Abstract
Key to a new contract for education is understanding that knowledge is not scarce, it is not a commodity, and it does not belong in a market economy. Instead, knowledge exchange is gift exchange, and education, when not thwarted or constricted, demonstrates its abundance. The abundance of knowledge operates in ways similar to the abundance of nature, as described by the ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her essay “The serviceberry: An economy of abundance”. We can therefore draw productive parallels between education and the new agroecology, which recognizes the intertwining nature and importance of the diversity of life and the gifts that come from the synergy of that diversity. Just as monoculture farming gives way to holistic farming, monoculture learning must also give way to a paradigm shift. Helping us envision this shift are arguments made in a court case in the US brought by the Department of Justice against 23 universities, including those in the Ivy League (US v Brown, 1992 and 1993). Through ideas expressed in court in defense of admissions practices, we can see how the cooperation necessary for a new education paradigm might be constructed. This essay invites us to more fully envision this new paradigm by focusing on the key shift that happens when knowledge exchange is understood to be gift exchange.
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Successful transition to a new social contract for education requires us to understand both the underpinnings of our current education paradigm and the leverage point that might profoundly shift that paradigm. In order to name that leverage point, this short essay begins by characterizing how we have often accepted and built educational institutions upon the idea that knowledge production and knowledge sharing—indeed, knowledge itself—represent a scarce resource for which the usual mechanisms of the economics of scarcity apply. I suggest that this idea is false: knowledge is abundant, rather than scarce, and operates, often, naturally, and most effectively within a gift economy that recognizes its abundance. To show the immense possibility inherent in the paradigm shift that redefines knowledge in its abundance, my argument draws parallels to ecological understanding that brings hope as it begins to redefine the relationship between people and Earth, including those holistic farming practitioners who are beginning to adopt new ways to grow food in their communities around the globe. These practitioners understand abundance, the intertwining and importance of life in its diversity, and the gifts that the Earth might provide from the synergy of that diversity. After exploring these practices and what they suggest about education, this essay then moves to the realm of higher education institutions in order to provide an example of the acknowledgement of gift culture and the synergy created when people from diverse lived experiences come together. In that context, I briefly share part of the history of one understudied US legal case from the 1990s that brings forward arguments whose ideas show how we might change the educational landscape world-wide in just the ways necessary for the future.
As characterized by UNESCO (2021), too often educational access is inequitable and inclusion is dependent on status or wealth. In addition, education has often become a vehicle for some form of credentialing, which is another way to say that it is how authority recognizes versions of itself. In too many circumstances, schools are institutions that have value because what they offer is unfamiliar and unavailable within home environments, thus bringing with them new norms and values dissociated from home cultures. In perhaps the worst instances, education seeks to hold rather than share knowledge in service to private moneymaking or nation-state power. All these behaviours are predicated on education functioning as a scarce commodity, operating within an economic system that places value on those things that many people want and most cannot have. Yet in reality, knowledge operates naturally within a gift or abundance economy, rather than a market or scarcity economy (Eisenstein, 2021; Kimmerer, 2022). We know this because with knowledge there is always enough to go around.
As teachers, we do not experience our knowledge to be diminished when shared. Sharing something that I know with you, showing you how something works, for example, does not lessen my own knowing. Instead, experience tells us that knowing will grow when shared so that the more we share, the more we have. This is why teaching is so magical. I share something, you see what I’m saying, you share something more and I am wowed by that. This experience tells us that knowledge is abundant, while also telling us that education, by nature, by human nature, is relational rather than transactional. Knowledge has real value in action, in its verb form in knowing, which is incarnate in collective humanity. Because of the abundance of knowledge, the relational foundation of knowledge exchange, the ways knowing relies on praxis or the doing of knowledge, education cannot easily, or rightly, commodify knowledge and turn it into an object of scarcity (Freire, 2002).
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay (2022), “The serviceberry: An economy of abundance”, provides a meditation on the natural world of the serviceberry that feeds birds and humans alike, as well as a meditation on Indigenous ethics, and allows us to think with her, in parallel, to understand education also as the sharing of abundance. Seeing alignment between humans exchanging gifts of knowledge and human acknowledgement of the great gifts of the natural world brings hope for the future of education and the environment in this age of climate crisis. In our present moment, environmental science, and specifically soil science, presents us with an epistemological shift. The literal ground on which we stand (epi-histēmi) is alive. We understand we live in relation with plants through our exchanges of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and that without plants Earth’s atmosphere would not allow us to live. We marvel at the miracle of photosynthesis and also give thanks to our grandmother trees, for example. But we are also learning that plants grow in symbiotic relationship with microorganisms, and living fungi likely brought plants evolutionarily from sea to land. Evidence of the intricate relations among so much of Earth’s life grows all around, even when these relations do not involve us directly. Incomplete and dangerous mechanistic understandings of how plants grow, understandings that focus specifically and only on plants in relation to human needs rather than in relation to larger ecosystems, compel us to feed plants some artificially derived ratio of nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium (NPK) while disregarding the living soil and decimating it as well—and yet, now science knows and can show this destruction. We are beginning to understand that we cannot attempt control of an ecosystem, determining what lives and what dies, without unforeseen consequences. This is at least partly because human knowledge, operating in the market economy of control, limits itself in its refusal to be relational. We are neither the centre of the Universe nor the keystone species of life on Earth, but rather ecosystem participants, called to be ecosystem citizens.
