Post by DA Malatesta on Aug 17, 2005 19:01:44 GMT -5
Deschooling: Unlearning to Learn
courtesy of Holly Hock (this article appeared in Rolling Thunder #1)
To speak of deschooling is to speak in favor of doing—self-directed, purposeful, meaningful things—and against education—learning cut off from active life and carried on under pressure of bribe and threat, greed and fear. It is to speak about people doing things, and doing them better, and the conditions under which this can be possible; about some of the ways in which, given those conditions, other people may be able to help us to do things better, and vice versa; and about the reasons why these conditions do not exist within compulsory, coercive, competitive schools or even so-called alternative learning institutions.
Performer and Performance
Your average student of music thinks of music as a thing to learn, not a thing to do. But despite academies and conservatories, methodologies and method books, pedagogies and pedagogues and millions of rapped knuckles, the active verb in relation to the word music is still “to play.” You play music. You can also make music. Playing and making are the essential elements of being a musician. Yet instead of playing and making, the student practices or works on. If you practice, you aren’t really doing it. You are always in preparation for when you’re really going to do it. Well, when are you really going to do it? At a lesson for your teacher? For an adjudicator in an exam or a judge in a competition? For parents or friends? Once you’ve really done it and your parent, teacher, or judge lets you know whether you’ve succeeded in making music or not, are you ever going to really do it again?
In a product-oriented society, performance (recording) and performer (persona) become the most important features of music, crucial because they are so eminently marketable. The only real music is the stuff that passes the ultimate test of commodification. When you “perform” at a lesson or on request for relations and you haven’t been practicing and doing the work you know you should have been doing and you fail to perform up to everyone’s expectations—real or imagined, including your own—you feel bad. You do not feel like a musician. You may feel like lying. You may dislike yourself and feel guilty. You may resent your teacher and parents for putting you through all of it. You may feel all these things even more intensely if you were the one who wanted the lessons in the first place! Whatever you feel, you certainly won’t feel very musical.
Enforced regimens cannot protect young people from the many failures and tragedies adults have lived through. Music can only be enjoyed on its own terms. Focus on performance initiates a complex of feelings: frustration at doing poorly, resentment that it takes so much work to be “good,” confusion about music not being any fun at all. Ultimately, the student may resist practicing altogether. All this counters a more authentic purpose of playing music: to be “a more well-rounded person,” to acquire another form of expression, for fun. Outside pressure of this sort is antithetical to learning and living.
What most people call “education” entails the assumption that learning is an activity separate from the rest of life, that is done best when one is not doing anything else and best of all where nothing else is done—in learning places especially constructed for learning alone. Most use the term “education” as if it referred to some kind of treatment. Even “self-education” can reflect this: it can be seen as a self-administered treatment. But it is utter nonsense to say that people need to be taught how to learn or how to think. We are born knowing how to do so. We are born with the inclination to play, and in doing so do not live a moment without learning.
The Origins of Compulsory Schooling
The structure of 20th century schooling in the United States was conceived in 1806, when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards, a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous “Address to the German Nation,” which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect, he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders.
Thus compulsory schooling arrived in the world, at the end of a state bayonet. Modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819, with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver: obedient soldiers to the army, obedient workers to the mines, well subordinated civil servants to the government, well subordinated clerks to industry, and citizens who thought alike about major issues. Thirty-three years after the fateful invention of the centralized learning institution, the US adopted the Prussian style of schooling as its own.
Education as Industry
Compulsory education is still meeting our superpower society’s need to train citizens for subservience. In addition, education now prepares people for careers in various industries that Fichte or Mann couldn’t have imagined in their time. The biggest surprise of all is that education has itself become an industry. In a progressively mechanized world, in which self-checkout at the grocery store and e-ticket computer check-in at the airport are replacing the very jobs that once kept citizens busily integrated into society, what can be done with all the surplus workers except to postpone endlessly their entry into the workforce?
It is said that today’s high school graduates can be sure that, if they are to have jobs at all, they will perform tasks of which we cannot yet even conceive. In the limbo between the known and the unknown, there is education. Teachers and administrators can always be employed when other jobs are scarce, and those taught to believe they won’t be ready to live life until they’ve been properly prepared form a ready mass of consumers. Would-be employees spend progressively more and more time competing with one another for an upper hand, an extra point, a longer list of credentials. This is an effective way to divert attention from the impending doom of unemployment, and a ready explanation for why some never get the dream jobs they thought awaited them—they just didn’t study enough.
