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Title: Toward the Destruction of Schooling Author: Jan D. Matthews Date: Winter 2004 Language: en Topics: education Source: Retrieved on May 9, 2009 from http://www.anti-politics.net/distro/text/schooling.html
“When examined, answer with questions” — Graffiti Paris, 1968
Most people don’t like being told what to do. Any institution that aims
to structure and regiment a person’s life is, to a certain extent, in
conflict with that person. The interesting thing is that that person is
not always in willful conflict with the institution. Those who are
obedient and fulfill their role as students understandably try to ignore
the negative effects their schooling is having on them. But who would
honestly deny that these effects are quite visible? Students are taught,
through the process of schooling, to be conformist, unimaginative,
docile, and a great many other things that are by and large considered
virtues in the working world. Stay this way and you may never feel good
about yourself, but you will be congratulated by authority figures for
the rest of your life. I think that the antagonistic feelings that
people have toward school reflect what schools are trying to do to you.
Our present situation in which compulsory schooling appears to be so
natural has a historical context; the forces at work and reasons why we
spend so much of our lives in school can only be adequately explained
from a perspective that looks at schooling historically in terms of the
means employed and the ends desired and looks at where these
institutional designs leave the individual caught up in school. Such a
perspective can be revolutionary only if it identifies with the
individual caught up in school — with their needs and desires, their
anger and frustration. We must look at how schooling fits into the whole
of society and what sort of social relationships and institutions are
hinged upon keeping this individual — you, for all practical purposes —
acquiescent. The problem, namely, that most people do in fact do what
they are told, is a problem with the totality civilized social
relations.
Schooling is a fundamental process of our society. It can be understood
as the ensemble of techniques by which a society instructs the young in
the knowledge, values, and attitudes necessary for becoming responsible
members of society, reproducing the dominant social order. The bells,
the classes, the rules, the discipline — all are important aspects of a
controlling process aimed at molding the individual into a form more
desirable to others — to authorities. Schooling, like work, is based on
coercion. Generally speaking, one does not do schoolwork because the
experience itself is rewarding. One does not do schoolwork on one’s own
terms. Also, there is a carrot or a stick guiding your progress —
usually both. Max Stirner had it right when he said that “the school
question is a life question.”[1]
The most important life-skill taught in schools is subservience. It is
absolutely essential to all hierarchical social systems. Education, as
William Torrey Harris (U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the
century) once defined it, is “the subsumption of the individual.”[2]
Nobody is absolutely free of social pressures, material forces, outside
influences. But it does not follow that we should submit to the ideal of
the individual’s “adjustment” to the social terrain: behavior
modification administered by the guardians of the Republic. There is an
essential tension here: the tension between unique individuals and the
social institutions that prevent their self-determination.
The necessity of schools is deeply ingrained in the modern psyche.
Implicit in the acceptance of any modern political ideology is the
assumption that the individual exists to serve the common good or some
higher principle exterior to personal subjectivity — in fact, this seems
to be the basis of all ideology, all political systems, all forms of
rule. So, proceeding from this assumption, the sufficiently schooled
person — the university student, for example — assumes the thinking of a
social planner with regard to all political questions. Critical thinking
is so discouraged that many are virtually incapable of taking an
anti-political stance against all the moral baggage of formal ideology,
against the totality of “mental production”.[3] Alexander Inglis had the
following to say about this aspect of schooling: “It must be recognized
that in American society each individual must be not merely a
law-abiding citizen but also to some extent a law-making citizen.”[4] In
a democratic state, social stability rests principally on the
internalization of the values behind the rules, the morality behind its
reification in law. One can dislike school and still believe in its
mythology — most people do. The stereotypes of good students, bad
students and every other category of student conceal the question of the
desirability of systems of grading and categorization. “Banalities, due
to what they conceal, work for the dominant organization of life ...
words will not cease to work until people do,” wrote Mustapha
Khayati.[5] The mythology of this dominant organization of life consists
of myths such as the necessity of being schooled in order to learn, the
detached objectivity (and intelligence!) of the intellectual, and many
others, all reflecting capitalist values — the most salient of which is
Progress.
The student, like society, is continually making progress. The student’s
progress, like that of society, is fundamentally a domestication of the
human animal. When Derrick Jensen asked himself why schooling takes so
long, the answer he came up with was straightforward and truthful: “It
takes that long to sufficiently break a child’s will. It is not easy to
disconnect children’s wills, to disconnect them from their own
experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful
employment they will have to endure.”[6] A few centuries earlier,
Immanuel Kant put it more succinctly: “Man must be disciplined because
he is naturally wild...”[7] Discipline is at the heart of the
educational enterprise. Schools are obviously not organized by the
students — they are the population that is to be controlled, monitored,
measured, and disciplined. Discipline is “what the factory and the
office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental
hospital.”[8] There are certain rules to be followed and the student is
watched at all times to make sure she is conforming. Discipline is
essential, but it does not explain all aspects of schooling. Knowledge,
the commodity that the school deposits in you or showers you with is
something exterior to the student, who accumulates knowledge in a
process beyond her control. Knowledge is power, most commonly to the
extent that one can serve the interests of power and secure a
comfortable or powerful place in the social order. Foucault pointed out
that power necessarily produces knowledge: “... power and knowledge
directly imply one another ... there is no power relation without the
correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that
does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”[9]
Highly specialized knowledge of the type that schools impart reflects
complex power relations hinging on extensive hierarchy and division of
labor. The increasing importance of schooling in modern society reflects
society’s increasing totalitarianism, in the sense that more and more
human activities are subordinated to and conditioned by the advanced
techniques of a technological society whose driving force is
Capital.[10]
It is obvious that any critique of schooling must have within it a
critique of the social order of which the schools are a part and vise
versa. Schooling seems to be a positive feedback system: more and more
people go through schools, capitalism advances, and more schools are
needed to keep people subservient to the bosses. Education is such an
important “right” for all people that it “shall be compulsory” according
to Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[11]
Education seems to be something that all the ideologues can agree on. It
is obviously helping people to adapt to the insanity of modern society.
We become automatons, docile bodies — boring, dumb, and monotonous from
doing schoolwork with the same characteristics. By and large, students
submit to their behavior modification and faithfully reproduce the
current social order.
“It may be an easy thing to make a Republic; but it is a very laborious
thing to make Republicans...” — Horace Mann
“The family and the tribe are the schools of savages,” wrote James
Mulhern.[12] It would be far more accurate to say that “savages” don’t
have schools, but that would perhaps bring the whole idea of schools
into question, or at least get the reader to think about how tribes have
been replaced by schools, families by classes. If modern schools are
presented as simply more advanced forms of something that has always
existed, they somehow seem more unavoidable, a part of our “human
nature.” Schooling is necessary to a society to the extent that a given
society constitutes a social order where individuals are subordinated to
some collectivity. Government and hierarchical social relations maintain
“social order” in civilized societies, and are therefore prerequisites
for the development of schooling.
The development of writing systems in Sumeria and Egypt set the stage
for the first specialists in the modern sense: scribes. Writing evolved
as a way of monitoring wealth, keeping track of the size of armies, and
recording monetary transactions — important functions of power for early
cities.[13] Scribes, or intellectuals, have always existed to serve the
interests of power. Schooling was originally intended for scribes and
other functionaries who occupied administrative and priestly roles. The
impersonal relationship of students to an authority figure who instructs
them is thus historically very intimately tied to the functioning of
power. Schools developed as adjuncts to the temple-courts of the ruling
castes of ancient cities. Accounting, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy,
and a significant amount of literature concerned with religious themes
grew out of these first specialized intellectual environments. Along
with all of these cultural pursuits, emphasis was always placed on
morality and good manners — renunciation being at the root of the work
ethic so essential to schooling.[14] Education in the East shared these
characteristics: Hindu schools stressed mental purity and
self-discipline, which were religious as well as school virtues.[15]
It is with Greece that the Western tradition in education is said to
begin. Greek education was originally concerned with the ideal of the
noble warrior. Slowly this heroic culture became more of a scribe
culture, although the written word was not to be the sole concern of
education until all learning was organized around the Book of Books, the
Christian bible. In Sparta, education had an essentially military
character, its chief purpose being the training of the hoplites, or
heavy infantry. Athenian education was never as strictly organized as
that of Sparta. Nonetheless, the ephebia of Athens were schools for
future soldiers organized by the state. The ephebia, however, eventually
lost their military focus, ceased to be compulsory, and began teaching
philosophy and rhetoric to the wealthy that would never have to
work.[16]
Prior to the sixth century B.C., Greek education was generally “artistic
rather than literary, athletic rather than intellectual.”[17] Many Greek
cities, especially Athens, were developing a very active political life
around this time. This more democratized Athens developed forms of
collective education that paved the way for the development of the
school as an institution. The Sophists responded to the need for a new
ideal of education and began to teach students with the intention of
molding successful citizens: people who were intellectual, scientific,
and rational.[18] If “man is the measure of all things,” as Protagoras
said, are sophists the best measurers?[19] The Sophists went from town
to town searching for pupils, literally selling their skills — they
became the first paid teachers. Their approach was looked upon
contemptuously by many who saw education as encompassing so much more
than practical pursuits; nonetheless, they laid the foundation for the
more highly developed Hellenistic education that would consist of a
complex course of studies undertaken from the age of seven to twenty.
