attending the primary groups and
do not wish to join a specialised tertiary group but want to extend
their knowledge of particular areas, or simply wish to update their
general knowledge acquired at primary groups, could do so either on an
individual basis through ‘open education’ programmes offered by TV, the
internet etc, or collectively, by voluntarily joining
‘secondary’ education groups, which could be done at any age.
These groups are distinguished from ‘tertiary’ groups on the basis of the
degree of specialisation involved. In contrast to ‘tertiary’ groups which
aim at a clearly specialised education, secondary groups aim at providing
semi-specialised education, beyond the level provided within primary groups.
Citizens attending the secondary groups are entitled to their basic and
non-basic vouchers as any other citizen, according to need and labour offered to
the community respectively, which implies that students attending such groups
would still have to contribute to the community the min