It seems to me there is an emerging version of 'open' that is a hyper-neoliberal one, or perhaps right-wing libertarian,
see for example, http://miiu.org/wiki/Vesting_students_as_co-owners_of_schools
which must be about the most awful proposal for reforming education that I've seen so far ...
in this version: people and parents would co-own the school, but the aim would be to generate profit, i.e. learning becomes a by-product of making a profit
the same people propose 'free economic zones' with zero worker rights, etc ...
I notice this is on John Robb's miu site under the name of resilience ...
please note that I have no problem with co-ownership, only with the notion that education is a for-profit activity and that this would be strenghtened by giving students a vested interest in commercial activity ...; co-ownership of a mission-oriented educational institution would be an entirely different matter
the issue at state here, a true ontological issue, is inscribing hyper-capitalism even deeper in the human structure,
I have personal experience of this. Years ago, I was working for USWeb/CKS
Thanks Michel this is an example of the poison that's beginning to infect education across the world and a worry I've expressed in my published work in a number of instances. The kind of crap the article you've forwarded to the list talks about attempts to eliminate any hope of wisdom that develops over time and with careful reading and thinking, i.e. scholarship and critical thinking; for an understanding that teachers really do know more than share-holding students. This is not a gesture toward democracy as the story will tell you, it's a crack in the door to complete subsumption to capitalism. It pains me to say that I'm sometimes not sure whether the next generations will be educated at all except into learning that the world is about competition and if you can't fight (unless we as educators continue to resist it), give up early and let the bullies win because it's easier. Forget widening participation and different learning styles and capacities. Just back to the neo Darwinian nonsense. Propaganda is about education after all. Phoebe On 2 Aug 2011 05:48, "Michel Bauwens" <[email protected]> wrote: -
MarchFIRST, a web consultancy that grew by leaps and bounds before collapsing. They had instituted a system whereby developers would become co-owners of the projects with our clients. The results were catastrophic as the whole culture of the company destroyed internal cooperation, since everyone was internally competing with everyone else, you could not call up a sister company, as they would steal your clients ... (actually that culture predated that reform, which only strenghtened it and was itself the result of a particular type of thinking). We had Jerry Springer-type meetings in which employees were competing to win prizes to exotic locations, and a VP saying: "if you see a competitor and he's down, jump on him again and again" .. The whole atmosphere was entirely disgusting.
To imagine such dynamics taking over the school environment, is a nightmare of the highest proportion.
Again this is not an opposition on any market dynamic per se. For example an interesting project is Kaospilots, a school for social enterpreneurship where students need to fund one third of their education by external consultancies ... but this is done entirely in the context of social projects, and it is a school for enterpreneurship that comes after general education, so it makes sense.
Michel
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