Although there were no infant schools in Greece, Plato felt that
children should go to school at six. Aristotle felt that five would be
the most sensible age to begin, and Chrysippus was modern enough to say
three. Schooling was beginning to assume great importance in the minds
of influential thinkers.[20] Plato felt that with schooling, man becomes
“the most divine and most civilized” of all animals; without it, “he is
the most savage of earthly creatures.”[21] Still, for all his
seriousness about preparing the next generation of political leaders,
the academy he founded was incredibly informal by modern standards.[22]
Roman education was originally very different from intellectual
Hellenistic education. Whereas the Greek boy was led to school by a
slave, a pedagogue, the Roman boy stayed at home and was raised by his
mother and educated by his father until he was old enough for military
service. As Rome extended its empire, Greek influence increased and
eventually Roman schools were created for the purpose of training
administrators and state functionaries. Still, there was never any
general scholastic policy as was to be developed later by the modern
nation-state. Christianity developed in the midst of Greco-Roman
civilization, and its educational practice would incorporate both Greek
intellectualism and Roman severity, absorbing what is perhaps the most
persistent theme of Western Education, the ideal image of man — man who
bowed down before the law and sacrificed himself for an ideal.[23]
The first Christian schools were the catechetical schools of the first
centuries A.D., where instruction was exclusively oral. They were
institutes of higher learning in the sense that they were geared toward
an older audience. They were principally concerned with instructing
pagans in Christian beliefs so that they could be baptized.[24] The
monastic school, originally created for future monks, appeared in the
fourth century and they became the first genuine Christian schools.[25]
Cathedral schools which were provided by every Cathedral were a later
development, and the enrichment of their program helped bring about the
rise of the Universities during the medieval period.[26] From the
11^(th) century onward, the church was very much concerned with the
development of an effective educational system. At the same time, the
characteristics of higher education were being established between the
11^(th) and 16^(th) centuries.[27] Frederick Eby writes, “By the end of
the 15^(th) century, 79 universities were recognized in western Europe.
Almost all had the blessings of the Pope, even if they did not owe their
initiation to papal decree... Most of the students were laymen, and
secular subjects such as law, medicine, and the sciences dominated their
interest [more and more].”[28] With the rise of Christianity, education
came to have a fundamentally moral aim. Discipline was becoming ever
more precise as living and learning became more and more conditioned by
set parameters of space and time.[29]
The 16^(th) and 17^(th) century grammar school that was physically
separated from the church was the product of the Renaissance and the
Reformation. The humanism of the Renaissance stimulated a greater
interest in intellectual activity and classical learning, while the
reformation moved beyond the traditionalism and formalism of medieval
times. In terms of schooling, the two movements seemed to work in
harmony.[30] Martin Luther, who was a staunch advocate of schooling,
influenced the growth of lower schools throughout northern Europe. With
Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, more and more Bibles were being
printed, and universal education, if not a humanist ideal, was rapidly
becoming a Christian one.[31] The provincial schools and the Christian
elementary schools of the seventeenth century were founded principally
to combat the ignorance of God and idleness among the poor. Comenius, an
educator born in 1592, believed that children are not born human, but
can become human through the proper training — educating them thus
became God’s purpose. Christian schools not only trained docile
children, but also tried to make sure parents stayed faithful and
replicated the discipline of the school in the home.[32]
The advancements of science during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries permanently changed the ways in which schooling was viewed and
implemented. In Francis Bacon’s unfinished utopia, The New Atlantis, the
inhabitants of the perfect commonwealth organize a scientific society,
the end of which is “the Knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of
things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the
effecting of all things possible.”[33] Bacon’s book influenced the
founding of the Royal Society and the scientific academies, while some
of his short essays, such as “Of Marriage and the Single Life” and “Of
Parents and Children” signaled the decreasing importance of the family
and traditional social groupings.[34] Descartes, too, made observations
that very clearly represented the increasing importance of science. He
came to the conclusion that he was “a substance the whole essence or
nature of which is simply to think, and which, in order to exist, has no
need of any place nor depends on any material thing.”[35] Science was
slowly beginning to replace religion, in the sense that it occupied the
same place as an object of faith: a good in and of itself.
“The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the
disciplines,” wrote Foucault. “In the eighteenth century, ‘rank’ begins
to define the great form of distribution of individuals in the
educational order: rows or ranks of pupils in the class, corridors,
courtyards, rank attributed to each pupil at the end of each task and
each examination; the rank he obtains from week to week, month to month,
year to year; an alignment of age groups, one after another; a
succession of subjects taught and questions treated, according to an
order of increasing difficulty.”[36] The individual was more and more
enmeshed in a psychogeography shaped according to the interests of
power. Such is the shape of the new schooling being forged during the
Enlightenment, soon to be systematically applied by the nation-state.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for example, both saw education
as a way to create a more “homogenous” citizenry.[37] Benjamin Rush,
echoing Aristotle’s thinking, spoke the hidden truth of schooling: “Let
our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is
public property.”[38]
In the United States, the Puritans were the first people to be
preoccupied with schooling. According to Puritan thinking, the child was
“not only ignorant but sinful in nature.”[39] The preacher,
coincidentally also the main teacher in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
was there to raise them up to civilized status.[40] In accordance with
the philosophy of John Calvin, Massachusetts voted for “the compulsory
establishment of schools, ordering every town, that is, township, of
fifty households to establish an elementary school and every town of one
hundred households a secondary school as well.”[41] Virginia was much
less concerned with universal education. Tutors were often hired by the
wealthy to prepare their boys for College (usually William and Mary or a
European school), but the poor had less opportunity for education. “In
moving from seventeenth-century Massachusetts to eighteenth-century
Virginia one senses a marked decompression in religious climate; in
place of ‘sin and profanes’ the Virginia teacher’s foes become the
awkward and uncouth.”[42]
The character of American education was nothing new: “Both [Noah]
Webster and [Benjamin] Rush believed that the teacher should be an
absolute monarch.”[43] The classroom was rapidly becoming an instrument
for the formation of modern republicans. Benjamin Franklin’s virtues of
temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity,
justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility
were perhaps the Bourgeois virtues par excellence.[44] These values were
becoming ever more entrenched in society as industry progressed and
industriousness became the absolute good: “The workshop, the school, the
army were subject to a whole micro-penality of time (latenesses,
absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence,
lack of zeal), of behavior (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle
chatter, insolence), of the body (‘incorrect’ attitudes, irregular
gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency)...
each subject find[s] himself caught in a punishable, punishing
universality.”[45]
Arising out of the belief that the existing schools were not systematic
enough to accomplish their purpose, and starting in the urbanizing,
industrializing regions of the East where America was acquiring a mostly
foreign-born proletariat, the common school movement strove for
universal “free” public education.[46] As the state’s attitude toward
economic life was becoming more non-interventionist, its attitude
towards education was changing in the opposite direction. The 1837
founding of the Massachusetts Board of Education and the appointment of
Horace Mann as its first secretary marked the transition into the modern
epoch of education in America.[47] The blazing humanitarianism of the
advocates of popular education was chiefly concerned with integrating
masses of people into the new industrial economy and diffusing social
tensions created by increasing inequality. Michael B. Katz disproves the
myth that the working class struggled for popular education: “The
committees [school committees] saw themselves arrayed against the mass
of parents, whom they considered uncomprehending and indifferent. School
committees were unashamedly trying to impose educational reform and
innovation on this reluctant citizenry. The communal leaders were not
answering the demands of a clamourous working class: they were imposing
the demands; they were telling the majority, your children shall be
educated, and as we see fit. Promoters represented educational reform,
especially the high school, as an innovation directly aimed at
urbanizing, industrializing communities. The high school was
simultaneously to foster mobility, promote economic growth, contribute
to communal wealth, and save towns from disintegrating into an immoral
and degenerate chaos.”[48]
Horace Mann called education “the great equalizer of the conditions of
men — the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”[49] Since schooling
was becoming more democratic, common school reformers were trying to
appeal to everyone: “To employers he [Horace Mann] claimed that
schooling made workers more industrious, obedient, and adaptive, thereby
increasing their output; to working people he held out the hope of
increased earnings.”[50] The overall trajectory of this schooling,
however, is best understood not in relation to democratic ideology, but
in its relation to industrialism and the new forms of social
organization being developed. Schooling was to “assimilate the
immigrants and teach all children to shun the moral temptations of
modern life.” Eventually, schools became graded, policy making
centralized, curricula standardized, and architecture uniform.[51] What
emerged were systems of public education, education having acquired its
entirely institutional character. This development paved the way for the
sterile bureaucracy of the 20^(th) century.[52] The schools became
important auxiliary institutions to the factory, teaching children to be
orderly and tractable. An important transitional period (1800–1830) in
the development of industrial society in England and America was marked
by a type of school known as a Lancaster or monitorial school. Such
schools were originally inspired by the schooling system in India
whereby the caste system was preserved through the gathering of hundreds
of children from the bottom two castes (95% of the population) into big
rooms where they were taught self-abnegation and little else by a
Brahmin. Joseph Lancaster, after reading a report of the Hindu system,
worked to establish similar schools in England and the United States.
