Radical Education and the Common School

A Democratic Alternative

Michael Fielding, Peter Moss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415498296
• eBook ISBN: 9781136870316
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What is education, what is it for and what are its fundamental values? How do we understand knowledge and learning? What is our image of the child and the school? How does the ever more pressing need to develop a more just, creative and sustainable democratic society affect our responses to these questions?

Addressing these fundamental issues, Fielding and Moss contest the current mainstream dominated by markets and competition, instrumentality and standardisation, managerialism and technical practice. They argue instead for a radical education with democracy as a fundamental value, care as a central ethic, a person-centred education that is education in the broadest sense, and an image of a child rich in potential. Radical education, they say, should be practiced in the 'common school', a school for all children in its local catchment area, age-integrated, human scale, focused on depth of learning and based on team working. A school understood as a public space for all citizens, a collective workshop of many purposes and possibilities, and a person-centred learning community, working closely with other schools and with local authorities. The book concludes by examining how we might bring such transformation about.

Written by two of the leading experts in the fields of early childhood and secondary education, the book covers a wide vista of education for children and young people. Vivid examples from different stages of education are used to explore the full meaning of radical democratic education and the common school and how they can work in practice. It connects rich thinking and experiences from the past and present to offer direction and hope for the future. It will be of interest and inspiration to all who care about education - teachers and students, academics and policy makers, parents and politicians.

1 The state we’re in

There is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex inter-solidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem.

(Morin, 1999, p. 74)

This book is an exploration of social alternatives in the field of education, and argues for a new public education that we term ‘radical education and the common school’. This exploration is made urgent by the parlous state that we, as societies and as a species, are in: Edgar Morin’s ‘number one vital problem’. It is inspired by a rich legacy of educational thinkers and doers and it is motivated by three desires: to overthrow the dictatorship of no alternatives, to practise an emancipatory social science and to pursue real utopias. The language we use to express these desires is borrowed from two social thinkers to whom we have frequently turned for their ideas about possibilities of social transformation: the American Marxist sociologist, Erik Olin Wright and the Brazilian social theorist, legal scholar and politician, Roberto Mangabeira Unger.

Unger’s concern that we live today under the dictatorship of no alternatives – reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s triumphant rallying cry ‘There is no alternative’ – reminds us of a powerful tactic of supporters of dominant discourses down the ages, and which today (or at least until recently) has been the clarion call of neoliberals and market fundamentalists, who have sought to turn a choice into a necessity. Thatcher and her ilk revelled in this dictatorship. Unger rebels, rejecting a poverty of political expectation that means ‘the humanization of the inevitable has become the limit of transformative ambition’ (2004, p. xviii).

Wright, too, believes in the possibility of alternatives. He coins the term ‘emancipatory social science’ to describe ‘an account of a journey from the present to a possible future’ containing three parts: the

critique of society [that] tells us why we want to leave the world in which we live; the theory of alternatives [that] tells us where we want to go; and the theory of transformation [that] tells us how to get from here to there.

(Wright, 2009b, p. 17; emphasis added)

Emancipatory social science leads Wright to an interest in ‘real utopias’, a term he uses to refer to ‘utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials for redesigning social institutions’. While believing in the need for imagination and vision, to help us appreciate what might be possible, he also argues the need to eschew ‘vague utopian fantasies’, instead proposing utopian ideals that ‘are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change’ (Wright, 2009a, p. 4).

In short, we need to work the tension between dreams and practice. Wright has sought to do so in his own work on ‘real utopias’, which has focused on a ‘radical democratic egalitarian’ alternative to capitalism. But he has also led a Real Utopias Project that has explored radical alternatives to existing social practices in a number of basic societal institutions including property rights, secondary associations, markets, the welfare state and gender relations in the family (Cohen and Rogers, 1995; Roemer, 1996; Bowles and Gintis, 1999; Fung and Wright, 2003; Ackerman et al., 2005 and Gornick and Meyers, 2009).

What this book offers is a radical alternative to another basic societal institution, namely education, and an important educational environment, the school. It offers an alternative to what we view as the current dominant but failed and dysfunctional discourse about education and the school, of which more shortly, taking to heart Unger’s comment that the dictatorship of no alternative cannot be overthrown without ideas. This offer comes from authors who share a particular perspective, both political and national, what might be termed left-wing English, though we hope that much of what we say resonates beyond England, indeed beyond the United Kingdom, and we draw widely for inspiration on people and places beyond the confines of our country.

The book also offers a contribution to Wright’s emancipatory social science, focusing on the first two stages of that journey from the present to a possible future, critique and alternatives. Wright further applies three criteria to any consideration of alternatives: desirability, viability and achievability. We consider these criteria in more detail in subsequent chapters, but for the moment note that our focus is, again, on the first two: desirability, setting out an alternative that is strong on abstract but important principles; and viability, ‘a scientifically grounded conception of viable alternative institutions’ (Wright, 2009b, p. 16). In so doing, we set out what we hope is a real utopia, a fundamentally redesigned but pragmatically possible alternative for education and schooling.

