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Title: Obedience, Oppression and Capitalism Author: Saint Andrew Date: 2021 Language: en Topics: capitalism, deschooling, anti-school, school, unschooling, schooling, COVID-19, Abolition, youth liberation, youth Source: [[https://shado-mag.com/all/obedience-oppression-and-capitalism-why-we-need-to-address-the-legacy-of-schools/]]
Our world has been fundamentally transformed by COVID-19. Our
vocabularies have expanded, our emissions have (very temporarily)
reduced, and weāve had to accessorise more than usual, while over 229
million people have been infected and over 4.7 million people have
succumbed to the virus. Hundreds of millions of people have lost their
homes, their jobs, and their loved ones. Some industries have halted,
innovated, and evolved in response to pandemic conditions. Others have
not. Some countries are now enjoying the privilege of opening up freely.
Others are struggling to stay afloat.
Throughout the past two years, my mind has lingered on one industry that
has refused to fundamentally change in any meaningful capacity in over a
century. The factory called school. While every country has its unique
scholastic quirks, the general model has remained fairly consistent over
the decades. Not even a pandemic could shake things up, as the vestiges
of colonial and industrial capitalist conceptions of schooling retain
their stranglehold on education.
Despite the heightened stress, uncertainty, and anxiety of the pandemic,
young people have been expected to maintain their ācareers,ā logging on
to online school every morning, turning on their cameras, sitting
through exhausting lessons, and submitting their assignments, perhaps
with slightly more flexible submission dates. And as the pandemic
exposed, some children simply canāt access online schooling, due to
their socioeconomic circumstances, so have been left to fall behind and
slip through the cracks. Even before the pandemic, weāve forced children
and teenagers through early starts, long hours, rigorous exams,
demanding assignments, and excessive regulation, robbing them of their
curiosity and freedom. Why?
The legacy of school has been fairly ugly thus far, marked by the
breaking of young spirits into the capitalist system, creating useful
workers for the factories of industry. All by design. One of the fathers
of state schooling (and German nationalism) Johann Fichte, argued that
schools should be used to create a cohesive and compliant citizenry who
would submit to the nation and the virtues of the State.
Prussian educational theorists created a schooling model built around
centrally controlled curriculums. This included constant fragmentation
of days, with changing classes signified by the sound of a bell which
promoted obedience and teacher-directed classroom groupings. The father
of scientific management, Frederick Winslow Taylor, outlined the purpose
of schooling as follows:
capitalist.
His ideas were adopted, interpreted, and applied by school
administrators all over the world. Alexander Inglis, Assistant Professor
of Education at Harvard University in the 1920s, reinforced the purpose
of state schooling through six basic functions:
obedience to arbitrary authority.
controllable masses.
society, based on their academic record.
designated role, and no further.
inferiority to āimprove the breeding stockā by tagging the āunfitā with
poor grades, poor placement and punishments.
of propagating this system of dumbing down, declawing, and controlling
the populace.
Schools have retained these primary functions through wars, revolutions
and pandemics. Throughout the world, whether in former colonies or the
heart of empire, they serve as tools of classism, racism, ableism,
sexism, nationalism, statism, and other systems of oppression. Schools
exist to maintain class- and race-based segregation; facilitate bullying
and harassment on the basis of race, sexuality, or neurodivergence. They
do this by funneling low-income students into further poverty, crime,
and eventually prison; stripping Indigenous peoples of their cultures
and lifestyles; penalising disabled children for missing school and
learning differently;; enabling rape culture through the pervasive
regulation of ā bodies; and propagandise children to accept the virtues
of a broken world.
By their fundamentally authoritarian nature, schools demand the
submission of their students to the authorities, including the authority
of the schoolbell itself. In many schools, children are expected to beg
for permission for the simplest of behaviours, including drinking water
and using the bathroom. Weāve accepted as normal that children should
have little to no choice in their own learning. And when children do
speak out against their conditions, they are punished, scorned, mocked,
and told to grow up. āEveryone goes through it,ā people say, as though
that were any excuse for the maintenance of a damaging and deeply
unhealthy institution.
When children start school, they are self-guided, curious about the
world they live in, and believe everything is possible. When they
finish, they are cynical, self-absorbed, miseducated, propagandised, and
used to dedicating forty hours of their week to an activity they never
chose. And yet we force them to go anyway. Something needs to change.
What currently exists is antithetical to actual learning. We need to
abolish schools.
We need to free education from the grip of compulsory schooling. I
understand the impulse to seek legislative reforms, but top-down
solutions cannot solve the fundamental issue with the structure of
schools, they can only reinforce it. No government or school board would
willingly give up their total monopoly on indoctrination. This
revolution of education requires a grassroots approach, allowing a
multiplicity of learning styles to bloom across regions.
Children and teens need to take the reins of their own education, an
education philosophy that already has a precedent in many parts of the
world. Democratic, self-directed education (such as in Sudbury schools,
where students and staff are equal citizens) afford students the freedom
and responsibility to manage their own learning, with great success.
These philosophies and models recognise that truly fulfilling learning
can only occur where there is trust, respect, and self-determination.
They recognise that learning is a life-long journey, and we should
prepare children to carry on that journey outside of the formal learning
environment, equipping them with the tools they need to lead a balanced
life.
But how can we get there? Students, teachers, and parents all have a
role to play in seizing education from the grip of the state. While
individual students may pursue unschooling and individual teachers may
afford their students more freedom, a truly comprehensive transformation
would require the organised efforts of autonomous studentsā and
teachersā unions. These sorts of grassroots organisations can strike,
walkout, and wrest control from school boards and authorities in order
to construct a more equitable and democratic system of education,
without the restrictions of exams, homework, and curriculum. The fight
wonāt be easy, but we canāt carry on as we are. We need to break the
cycle so that learning and freedom can flourish.