Clay Burell's Library tagged philosophy →  View Popular

But what distinguishes Crawford from his predecessors is how far blue-collar work, both in numbers and prestige, has fallen since even the '70s. Shop Class surveys an economic landscape where everyone must go to college or else be viewed as suspect, stupid, and/or unemployable. The massification of higher education has also created a new vocational pitfall: I've got a degree; therefore, I should be doing smart, clean, fun, and well-paid work. Except for clean, these adjectives can be scarce in cubicle alley.

Now, I don't want to leave you with the impression that Crawford is sending us all off to plumbing school. He's not idiotic. His macroeconomic argument is this: "We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power. … But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible (it is never guaranteed)." You might call Crawford a locavore of work. He wants economic policies that are human in scale and provide maximum opportunity for self-reliance and self-employment. That may sound like Declaration of Independence language, but it's not an amber-encased ideal. As Crawford shows, all freedom takes is a little willingness to get your hands greasy.

The educational matchmaking among people who have been successfully
schooled is a different task. Those who do not need such assistance are a
minority, even among the readers of serious journals. The majority cannot
and should not be rallied for discussion around a slogan, a word, or a
picture. But the idea remains the same: they should be able to meet around
a problem chosen and defined by their own initiative. Creative, exploratory
learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems.
Large universities make the futile attempt to match them by multiplying
their courses, and they generally fail since they are bound to curriculum,
course structure, and bureaucratic administration. In schools, including
universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation
of a limited number of people to take up predetermined 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.

The major obstacle on the way to a society that truly educates was well
defined by a black friend of mine in Chicago, who told me that our
imagination was "all schooled up." We permit the state to ascertain the
universal educational deficiencies of its citizens and establish one
specialized agency to treat them. We thus share in the delusion that we can
distinguish between what is necessary education for others and what is not,
just as former generations established laws which defined what was sacred
and what was profane. Durkheim recognized that this ability to divide
social reality into two realms was the very essence of formal religion.
There are, he reasoned, religions without the supernatural and religions
without gods, but none which does not subdivide the world into things and
times and persons that are sacred and others that as a consequence are
profane. Durkheim's insight can be applied to the sociology of education,
for school is radically divisive in a similar way. The every existence of
obligatory schoods divides any society into two realms: some time spans and
processes and treatments and professions are "academic" or "pedagogic," and
others are not. The power of school thus to divide social reality has no
boundaries: education becomes unworldly and world becomes noneducational.
Since Bonhoeffer contemporary theologians have pointed to the confusions
now reigning between the Biblical message and institutionalized religion.
They point to the experience that Christian freedom and faith usually gain
from secularization. Inevitably their statements sound blasphemous to many
churchmen. Unquestionably, the educational process will gain from the
deschooling of society even though this demand sounds to many schoolmen
like treason to the enlightenment. But it is enlightenment itself that is
now being snuffed out in the schools. The secularization of the Christian
faither depends on the dedication to it on the part of Christians rooted in
the Church. In much the same way, the deschooling of education depends on
the leadership of those brought up in the schools. Their curriculum cannot
serve them as an alibi for the task: each of us remains responsible for
what has been made of him, even though he may be able to do no more than
accept this responsibility and serve as a warning to others.

these approaches would oblige us to start with certain assumptions about a
relationship between school and education. To develop a language in which
we can speak about school without such constant recourse to education, I
have chosen to begin with something that might be called a phenomenology of
public school. For this purpose I shall define "school" as the
age-specific, teacher-related process requiring full-time attendance at an
obligatory curriculum.

School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three
unquestioned premises. Children belong in school. Children learn in school.
Children can be taught only in school.

