By Shawn McDougal

In this essay I argue a single contentious thesis: the only way for education to be a tool of empowerment and not a tool of oppression is if we get rid of institutionalized schooling as we know it. 1

My argument is primarily aimed towards two audiences. For convenience I call them the “multiculturalists” and the “affirmative-activists”. 2 In our imagined conversation, of which this essay is but one turn, the multiculturalists argue that the main problem with schooling is that it is Euro-centric, culturally biased in such a way that non-Europeans feel alienated in the classroom setting. Multiculturalists say that non-whites will not be alienated from the school environment, will thrive, once the schools teach them to be proud of their own culture, to know their own people’s history. Some of the affirmative-activists agree with the multiculturalists, some don’t, but all of them say that the real problem is not what is taught so much as who has access to what resources. For affirmative-activists, the main problem with the education system is that it’s unfair: Some people go to well-endowed, well-staffed schools, where they receive quality educations, whereas other people go to under-staffed, under-resourced schools, where the quality of learning is low. Both the multiculturalists and the affirmative-activists argue that the biases in the current educational structure, the inequalities in the “playing field”, are the main cause of alienation and oppression among people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

What my response is to the multiculturalists and the affirmative-activists, is that even if things like history and literature were taught in a way that respected the values and histories of all cultural groups, even if all kids had access to equal educational resources and funding, institutionalized schooling would still fail to serve kids properly, would still fail to be a means of liberation or empowerment. On the contrary, school would still be a powerful tool of social oppression.

I always thought schooling somehow made people better. Growing up, I was always told how smart I was by the adults I met, how far I’d go someday. I was always reading some book or looking through the twenty-dollar microscope I’d gotten at the toy store or browsing through the library. I looked around me at the drug addicts, the winos, the broken families, the people who seemed to be near the bottom of the barrel of social worth, and I just knew that their problems were due to lack of education. The way I thought education made people better wasn’t merely in terms of choices and social opportunity; it went much deeper than that. I thought that school made people wiser. The more schooling someone had, the hipper they would be about life, the universe, and everything in general. Since I wanted to be hip about life, the universe, and everything in general, I was an early convert to the doctrine of education, a true believer in the gospel of schooling.

When I first heard about and then got a scholarship to attend a prep school at the age of 14, it was like my dream was finally coming true, my vision was finally going to be realized. I was going to be away from the unchallenging, uninspired schooling I’d endured for so many years. I was the long-toiling provincial parishioner who was finally going to Rome, the ardent believer finally on the Hajj to Mecca.

The prep school I attended was a very elite one. The second-oldest college preparatory school in the nation, it regularly sent the majority of its graduating seniors on to Ivy League schools. Although the prep school professed to be an exemplar of Socratic ideals of learning, teaching its students “how to think” in classes centered on discussion at a round table, the learning environment there was very stifling and competitive. Most students were there because-thanks to socio-economic privilege-they’d been well-trained at playing the school game. They were good at figuring out what the teachers wanted, cramming it in for their exams, and spewing it out in their essays. Their schooling, along with their ambitious parents, had helped instill in the vast majority of them a sense of self-esteem that was tied to social prestige and “success” in a respectable profession. The dominant attitude towards both the curriculum and extracurriculum was one of cynically doing whatever it took to get into “the right college”. It was here that I first heard the terms “brown-nose” and “kiss-up”. This was supposed to be the best school in the country, one of the very pinnacles of learning.

What I’d believed all my life was some ennobling process, making people better and wiser, turned out to be a sham. For the people who had the greatest amount of resources and the highest quality of education, learning had lost any sense of intrinsic value. The wealthy, well-schooled kids, kept too busy “succeeding” to actually do any thinking, were prisoners of a system that inhibited their independent thought and kept them blind to the larger world outside their gilded cages.

I was profoundly disillusioned.

Although I was often uninspired by or frustrated with school, I’ve had some truly incredible learning experiences. What is notable about each experience is that it took place outside the normal institutional structure of school. Every time, it’s been about something I was motivated about for myself, not for my teachers or parents.

In the summer after the eleventh grade, after dropping out of prep school, I got a scholarship to study Spanish in Spain. It was so delightful! I’d studied Spanish for two years before that, in an academic setting, so I knew the basics of grammar and a decent amount of vocabulary. But nothing in my previous exposure could compare to the thrill of total immersion. Every new accent was a joy to hear, every new expression, every new joke, was a puzzle to figure out, a mysterious present to wonder about, a toy to play with, and a tool to make my own. I’d ask my Spanish friends to tell me all the expressions they knew for saying different things, and write them all down. I saw how fuzzy and fluid language is, how expressions can mean approximately the same thing but be used in different situations, have different nuances, how a given expression can have a certain meaning in one situation, but have different nuances in another. The language came alive!

By the end of my two months there I was fluent. I’d learned more in those two months than I could’ve possibly learned in ten years of formal schooling. My motivation wasn’t based on passing the next test so I could quickly forget it and just get on with my life. What I was learning was an intimate part of my life and my experiences.