Once upon a time, only the rich and powerful sent their children to school. In today’s credit-based economy, in which everyone is expected to be middle class and most must live beyond their means to maintain this illusion, the education industry has made a killing with a new form of protection racket. In order to be equipped for employment of all but the worst kinds, people must pay thousands or tens of thousands to go to schools that teach few of the skills the job market actually requires. This traps them in debt for decades, forcing them to go on to sell themselves wherever the economy will have them—it’s a highly sophisticated form of indentured servitude! Is there really no more “educational,” let alone worthwhile, way to spend that much money? And would so many students, fresh out of college and desperate to live freely for once, immediately seek employment if they didn’t have such crippling debts to pay off?
Dropouts and Deschoolers
Most people born with a parent or two find themselves in the smallest and most immediate socializing institution, a family. But to the government, this most basic institution is almost entirely undependable and unsurveillable. Schools and daycare systems, in complementary compulsory and voluntary models, ensure that children absorb mass values. Accordingly, a wide variety of families, interested in self-governance for any number of reasons, plan ahead to deschool.
In pop culture, these homeschooling and nonschooling families are represented as hippies or extremist freaks. We are told that many of them are rich and white. Rarely do we see information about homeschooling families from demographics that are marginalized by society. This may be because poor people and people of color are almost entirely ignored by the media. On the flip side, it may also be because many of these families prefer to remain anonymous: many black parents fear that if school authorities discover how readily and willingly they’ll remove their children from school, they will design laws to force them to bring their kids back. Any homeschooler may view institutionalized education as a form of slavery. Many black homeschoolers have cause to fear the government will enact truancy laws, like the fugitive slave laws, that will have a more serious effect upon marginalized families than upon more privileged ones. And while it is impossible to gauge, it also may be true that, because of greater access to tools, time, and a feeling of being entitled to bend rules, wealthier and whiter families are more prevalent in the formal homeschooling world.
Of course, many of the unschoolers out there are isolated in their principles not only from the system they refuse but from their parents as well. For the sake of deschooling, we should work to rid our minds of the prejudices that would have us view those who drop out of educational treatment as “failures” or “delinquents,” strays who must be caught and brought back into the fold. When we hear these things about dropouts, we hear them from the point of view of the dogcatchers. Let us view dropouts instead as wise refusniks, conscientious objectors to a stifling and dehumanizing process. Many students whose caretakers defined them as dropouts have since redefined themselves as successful escapees from a useless educational career.
In the USA, the vast majority of young people who drop out before graduation are Latino and black. By the time they leave they have been attacked in both soul and body. Understandably, they refuse further “care” after suffering through intensive remedial programs that imply that they are unable to succeed within the system or to make it into society at large by any route approved of by their teachers. In schools that teach them nothing about themselves, they have had to learn to fake almost anything. Many have come to see school as a world-wide soul-shredder that junks the majority and hardens an elite to govern the others. This is the self-consciousness of the truant to which we all may aspire. Let us remove the stigma currently attached to educational underconsumers.
The Misadventures of Teachers in the Temple of Doom
Most teachers are generous, intelligent, creative people. Some are very talented or knowledgeable in their fields and would be great mentors or friends outside the constraints of school. Many have given up chances to make lots of money because they believe in teaching even though it pays poorly. Especially if they are men, they sometimes endure years of being hassled by their families—“why don’t you find a real career?” Many teachers are terrific people. But the role they are forced to play in school keeps them from behaving as real people in interactions with certain other real people, i.e., students. Their talent and energy is drained by the task of constantly telling people what to do. As instructors, these good people scrape their sides against concrete barriers as they take the bureaucratic twists and turns any school requires them to. This is the nature of the fundamental restraints of institutional schooling.
When you have a knowledgeable, funny, or wise teacher, listening to that person weave stories and lectures can be delightful—assuming, that is, that she feels “allowed” by the administration to be herself and say what she truly knows and thinks. Unfortunately, this is seldom the case, since most education officials have to worry about offending any of the parents who might not re-elect them, and therefore strive to keep their teachers as mute and mousy as possible. Nearly all those employed in a school live in fear of their superiors, because their superiors live in fear of their voting constituency. Therefore, all the interesting ideas get censored down to the very lowest common denominator. The teacher can’t say, “Wait a minute. What’s fueling this so-called war on drugs?” because Johnny’s father, outraged, might call the principal to protest that “a teacher, of all people!” is encouraging drug use. Johnny’s father may in fact have serious doubts of his own about the war on drugs, but he isn’t likely to accuse the administration of brainwashing, either, lest others brand him an unfit parent—and a big ship like the Educational Curriculum isn’t easy to bring around.