I think these unexamined premises deserve serious questioning. We have
grown accustomed to children. We have decided that they should go to
school, do as they are told, and have neither income nor families of their
own. We expect them to know their place and behave like children. We
remember, whether nostalgically or bitterly, a time when we were children,
too. We are expected to tolerate the childish behavior of children.
Man-kind, for us, is a species both afflicted and blessed with the task of
caring for children. We forget, however, that our present concept of
"childhood" developed only recently in Western Europe and more recently
still in the Americas.*

Childhood as distinct from infancy, adolescence, or youth was unknown to
most historical periods. Some Christian centuries did not even have an eye
for its bodily proportions. Artists depicted the infant as a miniature
adult seated on his mother's arm. Children appeared in Europe along with
the pocket watch and the Christian moneylenders of the Renaissance. Before
our century neither the poor nor the rich knew of children's dress,
children's games, or the child's immunity from the law. Childhood belonged
to the bourgeoisie. The worker's child, the peasant's child, and the
nobleman's child all dressed the way their fathers dressed, played the way
their fathers played, and were hanged by the neck as were their fathers.
After the discovery of "childhood" by the bourgeoisie all this changed.
Only some churches continued to respect for some time the dignity and
maturity of the young. Until the Second Vatican Council, each child was
instructed that a Christian reaches moral discernment and freedom at the
age of seven, and from then on is capable of committing sins for which he
may be punished by an eternity in Hell. Toward the middle of this century,
middle-class parents began to try to spare their children the impact of
this doctrine, and their thinking about children now prevails in the
practice of the Church.

Technology provides man with discretionary time he can fill either with
making or with doing. The choice between sad unemployment and joyful
leisure is now open for the entire culture. It depends on the institutional
style the culture chooses. This choice would have been unthinkable in an
ancient culture built either on peasant agriculture or on slavery. It has
become inevitable for postindustrial man.

At stake in the choice between the institutional right and left is the
very nature of human life. Man must choose whether to be rich in things or
in the freedom to use them. He must choose between alternate styles of life
and related production schedules.

Highways result from a perversion of the desire and need for mobility
into the demand for a private car. Schools themselves pervert the natural
inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction. Demand for
manufactured maturity is a far greater abnegation of self-initiated
activity than the demand for manufactured goods. Schools are not only to
the right of highways and cars; they belong near the extreme of the
institutional spectrum occupied by total asylums. Even the producers of
body counts kill only bodies. By making men abdicate the responsibility for
their own growth, school leads many to a kind of spiritual suicide.

The manipulative institutions of the right are either socially or
psychologically "addictive." Social addiction, or escalation, consists in
the tendency to prescribe increased treatment if smaller quantities have
not yielded the desired results. Psycho-logical addiction, or habituation,
results when consumers become hooked on the need for more and more of the
process or product. The self-activated institutions of the left tend to be
self-limiting. Unlike production processes which identify satisfaction with
the mere act of consumption, these networks serve a purpose beyond their
own repeated use. An individual picks up the telephone when he wants to say
something to someone else, and hangs up when the desired communication is
over. He does not, teen-agers excepted, use the telephone for the sheer
pleasure of talking into the receiver. If the telephone is not the best way
to get in touch, people will write a letter or take a trip. Right-wing
institutions, as we can see clearly in the case of schools, both invite
compulsively repetitive use and frustrate alternative ways of achieving
similar results.

At both extremes of the spectrum we find service institutions, but on
the right the service is imposed manipulation, and the client is made the
victim of advertising, aggression, indoctrination, imprisonment, or
electroshock. On the left the service is amplified opportunity within
formally defined limits, while the client remains a free agent. Right-wing
institutions tend to be highly complex and costly production processes in
which much of the elaboration and expense is concerned with convincing
consumers that they cannot live without the product or the treatment
offered by the institution. Left-wing institutions tend to be networks
which facilitate client-initiated communication or cooperation.

At the opposite extreme of the spectrum lie institutions distinguished
by spontaneous use-the "convivial" institutions. Telephone link-ups, subway
lines, mail routes, public markets and exchanges do not require hard or
soft sells to induce their clients to use them. Sewage systems, drinking
water, parks, and sidewalks are institutions men use without having to be
institutionally convinced that it is to their advantage to do so.

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 life style 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. The
future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of
action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies. We need a
set of criteria which will permit us to recognize those institutions which
support personal growth rather than addiction, as well as the will to
invest our techno-logical resources preferentially in such institutions of
growth.

Modern bullets and chemicals
are so effective that a few cents' worth, properly delivered to the
intended "client," unfailingly kill or maim. But delivery costs rise
vertiginously; the cost of a dead Vietnamese went from $360,000 in 1967 to
$450,000 in 1969.

Our options are clear enough. Either we continue to believe that
institutionalized learning is a product which justifies unlimited
investment or we rediscover that legislation and planning and investment,
if they have any place in formal education, should be used mostly to tear
down the barriers that now impede opportunities for learning, which can
only be a personal activity.