These schools were very much like factories, emphasizing economy,
routine, and competition. While this particular form of school did not
survive, the ethos that informed the Lancasterian system continued. In
other words, the factory continued to be a model for schools. Schooling
became inextricably tied to the reproduction of the new industrial order
and capitalist social relations. Given the importance of the new
schooling system, it is no wonder that schooling would soon become
compulsory.[53]
America’s compulsory school system was inspired by the first effective
compulsory school system which was developed in Prussia and functional
by 1819. “In 1806, in the battle of Jena, Napoleon crushed the military
forces of Prussia, and in the Treaty of Tilsit, by which peace was
concluded in 1807, he exacted severe and humiliating terms of the
defeated nation.”[54] A wave of Prussian nationalism swept over the
nation. Creating a massive compulsory education system aimed at creating
patriotic masses that would die for their country was seen by leaders as
the way to assure national greatness. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the most
influential proponent of such a system, wanted students to develop a
love of “regular and progressive mental activity” that would direct them
toward a life of service to society. He was preoccupied with the
importance of an “image of a moral order of life” and “the good [as
opposed to my good], simply as such and for its own sake.”[55] From the
Swiss educator John Henry Pestalozzi (“the father of the modern
elementary school”) the Prussians learned of the great potential of
modern common schools.[56] The Prussian schools formed at this time were
divided into three categories: Akadamiensschulen for future policy
makers (1% of students), Realsschulen for future professionals (5 to
7.5% of students) and Volksschulen, which emphasized obedience, for
everybody else. Horace Mann visited Prussia in the 1840s and praised the
Prussian schooling system in his Seventh Annual Report. The curious
thing, which Mann neglects to mention, is that he “arrived in Prussia
when its schools were closed for vacation. He toured empty classrooms,
spoke with authorities, interviewed vacationing schoolmasters, and read
piles of dusty official reports.”[57] Nonetheless, Mann’s glowing report
accurately represents his opinion of the Prussian system. He was
particularly impressed by the Prussian classification of scholars
throughout their course of instruction and their enforcement of
compulsory school laws: “After a child has arrived at the legal age for
attending school, — whether he be the child of noble or of peasant, —
the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness
and death. The German language has a word for which we have no
equivalent either in language or in idea. The word is used in reference
to children, and signifies due to the school; that is, when the legal
age for going to school arrives, the right of the school to the child’s
attendance attaches, just as, with us, the right of a creditor to the
payment of a note or bond attaches on the day of its maturity.”[58]
Slowly but surely, the state was able to impose compulsory attendance on
the citizenry. During the latter half of the 19^(th) century, the United
States, France, and England, all established systems of public education
with compulsory attendance.[59] John Taylor Gatto describes the
imposition of compulsory attendance in America: “Our form of compulsory
schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It
was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated eighty percent of
the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod
not surrendering their children until the 1880s, when the area was
seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.”[60] By
1900, most states had government schools and compulsory attendance.[61]
An area of investigation that very clearly shows the role of schooling
in a society is the conflict between a society that has schools (the
United States) and societies that don’t (American Indians). During the
300 years following the establishment of a Jesuit missionary school in
Havana, Florida in 1568, Catholic and Protestant religious groups
dominated attempts to educate Indian youth. It was in the 19^(th)
century that schooling came to be seen as a way of assimilating young
Indians into the dominant (white) society. Civilization, Christianity,
and farming were to be the values forced upon the uncivilized. “In 1819
Congress established a civilization fund, which lasted until 1873 [when
the Bureau of Indian Affairs took control of Indian education], to
provide financial support to religious groups and other interested
individuals who were willing to live among and teach Indians.”[62] The
House Committee that recommended the creation of the fund, revealed the
philosophy behind the program: “Put into the hands of their children the
primer and the hoe, and they will naturally, in time, take hold of the
plough ... and they will grow up in habits of morality and
industry...”[63]
In many treaties with Indians from 1778 till 1871 (when Congress stopped
recognizing tribes as independent powers), the government made education
provisions, but it was not until after the reservation system was
established (following the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the building
of western railroads) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs took control that
Indian education became more of a systematic effort of
acculturation.[64] A significant figure in Indian education was Richard
Henry Pratt, who, while serving in the army, had helped bring about the
collapse of the Southern Plains tribes. The fact that there was little
contradiction between killing Indians and educating them says a lot
about the way many educators viewed the natives. Pratt felt that in
order to save the man, it was necessary to kill the Indian. He believed
that Indians could, if instructed properly, be fully incorporated into
American society. After the defeat of the Southern Plains tribes, Pratt
took on the task of being the jailor for 72 of the most intractable
Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne at a new prison in Fort Marion, Florida.
In three years, he was able to convince himself and others that Indians
could be transformed into proper citizens. He went on to found the
Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. “The opening of
Carlisle Indian School in 1879 came just at the time policy makers were
desperately searching for a means of absorbing Indians into the larger
society... Between 1879 and 1900 the Bureau of Indian Affairs created
twenty-four off-reservation schools roughly modeled after the Carlisle
prototype. By 1900 the Indian School system had taken on the shape of an
institutional hierarchy. When the system functioned according to plan,
students progressed from reservation day schools to reservation boarding
schools, finally moving on to Carlisle-type off-reservation schools. By
1900 three quarters of all Indian children were enrolled in boarding
school, with approximately a third of this number in off-reservation
schools.”[65] Children “were taken from their grieving parents and kept
for years, punished for speaking their own language, and brainwashed of
all traces of Indianness.”[66]
Students, often with the help of their parents, sometimes went to great
lengths to resist the schooling experience. The problem, as one Indian
agent put it, was that they had “not yet reached that state of
civilization to know the advantages of education, and consequently look
upon school work with abhorrence.” When parents refused to enroll their
children in schools, Indian agents employed by the state had the power
to withhold rations or use the police to track down the children and
force them to go to school. Thomas J. Morgan, the Commissioner of Indian
Affairs, wrote in 1892 that he did not believe that Indians “have any
right to forcibly [!] keep their children out of school...”[67] Students
resisted in a variety of different ways: simply running away was very
common, some risking death or dying on their journey home. Even
“mysterious” fires were somewhat common. In 1897, two Carlisle girls
tried to burn down the girls’ dormitory twice in the same day: once
right after the bell for supper and once just after the bell for chapel.
At Fort Mojave, several kindergartners were locked up in the school jail
for repeatedly running away from school. During breakfast one morning,
the kindergartners not locked up used a large log as a battering ram,
broke through the jail door, and ran for the river bottom with their
rescued classmates.[68]
Schools represented, especially to American Indians, a new relationship
to space, which was conceived of in linear terms. Lines, corners,
squares, and strait rows represented industrial civilization’s
relationship to wilderness. Space was colonized by the disciplinary
imperative: freedom of movement was carefully regulated. As the student
learns to heed the teacher’s commands, he internalizes the discipline
that shapes individuals. “A relation of surveillance, defined and
regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as
an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to
it and which increases its efficiency.”[69] Is it any wonder that
schools resemble prisons? As Morris and Rothman wrote, “With no ironies
intended, they [19^(th) century prison reformers] talked about the
penitentiary as serving as a model for the family and the school.”[70]
Foucault has written of the transition from the penality of spectacular
torture to that of an organized prison system, roughly coinciding with
the emergence of the nation-state and the Industrial Revolution: “The
reform of criminal law must be read as a strategy for the rearrangement
of the power to punish, according to modalities that render it more
regular, more effective, more constant and more detailed in its
effects...”[71] An early reformer, Cesare Beccaria, wrote that “the most
certain method of preventing crimes is, [sic] to perfect the system of
education.”[72] Some time later Horace Mann declared that “School is the
cheapest police.”[73]
By the time the common schools had proven their utility, the very
wealthy took a marked interest in education. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra
Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities bearing
their names. The universities were meant to train the middlemen of the
American system who would uphold its values: teachers, doctors, lawyers,
administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians. As late as 1915,
Carnegie and Rockefeller alone were spending more on education than the
government was. “In our dreams ... people yield themselves with perfect
docility to our molding hands [those of Carnegie’s General Education
Board].”[74] Marvin Lazerson wrote of the formation of the urban school
system at the turn of the century: “What had been an amorphous
collection of parochial and virtually autonomous agencies under the
guidance of transient untrained teachers became an integrated system
whose characteristics were strikingly similar across the nation, and
whose tone was set by a professionally certified interest group.”[75] By
1914 twelve of the twenty largest cities in Massachusetts had public
kindergartens, which were intended to domesticate the slum child, and
teach the parent, through the child, how to be a good parent.[76]
Friedrich Froebel had founded the first kindergarten (or, literally, a
garden of children) in 1837, and the proliferation of kindergartens
allowed educators to better shape the young child’s character.[77] The
new schooling system was seemingly unstoppable, irreversible. “Just
see,” said Carnegie, “whenever we peer into the first tiny springs of
the national life, how this true panacea for all the ills of the body
politic bubbles forth — education, education, education.”[78] There was
resistance, but usually not enough to really threaten this constant
bubbling forth. The Irish community, for example, boycotted and may have
tried to burn down a school in Lowell, Massachusetts; but, over time,
truant officers were employed and the institution moved ahead, as it did
across the United States.[79] Parents often faced fines or the
possibility of arrest if they refused to send their children.
