ron salaj's List: education

• Knowledge is not a set commodity that is passed from the teachers to the students. Students must construct knowledge from knowledge they already possess. Teachers must learn how the students understand the world so that the teacher understands how the student can learn.
• Schools become tools that are used by parents, business and the community to impose their values and beliefs. While no intentional harm is intended, this process often results in the oppression of less privileged persons.
• Trying to escape conflict, we preserve the status quo.

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• What are the theoretical principles of Marxism that should and can come into play in the scientific analysis of the university milieu to which students, along with teachers, research workers and administrators, belong?
• he Marxist concepts of the technical and social divisions of labour.
• They are valid a fortiori for a particular social reality like the university, which belongs for obvious reasons to every modern society, capitalist, socialist or communist.
• A society lives and develops by a labour process carried on by people in a particular mode of pro‑duction. The labour process, which is a total social process, gives to each individual who makes up this society a place in the division of labour. The division of labour thus defines the various jobs [postes] or positions that a society assigns to the individuals who compose it, in a labour process that maintains its life and development.
• Marx has shown that the division of labour has two forms, which are sometimes distinct and sometimes confused, either in the jobs, and the individuals, or in their results; the technical division and the social division of labour.
• (A)
• The technical division of work corresponds to all jobs whose existence is exclusively justified by the technical necessities that define the mode of production at a given moment in its development in a given society.
• Under this relationship an institution like a uni‑versity (corresponding to the technical necessities of economic as well as scientific production by its pedagogic function, and by its major role in scientific development and research) is basically a part of the technical division of labour in a given modern society.
• Its role in the technical division of labour consists of undertaking the pedagogic training [formation] of future technical, scientific and social cadres of the society, and of participating in creative scientific work. Pedagogical training [la formation pédagogique] – that is, the transmission of the knowledge [savoir] that exists in a society, knowledge which conditions the existence and development of the labour process of the society, is a vital necessity for every society; pedagogical training is therefore based above all on the technical division of labour.
• (B)
• The social division of labour expresses a com‑pletely different aspect of the division of labour. Its function is to ensure the work process of the society in the forms of class structure and domination. The social division of labour is therefore only technical in the sense that it reflects the mode (social, political, ideological) of domination in the social work process.
• In this way the state is, with its instruments – army, police, law courts, and so on – and with all the personnel and all the jobs attached to these means of class domination, the basis par excellence of the social division of labour. This division has profound repercussions at every level of the production process.
• The management of a factory is not only a form of the technical division of labour; the greatest part of its commercial and publicity apparatus, and so on, and of its internal apparatus for controlling and repressing the workers (legal or otherwise), comes under the social division of labour. Miners see in the foreman, generally speaking, an ex‑worker risen to the rank of overseer
• Other jobs have a dual func‑tion: technical division and social division united in a single job. The management often puts workers into this social function of control/repression over their comrades.
• Some men are thus given two contradictory functions; if they accept these jobs and obligations, the relation of social forces, at decisive moments, sometimes push them towards the boss and sometimes towards the workers.
• What is traditionally called the ‘independence of the university’ or its freedoms [franchises] (for example the fact that the police may not enter any university establishment without having been invited by the vice chancellor or his representative; the fact that professors are almost always chosen by their peers, etc.) dem‑onstrates the special and ‘privileged’ situation of the university in relation to the social division of labour.
• Why does the university enjoy such ‘privilege’? A long struggle of resistance to power, over centuries, has given the university this special situation which shelters it to some extent from government enterprises – that is, from the class politics of the bourgeoisie.
• The first universities were born in the medi‑aeval ‘free’ cities – that is, freed from feudal political tutelage; for example, Paris and Bologna.
• The great scientific and philosophical debates took place in these universities, in which the fate of modern science and very often the development of modern civilization were at stake. Traditionally the university represents ‘liberal’ values: critical spirit, freedom of scientific research and discussion, and so on. These do not, as some people dangerously say, spring from bourgeois individualism, but from genuine scientific values.
• It would be a serious mistake to confuse the liberty every scientific activity needs, as the very air it breathes, as the basic condition for all scientific research, with the ideology of economic and political ‘liberalism’ of the bourgeoisie.
• It would be extremely dangerous to confuse scientific forms, sometimes necessarily individual, which command in given circumstances al creative scientific activity, with the juridical and political forms of bourgeois individualist ideology.
• (For centuries scientific discoveries were often the work of isolated individuals: Marx himself made his discovery alone, with Engels; Lenin worked alone in two or three decisive moments for the history of humanity.)
