Deschooloing Society

Dave Pollard has an interesting article on the function of education in today's society. In his post he points to this concise article by Russ Kick that shows how deliberate the dumbing down of society has been.

It's interesting that this topic is coming up again now, it isn't as though it hasn't been known for a long time - as Gatto points out - hell I wrote papers on it while in unversity in the early 70's - it was pretty much the idée du jour - in the left bank alternate education, deschooling society crowd that I ran with at that time. Anyone interested in education and it's place in society should make themselves famiiliar with the writers such as Paul Goodman, John Holt and Ivan Illich amongst others.

In his 1970 book Deschooling Society Illich wrote:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

n these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery. I will explain how this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or "treatments." I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats. We need counterfoil research to current futurology.

I want to raise the general question of the mutual definition of man's nature and the nature of modern institutions which characterizes our world view and language. To do so, I have chosen the school as my paradigm, and I therefore deal only indirectly with other bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state: the consumer-family, the party, the army, the church, the media. My analysis of the hidden curriculum of school should make it evident that public education would profit from the deschooling of society, just as family life, politics, security, faith, and communication would profit from an analogous process.

In other words if you want a pliable public, largely incapable of truly critical thought, willing slaves to the work-a-day world, then create a public education system that rewards mediocrity and punishes individuality. That's what we have here in North America thanks to our forebearers who were greatly enamoured with the early 19th Century Prussian school system.

The prime fundamental of German education is that it is based on a national principle.... A fundamental feature of German education: education to the State, education for the State, education by the State. The Volksschule is a direct result of a national principle aimed at national unity. The State is the supreme end in view.

Franz de Hovre, 1917

In America the degradation of education is further compounded through the interference of fundamentalist right wing organizations and politicians who actively seek, and are often successful in their pursuit, to ban books and make religious myths equal to scientific fact.

Is it a consipracy? No, conspiracies are by definition secretive. There was/is nothing secretive about this process. America despite it's claims to be a land of eqaulity and a classless society has never been any such thing. America has always been a country where class was determined as much by the amount of money one has as by one's parentage. In the late 1800's and early 1900's the rapid industrialization of the US created a lot of wealth and a few very powerful families, the beginning of an american aristocracy.

What Greg Palast said about the 2000 election "The Best Democracy Monrey Can Buy" has always been the reality of American politics. From Grover Cleveland to Herbert Hoover, in one form or another the "robber barons" bought the democracy they wanted fairly openly - they were all of one "class", thought along the same lines and were the ones making the decvisions on the direction the country should go. There was little secretive about it. Today it is different in that it needs to be hidden, butthereality is no ifferent - Haliburton, Enron et al get what they want until their sins become to egregious to be hidden then their middle management are sacrtificed and their leaders pop open their golden parachutes.

It has always been in the interests of industrialized countries, or rather their captains of industry to have:

1. a large pool of uneducated workers
2. a rate of unemployment around 6%
3. Bread and circuses to divert the great unwashed.

It keeps the public's minds off how they are being manipulated. The purpose of school is not to educate but to socialize individuals, to get them ready for the rat race.

So, why is this becoming a hot topic again now? Maybe it's because the inherent tension between a system designed to numb minds and dedicated teachers who are tring to stimulate those minds has reached, through the constant de-funding of education - a breaking point. Maybe it's because the actions of our politicians have become so blatantly harmful that John Q. Public can't be distracted enough anymore to totally ignore them. Maybe the world has become so tumultuous and patently dangerous place, particularly for Americans, that the lotus eaters have started to awaken from their stupors and have begun to see reality through their dreams. Maybe Ajmerica is in the act of swallowing the red pill.. I don't know the reason - I can only hope that America is finally waking up.

Posted by The Dynamic Driveler at August 31, 2003 10:43 PM