Some of the brightest and most radically inclined people you could ever meet become either teachers or professors within this bureaucratic mud. School is one of the few socially ascribed places for “free thinkers” to do their thing. Now that the soil has been poisoned and cemented over and almost all people randomly deposited into vehicles, offices, prisons, and hotels, to speak of friendship, god and godlessness, or joint suffering is to be an academic dreamer.
What would happen if, instead of becoming academics who train other would-be academics, we thoughtful folks sought out our true peers and enacted our natural influence in more immediate ways? While opposing all pleas for any new form of institutionalized haven, this writer for one dreams of niches, free spaces, and squatted social centers. She hopes for plotting tents for those who gather to take on a project or a specific thought together, those who have met through common desire for self-governance and have renounced all integration into the “system.”
Reconsidering Discipline, Safety, Certification, Public Spaces, Child Labor, and Thinking
Let us rethink discipline. One of the worst things about this sort of arbitrary authority is the way it makes us lose our trust in the natural authority of people who know what they’re doing and could share their wisdom with us. When they make you obey the cruel and unreasonable teacher, they steal your desire to learn from the kind and reasonable wise person. When they tell you to be sure to pick up after yourselves in the cafeteria, they steal your own natural sense of courtesy. Imagine a room full of screaming people: truly, it is much easier to allow them to quiet themselves than to forcibly quiet them. Today’s schools insist on the latter and thus strip people of the ability to be quiet and attentive on their own.
Let us reconsider safety. Safety is always a dominating concern for everyone hanging out with especially young people. But the way to promote safety is to help kids become stronger, not weaker. Whether you are a parent or not, consider that responsibility encourages strength, while surveillance and control ensure weakness.
Let us not discriminate against the uncertified. If we must assess competence for a given task, let us assess it as directly as we can, and not conflate competence with the length of time spent sitting in educational institutions. Those of us who have spent a lot of time in those institutions can do our part to deflate the value of educational currency by refusing to boast of our own “official” educational credentials. Strike these from your résumé; demand that others judge you by your actual talents and accomplishments, as you would judge others.
Let us frequent libraries, cooperatives, museums, theatres, and other voluntary, less coercive community institutions. Where they are inaccessible, let us work to make them accessible. Let us create more spaces in our communities where young, old, and those in between can get together to pursue un-programmed activities of all sorts. Let us end the policy of shunting young and old into separate institutions “for their own good.”
Let us spit on exploitative labor of all kinds, not child labor, the prohibition of which currently denies many forms of meaningful participation to the young. This will help reveal for what it is age discrimination, which mandates that young people be taught about the world before they are allowed to learn from it by participating in it.
Let us learn to think again, and make spaces that encourage it! Book culture depends upon stable companions and spaces in which they can come together, such as coffee shops and periodicals for writers and readers. Today both books and dialogue itself are opposed by competing media. The screen dissolves the text. The picture and its caption triumph. Silent and sustained attention is constantly interrupted by programmed noises. Specialized school subjects and the school bells dividing them into regular fifty-minute intervals interrupt the thoughts of any individual attempting to think critically inside the school. Our ability to carry a sustained thought is under attack from movies and TV, from the noise, speed, and information density that prevail. Institutions that cater to the lowest common denominator, that aim to prepare students for the insane world that exists—these cannot do anything but smother the ability to think and feel freely.
Trusting Relationships with One Another and the Young
We all have observed ongoing conservative culture wars over “family values.” “Family values,” of course, are about kids: precious, obedient, little spittin’ images of upstanding agreeable citizens. People wary of change often fear that the young, the heart of the nuclear family, are potential disruptions. This suspicion is well-founded. Young people, as anyone who takes them seriously can attest, often demonstrate an ability to draw attention to the political dimensions underlying everyday life—to the dubious pretences by which authorities, often including parental authorities, establish themselves. Without censure, with the room to be confidently inquisitive and direct, young ones can discern the fundamentals of social relations by unearthing the root—that is, radical—details which betray the reality of those relations, reminding us of the hidden roots of power on which authority rests in the USA. Spying that loose edge, they may just pry it back to ask: Why? Why do my sneakers say “Made in Pakistan”? Why are the sidewalks in this part of town crumbling? Why are we supposed to go to school?
