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Surviving Economic Crises Surviving Economic Crises through Educationthrough Education
David R Cole
Introduction• As the event immanent to the polis, the
citizen is the horizon whereby the trauma of the human organism is transplanted within the territorial trauma of the city and the state. (Reza Negarestani)
‘Knowledge Economy’, Economic Crisis and Cognitive Capitalism: Public Education and the Promise of Open Science• The project for revitalizing and restoring the publicness of
science and education is enhanced, especially in an era of severe budget cuts to public services through the utilization of new platforms of openness based on Web 2.0 technologies that promotes universal access to knowledge and economical forms of collaboration through file-sharing and the nested convergences in open access, open archiving and open publishing (open journals systems) that have the potential to reconstitute science and education as open and public institutions in the years to come. (Michael A Peters)
Education for Resilience and Resistance in the ‘Big Society’• Educators have an important role in developing
counterarguments which address the reality of life for people in poor communities. Counter-information may also help those who live there to develop the resilience to withstand hostile policy discourses and market forces that undermine services and resources which they may ultimately depend on. (Jim Crowther & Mae Shaw)
Capitalist Crisis and Fascism: Issues for Educational Practice• In the barrios of Caracas and elsewhere in
Venezuela, where “the people have awoken” (Martinez, Fox and Farrell, 2010, p. 24), and in other spaces where the poor live and the spark of socialism has been lit, people are engaging with the possibility of a practical democratic socialism. Part of the contribution of Marxists to these movements for socialist transformation is an unremitting struggle against fascism whenever and wherever it occurs. (Mike Cole)
Teach for What America? Beginning Teachers’ Reflections about Their Professional Choices and the Economic Crisis
• Our work needs to focus on equipping all teachers with the space and tools to engage in the development of new narratives and possibilities. Those new narratives cannot but have their starting point in the current reality of our schools and public education. (Gustavo E Fischman & Victor H Diaz)
Transversality and Innovation: Prospects for Technology-Enhanced Learning in Times of Crisis• Positioning learning technologies not just as part of the
infrastructure of universities but as the focus of transverse working and discussions about pedagogy provides a means of initiating more wide-ranging discussions: … where learning environments promote critical engagement with new technologies; and which contribute to multiple, generative and excitingly unpredictable models of learning in higher education that have pedagogy firmly at their core. (Carmichael & Litherland)
When the Sun Does not Shine after the Rain: The Effects of the 2001 Crisis on the Educational System of Argentina• We conclude that the three dimensions of the education system
studied worsened considerably immediately following the 2001–2002 financial and economic crisis (internal efficiency/PISA results/material conditions)…. The two material conditions studied show a different behavior: while investment in education increased from 2004, instructional time was affected by teacher strikes until at least 2008. Internal efficiency indicators—repetition and inter annual dropout rates—showed signs of improvement in both primary and secondary education after 2005. Finally, academic performance showed a decline in student achievement in basic subject areas in 2006 and an improvement not until 2009. (Gvirtz & Barudi)
Struggle for Agency in Contemporary Argentinean Schools• Keep in mind that starting with an analysis of what may look as more simple, issues may
lead to more specific, yet complex ones, that can be addressed by specific data gathering and analysis. Keep the focus on “what these policy measures will look like” at everyday school life when planning, promoting or discussing policy changes.
• Establish connections amongst worldwide tendencies and local issues that are affected by them.