There are other facets to the work of Wright and Unger that we find attractive. Their critiques of current economic and social conditions seem ever more necessary and urgent as these conditions come to be seen increasingly as inimical to flourishing, whether individual, societal or environmental. Their hopes for a better world are anchored in a strong belief in human beings and their capacity to act democratically, collaboratively and creatively. Their writing on alternatives and transformation is highly pragmatic, concerned with analysing how and why transformatory change might come about, rejecting both trivial revisions and revolutionary ruptures in favour of an incremental, cumulative and reactive process governed by a clear sense of direction – ‘where to?’ being the critical question – while at the same time eschewing the dangers of ‘blueprint’ utopianism. Wright, indeed, insists that the project of radical social change should be thought of less as providing a detailed blueprint or road map, with a clear itinerary marking the route unambiguously to a known destination and more as ‘a voyage of exploration’:

We leave the familiar world equipped with navigational devices that tell us the direction in which we are moving and how far from our point of departure we have travelled, but without a map laying out the entire route from origin to endpoint. This has perils, of course: we may encounter unforeseen obstacles which force us to move in a direction we had not planned . . . In the end, we may discover that there are absolute limits to how far we can go; but we can at least know if we are moving in the right direction.

(Wright, 2006, p. 105)

We return in the final chapter to further discussion about the ways and means of transformation. Though the theory of transformation is not the subject for this book, we hope to leave the reader aware that such a theory is as important today as ever and that there exist some useful building blocks for creating a theory for the transformation of education. But we warn the reader in advance that, following Wright, we will not offer a detailed road map specifying the route and journey time to destination ‘radical education’. We think such certainty neither desirable nor feasible. Unlike some educational pundits who have no doubts about direction or destination, the way ahead to us seems full of uncertainties: changing environments, unforeseen obstacles and unplanned deviations. It will take us to new viewpoints, leading us to review where we are heading towards and demanding route changes.

This talk of transformation, however, risks putting the cart before the horse. We start, in this chapter, therefore by paying particular attention to critique and why the current discourse of education and schooling is not fit for purpose, given the state we are in. In Chapters 2 and 3, we address alternatives. We propose desirable principles for redesigning education, a radical education that both looks backwards to draw on a rich educational legacy and looks forwards to offer an education that promises hope for the future; and for a school well-suited to practise a radical education, a common school. We also explore the viability of these alternatives, adopting Wright’s understanding of viability as involving both ‘systemic theoretical models of how particular social structures and institutions would work, and empirical studies of cases, both historical and contemporary, where at least some aspects of [our] proposal have been tried’ (Wright, 2007, p. 27; emphasis added).

But before plunging into the sometimes gloomy topic of critique, we want to start on a hopeful note by offering two cases of viability: educational projects that have sought and, for a time at least, offered the prospect of real utopias in practice, and which provide some inkling of what we mean by radical education.

Two tales of hope

A community takes responsibility for its children’s education

The city began its educational project more than 40 years ago. Today it runs a network of 34 municipal schools, for around 2,500 children, an expression of this community taking responsibility for the education of its younger citizens. Right from its beginning in the early 1960s, the project has been understood as, first and foremost, political and ethical, built on critical questions and explicit values. Critical questions have required choices to be made, and these choices have been made collectively and infused by values; once made, they have ‘been reference points for us, guiding our experience, our journey’ (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 71).

A central value has been democracy. The mayor at the time the city’s project began talks about it as a reaction to fascism which ‘had taught them that people who conformed and obeyed were dangerous, and that in building a new society it was imperative . . . to nurture and maintain a vision of children who can think and act for themselves’ (Dahlberg, 2000, p. 177). Democratic participation – of children, parents, educators, other school staff and other citizens – is ‘a value, an identifying feature of the entire experience, a way of viewing those involved in the educational process and the role of the school’ (Cagliari et al., 2004, p. 29). Other key values, important qualities that are precious to the education project, include dialogue and solidarity, uncertainty and subjectivity, plurality and border crossing.

The city’s first question and choice was the most fundamental: what is our understanding, what is our image of the child? And the city’s answer has been that of the ‘rich’ child – ‘rich in potential, strong, powerful, competent and, most of all, connected to adults and other children’ (Malaguzzi, 1993, p. 10) – and the child as citizen and subject of rights.

The second question and choice has been: what is our theory of learning? From their questioning has emerged a distinctive approach. Learning, for instance, is not seen as a form of linear progression; it is not like a staircase, where you have to take the first step before you move onto and reach the other, en route to a known end point – it is not the learning of transmission and predetermined outcome. Rather learning is understood as a process of co-construction, building meaning in relationship with others, as this former director of municipal schools describes:

Learning does not take place by means of transmission or reproduction. It is a process of construction, in which each individual constructs for himself the reasons, the ‘whys’, the meanings of things, others, nature, events, reality and life. The learning process is certainly individual, but because the reasons, explanations, interpretations and meanings of others are indispensable for our knowledge building, it is also a process of relations – a process of social construction. We thus consider knowledge to be a process of construction by the individual in relation with others, a true act of co-construction. The timing and styles of learning are individual, and cannot be standardised with those of others, but we need others in order to realise ourselves.