Kimmerer (2022) points out that “gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource” (para. 10). As I reflect upon my life’s work in higher education and continue to think in parallel with Kimmerer about abundance and gift, I see how institutions, by creating scarcity, can prevent the way knowledge operates naturally as a gift economy. Institutional purpose can become overwhelmed by the desire to create value for itself over other institutions. “Selective”, after all, means that my degree is better than yours. Competition among colleges may drive some out of business but no educator really wants to see competition taken to this extreme. No one wants to teach in the last college standing.
Even within examples of education that take place in such market-driven contexts, evidence of the gift economy also exists. We still exhort students and colleagues by saying “each one, teach one”, using this African folk proverb to keep alive the history of literacy as it expanded during African American enslavement even though reading was forbidden by law (Cornelius, 1992). Peer learning, peer instruction, students working collaboratively in groups or as lab partners—these are popular and effective pedagogies of cooperation. As part of many school cultures, students thank teachers by bringing small gifts at year’s end. In the best taught classes, students sometimes burst into spontaneous applause at the end of a semester or quarter, appreciative of the ways we have genuinely learned together. These behaviours of gratitude and reciprocity demonstrate the gift economy in action. How, we might ask, do we structure education for more of this response?
Holistic farming practitioners show a way forward. Some farmers grow corn in monoculture, with expensive seeds that have been recreated in laboratories to grow even as pesticides and herbicides poison all other plants in the cornfield. Other farmers grow corn following milpa planting practices, an ancient polycultural farming tradition sometimes called “three sisters” planting by Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike (Carlisle, 2022, pp. 93–99). Hopi corn planting is said to include growers putting corn seed into their mouths prior to planting, as a way to inoculate the seed with the human body’s microbiome (Godschalx, 2023). We might call this a version of farming “with each others’ tongues in our mouths”, to use the delicious idea of the African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, from her 1937 novel Their eyes were watching God, as she describes how it feels when friends tell and really hear one another’s stories (Pryse, 1985, p. 22; Hurston, 1978, p. 17). Through the practice of putting seed in our mouths and then into the earth, we create intimate connections between ourselves and earth and seed, connections at least as important as the scientific justification for this practice. For in the language of agroecology, these connections serve a specific biological purpose: human saliva is being used as an inoculant to treat the seed with the microbiology that will help it to thrive.
Agroecologists have begun to document the ways that old growing practices keep ecosystems in balance, growing more and better food with no expensive inputs, making even irrigation water unnecessary. These redefinitions of farming might also include recognition of Indigenous environmental knowledge (IEK), which recognizes core culture and belief systems, the “governance principles” inherent in Indigenous knowledge (Whyte, 2018, pp. 63–67). In the Hopi example of seed corn, the act of putting seed into our mouths is not only for the biological inoculant but also for the spiritual connections the action engenders. Recognizing Indigenous environmental knowledge, then, means much more than accepting Indigenous practice as having supplemental value to science, value that fills information gaps without changing core practices or altering scientific “methods” and ways of understanding (Whyte, 2018, p. 63). Knowledge exchange that acknowledges differing world belief systems must also occur. In the cornfield, monoculture growers will need to first unlearn the farming practices they depend upon in order to follow practices that ancient knowledge and recent science show are best for humanity. As they change their practices, growers might also see themselves differently in relation to the Earth, recognizing their fundamental place within, rather than outside of, the natural world. The agriculture industrial complex represents one system of farming that includes many obstacles to change but the unlearning that regenerative farming requires is underway. Where the regenerative system becomes dominant, it should not be surprising to see changed interconnections between farmers and Earth and seed.
For similar unlearning to happen in the realm of education, the systems that support “monoculture” learning must also give way to a paradigm shift. By fully embracing the idea that knowledge is abundant, we might grasp the leverage point that will shift the education paradigm, not only by changing numerous counterproductive classroom practices, but also by placing the synergy of human connection at the centre of the enterprise. What might be built through a recognition that within educational practice and knowledge production it so happens that the more we teach the more we learn, and the more we give the more we get?