• To amalgamate individual research (sometimes absolutely indispensable) with bourgeois judicial, political and ideological individualism, to oppose collective forms to the well‑grounded individual or liberal forms of scientific research; to condemn the latter as if they were manifestations of the bourgeoisie’s ‘liberal’ or ‘individualist’ ideology; these are very dangerous points of view, as much from the pedagogic as from the political and ideological standpoint. For Marxists, it is not the form in which knowledge is either transmitted or absorbed or discovered that constitutes the ‘decisive link’, but the quality of the knowledge itself.
• University liberalism is today a real political value in the struggle against the transformation of the edu‑cational organization into an instrument subject to the objectives of the ruling technocracy – that is, to the objectives of the monopolistic bourgeoisie. To neglect this value would be to commit a political mistake.

  • what EU has done with Bologna reform.
• To alienate academics because, being ‘liberal’, they are ‘old hat’, and to violate the university’s liberal traditions, would be to commit a political mistake. To condemn ‘individualism’ in general, without carefully distinguishing bourgeois ideological individualism from the need for individual research in al cases, would be, according to the particular instance, either a scientific or a political error, or both (and particularly in the case where individual work is carried on in rational collective forms that can only flourish where there is a development and rationalization over and above that of the individual work itself).
• Now, what is remarkable is that in the case of the university the social division of labour, and therefore class domination, comes massively into play, but not only – or even mainly – where student and non‑student theorists look for it. It comes massively into play, and in a ‘blinding’ way (which doubtless is why one does not always ‘see’ it), in the very object of intellectual work; in the knowledge the university is commissioned to distribute to the students.
• One can easily see the general effects of the social division of labour – that is, class domination – in certain serious government measures (control of the appointments of teachers by head teachers [préfets], creation of the job of general secretary of national education, politic manoeuvrings behind the nomination of vice chancellors, projects for reforming teaching along technocratic, anti‑democratic lines, etc.).
• Gov‑ernmental projects to reform teaching are the most dangerous, for they will be able to lean on certain erroneous claims based on theoretical confusions. (For example, the most enlightened technocrats are not, in principle, hostile to ‘student wages’, with a good limited intake [of students] and suitably precocious professional training, one that is detestable to science but useful to technocracy.) In any case, the struggle for university reform goes beyond the framework of the student struggle alone, and concerns the whole teaching body in its three levels – technical, teaching and research institutions; it also concerns the whole nation, which is to say in what most directly concerns us, the workers’ organizations, the worker’s unions, and in particular the CGT and the Communist Party. The battle to be waged calls for the union of all abilities and of all university and popular forces.
• If yes, then its distribution really corresponds to technical necessity, and then the pedagogic function is essen‑tially healthy, even if its forms are relatively ‘old’ and need reforming.
• a true science?
• Is the knowledge distributed
• Is the knowledge distributed
• a pure ideology
• If yes, then education is in the service of an ideology, and therefore of a class policy, even if the ‘forms’ of teaching are very ‘modern’.
• As in certain subjects and courses?
• Is the nature of the knowledge that is taught doubtful, are the ‘sciences’ that are taught still uncertain, problematic, without a definite status, hesitating between ideology and science, and gener‑ally settling at the level of techniques shot through with ideology? Then the pedagogic function is itself ambiguous, with two uses, one part technical, the other politico‑ideological, whether the forms within which this half-knowledge is distributed are ‘outdated’ or modern.
• The number one strategic point where class domi‑nation over the minds of researchers, teachers and students is at stake is the nature of the knowledge taught, knowledge which a class division cuts into two: science on the one hand and ideology on the other.
• The pedagogic function has as its object the trans‑mission of a determinate knowledge to subjects who do not possess it. Therefore the pedagogic situation is based on the absolute condition of an inequality between a knowledge and a lack of knowledge.
• Those to whom society transmits, through its peda‑gogical institutions, the knowledge that it has decided they should assimilate, represent the side of non‑knowledge, or, if you prefer (since a non‑knowledge is also a certain knowledge), the side of unequal–inferior knowledge.
• Those whom society puts in charge of transmitting to the non‑knowers the knowledge that they possess represent the side of knowledge, or those who have unequal‑superior knowledge.
• The famous pupil–teacher, lecturer–student, relationship is the technical expression of this fundamental pedagogic relationship.
• As a general rule society gives the job of teacher to past students who have become teachers and who are therefore older than their pupils. But teach‑ers can, in certain cases (adult education, retraining courses, etc.) be younger than their pupils; this is very frequently the case during periods of great political and social transformation, for instance during mass literacy campaigns (the USSR after 1917, China after 1949, and Cuba or Algeria today), or for giving basic education to political leaders who have risen directly from the masses (e.g. the Rabotfak in the USSR hailed by their alumnus Khrushchev).
