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Title: The Promise of Deschooling Author: Matt Hern Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: anti-school, children, deschooling, education Source: Retrieved on August 17, 2011 from http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SA/en/display/130 Notes: Published in Social Anarchism #25, 1998
It is virtually anathema in our culture, but I want to argue here that
our society needs far fewer schools, not more. I believe that schools as
we have conceived them in the late-20^(th) Century are a parasite on our
communities, a burden to our children and are the very essence of a
hierarchical, anti-ecological culture. I further contend that dissolving
the school monopoly over our kids may well hold the key to
reconstructing our communities around local control and participatory
democracy. Fortunately, there are a phenomenal number of alternatives to
schools and schooling already flourishing in every community across the
continent, representing a major threat to centralized institutional
control. The abject failure of monopoly, state-controlled, compulsory
schooling is evident to anyone who looks. The nightmare of schooling is
costing our kids, our families and communities dearly in every way.
Schools waste more money than anyone can fully conceive of, demand that
our kids spend twelve years of their natural youth in morbidly
depressing and oppressive environments and pour the energies of
thousands upon thousands of eager teachers into demeaning and foolish
classrooms. The sanctity of public schools has become so reified in our
bizarre North American public political consciousness that people
reflexively mouth support for ‘education spending’ or ‘school dollars’
without any comprehension of what they are calling for. The reality that
stands as background to the sordid liberal-conservative debate about how
much cash to allocate to public schools is a system that systematically
nurtures the worst in humanity and simultaneously suppresses
individuality and real community.
Deschooling is a call for individuals, families and communities to
regain the ability to shape themselves. It is a political, a cultural
and a pedagogical argument against schools and schooling, and the
impetus to fundamentally reorganize our institutional relationships. For
many good reasons I believe schools are the linchpin of the monopoly
corporate state power over local communities, and actively resisting
their grip holds much of the key to local power. I want to analyze and
forward deschooling here in terms of three kinds of arguments:
political, cultural and pedagogical, and draw each into a rubric of
radical decentralism and direct democracy.
A political argument in favour of deschooling is a fairly simple one.
Schools are huge businesses. They command massive amounts of capital,
huge administrative apparatuses, they have enormous workforces and
sprawling facilities, “Schooling is the largest single employer in the
United States, and the largest grantor of contracts next to the Defense
Department”. Over the course of a century, schools have developed into
monumental undertakings, and the money that pours into them comes
directly out tax dollars. Schooling is “a very profitable monopoly,
guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state”. Schooling is
about the triumph of the state over families and communities, and the
spectacular entrenchment of bureaucracy at innumerable levels makes
reform unthinkable. All across North America the pattern is relentless:
tax money is appropriated in ever growing amounts and amassed in
Ministries of Education, with colossal infrastructures and blanket
mandates to license schools, accredit teachers and manufacture
curricula. These Ministries then distribute that money to sanctioned
school districts, themselves with huge bureaucracies who transfer money
and required curricula to the actual schools. Teachers, also all
accredited and sanctioned, are then given a series of groups of
children, and are required to pass on a required curriculum in a
required time frame. The effect is a seemingly endless hierarchy, with a
downward spiral of tighter and tighter control, so that at the classroom
level there is minimal flexibility. Teachers are given strict guidelines
about discipline, achievement, pedagogy and time. They are reduced to
information conveyers, passing on a prescribed set of knowledges to a
prescribed population in a strictly regulated environment. And the real
losers, of course, are the kids and their families. First, they are
seeing only a sliver of their tax dollar returned to them, and have no
political voice in how or where that sliver is spent. As John Gatto
(1935- ), a past New York City and State Teacher of the Year and now
vigourous deschooling advocate shows:
Out of every dollar allocated to New York schools 51% is removed at the
top for system-wide administrative costs. Local school districts remove
another 5% for district administrative costs. At the school site there
is wide latitude (concerning) what to do with the remaining 44%. but the
average school deducts another 12% more for administration and
supervision, bringing the total deducted from our dollar to 68 cents.
But there are more non-teaching costs in most schools: coordinators of
all sorts, guidance counselors, librarians, honorary administrators who
are relieved of teaching duties to do favours for listed
administrators... under these flexible guidelines the 32 cents remaining
after three administrative levies is dropped in most schools to a
quarter, two bits. Out of a 7 billion dollar school budget this is a net
loss to instruction from all other uses equaling 5 1/2 billion dollars.
