Schooling As An Instrument Of Oppression

[Agnapostate]

Modern schooling functions as an instrument of oppression due to its compulsory, hierarchical, and authoritarian nature. Numerous theoreticians of the most diverse political perspectives are united on this fact.

For instance, we might consider the perspective of socialists Bowles and Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, in which they argue that the hierarchical subordination of students inherent in schooling is designed to indoctrinate students so that they might conform to the hierarchical subordination of labor under capital later in life. The libertarian socialist (and indeed, the Marxist) is able to recognize the role of this form of hierarchical schooling in preparing students for the similarly hierarchical workplace and weakening the working class so that they may score few victories in class conflict.

If we are displeased with the perspective of socialists, we might consider the perspective of classical liberals. (Described as "libertarians" in modern American political circles.)

For instance, this is the perspective of Sheldon Richman of the Cato Institute.

http://www.school-survival.net/arti...s_Maybe_the_Schools_Are_Working_Just_Fine.php

Most people today are convinced that the public schools are failing. Dissatisfaction with public education is at an all-time high. But have the public schools really failed? That depends on what they were originally set up to do.

In a profound sense, the public schools are not an American institution. They were modeled on the system of public education found in authoritarian Prussia in the early 19th century. After Prussia's defeat by Napoleon in 1807, King Frederick William III reinforced the national school system set up in 1717. Children aged seven to fourteen had to attend school, and parents who did not comply could have their children taken away.

Private schools could exist only so long as they met government standards. Teachers had to be certified, and high-school graduation examinations were necessary to enter the learned professions and the civil service. The schools imposed an official language to the prejudice of ethnic groups living in Prussia. The purpose of the system was to instill nationalism in demoralized Prussia and to train young men for the military and the bureaucracy. As the German philosopher Johann Fichte, a key influence on the system, said, "The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will."

What does that have to do with the United States? Early in our history, education was mainly a private, free-market activity — no compulsory attendance laws, and no school taxes. That system produced the most literate, independent-thinking, self-reliant people in history.

But not everyone was satisfied with the American way of doing things. According to John Taylor Gatto, the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991:

A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century; fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to these shores.

They finally succeeded early in the 20th century.

Just as the Prussian system was intended to unify Germany, the American educators' goal was to create a national culture out of the disparate subcultures that comprised the country in that period. (Catholic immigrants were a prominent target.) "To do that," writes Gatto, "children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influences."

The modern public school curriculum comes right out of the Prussian system. Gatto says the American educationists imported three major ideas from Prussia. The first was that the purpose of state schooling was not intellectual training but the conditioning of children "to obedience, subordination and collective life." Second, whole ideas were broken into fragmented "subjects," and school days were divided into fixed periods "so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions." Third, the state was posited as the true parent of the children.

Over the years, various fads have seized the education bureaucrats of America, but those fads have been variations on a theme: The public schools are intended to create complacent "good citizens" — not independent thinkers — because political leaders do not like boat-rockers who question things too closely. They prefer citizens who pay their taxes on time and leave them alone to chart the course of the nation. The growth in government power since the advent of public schools is hard to ignore.

So, judged by their purpose, how have the public schools performed?

Not bad, really. Unlike our ancestors' private schools, the public schools produce citizens who look to government to make important decisions for them — from whether to help the poor, to what drugs to take, to how to get an education — and solve societal problems.

In other words, the public schools are working. If we do not like what they have achieved, then we have to junk the Prussian system and move toward an education based on the American principles of free markets and individual liberty. Mere reform is not enough. We need to separate school and state. That's the only sure way to revitalize education, families, and the American spirit.

What's most striking is that whether it comes from the perspective of socialists (Bowles and Gintis) who condemn authoritarian schooling as preparing students for entry into a hierarchical and inefficient capitalist workplace that's rank with principal-agent problems or the perspective of capitalists (John Taylor Gatto, the aforementioned Sheldon Richman of the Cato Institute) who condemn schooling as preparing students for rigid obedience to state mandates, all agree that it functions as a tool intended to create conformity to an oppressive environment.

I've posted this crooked graph (I fail at image scanning) before, and defenders of compulsory, authoritarian schooling have said little to discredit it. It is an illustrative example of how the expansion of compulsory schooling served to eliminate youth competitors from the labor market during the Great Depression.

