Education, especially formal education, is exclusive in many ways, for example:
- Institutions that are highly selective in admissions (they even call themselves "exclusive") exclude those who do not meet the selection criteria. The criteria is often based on social class *
- Social class also impacts how much time people can spend in educational pursuits, the safety of education (e.g. access to schools with less violence, transport related safety risks), and access to additional supports (digital / internet based aids, private tutoring, etc)
- Much of educational practice is designed around certain neuroidentity profiles (which are called "neuro-typical", stigmatizing everyone else as "neuro-divergent" and sometimes even pathologizing their identities as disorders such as ASD, ADHD, PDA) which exclude everyone else, despite the differences just being part of the natural and necessary diversity of the human species
- There is credentialism, where only those with the appropriate credentials (often earned at great cost) are permitted to teach, or even to express an opinion, depriving other adults of the opportunity to support young people and marginalizing, and sometimes silencing, those whose only "qualification" is their lived experience.
- There is age based discrimination against young people (for example, that they must be supported and only adults can provide that support - preferably "qualified adults" because of credentialism)
- There is gender/sex-based discrimination against women, and against gender/sex minorities
- Speakers of minority languages (within and across countries) have access to fewer educational resources and access to schools
- Displaced persons/refugees/asylum seekers are often denied access to the same education that those around them are entitled to
- In addition to discrimination in education, all of these may also be bases for discrimination (e.g. each of these can be vectors for bullying)
We believe marginalization and prejudice is an assault on human dignity and human rights. How can education be made more inclusive?
- A community that isn't trying to monetize educational scarcity need not charge fees for the provision of education within the community **. \swarm it^ will seek to eliminate fee based barriers by only charging a nominal fee to cover operating expenses (including salary expenses for those contributing by stewarding the community)
- Commoning resources can reduce costs while weaving a sense of community. For example, when communities meet in person, they can share physical resources (including computing devices, which reduces the impact of the digital divide, but this is also about instruments, books, toys, art & craft supplies, etc.). Participation in the \swarm it^ virtual platform may be restricted by digital divide, and will require at least a basic smartphone and internet connectivity, but we are hopeful that we can be more inclusive towards them than other educational approaches.
- While the virtual platform itself may exclude some people (in terms of visible/hidden impairments, or difficulties around digital literacy), we are hopeful that each person who wishes to use the platform has someone (e.g. a family member) who can help them navigate the virtual spaces, and we hope that the virtual platform will birth a variety of in-person \swarm it^ local communities
- In a small society, everyone has a reputation that everyone else knows, and there is really not much need for a formal credential - your work speaks for itself, and you don't want to be ostracized from the society by delivering work of lower quality than your reputation suggests. But how do you scale this to a larger society? By outsourcing trust to credentials issued by people we trust. Practically, this is not working (because the people we are supposed to be able to trust to do the credentializing are abusing our trust by monetizing the sale of credentials, leading to a flood of fake credentials), but what if we go back to personal connections and trust? That is what \swarm it^ strives to realize.
- In all \swarm it^ interactions, physical and virtual, we will actively and consciously seek to dismantle neuro-identity based barriers and seek to weave communities that can accommodate and support every individual's needs, and to the maximum extent possible do this without requiring a formal diagnosis
- \swarm it^ will also actively and consciously seek to dismantle other forms of discrimination (including age, gender, citizenship status, etc). We are regretfully required to use English as a bridge language, but we will try to soften this as much as possible using translation tools, and in-person communities can work with the languages the community is comfortable with.
* Either directly (as fees) or indirectly (by merit measured in prior examination results - which is, in many cases, a result of an education system that transforms "social class" to "merit")
** If the community chooses to "learn from" a resource outside the community, that may incur a cost and this cost may need to be borne by those who wish to access it. Unfortunately, this restricts access to those who can afford it, but we will see if community-based rather than individual-based funding models are possible