125. School damages humanity and autonomy

125. School damages humanity and autonomy
I am the survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers; children poisoned by educated physicians; infants killed by trained nurses; women and babies shot and burned by high school graduates. So I am suspicious of education.
My request to you is, help your children become more human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human. Letter from head teacher in US to his teachers at the beginning of each academic year. Quoted in Harber C p15


Humanity
JTG tells us that no-one survives schools with their humanity intact “not kids, not teachers, not administrators, not parents” (JTG DuD p51) I consider humanity to be our ability to connect, to care and to show compassion for all living creatures including ourselves. By dismissing awe for the natural world, damaging our connections to ourselves and others and stifling development of profound human qualities, we do our children a great disservice.

The outcomes of our inhumane institutions are to be seen all around us. TAASA talks of students who endure schooling coming out as “passive, acquiescent, dogmatic, intolerant, authoritarian, inflexible, conservative personalities, who desperately need to resist change in an effort to keep their illusion of certainty intact”. (TAASA p217) We have industrialised our children and denied their humanity. As a result, they are “mistrustful of intimacy”, they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected and addicted to distraction. (JTG 7 Lessons p6)

We do not allow them to grow and develop in whole and connected ways, as we fragment their existence, separate them, coerce them and deny their needs, rights and freedoms. The cruelty we see in our playgrounds, our classrooms, on our TVs, in our foreign policy, in our war on terror is not natural. It has to be learned. As Holt, points out, we have to be trained to tolerate or enjoy suffering and pain. (Holt IOE p114). This is exactly how we are training our young people, by trapping them in institutions that brutalise them.

To become a caring adult it is necessary to be cared about, respected and taken seriously. (CR p178). In order to be able to grow, trust, share feelings, take risks and ask questions children need to feel safe. (Kohn PBR p239) We stifle our young, and then become surprised when a damaged humanity acts out in destructive and cruel ways. Erich Fromm told us that: “Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life”. (Fear of freedom) The strong drive for power, domination, and violence and possession and consumption of goods comes from unsatisfied needs. (MaxNeef cited in Karen Parr’s Dissertation p61) Those needs are for emotional connection, for acknowledgement and for freedom to grow.

Lucinda Green MBE, horsewoman, left school at 15 with no qualifications. Here is what she says about school:

I was stagnated. I couldn’t move forwards or backwards. The whole system had only one effect on me: complete turnoff. My mother took me away. From that moment onwards, it was all flying, wings flapping. I got to an age when I needed to be able to open my wings, and I simply couldn’t. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen is the age of initiation, and it is when most people in the Western world are absolutely unable to blossom out, because the schooling system prevents it.
(quoted in nlp for lazy learning p151)

Our ability to spread our wings is being hampered as young people’s wings are now being clipped until aged 18. This is to prevent them ever being able to fly.

It is like training elephants. When they are young they are tethered by a stake firmly attached to the ground. They learn not to pull. When they are older and stronger, they can be tethered to an unattached stake and they don’t try to escape. (except for Nelly the elephant) (I have this in somewhere else??)
Schools don’t produce people to live in courage and conviction. (Kozol) They act to destroy any sense of justice. By creating highly skilled, but numb and brutal people to be part of the ruling class or the pawns of it, we are creating a loyalty to a “murderous nation and an unjust social order”. (Kozol the night p121)

The inhumane jobs schooling prepares us for continue the damage of our lives. We are all affected by the resentment and anger of unlived lives, of potential confined to boxes to tick, of power crushed and rebellion averted by a brainwashing to believe in our impotence.
125. autonomy p2
Autonomy By autonomy, I mean the ability to think and act for yourself. Levine defines it as: “Self-direction, the experience of potency and the capacity and ability to self govern” (CR p4). Autonomy is about personal responsibility and control. In institutions like school, we are held responsible for actions but are given no control. Schools talk about children behaving responsibly, by which they mean doing as they are told and doing as they are expected to do and doing nothing else. This is not responsibility or autonomy. It is simply compliance and obedience. It creates dependency and acts against young people becoming independent and self directed, and prevents them acting with agency, with meaning and genuine control.