Read the rest of the article here..
courtesy of Holly Hock (this article appeared in Rolling Thunder #1)
To speak of deschooling is to speak in favor of doing—self-directed, purposeful, meaningful things—and against education—learning cut off from active life and carried on under pressure of bribe and threat, greed and fear. It is to speak about people doing things, and doing them better, and the conditions under which this can be possible; about some of the ways in which, given those conditions, other people may be able to help us to do things better, and vice versa; and about the reasons why these conditions do not exist within compulsory, coercive, competitive schools or even so-called alternative learning institutions.
Performer and Performance
Your average student of music thinks of music as a thing to learn, not a thing to do. But despite academies and conservatories, methodologies and method books, pedagogies and pedagogues and millions of rapped knuckles, the active verb in relation to the word music is still “to play.” You play music. You can also make music. Playing and making are the essential elements of being a musician. Yet instead of playing and making, the student practices or works on. If you practice, you aren’t really doing it. You are always in preparation for when you’re really going to do it. Well, when are you really going to do it? At a lesson for your teacher? For an adjudicator in an exam or a judge in a competition? For parents or friends? Once you’ve really done it and your parent, teacher, or judge lets you know whether you’ve succeeded in making music or not, are you ever going to really do it again?
In a product-oriented society, performance (recording) and performer (persona) become the most important features of music, crucial because they are so eminently marketable. The only real music is the stuff that passes the ultimate test of commodification. When you “perform” at a lesson or on request for relations and you haven’t been practicing and doing the work you know you should have been doing and you fail to perform up to everyone’s expectations—real or imagined, including your own—you feel bad. You do not feel like a musician. You may feel like lying. You may dislike yourself and feel guilty. You may resent your teacher and parents for putting you through all of it. You may feel all these things even more intensely if you were the one who wanted the lessons in the first place! Whatever you feel, you certainly won’t feel very musical.
Enforced regimens cannot protect young people from the many failures and tragedies adults have lived through. Music can only be enjoyed on its own terms. Focus on performance initiates a complex of feelings: frustration at doing poorly, resentment that it takes so much work to be “good,” confusion about music not being any fun at all. Ultimately, the student may resist practicing altogether. All this counters a more authentic purpose of playing music: to be “a more well-rounded person,” to acquire another form of expression, for fun. Outside pressure of this sort is antithetical to learning and living.
What most people call “education” entails the assumption that learning is an activity separate from the rest of life, that is done best when one is not doing anything else and best of all where nothing else is done—in learning places especially constructed for learning alone. Most use the term “education” as if it referred to some kind of treatment. Even “self-education” can reflect this: it can be seen as a self-administered treatment. But it is utter nonsense to say that people need to be taught how to learn or how to think. We are born knowing how to do so. We are born with the inclination to play, and in doing so do not live a moment without learning.
The Origins of Compulsory Schooling
The structure of 20th century schooling in the United States was conceived in 1806, when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards, a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous “Address to the German Nation,” which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect, he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders.
Thus compulsory schooling arrived in the world, at the end of a state bayonet. Modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819, with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver: obedient soldiers to the army, obedient workers to the mines, well subordinated civil servants to the government, well subordinated clerks to industry, and citizens who thought alike about major issues. Thirty-three years after the fateful invention of the centralized learning institution, the US adopted the Prussian style of schooling as its own.
Education as Industry
Compulsory education is still meeting our superpower society’s need to train citizens for subservience. In addition, education now prepares people for careers in various industries that Fichte or Mann couldn’t have imagined in their time. The biggest surprise of all is that education has itself become an industry. In a progressively mechanized world, in which self-checkout at the grocery store and e-ticket computer check-in at the airport are replacing the very jobs that once kept citizens busily integrated into society, what can be done with all the surplus workers except to postpone endlessly their entry into the workforce?
It is said that today’s high school graduates can be sure that, if they are to have jobs at all, they will perform tasks of which we cannot yet even conceive. In the limbo between the known and the unknown, there is education. Teachers and administrators can always be employed when other jobs are scarce, and those taught to believe they won’t be ready to live life until they’ve been properly prepared form a ready mass of consumers. Would-be employees spend progressively more and more time competing with one another for an upper hand, an extra point, a longer list of credentials. This is an effective way to divert attention from the impending doom of unemployment, and a ready explanation for why some never get the dream jobs they thought awaited them—they just didn’t study enough.