The discovery that most
learning requires no teaching can be neither manipulated nor planned. Each
of us is personally responsible for his or her own deschooling, and only we
have the power to do it. No one can be excused if he fails to liberate
himself from schooling. People could not free themselves from the Crown
until at least some of them had freed themselves from the established
Church. They cannot free themselves from progressive consumption until they
free themselves from obligatory school.

school is not, by any means, the only modern institution
which has as its primary purpose the shaping of man's vision of reality.
The hidden curriculum of family life, draft, health care, so-called
professionalism, or of the media play an important part in the
institutional manipulation of man's world-vision, language, and demands.
But school enslaves more profoundly and more systematically, since only
school is credited with the principal function of forming critical
judgment, and, paradoxically, tries to do so by making learning about
oneself, about others, and about nature depend on a prepackaged process.
School touches us so intimately that none of us can expect to be liberated
from it by something else.

School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving
education of reality and work of creativity. School prepares for the
alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.
Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in
independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close
themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not
predetermined by institutional definition

In a
schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer's index.

People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience
slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes
secondary, threatening. They do not have to be robbed of their creativity.
Under instruction, they have unlearned to "do" their thing or "be"
themselves, and value only what has been made or could be made.

In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as
they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is
due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive
style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all
schools-the idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when
another person must learn.

This transfer of responsibility from self to institution guarantees
social regression, especially once it has been accepted as an obligation.
So rebels against Alma Mater often "make it" into her faculty instead of
growing into the courage to infect others with their personal teaching and
to assume responsibility for the results. This suggests the possibility of
a new Oedipus story-Oedipus the Teacher, who "makes" his mother in order to
engender children with her. The man addicted to being taught seeks his
security in compulsive teaching. The woman who experiences her knowledge as
the result of a process wants to reproduce it in others.

Most people around the world, then, either do not want or cannot get
modern childhood for their offspring. But it also seems that childhood is a
burden to a good number of those few who are allowed it. Many of them are
simply forced to go through it and are not at all happy playing the child's
role. Growing up through childhood means being condemned to a process of
in-human conflict between self-awareness and the role imposed by a society
going through its own school age. Neither Stephen Daedalus nor Alexander
Portnoy enjoyed childhood, and neither, I suspect, did many of us like to
be treated as children.

The American university has become the final stage of the most all
encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in
history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the
first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive
initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the
first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental
initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of
education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor
social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go
beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory
public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is
taught in them.

Large parts of the general population, however, regard the modern mystic
and the modern heresiarch with alarm. They threaten the consumer economy,
democratic privilege, and the self-image of America. But they cannot be
wished away. Fewer and fewer can be reconverted by patience or coopted by
subtlety for instance, by appointing them to teach their heresy. Hence the
search for means which would make it possible either to get rid of
dissident individuals or to reduce the importance of the university which
serves them as a base for protest.

Only a
generation which grows up without obligatory schools will be able to
recreate the university.

The school system today performs the threefold function common to
powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository
of society's myth, the institutionalization of that myth's contradictions,
and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities
between myth and reality. Today the school system, and especially the
university, provides ample opportunity for criticism of the myth and for
rebellion against its institutional perversions. But the ritual which
demands tolerance of the fundamental contradictions between myth and
institution still goes largely unchallenged, for neither ideological
criticism nor social action can bring about a new society. Only
disenchantment with and detachment from the central social ritual and
reform of that ritual can bring about radical change.

The ability of the university to fix consumer goals is something new. In
many countries the university acquired this power only in the sixties, as
the delusion of equal access to public education began to spread. Before
that the university protected an individual's freedom of speech, but did
not automatically convert his knowledge into wealth. To be a scholar in the
Middle Ages meant to be poor, even a beggar. By virtue of his calling, the
medieval scholar learned Latin, became an outsider worthy of the scorn as
well as the esteem of peasant and prince, burgher and cleric. To get ahead
in the world, the scholastic first had to enter it by joining the civil
service, preferably that of the Church. The old university was a liberated
zone for discovery and the discussion of ideas both new and old. Masters
and students gathered to read the texts of other masters, now long dead,
and the living words of the dead masters gave new perspective to the
fallacies of the present day. The university was then a community of
academic quest and endemic unrest.