In order to analyze a social institution, it is crucial that we are aware of the oft covert metaphors which inform its operation. When we’ve examined a system’s underlying ideo-logic then we can understand its contradictions.

Our current model of education is based on two de-humanizing metaphors of learning. First, there is the “mass-production” or “assembly line” metaphor of education. There is a certain pre-ordained set of criteria or standards that the “products” of the system (the students) must fulfill at every point along the assembly line. The “workers” on the line, the teachers/professors, are employed to “fix” and “mould” the product to the proper specifications, while the “supervisors” or “managers”, the principals, deans, etc., make sure everything runs smoothly. Testing and grades are the assembly line’s “quality control”. Products which fail quality control get sent back or labelled “inferior”.

A second metaphor that powerfully informs our institutional approach to learning is the “student-as-container” metaphor. “Knowledge” or “information” is understood as a substance that the teachers must pour into the students. The students are successful insofar as they passively swallow and faithfully regurgitate what they are fed. “Quality of education” is measured in terms of quantity of information transferred per unit time, as in credits per semester or chapters per week. “Intelligence”, of course, is also understood to be a measurable quantity, perhaps some distilled essence of the knowledge-substance that the kids are fed.

Students who refuse to assume a passive position, to “take what’s good for them”, children whose spirits are too active to be satisfied by the schooling environment, kids who refuse to let the school game define them by structuring how they spend their time, are “problem kids” or “behavioral cases” or, most demeaning, “stupid”. They are “broken containers” to be fixed, or discarded, as is expedient.

Both the mass-production metaphor and the student-as-container metaphor lead to a disempowering and hence de-humanizing role for the students. In a system where they are mere products, judged by and valued for their fulfilling of the standards set by others, acted upon and subject to the will of the authorities, the only way for most students to survive is to bend to the system, to ultimately see themselves not as self-determining agents in but as passive objects of a structure in which they have no say. It is this enforced passivity that is most damaging to the human psyche.

To people who decry the apathy and lack of politcal participation on the part of many Americans, I say, Look to the schools for the roots of apathy, the roots of resignation. It is there where we first learn to be passive towards our own environment. Passivity is a necessary tool for survival in school.

It is amongst the college-educated that the truest believers in the system predominate-most of them arrive thus far precisely because they learn to identify their own values with those of the system. By internalizing their oppression, they learn to love Big Brother.

It is the triumph of an oppressive system, such as slavery or patriarchy or corporate-controlled media, when the people shaped by that system cannot imagine any other.

Most well-schooled people I talk to have never even considered the kind of analysis I present to them. They are so used to playing the game, so used to performing for the authorities, so used to fear and guilt being their guides, that they earnestly believe that this is the only way to learn. They forget everything they knew as toddlers: you don’t need coercion or fear to have curiosity and the will to learn.

Healthy children are initially very eager to explore the world, and have little or no self-consciousness about asking questions of the world and of people around them, little self-consciousness about expressing themselves. They are natural explorers, natural scientists, natural communicators. Institutionalized schooling changes this. The enforced passivity towards the very process that shapes them, the fundamental lack of agency in their dealings with their environment, conspire to transform children into cynical and fear-driven people that care little about the world outside their immediate comprehension or short-sighted material or social gain, people that are afraid to ask questions or voice their unique perspectives lest they “look stupid”, people that care more about fitting in than finding out.

In an institution where the maintenance of authority is paramount, there are many lessons to be learned. Instead of pursuing what is interesting or engaging, we learn to pursue what is acceptable. Instead of learning about self-determination, we learn about “self-discipline”, which means (paradoxically) being controlled by the opinions of others, disciplined by a power-structure: we are “self-disciplined” precisely to the degree that we lack a strong independent self. Instead of genuine encounter with people, we learn to substitute inert “politeness”. In place of honesty and creativity, we learn to substitute “maturity” and “normality”. (I tell you, to the degree that a person is “polite” and “mature”, that person is a mindless and soulless automaton! It is for “algorithmic” people such as this that we will very soon have reliable AI programs.)

Institutional education, in all its guises, multicultural or otherwise, is anathema to real human empowerment because it is based on the belief that there is some program that everyone should follow, whether they want to or not. It is a system where other people decide for us what we are to learn, when we are to learn, how we are to learn. It is part of a larger program of technocratic social control, a system where everyone is assigned their appropriate place by an “objective” and “rational” policy-making elite. Such a system seeks to destroy individuality or unpredictability, seeks to destroy what makes humans more interesting than machines. Perhaps before we’ve ever succeeded in making machines like people, we’ll already have made people like machines.

Technocratic thinking would have us believe that a human being, the value of human life, is quantifiable. So, for instance, in order to make our economy more ecologically sustainable, we don’t talk about wasteful, greed-driven short-sightedness, and how we can change that sort of consciousness in people. No. Instead, we learn to talk about “externalities” and “pollution credits”, as if such profound concepts as health or quality of life were mere numbers.