• Last, and very important: keep in mind that locally enacted actions also have lessons to teach, since history is what women and men do, every day. In this way, we may survive future economic crises through education. (Heras)
Education and Governmentality in Degraded Urban Territories: From the Sedimented to the Experience of the Actual• Nihilism, the hypothesis of low self-esteem as a response to the threat of
further cuts, is a hypocrisy, a low blow, Deleuze would say, that does not anticipate anything, but rather serves to cover up the sewage drains in societies where subjects fight, struggle and, above all, desire. And those “I want’s” constitute modes of perduring, insisting and resisting. (Grinberg & Langer)
Doing work as a reflection of the other• She was a vampire incarnate and she led more people astray than the Pied
Piper led children … It was only when credit was taken from her that she appeared in her true colours. Then it found that her eyes were hard, her lips cruel, and her body a mere empty shell. (Smitley, 1933, p. 8)
The Crisis of Mutative Capitalism: Holey Spaces, Creative Struggle and Educative Innovations• Not only are dominant conceptions of the body thrown into question,
but also are our own subjectivities and how this is tied to larger power struggles occurring locally, nationally, and internationally. These new movements form educative innovations and creative struggle in and around, as well as outside of, oppressive structures—enabling experiments and the emergence of new forms of subjectivity (Day, 2004, p. 740). (Haworth & DeLeon)
The Current Dynamics of Professional Expertise: The Movable Ethos, Pathos, and Logos of Four Norwegian Professions• … promoting robust knowledge cultures is not only to educate
professionals with the capacity of developing and renewing their productive procedures, techniques, and skills, but also to educate professionals with the capacity to building and renewing flexible, dynamic and creative epistementalities …. Yet, to strengthen educational institutions in their vital efforts to prepare the students for an even more complex workplace and to offer professionals tools to build robust and dynamic knowledge cultures, more knowledge is needed. (Strand)
Educating the Person for Democratic Participation• Sennett (1998, p. 119) argues that a superficial approach to character as exemplified
through a self-interested capitalistic culture is a failure of a “deeper kind” because it incapacitates persons “to make one’s life cohere…to realize something precious in oneself…rather than merely exist”... Such an approach to education is required to resist and challenge the conforming social character which Fromm, Saul and Sennett have argued is characteristic of a capitalistic culture and which all too easily can produce economic crises on a global scale because it fails to constantly deliberate first and foremost about the public good. (Webster)
Remachining Educational Desire: Bankrupting Freire’s Banking Model of Education in an Age of Schizo-Capitalism• Guattari’s provocation requires that pedagogy become intimate to the
task of creating “other worlds within this world” as a means to escape capitalism’s flattening of desire and, further, to remachine flows of desiring production within the school (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008, p. 16). This posed, the formation of alternative or countercultural forms of enunciation are not inherently liberatory. They must continually be connected to the authentic molecular concerns of group formations. It is no use to create a pirate Internet radio station, for example, if this mode of enunciation is not machined to the aspirations of a collective that seeks to reconfigure their very relationship with daily life (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008). (Wallin)
When No Crisis Is the Real Crisis! The Endless Vertigo of Capitalist Education• Thus financial crisis equates with capital crisis and this in turn
becomes educational crisis as the ground for edu-anxiety which demands the response once again of system. This permanent reinvention of system, the endless restlessness of formulations, as the reflection of an equally restless creator-market is currently framing education as a strata of the economic in which calculability, legibility and accountability are driving memes. Market failure, aka learning failure, is punishable as an offence against order. In this way we see that the socioeconomic assemblage of capitalist modernity is in fact committed to the disorders of restless capital formations. (Bussey)
• «At last, we have a book that not only attempts to chart the crucial relationship between education and the crisis of economics, but one that explores critically and insightfully what that crisis may tell us about how to proceed in both opening up new understandings of pedagogy, education, politics, and charting a notion of hope that is as militant as it is realistic. We live at a crucial time, when the ethos of surviving has replaced the possibility of imagining a decent life and the promises of a real democracy. The discourse of surviving for the authors in this book does not suggest a retreat into cynicism or a life stripped of possibility. On the contrary, it suggests a new beginning, a new sense of struggle, and a new sense of hope. ‘Surviving Economic Crises through Education’ puts education back into politics, and in doing so puts politics back on a footing that makes individual and collective struggle possible again.» (Henry Giroux, Global Television Network Chair, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University)
References• Day, R. J. F. (2004). ‘From hegemony to affinity’.
Cultural Studies, 18 (5), 716–748.• Guattari, F., & Rolnik, S. (2008). Molecular revolution
in Brazil. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).• Guattari, F., & Negri, A. (2010). New lines of alliance,
new spaces of liberty. New York: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions.
• Martinez, C., Fox, M., & Farrell, J. (2010). Venezuela speaks: Voices from the grassroots. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
• Sennett, R. (1998). The Corrosion of Character. New York: Norton.
• Smitley, R. L. (1933). Popular financial delusions. Philadelphia: Fraser Publishing.
