CONSTITUTING THE COMMONS

Mary Anne Raywid
Hofstra University

I am honored to be responding to Ken’s presidential address, although I am not quite sure why I was invited. It could be because we have long shared an interest in political philosophy and policy. It might have something to do with my interest in community, the topic of my own address from this podium several years ago. It might be because of my efforts in connection with school restructuring. Or it could be because I chaired the Nominating Committee that made Ken President (which should sound a warning about serving on Nominating Committees). In any event, whatever may explain my standing here, I am pleased to have been asked.

My comments on Ken’s paper have been influenced by two considerations. First was an exchange he and I shared when he called to invite me to respond. As we chatted, he noted that his circumstances as a professor of philosophy of education at Cornell had channeled him increasingly in the direction of monastic philosophy: he enjoys the luxury of removal, permitting increasing focus on the doing and writing of philosophy. I commented that over the last decade my own work has gone in the opposite direction, with less time on explicitly philosophic endeavor and increasing concentration on schools and their improvement. These two foci dispose us to complementary examinations of an issue.

The second consideration that has shaped my comments today is that Ken’s work is consistently well reasoned and tightly argued. The questions one might want to bring to bear about it are far less a matter of its internal characteristics — the structure of his arguments or the veridical properties of his claims — than of external considerations — other ways to come at the problem he is trying to solve, or the identification of other, equally pressing challenges in the situation he is addressing. But finding targets here for either internal or external criticism is complicated by the fact that the paper is, in effect, one of a trilogy Ken has done over the last several years — and what is not answered here is taken care of in one of the other two! So both the quality and thoroughness of Ken’s work, and the focus of my own, have guided my comments about his paper.

One of my very few internal criticisms is prompted by my own interest in public school choice as a means to restructure schools. Ken, it seems to me, equivocates or evades on the question of choice. He finds it introduced in the bazaar model Ackerman suggests and makes quick work of the view that children ought to be the deciders of their own education. But if school restructuring is a serious concern to him here, the form in which choice surfaces today in school restructuring discussion is not so much a matter of children controlling their own education as of families selecting an education in accord with their own predilections. A much stronger case can be built for family choice, I think, and its compatibility with building the commons — as, in fact, Ken himself has suggested elsewhere in the trilogy.¹ As Ken’s paper unfolds, it appears that this question is not as peripheral to its message as might initially appear. For he, like Ackerman, seems to assume that our picture of the commons — whichever the image we select — ought to be mirrored within the school. I find that problematic.

One of the questions it raises is the vintage “level” problem of democratic thought, and who constitutes the public appropriate for dealing with which matters: For instance, on the questions of abortion and euthanasia, is the commons one’s hospital? one’s city? one’s state or region? With respect to public schools, is the commons those associated with a school (as a strict version of school-based management like Chicago’s would recommend), or is the commons the people of Chicago? or of Illinois? or of the nation? It seems to me that Ken’s concern with legitimation of the commons makes central this matter of proximity and level. Is it a single commons we are after, or can there be many? Or is that a contradiction in terms? I wish he had gotten to such matters.

But where did he go instead? Ken seems to be addressing three somewhat separate topics: constituting the commons; some vulnerable points in discourse and deontological ethics; and school restructuring. The third of these gets somewhat shorter shrift, but even without it he has plenty to do. His first question alone is intimidating. As he has elsewhere put it,

The attempt to define the public sphere is at once an attempt to define the scope of democratic authority, the scope and character of democratic community, and the nature of citizenship in a democratic society.²

Ken starts from discourse ethics. He has singled out just one concern of discourse ethics — the legitimation of social norms — and this takes him into an examination of the proper relation between public and private, and how what is public can emerge from the sphere of the private. From the literature of discourse ethics, he elaborates three models for envisioning the public space: an area built to accommodate a town meeting; a bazaar; and a negotiating table surrounded by caucus rooms. He finds fault with the first two models, although it is never quite clear whether it is the models that are at fault or just the particular spokesmen Ken selects to present them. His process suggests it may be just the spokesmen. Ken rejects the town meeting model on the basis of his critique of Habermas; he rejects the bazaar conception on the basis of a critique of Ackerman; he critiques Rawls’s conception of the negotiating table, but finds the model redeemable when defended in other ways, which he proceeds to do.

The town meeting model is ruled out because of the bounds it sets on discussion and the nature of the justification offered for it. The bazaar model suffers from eliminating the commons from decisions with public implications, as well as from giving children decisions they cannot handle. It is the third model, the negotiating table plus caucus rooms which Ken embraces (after amending Rawls’s version of this one).

Ken’s choice of the negotiating table model has important ramifications. It reflects the classical liberal’s preoccupation with the individual and his chosen cadre, as they stand against the rest. I think of at least two other models, for instance, that might be proposed as ways to build and legitimate the commons. One is a model portraying something I have witnessed in my association with Hawaii: it is an all-day, outdoor concert or celebration that involves a lot of mingling and at various points may take on political as well as cultural overtones, all in the midst of beauty and vividness and shared pleasure. Such occasions often generate sentiments of identification not unlike those we are told July 4th celebrations used to evoke.