Once upon a time, only the rich and powerful sent their children to school. In today’s credit-based economy, in which everyone is expected to be middle class and most must live beyond their means to maintain this illusion, the education industry has made a killing with a new form of protection racket. In order to be equipped for employment of all but the worst kinds, people must pay thousands or tens of thousands to go to schools that teach few of the skills the job market actually requires. This traps them in debt for decades, forcing them to go on to sell themselves wherever the economy will have them—it’s a highly sophisticated form of indentured servitude! Is there really no more “educational,” let alone worthwhile, way to spend that much money? And would so many students, fresh out of college and desperate to live freely for once, immediately seek employment if they didn’t have such crippling debts to pay off?
Dropouts and Deschoolers
Most people born with a parent or two find themselves in the smallest and most immediate socializing institution, a family. But to the government, this most basic institution is almost entirely undependable and unsurveillable. Schools and daycare systems, in complementary compulsory and voluntary models, ensure that children absorb mass values. Accordingly, a wide variety of families, interested in self-governance for any number of reasons, plan ahead to deschool.
In pop culture, these homeschooling and nonschooling families are represented as hippies or extremist freaks. We are told that many of them are rich and white. Rarely do we see information about homeschooling families from demographics that are marginalized by society. This may be because poor people and people of color are almost entirely ignored by the media. On the flip side, it may also be because many of these families prefer to remain anonymous: many black parents fear that if school authorities discover how readily and willingly they’ll remove their children from school, they will design laws to force them to bring their kids back. Any homeschooler may view institutionalized education as a form of slavery. Many black homeschoolers have cause to fear the government will enact truancy laws, like the fugitive slave laws, that will have a more serious effect upon marginalized families than upon more privileged ones. And while it is impossible to gauge, it also may be true that, because of greater access to tools, time, and a feeling of being entitled to bend rules, wealthier and whiter families are more prevalent in the formal homeschooling world.
Of course, many of the unschoolers out there are isolated in their principles not only from the system they refuse but from their parents as well. For the sake of deschooling, we should work to rid our minds of the prejudices that would have us view those who drop out of educational treatment as “failures” or “delinquents,” strays who must be caught and brought back into the fold. When we hear these things about dropouts, we hear them from the point of view of the dogcatchers. Let us view dropouts instead as wise refusniks, conscientious objectors to a stifling and dehumanizing process. Many students whose caretakers defined them as dropouts have since redefined themselves as successful escapees from a useless educational career.
In the USA, the vast majority of young people who drop out before graduation are Latino and black. By the time they leave they have been attacked in both soul and body. Understandably, they refuse further “care” after suffering through intensive remedial programs that imply that they are unable to succeed within the system or to make it into society at large by any route approved of by their teachers. In schools that teach them nothing about themselves, they have had to learn to fake almost anything. Many have come to see school as a world-wide soul-shredder that junks the majority and hardens an elite to govern the others. This is the self-consciousness of the truant to which we all may aspire. Let us remove the stigma currently attached to educational underconsumers.
The Misadventures of Teachers in the Temple of Doom
Most teachers are generous, intelligent, creative people. Some are very talented or knowledgeable in their fields and would be great mentors or friends outside the constraints of school. Many have given up chances to make lots of money because they believe in teaching even though it pays poorly. Especially if they are men, they sometimes endure years of being hassled by their families—“why don’t you find a real career?” Many teachers are terrific people. But the role they are forced to play in school keeps them from behaving as real people in interactions with certain other real people, i.e., students. Their talent and energy is drained by the task of constantly telling people what to do. As instructors, these good people scrape their sides against concrete barriers as they take the bureaucratic twists and turns any school requires them to. This is the nature of the fundamental restraints of institutional schooling.
When you have a knowledgeable, funny, or wise teacher, listening to that person weave stories and lectures can be delightful—assuming, that is, that she feels “allowed” by the administration to be herself and say what she truly knows and thinks. Unfortunately, this is seldom the case, since most education officials have to worry about offending any of the parents who might not re-elect them, and therefore strive to keep their teachers as mute and mousy as possible. Nearly all those employed in a school live in fear of their superiors, because their superiors live in fear of their voting constituency. Therefore, all the interesting ideas get censored down to the very lowest common denominator. The teacher can’t say, “Wait a minute. What’s fueling this so-called war on drugs?” because Johnny’s father, outraged, might call the principal to protest that “a teacher, of all people!” is encouraging drug use. Johnny’s father may in fact have serious doubts of his own about the war on drugs, but he isn’t likely to accuse the administration of brainwashing, either, lest others brand him an unfit parent—and a big ship like the Educational Curriculum isn’t easy to bring around.
