Reading, Writing, Revolution
Published in "Orion
"
March/April 2004
We
hear, more or less constantly, that schools are failing in their mandate.
Nothing could be more wrong. Schools are succeeding all too well, accomplishing
precisely their purpose. And what is their primary purpose? To answer this, ask
yourself first what society values most. We don’t talk about it much, but the
truth is that our society values money above all else. We live in a culture
that is based on the illusion that happiness is outside of us—and schooling is
central to the creation and perpetuation of that illusion.
Pretend you wish to procure for your nation’s commercial interests a
steady supply of workers, and a population pacified enough to not resist the
expropriation of its resources. The crudest and probably most common means of
facilitating such production is to capture the workers and haul them to your
factories and fields in chains. Or dispossess them at gunpoint, then give them
the choice of starvation or wage slavery. Alternately, you can force them to
pay taxes or purchase your products, thereby guaranteeing they’ll enter the
cash economy, meaning, ultimately, that they’ve got to work in your factories
or fields to gain cash.
Throughout our lives, it is expected that we will be good citizens,
good boys and girls all. We won’t question country, God, capitalism, science,
economics, history, the rule of the law, but in all those areas we will defer
to experts, just as we were taught. And the experts themselves? It is expected
that they will always know what or whom to question, and what questions to
leave unexamined. And none of us, if all goes well, will ever question how
these areas—religion, capitalism, science, history, law—trick out in our own
lives.
Here are some questions I’ve been asking lately: What are the
effects of schooling on creativity? How well does schooling foster the
uniqueness of each child? Does schooling make children happier? What does each
child receive in exchange for the so many hours for years on end that she or he
gives to the school system?
As midwives attending to the births of their students, teachers
carry an awesome responsibility, with correspondingly awesome possibilities.
Education, if it is to be worthy of its true meaning, can, should, and must be
at the forefront of resistance to the routine dehumanization of our whole
industrialized mass culture. This is possible. But it is rare. Too many
teachers, like too many students, too many workers at too many war
manufacturing plants, too many writers, too many politicians, too many people
who could be human beings but who have been trained by their schooling and by
their work and by their pursuit of money and their pursuit of acceptance and by
their very real fear of being who they are, step away from this responsibility.
In so doing they lead themselves and those around them ever further from their
hearts, and lead us all ever closer to the personal and planetary annihilation
that is the looming end point of industrial civilization.
If one of the most unforgivable sins is to lead people away from
themselves, we must not forgive the processes of industrialized education.
There is, however, an alternative. Or rather, there are as many alternatives as
there are people.
I’ve heard it said that within our deathly culture, the most
revolutionary thing anyone can do is follow one’s heart. I would add that once
you’ve begun to do that, the most moral and revolutionary thing you can do is
help others find their hearts. Time
is short. It’s short for our planet, and it is even shorter for all of those
students whose lives are slipping away from them with every awful tick of the
clock on the classroom wall. There is much work to be done. What are we waiting
for?
Last updated 5/1/04