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Title: Anarchy in the classroom
Author: Judith Suissa
Date: 2005
Language: en
Topics: Libertarian Education, education, schooling
Source: Retrieved on 12th July 2021 from https://newhumanist.org.uk/1288/anarchy-in-the-classroom

Judith Suissa

Anarchy in the classroom

We’ve become used to the words ‘anarchist’ or ‘anarchism’ being casually

tossed around whenever the press wish to describe some apparently

inexplicable act of violence or to lampoon an idealistic theory of

social change. But some intellectuals can be equally guilty of

misrepresentation. Anarchism, they insist, has no claim to be considered

as a coherent or serious political theory. It is branded as ‘utopian’ or

‘naïve’ for proposing that human beings are naturally good, and that

this natural goodness is quite enough to sustain a stateless society.

Here is Max Beloff, hard at work, ploughing this familiar furrow.

Anarchism, he writes: “is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of

human nature, on the unproven supposition that given total absence of

constraints, or alternatively material abundance secured by communism,

human societies could exist with no coercive element at all “ Or

consider Jonathan Wolff’s sweeping assertion in his account of anarchism

in his Introduction to Political Philosophy: “to rely on the natural

goodness of human beings to such an extent seems utopian in the

extreme”.

No wonder anarchism is so disregarded in contemporary society. It has

become almost fatally tarnished by such thoroughly misleading and

partial depictions of its central argument.

If this idea constitutes a gross misrepresentation, then what is the

anarchist conception of human nature? Both Proudhon and Bakunin insisted

that it was inherently two-fold, involving both an egotistical potential

and a sociable, altruistic potential. As Bakunin picturesquely expresses

it: “Man has two opposed instincts; egoism and sociability. He is both

more ferocious in his egoism than the most ferocious beasts and more

sociable than the bees and ants.”

There is a very similar recognition of the complexity of human nature in

Kropotkin, whose monumental treatise, Mutual Aid, written at the

beginning of the 20^(th) century, can be interpreted as an attempt to

counter the extreme version of social Darwinism put forward by theorists

such as Huxley. Kropotkin regarded the simplistic notion of ‘survival of

the fittest’ as a misleading interpretation of evolutionary theory, and

pointed out that Darwin himself had noted man’s social qualities as an

essential factor in his evolutionary survival. Origin of Species is full

of references to man’s ‘social nature’, without which, Darwin argues, it

is highly probable that “the evolution of man, as we know it, would

never have taken place.”

Kropotkin’s paradigm case of ‘mutual aid’ as a factor in the evolution

of animal species is that of ants. While there may be aggressive

fighting for survival between species, within the ant community, mutual

aid and cooperation prevail: “The ants and termites have renounced the

‘Hobbesian war’, and they are the better for it.” Although Kropotkin did

not deny the principle of the struggle for existence as a law of nature,

he ultimately regarded the principle of mutual aid as more important

from an evolutionary point of view, as it is this principle which

“favours the development of such habits and characters as ensure the

maintenance and further development of the species, together with the

greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual,

with the least waste of energy.”

The notion that anarchism should be interested in the development of

‘habits and characters’ is clearly incompatible with the notion of some

original altruistic state of grace. But Kropotkin was often even more

explicit. In a particularly powerful piece written for Freedom in 1888,

entitled ‘Are We Good Enough?’ Kropotkin directly confronted the common

argument that people are ‘not good enough’, or ‘not yet ripe for free,

Anarchistic Communism’ by tersely asking: “But are they good enough for

Capitalism?”. If people were naturally and predominantly kind,

altruistic and just, argues Kropotkin, there would be no danger of

exploitation and oppression. It is precisely because they are not that

the present system is intolerable and must be changed.

Kropotkin did believe ultimately in the power of the altruistic aspects

of human nature to prevail. He contended, against Rousseau, that even a

corrupt society cannot crush individual human goodness: even a

capitalist state cannot “weed out the feeling of human solidarity,

deeply lodged in men’s understanding and heart”. Nevertheless, he

acknowledged that people “will not turn into anarchists by sudden

transformation”. Even after a successful social revolution which

dismantles the state there will still be a vital need for an education

which can nurture the social virtues on which an anarchist society might

be built. This is a central theme.

And no wonder. It is precisely because anarchists — particularly social

anarchists — did not assume human beings to be essentially good that

they assigned such an important role to this subject.

But what exactly is anarchist education? Historians of education and

educational theorists often lazily conflate it with ‘libertarian

education’, an approach which rejects traditional models of teacher

authority and hierarchical school structure, and which advocates maximum

freedom for the individual child within the educational process —

including, in its extreme version, the chance to opt out of this process

altogether. Even writers who are sympathetic to anarchist notions of

education include descriptions of anarchist schools (such as the Escuela

Moderna, founded by Francisco Ferrer in Spain in 1907, and the Modern

School Movement in the United States which followed it) alongside

libertarian schools such as A S Neill’s Summerhill.

This is another misconception. The sheer volume of anarchist literature

devoted to educational issues, and the efforts invested by anarchist

activists in educational projects, shows quite clearly that for the

social anarchists, schools, and education in general, are a valuable

aspect of the project for social change, rather than something to be

dismantled along with the other machinery of state bureaucracy.

It’s true that anarchist schools often share structural features with

free schools, such as a non-coercive pedagogy, democratic management,

student-led timetables and lesson plans, and informal student-teacher

relationships. But there are crtical differences. Typical anarchist

schools have substantive curricula with clear anti-statist,

anti-militaristic and anti-religious messages. Great emphasis is placed

on the communal aspects of life in the school, and involvement in

broader political issues.

In contrast, the libertarian position associated with educational

experiments such as Summerhill makes just the type of optimistic or

naïve assumptions about human nature which are often wrongly attributed

to anarchism. John Darling quotes A S Neill as asserting that children

are “naturally good” and will turn out to be “good human beings if [they

are] not crippled and thwarted in [their] natural development by

interference”.

Neill indeed had considerable sympathy for Homer Lane’s idea of

‘original virtue’ — reflected in his insistence that all moral

instruction perverts the innate goodness of the child. This pure

libertarian view is in clear contrast with the anarchist view, which

holds that there is nothing morally objectionable in the attempt by

educators to pass on substantial beliefs or moral principles to

children. Anarchist schools, unlike schools such as Summerhill, made no

pretense at neutrality in their ethos and curriculum.

For anarchists, the ideal society is something that has to be created.

And education is primarily a part of this creation; it involves a

radical challenge to current practices and institutions, yet at the same

time a faith in the idea that human beings already possess the

attributes and virtues necessary to create and sustain such a different

society. They do not need, therefore, to either undergo any radical

transformation or to do away with a Marxist ‘inauthentic’ consciousness.

Education is not a means of creating a different political order, but a

space in which we experiment with visions of a new political order — a

process which itself constitutes an educative and motivating experience

both for educators and pupils.

In many standard works on anarchism, education gets barely a passing

mention. A pity. For the anarchists’ acknowledgment of the need for a

substantive educational process, designed along clear moral principles,

goes hand-in-hand with their contextualist account of human nature. It

thus turns what what might otherwise be nothing more than naïve optimism

into a complex and inspiring social hope.