The Progressive movement (1890–1930) was philosophically concerned with
tailoring education to the needs of the child. Practically, this meant
categorizing, observing, testing, and controlling the child to smooth
the transition to corporate capitalism.[80] Education became quite the
religious calling: “Every teacher should realize he is a social servant
set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the
securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher always is
the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of
God,” wrote John Dewey.[81] Understood metaphorically, the kingdom of
God could signify a new era of capitalism; although Dewey considered
himself a socialist. To focus on politics would be to miss the point —
social order, the “subsumption of the individual” has become a good in
and of itself. Progress is what matters — the truth behind the
capitalism. Raymond E. Callahan observed the real structural changes
shaping modern schooling: the adoption of business values in educational
administration started about 1900 and by 1930 administrators saw
themselves as business managers or “school executives.” Emphasis was
placed on accounting, finance, public relations, and running schools
like businesses. At the annual meeting of the National Education
Association in 1905, George H. Martin (Secretary of the State Board of
Education in Massachusetts) decried the fact that “educational processes
seem unscientific, crude, and wasteful” when compared to modern business
practices. In 1907, William C. Bagley published Classroom Management,
which concerned itself with the most efficient operation of the “school
plant.” School boards were increasingly dominated by businessmen, and a
more utilitarian, career-focused education was called for.[82]
“We couldn’t ask more from a patriotic motive than Scientific Management
gives from a selfish one,” said Theodore Roosevelt, obviously full of
enthusiasm.[83] Frederick Winslow Taylor (who developed Scientific
Management) clearly grasped the import of his ideas when he wrote, “In
the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be
first.”[84] Taylor saw that the best type of industrial management in
operation in his time was based on the workman taking initiative and the
employer giving some special incentive in order to keep the worker
motivated and productive. Taylor’s idea of Scientific Management or task
management was that the employer could even more effectively and
efficiently secure the initiative of workmen by studying the tasks of
the workmen and developing a science for each element of a man’s work
and then selecting and training workmen best suited for the tasks which
the employer had familiarized himself with. By studying tasks, assigning
workmen to definite tasks which they are to perform within a specified
amount of time, and monitoring the workmen’s progress, the employer
takes on new responsibilities, but will be able to greatly increase the
efficiency of his operation. Taylor was indifferent to the dehumanizing
aspects of Scientific Management; he felt that an increase in efficiency
would bring greater prosperity to all; and the rights of “the people”
(in other words, people as consumers) were more important to him than
those of employers or employees. [85] Scientific Management sounded the
death knell for what was left of the dignity or autonomy of labor — a
prerequisite for the fast-paced consumer culture of today.[86]
There was much enthusiasm for scientific management in the corporate
world and especially the corporate media: articles appeared in popular
magazines seeking to apply Taylor’s principles to the army, the legal
profession, the home, the family, the household, the church, and of
course, education.[87] Taylor’s ideas “were adopted, interpreted, and
applied chiefly by administrators; and while the greatest impact was
upon administration, the administrator, and the professional training
programs of administration, the influence extended to all of American
education from the elementary schools to the universities.”[88] An
abstract of a speech (regarding the application of scientific management
to schools) delivered to the High School Teachers Association of New
York City was published in the Bulletin:
A [.] Purpose or object of ‘Scientific Management.’
1. To increase the efficiency of the laborer, i.e., the pupil.
2. To increase quality of the product, i.e., the pupil.
3. Thereby to increase the amount of output and the value to the
capitalist...[89]
Another development was the Gary Plan, started in Gary, Indiana in 1908
by William A. Wirt, superintendent of schools there at the time. The
Gary Plan consisted of the departmentalization of school subjects and
children being “platooned” into groups that would use assembly rooms,
gymnasiums, shops, laboratories, and playgrounds at the same time as
other groups used classrooms so that all facilities were being utilized;
and at the sounding of the bell, children would change classes. The Gary
Plan allowed administrators to show how efficient they were. After it
was endorsed by the Federal Bureau of Education in 1914, it was blocked
in New York in 1917 where riots broke out in opposition to it: schools
were stoned and police tires slashed and 300 students (mostly Jewish)
were arrested. Nonetheless, by 1929, the Gary Plan or variants of it
were in operation in 1,068 schools in 202 cities. After 1930, this
specific form of schooling declined, yet Wirt’s innovations left a
permanent mark on schooling in general.[90]
With the increasing specialization of American life came the growth of
specialized training in education. As John Taylor Gatto observed,
“Before the 20^(th) century there was no parasitic army of assistant
principles, coordinators, and assorted bureaucratic specialists.”[91]
The increasing complexity of the administrative hierarchy and the
proliferation of standardized tests helped to ensure teacher conformity.
Given impetus from the work of Edward Lee Thorndike, standardized
testing spread rapidly after World War I and the Carnegie Corporation
poured over $3 million into the effort.[92] Worldwide, universal primary
education became the goal of virtually all governments in the post-World
War II era. Also in this era, higher education experienced tremendous
growth in industrialized nations. More and more money is being put
toward postgraduate training and scientific and engineering research and
experimental development.[93] Schooling in America looks now like a
finely tuned behavior modification machine, channeling people into
various meaningless jobs for the rest of their lives.[94] Schooling
produces masses of people, not autonomous individuals. Individual parts
of the schooling machine don’t really matter any more. Technology has
obviously served to institute new forms of social control, as Marcuse
observed in One-Dimensional Man.[95] Our very consciousness is
surrounded on all sides by a mass media, and in this modern context,
schooling becomes a technique of propaganda that functions through the
use of knowledge, not in the service of any classical ideal. When
Jacques Ellul wrote about modern propaganda in Propaganda: the Formation
of Men’s Attitudes, he emphasized that it is above all a set of methods
of a technological society based on mass media that addresses
individuals only as members of a mass that shares common feelings and
myths. Ellul pointed out that not all propaganda is explicitly
political. Schooling is a type of sociological propaganda, aimed at the
integration of the individual into the social group.[96] As students go
hazily from class to class, box to box, schooling as a technique of
social control perpetuates itself. And as leftists drone on about better
education for the people, for the masses of people, they are unaware of
what an important role they play in reproducing existent social and
economic formations.
“Why not whip the teacher when the student misbehaves?” — Diogenes of
Sinope
Schooling is seen as a good thing. Those who are uneducated are seen as
lacking something essential to being fully functioning, fully human.
From Plato to Comenius to Kant, humanity is something that is imposed
upon the young. Even Paolo Freire, a favorite of leftists, believes in a
“humanizing pedagogy,” presumably one that makes people more fully
human.[97] We need to spend less money on the military, more money on
schools, say the progressives. Their complete identification (“we”) with
the nation-state is utterly pathetic. “Humanitarianism” has saturated
the left and the right: everyone is working hard oppressing themselves,
all for a better humanity, a better future. Like George Bush, the
progressives don’t want to leave a single child behind.[98]
In Hebrew there is one word for both “education” and “chastisement.”[99]
The powerful men of the ancient world were rather clear about what
schooling entailed. Today it is of the utmost importance to conceal the
role of schooling in society. Submission to authority is always the goal
of schooling. The power wielded by authorities — the power to reward and
punish, to habituate the individual to desired patterns of thought and
action — works to integrate the individual into a hierarchical social
order. 19^(th) century prison reformers and progressive school reformers
were working to make this integrating function more efficient and more
total in its effects. Both groups were humanitarians because they sought
to make the individual better adapted (obviously doing her a great
service) to a new set of social conditions; society had to be shaped
into a different form, re-formed. Society is the main actor, and
individuals merely respond. To those who haven’t picked up on this
clever phrasing, “society” can be understood as those who have the power
to make administrative and legislative decisions. Individuals only act
as a part of “society” to the extent that they submit to existent social
conditions, and possibly try to influence those who hold positions of
power. As John Dewey put it, “through education society can formulate
its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus
shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it
wishes to move.”[100]
At first glance Dewey seems to be saying that education can determine
the direction in which society goes, but in fact he says that society
shapes itself through education, so education is really not determining
anything. In other words, schooling is a technique that society uses.
One cannot fault him for such truthfulness. Durkheim agreed that
education is “only the image and reflection of society. It imitates and
reproduces the latter in abbreviated forms. It does not create it.”[101]
Educators respond to changes in society and make sure their schooling
produces the necessary products. In a Harvard lecture of the 1920’s
George S. Counts said the following: “This is not the place to evaluate
industrial civilization... Education must come to terms with industrial
civilization and discover its tasks in the new age.”[102] Educators work
within institutional confines, within the confines of their social roles
as authorities and slaves (just like the Greek pedagogues) of the powers
that be. Since most educators believe unquestioningly that schools serve
a positive function in society, all of their theories of schooling and
ideas for reform are likely to reinforce the basic assumption that
schools are a good thing.[103]
Modern theories of schooling are based on a social ideal of progress.
This is basically a conservative ideal in the sense that technological
change tends to be irreversible and reform tends to build upon itself,
by and large keeping institutional structures and social relations
intact. The more things change the more they stay the same. Schools have
been steadily expanding (progress) and have been able to reform by
accretion.[104] The technical basis of modern industry may be
revolutionary in the Marxist sense of bringing us closer to revolution
within a linear model of historical progress, but is this revolutionary
at all? Marx himself praised the essentially “dangerous character” of
revolutionists such as “steam, electricity, and the self-acting
mule.”[105] Attributing such a character to technology is clearly an
oversight, more or less incompatible with any revolutionary theory based
on the need for an insurrectional rupture with our technological
society. Marx’s oversight stems from his failure to adequately identify
the relationship between the productive apparatus and the capitalist
system that produces it and to fully recognize Capital’s domesticating
function. The writings of Jacques Camatte and Fredy Perlman are
excellent in expanding upon these themes. In many ways, resistance to
the proliferation of the factory system parallels the resistance to
compulsory schooling. When a definite loss of autonomy was seen as a new
and threatening imposition, radical acts of resistance and sabotage were
not uncommon. The industrial system (along with puritanical morality)
served to domesticate the exploited, allowing for resistance to be more
easily recuperated through institutional channels such as union
bargaining and political reformism. What were considered factory virtues
are virtually the same thing as school virtues. Discontents who have
internalized these virtues aim at tinkering with the repressive
apparatus, not destroying it.
