Deschooling L'earning

Young Adults and the New Spirit of Capitalism

M. Singh, B. Harreveld

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137310354
• eBook ISBN: 9781137310361
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Administration de l'éducation

This book explores reforms to young adults' schooling that mobilise capital friendly learning-and-earning (l'earning) webs. It argues that deschooling l'earning builds young adults' commitment to modern modes of capital accumulation, gives insights into how they can secure their future, and reassures them that this can serve the common good.

1

Classrooms Need Not Interfere with L’earning

Introduction

L’earning is our combination of the words of learning and earning. The concept of deschooling l’earning focuses on the educational transformation of young adults through policies and practices that embrace first-hand experiential pedagogies and curricula (Douglas, 2014). Thus, deschooling l’earning refers to how young adults develop their capabilities to transform knowledge, skills and understandings through participation, collaboration and production via active, real-world contributions to adult life (Fischer, 2009). This deschooled l’earning calls for a focus by governments as much as teachers on where and how young adults’ l’earn and not just their passive acquisition of pre-packaged, test-driven classroom-centric instruction.

Over the past decade, we have been researching reforms that have made possible the increased deschooling of l’earning throughout Australia (Harreveld and Singh, 2007; 2011). We undertook an in-depth, longitudinal study of Queensland’s education and training reforms to senior secondary schooling (Years 10–12) (Harreveld and Singh, 2008; 2009). We investigated Vocational Education and Training in Schools (VETiS) and the specialist academies created by the Australian and Queensland governments (Harreveld and Caldwell, 2010; Harreveld et al., 2013). While conducting this research, we visited a vineyard and wineries, an aluminium plant, an accountant’s office, a building prefabrication factory, a legal firm, a hospital, a local government’s horticultural workshop and an airplane hangar. Our fieldwork also took us to colleges of technical and further education, the headquarters of registered training organisations and universities. The research, which is reported in this book, focuses on the brokering of l’earning provisions for young adults to make real-world contributions to adult life as part of accredited curricula. We explore what this research means for teachers’ professional learning, especially their work as network leaders (Singh et al., 2013).

One way of classifying the relationship between learning and earning is to hold that they are either separated or integrated (Bernstein, 1977). For the most part, the principles, contexts and possibilities governing young adults’ learning and earning are strongly insulated rather than productively combined. Wiener (1981, p. 138) argues that in the past, senior secondary schooling ‘for social status [was] preferred to specific education for an industrial career.’ This classification, which shields learning from earning, strengthens and is strengthened by academically oriented, university-focused senior secondary schooling. This separatist classification is valorised, while vocational education in schools is characterised as educationally weak. Moving beyond such separatism is now timely.

Williams (1965) argues that both cultural training and the character training provided by academically oriented, university-focused senior secondary schooling are important forms of vocational education. The cultural and character training provided by senior secondary schooling is undertaken in consideration of young adults’ future prospects for higher learning and higher earnings. Secondary schooling was established to provide such specialised vocational training (Wiener, 1981). Moreover, Crawford (2009) demonstrates that an electrician’s helper can complete a university degree in physics and run a motorbike business. Furthermore, across England, Italy and Germany (Higham et al., 2013), young adults’ l’earning now involves the multidirectional crossing of education-training-work boundaries. This networking of young adults’ l’earning requires cross-sectoral, multilevel partnerships (Ma Rhea, 2012). Young adults’ l’earning is also being deschooled, because many cannot be confined within alienating classrooms, schools and educational bureaucracies (Anderson, 1973; Brown et al., 2003b; Emdin, 2010; Newmann, 1981; Nutbeam et al., 1993). A new ethos of l’earning has emerged over the past 50 years, providing young adults with new opportunities for deschooling their education. In Wenger’s (1998, p. 263) terms, education is defined as formative and transformative processes, which take young adults beyond their current capabilities to open up broader life/work trajectories, and thereby renewing the communities of which they are a part.

A new ethos of l’earning

This new ethos l’earning is now necessary to secure young adults’ adherence to twenty-first-century global capitalism (Brown et al., 2010; Florida, 2005). This ethos sees teachers providing twenty-first-century young adults with pathways that present them with exciting prospects for self-realisation and freedom, while maintaining the lifestyle advances gained by their forebears and chances to contribute to the common good (Allen and Hollingworth, 2013; McKeown, 2011; Schlimbach, 2010). Technologically enabled l’earning webs are the educational frontiers for many young adults, and post-classroom, non-school learning the norm for at least some (Gatherer, 1983; Moore, 1986; Roderick and Hopkins, 1984).

