Educating the Commons Through Cooperatively Run Schools

Abstract

In this chapter, I am chiefly interested in articulating a theoretical claim that cooperatively run schools can educate the commons causally and reproductively. Cooperatively run schools educate the commons because going to school at a cooperative can cause commons to come about by reproducing the kinds of knowledge and skills necessary to maintain an existing commons. I will make this case by completing the theoretical background already begun in this introduction, then narrating the “educational genesis” of one of the world’s best-known large-scale industrial cooperatives: the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain. After narrating that educational genesis as a kind of founding myth, I claim that cooperatively run schools can teach the commons and lay out a brief set of considerations for how to apply this strategy in the United States in the early twenty-first century.