This kind of pattern is recognizable in every school district across the
continent. There is an incredible amount of money devoted to education,
for example, “in Washington State nearly half of every tax dollar is
spent on kindergarten through twelfth-grade education.”, and precious
little of it is ever returned to those it was appropriated for, “New
York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of
the European Economic Community nations combined.” There is an amazingly
pervasive myth that government schooling is cheaper than private
education, and that opposition to schools is thus a necessarily elitist
proposal. It is a contention that is plainly absurd, and one that common
sense, a priori evidence and statistics prove foolish.
of the two forms (public and private) ... public school is by far the
most expensive in direct cost (we’ll leave social costs out of it for
the moment!), averaging $5500 a year per seat nationally, to a national
average for all forms of private education of about $2200.
The scale of school bureaucracy is monstrously wasteful, and as a
government sponsored monopoly with guaranteed customers there is no
pressure on schools to perform, in fact the opposite is true. Schools
are rewarded for failure. When students emerge from schools with minimal
skills and degraded personalities, the call inevitably goes up for more
school money, more teachers, longer school years, more rigourous
regulation. Schools are failing at even their own narrow mandates, and
yet the response is to then increase their power and scope, which is the
reverse of what is really needed. We need fewer schools and less
schooling. The inherent logic of centralized monopoly schooling is
faulty, both in terms of economics and pedagogy. Schools have always
been conceived of in terms of warehousing and the efficient maintenance
of a maximum number of children, and in a very limited way, contemporary
schools are moderately effective at that, although hardly
cost-effective. The difficulty with school logic is that kids habitually
defy regimentation and families continue to demand that their children
be given conditions to flourish in. What it means to flourish though,
and what each individual family and child needs to grow into themselves
is as variable as kids themselves. Every child is a unique and enigmatic
individual with all the nuances and contradictions humanity entails, and
each requires a specific set of circumstances and environments to learn,
grow and flourish that only the kid and their family can even begin to
comprehend. Necessitated by its very structure, compulsory schooling
attempts to standardize and regulate all students’ patterns of learning,
and plainly does not and will not work. This represents the street-level
tragedy of schooling, and underlines a political argument for
deschooling. The centralized appropriation of school money drains
families and local communities of the resources to create locally and
individually appropriate learning environments. What is needed is a
vast, asystematically organized fabric of innumerable kinds of places
for kids to spend their time. A decentralized, deschooled community
vision includes homelearners of every stripe, learning centres,
traditional schools, religious schools, Montessori, free schools, arts
and performing centres, dance troupes, language training, athletic clubs
etc., all organized on the basis of local need and interest. The
resources should be available in every community to create a swath of
local answers, and for each family and kid to develop their own
educational and pedagogical approaches. The attempt to drive all
children into centralized, compulsory and regimented schooling is an
absurd scam and wasteful at every level. It is impossible for healthy
children to thrive in such circumstances, and the century-long effort to
enforce schooling has been hugely costly. It is a burden our communities
should bear no longer.
A cultural argument for deschooling follows naturally and easily from a
political analysis. The attempt to entrench compulsory schooling is felt
throughout society, not only by children, and the corrosive effects of
the school mentality reaches deep. Americanist culture is profoundly
mired in what Wendell Berry calls simply ‘a bad way of life’: “Our
environmental problems (are not) at root, political; they are cultural
... our country is not being destroyed by bad politics, it is being
destroyed by a bad way of life. Bad politics is merely another result.”
Clearly, the domination centralized, hierarchical and compulsory state
schooling exercises over our children represents a major support for a
bad way of life. A culture of compulsory schooling is a culture that
reifies the centralized control and monitoring of our daily lives. A
society that has been obsessively schooled from an early age swiftly
becomes a place where self-reliance is abandoned in favour of
professional treatments, and the most essential human virtues are
transformed into commodities. As Ivan Illich put it in Deschooling
Society: imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.
Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the
improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military
poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health,
learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as
little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to
serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating
more resources to the management of hospitals, schools and other
agencies in question... the institutionalization of values leads
inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological
impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and
modernized misery.
