Finding the Primacy of Educational Practice as a Gift in an Ownership Society

• In Event: Roundtable Session 45
  In Roundtable Session: (Re)framing Theory: Foucault, Education, and Subjectivity

Abstract

Our objective in this paper is to debate the so-called crisis in Education from a philosophical perspective. Doing an inquiry into the origins of knowledge through the Nietzsche-Foucauldian genealogical method, we would like to demonstrate how Education originally belonged to a gift economy instead of a market economy. Here, we draw on Lewis Hyde’s studies The Gift and Common as Air. On a final moment, we analyze Ivan Illich and the problem of institutions transforming knowledge into a commodity. As a result, educators are faced with the alarming commercialization of education in which we must cope with the problem of ownership versus free access (public domain/creative commons) to knowledge for the benefit of the public sphere.

Authors

• Jason Manuel Carreiro, Simon Fraser University

• Bhuvinder Singh Vaid, Simon Fraser University