Modern theories of schooling can be said to begin with Rousseau.
Rousseau considered civilization some form of mistake, but he did not
oppose it. In his view, society was the source of all evil. He did not,
however, see the teacher as part of this “evil,” and consequently gave
teachers invaluable advice about how to exercise their supposedly
righteous control over their pupils. “Begin then, by studying your
pupils more thoroughly, for it is very certain that you do not know
them,” he wrote.[106] Rousseau gave the following advice in regard to
the way teachers should control their students: “Let him [the student]
believe that he is always in control though it is always you [the
teacher] who really controls. There is no subjection so perfect as that
which keeps the appearance of freedom.”[107] This statement describes
much of the philosophy of modern schooling. The institutionalized
authority of the teacher is a given. The question is how the teacher can
make best use of this authority. Rousseau gave an excellent answer. To
think that this somehow encourages the freedom and independence of the
student is reasonable, as long as that freedom and independence is
exercised within the boundaries set by the authorities. As B.F. Skinner
said approvingly, Rousseau “did not fear the power of positive
reinforcement.”[108] B.F. Skinner was an influential behaviorist
psychologist of the mid-twentieth century. His overriding interest was
in the control and modification of human behavior — a practice he
believed could solve the world’s problems — if only everyone could value
efficiency over freedom.
B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity is a work of profound
scientific insight — but total crap compared to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good
and Evil. Skinner feels that what people call autonomy is an illusion
since no behavior is uncaused.[109] He assumes that autonomy refers to
the existence of causes of behavior and not the nature of those causes.
The nature of the causes of human behavior is contingent upon social
relations — which Skinner doesn’t want to get into. The application of
his science is allowed free reign only when reified social roles
separate the controllers from the controlled — the managers from the
managed. And since the application of Skinner’s science of human
behavior is his top priority, institutionalized authority and its
relationship to scientific advancement must remain unquestioned. Skinner
sees any questioning of the desirability of scientific advancement as
taking “a stubborn position of not knowing” and valuing “ignorance for
its own sake.”[110] So anyone who abandons scientific thinking is doing
so “for its own sake,” whereas the enlightened specialist obviously has
a multiplicity of valid reasons for their practice. Skinner’s agenda is
made somewhat clearer in Reflections on Behaviorism and Society, where
he bemoans the “damaging” influence of “noncontingent reinforcers” — or
things that come to us for free. Such things do not allow the “control
of people by people” to realize its full potentiality. So a gift economy
is bad and a capitalist economy is good because money is “possibly the
greatest of all conditioned reinforcers.” As our social environment
becomes increasingly complex, more control must be exercised over the
individual growing up. “Programmed sequences of contingencies, in the
hands of skillful teachers and counselors, can lead to the complex
repertoires demanded by a social environment,” writes Skinner.[111]
The implications of Skinner’s ideas for the modern classroom are
profound. They explain much of the behavior of teachers and provide a
scientific foundation for their future progress. He saw more efficient
teaching practices as extremely important, hoping that teaching could
eventually become a science.[112] Indeed, much educational theory in the
last 50 years has shared Skinner’s behaviorist conception of teaching,
an advancement from the older method of mirroring the factory. It is not
the rules or the enforcement of rules that is most important — it is the
habitual following of those rules that helps the individual internalize
desired patterns of behavior. The focus shifts from more obvious forms
of discipline to the use of techniques which encourage a self-discipline
which diminishes the need for those more obvious forms of discipline.
Even early in the 19^(th) century, Fichte saw this as ideal. The pupil
of pure morality (a concept similar to what Jesuits might call being a
man for others), Fichte professed, “goes forth at the proper time as a
fixed and unchangeable machine produced by this art [teaching], which
indeed could not go otherwise than as it has been regulated by the art,
and needs no help at all, but continues of itself according to its own
law.”[113] This is the essential feature of modern schooling. Fichte
called the ideal pedagogy an art, Skinner would call it a science, but
the message remains the same. Even when the teaching of values is the
professed goal of pedagogy, if modern techniques and methods of
organization are employed, the approach (which Skinner might term
“mentalistic” or not thoroughly focused on scientific analysis) has
similar goals and effects upon the student as a purely behaviorist
approach.
During the 1950’s, Benjamin Bloom and a team of specialists worked very
hard to put together a book (in two volumes) called Taxonomy of
Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, which
had a significant influence on government schools in America. It was
designed as a tool to help educators classify the ways in which students
are to respond to their lessons. Thanks to standardized testing,
intelligence is the new idol that educational theory must bow to. The
ideal student is a well-behaved and objectively intelligent
automaton.[114] The second volume deals with “affective objectives,” in
other words character development, attitude, values — things that Bloom
feels are not graded mainly due to the “inadequacy of the appraisal
techniques and the ease with which a student may exploit his ability to
detect the responses which will be rewarded and the responses which will
be penalized.” “In contrast,” Bloom writes, “it is assumed that a
student who responds in the desirable way on a cognitive measure does
indeed possess the competence which is being sampled.”[115] Due to this
danger, educators must stress not just the outward conformity of
socialization, but “internalization,” or the student’s acquisition of
values organized into a moral code used to regulate one’s life.[116] The
book goes on to classify in a hierarchy the various responses to
teaching that a teacher must bring about in the student. The peak of
this internalization process is the student’s “characterization by a
value or value complex.”[117] An example of this would be a student who
has learned not to talk back: such a student stays quiet and only speaks
when the teacher allows.
A less refined list of goals/functions of schooling was presented in the
early 20^(th) century by Alexander Inglis. In his book Principles of
Secondary Education, he lists the “six important functions of secondary
education; (1) the adjustive or adaptive function; (2) the integrating
function; (3) the differentiating function; (4) the propaedeutic
function [training the future guardians of the system]; (5) the
selective function; (6) the diagnostic and directive function [not
necessarily in that order].”[118] So basically, students must be
adjusted so that they behave, integrated into the social group, tested,
sorted, classified, trained, etc. It would be difficult to better
describe the function of schooling. Inglis sees the school for what it
is, “a social institution or agency maintained by society for the
purpose of assisting in the maintenance of its own stability and in the
direction of its own progress.”[119] In this sense it is clear that it
is society and the network of control that covers it that must be
destroyed. It is hardly radical to substitute the existing society for
another one which will serve the same functions in different ways.
In many ways, Marx’s theory of alienation explains the student’s
situation as well as the worker’s. Does not the knowledge that the
student works to accumulate confront him “as something alien, as a power
independent of the producer”?[120] And to use Marx’s words for the
student, one could say that the student only feels herself outside her
schoolwork, and in her schoolwork feels outside herself.[121] Life
itself becomes a means to life; or, as the situationists felt, life has
been reduced to mere survival. School is undoubtedly an institution that
initiates students into a life of alienated living. In school, the
student learns that learning requires its usually authoritarian
counterpart: teaching. Once the young learn dependence, the other
lessons come much easier. Is not knowledge treated as a commodity, and,
as such, fetishized by the consumers/producers? It begins to acquire all
the metaphysical power that modern man attaches to facts. All knowledge
becomes interchangeable and divorced from social context, and units of
knowledge are to be accumulated — having practical application only
within the specialized world of academia. The detached objectivity of
the scholar is idealized. As Raoul Vaneigem wrote, “Knowledge is
inseparable from the use that is made of it.”[122] And academic
knowledge — in this sense knowledge that is not used against the
interests of power — can only serve to enlarge and consolidate power.
“What makes power hold good,” said Foucault, “what makes it accepted, is
simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says
no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure,
forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a
productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more
than as a negative instance whose function is repression.”[123] In the
era of fragmentary power, when all can share in its ability to
compensate for the poverty of our everyday lives, the world of schooling
reinforces power by managing and allocating knowledge — possibly power’s
greatest tool.
When Marx mentioned schools, he merely said that “government and church
should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the
school.”[124] The pristine school! Divorced from its social context, the
school can look like a rather positive thing. But as long as there are
governments and churches, they are going to have something to do with
schooling. Schooling has a long history of pseudo-opposition from
libertarians: Tolstoy, Ferrer, and Freire did not critique schools as
such, but called for different educational practices.[125] In Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, Freire even talks of the pedagogy of the revolutionary
leadership, tipping his hat to authoritarians such as Che Guevara and
Fidel Castro.[126] Revolutionary educational practices, if they are not
based on a fixed ideology to which the masses are to be converted,
cannot have anything to do with schooling or schools. Schools are
institutions, and all institutions have a certain degree of permanence
that can extend beyond the control of their initiators; they are not
associations developed for a specific limited purpose and they are not
self-organized. Institutions perpetuate themselves because people
organize each other’s living activity through them, not living for
themselves. In order for educational practices to have a subversive
character they must not aim to fit themselves into the dominant society
as an “alternative” to what is already offered. They must be a part of a
community actively seeking to undermine the dominant social order. The
ateneos, or storefront cultural centers of Spain in pre-Civil War times
which had classes for those who wanted to learn to read and write,
provide a simple example. The Spanish anarchists did not try to build an
“alternate society,” but rather a “counter-society.”[127] Some
conception of the difference between the two is essential. In order to
destroy capitalism and the state apparatus, we cannot simply build new
institutions and expect the old ones to fall apart. Only through
attacking the old institutions and organizing ourselves in a
decentralized manner can we function outside the realm of capitalism and
attack it as a social system. Capitalist social relations must be
actively subverted; we cannot simply form co-operative or collective
exchange relationships which reproduce capitalist logic. The Soviet
Union, for example, was never communist in any real sense; it could best
be described as state-capitalist.
