“We take seriously the idea of school as a public space where many projects can be undertaken in response to the needs and the desires of the local community”
In this interview to Latin-American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE), Peter Moss and Michael Fielding reflect about the importance of schools as privileged remaining public spaces in our societies and the challenge to live full practice of democracy in these places
December 19, 2014
Peter Moss (pictured at left) and Michael Fielding (in the picture below) are professors at Institute of Education, in the University of London, and are well-known experts in the fields of early childhood and secondary education. In this interview to Latin-American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE), they reflect about the importance of schools as privileged remaining public spaces in our societies and the challenge to live full practice of democracy in these places. “We are wasting an enormous opportunity for creating places where people can encounter each other, where people can work together on projects, where all sort of differences can be encountered and experienced.”
In the book “Radical Education and the Common School: A Democratic Alternative”, you both explore the idea of a “radical public education” and the common school as a good place to achieve it. What does it mean and what is the importance of a public education on a radical basis considering our current challenges?
Michael: Our concept of radical education is in response to a number of key political questions. For example: what are the fundamental values of education? What is the diagnosis of our time? What do we want for our children? So our conceptualization of radical education includes an acting and ethics care, adopting an education in its broadest sense and working with the image of each child and with democracy as a fundamental value. We argue in our work that we can tell whether the school is adopting democracy as a fundamental value by a number of different indicators.
In this sense, what would be the picture of a democratic school? Which indicators should be considered?
Michael: There are ten characteristics in our view which contribute to the making of a radical democratic school. The first one is that the school must proclaim publicly in some way that it is concerned with democracy. Secondly, the structures and the spaces that characterize the school must be of a certain kind. For example, we would argue that the existence of shared public spaces in school is crucial. But shared public spaces will only work well if there are also minority spaces, a number of different spaces in which people can feel confident and develop their identity, alongside public spaces where a whole school is a community and can gather together and explore issues that are important to it. The third characteristic has to do with “radical roles” in schools. Here we offer a typology which we call “Patterns of Partnership’. 
These outline realistic ways in which we can move from minimal forms of collaboration between adults and young people to forms of partnership that are fully democratic. The fourth characteristic of a democratic school is the kind of relationships that exist in the school. So it´s the issue of young people and adults seeing each others as human beings, as persons, not just in the role of student, in the role of teacher. The fifth one is what we call personal and communal narrative. Education is about human flourishing in its rich sense. Here young people are encouraged to make meaning of their work, understanding its meaning to them and to their community. Here teachers are encouraged to connect with the histories and contemporary developments in radical traditions of democratic public education.
The sixth issue concerns the importance of how we approach the curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in ways that enable us to construct knowledge together. The seventh point argues for the insistent affirmation of possibility. This basically means that we should not label people, that we should encourage people working together, not to compete. Competition is destructive of human flourishing. Instead, we need to emulate each other; we need to delight in each other´s accomplishments. The eighth characteristic would be that a democratic school engages fully and imaginatively with the local community and the ninth is about democratic accountability. Here we want to argue that we need to move away from a legalist narrow notion of accountability. We want to develop a richer, a moral notion of accountability as a shared moral responsibility. And finally the last one: we can only develop these kind of practices if we understand the importance of solidarity, if we link to other people trying to do the same kind of thing in their own neighborhood, in their own locality or nation. We must link across continents, to other places, so that we can support each other. If you do these ten things, this is an exemplification of what a democratic education is about.
You mentioned in the same book that schools are privileged remaining public spaces in our society. In Latin America the public schools are at the crossroad, we have seen them at risk, undermined by several privatization trends. Can public education in public schools create alternatives to the neoliberal model aiming to build an egalitarian and sustainable society?
