The Education Commons: Reviving the Soul of Lifelong Learning (6 June 2023)

We’re delighted to announce that Prof. Guy Standing will be GO-GN’s guest speaker on Tuesday 6 June 2023 at 16.00BST. Prof. Standing will be presenting on The Education Commons: Reviving the Soul of Lifelong Learning:

From the beginning of humanity, education has been a commons. It belongs to everybody, or should do, and everybody should have an equal right to obtain it. Education is also a natural public good. A public good is unlike a private one in that if one person has it that does not or should not deprive others of having it.

However, in reality, for most of history those who rule the state have hindered the educational commons. The tragedy of the educational commons is that it has been converted into a private good in which it is to the advantage of some to have more of it than everybody else. And the educational system has been converted into an instrument of class power and an instrument of economic control.This presentation will explore how the educational system has been privatised and turned into one of the biggest industries of the world, increasingly controlled by capital and, above all, by financial capital. It will consider how all types of learning have been converted into zones of profit and functional schooling rather than retain their emancipatory potential.    

All welcome! Join the call via Zoom.

About Prof. Guy Standing

Guy Standing is an economist, with a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He is currently Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, and previously was a professor at SOAS and the Universities of Bath (UK) and Monash (Australia). Before that, he was Director of the Socio-Economic Security Programme of the International Labour Organisation. 

In 1995-96, he was Director of Research for President Mandela’s Labour Market Reform Commission. He has been a consultant for many international bodies and governments, including the UNDP, UNICEF and the World Bank, and for three years has been an invited speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos.  

Professor Standing is a founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), an international NGO promoting basic income as a right. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. He has designed and conducted basic income pilots in India and elsewhere, and is currently advising the governments of Wales and Catalonia on ongoing basic income pilots. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network.  

His most recent book is The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea (2022), which the Financial Times has made one of its Books of the Year. His previous books include Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now (2020); Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (2019); Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen(2017); The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (2016; third edition 2021); Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (2015); A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (2014); and The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011; fourth edition 2021). The Precariat has been translated into 24 languages. 

All welcome! Join the call via Zoom.