Well burrowed, old mole!

Problem–The War on/as Education:  

Louis Althusser, in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, wrote that the school system was the most important institution for the reproduction of capitalism as an economic system and a way of life.  The educational system reproduced the skills needed for the economy and at the same time produced a certain ethos of obedience necessary to keep the other apparatuses functioning. One might be tempted to ask: what about the mass media, the spectacle? What about work? Don’t these condition us to accept things as they are, aren’t they the primary sources of servile consciousness and collaboration? Tempting as these analyses are, it is the educational system that trains children to fit themselves into work and the spectacle. It prepares them bodily and mentally to be capable of tolerating and collaborating with these institutions. Spectacle and work repeat reactivate and maintain certain fundamental behavioral, emotional and intellectual patterns which must be set in place when people are younger and more malleable.

According to Althusser, education has replaced religion as the main ISA.  Education, which was once a part of the church institution, has been taken over by secular authorities. Ironically, it was during revolutionary events like the Paris Commune that the demand for universal secular education was articulated. These demands were used as a starting point for the social contract between capital and labor that domesticated the workers movement. It was said that everyone would be given equal opportunity through equal access to universal public education. This is why Althusser, writing in 1970, could describe the school system as something which operated outside of the sphere of production to reproduce the conditions of production. This equilibrium of forces gave the school a certain freedom, a relative autonomy, from the demands of the market. Teachers, like other “professionals” (doctors lawyers etc.) could comfort themselves with the thought that they were less subject to market forces than other workers.  They enjoyed academic freedom through institutions like tenure, and the sphere of knowledge was respected as something that could not be subjected to market logic. Curriculum did not need to align explicitly with the demands of employers; students should be equipped with the tools that would help them to find employment and participate in democratic politics.

In the past thirty years, we have seen a mutation of the educational institution. Each year the relative autonomy once enjoyed by the school is reduced, and the protections from the market are erased. We can refer to this as the “war on education.”  The education reforms that are currently being enacted are part of a wider shift in governance.  Governance today operates through the paradigm of war. What does this mean? Power acting anarchically. Power has become anarchy in the sense that it operates without reference to any governing principle. It will do anything. The war paradigm allows for the suspension of all social contracts, the open violation of all laws and accountability measures. Power today only recognizes the 11th commandment–thou shalt not get caught. Margret Thatcher articulated the new model in her remark that there is no such thing as society. Unfortunately, the resistance to this new model of governance is not operating on the same terrain.  Parent groups, teachers, and students have not grasped the mutation. They are still holding demonstrations and symbolic protests that presuppose a social good will that no longer exists if it ever did.  Power is no longer listening.  To the anarchy of power, we need to oppose a positive anarchy of ungovernability and uneducability; their calculations all presuppose we will remain beneath that threshold–that we will not “throw away our future.”

Solutions: Taking Back the War

How can we respond to this problem? Power is running rampant doing whatever it wants; people can’t seem to get a handle on how to resist and so on. If education is as important as Althusser said it was, this gives people a crucial leverage point in the social war if they want it. All they need to do is to disengage from the mythology of education that power has already discarded. The school is the factory of the 21st century in the sense that it is the leverage point from which the whole social order can be overthrown.  Here we see an opening for a new kind of general strike.

(1)Recognize that what is going on is war, not reform.

First, we need to see this for what it is. The war on education aims to completely subordinate education to the market. The primary goal is to produce an education that is profitable which means, if we can judge from other privatization efforts, worse for everyone involved. Arguments about what actually works in the classroom, and what parents want for their children will be ignored or reduced to what they have in common with the demands of capital. Overall, this is the most important front in the social war. This is where power aims to break the last of the unions, and set in place an educational system that will produce the next generation of docile, post-democratic subjects.

(2)Recognize that it has always been war.

Second, we need to recognize that compulsory public education has always already been a war against our families, our communities and our children. We remain complicit in the torture of young people and remain mendacious insofar as we tell them it is for their own good.  The truth of compulsory public education has always been the reservation school. Adults need to remember their time in school, how it actually felt to be a student, and affirm that as a memory of truth.  Once we reestablish contact with the actual feeling of being-in-school, and accept it as an authentic recognition of social reality, we are in a position to thrown the myth of education in the garbage.

(3) Respond to it as such.

Third, we need to realign our tactics and strategies to fit these recognitions. Instead of symbolic protests, people need to withdraw their participation. Instead of appealing to public officials who are no longer listening, parents need to pull their children from schools. Students need to refuse to attend and hold riots when and if they are forced to attend. Teachers need to sabotage the obedience-training component of the school and overthrow the leadership of their unions through wildcat actions and occupations.

(4)Reappropriate the power of education

Fourth, we need to create. If teachers parents and students come together, if these groups organize themselves to withdraw their complicity, a new space of creative action will emerge. On the local level people can create autonomous groups in order to share knowledge, to read to discuss and to critique.  Overall, it will be found that what the public school took 15 years to teach was obedience to unjust authority and voluntary associations can educate better in less time.