This new ethos of l’earning echoes the critique advanced by Illich (1973a, p. 7), who argues that young adults have the right to learn without that right being ‘curtailed by the obligation to attend school.’ Illich (1973a) contends that classroom-centric schooling is inherently anti-educational, and the bureaucratisation of schooling limits society’s ideas about the possibilities for learning and education. For Illich (1973a; 1973b), the central problem with schools is the tendency towards being manipulative bureaucracies rather than convivial institutions. Illich (1973a, p. 7) argues ‘that the ethos, not just the institutions, of society ought to be deschooled.’ In response, he offers a schematic programme for deschooling l’earning through flexible educational webs operating through l’earning networks. Contemporary changes, which take learning beyond classrooms, echo his arguments for deschooling. Illich (1973a, p. 7) established ‘educational webs’ to enhance their opportunities and choices for ‘learning, sharing and caring.’

Illich (1973a) uses Webers’ (1978; 2009) analytical concept of ‘ideal types’ to construct his categorisation of schooling as manipulative institutions in contrast to convivial institutions that facilitate learning. In the manipulative institution, schooling is ‘imposed’ and young adults are embroiled in ‘highly complex and costly production processes in which much of the elaboration and expense is concerned with convincing [them] that they cannot live without the product or the treatment offered by the institution’ (Illich, 2002, p. 55). In the convivial institution, opportunities and choices for learning and education are fostered ‘within formally defined limits, while the [young adult] remains a free agent’ (Illich, 2002, p. 55). The learning and education of young adults are the major analytic points for consideration of a society’s convivial institutions.

Illich (1973a, p. 67) also questions labelling young adults who are ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ as NEETs (Chen, 2011b; Leino et al., 2013; Toivonen, 2011). Critiques of the South African government’s policy focus on its failure to meet the needs of those not in employment, education or training (Allais, 2012; Kraak, 2013). Similar concerns about the labour market outcomes of vocational education have arisen in Estonia (Leino et al., 2013), Indonesia (Newhouse and Suryadarma, 2011) and Taiwan (Chen, 2011b).

The label, NEET, refers to those who do not buy into manipulative institutions and place little value on their manufacture of certificates. Through a series of ‘irrational inconsistencies’ in publicly prescribed schooling, Illich (1973a) sees it morphing into a manipulative, bureaucratic logic (also see Anderson, 1973). The spectrum of concerns Illich (1973a; 1973b) raises spans the escalating amount of compulsory schooling that is required of young adults and the unreasonable expectations that schooling deliver the good life for all through sustainable economic development. It is within and against this spirit of manipulative and irrational bureaucracies that the deschooling of l’earning has gained leverage among some educators today (Orela, 2011; Zaldívar, 2011). Schooling, its institutionalised values and the ways in which these values are packaged and tested continue to be questioned (Alvermann and Moore, 2011; Coldron et al., 2010; Larsson, 2013). In this book, we revivify Illich’s (1973a; 1973b) idea of deschooling in terms of networked l’earning webs.

Deschooling l’earning

Our concept of deschooling l’earning refers to ‘networking l’earning webs’ by network leaders responsible for brokering opportunities and choices for young adults to work towards lives they value and which are socially valued. However, the concept of deschooling l’earning does not refer to home-schooling (Takahashi, 2008), or to open schooling (Andrade, 2008). Deschooling l’earning may include the home, but mostly many other non-school sites where young adults access opportunities and choices to make real-world contributions to adult life and develop their capabilities for lives worth living (Gandjour, 2008; Sen, 1992; 1999). These twenty-first-century capabilities may include undertaking project-driven work, networking to make trustworthy l’earning connections and using multiple languages for ongoing l’earning, research and critique (Znepolski, 2010). In the twenty-first century, we have greater research-based knowledge for developing more appropriate, intersectional policies for deschooling young adults’ l’earning (Chun et al., 2013; Verloo et al., 2012; von Wahl, 2011; Zaff, 2011).