Institutionalized education reinforces this belief, this ideology of quantification. Part of the program of schooling is to instill within students this belief that everything socially significant is measurable. We are products of a schooling system where all our actions and creations are quantified in the form of grades, test scores, credit-hours, etc. Underlying many debates about “human intelligence” is the presumption that we would even measure our minds.

This is confusion, to say the least.

As you can see, my arguments about school’s failures are much more general than questions of what gets taught, or equality of resources, the standard issues raised by the multiculturalists and the affirmative-activists. To the multiculturalists I say: Although I recognize that inequalities and exclusions within the system play very real roles in maintaining the hegemony of certain cultural forms, what I’m arguing against is the hegemony of any normative culture. It is my belief that all imposed hierarchical social systems are disempowering of people, in that they inhibit people from thinking for themselves and seeing their own power to shape social reality. Rich whites in Europe and America did not invent elitist, hierarchical cultural forms. It is just their brand that characterizes the current system. Insofar as all canon are ultimately about shaping people to fit some pre-established cultural identity, substituting one canon for another misses the point entirely. To the affirmative-activists I say: Who cares about equal access to a system that works to squash the independent spirit of everyone? Who cares about a “level playing field” in a race to destroy our humanity?

What would it take for education to be an aid in human liberation instead of a tool for human oppression? Although I’ve already said this in so many words above, let me state it here for clarity. For me, if the words “freedom” or “empowerment” are to have any meaning at all, it must be in the following manner: A person is free or empowered to the extent that they are conscious of the forces at play within themselves and within their social world, and to the extent that they are able to take an active role in shaping those forces.

In my view, dictators and other power-greedy individuals aren’t really free. They are slaves to their own insatiable and misunderstood feeling of lack. If they understood themselves better they would have healthier, less destructive lives, and would help produce work that ignites the human spirit instead of work that feeds on and reinforces human fear and hatred.

The drive for freedom, just like many other human drives, requires practice and nurturing to grow. The only kind of education that would nurture freedom would be an education where people are, from the start, encouraged to learn whatever they want to learn, to explore the world, to follow their own hearts. It is an education where there is no centralized authority to dictate to people what, when, or how they must learn. There are no standardized tests used as general measures of “competence” or “intelligence”.

What I envision is a decentralized network of learning, an informal network that facilitates, not dictates, the learning that people do. People with similar interests and learning goals can spontaneously come together, forming study-groups, or research-groups. Individuals who want to learn a specific skill can be guided by educational facilitators to nearby learning resources, such as other people who are competent in that particular skill, or available jobs that train that skill, etc. People exchange skills, perhaps by barter, perhaps based on some kind of credit system. For example, by helping someone learn to speak Portuguese, I then have credits to spend on learning to play guitar. Or whatever. In this framework, people will learn to see each other as resources and companions, not competitors. When people do what they do out of intrinsic interest, not out of fear or desire for social status as in our current system, competitiveness has less value. Tests, no longer used as tools to enforce conformity to an institutional program, no longer used to “measure” such vague notions as “intelligence”, can serve their proper role of gauging preparedness for doing specific jobs.

Those who are resigned to the status quo may find it hard to imagine real alternatives. No matter. Real alternatives are what people today, all over the country, are actually creating. There are alternative schools that espouse “child-centered” approaches, such as those based on the Sudbury model, where kids learn what they want in a democratic and non-coercive environment. There are progressive home-schooling collectives, adult-education organizations, communtiy groups, people all over are working to rid themselves of the old, authoritarian and centralized ways of thinking. They publish newsletters, have educational exchanges, use the internet as a learning tool, fight the local and state bureaucracy for their right to deinstitutionalize their thinking.

You can see that what I’m proposing here is, in fact, a truly multicultural and affirmative-active education. I am proposing an education that respects our rights to create our own culture, that allows us to be active participants in making history, that, transcending any canon, allows us to be our own authors. I am proposing an education that can be equally valuable and exciting for everyone. In the kind of education I propose here, there simply can’t be unfair competition for scarce educational resources, because our primary resource is ourselves. 3

Notes:

1. By “institutionalized schooling” I mean the kind that takes place in the formal and specialized settings we call “schools”, conducted in the conventional manner. The standard American K-12 framework is a typical example of an “institutionalized schooling framework”.

2. For some people, the word “multiculturalism” mainly concerns the curricula in post-secondary settings, viz. Women’s Studies, Chicano/a Literature, etc. In this essay I am using it in a more general sense, i.e. having to do with curricular change as a way to stop the the system from being oppressive. Also, “affirmative action” is usually associated with efforts to address historical race, gender, or ethnic inequalities in access to higher-education. Again, here I’m using the term in a more general sense, i.e. having to do with a general equalizing of access to educational resources, a general levelling of the “playing field”.

3. People familiar with the work of such education thinkers as Paulo Freire, John Holt, A.S. Neill, and Ivan Illich will recognize in what I say the reflections of many of the ideas of these great educators and authors. I owe such writers a debt, for helping me find the language to express my ideas, helping me broaden the scope of my own analysis, and helping guide me in my thinking about alternatives. However, my ideas derive their real force from my reflections on my own experiences, and from my observations of those around me.

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