Another model for the commons and its construction which might stand as a desirable alternative to the negotiating table is that recommended by the neighborhood organizers, who in trying to help residents effectively combat their circumstances, typically start from and focus on the political dimension rather than on community building. Here the image is of a number of people jammed into a room intensely trying to solve a common problem. I think either of these two models represents an image recommending better ways to build and sustain the commons Ken seeks. The Hawaiian concert image responds to the concerns of a Robert Bellah. It suggests the communitarianism of Amatai Etzioni and that described by Jane Mansbridge, while the organizing image suggests the legatees of Saul Alinsky — Harry Boyte and Barbara Mikulski — as well as such sources as Benjamin Barber’s “strong democracy.”

Now I imagine that of these two models, Ken might find the second more germane — the community organizing model. It addresses the commons explicitly, focusing directly on public and political issues. Two things about it appeal to me more strongly than the negotiating table metaphor. First, it seems psychologically sounder in trying to build commonality out of joint efforts to tackle problems, rather than from essentially adversarial proceedings. Second, it accords with the psychological intuition that the ability to identify with large groupings can only follow the experience of identifying with smaller ones. So the building of a sense of solidarity is an acknowledged part of this political model. While the image Ken selects suggests trying to out-bargain the opposition (which is what negotiating tables are about), this one suggests shoulder to shoulder in the interests of a shared cause.

I think there is much, also, to recommend the Hawaiian celebration model. Not the least of this is its provision of the context for building common sentiments — rather than simply settling for the public space as one occupied solely by strangers. For me, such a focus has considerable merit, since I share Maxine Greene’s conviction that one of the most urgent needs of our time is attending and cultivating the public space.

Before leaving Ken’s negotiating table conception of the commons, I want also to comment on the implications he draws from it for schools. The nature of the commons, he says, has implications for the conduct and content of education. Lessons for schools and the discourses they generate follow from the model selected: there ought to be more school time spent in the caucus rooms — that is, in discussions among the members of identity groups; points made at the negotiating table must be justifiable in terms of public reasons and concerns; and the construction of the commons must include critical evaluation of participants’ contributions — that is, discussion at the negotiating table must critique what comes out of the caucus rooms.

Should there be more “alone time” in the caucus rooms for kids? I get a frightening picture of youngsters choosing identity groups in all sorts of ways we abhor (on the basis of wealth and class, for instance, or smart and slow) and being encouraged to sharpen their sense of how they differ from all others. Moreover, instead of trying to minimize and somehow compensate for the problematic, interest group fractionation of society we’ve got now, this would extend and institutionalize it in one more setting, within the public schools. We might do a lot better just to take the kids to an Hawaiian concert!

Nevertheless, though we disagree over images, I strongly applaud the venture Ken undertakes in this paper. What I take to be the broad question he is tackling is of enormous importance. It has not only been a central issue of philosophic liberalism, but it is an urgent practical problem for a society in which the private arena in two of its aspects — individual and subcultural isolation — looms increasingly larger. The problem grows both demographically and in terms of its prominence in daily affairs. In a world where difference is so evident, disagreement so prevalent, and conflict so likely to yield violence, how do you build a “We?” How do you go about establishing a common base for our interactions? How do you arrive at a common base fairly, as opposed to trying to force that of the most powerful on everybody? These are the problems to which Ken is responding. But, as I am sure he would be quick to tell me, his pretensions are less grand: he has bitten off only one small piece of the problem. He more modestly seeks only to examine the legitimation of the norms advanced for acceptance. He suggests — and I think quite appropriately — that these norms cannot be limited exclusively to matters of justice or right. Particularly if the commons is to speak to, and guide, the conduct of education, it must address aspects of the good as well. I not only agree but welcome such a move. From my standpoint, it represents a giant step away from the confines of classical liberalism and in a direction contemporary knowledge and circumstances require us to explore.

So I applaud his project, even though we come at it differently. Ken has picked a broad problem in political philosophy but tackled a small enough piece to examine with analytic precision. I have done a rather sprawling response to him, as well as to the larger ballpark from which he chose (in part the luxury of being a respondent — able to toss out solutions without the obligation of defending them or weighing their costs). Ken’s problem was carefully selected and framed in terms of a particular philosophic literature, discourse ethics. He brings to it the traditional concerns of liberalism, although he ultimately ventures beyond them. For me, the world’s current state and difficulties generate as much concern about the absence of a commons as about its infringement upon us. Thus, my response looks largely instead to practical urgencies and the activists, sociologists, and political theorists who are addressing them.

So far as school restructuring is concerned, neither Ken nor I have taken it very far here. But my familiarity with some of the restructured schools that might be relateable to Ken’s model lead me to approach restructuring from somewhat different directions. Among the restructured schools I have seen, I would not necessarily pick those which took participatory democracy most seriously as the model most worth emulating. Nor would I select Chicago’s local school councils as today’s most promising version of restructured schools or as the process model for school transformation. I am not sure that the constitution of the commons is the best place to begin in restructuring a school. But as I understand his paper, that was not really Ken’s project here. Nor, accordingly, has it been mine.

---

1. Kenneth A. Strike, “Professionalism, Democracy, and Discursive Communities: Normative Reflections on Restructuring,” American Educational Research Journal, 30, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 255-75.

2. Kenneth A. Strike, “The Moral Role of Schooling in A Liberal Democratic Society,” in Review of Research in Education, vol. 17, ed. Gerald Grant (Washington: American Educational Research Association, 1991), 416.