• In any case, at least in non‑primitive societies, the pupil–teacher relationship is not based on an age difference, but on the funda‑mental pedagogical relationship between a knowing or knowledge [savoir] and the non-knowledge of this same knowledge.
• A slogan which proclaims ‘The Sorbonne for the Students!’ should be examined under this precise relationship. If this slogan means the Sorbonne does not belong to the police, it is correct. But the Sorbonne does not belong only to the students; it also belongs to their teachers, and to the organization that enables the pedagogical relation to function, and so also to its ‘technical’ administrators. To forget this, in a slogan directed against a government that allows the police to enter the Sorbonne, is pedagogically a mistake, and politically an insult to the convictions of the majority of the teachers.
• To stress the age difference or difference of gen‑erations in order to combat a number of admittedly backward institutions can also be a mistake. It’s not the age of people or of institutions that automatically determines their pedagogical value, but the actual role they fulfil in teaching.
• No pedagogic questions, which all presuppose unequal knowledge between teachers and students, can be settled on the basis of pedagogic equality between teachers and students. It is a legitimate claim that students be represented on all the consultative management committees of a faculty or of a school, assuming that they are old enough to attend univer‑sity. But students are mistaken in demanding that in these pedagogical organizations their representatives should have powers of decision equal to those of the representatives of the teachers, for this does not correspond with the reality of the pedagogical func‑tion. Student demand for equal representation or even majority representation in the management of student activities outside the teaching situation is valid, for it corresponds to a social and political reality and not to a pedagogical reality. Student demands for a representation that corresponds to their position and their importance in the consultative administrative committees (not strictly speaking pedagogical) are also justifiable. But it is erroneous to transfer a demand (for equal representation) from one sector where it is objectively justified (the coordination of activities) to a sector where it is not justified (the coordination of syllabuses and of properly pedagogical institutions).
• When students want their work relationships with their teachers, which generally presuppose even in higher education an inequality between a knowledge and the non‑knowledge of that knowledge, to be organized as if there existed a genuine equality of knowledge between teachers and students, they risk committing themselves to a confusion. The attraction that scientific research exercises can foster this error.
• But research doesn’t just presuppose an equality of knowledge, but an equality in the knowledge that is indispensable for conducting true research, rather than its simulacrum.
• Students should convince themselves of the need for long training in order really to do research, unless they mean by research the technical division of piecemeal investigations, dubbed research by capitalist society, which abound in both the natural sciences and the humanities, and where the researcher is more a blind operative of fragmented tasks arranged by others than a true researcher – these are ‘semi‑researchers’, victims of the consequences of the positivist ideology that dominates the field of research itself. In any case, we must not call the mere personal or collective rediscovery of an already existing knowledge research – otherwise we would have to take bibliographical work for scientific research.
• determined collective work only has a meaning and direction if it is led by teachers or their assistants, teachers who have exactly that knowledge which the students need to acquire, and who have the scientific technique for transmitting that knowledge. This scien‑tific technique is cal1ed ‘pedagogy’.
• Such an anarcho‑‘democratic’ conception of pedagogy can only lead students to disappointment. It is absurd to waste time rediscovering by uncertain methods, and at the cost of considerable effort, knowledge to which there exists a path that is infinitely more direct, since it is rational.
• They also risk alienating the goodwill of their pro‑fessors, who are thus unjustly treated with suspicion in their own pedagogical activity, and whose knowledge is held to be superfluous.
• They may even alienate them politically, to the point of transforming possible allies and comrades in struggle into enemies of the politi‑cal or trade‑union cause that the students defend.
• By retarding their scientific training, students who content themselves with ‘participationist’ methods, through which they give themselves the ‘democratic’ illusion of knowledge, will get stuck for a long time in a half‑knowledge – that is, in a state that does not give them the weapons of scientific learning.
• It is no accident that a reactionary bourgeois or ‘technocratic’ government prefers half‑knowledge in all things, and that, on the contrary, the revolutionary cause is always indissolubly linked with knowledge, in other words science. It is much easier to manipu‑late intellectuals with a weak scientific training than intellectuals with a strong one, to manipulate them and submit them to a policy which, whatever certain people say, is being implemented with considerable skill. What the government fears above all is the scientific and critical training of the intellectuals it is nonetheless obliged to train, in order to provide itself with cadres and teachers.

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