By demanding absolute compliance schools lock children into a set number of ways of responding or resisting to maintain some autonomy and integrity. Acting dumb allows kids to subvert control without punishment, though they may get labelled and acquire dumbness for life. (Holt, Gatto) Active resistance becomes labelled as illness, as mental illness in need of diagnosis and treatment. This is one way school robs agency, denies reasons for behaviour and damages autonomy. Those kids labelled with ODD, CD, ADHD are trying to assert control over their own lives, even if is in destructive ways. Some try to escape with suicide, truancy, school refusal or drugs. Those who conform don’t fare much better. Some respond to the robbing of their autonomy in ways that become seen as illnesses-depression, anxiety and stress.

The stress of being who you are not tells in time, with dissociation from self and confusion over who you are. Forcing children to do and be what they can’t and aren’t has consequences for the child, the institution and society as a whole. The creation of dependent humans “unable to fill their own hours” (JTG speech 31/1/90) is the primary outcome. We are extending childhood and dependence to age 20 and compulsion to attend to someone else’s lessons to age 18. This acts to prevent the development of strategies and values and identities that allow mature, self-determined adults to emerge. An ad man’s dream. We trick children into believing that they can grow up independent and free because our social order needs people to think themselves unmanaged to enable them to be controlled with maximum success. (Galbraith in Kozol the night)

Being self-directed and doing as you love, leads to a lot of resentment among those who do as they hate, do as they are told, and do as they should. (I want to add the story about do as you’re told, do as you should and do as you love, but need to copy it again). This explains why many want children to suffer, to be made to do what they hate “for their own good”. As Alice Miller points out, we justify our cruelty to children by telling them and us that what we are doing is for their own good. (Miller FYOG)

We destroy children’s confidence in themselves, their choices, their abilities by telling them constantly, that they are wrong, not good enough that they can never be good enough. Freire noted, while working with adults “So often do they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning anything that they become convinced of their own unfitness” (Freire and Macedo p61) This is what children learn at school.
125. autonomy p3
School plays a major role in creating the oppressed in society (which includes the majority): those who have learned to become incapable, to doubt their own abilities, to fear exposure of their inadequacies and to accept their lowly position in an unjust hierarchy. By robbing children of their power, we create a society of easily manipulated, directionless individuals who cannot perceive clearly the damaging institutions in our society or begin to see ways they can act to transform them.

Meaning
We are meaning making beings. When immersed in meaningless busywork for the majority of our childhoods, our ability to create meaning and purpose in our lives becomes hampered. For our lives to have meaning, we require: “inspiration, and presence, and beauty and caring and community” (Thomas Berry in O’Sullivan pxiii). The role of purpose, values, ideals, possibilities, and qualities, (O’Sullivan p 43) is undermined by a schooling with purposes of control and coercion, values of competition and conformity, ideals of boxes ticked, curtailed possibilities and denial of true qualities.
Gatto argues that we find meaning in family, friends, nature, service, ceremonies and privacy, among other things. (JTG 7 Lessons) But we are schooled to look for meaning in a grade, in purchased items, a job title, a number. In his classic book “Man’s search for meaning” holocaust survivor Victor Frankl talks of the existential vacuum that results from loss of meaning in life: “No instinct tells him what he has to do, no tradition tells him what he ought to do, sometimes he doesn’t even know what he wants to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do ( conformity) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism)” (Frankl p128) We are creating children who are “ethically incompetent within a time of torment”. (Kozol p13) School teaches us that we do not have the power to change the world or the responsibility to do so. (Kozol)
125. autonomy p4
To survive as a species and as a planet we need to rediscover meaning, purpose and hope, but they do not show up on any curriculum. To be honest, if these were to be taught in schools it would no doubt be counter-productive. By losing our autonomy and humanity we lose hope. By sacrificing our children to the needs of the state and big business we rob them of meaning and their capacity to create it. And their hope for a better future.

The children are our hope. They are our future. Enabling them to hold on to their humanity, develop their autonomy and use their power in positive ways to push for justice, compassion, truth, trust, connection and life is our only hope of having a future worth living in, or any future at all.