Max Stirner, a poor German schoolteacher, was one of the most radical
thinkers of the 19^(th) century. In “The False Principle of Our
Education,” Stirner criticized popular theories of schooling of his
time: “Only a formal and material training is being aimed at and only
scholars come out of the menageries of the humanists, and only ‘useful
citizens’ out of those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing
but subservient people.”[128] Stirner saw the ideas and knowledge
acquired in schooling as being detached from the person who supposedly
learns such things. Stirner criticized all abstractions which are held
above people’s own wills and desires. In an authoritarian society, such
abstractions or ideologies seem to govern our actions to the extent that
people merely accept the idea that they should serve such things, such
“wheels in the head.” Clearly schooling, which subordinates the
individual to the social group, utilizes such abstractions in the
socialization process. In criticizing the institutionalization of the
socialization process that was taking place in his time, Stirner
criticized authority — the crux of the matter, around which all
socialization revolves.[129]
A more in-depth critique of schooling in particular came from Ivan
Illich in Deschooling Society, published in 1970. Illich was opposed to
the school as an institution and formed a cogent critique of its
functions. Schools divide social reality: “education becomes unworldly
and the world becomes noneducational.”[130] Illich saw childhood as a
product of industrial society and a social category that perpetuates the
authority of the schoolteacher. “Once young people have allowed their
imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are
conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. ‘Instruction’
smothers the horizon of their imaginations. They cannot be betrayed, but
only short-changed, because they have been taught to substitute
expectations for hope.”[131] His criticisms of schooling are manifestly
evident and entirely valid: “The school system today performs the
threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is
simultaneously the repository of society’s myth, the
institutionalization of that myth’s contradictions, and the locus of the
ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and
reality.”[132]
The themes inherent in theories of schooling have been rehashed for
centuries. It is all too easy to see the devastating effects of
schooling in our everyday lives: people have lost their imaginations and
others must determine the meaning of our lives. Students are taught to
recognize that they are constantly under surveillance. The rooms are
distributed along a corridor at regular intervals. The teacher stands in
front of the class making sure that everyone displays acquiescence in
receiving the lesson. Later the students are examined, tested — observed
and controlled. The examination “manifests the subjection of those who
are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are
subjected. The superimposition of the power relations and knowledge
relations assumes in the examination all its visible brilliance.”[133]
We must be made dependent, even helpless — memorizing bits of knowledge
without any need. All sorts of industries would collapse, John Taylor
Gatto observed, “Unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued
to pour out of our schools each year.”[134] Capital must dominate the
future not just through the production of new commodity-things and
technologies, but through the production of commodity-people. Every
individual is merely a component, a piece of machinery. This is the
essence of modern schooling. To argue otherwise would be mundane,
untrue, and utterly academic.
“I suspect God of being a Leftist intellectual” — Graffiti Paris, 1968
The university is the training grounds for the future ruling class and
their most dependable lackeys. Most university students — after being
constantly adjusted throughout their youth — are already well adjusted
to subservient roles. They are model consumers, if not always model
students. The students who are content with their social role as
students have accepted passivity. Some accept passivity by ignoring all
politics, others by becoming politically active. The result is the same
— a useful citizen — useful to others. “Modern capitalism and its
spectacle allot everyone a specific role in a general passivity. The
student is no exception to the rule. He has a provisional part to play,
a rehearsal for his final role as an element in market society as
conservative as the rest... Meanwhile, he basks in a schizophrenic
consciousness, withdrawing into his initiation group to hide from that
future.”[135]
Students are vaguely conscious of why universities exist and what is
expected of them — most simply don’t care. To be (a)pathetic is to be
fashionable. When Nietzsche said that the idealism of humanity was on
the verge of deteriorating into nihilism and meaninglessness, he
couldn’t have been more prophetic. Instead of the transvaluation of all
values that Nietzsche called for, however, we have experienced a further
devaluation (Nietzsche saw nihilism as the devaluation of the highest
values — a condition at once regrettable and full of possibility).
Money, too, is fashionable — how could it not be? Wilhelm Reich’s
middle-class reactionary dominates the radio, the television, and
popular culture in general.[136] He is a person who gives the appearance
of independence, of rebelliousness, while being Capital’s most faithful
servant. He is a person who has been yelled at, disciplined, and
brutalized during the socialization process only to grow up with no
greater desire than to do the same to others. Often he is the hero of
high school, the well-trained athlete, the well-trained imbecile. What
Max Stirner said of college students in general clearly applies:
“Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled,
they continue drilling.”[137]
The modern student thrives in a milieu of privileged consumption. All
social life is subordinated to the imperative to accumulate commodities
that affirm the student’s chosen identity within the social group — so
much so that it is possible for the student to ignore much of the
substance of schooling. Entertainment is organized around (sub)cultural
identity — a dead world of media swill with an appearance vaguely
reminiscent of actual life (which has been vanquished by modern
capitalism). Sexual activity, long repressed, is now tolerated within
the context of relationships which could only be described as
masturbatory. If it had any meaning, if it opened up new realms of
communication, sex would be a force antagonistic to schooling — instead
it is a safety valve. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud said
that civilization uses sexual energy for its own purposes (displacing it
through work, for example). We are now so alienated from each other that
it is difficult to conceive of a world in which our energies and desires
are not systematically controlled and manipulated — a world in which
meaningful communication is commonplace. Our capacity for
self-regulation and autonomy has been schooled out of us; we are left
with a character armor (the colonization of Capital) which protects us
from expressing ourselves freely.[138]
“Politics, morality, and culture are all in ruins — and have now reached
the point of being marketed as such, as their own parody, the spectacle
of decadence being the last [hopefully] desperate attempt to stabilize
the decadence of the spectacle.”[139] Religion is a perfect example of
this. It is now often marketed as spirituality, an admission of some
vague need to retreat from reality and be enriched by assorted mystical
beliefs. Any justification for the present madness will do. Depression
is endemic. Drugs and alcohol help out as much as possible, setting the
stage for all social interaction. But is it enough? Consumer goods help
fill the void, but are they sufficient? So far, it seems to be. The life
that gets away from us can always be sold back to us by the mass media
in the form of images. All that once was directly lived has become mere
representation. “For in the mass society, individuals have a tendency to
withdraw from each other more and more. Their relationship is only
artificial; it is only the product of the mass media,” wrote Jacques
Ellul.[140]
The student often finds more meaningful forms of escapism — ideological
escapism. Students are for justice, Che Guevara t-shirts, and
affirmative action. And the socialist organizations are waiting to
recruit. The student’s “rent-a-crowd militance for the latest good cause
is an aspect of his real impotence.”[141] The student serves the cause
and the cause serves to justify the student’s subservience. The student
activist consciously aligns their thinking with what they perceive to be
that of an oppressed group (which they may or may not be a member of).
Now they can speak for that group and articulate the desires of that
group, usually phrased as demands made of the authorities. Every person,
every group, must be represented. Representation is at the heart of the
logic of modern politics, and its so-called enemies uphold this logic
better than anyone. Such thinking is institutionalized among the
academic Left, who are proud of their broad curriculum which includes
all sorts of women’s studies, queer studies, African-American studies,
etc. As long as students learn to demand “justice” for everyone, the
possibility of revolutionary change can be ignored. Through appeals for
justice or equal rights within the system, the academic Left perpetuates
the system and its moralistic logic. And since academia is virtually
defined by the dissociation of thought and action, no revolutionary
theory could possibly thrive in this context; conversely, it is here
that revolutionary ideology is at home, an object of passive
consideration.
The university gives the appearance of fostering learning on one’s own
initiative. Indeed, many of the controlling aspects of high school are
absent — but only because they are no longer necessary. The university
student is self-oppressed, a beautiful example of modern schooling’s
hegemony. Her only hope is to stop identifying with the university and
its myths. The student must commit the sin of pride (non serviam — I
will not serve) just as Stephen Dedalus did: “I will not serve that in
which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland,
or my church...”[142] Perhaps the student read this in high school but
thought nothing of it. Perhaps, too, they read of the Combine in Kesey’s
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest but did not recognize the similarity to
their teachers. As long as knowledge is looked at from afar as one views
the world of commodities, whatever truths it may reveal remain
concealed.
The fact that universities serve the interests of power is all too
obvious. As Fredy Perlman observed, students are taught to be innovative
when it comes to the sciences and the physical universe, but their
approach must be adaptationist in regard to the social world. Every
academic field must be focused toward progress where it is needed and
apologetics when it comes to the effects of such progress. Every
individual must fit themselves into institutions, jobs, and the whole
social network without ever thinking twice about what is lost. As
Michael B. Katz put it, “We live in an institutional state. Our lives
spin outward from the hospitals where we are born to the school systems
that dominate our youth through the bureaucracies for which we work and
back again to the hospitals in which we die.”[143]
The university is a perfect representation of our institutional reality.
