124. Schools have a huge social cost

124. Schools have a huge social costOr/ schools shape a sick society

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children. Nelson Mandela

We all know there are many ‘problems’ in society. In school we are educated to be part of a sick, unequal, distorted, damaging and damaged society without questioning the structures, powers, oppressions and assumptions of institutions that are responsible for making our world the way it is. ‘Success’ in school comes from conforming and regurgitating on exams to get pieces of paper to allow you to slot into slightly higher up positions in a sick and distorted hierarchy.

Just as a person with a hammer sees every problem as a nail, a government with an education system sees every social ill, from crime to poverty, from teenage pregnancy to homelessness, from ill-health to disaffection as being solvable by more education. The illusion that if you have enough schooling then you won’t be poor does nothing to tackle the existence of poverty or allow you to question that poverty is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. Homelessness is inevitable where there aren’t enough decent, affordable homes for the people needing them and you don’t need GCSE maths to understand that. Crime and disaffection are much bigger problems in unequal societies as are health problems of all sorts.

Forces that exist within contemporary education can flip from liberal progressive education, focussing on the individual, to “back to basics” focussing on obedience and conformity. Quarter and Mathews argue that these are linked to the business cycle: when business is good, there is a move towards a liberal focus; when business is bad the shift is to more authoritarianism. (O’Sullivan) Neither of these approaches questions the “consumer-industrial order”. (O’Sullivan p51) In the UK we have been locked into a ‘back to basics’ model for a long time, with feeble attempts at “personalised education” being swept aside by claims of economic need.

Schooled mindsThe products of schooling, the schooled minds that emerge at the end of an industrial schooling process, are schooled not to question authority, to fear it, to feel powerless. This makes people easier to manipulate and control-by advertisers, TV celebrities, politicians. The socialisation of schooling is akin to brainwashing. Kozol tells us that: “Indoctrination, in a nation dedicated to the idea of free conscience, must be far more subtle than in nations that are openly totalitarian”. (Kozol The night p4)

When educators see their role as preparing their students to slot into the social order, they are unlikely to question it. (O’Sullivan) Students, who lose the power to question, to clearly see injustice, corruption, vested interests and corporate take-over of the planet, also lose themselves. The resulting broken people, addicted to things and spending to fill the gap inside, cannot find contentment.

All the things that aren’t learned- from the useful to the important, from creativity to questioning, hamper individual development and social functioning. The mistaken perceptions induced in the schooled mind were elaborated on by Illich: “medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, the rat race for productive work”. (Illich p9) The social cost of these distortions is immense. Individuals, communities, nations and the planet suffer damage because we can no longer connect to ourselves, our communities or nature. (see Separation chapter)

This puts power into the hands of institutions that have no conscience. Corruption seems to be the norm in all institutions- from lying to cover your back, to cheating to advance personal agendas over communal survival; from abusing power for personal gain to producing propaganda to hide reality. This type of immorality or even amorality is fostered in school. (See dishonesty) Dore argued that organisations can become wholly corrupt and that good men and women get corrupted by corrupt organisations. He observed that this is more likely where a high proportion have experienced “learning to get a job” schooling. (Dore pxiv)

Our schools have become those corrupt organisations, corrupting all who pass through them. By producing masses of corrupted and damaged young people, we create a society lacking any moral direction, often lacking any morality at all.

Separation and disaffectionThe multiple separations in school (see separations section) fragment individuals, communities, families and societies. Genuine connections become harder when bonds to people, places and nature are damaged in early childhood. It’s everyone for themselves. Individuals against the world. Succeed or die trying.

Where communities are destroyed by schooling and hostile government policies, there are now calls to centre all communities on school, for schools to become a 10 hour focal point. Institutions cannot adequately replace the connections of affection, especially when children are so separated from the rest of society, forced to stay in their young people’s prisons all day.
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Social decline is often blamed on parents inability to ‘parent’ (read ‘control’) their kids. This seems to necessitate teaching parents how to parent and getting children away from their feckless parents at younger and younger ages. Those who cannot connect to their own children have been so separated from themselves, their family, their community, and their peers for so many generations that the structures are not there to raise children with love and consideration for there needs. When we have learned that everything needs to be taught, we have mothers having to turn to the latest childcare guru, or Super Nanny, because they have not been mothered or observed mothering as they and their mothers have been age-segregated for generations.

Those that accept their teaching, or develop nicely schooled minds, neat work, ticking all the right boxes, have their humanity warped and perpetuate a damaged society. Those who are disaffected are differently damaged and contributed to the destructiveness of unlived lives that seem a constant in 21st-century Britain. Those disaffected, who drop out or are thrown out, those school failures, do not disappear. “They remain in the community, and they comprise an endless and growing population dedicated to ‘getting even’ with a society that has reviled and rejected them in school.” (TAASA p186)

The angry young men and women, whose childhoods have been robbed, who either have the bits of paper and ask “is this it” or who don’t and feel cheated and discarded, are those who are going to be running the show, eager to get their own back on a world that has denied their needs.

Holt point out that there is no experience from which we learn nothing. “People doing moronic work learn to hate their work and themselves for having to do it- and in time all those who do not have to do it“. (Holt IOE p12) The moronic work exists inside and outside school. Even the highly educated seem unable to escape totally from the degradation of the quality of the work humans are required to do when we are all simply cogs in huge global industrial machine.

