Global cultural commons
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A global cultural commons — one generated by the questions, what educates? — should present knowledge and ideas about education, but it should also be a venue where people discover answers to this basic question, as they communicate and as they educate themselves and others. A commons is not simply a place to store things, a commons is a working environment shared and maintained — for use by all, through use by all.
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[edit] A cultural commons
StudyPlace is a place where people come to develop and share ideas about what educates and to engage in their experiential discovery of what educates. As a cultural commons, the site is a place where participants must engage in peer production — that is, sharing with others in both the production and consumption of knowledge. Unless both occur StudyPlace is neither pedagogical (in a rich sense) or common (in a strict one).
Although the possibility of constructing a digital commons, where people participate at will as communicator and as communicatee, has emerged only in recent times, the general idea of a cultural commons is far from new. Socrates habitually situated himself in the agora, the common place of ancient Athens, just as in modern history the foundation of American public schooling came to rest on the common school, which took that name, not because it was common or vulgar, but because it was like an agricultural commons, supported and shared by all.[1]
Human culture has the presence of a commons embedded in it necessarily and inherently. It gives rise to identity, for having an identity entails internalizing one or another cultural commons as the substance and locus of the identity, for within that cultural commons, persons form and structure the judgment by which they conduct their lives. Knowledge, beliefs, values, and skills are matters people hold in common with one another. Montaigne put it well —
Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after: 'tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both he and I equally see and understand them. Bees cull their several sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find them, but themselves afterwards make the honey, which is all and purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the several fragments he borrows from others, he will transform and shuffle together to compile a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment: his instruction, labour and study, tend to nothing else but to form that.[2]
The idea of a commons is deeply embedded in our language for thinking about the shared, public aspects of life — commonwealth, commonweal, commonsense, common knowledge, commonplace, etc. How people manage their cultural commons has deep consequences for the character of their shared, public life, their politics in the Aristotelian sense of the common determination of the public good and the shared effort to achieve it.[3] As early as Heraclitus, the political significance of the cultural commons was clearly evident —
Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds to its law, and even more strongly. For all human laws are fed by the one divine law. It prevails as much as it will, and suffices for all things with something to spare.[4]
The public sphere, essential to the cultural commons, has weakened as the concept of communication has become synonymous with the media of communication, the ownership of which has been increasingly privatized, that is enclosed, as part of the great movement of modern capitalism in which common property for the use of all has been converted into capital owned privately by the few. By disclosing the cultural commons, we seek to reverse these historical dynamics.
[edit] A global commons
Ironically, in a global era, scholarship has become peculiarly parochial, particularly American scholarship, even more particularly American educational scholarship. Academic fields are over-populated with too many researchers and too many publications. Keeping up is difficult and time-consuming. If the circumstances of life have not made the scholar multi-lingual, setting out to become so in order to keep up with the scholarship in some other language seems to be imprudent, when one is falling behind the output in one's native tongue as it is. A global commons cannot make these circumstances disappear, but it can serve as a place where scholars work to dismantle the accidents of circumstantial blinders. Good scholarship originates in many different languages and we should be finding ways to bring it all to bear on discovering what educates and explaining how and why.
[edit] Disclosure of the commons
In the rise of capitalism, the enclosure movement converted many common lands to private property. Land as a commons was vulnerable to enclosure, for it was fixed and finite; once someone asserted full ownership over it, the land was unlikely to revert to a common status. In a digital world, the resources are neither finite nor fixed. Digital space, as a commons, can be disclosed rather than enclosed.
[edit] References
- ↑ See Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983) and Lawrence A. Cremin, The American Common School (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers college, Columbia University, 1951).
- ↑ Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Charles Cotton, trans., William Carew Hazilitt, ed. 1877. "Chapter XXV — Of the Education of Children." Internet Archive, Retrieved December 26, 2006.
- ↑ Aristotle, Politics, I.1, and passim and Nicomachean Ethics, I.2.
- ↑ Heraclitus, Fragment 114, Diels., John Burnet, trans. cf. fr. 2: "Though wisdom is common, yet the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own;" fr. 44: "The people must fight for its law as for its walls;" fr. 89: "The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own;" and fr. 113: "Thought is common to all." Philoctetes: Heraclitus (PDF), Retrieved December 26, 2006.
