Knowledge in the bazaar : pro-active citizenship in the learning society

Abstract

This chapter aims at identifying relationships between the transformations underway within capitalism itself, within the state and with regard to the nature and role of knowledge in present social contexts (characterised by social analysts such as Beck, Giddens, and Harvey as risk societies and as societies in which appears a reconfigured economic determination in the ‘first instance’) and their impact on the reconfiguration of the mandates addressed to education, and to education systems, at the beginning of the new century. The chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part has as its aim precisely the analysis of the transformations and respective relations of capitalism, the state and the exercise of citizenship in present contexts. The increasingly visible presence of examples of pro-active citizens who claim their difference with regard to an institution such as the school constitutes that which we might designate as a process of the repoliticisation of education where citizens refuse to see themselves as the passive objects of action by the state (which appears more and more to speak in the name of the market). Indeed, a tension appears to develop between a process of the individualisation of citizens, by way of which they are made responsible for everything including, above all, their own failure, and a process of individual and institutional reflexivity (in Beck’s terms [1992] ‘individuation’) enacted by the pro-active citizen who claims her own difference, in which citizens redefine themselves, not only on the basis of the homogenising logic of the market but, also, on the basis of heterogeneity. We aim here to develop further an assumption of a previous work (Magalhães and Stoer, 2003) according to which not only the concept of citizenship is re-appropriated by individuals and groups in a process of reclaiming sovereignty, but also this process of reclaiming is carried out not on the basis of that which people hold in common, but, rather on that which differentiates them, namely identity. In the second part, and on the basis of these new claims for citizenship, we centre the discussion on their expression, namely in the field of education. As this field is increasingly framed by entities and energies at the supranational level, it is on this basis that we analyse the impact of the change in the nature and function of knowledge in present societies. In taking up again the question of the repoliticisation of education and of the role of knowledge within education, we attempt to relate the exercise of reclaimed sovereignty with the political models on the basis of which Europe is being thought as a new political entity. In a recent work (Stoer and Magalhães, 2003), we have argued that it is the metaphor of ‘Europe as a bazaar’ that, among other metaphors such as ‘the flag’, ‘issues or themes’, or ‘network’, best captures a European construction process capable of promoting unity within diversity. The bazaar as a political metaphor for European construction incorporates and mediates the flag, issues/themes and the network without destroying these latter in some overarching synthesis and without losing its own specificity, that is, the fact that it is founded on the enunciation of what we term below ‘difference is us’. Within the bazaar, knowledge, in an epoch of globalisation, has taken on a new role as central element in the production process. As a result, it can be argued that knowledge as formation of the individual is moving from the school as an institution to ‘society’, both to society as a network and to society as a site of local sociabilities. There are important implications here for the design of the so-called (in various official EU documents) ‘learning society’. Finally, this chapter will take this discussion further in its attempt to better understand a process of reconfiguration that offers new definitions not only of ‘Europe’, but also of ‘learning’ and of ‘citizen’. We refer to this process in relation to the school as the consequence of its very repoliticisation, that is, a school as a context where citizenship is not only ‘prepared for’ but, rather, where it exercises its claims.