The university is an impersonal bureaucracy even when it tries to be
something else. Alexis de Tocqueville clearly described the techniques
through which such institutions function: “[Administration] covers the
surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and
uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic
characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is
not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it
to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting; such a power
does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but
it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is
reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious
animals, of which government is the shepherd.”[144]
The university purveys an advanced form of schooling. It is advanced
mainly because the university is the schooling institution most directly
in the service of Capital. But haven’t the students had enough of
schooling by the time they get to the university? They are most likely
tired of it. It is not easy to have your will systematically softened,
bent, and guided by authoritarian social structures. Opposition to work
itself must now be the basis of any radical opposition to Capital (which
recuperates all forms of partial resistance). Opposition to schooling is
now a necessity for those who resist the domestication of capitalist
society. “Schools function as the organization of the passivity of the
soul, and this is true even when active and libertarian methods are
used; the liberation of the school would be the liberation of
oppression,” wrote Camatte.[145] It is all too apparent that schooling
breaks your spirit. And while it is not easy to resist, it is well worth
it. Only through resistance to this society can life become worth
living.
[1] Max Stirner, “The False Principle of Our Education,”
. This article was originally published by Marx in the Rheinische
Zeitung. After Stirner wrote his masterwork The Ego and Its Own (an
excellent book), Marx was so infuriated by it that he devoted a large
(most of the book) and largely irrelevant portion of The German Ideology
to a critique of Stirner’s ideas.
[2] John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis
of American Schooling (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books, 2002), 61–62.
[3] “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas:
i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the
same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means
of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the
means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the
means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling
ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant
material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas;
hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one,
therefore, the ideas of its dominance.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
The German Ideology (Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 1998), 67.
[4] Alexander Inglis, Principles of Secondary Education (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1918), 343.
[5] Ken Knabb ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley, CA:
Bureau of Public Secrets, 1995), 170–175. The Situationist International
(1957–1972) was a relatively small yet influential Paris-based group
that had its origins in the avant garde artistic tradition. The
situationists are best known for their radical political theory and
their influence on the May 1968 student and worker revolts in France.
The most important situationist books are probably The Society of the
Spectacle by Guy Debord, The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul
Vaniegem, and the anthology cited above.
[6] Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (White River Junction,
VT: Chelsea Green, 2000), 102. This book is possibly the most accessible
and convincing critique of civilization.
[7] Immanuel Kant, The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant
(Philadelphia: Lippincott Company, 1904), 225.
[8] Bob Black, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays (Port Townsend,
WA: Loompanics, 1986), 20. The theme of the essay “The Abolition of
Work,” readily available on the internet, closely parallels the theme of
this essay.
[9] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New
York: Vintage, 1977), 27.
[10] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964).
[11]
[12] James Mulhern, A History of Education (New York: The Ronald Press
Company, 1959), 52. This idea is echoed elsewhere: “In the most
primitive cultures, there is often little formal learning, little of
what one would ordinarily call school or teachers; for, frequently, the
entire environment and all activities are school, and many or all adults
are teachers... The concentration of learning in a formal atmosphere
allows children to learn far more of their culture than they are able to
do by merely observing and imitating.” “History of Education,” The
Encyclopedia Britannica (1988 ed.), 11.
[13] Michael Cole, “Cognitive Development and Formal Schooling: The
Evidence from Cross-Cultural Research,” The Evolution of Education ed.
David Swanger (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 68.
[14] William A. Smith, Ancient Education (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1955), 20–46; Everett Reimer, School is Dead (Middlesex,
England: Penguin, 1971), 56.
[15] Mulhern, 111.
[16] H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1956).
[17] Ibid., 43.
[18] Ibid., 39–47.
[19] Ibid., 51.
[20] Everett Reimer, School is Dead (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1971),
57; H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity.
[21] Edward J. Power, A Legacy of Learning: A History of Western
Education (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1991),
32.
[22] Ibid., 30; Plato, The Republic. The Portable Plato (New York:
Penguin, 1977).
[23] Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity.
[24] Power, 95–96; Mulhern, 258.
[25] Power, 106.
[26] Frederick Eby, The Development of Modern Education: Second Edition
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1952), 20; Mulhern, 279.
[27] “History of Education,” The Encyclopedia Britannica (1988 ed.), 34;
“Higher Education,” The Encyclopedia Britannica (1988 ed.), 1. Also of
note: “Between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, an attempt to
reduce the influence of emotionality in religion took command of church
policy. Presenting the teachings of the Church in scientific form became
the main ecclesiastical purpose of school, a tendency called
scholasticism. This shift from emotion to intellect resulted in great
skill in analysis, in comparison and contrasts, in classifications and
abstraction, as well as famous verbal hairsplitting — like how many
angels could dance on the head of a pin. Scholasticism became the basis
for future upper-class schooling.” John Taylor Gatto, The Underground
History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Prison
of Modern Schooling (New York: The Oxford Village Press, 2003), 15. This
book, though hard to find, is possibly the most eye-opening book on the
subject.
[28] Eby, 22–23.
[29] Reimer, 58; Foucault, 150: “For centuries, the religious orders had
been masters of discipline: they were the specialists of time, the great
technicians of rhythm and regular activities.”
[30] Kenneth W. Richmond, The Free School (London: Methuen & Co., 1973),
102; Eby, 40–41.
[31] Reimer, 357. “I maintain that the civil authorities are under
obligation to compel the people to send their children to school.” —
Martin Luther, quoted in Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State: How
to Liberate America’s Families (Fairfax, Virginia: The Future of Freedom
Foundation, 1994), 40.
[32] Eby, 181; Foucault, 210–211.
[33] Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis
(London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 288.
[34] Eby, 155; John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving
the Crisis of American Schooling, 151.
[35] Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First
Philosophy (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett, 1998), 18–19.
[36] Foucault, 222, 146–147.
[37] David B. Tyack, Turning Points in American Educational History
(Waltham, Massachusetts: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1967), 85: George
Washington on education: “The more homogeneous our citizens can be made
in these particulars, the greater will be our prospect of permanent
union...” Thomas Jefferson: “They [the most beloved and trusted] are
those who have been educated among them [the American people], and whose
manners, morals and habits are perfectly homogeneous with those of the
country.”
[38] Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State: How to Liberate
America’s Families (Fairfax, Virginia: The Future of Freedom Foundation,
1994), 37. “But matters of public interest ought to be under public
supervision; at the same time also we ought not to think that any of the
citizens belongs to himself, but that all belong to the state, for each
is a part of the state, and it is natural for the superintendence of the
several parts to have regard to the superintendence of the whole.”
Aristotle, Politics. The Evolution of Education, ed. David Swanger
(Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 10.
[39] Tyack, 3.
[40] Ibid., 2.
[41]
H. G. Good, A History of Western Education: Second Edition (New York:
Macmillan, 1960), 383.
[42] Tyack, 28–34.
[43] Ibid., 88.
[44] Ibid., 66–67, 92. Noah Webster: “...good republicans... are formed
by a singular machinery in the body politic, which takes the child as
soon as he can speak, checks his natural independence and passions,
makes him subordinate to superior age, to the laws of the state, to town
and parochial institutions.” Quoted in Sheldon Richman, Separating
School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families (Fairfax, Virginia:
The Future of Freedom Foundation, 1994), 47. Benjamin Rush: “The
government of schools... should be arbitrary. By this mode of education
we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify
them for becoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the
most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have not
known or felt their own wills til [sic] they were one and twenty years
of age.” Quoted in Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in
Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 36.
[45] Foucault, 178.
[46] Tyack, 120–121.
[47] Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational
Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968), 3–13. Mann was asked if
he would accept the position by Edmund Dwight, a major industrialist
from Springfield, after Dwight had convinced the governor that the
position was too important to give to an educator. Mann was a
politician, and as Secretary of the Massachusetts Senate he had
advocated railroad construction, insane asylums, and other reforms.
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New
York: Basic Books, 1977), 165.
[48] Katz, 47.
[49] Horace Mann. The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the
Education of Free Men (Richmond, VA: William Byrd Press, 1957), 87.
[50] David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School
Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 55.
[51] Howard P. Chudacoff, The Evolution of American Urban Society
(Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 41, 164.
[52] Michael B. Katz emphasizes the importance of the word systems as
representative of a profound development in schooling in Michael B. Katz
et al The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), 351 and in Michael B.
Katz, Reconstructing American Education (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1987), 6.
[53] John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education:
An Intimate Investigation into the Prison of Modern Schooling (New York:
The Oxford Village Press, 2003), 17–21; Carl F. Kaestle, “Introduction.”
Karl F. Kaestle ed. Joseph Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement:
A Documentary History (New York: Teachers College Press, 1973), 3–48;
John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: C.A.L. Press, 1999),
128. This book examines the origins of modern domestication and presents
an impressive account of the practical effects of the Industrial
Revolution.
[54] Edward H. Reisner, The Evolution of the Common School (New York:
Macmillan, 1930), 215.
[55] Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (New York:
Harper & Row, 1968), 19–29.
[56] Reisner, 179–200. From pages 199–200: “Briefly to mention the major
changes which are to be attributed to Pestalozzi’s precept and example,
we may say that he called the attention of his age to the social
significance of the common schools; that he did much to rescue teaching
in the common schools from a nondescript teaching personnel and to place
it in the hands of men and women much more adequately prepared to follow
teaching as an honorable and skilled calling; that he gave great impetus
to the classification of pupils according to their abilities and
achievements; that he greatly expanded the curricula of the common
schools beyond the narrow exercise in reading which it had been before
his time; that he introduced methods of instruction which greatly
facilitated the mastery of the ordinary school skills and the
acquisition of information; that he substantially improved the quality
of school experience by introducing more of concreteness, more of
thinking, and more of doing into school; that he wrought a revolution in
the conception of school discipline by substituting the rule of love for
the rule of fear and by treating children as cooperative individuals in
a social enterprise rather than as potential rebels in a kingdom of
repression.”
[57] Gatto, The Underground History, 137–144.
