Beyond Educating City Projects, community-based educational plans and educating zones: a rough draft of the school-municipality

Abstract

Since the 1970’s, the mass school concept, structure and organization have been questioned deeply. Movements like deschooling or Educating Cities, and initiatives like the Educating City projects and community-based educational plans (plans educatius d’entorn, PEE, in Catalan) or educating zones, among others, have proposed alternative ways to educate related to education networks formed by schools, families and communities. This paper seeks to move forward with these proposals in order to achieve a «school without walls» or a «city-classroom». The concrete proposal to reach these goals is that in every municipality (or in every district in big cities) there should only be one school with different buildings. Proposed within the framework of the process of the municipalization of formal education, the proposal of a «school-municipality» seeks to build a local government of education as the best way to meet today’s major education challenges: education stages and tracks; school zones and school choice; school stages transitions; the decontextualization of school knowledge related to the school reproduction of social inequalities; the current grammar of schooling and the current teacher identity. This paper proposes a rough draft of the municipality-school proposal for its discussion.


Keywords
School and context; educational innovation; municipalization of school; educating zone; inequalities; teacher identity.