A schooled society actively undermines the development of self and
community reliance, in favour of institutional treatments. A directly
democratic agenda has to include an explicit renunciation of the
other-controlled mentality of compulsory schooling. There is an
important set of distinctions to be made here, and it is a critical
deschooling project to carefully define schooling, education and
learning. Popular and professional usage tends to conflate the three
cavalierly, and the differences in real and perceived meaning are
useful. Schools practise a certain brand of schooling: they are
institutions with their own particular ideologies and pedagogical
approaches, and they are devoted to schooling, or imparting a certain
set of values, beliefs and practises upon their clients. Schooling has
found its ultimate (thus far) expression in the current state-run,
compulsory child warehousing system we call public schools. But
schooling can still take place outside of schools themselves, and
clearly that is what many homeschooling families do, they school their
children at home. Schooling is about people-shaping, it is about taking
a particular set of values, an explicit view of the way things are or
ought to be, and training students to be able to repeat that information
in specific ways. The success of schooling can be evaluated in very
quantifiable and obvious ways. Teaching is the practise of that transfer
of information. The teacher is a professional, someone trained in a
variety of ways to coerce, cajole, plead, beg, drive, manipulate or
encourage their students to receive, accept and repeat the information
they are offering. The teaching profession often attempts to view its
work as ‘sharing’, but the practise of teaching and the act of sharing
are very different things. One is a service, with one person, very often
unrequested, imparting a piece of information onto another, defining the
knowledge and evaluating the other’s ability to describe that knowledge.
Sharing is about offering one’s understanding freely, it is allowing
another person access to a private understanding. One is
professionalized manipulation, the other is friendship and genuine
humanity. Further, I want to draw your attention to education. Education
is the larger context, the meta-model, the excuse for schooling. The
educative stance is an interpretation of what is good and important
knowledge to have, a description of what every person ought to know to
become a legitimate member of society. Educators describe what people
should know, for their own good. As Boston writer and unschooler Aaron
Falbel writes:
I believe that John Holt is right in saying that most people use
‘education’ to refer to some kind of treatment. ... It is this usage
that I am contrasting with learning, ... this idea of people needing
treatment. ... Many people use the words ‘learning’ and ‘education’ more
or less interchangeably. But a moment’s reflection reveals that they are
not at all the same... Learning is like breathing. It is a natural human
activity: it is part of being alive. ... Our ability to learn, like our
ability to breathe, does not need to be tampered with. It is utter
nonsense, not to mention deeply insulting to say that people need to be
taught how to learn or how to think. ... Today our social environment is
thoroughly polluted by education ... education is forced, seduced or
coerced learning.
This is clearly not a simple semantic discrepancy and begins to mark out
important territory. Education is all about the centralization of
control, self-directed learning is fundamental to a self- and community
reliant culture. The deschooling argument I want to make here presumes
that each and every individual is best able to define their own
interests, needs and desires. Schools and education assume that children
need to be taught what is good, what is important to understand. I
refuse to accept this. Kids do not need to be taught. Our children
should be supported to become who they are, to develop and grow into the
unique, enigmatic, contradictory individuals that we all are, away from
the manipulative and debilitating effects of education. The renunciation
of education is imperative for the creation of a ecologically sane,
decentralized and directly democratic society. As John Holt (1923–85),
the Godfather of the unschooling and homelearning movements has written:
Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive
schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas and
credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and
dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest
foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people
feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators and
‘fans’, driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed,
envy and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away
with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and
let people shape themselves.
Deschooling suggests the renunciation of not only schooling, but
education as well, in favour of a culture of self-reliance,
self-directed learning, and voluntary, non-coercive learning
institutions. A disciplined rejection of schooling and education does
not insulate a person from the world, it engages them, demands that they
make decisions and participate genuinely in the community, rather than
waste time in institutions that have limited logic and meaning only
internally. I believe that schooling and education are destructive
forces across the board, with their implicit and explicit effects being
to further entrench and reinforce hierarchy and centralized domination.
At root, any political or cultural arguments for deschooling have to
rest on some specific pedagogical beliefs about the nature of learning
and living. Years of considering pedagogy and five years of running a
learning centre for young children has consistently shown me that kids
and adults are perfectly capable of running and directing their own
lives, given the opportunity and nurturing circumstances. The idea that
there is an absolute body of knowledge that every child should access if
they are to grow up healthily is a dangerous and debilitating one.