This book explores the intersections between deschooling young adults’ l’earning and the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007). Early forms of capitalism supported the schooling of skilled workers in ways that separated the production of labour from economic life (Hamilton, 1989; Kliebard, 1999). Contemporary permutations in local/global capitalism are remarkable for reconnecting and integrating education and production (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007; du Gay and Morgan, 2013; Florida, 2005; Young et al., 1997b). Of course, efforts to connect learning and earning are not always successful (Wright, 2012). Government policies and practices have not delivered on the promise of having all young adults in schooling, training and/or employment (Bynner and Parsons, 2002; Chen, 2011b). During the transition from school to further education, training and/or work, some young adults confront socio-economic exclusion. Their elimination indicates policy failure, as in England (Maguire, 2013), Estonia (Leino et al., 2013) and South Africa (Kraak, 2013).

This intersectionality between deschooling young adults’ l’earning and the new spirit of capitalism is evident in the local/global competition for highly skilled, talented but low-cost labour for the world’s multilingual knowledge economies (Brown et al., 2011; Florida, 2005). The idea of ‘local/global’ refers to the interplay between local and global imaginings, forces and connections, whereby the local is embedded in broader global constellations. This is in preference to seeing the local as narrowly situated and disconnected from more expansive processes, or the global as an abstract distant phenomenon. Wenger (1998, p. 131) explains that the local and the global are interrelated, coexisting and shaping each other, and definitely not moments in an expanding horizon. Thus, we bring a local/global orientation to exploring the intersections between deschooling young adults’ l’earning and the new spirit of capitalism. We recognise that governments across Eurasia and the Indian-Pacific pursue policy learning by borrowing policies from each other to promote deschooling reforms (Halpin and Troyna, 1995; Goldstein, 2004; Koh, 2011). However, such transnational learning about policy does not produce an unthinking convergence of government reform agendas.

The term multilingual knowledge economies (Singh and Scanlon, 2003) refers to three key aspects of local/global capital accumulation. The first concerns building the people’s commitment to capital accumulation by tapping into the knowledge-based products and services embedded within the world’s diverse languages. The second facet concerns assuring the people’s security through local/global production and exchange of goods and services within and across multiple languages. A third characteristic of capital accumulation is serving the common good by ensuring the public rather than just individuals benefit by bringing forward as many languages as possible into the twenty-first century through reinvigorating their contributions to local/global knowledge.

Teachers in Australia (Harris and Rainey, 2012), Britain (Garland, 2012) and Canada (Levac, 2012) are being encouraged to induct young adults into the ethos of deschooling l’earning that accords with the new spirit of capitalism. The expectation is that young adults might find more rewarding jobs and get higher levels of income in their post-school, work-life trajectories (OECD, 2011a; 2011b). Nevertheless, further investigations into these deschooling reforms are necessary to meet the challenges of local/global multilingual knowledge economies, the competition for high-skilled jobs and the ‘de-institutionalisation of learning and assessment’ (Harris, Simons & Moore, 2005, p. 12).

Defining senior secondary schooling

Local/global conceptions of senior secondary schooling are interrelated. Ideas about what constitutes senior secondary schooling coexist and shape each other. There is no one fixed or unifying definition for senior secondary schooling embraced by all countries. Moreover, within individual countries, considerable leeway is possible in how their levels of schooling are defined. In addition, different terms are used throughout the world for Years, including grades, classes and draft, all of which mean category and order In India, Ireland and Spain, senior secondary schooling covers Years 11–12. In Brazil, China, Japan, Portugal, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and South Korea, senior secondary schooling covers Years 10–12. In Canada, Years 9–12 constitute senior secondary schooling. However, in various countries what constitutes different levels of schooling varies between provinces and districts.

The international commitment to senior secondary schooling has not produced a convergence among governments making their national curricula a vehicle for integrating education, training and employment. In Finland, Germany and Greece, senior secondary schooling for 16-to 18-year-olds in Years 10–12 is divided into dual vocational and academic systems. Students enter high schools in Norway at the age of 16, from where their education and training leads to university admissions or vocational certification, which can include in-school studies, or studies in both school and business enterprises. Variations occur in Australia in terms of offering integrated or separate vocational and academic education and qualifications for young adults in Years 10–12.

