Fernando MARHUENDA FLUIXÀ
Profesor, Didactics and School Organization, Department Education and School Management, University of Valencia UVEG. Co-ordinator of the research group “Transitions” Valencia (Spain)
Introduction
The conference has addressed so far a conversation on skills, communication, and good life, among others, within a context of a widespread precarity. My contribution tackles these issues focused upon a very particular context, that conformed by schools, the school as an institution. School is the place to which we, in the western society and in the e nlightment societies, give the command to have an influence and educate our young generations.
Very briefly I want to mention a couple of issues why I consider that education is so fragile and precarious nowadays, and then what are the tensions that schools are suffering and that have them under siege, which are the pillars of education as we know it as we are entering in this 21st century in which we are facing this context of increasing precarization.
1-The pillars of education
The fragility of education is linked to the sources of the school, the foundations of national education systems, that go back to the 19th century: It is the Enlightment which acknowledges the right to education, though this comes together with the rise of Nation State as well as at the time of the first industrial revolution. All three factors contributed to the provision and expansion of primary education to larger sections of the population. But it was not until the 20th century, after the Second World War, that the development of the right to education and the expansion of the welfare state in the western societies, contributed to the expansion and universalization (again, in Western societies) of secondary education, based upon the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the consolidation of the Welfare State along the second half of the 20th century.
Can those sources still hold its legitimacy in the context we experience in the 21st century? If we consider the sources of legitimation of schooling, these are the following: the education of citizens, the assumption that socialization provides identity, so it’s getting in communication with people different to you that contribute to develop your own identity, therefore not focusing on the personal but on the collective side. Of course, collective identity is also related to national identity: common language and shared history, as well as clear borders with neighbour countries.
School was also considered a sacred space, where teachers have a vocation and a call to deliver and take part in the transmission of knowledge as the cultural heritage of a society, under the belie that knowledge gives freedom to people. We also understand that making school attendance compulsory had to face the debate between the State and the families, who was entitled to safeguard the children and therefore who was entitled to take decisions on education; what knowledge to teach, what knowledge is considered valuable.
Looking at the French sociology of conventions, in the 20th century there has been a compromise in the expansion of the schooling between a civic approach (the right to education), the industrial approach (the need to develop everyone’s capacities to be productive and competitive), and also a market orientation, given the interest in considering education rather a private/elitist than a public common good.
2-The world of school and the challenge of precariousness
Having set this framework, we can now first address the question whether education is causing or rather being affected by precarity; and second, how are the pillars of education been challenged by this.
If we look at the crisis of sources of education, that the French sociologist Francois Dubet has considered, we can start by considering mass education. Mass education has been redefined towards the end of the 20th century because it has been standardized, which was a requirement to become
massive and universal. This feature makes it almost impossible to serve the claim to individualize education, to pay attention to individual needs and diversity of different kinds: cultural diversity, sexual identity, language diversity and many more. The education structure is a standardizing, not individualizing one.
The second source of legitimation of schooling in the past was meritocracy, the belief that education could contribute to increase or improve the living conditions and social class of people properly educated. The American sociologist Michael J. Sandel, among others, has explained the abuse of the notion and the value of meritocracy, providing and analysing examples of higher education in the United States. But also there is a huge claim that access has been access granted to upper secondary and higher education, but access is no guarantee of success, not for many people, who are expelled from the system or come out from the system without achieving its goals, the acquisition of valuable knowledge. Teachers, furthermore, have been professionalized and this has contributed to a loss of their vocational identity, which is now referred to their specialization and segregated discipline rather than to the occupation they serve.
The worth of knowledge at school is also subject to changes. It used to be common culture, delivered to everyone to arrange a citizenship that was also linked to the development of the Nation State: common geography, common history, common language. Nowadays, with the increasing claim for diversity, that common feature of culture is fading away.
Learning is also considered as an acquisition: most European policies on education invite us to get out of teaching and to move into learning; changing the focus from the teaching to the learning side. It is as if the school as an institution was losing its place and it is the learner who comes to the centre, the learner as an individual, not as a member of the society. This is reinforced by discussions between motivation and engagement; the value attributed to more practical and useful knowledge, instead of academic knowledge; together with the expiration date of knowledge nowadays: under the frame of lifelong learning, what you know today will not be useful in the future.
If we then reconsider what is the right to education nowadays, and here again we have to refer to the United Nation’s Declaration; is this right something that is enacted upon the individual or upon the society? Are we looking for ways to conduct people themselves, their own behaviours for the individual interest or for the collective common interest?
Another dimension is that of the delivery of education: teaching practice has become hybrid, not only because of the pandemic, but also because of the sources or platforms of information nowadays, that provide short term inputs. The need to learn has to be pacified whenever it comes but it lasts very short and the will to learn and curiosity as such have vanished from schools. What learners, children and youth and their families demand, is more “a la carte”, in the sense that everyone can take and grab the knowledge he/she feels and I come to school and serve myself as if I was in a McDonald’s and buy the knowledge that I want, not necessarily the shared knowledge that has been agreed as the cultural heritage of a society and its common values.
Schooling is built around the organization of time and space, and around common standards to provide this massified education, but now there is an increasing offer of extracurricular choice, and this proves more interesting for wealthy families than what school has to offer. As a result of this, school is losing its space and its time as well.
3-How to improve education? Some open questions
Should we improve education nowadays? If I may use also the notion developed by Harmut Rosa, a German philosopher: “is education, is the school, a space for resonance where people can find its place and find the place of personal and social restoration, identification with the collective, or there is not this place anymore?” (H.Rosa: The Resonance Pedagogy, 2020). If we consider the aims of education, it seems that custody what is gaining place and custody is of course related to control and therefore to power.
But there is also, after the pandemic, an increasing demand for school taking care of the emotional development of young people and of course of resolving social problems: we demand school to provide remedies for social needs that we cause: the school as a place to prevent people
from smoking, to raise sustainability awareness, to be kind drives or whatever other need or urge a society may feel: education is always the answer, whatever the question. Of course the large issues like environmental crisis, migrations, work crisis are not dealt in school, though this seems something aside from that.
QUESTION - ANSWER
Question by Halima Ozimova: I liked the presentation by prof. Marhuenda Fluixà very much. It seems very clear that you are an active teacher. What do you think about private universities? Here in Uzbekistan we have about 50 private universities, mostly from Japan, South Korea, Germany.
Answer by Fernando Marhuenda Fluixà
In Spain private universities are academies that provide an extension of secondary education for wealthy people and families and they facilitate the entry to working life. And for teachers, professors, lectures private universities are serving as a platform in the meantime as they can have access to public universities, so people who are educated in public universities who go lecturing in private universities, they try to come back to public universities because academic freedom and working conditions are better.
Contacts;
https://www.uv.es/education-work-transicions/en/transitions-education-work-contexts-social-
vulnerability-transicions.html
Email: Fernando.Marhuenda@uv.es