Peter: Schools have the potential to be public spaces and that´s a choice that society, all of us, need to think about and decide. I think you are suggesting a present where we are seeing increasingly the potential of schools as public spaces being undermined and eroded because schools are being treated as private spaces, as spaces restricted to certain people, and this is very serious. Schools are privileged, or should be, because they are almost the only institution in our society which everybody goes to. It´s an extraordinary resource and we don´t take advantage of that. We are wasting an enormous opportunity for creating places where people can encounter each other, where people can work together on projects, where all sort of differences can be encountered and experienced, where democracy can be practiced. So I think a really central political question is: are we going down this road of school as private space, as a place where people buy education as a commodity? Or are we going down the other road that proposes schools as vital places of encounter, where citizens can work together to actually address their problems, needs and desires?
So there are very important alternatives here and our point of view, because we very much reject the neoliberal agenda that reduces everything to economic relationships and individual choice, is that we should go down that road reaffirming school as a public space, a place for the social to flourish and for the exercise of collective choice. It´s a choice and we have to come out and remind people. We need to challenge the idea, which is increasingly common, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, of schools being seen as just places where parents send their children and governments fund to maximize returns on investments. I think it also raises important questions about private schools and also about faith schools. In our country we are seeing growing numbers of faith schools run by religious organizations and it’s a very big issue.
And in this sense, how far can public education and public schools create alternatives to neoliberal model?
Peter: I suppose it’s really a very important question to clarify. I think it is obvious that by themselves education and schools can’t change the prevailing political economy; they can’t cut against political and economy. They are constrained by that. But they can do some things and they can be part of wider movements.
Michael: In our book, we talk about the notion of pre-figurative practice, in other words, a way of working that tries to anticipate a very different kind of society and not waiting for years and years for it to happen, but doing something now. Whatever system you’re in, how can you develop the kind of practices those of us who believe in democracy are committed to? We do think building networks among people who have similar kinds of values is very important in order to gain courage from each other, to support each other. I’ll give you an example. In England, we have seen the rise of the cooperative schools movement in the last three or four years. It has an explicit set of values that has to do with cooperation and human solidarity. And if you become a cooperative school you have to, not just be aware of those values, but live those values. So, although in our country, we are having very difficult times at the moment because we have a neoliberal trend, there are a number of schools, nine hundred now, that are beginning to say “we belong to a different set of political and social traditions and we wish to support each other in that work”.
What is the importance of experiencing participation in schools? How can young people really experience participatory and democratic engagement in schools?
Michael: Adults and young people can work together in a spirit of building up to the full practice of democracy. I want to give more examples of the category we call intergenerational learning as a lived democracy. I was particularly impressed by how young people in one particular school became very conscious of the fact that older people in their community seemed unhappy, but they were not sure if this was the case. They didn’t want to be condescending or presumptuous so they developed a little research project in which they interviewed older people in the community trying to know and understand their concerns and their aspirations. It turned out that many of them were lonely, very lonely and so the students developed, as a result of becoming aware of this, not just stronger relations with the adults, but together with the adults they developed ways in which the community could come together and be more supportive. Peter and I keep on coming back to this kind of example in our work. Education is fundamentally about human encounter. It is certainly about the importance of rights. But we need more than rights. Rights are fundamental, but they are not enough. Rights are for something else, they need to be informed by care for others as persons.
We have seen a considerable drop off rate at schools in LAC, particularly at secondary schools, and this is due to many reasons, including, among others, violence and discrimination. How do you think schools could help to overcome discrimination and rights violations? Is that part of their role?
Peter: We take seriously the idea of school as a public space. And as a place where many projects can be undertaken in response to the needs and the desires of the local community, and issues to do with violence and discrimination, for example, can be exactly the sort of projects that school can engage with. So again it comes back to what is our idea of school. Is it a space that turns its back on and excludes the community and only addresses its own narrow agenda or is it a meeting place open, outward-looking and inclusive, where people can actually work on issues of common concern, and I am including here people of all ages. The best schools should be really open to work on the issues that confront their children and their families and indeed their whole wider community. School is failing in its task, and this comes back to one of our indicators mentioned at the beginning, if it does not develop a radical curriculum that is relevant to students and the community. It means developing a radical pedagogy which engages young people and treats them as protagonists and not just people who are waiting to have some information transmitted to them. And it means creating environments that are more attractive, places where people, young and old, feel comfortable, secure and excited to be. So it seems to me that once we begin to break down the very traditional, but still widespread, model of school, launched in the 19th century, into something that it is a living, breathing public institution which also has infinite possibilities, then this provides a fruitful environment for addressing issues of violence and discrimination.