Further, “it cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory exists to
accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of the
most worth”. Every individual is an enigmatic creation of circumstance,
personality, environment, desire and much else, and their learning
interests, styles and needs are equally unique. It is absolutely true
that there is no body of theory explaining how children learn, since it
is absurd to speak of ‘children’ in any unified way, any more than we
would speak of women or men as homogenous groups. Individual learning
patterns and styles come in infinite varieties, and the only way to fit
a vast number of children into a single pedagogical program and a
regimented schedule is with a severe authoritarianism. To maintain a
modicum of order, schools are reduced to the kind of crude control
unschooling advocate and author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook Grace
Llewellyn describes:
The most overwhelming reality of school is CONTROL. School controls the
way you spend your time (what is life made of if not time?), how you
behave, what you read, and to a large extent, what you think. In school
you can’t control your own life. ... What the educators apparently
haven’t realized yet is that experiential education is a double-edged
sword. If you do something to learn it, then what you do, you learn. All
the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in
a dictatorship. In school you shut your notebook when the bell rings.
You do not speak unless granted permission. You are guilty until proven
innocent, and who will prove you innocent? You are told what to do,
think, and say for six hours each day. If your teacher says sit up and
pay attention, you had better stiffen your spine and try to get Bobby or
Sally or the idea of Spring or the play you’re writing off your mind.
The most constant and thorough thing students in school experience — and
learn — is the antithesis of democracy.
This centralized authoritarianism is the core of schooling, and it
reduces learning to a crude mechanistic process. Alongside a deep
distrust of self-designed learning, schooling teaches children that they
are always being observed, monitored and evaluated, a condition French
philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has named as
panopticism. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault described the prison
panoptical model as a thin circular building, divided into a vast number
of cells, with a guard tower in the middle. The cells have a window on
either end, but none on the sides, leaving the inhabitants of each small
box effectively backlit for viewing from the tower, but fully isolated
from one another. All the prisoners can thus be viewed fully at any time
by any one single person in the central tower, “the arrangement of his
room, opposite the central tower, imposes upon him an axial visibility;
but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral
invisibility.” The critical factor in this arrangement is that the
prisoners do not ever know if or when they are being watched. They
cannot see when the guards are in the tower, they can never know when
they are being observed, so they must assume that it is always the case.
Hence, the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a
state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is
permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action;
that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise
unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for
creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who
exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power
situation of which they are themselves the bearer.
This is the essence of panopticism. The actual surveillance is not
functionally necessary, the subject swiftly assumes responsibility for
their own constraints, and the assumption of constant monitoring is
internalized and they evolve into both the prisoner and warden.It is
hardly a stretch to fit modern schools, hospitals, prisons or
psychiatric institutions into this model. One of the cultural residues
of mass compulsory schooling is a widespread panoptical imprint. People
who have been rigorously schooled reflexively believe they are always
being watched, monitored and evaluated. It is a condition many of us,
myself certainly included, can recognize easily and identify working
virtually constantly in our lives. Schools and schooling lead us to
believe that we are always under surveillance, and whether or not it is
actually true is insignificant, it is the impulse that the schooled
person necessarily accepts, and adjusts their behaviour accordingly. The
schooled panoptical mentality extends itself further into parenting and
adult-child non-school relationships. At school children are always
monitored, and schooled parents believe that they should similarly be
constantly monitoring their offspring, in the name of safety. The last
decades of this century has seen an exponential growth in concern for
children’s daily safety, particularly in cities, and most parents I come
into contact with want to keep a very close eye on their kids. This is a
laudable concern, and one I share, yet I have a deep suspicion of the
equation that safety = surveillance. There is a threshold where our
concerned eye becomes over-monitoring and disabling, an authoritarian
presence shaping our kids’ lives.
If we want and expect our kids to grow up to be responsible creatures
capable of directing their own lives, we have to give them practise at
making decisions. To allow authority to continually rob our kids of
basic decisions about where and how to play is to set our kids up for
dependence and incompetence on a wide scale. Children who are genuinely
safe are those who are able to make thoughtful, responsible, independent
decisions. The panoptical society and schooling severely restricts
individual self-reliance, and supports a disabling reliance on
authoritarian monitoring. A deschooled antidote to this condition is
trust. Parents have to trust their kids to make real decisions about
their own lives, as Dan Greenberg, who founded the Sudbury Valley School
in 1968 outside of Boston, describes:
We feel the only way children can become responsible persons is to be
responsible for their own welfare, for their own education, and for
their own destiny. ... As it turns out, the daily dangers are challenges
to the children, to be met with patient determination, concentration,
and most of all, care. People are naturally protective of their own
welfare, not self-destructive. The real danger lies in placing a web of
restrictions around people. The restrictions become challenges in
themselves, and breaking them becomes such a high priority that even
personal safety can be ignored. ... Every child is free to go wherever
they wish, whenever they want. Ours is an open campus. Our fate is to
worry.
