Civic education and inclusion: a market or a public interest perspective?

• Author: Boucher, Jacques L.

in recent years, we have constantly been reminded that we are living in a knowledge economy. Societies that invest most heavily in training their citizens will therefore be in the best position on the global chessboard. Thus, education is being given a new role in the concept of competition. Not only is this concept of competition encouraged within society, whether in the North or South, the implication is that the primary benefit of an education is economic. For this reason, skills which are not specifically related to knowledge are frequently overvalued, often at the expense of fields of knowledge that are considered abstract and useless.

It is, however, no secret that the modern world was built on tacit or explicit knowledge through the courageous actions of city dwellers who, like Galileo and Michelangelo, challenged established beliefs and world views that were considered immutable. They, of course, did so not only in spite of dominant establishments, but also with the support of newly-emerging institutions and new types of power. We should also bear in mind that the dissemination of new forms of knowledge during the Age of Enlightenment was facilitated by a significant technological development--printing. New forms of media communication such as the Internet are, without a doubt, an equally important step forward in the dissemination of knowledge and information.

Yet how much influence would printing have had without changes in society brought about by rising levels of school enrolment that gave most citizens of Western societies access to the written word? Thus, universal education and literacy both provided access to information and made it possible for citizens to express their will, at least in principle. Of course it took several centuries for education, which was for a long time a prerogative of the elite, to spread to all sectors of Western society. Universal education through compulsory primary school enrolment, which must first and foremost be viewed as a right, constituted a genuine revolution thanks to the establishment of state-run public schools. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of the world's population does not yet enjoy the right to this fundamental source of instruction in reading and writing, which would give these people access to information and self-expression on a civil level through either print or electronic media. Furthermore, what is the use of producing increasingly efficient and affordable...