Educators often champion equity in access to education, and, indeed, UNESCO’s (2021) call for a new social contract for education centres the necessity for such equity. While an important aspect of reimagined educational systems, equitable access does not move away from the fundamental understanding of knowledge as commodity, as scarce resource, even while it calls for its equitable distribution. A fuller reimagining of educational systems would centre knowledge, and knowledge exchange, as gift. This brings up a little-known twentieth-century legal dispute argued within the court system of the US, a case brought by the Department of Justice against a set of elite higher education institutions, including all of the so-called “Ivy League” (US v Brown, 1992, and Scott, 2015).
During the 1980s and the decades preceding, in response to the spirit as well as the letter of the law that declared race-based segregation in the US illegal (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954), elite colleges and universities, as well as other colleges that followed their lead, began to organize themselves around principles of access. They did so by providing only need-based financial aid in order to practice need-blind admissions (Cage, 1989; Cotter, 1989). As part of making these policies operable, they met to agree upon the amount of financial aid for students whose acceptances overlapped. These agreements prevented competition among colleges and universities on price. A student accepted to Harvard and Yale or Princeton universities, who could not afford tuition and room and board, received the same financial aid package from each because the universities shared information and made collective decisions about that student’s financial aid award. For the student, this meant that the choice of university was based on academics or other educational factors. For the universities, this meant that scarce scholarship dollar resources supported student financial need only. No non-need based financial aid was offered to students. Effectively, by creating the “overlap” structure of admissions decisionmaking, colleges and universities were cooperatively declining to participate in the marketplace of education.
The institutions enacting “overlap” practices saw financial aid as charitable activity—as gift. The US Department of Justice, however, saw antitrust violations of the Sherman Act (Lewis, 1994). For the Department of Justice, the “overlap” practice was commercial activity, a price “discount” that amounted to price fixing and was therefore illegal. This view in the end won the day, and as a consequence almost all US universities and colleges now compete with one another based on cost, with the related effect of driving some out of business entirely. But what happened along the way, the arguments made and the conceptualization of education put forward, was quite wonderful and worth reconsidering.
All of the institutions that the Department of Justice accused of violating antitrust laws, except the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), negotiated a consent decree and conceded; they agreed to stop their cooperative practice. MIT refused on principle to sign this consent degree, persisted alone in court and, in fact, won their case on appeal (US v. Brown, 1992). In their appeal, they made a very significant argument related to education as gift. An amicus brief filed by the MIT alumni association recognized alumni themselves as both “substantial beneficiaries of the high quality of the educational program at MIT” and “the principal donors which enable MIT to be charitable and to provide need-based scholarship and aid” (Brief for the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Support of the Appellant, US v. Brown, 1993). The alumni association argued, as both the givers and the receivers of educational gift, that the quality of education at MIT would suffer if access were denied on the basis of ability to pay. By doing so, they first recognized that learning happens best when all those with talent might be able to join the learning community. They also recognized and argued that education is not a commercial commodity, that it exists within a gift economy instead, and that the gift of education to others accrues more value to the very people giving the gift. This happens, they argued, because the knowledge that benefits them as “renowned scientists and researchers, and in leadership positions throughout the world”, is the same knowledge that benefits society at large, and grows with every scholarship gift that provides opportunity to talented students regardless of socioeconomic status, who then become productive scientists and innovators alongside the MIT alumni who had come before them. These educational gifts, in other words, and to use Kimmerer’s (2022) description of the essence of gift economy, multiply “with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand” (para. 10).
Education is not commodity, but gift. As such it needs structures of support, other than those borrowed from the marketplace, and those structures must be built in keeping with the natural abundance of knowledge. Those structures must be cooperative, and principled. For the benefit of all humanity, they must encourage and multiply the ways we grow and share knowledge. They must recognize that knowledge is our one unlimited resource. Donella Meadows’s (1994) work with systems thinking includes the process of visioning. It is, she says, the most important step in the policy process. She exhorts us, therefore, to “make the world safe for vision” (p. 7). In one example of envisioning education, then, we might imagine a worldwide network of the very best institutions that collectively admit students who have had many different lived experiences and hold many different world views, where admission is a process that matches student and university without concern for ability to pay. We might further imagine many such worldwide networks cooperatively working together, so that no college or university “buys” a student from another, but instead all allow student choice based on academics, on “fit”. In these networks of universities students receive expensive educations, the very best, and as alumni they reciprocate with monetary gifts back to their universities, helping future students to also receive the very best educations. As for financing such networks, whatever mechanisms created would recognize that education thrives within a gift economy, and this would preclude the current hoarding of resources. And it is also fitting, in these networks of institutions, that all knowledge is open access and all pedagogy cooperative, because that’s what knowledge exchange requires. When we build these networks that fundamentally acknowledge education as gift, something much larger than ourselves will also come into being, a lasting gift to posterity that all might share with gratitude and great joy.
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Lewis, L.W. Envisioning knowledge exchange in a gift economy. Prospects 54, 433–439 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-023-09662-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-023-09662-9