Chapter 16: Poverty, Learning Opportunities, and the Social Construction of Collective Intelligence

This chapter is concerned with the massive rise in child poverty in Britain and America over the past twenty-five years and its implications for learning opportunities. It argues that dominant assumptions about what counts as a contribution to society need to be challenged if children in poverty are to capitalise on the opportunities for educational achievement. The concept of collective intelligence provides the foundation for this challenge. In an era when knowledge and knowledgeable workers are seen to be key to economic prosperity the standard distinctions between economic and social domains collapse because the creation of both are a matter of social and economic conditions. The concept of collective intelligence provides, therefore, a way of re-thinking how social justice and economic efficiency, in relation to child poverty, can be reconciled to achieve social justice in the twenty-first century.