Conference Agenda

This proposal focuses on forms of education that exist in contemporary initiatives to recover Europe and consequences that these forms have for action in our common decision over education. The research case is various recovery plans of Europe after Covid. Interestingly, education appears in two forms: a means and an end of recovery. Through the social topology of agency, I scrutinise the patterns that enabled or prevented some action looking at a whole range of elements involved in it – positions for action, actors, audiences, rationalities, logics of work, and justifications.

During the Covid pandemic, various European-scale initiatives for recovery appeared, notably the European Commission’s program NextGenerationEU (NGEU), which is explicitly aimed at the “recovery of Europe which works for everyone”. This recovery is strongly pedagogised (of and through education) and connected to technology as a solution and as an end (digitalisation). This recovery project models the educational future significantly since it is connected to generous funding and, formally, to the national governments.

However, the case of taking up the NGEU by local governments involves many new relations among actors, labour, technics, and reason. These new relations unsettled the taken-for-granted geographies and jurisdictions and revealed that the problem of agency and the problem of existence of Europe(s) are entangled and relational precisely in connection to education. The new relations of distancing and reaching (Allen, 2020) among actors, positions, rationalities, and audiences have consequences for a specific division of education. Not only various Europes may exist but also various worlds of education – and this division is not necessarily balanced and equal (Mitescu-Manea et al., 2021). Through field research in the public debates and desk research of media entries and documents, I will demonstrate how education as means and as an end brings two worlds while excluding the latter from public action. Specifically in the Czech context, if education is the solution to something else, it is less of education (Wirthová & Barták, 2023). However, this argument needs more comparative research. Modern topographies of education and especially positions of educational actors are changed within these recoveries – the possibility of agency is inscribed in different coordinates (and this also troubles how to imagine human agency in it because modern imaginaries are based on subject). Therefore, I am focused on the new ecology of agency which distances and diversifies education as a means and an end.

My theoretical approach is driven by recent social topology (Allen, 2016; Decuypere et al., 2022; Massey, 2005), but I connect it with two scholars’ accounts on subjectivity for the purpose of accessing to the relation between forms of action and forms of education which is enacted/materialised through production and placing of subjectivity. Engaging in the late thinking of Jan Patočka, a Czech philosopher dealing with the existence of Europe (Francesco Tava & Meacham, 2016; Patočka, 1999, 2018) and space (Patočka, 2016), we can see that modern objectivity and rationality is impossible without subjectivity; and who has the subject can seize the object, which was generalised to the degree of “falling Europe”. Engaging in the thinking of relational sociologist Jean-Sébastien Guy, we can see, however, that subjectivity and identity are produced in so-called non-metric forms (Guy, 2019), which generates groups, not in metric forms generating flows. In that, only those may “have the object” who are in non-metric forms, while flows do not produce identities. I will demonstrate how these topological practices of subject/action is entangled in the division of education into worlds of the flow of toilers of the education and the group of men of change which do not overlap with traditional jurisdictions.

In this contribution, I argue that building on the diversity and combined strengths of different approaches and perspectives to citizenship education (CE) is essential to creating a sense of shared, public responsibility for both the new generations and our common world, which appears to be lacking in the current, crisis-driven approaches to CE. I will argue that looking for a common ground between sociological and pedagogical accounts of the reality of schooling in citizenship education, might provide a fertile starting point.

In democratic societies, questions about democracy have always been closely intertwined with questions about education: asking what kind of education would best prepare the people (demos) for their participation in the ruling (kratos) of their society (Biesta, 2006). Today, however, a myriad of ‘crises’ and issues is raising questions about how we can continue to (co)exist and govern our (co)existence democratically, and young people or new generations find themselves confronted most directly by the extraordinary challenges and questions these crises present (Riddle & Apple, 2019). One such crisis, the Covid pandemic, has reinvigorated calls on both the European and global level to rethink or renew citizenship education (CE), as a crucial contribution to a better world and global recovery after the pandemic (Unesco Institute for Lifelong learning, 2021). In this regard, Matjaž Gruden, Director of Democratic Participation for the Council of Europe (n.d) stated for instance that developing democratic competences through CE can “help learners adapt to the current crisis in a positive and constructive manner, avoiding the pitfalls of social fragmentation and extremism.” I will argue that such a common focus of CE as adapting young people while leaving out the responsibilities of other actors and contexts in CE, rather deepens than avoids such pitfalls. My argumentation will be based on three main theoretical underpinnings. First, a reflection on the notion of crisis and its educational implications. A crisis does not necessarily refer to a negative event, but rather to a decisive moment or a point that provides the opportunity “to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter” (Arendt, 2006/1961, p.171, emphasis added). In the specific case of responding to the Covid crisis through citizenship education in schools, this essence can be said to be equally political and pedagogical of nature. Whereas sociological and political approaches to CE stress its political character, pedagogical perspectives can contribute to the recognition that it is also, and foremost, a pedagogical undertaking.