Some of the brightest and most radically inclined people you could ever meet become either teachers or professors within this bureaucratic mud. School is one of the few socially ascribed places for “free thinkers” to do their thing. Now that the soil has been poisoned and cemented over and almost all people randomly deposited into vehicles, offices, prisons, and hotels, to speak of friendship, god and godlessness, or joint suffering is to be an academic dreamer.
What would happen if, instead of becoming academics who train other would-be academics, we thoughtful folks sought out our true peers and enacted our natural influence in more immediate ways? While opposing all pleas for any new form of institutionalized haven, this writer for one dreams of niches, free spaces, and squatted social centers. She hopes for plotting tents for those who gather to take on a project or a specific thought together, those who have met through common desire for self-governance and have renounced all integration into the “system.”
Reconsidering Discipline, Safety, Certification, Public Spaces, Child Labor, and Thinking
Let us rethink discipline. One of the worst things about this sort of arbitrary authority is the way it makes us lose our trust in the natural authority of people who know what they’re doing and could share their wisdom with us. When they make you obey the cruel and unreasonable teacher, they steal your desire to learn from the kind and reasonable wise person. When they tell you to be sure to pick up after yourselves in the cafeteria, they steal your own natural sense of courtesy. Imagine a room full of screaming people: truly, it is much easier to allow them to quiet themselves than to forcibly quiet them. Today’s schools insist on the latter and thus strip people of the ability to be quiet and attentive on their own.
Let us reconsider safety. Safety is always a dominating concern for everyone hanging out with especially young people. But the way to promote safety is to help kids become stronger, not weaker. Whether you are a parent or not, consider that responsibility encourages strength, while surveillance and control ensure weakness.
Let us not discriminate against the uncertified. If we must assess competence for a given task, let us assess it as directly as we can, and not conflate competence with the length of time spent sitting in educational institutions. Those of us who have spent a lot of time in those institutions can do our part to deflate the value of educational currency by refusing to boast of our own “official” educational credentials. Strike these from your résumé; demand that others judge you by your actual talents and accomplishments, as you would judge others.
Let us frequent libraries, cooperatives, museums, theatres, and other voluntary, less coercive community institutions. Where they are inaccessible, let us work to make them accessible. Let us create more spaces in our communities where young, old, and those in between can get together to pursue un-programmed activities of all sorts. Let us end the policy of shunting young and old into separate institutions “for their own good.”
Let us spit on exploitative labor of all kinds, not child labor, the prohibition of which currently denies many forms of meaningful participation to the young. This will help reveal for what it is age discrimination, which mandates that young people be taught about the world before they are allowed to learn from it by participating in it.
Let us learn to think again, and make spaces that encourage it! Book culture depends upon stable companions and spaces in which they can come together, such as coffee shops and periodicals for writers and readers. Today both books and dialogue itself are opposed by competing media. The screen dissolves the text. The picture and its caption triumph. Silent and sustained attention is constantly interrupted by programmed noises. Specialized school subjects and the school bells dividing them into regular fifty-minute intervals interrupt the thoughts of any individual attempting to think critically inside the school. Our ability to carry a sustained thought is under attack from movies and TV, from the noise, speed, and information density that prevail. Institutions that cater to the lowest common denominator, that aim to prepare students for the insane world that exists—these cannot do anything but smother the ability to think and feel freely.
Trusting Relationships with One Another and the Young
We all have observed ongoing conservative culture wars over “family values.” “Family values,” of course, are about kids: precious, obedient, little spittin’ images of upstanding agreeable citizens. People wary of change often fear that the young, the heart of the nuclear family, are potential disruptions. This suspicion is well-founded. Young people, as anyone who takes them seriously can attest, often demonstrate an ability to draw attention to the political dimensions underlying everyday life—to the dubious pretences by which authorities, often including parental authorities, establish themselves. Without censure, with the room to be confidently inquisitive and direct, young ones can discern the fundamentals of social relations by unearthing the root—that is, radical—details which betray the reality of those relations, reminding us of the hidden roots of power on which authority rests in the USA. Spying that loose edge, they may just pry it back to ask: Why? Why do my sneakers say “Made in Pakistan”? Why are the sidewalks in this part of town crumbling? Why are we supposed to go to school?
Read the rest of the article here..
