Public Engagement: Preserving the LOCAL in Centralized Systems Canadian School Board Association Annual Convention

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized SystemsCanadian School Board
AssociationAnnual Convention St. Johns,
Newfoundland and LabradorJuly 8, 2010 John R.
WiensUniversity of Manitoba
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Public EngagementPreserving 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

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• Introduction
•  
• Nothing New Here

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• Introduction
•  
• Nothing New Here
• What Im Thinking Now

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• Introduction
•  
• Nothing New Here
• What Im Thinking Now
• Opportunity to Think Together
• Reminders
• Whats going on with School Boardsand Why?
• What Does it Mean for Education and School
  Boards?
• What Might/Should School Boards Do?
•  

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• Introduction
•  
• Nothing New Here
• What Im Thinking Now
• Opportunity to Think Together
•  
• Local Leadership is the Problem and the Answer

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• Whats going on and Why?
•  Our Most Recent Experiences and Fears
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• 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/ Reinforceme
  nt of Financial Hierarchy Shift
• Target Funding in Locus of Strategic Direction
  and
• Priorities

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• Whats 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 (P3s) 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

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• Whats going on?
• The Humanity is Taken Out of Education
• More Power in Fewer Hands
• Increased reluctance for transparency
• Role Reversal Public Serving Private

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Public EngagementPreserving 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

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• A Stop and Think Reminder 1
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• 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 enoughto prepare them in advance for
  the task of
• renewing a common world.
• Hannah Arendt

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• A Stop and Think Reminder 2
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• 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 societys
  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

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• A Stop and Think Reminder 3
•  
• Public Schools Acts eg. Manitoba Statue P250
•  
• Sec.4/ - Duties of School Boards
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• 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.
•  
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• Sec.48/ - Powers of School Boards
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• 48(1) Subject to the regulations, a school board
  may
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• (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

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Public EngagementPreserving 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

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• Education is about preparing children and young
  people, not
• every adults responsibility, not
• renewing democracy, not
• recreating a public and public space not
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• Democracy is about ability to exercise
• agency
• initiative
• responsibility
• civility
•  
• (Education ) is about public good
• public action
• public engagement

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

•  
• School Boards Local
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• Representatives (Neighbours)
• Guardians (Workers)
• Citizens
• with
• Rights and Responsibilities
• Hopes and Opportunities

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized Systems

• One day as our children or their children or
  their childrens
• 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

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Public EngagementPreserving 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

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Public EngagementPreserving 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
ratherthe most natural way of interspersing it
at the grass roots with those whohave
demonstrated that they care for more than their
private happiness and are concerned about the
state of the worldand its young Hannah Arendt
(1965) On Revolution, p. 279
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Public EngagementPreserving 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

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Public EngagementPreserving the LOCAL in
Centralized SystemsCanadian School Board
AssociationAnnual Convention St. Johns,
Newfoundland and LabradorJuly 8, 2010
John R. WiensUniversity of Manitoba Thanks for
allowing me to be part of your lives for a short
time!
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