What Is the Commons in Education?

As many regular listeners to the podcast know, on this channel we have been exploring the new kinds of educational institutions that are emerging in response to the challenges that our legacy institutions are facing. For the last 250 years we've gotten used to compulsory standardised schooling being provided at scale by either the state, as public government schools, or by the market, as private fee-paying schools. I'm fascinated by the question of what alternatives there might be to this binary choice. Home-schooling networks, religious and intentional communities are certainly examples, but often still very much at the margins. My guest this week, David Bollier, is a global expert in the the way that communities work together to steward shared resources often known as the Commons, rather than relying on the market or the state. So I was very keen to ask him about the implications of reframing education itself as a commons, what would this do to the ways that we provide, fund, and govern education.

David is an author, activist, blogger and independent scholar with a primary focus on the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. He is the Reinventing the Commons Program Director at the The Schumacher Center for a New Economics https://centerforneweconomics.org/, and co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group, an advocacy/consulting project that assists the international commons movement. David’s work on the commons especially focuses on Internet culture; law and policy; ecological governance; and inter-commoning. 

David has written and edited many books on the commons, including the revised second edition of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons that was published this year. His other books include: Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons and The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking; Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (2014); Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Commons (2013), co-authored with Burns Weston; and Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2010). With Silke Helfrich, he co-edited two anthologies of original essays, Patterns of Commoning (2015) and The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (2012).

David spent many years in various policy advocacy jobs in Washington, D.C. in the 1970s and 1980s – with a Member of Congress, the auto safety regulatory agency, and public-interest organizations.  From 1985 to 2010, David collaborated with television producer, writer and activist Norman Lear on a wide variety of non-television public affairs and political projects.  In 2001, David co-founded Public Knowledge, a Washington advocacy organization for the public’s stake in the Internet, telecom and copyright policy. 

David's website and blog: https://www.bollier.org/

David's podcast, 'Frontiers of Commoning', with The Schumacher Center for a New Economics: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/frontiers-of-commoning-with-david-bollier/id1501085005
David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-bollier-254129/