We have been talking about how schools can be based on democracy and participation specially focused on local communities. How can these debates and experiences inform national and international policies?
Peter: I´d like to step back away from the term policy to say: “what are the conditions that are required to achieve, not only the full realization of education as human right, but a democratic education?” Because it is simply not enough for a governmental to write a nice document saying “we want our schools to be democratic”. I think if we are serious about developing the radical education that Michael and I want, it is all about democracy. We need to give a lot of very careful and continual attention to creating the right conditions. At one level, the conditions are about issues to do with time, with commitment by many people to try to make things work; about the sort of support systems we need, with the sort of education we need for our educators. So there is a lot of work to be done.
Michael: Let me give you an example of young people taking the lead in creating conditions that enable and express their democratic agency. This was in a school for young people with special educational needs. There were young people who had all sort of difficulties and challenges in their learning and some of these young people had no voice. They literally could not speak. Once a year they have a formal review of their work and their progress. In most schools it is led and managed by adults. But here they insisted it was led and managed by themselves as students. They worked in small groups in order to prepare a statement about their learning over the year and to name things they wished to develop in the future. Not only were they able to describe things they had done well, but they were quite clear about how they wished to develop. A key question they asked was, not just how do I get better grades, but: “How do I live a good life? What does it mean to live a good life?” In our country, the education system does not regard that this is an important question. Yet it is the fundamental question. It is the most important question because it brings us back to human purposes and to democracy as a way of achieving those purposes together.
Peter: The question you ask is what kind of educational policies are required. Perhaps, it should be reframed not just as what conditions are needed but also as what kind of educational politics is required. Politics should be the arena in which we discuss fundamental political questions, to which there are alternative and often conflicting answers. Questions like what is education for? What is our image of the child, the educator, the school? What ethics and what values? We cannot have policies without a democratic politics in which citizens debate and argue about such questions and the alternative answers to them. Neoliberalism, of course, wants none of this, it wants to take the politics out of education, and reduce it to a technical practice left in the hands of experts and managers with technical questions like ‘what works?’.
There is a current debate connecting youth and technology, with some people defending that ITCs make schools useless. In other words, physical schools are not necessary anymore because people can access to knowledge and learn from the internet. What is your opinion about education and ICTs?
Peter: I think we have a very clear position on this. Posing schools versus technology is a dangerous and a superficial comparison. If you think that schools have no wider social and cultural functions, or if you think that education is simply transmitting facts, then yes, schools probably are no longer needed. But Michael and I profoundly disagree with this understanding of schools and education. We do think they are complex institutions and can have a many, many functions: cultural, social, political, esthetical and so on. Furthermore, education is a relational practice. You learn through relationships, you learn through encounter. So we think that we need physical schools just as we need to use new technology in those schools.
A colleague of ours, Keri Facer [Professor at the University of Bristol], has explored this issue very well in a recent book called “Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change”. She spent a lot of time thinking about future education and the impact of new technology. But while very aware of the potential of new technologies, she remains absolutely convinced of the central importance of schools in the future. Let me quote what she says: “The reason that I think we need to continue to invest in the school as a physical space and a local organization is because I believe that it may be one of the most important institutions we have to help us build a democratic conversation about the future.
A physical, local school where community members are encouraged to encounter each other and learn from each other is one of the last public spaces in which we can begin to build intergenerational solidarity, respect for diversity and democratic capability needed to ensure fairness in the context of socio-technical change. (…) It is therefore the time both to defend the idea of a school as a public resource and to radically re-imagine how it might evolve if it is to equip communities to respond to and shape the socio-technical changes of the next few years”. I think that sums up the idea that we need schools because they are public spaces and we need them for enriching and renewing our democracy and for many other reasons like that. And we need to use the latest technology to enable them to do that task better, but technology should complement, never replace, relationships and the power of encounter.