co-operation and radical democracy in/for education

Here is my wife, Dr Sarah Amsler's, latest analysis of the catastrophic state of British universities (which is spreading fast in the western world and beyond), an effect of neo-liberalism as a counter-revolutionary force. In universities, marketisation, bureacratisation, commodification and managerialisation (as different aspects of neo-liberal ideology) are diminishing the spaces of creativity and reflection and knowledge production. These have little use in the logic of the market and challenge the rationale of the market, and their loss which has increased the loss of freedom and independence of human agency, hence alienating human as sources of creativity and knowledge which are acquired through critical reflection.  In this analysis, She moves from critique to introducing an alternative, the new projects in co-operativism and towards the creation of alternative, co-operatively run and inspired universities:

"It has been nearly impossible to keep pace with Significant Things Happening in education in recent weeks. This may be due to my inability to filter the floods of information and analysis which are now continuously created in our hyper-reflexive ‘attention economy’ of public writing. Or due to a stuckness in negotiating the dissonance between feeling overwhelmed by critique and simultaneously sensing that the praxis to which it points often just cannot yet exist in embodied resistance within our institutions. Or perhaps it reflects the experience of ‘uninterrupted disturbance’ which characterises the permanent counterrevolution of managerial restructuring and governmental policy making in schools and universities. ‘All new-formed [relations] become antiquated before they can ossify’…but it does not feel that we therefore even have the possibility of ‘facing with sober senses’ the real conditions of our lives and relations with one another. Instead, endless reformation, the pseudo-creative but ultimately adaptive and conformist reinvention of the self and of the horizons of possibility, has become a precondition for the intelligibility of the everyday world itself. The irony is that the more we try to make a sensible world within the parameters of this irrational logic, the more impoverished and impaired our sociological and radical imaginations become. We need new ways of making sense, and doing right.

But what we really need is time and space and courage and faith to respond to this analysis, to throw ourselves into the project of democratising education at the highest and most intimate levels, to understand and test the limits and living political contradictions of our own knowledge and actions, to orient ourselves morally and politically away and farther away from discourses and practices and habits and systems and acts of power that depoliticise, dedemocratise, dehumanise, and generally foreclose possibilities for people to make autonomous and alternative futures. In education and everywhere. We have so much knowledge in public, but so little public knowledge. So much knowledge in common, and not yet sufficient common knowledge about how to transgress the limits of tolerance that are now bursting at their seams."


http://amsler.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2013/12/19/on-co-operation-and-radical-democracy-infor-education/