Public Engagement: Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems

2. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized SystemsCanadian School Board AssociationAnnual ConventionSt. John’s, Newfoundland and LabradorJuly 8, 2010 John R. WiensUniversity of Manitoba

3. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems We are at once citizens of different nations and of one world in which the local and global are linked. From the Earth Charter Preamble

4. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems Introduction • Nothing New Here

5. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems Introduction • Nothing New Here • What I’m Thinking Now

6. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems Introduction • Nothing New Here • What I’m Thinking Now • Opportunity to Think Together Reminders • What’s going on with School Boards…and Why? • What Does it Mean for Education… and School Boards? • What Might/Should School Boards Do?

7. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems Introduction • Nothing New Here • What I’m Thinking Now • Opportunity to Think Together • Local Leadership is the Problem… and the Answer

8. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems What’s going on …and Why?  Our Most Recent Experiences …and Fears Events/Activities Consequences Second/Third Round of School Scale Enlargement – Geographic, Social, DistrictAmalgamations 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

9. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems 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

10. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems What’s going on? The Humanity is Taken Out of Education More Power in Fewer Hands Increased reluctance for transparency Role Reversal – Public Serving Private

11. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems The LOCAL Means Greater Responsibility for Trustees As: Guardians of Education (Public Good) Creators of Public Spaces Promoters of Public Appearances

12. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems 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

13. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems A “Stop and Think” Reminder – 2 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

14. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems A “Stop and Think” Reminder – 3 Public Schools Acts – eg. Manitoba Statue P250 Sec.4/ - Duties of School Boards Instructional Responsibilities of School Boards 41(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…

15. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems 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 Action Volume Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason

16. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems 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

17. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems School Boards = Local • Representatives (Neighbours) • Guardians (Workers) • Citizens with • Rights and Responsibilities • Hopes and Opportunities

18. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems 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

19. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems 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

20. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems [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

21. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems 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 to initiate, to begin to act in concert with others. Bernstein, 1993, 127

22. Public Engagement:Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized SystemsCanadian School Board AssociationAnnual ConventionSt. John’s, Newfoundland and LabradorJuly 8, 2010 John R. WiensUniversity of Manitoba Thanks for allowing me to be part of your lives for a short time!