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Over the years we have seen what education becomes in the context of rapid industrialization, postwar state investment and Cold War rivalries, and neoliberal marketization. But we have caught only brief glimpses of what education might become under a more fully democratic system. Under more robust conditions of economic democracy — where jobs are not scarce but guaranteed, work hours radically diminished, or a universal basic income provided — learning could be decoupled from career pressure and remade as a lifelong endeavor instead of something aimed at a terminal degree. (Primary and elementary schools, then, could also be released from strict adherence to the eight-hour day of the. modern workweek, and the necessity of keeping children occupied for long hours while parents labor.) Expanding spaces of learning for people of all ages would foster social equality and cultivate the liberty inherent in the liberal arts, enabling the continual pursuit of knowledge self-rule requires. Only when schools are freed from the structural constraints that compel them to track and sort students (while telling them they deserve what they get) will the promise of universal education cease to be a lie, for only then could educators truly prioritize cultivating curiosity over imposing social control, firing up students instead of cooling them out. Until such a day the observation of one of the outspoken girls from the youth center in Overtown remains true: "Democracy's not really real, to be honest... If we have to constrain our opinions because we have people over us, that's not democracy. Because democracy is run by the people, for the people." That's not how people live, she concluded, and certainly not how her country or her school is run.

— Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone by Astra Taylor (Page 227)

I don't think market capitalism is going to vanish; the faceless institutions that benefit from it are too entrenched. The thieves are very powerful. But I don't think it's pie in the sky to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy.

— The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Page 92)

It is manufactured scarcity that I cannot accept. In order for capitalist market economies to function, there must be scarcity, and the system is designed to create scarcity where it does not actually exist… I try to lay out the understanding for myself, to think like an economist, not an ecologist. In order for money to be made, there must be commodities to be bought and sold. The scarcer those commodities, the higher their cost and thus the greater the revenue. So, I guess I do understand this: market economics demands that abundant, freely avail-able, earthly gifts be converted to commodities and made scarce by privatization and high prices. This seems crazy…

— The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Page 79 - 80)