Second, I explore this dual nature of CE through the lens of both critical and post-critical theoretical perspectives on education, citizenship education and their role in a ‘better future’ and pursuing social justice (Hodgson,Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2018). In short, I will explore how (citizenship) education can find its starting point, not in deploring what not-yet is or what we fear and condemn about the present state of the world and education, but rather in the good that is already there, and the things that we cherish and value (Hodgson et al., 2018). However, we also need to acknowledge that schools do have a responsibility and a role to play in striving for a more equal and just democratic society, by educating young people to take part in that society, for instance through CE. Thirdly, I separate political ends from pedagogical processes of CE, and political from pedagogical responsibilities, based on Simons and Masschelein’s (2010) distinction between political and pedagogical subjectivation and Biesta’s (2010, 2020) triad of the aims and functions of education as qualification, socialization and subjectification.

This paper offers a work of a theoretical nature aimed to problematize the notion of “commons” in the field of education in the light of a specific experience of commoning in education: the Bachilleratos Populares (henceforth BPs) in Argentina. For this purpose, it deploys the neo-Marxist approach to the commons as a theoretical-analytical grid in light of the movement of BPs. The BPs are free and self-managed high schools created by grassroots social organizations after the Argentine crisis of 2001 to provide an option for youth and adults to finish their secondary education as a response to the gap the neoliberal reform left in this educational modality during the 1990s. After some BPs received state recognition to issue degrees in 2007, their number increased rapidly to almost a hundred BPs in 2015. Drawing upon this empirical experience, this paper discusses the limits and possibilities of commoning experiences in education to enhance social justice and promote social transformation.

The “common” has been explored in the last decade —with several formulations, such as “the commons”, “commoning”, “the common good” or “the communal”— as a loose category to explore alternatives to the neoliberal reform in education (Collet & Grinberg, 2022; Revista de Educación, 2022/395). This project draws upon a specific conception of the commons developed within the neo-Marxist approach (for an overall review of this approach, see Pérez & Zamora, 2022). This perspective gained prominence in the European context after the 2008 crisis. However, commons experiences took shape beforehand in Latin America, within the cycle of social struggle in the 1990s, through a big number of community-popular initiatives —commoning— that were autonomous from the state and the market, self-managed, and horizontal to respond to the (re)production needs of life that the capitalist order systematically threatens (Gutiérrez, 2017). These initiatives include soup kitchens, popular economy cooperatives, recovered companies, and Popular Education initiatives, such as the BPs in Argentina. In this way, these community-popular initiatives are a hopeful reservoir of knowledge in movement built and accumulated in the South.

From the neo-Marxist approach, the commons are defined in opposition to the processes of enclosure (commercialization and privatization), as “the bonds that we build to continue being, to make life be life; links that cannot be limited to institutions or things (water, land, nature)” (Zibechi, 2019, p. 59). Without aiming to establish a replicable model, Federici and Caffentzis (in Federici, 2019) list several features of commoning practices: utopian character, horizontality, equitable access to satisfying social needs, and direct democracy formulas. Based on these principles, the commons claim their autonomy from the market and from the state. Thus, the commons distance themselves from “the public”, understood as ‘which is owned, managed, controlled, and regulated by and for the state’ (Federici, 2019, p. 96).

From the neo-Marxist perspective of the commons, the neoliberal educational reform of the last four decades constitutes an enclosure movement on education and schooling (Saltman, 2018). As a constructive response to this neoliberal enclosure, this approach has explored the guiding principles that should inspire educational commons (democratic, feminist, decolonial, or eco-socialist). However, far little research has connected this theoretical perspective with empirical observation, and none have systematically addressed the intersections between the educational commons and the state. This is a significant gap given the crucial role of the state in the construction, control, and high regulation of the formal education space (Green, 2013).

This paper is framed in the research project EduCommon. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101027465.