[58] Horace Mann, Life and Works of Horace Mann: Vol. III (Boston: Life
and Shepard Publishers, 1891), 302–303, 365–366.
[59] Reisner, 235–236.
[60] John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down (Gabriola Island, British
Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2002), 22. H.G. Good writes,
“According to the Massachusetts law of 1852, all children between the
ages of eight and fourteen years were required to attend school for
twelve weeks a year, and for six of the twelve weeks the attendance had
to be consecutive.” H. G. Good, A History of Western Education: Second
Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 450.
[61] Richman, 44.
[62] Jon Reyhaer and Jeanne Eder, “A History of Indian Education.” Jon
Reyhaer ed. Teaching American Indian Students (Oklahoma: University of
Oklahoma, 1992), 33–44.
[63] William T. Hagan, American Indians: Revised Edition (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1979), 87–88. Joel Spring writes, “In the
early days of missionary schools, teaching the value of work became a
major source of conflict between teachers and parents.” Joel Spring, The
Cultural Transformation of a Native American Family and Its Tribe
1763–1995 (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 69.
Along with the teaching of “a good work ethic” came profound social
transformations. For example, “Among Choctaws, who traditionally did not
have social classes, schooling became an important means of creating and
distinguishing social classes.” Spring, 201.
[64] Reyhaer and Eder, 33–37.
[65] David Wallace Adams, “Foreword to the Paperback Edition.” Richard
Henry Pratt, Battlefield & Classroom: An Autobiography by Richard Henry
Pratt (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), xi-xv [from which
the quote was taken]; Robert M. Utley, “Introduction.” Richard Henry
Pratt, Battlefield & Classroom: An Autobiography by Richard Henry Pratt
(Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), xix-xx. “By 1899 over
$2,500,000 was being expended annually on 148 boarding schools and 225
day schools with almost 20,000 children in attendance.” Hagan, 134.
[66] Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States
(Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), 287–288. In The Cultural
Transformation of a Native American Family and Its Tribe 1763–1995
(Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), Joel Spring
writes, “The specific values that common school reformers of the period
wanted instilled [Protestantism, republicanism, and capitalism] matched
those advocated for the civilizing of Native Americans.” Since Native
American children were considered lazy by missionaries, Lancaster’s
method of instruction, which encouraged orderliness, industriousness,
and obedience, was at one time used in Indian schools: “...many of the
missionary teachers sponsored by the Civilization Fund Act established
schools among the Choctaws and Cherokees using Lancasterian methods of
instruction.” (Both quotes taken from page 29)
[67] David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and
the Boarding School Experience 1875–1928 (Kansas: University Press of
Kansas, 1995), 221.
[68] Ibid., 210–230: A group of Navajo students who were once asked to
write a poem about school, responded with the following: If I do not
believe you / The things you say, / Maybe I will not tell you / That is
my way. // Maybe you think I believe you / That thing you say, / But
always my thoughts stay with me / My own way.
[69] Foucault, 176.
[70] Norval Morris and David J. Rothman eds. The Oxford History of the
Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 106.
[71] Foucault, 80–81.
[72] Cesare Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (Boston:
International Pocket Library, 1992), 97. Beccaria nonetheless did not
foresee the rise of common schools and compulsory schooling.
[73] Gatto, The Underground History, 256.
[74] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 256–257; Gatto, A Different Kind of
Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling, 52.
[75] Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in
Massachusetts, 1870–1915 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1971), xiv.
[76] Ibid., 56.
[77] “History of Education,” 55.
[78] Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America
(New York: Basic Books, 1977), 19.
[79] Ibid., 164.
[80] Ibid, 181–199.
[81] Gatto, The Underground History, xxvii-xxviii.
[82] Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study
of the Social Forces that Have Shaped the Administration of Public
Schools (Toronto: University of Chicago, 1962), preface, 4–10.
[83] Ibid., 20.
[84] Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1919) [copyright 1911], 7.
[85] Ibid. “No efficient teacher would think of giving a class of
students an indefinite lesson to learn. Each day a definite, clear-cut
task is set by the teacher before each scholar, stating that he must
learn just so much of the subject; and it is only by this means that
proper, systematic progress can be made by the students. The average boy
would go very slowly if, instead of being given a task, he were told to
do as much as he could.” (p.120)
[86] John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: C.A.L. Press,
1999), 170: “The age of the consumer began from the systematic
destruction of much of the last autonomy of the producer.”
[87] Callahan, 23.
[88] Ibid., 41.
[89] Ibid., 58: Some suggested labor saving devices were printed
outlines, seating plans, recitation cards, and attendance sheets.
[90] Ibid., 128–146; Gatto, The Underground History, 187–189.
[91] Gatto, The Underground History, 193.
[92] Gerald L. Gutek, A History of the Western Educational Experience
(New York: Random House, 1972), 378; Bowles and Gintis, 195–197.
[93] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World,
1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1995), 295–296, 522–525.
[94] “One of the distinctive features of modern schooling is the use of
classroom and school organization to consciously shape the social
behaviors of students.” Joel Spring, The Cultural Transformation of a
Native American Family and Its Tribe 1763–1995 (Mahwah, New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 200.
[95] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
[96] Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New
York: Vintage, 1973). From page 13: “No contrast can be tolerated
between teaching and propaganda, between the critical spirit formed by
higher education and the exclusion of independent thought. One must
utilize the education of the young to condition them to what comes
later.”
[97] Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2003), 68.
[98] John Taylor Gatto, “Against School,” Harper’s (September 2003): 34.
Contains the George Bush quote being alluded to.
[99] Marrou, 159.
[100] John Dewey, “The Democratic Conception in Education,” in The
Evolution of Education ed. David Swanger (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace,
1995), 232.
[101] Quoted in Geoffrey Walford and W.S.F Pickering eds. Durkheim and
Modern Education (New York: Routledge, 1998), 4.
[102] George S. Counts, Secondary Education and Industrialism (Norwood,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1929), 11–12.
[103] Jill Haunold, “It’s About Time: Schooling as Oppression,” Anarchy:
A Journal of Desire Armed (#57, Spring-Summer 2004): 45.
[104] Tyack and Hansot, 11.
[105] Saul K. Padover ed. The Essential Marx: The Non-Economic Writings
(New York: Signet, 1979), 355.
[106] Eby, 329–337.
[107] Michael P. Smith, The Libertarians and Education (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1983), 8.
[108] B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Indianapolis, Indiana:
Hacket Publishing Company, 2002), 40.
[109] Ibid., 19.
[110] B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: The Free
Press, 1953), 5.
[111]
B. F. Skinner, Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 12–13, 22.
[112] Ibid., 129,132; B.F. Skinner, “How to Teach Animals,” Skinner for
the Classroom: Selected Papers (Champaign, Illinois: Research Press,
1982), 261.
[113] Fichte, 31.
[114] Benjamin S. Bloom ed., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The
Classification of Educational Goals: Handbook I: Cognitive Domain (New
York: David McKay, 1956).
[115] Benjamin S. Bloom et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The
Classification of Educational Goals: Handbook II: Affective Domain (New
York: David McKay, 1964), 17.
[116] Ibid., 29–30.
[117] Ibid., 176–185.
[118] Inglis, 375–376.
[119] Ibid., 340.
[120] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York:
Prometheus, 1988), 71.
[121] Ibid., 74: “The worker therefore only feels himself outside his
work, and in his work feels outside himself... His labor is therefore
not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the
satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external
to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as
no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the
plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor
of self-sacrifice, of mortification.”
[122] Knabb, 168.
[123] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other
Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 119.
[124] Padover, 226.
[125] Michael P. Smith, The Libertarians and Education.
[126] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
[127] Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years
1868–1936 (San Francisco: AK Press, 1998), 48.
[128] Stirner, “The False Principle of Our Education”
[129] Joel Spring, A Primer of Libertarian Education (Montreal, Quebec:
Black Rose Books, 1975), 50–51.
[130] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1970),
35.
[131] Ibid., 56.
[132] Ibid., 54.
[133] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 184–185.
[134] Gatto, Dumbing Us Down, 9.
[135] “On the Poverty of Student Life,” reprinted in Dark Star, Beneath
the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 1968 (San Francisco:
AK Press, 2001), 10. This essay was quite an inspiration. See
[136] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1970).
[137] Max Stirner, “The False Principle of Our Education”
[138] Jay Amrod and Lev Chernyi, “Beyond Character and Morality: Towards
Transparent Communications and Coherent Organization.” Howard J. Ehrlich
ed. Reinventing Anarchy, Again (San Francisco, California: AK Press,
1996), 321: “Throughout the first years of our lives we were forced not
just to internalize a few aspects of capital, but to build up a
structure of internalizations. As our capacity for coherent natural
self-regulation was systematically broken down, a new system of self
regulation took its place, a coherent system, incorporating all the
aspects of self-repression. We participated in capital’s ongoing project
of colonization by colonizing ourselves, by continually working at the
construction of a unitary character-structure (character armor), a
unitary defense against all drives, feelings, and desires which we
learned were dangerous to express. In the place of our original
transparent relations to our world, we created a structure of barriers
to our self-expression which hides us from ourselves and others.”
[139] “On the Poverty of Student Life”
[140] Ellul, Propaganda, 210.
[141] “On the Poverty of Student Life”
[142] James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York:
Penguin, 1992), 268.
[143] Michael B. Katz et al., The Social Organization of Early
Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1982), 354.
[144] Quoted in Gatto, The Underground History, 91.
[145] Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave and Other Essays
(Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 1995), 109.