public engagement: preserving the local in centralized systems

Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems

We are at once citizens of different nationsand of one world in which the local andglobal are linked.

From the Earth Charter Preamble


INTRODUCTION

Nothing New Here


INTRODUCTION

Nothing New Here

What I’m Thinking Now


INTRODUCTION

Nothing New Here


Opportunity to Think TogetherReminders

What’s going on with School Boards…and Why? What Does it Mean for Education… and School Boards? What Might/Should School Boards Do?


INTRODUCTION

Nothing New Here


Opportunity to Think Together

Local Leadership is the Problem… and the Answer


WHAT’S GOING ON …AND WHY? OUR MOST RECENT EXPERIENCES …AND FEARS

Events/Activities Consequences

Second/Third Round of School Scale Enlargement – Geographic, Social, District Amalgamations Political, Cultural, Economic Loss or Limitation on Ability to Shift in Locus of Resource Acquisition Raise Taxes Change in Discretion over Allocation Elimination of Boards of Trustees Local Schooling Increasingly an Agency

of Provincial Governments

Coercive Financial Practices/Rewards/ Reinforcement of Financial Hierarchy Shift

Target Funding in Locus of Strategic Direction and Priorities


WHAT’S GOING ON …AND WHY? OUR MOST RECENT EXPERIENCES …AND FEARS

Events/Activities Consequences

Schools of Choice (in Multiple Forms) Schooling as Individual Commodity in Competitive Marketplace

Privatization of School Servicing (Programs) School Boards as Private Contractors /Faculties (P3’s) with Public Money

GATT, AIT Education (Schooling) as a Trade Good; Corporation Democracy/

Governments as Trans-National Consumer Producers

Commercialization or Knowledge Education as Transactional Trade Advantage


WHAT’S GOING ON?The Humanity is Taken Out of EducationMore Power in Fewer HandsIncreased reluctance for transparency Role Reversal – Public Serving Private


The LOCAL Means

Greater Responsibility for Trustees As:

Guardians of Education (Public Good)

Creators of Public Spaces

Promoters of Public Appearances


A “Stop and Think” Reminder – 1

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it… And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough…to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Hannah Arendt



Education is always cast as the means whereby some, or all, citizens of a particular society get their bearings and learn to live with and among one another. Education always reflects a society’s views of what is excellent, worthy, necessary. These reflections are not cast in concrete, like so many foundation stones; rather they are ongoingly refracted and reshaped as definitions, meanings and purposes change through democratic contestation. In this sense education is political. But this is different from being directly and blatantly politicized, being made to serve interests and ends imposed by militant groups – whether in the name of heightened racial awareness, or true biblical morality, or androgyny, or therapeutic self esteem, or all the other sorts of enthusiasms in which we are currently awash.

Democracy on Trial, Jean Bethke Elshtain, 1993, p. 82



Public Schools Acts – eg. Manitoba Statue P250 Sec.4/ - Duties of School Boards Instructional Responsibilities of School Boards41(4) Every school board shall provide or make provision for education in Grades I

to XII inclusive of all resident persons who have the right to attend school.

Sec.48/ - Powers of School Boards

48(1) Subject to the regulations, a school board may (P) notwithstanding any other provision of the Act, enter into an agreement with the government or any minister of the government on behalf of the government, or any agency of the government or any school board or any person…


The Challenge For School Boards

The point is to protect areas of life that are functionally dependent on social integration through values, norms and consensus formation, to preserve them from falling prey to the systematic imperatives of economic and administrative subsystems growing with dynamics of their own, and to defend them from becoming converted over, through the steering medium of the law, to a principle of association that is, for them, dysfunctional.

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative ActionVolume Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason


Education is …about preparing children and young people, not…

…every adult’s responsibility, not……renewing democracy, not……recreating a public and public space not…

Democracy is about …ability to exercise

…agency…initiative…responsibility…civility

(Education ) is about …public good

…public action…public engagement


School Boards = Local

Representatives (Neighbours)Guardians (Workers)Citizens

withRights and ResponsibilitiesHopes and Opportunities


One day as our children or their children or their children’s children stroll in gardens, debate in public places, or poke through the ashes of a wrecked civilization, they may not rise to call us blessed. But neither will they curse our memory because we permitted, through our silence, democracy to pass away as in a dream.

Democracy on Trial, Jean Bethke Elshtain, 1993, p. 142


The public realm was reserved for individuality, it was the only place where [people] could show who they really and inexchangeably were. It was for the sake of this chance, and out of love for a body politic that made it possible to them all [the Greeks], that each was more or less willing to share the burden of jurisdiction, defense and administration of public affairs.

Hannah Arendt, 1958 The Human Condition, p. 41


[Boards of trustees are among]… the best instruments… for breaking up the modern mass society, with its dangerous tendency toward the formation of pseudo-political mass movements, or rather…the most natural way of interspersing it at the grass roots with… those who…have demonstrated that they care for more than their private happiness and are concerned about the state of the world…[and its young]

Hannah Arendt (1965) On Revolution, p. 279


It is action which is established in the public space of political debate, action that presupposes the human conditions of plurality and natality that is the highest form of the vita activa. Arendt also thinks that praxis has been deformed in the modern technological age. There has been a consequential inversion of the classical hierarchy of action, work and labor …. But her analysis of action is intended as an act of retrieval, to reveal a possibility that can never be completely obliterated, and to show how this possibility is rooted in human plurality – the capacity toinitiate, to begin to act in concert with others.

Bernstein, 1993, 127

public engagement: preserving the local in centralized systems

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