So, apart from the home and the workplace, the school is the other crucial institution where we spend the other major part of our life. Notice the current absence of democracy from all three.
The school dictates what kind of human beings we produce which then determines what kind of society we live in. If you don’t want anything to change, keep the schools as they are. If you do want things to change, change the schools. But how?
The educational syllabus is irrelevant to the everyday needs of the individual – geared to the needs of “jobs” (labour without capital), industries, powerful employers with sick ideas about the meaning of progress. How many times have I applied this incredibly specialist knowledge of mathematical and scientific techniques in my everyday life? I haven’t been taught about the things that I need and it’s not co-incidence.
It’s only at the end of the University degree that the faces come out from behind the masks at the University’s “Milk Round” for visiting employers. Only then, far too late, could I finally realise why my education had been the way it was. It wasn’t for me, it was for them. Millions of young ex-students who never even made it this far will never know why they were taught those weird subjects that they were made to fail at school – the system ensures that only some make the grade therefore allowing the State to justify its abdication of responsibility for its “failures” who slowly get used to the idea that they’re supposed to clean the houses of the “more intelligent”.
Chemistry, the subject offered for me to select, proceeded to give me the highly specialised degree knowledge to put myself in the service of multinationals and the State. The offers came from Reckett and Colemans to perfect a new table polish, from the Ministry of Defence to develop weapons, from British Nuclear Fuels to build Nuclear Reactors and so on. Not causes that I’d have supported given the choice. It is very much a political decision that education is geared to the needs of Industry, and certain types of industry – I was not taught about chemical components of solar panels. It is disingenuous to argue that school syllabuses are apolitical and that attempts to change them would be political.
But nobody’s currently given that kind of choice, certainly not at the age when it really counts. A certain amount of resentment builds amongst grown adults who followed the educational road in good faith that all would become clear and that this obscure knowledge would help in their lives. Only at the end of the road can the shocked adult realise that the obscure knowledge was to help them become servants of specific political and economic priorities, i.e. working for something which they do not control nor agree with.
So what should we be learning at school? The short answer would be something relevant to my ability to function as an independent adult when I leave.
Crucial omissions from the current school syllabus are the tools that we would need to take control of our own lives. The things we need in order to act in public. English Literature and Chemistry are not the tools for the job in hand – introductions to Law, Medicine, Political Science, Finance, Economics, Banking, Sociology, Linguistics, Anthropology, Government. And crucially, a general introduction to the Institutions that control our world and, (assuming we would like to live in a democracy) some insight into how to influence their behaviour. The teaching of a coherent history of human development would also help to this end. In England, teachers decree that the place to start is 1066 AD (!) plus the Romans and some sketchy stuff in between called the “Dark Ages”. Before the Romans we were savages. Incorrect, there is a middle stage called Barbarism.
There is a simple criterion for the inclusion of any subject in the syllabus – evidence of common, social, useful application. Information that prepares the individual to operate in the private and the PUBLIC arena (if you want democracy). The Educational system is the route that prepares the child to operate in these arenas. We can be taught to prosper independently, to stand on our own feet. Or we can be taught dependency – an incredibly specialist array of skills that help us claim a job from the owners of Capital. Educational syllabuses are deeply political.
How to teach?
But once the hurdle of WHAT to teach is overcome and school no longer serves exclusively the owners of capital, then the next hurdle is HOW to teach it.
We cannot trust the Experts who have been experimenting on our children.
Charles Dickens in his classic book “Hard Times” identifies the teaching ethos that has reigned supreme among Imperial-minded educationalists – children are empty vessels who must be filled with facts. But as every parent knows, a child is born with the ability to explore and learn. What the child has – a conscience – should be nurtured and therefore empowered. The conscience is inborn and the child quickly becomes conscious, i.e. able to feel, perceive and think – to be in full possession of their senses.
But the conscience can be altered. The school takes the child as having nothing inside, nothing to contribute, nothing that needs servicing. The school discards the conscience. And that is why the thing inside us is killed by education – ignoring what is there and replacing these inborn human values and natural ability to learn in a certain way. Replacing this conscience with the Imperial set of values. Education as a one-way street. The teacher informs and directs, the child absorbs and mimics.
The classic case is of course in the teaching of history. We are only taught the Imperial variety, the history since property. Ignoring the hugely-longer time-scale of human development from subsistence through government, family, language, religion, house life and architecture. History as it is currently taught ignores 50,000 years of life before the idea of private land and property and dismisses it as savagery. The history that remains is the history of greed, and without any previous historical evidence to go on, the child is directed towards the inevitable conclusion that property is our one and only human nature, since the nature that we possessed before is not taught or even acknowledged to exist.. This manipulation is how they get us to believe that selfishness and greed IS human nature, the most important lesson that an Imperialist must teach to his captive population – “things are like this because there is no other way that humans have ever behaved”. It was the ability to co-operate that set us above animals in the first place. The chewing gum of TV is an attempt to roll back our minds, to turn us back into thoughtless, mindless savages. As they say, “Wise Up, Turn Off”.
