What is the purpose of schooling?

Part of what I will have to articulate in the Enough is Enough book is a radical new purpose of schooling that is not just a balance of the old binary of workers/citizens. And not just something that integrates constructionist ideas into that binary. So what needs to be there?

• Power
• Agency
• Shared purposes with social justice ends
• Fluid identities and learning trajectories
• Heterarchy
• Equipotentiality
• Sustainability
• Cosmopolitanism – everyday (local) and intercultural (global) identities
• Spaces for ideological becoming
• Spatialized practice
• Innovation
• Knowledge produsage

And, again following Shirky, if we celebrate what we value, what do we celebrate in schools? With the deficit model running rampant, especially in urban schools, and with high-stakes testing, it seems we don't celebrate much. On the ground in classrooms there are everyday celebrations of the creation and sharing of human generosity, but that celebration stops at the classroom door and has to be done subversively. We have allowed external forces - non-educators - to break the culture in the name of accountability (neoliberal agenda). Accountable to who? Why?  Whose purposes are being served by this reductionist focus? Is the social contract of school irrevocably broken?