Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed. The pupil thereby is ‘Schooled’ to confuse teaching and 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 and the rat race for productive work.
Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Modernized poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency. This modernization of poverty is a world-wide phenomenon and lies at the root of contemporary under development.
It is obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one. Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities, which are casually available to the middle class child. These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to a vacation travel and a different sense of oneself. So the poorer student will generally fall behind as long as he depends on the school for his learning and advancement.
Paradoxically, the belief that universal schooling is absolutely necessary is most firmly held in those countries where the fewest people have been and will be served by schools. All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on the society: school is recognized as the institution, which specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as a proof that education is very costly, very complex, always arcane and frequently almost impossible task.
School appropriates the money, men and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Obligatory schooling inevitably polarizes a society; it also grades the nations of the world according to an international caste system. Countries are rated like castes whose educational dignity is determined by the average years of schooling of its citizens, a rating, which is closely related to per capita gross national product and much more painful. School has become the world religion of a modernized proleriat and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The escalation of schools as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so. Everywhere in the world, school costs have risen faster than enrolments and faster than the GNP.
Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling. Yet to learn means to acquire a new skill or insight, while promotion depends on an opinion, which others have formed. Learning frequently is the result of instruction, but selection for a role or category in the job market increasingly depends on mere length of attendance.
Curriculum has always been used to assign social rank. An illusion regarding schools is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school in so far as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.
The deschooling of society implies a recognition of the two-faced nature of learning. An insistence on skill alone could be disaster; equal emphasis must be placed on other kinds of learning. But if schools are the wrong places for learning a skill, they are even worse places for getting an education. School does both tasks badly, partly because it does not distinguish between them. School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances, which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which the term ‘liberal education’ is used. The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling’s sake: en enforced stay in the company of teachers.
In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up pre-determined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service, which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern. Some schools become so flexible that they cease to be useful. ‘School’ and ‘teaching’ are such terms. Like an amoeba they fit into almost any interstice of the language. ABM will teach the Russians, IBM will teach Negro children and the army can become the school of a nation.
A degree always leaves its indelible price tag on the curriculum of its consumer. Certified college graduates fit only into a world, which puts a price tag on their heads, thereby giving them the power to define the level of expectations in their society. In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up pre determined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service, which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern.
I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style, which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume – a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment.
‘Modern’ technology transferred to poor countries falls into three large categories: goods, factories, which make them and serviced institutions – principally schools – which make men into modern producers and consumers. Most countries by far spend the largest proportion of their budget on schools. Fundamental social change must begin with a change of consciousness about institutions and to explain why the dimension of a viable future turns on the rejuvenation of institutional style.
Schools are fundamentally alike in all countries, be they fascist, democratic or socialist, big or small, rich or poor. This identity of the school system forces us to recognize the profound world-identity of myth, mode of production and method of social control, despite the great variety of mythologies in which the myth finds expression.
A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which infact restricts the public’s chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president or with the teaching goals of a professional educators or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the questions, “What should someone learn?” but with the questions, “What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?”
In a world, which is controlled and owned by nations and corporations, only limited access to educational objects will ever be possible. But increased access to those objects which can be shared for educational purposes may enlighten us enough to help us to break through these ultimate political barriers. Public schools transfer control over the educational use of objects from private to professional hands. The institutional inversion of schools could empower the individual to reclaim the right to use them for education. Local communities are valuable. They are also a vanishing reality as men progressively let service institutions define their circles of social relationship.
School has become the advertising agency, which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. In such a society, marginal value has become constantly self-transcendent. The ethos of non-satiety is thus at the root of physical depredation, social polarization and psychological passivity.