Reforms to senior secondary schooling in the Netherlands include increasing liaisons between secondary schools and higher education institutions (Veugelers, 2004). By clustering subjects into profiles relevant to higher education and the job market, these school/university partnerships improve students’ success rate in higher education, have them progress through higher education at a faster rate and minimise overly frequent changes in university subjects. For more than a decade, England has developed education and training for 14–19-year-olds, through joined-up youth services and partnership-driven learning. Pring (2008, p. 680) explains that for the many young adults who ‘require a more practical and vocational learning experience than the school can offer [this] practical, hands-on and occupationally-orientated learning is highly motivating.’ In these scenarios, classroom-centric schooling policies and practices now seem much less important than in the past.

Beyond classroom-centric schooling policies and practices

That education should necessarily occur in school classrooms seems incontestable. It may seem that the classrooms we know today have existed since time immemorial. In order to appreciate the prospects of deschooling classroom-centric schooling policies and practices, it is important to have a historically informed understanding of classrooms (Cowan et al., 2012; Hamilton, 1989), lecture halls (Clark, 2006) and school science laboratories (Hofstein and Lunetta, 2004). Hamilton’s (1989, p. 1) history of schooling in England and Scotland shows that ‘the multi-teacher, multi-room school is of recent vintage – a monument to the educational reforms of the late 18th century.’ The constitution of the ‘classroom’ to bring ‘teachers, classes and rooms into one-to-one relationship’ (Hamilton, 1989, p. 111) was an organisational innovation to realise government aims to institutionalise cost-efficient and regulated public schooling. The classroom made it possible to establish conventions governing ways to class-ify learners and teachers, and to create criteria for allocating resources within each class of learners. Schooling policy is a practice that involves deliberations and debates about, and the determination that further practices of classroom-centric schooling should be pursued (or not) and shaped (or not) in certain ways.

Being able to situate the invention and development of classrooms historically is necessary for debating the relevance of classroom-centric schooling policies and practices to pursuing local/global socio-economic policies (Perry, 2009). For instance, there are policies and practices in the United States that tend to privilege the classroom as the site of young adults’ schooling (Hanushek and Raymond, 2005). Understanding the history involved in creating classrooms is necessary for appreciating the prospects for contemporary reforms aimed at deschooling young adults’ l’earning. For young adults in England (Steedman, 2011), Germany (Walther, 2012), Ghana, the United States (Zoogah, 2013) and the Netherlands (Veugelers, 2004), their l’earning is now dispersed across a range of sites and a multiplicity of education, training and workplace l’earning providers.

Liberating new understandings of l’earning

For a sceptical Toch (2010), classroom-centric schooling is giving way to forms of education that students assemble themselves from many different providers, online libraries with search engines that respond adaptively as students’ requests and recommend relevant literature, play lists of learning activities and on-demand tutoring. New learning environments use digital technologies to move teaching and learning beyond school classrooms (Conacher and Kelly-Holmes, 2007). For instance, mobile technologies are being used to have learners in Japan to work freely outside of classrooms on language learning activities (Stockwell, 2013). The deployment of the advanced information, communication and surveillance technologies (ICSTs) in senior secondary schooling has moved students’ learning environments beyond the classroom (Hunter, 2011). The ubiquitous digitised technologies employed in the service of young adults’ l’earning are now irretrievably blurring the borders between their personal and work lives (Chen et al., 2012). These l’earning webs involve using ICSTs to connect schools, training providers, workplaces and higher education institutions (Hadfield and Chapman, 2009).

Likewise, school/industry partnerships have also moved young adults’ l’earning outside classrooms (Hay and Kapitzke, 2009; Ma Rhea, 2012). In England, local collaborative partnerships among different l’earning providers such as schools, colleges and higher education institutions and training organisations are providin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• 1. Classrooms Need Not Interfere with L’earning
• 2. Disenchantment with Classroom-Centric Schooling
• 3. Brokering Capital-Friendly L’earning Webs
• 4. Networking Policy for Deschooling L’earning
• 5. Networking L’earning Webs Is Not So Radical
• 6. Deschooling Network Leadership
• 7. Deschooling, Democracy and Accountability
• 8. Tests of Government Accountability
• 9. Concepts and Implications for Deschooling
• References
• Index