Channelling Hope through Peer to Peer Technology: Education and Participatory Practice

This chapter is framed by the intersection of two problems one new and one old. The new problem is a radical transformation already underway that promises the end of a four-hundred year-old industrial work-based social and economic order. This change process raises questions about what we mean by intelligence, what it means to be human and how we will live. The old problem is the continuing authority and appeal of a state-sponsored educational paradigm based on the transmission and reproduction of approved modes of knowledge and skills like reading, writing and counting. For much of the twentieth century it has been applied to civilising or socialising young people and preparing them for 'work and life', a project recently redacted through the lens of human capital theory. I outline the emergent crisis drawing on what Serres refers to as the convergence of two tectonic plates. As Serres argues, there is nothing riskier than living across such a gap that 'strangely resembles the tension between two tectonic plates'. (2015). Turning back to one of the metaphoric origins of 'crisis', Serres uses a medical metaphor to explain the nature of 'the crisis' we face, describing it as a critical condition, the point at which the body itself takes a decision (2015: xii). In this way the capacity to make choices about the options and even to prepare for and shape what lies ahead is taken out of one's hands. Moreover, as Serres notes, once a critical point is reached we can never go back to the previous state, because doing so requires us returning to that critical situation. I consider likely obstacles to change in the form of inertia and resistance- and draw on Bourdieu's theory of practice to help explain the persistence of traditional educational practice.