Tuesday, August 19, 2003
(1:32 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
On Education
Last night I read the very nice "conspiracy theory" article on education in the latest Harper's. It argued that the school system is designed to demoralize, divide, and conquer children, so that the chances of a worker's revolution are effectively reduced to zero. All the negative points of education, which people see as accidents keeping it from achieving its real goal, are themselves the goal. The entire point is to create bored and boring hollow men.
He documents this moderately well, at least as well as the average French theorist, but I think he neglects a couple points. First, plans as large and unwieldy as the public education system are bound to produce unexpected results. This is because the model of the police state, on which the author whose name I lazily can't remember rightly claims our public schools are built, is incapable of achieving its goals. Totalizing projects are horrible, brutal, dehumanizing, and -- which makes it all the worse -- impossible. To put it in academic jargon, ideological interpellation does not fully constitute the subject. There are gaps in the system, and that's where our freedom comes into play. Thus we have people who use the oppressive school system to actually become thoughtful and critical members of society, such as (I think) the holy trinity who writes this blog. The universe is not the realm of pure determinism -- the very fact that he's writing this article, despite having been indoctrinated for twelve years, proves that indoctrination is not all-powerful.
Second, his vision of a liberated, "truly" educated society rings hollow. In reality, it is nothing but the same old thing of the public schools, the same individualization, division, meritocracy, except that the materials used are ostensibly higher-quality. He claims that a society full of people who have learned to be self-reliant and to think for themselves would "manage itself," but isn't it the case that people in our society largely internalize the lessons of school so that it becomes second nature to submit to authority, stand in line, etc.? The simplistic idea that people would act according to their positive "deep down" inclinations if not for the intervention of oppressive society is not an adequate theory on which to build a society. As they say, hope is not a plan.
So yes, the public school system often tends to be mediocre, and it teaches people to be conformists. Yet a whole lot of people don't quite get the lesson. In addition, in the universal home schooling situation that he envisions, doesn't he realize that class inequalities will be even more pronounced than in our current socialized system? I think that universal mandatory public schooling is something that can be put to good use, and I don't think that the supposed motivations of its original creators thoroughly corrupt it beyond saving.
We are in a situation in which there is mandatory public schooling. We have a moderately well-funded infrastructure for this program. Millions of people are employed or otherwise involved in it. So do we just throw out the whole thing? Do we just radically alter our society in such a way and trust that it will "work out" due to the supposed real-life application of a romantic platitude? Is it ever possible to return to innocence, return to the times when schooling supposedly meant more or worked better? I don't have any answers to the problems facing public schools, but I do think that they, like most problems, are able to be solved, at least in part.