We should observe that the number of white males aged 16 in school prior to 1930 and beyond exceeded that of the number of white males aged 16 that were working, but not by a substantial amount. In the early 1930's, however, with more than a quarter of the population unemployed due to the Great Depression, the government was successful in passing legislation largely eliminating youth from the formal workforce, eliminating them as a source of competition for the multitudes of unemployed workers. Previous attempts to do this, such as the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916, were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. (See Hammer v. Dagenhart.) But this process was renewed once the Depression was in full swing through measures such as the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, which set a minimum working age of 16 in many industries. This second attempt to expand the Commerce Clause was again declared unconstitutional in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States. Not to be deterred, several components of the 1936 Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act included federal guidelines prohibiting "child labor." The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was the final nail in the coffin, and essentially established the current working age of 16.

A quotation of Lawrence A. Cremin, author of American Education: The National Experience 1783-1876, is in order:

[Factories] required a shift from agricultural time to the much more precise categories of industrial time, with it's sharply delineated and periodized workday. Moreover, along with this shift in rhythm, the factory demanded concomitant shifts in habits and attention and behaviour, under which workers could no longer act according to whim or preference but were required instead to adjust to the needs of the productive process and the other workers involved in it...The schools taught [factory behaviour], not only through textbook preachments, but also through the very character of their organization--the grouping, periodizing, and objective impersonality were not unlike those of the factory.

Since we've identified the oppressive function of modern schooling, what are our solutions? I'd personally favor a framework of unschooling and autodidactism (self-directed learning) in conjunction with the establishment of libertarian forms of education, for example, schools that are democratically managed by their students. For instance, we might refer to Summerhill School, in which the school functions as a democratic community managed based on consensus from students.

 

[dahermit]

Since we've identified the oppressive function of modern schooling, what are our solutions? I'd personally favor a framework of unschooling and autodidactism (self-directed learning) in conjunction with the establishment of libertarian forms of education, for example, schools that are democratically managed by their students. For instance, we might refer to Summerhill School, in which the school functions as a democratic community managed based on consensus from students.

As a retired former teacher who ended up babysitting rather than teaching because the students acted with complete impunity, I have not observed any meaningful, '...oppressive function of modern schooling..." Furthermore, the suggestions for solutions in the school system in which I was employed, if followed, would lead to an even more dysfunctional result than which I observed. If it were truly operated on consensus from the students I observed, there would only be time for sex, drugs, and alcohol. Children are not adults, children are not naturally burdened with any sense of responsibility. I find little in the article with which I can agree.

 

[Agnapostate]

As a retired former teacher who ended up babysitting rather than teaching because the students acted with complete impunity, I have not observed any meaningful, '...oppressive function of modern schooling..." Furthermore, the suggestions for solutions in the school system in which I was employed, if followed, would lead to an even more dysfunctional result than which I observed. If it were truly operated on consensus from the students I observed, there would only be time for sex, drugs, and alcohol. Children are not adults, children are not naturally burdened with any sense of responsibility. I find little in the article with which I can agree.

Widespread youth addiction to vice is largely a myth manufactured by the mass media. Drug crises, for instance, primarily exist among older generations rather than youth, though the latter is more commonly scapegoated by the media and punditry. As to sexual issues, rampant teenage promiscuity is largely the stuff of myths, exacerbated by overhyped and nonsensical "reports" of oral sex epidemics and rainbow parties, as well as misinformation regarding the alleged economic costs of teenage pregnancy. When it comes to alcohol, underage drinking and alcohol-related problems are decreasing, and in my view, the U.S. would do well to look to the European experience with alcohol, in which moderate consumption is introduced to youth at a young age. Thus, moderate alcohol consumption is more widespread than in the U.S., but binge drinking is far more prevalent in prohibitionist America.

Regardless, if you find that democratic input from students would destabilize the school system, one wonders whether they're really prepared to learn much from it in the first place, as well as whether this apparent immaturity is itself a cost of school indoctrination. Summerhill School, for instance, continues to operate smoothly and function democratically, likely because student input is valued from young childhood. As to unschooled youth, I think you'd find that they're far more well-educated and intelligent than their peers in the formal schooling system, a fact well summarized by Colin Roch, a 12 year old unschooler who declared, "Comparing me to those who are conventionally schooled is like comparing the freedoms of a wild stallion to those of cattle in a feedlot."