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Title: Education—What For?
Author: Laurance Labadie
Date: 1958
Language: en
Topics: deschooling, division of labor, education, specialization
Source: Retrieved 10/25/2021 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/labadie/LabadieEssays.pdf
Notes: From a carbon copy of the typed manuscript original, signed and dated November 9, 1958. Reprinted in Laurance LaBadie: Selected Essays (Libertarian Broadsides), James J. Martin, ed., Ralph Myles Publisher, Inc., 1978.

Laurance Labadie

Education—What For?

Discussions about education blandly assume the necessary existence of

buildings, classrooms, teachers, pupils, and a curriculum. But education

in fact is something which everyone acquires every day and hour in life.

Everything we experience educates us in some way. That is to say,

something impinges itself upon us, and there is an impression made which

evokes some kind of reaction, with appropriate consequences, and the

whole episode is recorded upon something we call our memory (whether

conscious or subconscious), and probably is correlated with other

impressions we have received, It appears to be an exceedingly

complicated and mysterious phenomenon—education.

Be all this as it may, it almost never occurs in such discussions to

suppose the complete abolition of formal or schoolroom education. Why

indeed should this appear so silly? Of course it will appear silly to

professional educators, but I am speaking about the rest of us.

Speaking for myself, much of what I learned in school I found out later

was pretty much nonsense. But it was much more difficult to unlearn this

stuff than it was to learn it. I had to unlearn it however before

something sound could take its place. Here was a terrific waste of

effort which might have been avoided if I hadn’t been “educated” in the

first place. Moreover, the things I learned afterwards were things I wag

interested in and did not need to be disagreeably pounded into me. Most

of what I “know” I got outside the schools, soaking much of it up in day

by day contacts.

Frankly I really cannot see where I would have been much worse off, it

any without any formal education at all. No doubt everyone has heard

someone express the same idea at one time or another.

Specialization has gone so far as to erase versatility. Most of us are

salesmen, or motormen, or executives, or nut-tighteners, and not much of

anything else. Few of us stop to consider what’s the sense of what we

are doing and I suspect that at least three-quarters of what people are

engaged in doesn’t really amount to anything, if indeed it isn’t

downright pernicious.

I also have a suspicion that if formal education were abolished, there

would arise in its place forums where people would get together to

discuss things, to inaugurate laboratories to experiment with and test

some of the ideas or theories which occurred to them, to construct

things, etc. All in all a voluntary spontaneous developing of thought

would arise to supplant much of that formal, dull, specialized

caricature which is called the school system today. And who knows, maybe

even teachers would get to know something themselves.

I have not too much difficulty in imagining that the inane, vacuous

“conversation” which goes on when people get together in homes, cocktail

parties, and the like would cease, if for no other reason that schools

which educate us how to be stupid had ceased to exist.

Is anybody of even limited experience going to deny that the driest,

dullest, boring stuff put into books is writ by professional educators?

Considering their numbers, how many of the professional pundits can you

name who ever really amounted to much?

I have listened to several radio programs dealing with the education

question, by those in the educational system, and about all they could

talk about with any vim and conviction was if only teachers would be

paid more money. From the top to the bottom, college presidents to

truant officers, what they couldn’t do in the way of “education” if they

weren’t subjected to such stinginess in funds. They may be right, but

somehow I developed a sour taste in my mouth.

Parents would appear to be the natural teachers of the child, but one

wonders what would happen to filial respect when the alert, inquisitive

mind of the child meets the vacuity of mind not uncommon among parents.

The economic pressures which are causing the break-up of home life are

not conducive to the education for sane living which some deer so

important, It is no secret that kindergartens and some primary grades

appear to be for the purpose of “keeping the kids off the street” or a

place to stow them so that the parents might get a respite from the

annoyance of the little brats. Truly the sins of the parents are visited

down even to the fourth generation.

Before we go haywire pouring more funds into the education mills, I

propose for serious consideration the complete abolition of the

educational system, and contemplation of what would arise in the

supposed void.