Politics
When the school environment demands behaviour such as dogmatism, intellectual timidity and fear of change it shapes our political and social lives. (TAASA p24)
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Many vested interests do not want the youth (or any of us) to ask relevant and pertinent questions about important issues in our lives. Why are their poor people? How come we have record levels of obesity here and massive malnutrition in other countries? How come it’s okay to cut down forests for disposable chopsticks or to graze cattle for burgers? Who benefits when the markets slump? Who makes a fortune out of the misery of millions? How do they get away with it?

The vested interests of big business and huge institutions and bureaucracies from schools to the health service, from the military to the police, and governments do not want us to ask any of these questions, because they fear we may find out the answers.

Pushing for positive change usually requires groups of people acting together for a cause, for a positive move forward, for a common goal. Schools’ separations and competitiveness, setting one against the other, act to make stable groups less likely. In the current social climate, with erosion of rights, of privacy, of freedom, campaigns require huge energy to fight to stay still, to try to prevent the slide into totalitarianism and fascism that threatens us all.
The flimsy pretence of democracy is falling apart. Putting a cross on a bit of paper, or more likely not being bothered to because it seems and probably is pointless, is not democracy. Harber described a democratic person as one who celebrates social and political diversity, and regards all people as having equal access and political rights as human beings. He went on to describe further attributes including the ability to reason, open-mindedness, fairness and being able to co-operate, bargain, compromise and accommodate other views. (Harber C)

The global economic system, sold through schooling, pushes us further away from this. The values that we need to foster to enable planetary and social survival include the value of respect for those weaker than ourselves. This must include children. Alice Miller tells us that every brand of fascism lacks this respect, and respect for life and its laws, leading to “psychic death and castrating the soul with the aid of its ideology.” (Miller FYOG p64)

The global model we are trained to see as good and inevitable and just and fair (because, of course, competition is all of those things-see competition) does not provide our needs. Those needs include “meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal or simple justice” (JTG DuD p??)
And, overall, connection to each other so we work together rather than alone at our desk, towards a more humanitarian future.
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Poverty and poor countriesThe poor in rich societies and poor societies generally get a worse deal from the schooling imposed on the young. Illich argues that the mere existence of schools acts to discourage and disabled poor people from taking control of their own learning. (Illich) The disaffected and rejected lose the ability to question the structures that oppress and disenfranchise them. The export of Western-style schooling to poor countries, pretending that ‘modernisation’ will lift these countries out of poverty, is a travesty. Aid to schools, but not for local food production, contracts for Western businesses, buying into drug company lies, being guinea pigs in drug trials, Tarmacking over the rainforests and vast environmental degradation, low wage slave labour for overseas companies to make profits and cut corners on safety, life in call centre-prisons as a reward for learning English: this is the modernisation we export.

O’Sullivan tells us that it is now becoming clear that what we call development in the northern hemisphere is the major source of underdevelopment in the southern hemisphere. (O’Sullivan p129) Schools play their role in selling this lie.

What will lift these countries out of poverty is fair trade, debt cancellation, ownership of their own land, use of land for domestic food production, rather than cash cropping dictated by structural adjustment and funnily enough, they are not on the curriculum. Training young minds to focus on irrelevancies allows powerful governments and commercial enterprises to literally get away with murder.

In poorer countries, schools separate generations from stewardship of the land, from indigenous knowledge and practices substituting a taught curriculum. In Kenya, traditional inter-cropping of maize and beans was abandoned in taught agriculture, where a monoculture of beans were grown and assessment made simply on yield. Those unfortunate enough to have a plot near the entrance, where cows could come in and eat their plants, were bound to fail.

Dismissal of all indigenous practices, including local languages, without questioning what is of benefit to individuals, communities and the planet results in a loss of connection to previous generations and to nature. It causes a schism, a rift between the schooled and their unschooled elders, whose knowledge and wisdom is judged contemptible and backwards by the schooled mind. Imposed criticism of cultural practices from outside, entrenches them. Questioning has to come from within. Schooling of girls, for instance, when that schooling is profoundly sexist and exists in an environment of sexual threat, does not improve the position of women. In places where high attendance of girls in school and improved status of women coexist (e.g. Cuba, Kerala) evidence indicates that the status increased first by other means before girls have access to what boys have. (may need reference)
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As O’Sullivan points out education is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. (O’Sullivan) Its entrenches harmful practices, it contaminates the minds and bodies and souls of those who pass through it. Holt put it like this: “Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, of its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas and credentials now seems to me the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind”.(Holt IOE p4)

And it is an invention, not a natural or normal or inevitable phenomenon, not the only way. One of school’s more disturbing features is that it stops many from seeing that there is an alternative, that there could even be one. And if there is, then it has to look like school. (See school is the only way)

Those whose minds have not been warped by this process, those unschooled who are adept at ‘crap detecting‘, would not tolerate the invasion of privacy and erosion of freedom that goes under the guise of ‘national security‘, The unschooled can question corporate propaganda, political spin and their own oppression.

This is perceived as a huge threat by those in power. Recent attempts to regulate home education out of existence unless it looks just like school, with threats to remove children to have them indoctrinated elsewhere, tells us just how much of a threat a free-thinking mind can be.

This tells us, more than anything else, that we are doing the right thing by freeing our children from mental slavery. We need more forces for freedom, for rights, for justice, for the needs of humans and the living planet to be prioritised over profits of the few. Then we can begin to build a society worth living in.


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