In the modern multiversity this community has fled to the fringes, where
it meets in a pad, a professor's office, or the chaplain's quarters. The
structural purpose of the modern university has little to do with the
traditional quest. Since Gutenberg, the exchange of disciplined, critical
inquiry has, for the most part, moved from the "chair" into print. The
modern university has forfeited its chance to provide a simple setting for
encounters which are both autonomous and anarchic, focused yet unplanned
and ebullient, and has chosen instead to manage the process by which
so-called research and instruction are produced.

The university thus has the effect of imposing consumer standards at
work and at home, and it does so in every part of the world and under every
political system. The fewer university graduates there are in a country,
the more their cultivated demands are taken as models by the rest of the
population. The gap between the consumption of the university graduate and
that of the average citizen is even wider in Russia, China, and Algeria
than in the United States. Cars, airplane trips, and tape recorders confer
more visible distinction in a socialist country, where only a degree, and
not just money, can procure them.

Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western
culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical,
and deadly serious. School could not create such an enclave within which
the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically
incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory.
The attendance rule makes it possible for the schoolroom to serve as a
magic womb, from which the child is delivered periodically at the school
days and school year's completion until he is finally expelled into adult
life.

To understand what it
means to deschool society, and not just to reform the educational
establishment, we must now focus on the hidden curriculum of schooling. We
are not concerned here, directly, with the hidden curriculum of the ghetto
streets which brands the poor or with the hidden curriculum of the drawing
room which benefits the rich. We are rather concerned to call attention to
the fact that the ceremonial or ritual of schooling itself constitutes such
a hidden curriculum. Even the best of teachers cannot entirely protect his
pupils from it. Inevitably, this hidden curriculum of schooling adds
prejudice and guilt to the discrimination which a society practices against
some of its members and compounds the privilege of others with a new title
to condescend to the majority. Just as inevitably, this hidden curriculum
serves as a ritual of initiation into a growth-oriented consumer society
for rich and poor alike.

School, by its very nature, tends to make a total claim on the time and
energies of its participants. This, in turn, makes the teacher into
custodian, preacher, and therapist.

In each of these three roles the teacher bases his authority on a
different claim. Theteacher-as-custodian acts as a master of ceremonies,
who guides his pupils through a drawn-out labyrinthine ritual. He
arbitrates the observance of rules and administers the intricate rubrics of
initiation to life. At his best, he sets the stage for the acquisition of
some skill as schoolmasters always have. Without illusions of producing any
profound learning, he drills his pupils in some basic routines.

The teacher-as-moralist substitutes for parents, God, or the state. He
indoctrinates the pupil about what is right or wrong, not only in school
but also in society at large. He stands in loco parentis for each one and
thus ensures that all feel themselves children of the same state.

The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is
paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the
dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his
person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style
of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life.
A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the
child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic
minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.

By definition, children are pupils. The demand for the milieu of
childhood creates an unlimited market for accredited teachers. School is an
institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And
institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming
evidence to the contrary.

We have all learned most of what we know outside school. Pupils do most
of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers. Most
tragically, the majority of men are taught their lesson by schools, even
though they never go to school.

Everyone learns how to live outside school. We learn to speak, to think,
to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick, and to work without
interference from a teacher. Even children who are under a teacher's care
day and night are no exception to the rule. Orphans, idiots, and
schoolteachers' sons learn most of what they learn outside the
"educational" process planned for them.

Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional
wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional
wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us
that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human
beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the
authority of a schoolteacher.

If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning institution,
"childhood" would go out of production. The youth of rich nations would be
liberated from its destructiveness, and poor nations would cease attempting
to rival the childishness of the rich. If society were to outgrow its age
of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present
disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a
school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained.

School initiates, too, the Myth of Unending Consumption. This modern
myth is grounded in the belief that process inevitably produces something
of value and, therefore, production necessarily produces demand. School
teaches us that instruction produces learning. The existence of schools
produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all
our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other
specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been
discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect. In school we
are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the
value of learning increases with the amount of input; and, finally, that
this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates.

In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation
by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the
result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people
learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their
personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.