If we are to truly counter the disabling effect of schools, this is
indeed our fate. A genuine democracy, a society of self-reliant people
and communities, has to begin by allowing children and adults to shape
themselves, to control their own destinies free of authoritarian
manipulation.
There are many objections to a deschooling agenda, and while many of
them are vigourously forwarded by those with very entrenched interests
in the maintenance of schools and school funding, some of the critiques
are salient. The primary set of reservations centers around access
issues, the inference that without public schools, many kids will be
without adequate educational opportunities, and the oft-repeated claim
that a deschooled society would mean excellent facilities for rich
communities and inadequate ones for poor families. These kinds of access
arguments all focus around the implied belief that schools have somehow
operated as great levelers, institutions that rise above societal
inequalities and become places of equal opportunity where anyone can
succeed regardless of their background, a claim that is patently false.
Schools have always closely mimicked larger cultural and social
inequities and rich kids have always had huge advantages in a schooled
culture. The scenario of well-funded and prospering schools in rich
areas alongside nightmare schools with abysmal resources in poor
neighbourhoods is already the reality, as Jonathon Kozol has documented
so clearly in Savage Inequalities. It is a pernicious myth that schools
have ever acted as levelers. Moreover, the argument that school funding,
if loosed from State control and returned to local communities would
result in wide disparities in quality of opportunity is exactly the kind
of paternalizing ethic that is so endemic in centralizing arguments. The
assumption is that poor or non-affluent people cannot manage their money
appropriately, and that families and communities need government
agencies to spend their money for them, less they waste it. This is the
paternalism that is at the heart of statism. The second major set of
objections revolves around the idea that schools should shepherd and
caretake an existing canon of knowledge that it is essential for
everyone to comprehend, and without that understanding, kids have little
chance to succeed in a society that reifies that canon. This argument is
frequently forwarded by cultural conservatives lamenting the decline of
Western Civilization and traditional standards and the clear
articulations of education and intellectual status that were so once so
easily defined. The contention that schools are the only guarantor of
certain kinds of success has been convincingly refuted by the
homeschooling and alternative education movements in North America and
elsewhere, not to mention the examples of a plethora unschooled figures
throughout history. Free school follow-up studies and the examples of
families like the Colfaxes, who sent three homeschooled sons to Harvard,
continue to demonstrate that success, however defined, is entirely
possible beyond the constraints of compulsory schooling, and that there
are innumerable paths to any goal. The final set of objections to
deschooling I want to address here is argument that schools actually are
not that bad and that the deschooling agenda somehow over-dramatizes
their failings. The reasoning is that so many of us attended traditional
schools and emerged alright, and that there are, in fact, good teachers
and nice schools out there. These assertions are all undeniably true,
but miss the point entirely in a culture where it is an old clich_ that
‘all kids hate school’ As Bookchin puts it “The assumption that what
currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all
visionary thinking” (21), and its this kind of debilitating reformist
stance that deschooling so plainly refutes.
I believe that deschooling represents a fundamental piece in the
construction of an ecological society. To resist compulsory schooling is
to resist the other-control of our lives at levels that dig at the very
root of family and community at a daily, visceral level. Real
communities can and are being built around an opposition to monopoly
schooling all across the continent. The most compelling of these
movements are those which are rejecting not only government schools, but
the cultural and pedagogical assumptions of schooling and education
themselves. It is easily possible to envision a society where schools
are transformed into community learning centres that fade into a
localist fabric, and are replaced by a vast array of learning facilities
and networks, specific training programs, apprenticeships, internships
and mentorships, public utilities like libraries, museums and science
centres. The simplistic monoculture of compulsory schooling is abandoned
in favour of innumerable learning projects, based on innumerable visions
of human development, and children and adults alike are able to design,
manage and evaluate the pace, style and character of their own lives and
learning. The implications of schools reverberate throughout our
culture, and it is plainly clear that an ecological society cannot bear
the burden that schools place on our kids, families and communities.
They are crude constructions for a world that has been exposed as
unethical and unsustainable. Deschooling represents a tangible and
comprehensive site for a disciplined renunciation of centralized
control, and a transformative vision, not only of personal autonomy, but
of genuine social freedom.
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