David Blacker

The Institutional Autonomy of Education

This paper develops a liberal contextualist account of schooling that balances institutional autonomy with public accountability under conditions of reasonable pluralism. First a conceptual obstacle is discussed: the tendency to conceive educational autonomy according to the false dilemma of instrumentalism versus non-instrumentalism. Then an alternative is advanced-the contextualist picture-that places educations institutional autonomy in its proper light. The conclusion raises and then responds to important objections to the contextualist picture.

Compulsory Education Cycles Down

A component of the ideal of universal education, compulsory education is distinctive as an imperative of forcible exercise; not only may one enjoy it, one must. Why? The liberal story is the triumphal one that, it is a case of forcing citizens (or citizens-to-be via their parents) to be free. The beneficent state must act as guarantor of children’s best interests, keeping them out of factories, etc. This picture is too simple, though. Not merely an ideal, compulsory education should also be seen as a temporary excrudescence of a certain period in the history of capitalist production. Following Marx, it is no coincidence that compulsory education arises along with the advent of industrialism, an era where the owners of capital required “all hands on deck” for accumulating capital via the large-scale extraction of surplus labor value from ever-expanding numbers. Schooling provides a complex yet crucial aid in this process, one whose continuing mechanisms have finally led to an impasse. Intensive automation and other processes have now reduced the need for human labor inputs on anything like the traditional scale. Correspondingly, compulsory education is now cycling down in frightening new ways will force us once again to ask uncomfortable questions about our educational institutions.