(Rinaldi, 2006, p. 125)

The pathways taken by such learning and its outcomes are uncertain: learning ‘does not proceed in a linear way, determined and deterministic, by progressive and predictable stages, but rather is constructed through contemporaneous advances, standstills, and “retreats” that take many directions’ (Rinaldi, 2005, p. 19). Another leading educator in the municipal schools emphasises their ease with uncertainty of direction, their resistance to shackling learning and their belief in the potential of the rich child:

It is important to society that schools and we as teachers are clearly aware how much space we leave children for original thinking, without rushing to restrict it with predetermined schemes that define what is correct according to a school culture. How much do we support children to have ideas different from those of other people and how do we accustom them to arguing and discussing their ideas with their classmates? I am quite convinced that greater attention to processes, rather than only the final product, would help us to feel greater respect for the independent thinking and strategies of children and teenagers.

(Vecchi, 2010, p. 138; original emphasis)

Ideas about learning reflect ideas about knowledge. Knowledge, to quote the first director of the municipal schools, is like a ‘tangle of spaghetti’, a metaphor similar to Gilles Deleuze’s idea of rhizomatic knowledge:

something which shoots in all directions with no beginning and no end, but always in between, and with openings towards other directions and places. It is a multiplicity functioning by means of connections and heterogeneity, a multiplicity which is not given but constructed. Thought, then, is a matter of experimentation and problematization – a line of flight and an exploration of becoming.

(Rinaldi, 2006, p. 8; original emphasis)

The process of learning as co-construction, in relationship with others and without the necessity of known outcomes, involves all concerned creating and re-creating theories:

For adults and children alike, understanding means being able to develop an interpretive ‘theory’, a narration that gives meaning to events and objects of the world. Our theories are provisional, offering a satisfactory explanation that can be continuously reworked; but they represent something more than simply an idea or a group of ideas. They must please us and convince us, be useful, and satisfy our intellectual, affective, and aesthetic needs (the aesthetics of knowledge).
In representing the world, our theories represent us.

(Rinaldi, 2006, p. 64)

Theories are created and shared, questioned and re-formed. This requires listening to thought – the ideas and theories, questions and answers of children and adults alike; treating thought seriously and with respect; and struggling to make meaning from what is said, without preconceived ideas of what is correct or appropriate. Listening, therefore, is one of the foundations of the educational project,

careful, respectful, tender ‘listening’ with solidarity to children’s strategies and ways of thinking. Careful however! These are children who feel free to express their opinions and who trust in the fact that they will be listened to carefully and respectfully. It is no coincidence that Jerome Bruner recalls that what struck him most on first entering [our] schools was a teacher who was listening to a child’s theories on how shadows are formed. He emphasises how this listening was interested and serious, because the child was putting together a theory the credibility of which was not important. What was important was the process that led to the construction of the theory.

(Vecchi, 2010, p. 29)

The city’s educators speak, therefore, of a ‘pedagogy of relationships and listening’. Another pedagogical concept of great importance is the ‘hundred languages of children’, an idea that emerged early on in this municipal project, during debates about the privileged position given in traditional education to just two languages, speech and writing, which ‘supported the power, not only of certain knowledges, but also of certain classes’ (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 193). The ‘hundred languages’, a theory full of democracy, refers ‘to the different ways children (human beings) represent, communicate and express their thinking in different media and symbolic systems; languages therefore are the many fonts or geneses of knowledge’ (Vecchi, 2010, p. 9). These numerous linguistic possibilities range from mathematical and scientific languages to the poetic languages, ‘forms of expression strongly characterised by expressive or aesthetic aspects such as music, song, dance or photography’ (ibid.). The choice of a ‘hundred’ does not denote a precise count, but is intended to be ‘very provocative, to claim for all these languages not only the same dignity, but the right to expression and to communicate with each other’ (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 193).

A pedagogy of relationships is not only about interconnection and interdependency between people, but also between the ‘hundred languages’. This means breaking down the divisions and opening up the compartments that too often exist in education with ‘proposals for learning that do not hurry to fence the world in more or less rigid categories of thought; but, on the contrary, seek connections, alliances and solidarities between different categories and languages or subjects’ (Vecchi, 2010, p. 32). Learning processes occur and are enriched when ‘several languages [or disciplines] interact together’ (ibid., p. 18).

The city has developed these ideas over nearly half a century, and put them to work in its schoo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Boxes and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The State We’re In
• 2. Democratic Radical Education
• 3. The Democratic Common School
• 4. Transforming Education
• A Post-Electoral Post-Script
• Notes
• Bibliography