Cooperative education, a collective construction

Abstract

In order to talk about cooperative education we must first talk about basic aspects of cooperativism, from its history to its presence in the solidarity economy and its potential for Good Living, contextual aspects that will help to better understand it. The spirit and action of cooperatives are as old as humanity; otherwise it would not have been able to overcome the great adversities it faced during the first millennia of its existence. Several experiences of organization in different places show this. Cooperativism as an organisation and a social movement is a recent response to the terrible conditions of exploitation and bad treatment suffered by the workers of Europe, mainly of England, in the first centuries of industrial capitalism.