We pay a lot of heed to expert educationalists who have come up with many “learning styles” over the years, which has left us with a great deal of illiteracy. In the USA, Australia and the UK, hindered reading ability runs at 38%, 20% and 20% respectively. But apparently it’s not the fault of the learning styles. Any responsibility borne by the Education System is abdicated by medicalizing the condition… the child has “dyslexia”, a condition that has no more specific criteria than “difficulties with reading” and whose very existence as a medical condition has been questioned by other educationalists. And then a very inconvenient programme was broadcast. East Dunbartonshire Council decided to ditch the alternative “learning styles” and insist on good old fashioned synthetic phonics as the correct method of teaching the 44 sounds associated with the 26 letters of the alphabet. The Council Officer announced that of all the children in East Dunbartonshire, the numbers a little slow to read could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Where is Dyslexia in East Dunbartonshire?
Then finally in the UK in 2005 came the Rose Report, reviewing how children were taught to read and write in England. Subsequently, all other “learning styles” were promptly abandoned and teaching literacy by Synthetic Phonics became mandatory; schools MUST teach using Synthetic Phonics. The Educationalists never took responsibility for their expert ideas damaging the futures of so many children. They might sneer at the un-expert attempts of people to have an input into the education system, but could we do worse than them? Could we actually do better? Or do we consent to having any input to our children’s education solely contributed to by heavily circumscribed Institutions stuffed with Servants of the State?
We should not forget in all of this that going to school to learn to read is the very minimum that we should expect. And schools fail even in that. How little should we accept? Without this basic ability how may the child progress through the Starting Gate to then acquire all the knowledge that they need?
Beyond reading, how many other flaws in the System should we accept before we decide that alternatives should be examined, that the asphyxiating and extremely political agenda should be ditched?
We could for instance ditch the agenda of the polluting Industries and explore the work of radical educationalists such as Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire and Guerrero Ramos. In these, the teacher allows the student to lead the line of enquiry, to attempt to connect their experience with the world around them. We ditch the idea that special interest groups should maintain a stranglehold over what the child learns, what should be considered valuable. We instead allow education to illuminate and inform experience.
The best place to start is at the beginning with the very language that we use. The Irish folk singer Christy Moore picks up this theme in his song “No Time for Love”… “They call it the Law, we call it apartheid, internment, conscription, partition and silence”. The educational process is to look at the very words we use and promote an understanding of them that fits with our experience. Once the propagandist meaning is discarded and the real meaning of every important word is understood, only then can a student start to reason using the words that this student has come to understand the meaning of. The start is to reclaim our language, claiming back meanings that have been stolen, misused, propagandised. Remember again the words of Godfrey Reggio – “our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live”.
The traditional system of education has a name and a purpose. The name is “memorisation”. The purpose is to get everyone to think the same way according to a given set of Imperial values – to do what you’re told, not to do what you think. The alternative is called “codification”, a process that gives students the ability to work words and arguments out for themselves and therefore to develop the kind of mind that can think independently, make decisions and take control of their own lives.
Codification is the key to self-education. It is a means by which people are taught how to teach themselves. The aim of codification is “conscientisation”, popularized by Paolo Freire and way before him by the ancient Greeks who first identified the essence of critical consciousness when philosophers encouraged their students to develop an “impulse and willingness to stand back from humanity and nature… [and] to make them objects of thought and criticism, and to search for their meaning and significance” i.e. learning to express the conscience that we are all born with.
At the helm of this system is a group of facilitators. At the helm of the current system is a group of directors. A friend of mine accurately described the current system as “learned helplessness”.
Education, simply put, can teach you to be controlled or it can teach you to take control. It is the choice between knowing by remembering and knowing by understanding. They can teach you where to buy something or they can help you to teach yourself how to make it.
And if you feel that the current method is in the hands of people who can’t be trusted to represent anybody else’s interests apart from the System they serve, then we need a new system.
This new school is the kind of school where humanity applies scientific reason to the uncompromised and sympathetic development of a child’s ability to reason and therefore to act in their own best interests. To enable the child to grow in their own direction, to grow from the plan developed from within as opposed to the plan imposed from without.
This is the kind of school where you may learn about the history of 50,000 years of non-land owning sustainable life systems. Do you know why you haven’t got this kind of school?
Our current school system frames the individual, the family, the Town, the Nation, and the World. Another type may frame the individual, the extended family, the community, connected communities, and the Planet. It is permitted to open up the deeper past and show us the Gen, the fraternity, the tribe, and finally the Nation and the Confederacy
Capitalists talk about Socialists trying to control and plan people’s lives, as if the Capitalist system is entirely natural, apolitical, uncontrived. But they make it appear as the only way by the systematic destruction of alternatives. You can’t argue against diversity. But you can hide it.
If you want to be taught how to serve a rich Capitalist mega-industry please go right ahead. But the rest of us would like the right to choose.