Yeah, I think a lot depends on how a person sees the purpose of education. If it's to make sure everyone learns A, B, and C, then it's easy to standardize it, and by standardizing you make sure everyone's given the same information - they get an "equal" education, or equal educational opportunities. But if the point of education is to dr…
Yeah, I think a lot depends on how a person sees the purpose of education. If it's to make sure everyone learns A, B, and C, then it's easy to standardize it, and by standardizing you make sure everyone's given the same information - they get an "equal" education, or equal educational opportunities. But if the point of education is to draw out the slumbering capacities, the potential gifts that live in each child, how do you standardize that? The second is obviously much more holistic and, I would argue, grounded in reality. (Does anyone really think the child is a completely empty vessel that they can fill up however they want? Have they ever met a child, each with their own particular soul mood and approach to the world?) If you think every human being is different, unique, never-before-seen-under-the-sun, then I'd say the only way to ensure equal educational opportunities is to work with parents to make sure they've got everything they need in order to be able to send their child to the school of their own choosing. Vouchers, at least in concept, were a pretty straightforward way of doing this. I never read much about how they worked out in practice.
And yes, I never read too much of Ostrom's work directly, but I think you've got it right. In the actual lived experience of working within a commons, local people generally manage their own resources far better than some bureaucrat managing them for them. I don't know if that's particular to commons-management that's existed for generations, and therefore has a tradition to fall back on, or if that's the case for new commons being managed by a community as well. I would imagine there is some necessary learning curve when a community is first taking it up... (One does have to unlearn selfishness if you've always done things one way - exploit, exploit - and also the community ties probably have to have a certain strength to them.)
Yeah, I think a lot depends on how a person sees the purpose of education. If it's to make sure everyone learns A, B, and C, then it's easy to standardize it, and by standardizing you make sure everyone's given the same information - they get an "equal" education, or equal educational opportunities. But if the point of education is to draw out the slumbering capacities, the potential gifts that live in each child, how do you standardize that? The second is obviously much more holistic and, I would argue, grounded in reality. (Does anyone really think the child is a completely empty vessel that they can fill up however they want? Have they ever met a child, each with their own particular soul mood and approach to the world?) If you think every human being is different, unique, never-before-seen-under-the-sun, then I'd say the only way to ensure equal educational opportunities is to work with parents to make sure they've got everything they need in order to be able to send their child to the school of their own choosing. Vouchers, at least in concept, were a pretty straightforward way of doing this. I never read much about how they worked out in practice.
And yes, I never read too much of Ostrom's work directly, but I think you've got it right. In the actual lived experience of working within a commons, local people generally manage their own resources far better than some bureaucrat managing them for them. I don't know if that's particular to commons-management that's existed for generations, and therefore has a tradition to fall back on, or if that's the case for new commons being managed by a community as well. I would imagine there is some necessary learning curve when a community is first taking it up... (One does have to unlearn selfishness if you've always done things one way - exploit, exploit - and also the community ties probably have to have a certain strength to them.)