It is September. The prison gates must be unlocked and the young people who must be taught a lesson or two are being returned to their place, to be instructed, shouted at, forced to memorise the often irrelevant — to have games played with their minds. When it is enacted by the master class that all children between the ages of five and sixteen shall be subjected to schooling they are doing our class no favours: they are endeavouring to catch early the impressionable minds of the young.
How valid is the analogy between school and prison? The more detached from the prison walls of the school one becomes the stranger it might seem, but to the children being schooled (not educated the two are different) the relationship between school and denial of freedom is all too clear. Schools are places where children, coming in with the innocent belief that they are at liberty in the world, are taught the firm conviction that to behave freely is a crime. They must learn to know their place.
Capitalism sends those who do not know their place to prison. It is done "for their own good". Children are told that schooling will be for their own good. In prison you obey orders or you are punished. And in school. Do not question orders. Do not question the right of the person giving orders to give them. They are dictators appointed by the state; the tax paying capitalist has invested good money so that the orders will be carried out
The prisoner is stripped of individuality and made to wear a uniform. So are school kids. In both cases, uniforms make identification and discipline easier. In prison you become a slave to routine. When a bell rings you eat, you exercise, you work, you slop out. In school, children learn to jump to the dictatorship of the bell: "Why are you outside after the bell has gone? It went five minutes ago. When the bell rings you must be in your proper place". Chimpanzees can be taught such bell-obedience: in a human being it is a descent, not progress.
In prison it is assumed that the prisoner can never be equal to those with authority over him. In schools, however clever the pupil becomes, the teacher will always be superior and one will teach while the other learns and never shall the roles be reversed. You are sent to prison for breaking socially-made rules called laws. Often this means you have stolen food because you are broke, an act which would not be criminal in a world without property. You are sent to school to learn how to accept the wisdom of insane socially-made rules. The "rehabilitated” prisoner, like the properly “educated" school student. is released in the hope that they will be a decently exploitable wage slave.
The function of schooling is to create little human commodities: neatly-packed, subservient embodiments of labour power, there to be exploited as wealth-producing wage slaves. A well-schooled young worker will be fit to go out into the market and sell themselves. The skill of the teacher is not to bring out from a child what it could be. but what the capitalist social system requires it to be. Eighty years ago the Report of the Consultative Committee to the Head of Education on Higher Elementary Schools was candid in explaining the declared needs of employers for which schools should cater:
. . boys and girls in their service should possess habits of discipline, ready obedience, self- help, and pride in good work for its own sake whatever it might be. (1906 Report)
The Report complained that
Employers are said to be dissatisfied with much of the elementary education given, because the instruction, in so far as it is carried beyond the simplest elements, tends, if anything. to make a boy a little above his job.
The present recession has provided educational authorities with the ideal opportunity to make schooling more than ever a job-based process. It is all very well teaching children to express themselves freely through dance, say the traditionalists, but what good will that do them as training for a life behind the check-out counter in Tesco? The investors in Tesco need wage slaves who can add up (we can’t have Lady Porter short-changed. can we?) and not poets, dancers or inventors. So at school the child is taught to regard big ambitions as dreams for the back of the mind: the real objective must be to become a purchasable labour-power commodity.
Capitalism cannot cope with childhood. It needs children, because they represent the reproduction of labour power — new profit-makers for the future. But children must be censured for being childish. The great, civilised struggle for maturity must be entered as soon as possible. To be mature means to be as stupid as the others who have been conned by the system. A child is a dangerous being: not yet conditioned, not yet afraid to see the world as something to be shared. So schools keep children out of society's way. just as prisons keep others away until they are prepared to conform.
Workers need education but not schooling. Education means learning to know what is happening and why. In social terms, there can be no doubt that the working class needs to learn what is happening in the world and why. In this way we shall see the capitalist system as the cause of our problems and then the solution will be not far off. But working class self-education is very different from what passes as education in the capitalist school. From the earliest days socialists have rejected that schooling designed, not to expose social reality but to indoctrinate working class kids to “ honour the Queen, obey your superiors, and run away from every policeman" (Justice, 30 June 1894). It was not education for life, but propaganda for submission.
Many reformers of capitalism have engaged in several campaigns to humanise the education system: to make it useful, or at least better, for the working class. At the beginning of this century the Social Democratic Federation campaigned for free school dinners. It was in opposition to this piddling reformism that revolutionaries left the SDF. refusing to plead for bit-by-bit changes to the exploitation system. As with many reform campaigns, this one was never successful but parliament did grant free school milk which was subsequently withdrawn.
Immense reformist effort went into abolishing the old grammar school system. This fight was nominally won but comprehensive indoctrination has hardly changed the essential nature of the oppressive schooling process. Parent governors have been introduced even student governors — but they would be the first to concede (and often complain bitterly) that their views count for little in relation to the state s dictatorial control of schools. Another campaign has been to abolish public schools for the children of the privileged. Eight Labour governments have made noises about them, but not one has made a single move to abolish them.
When Neil Kinnock was shadow Education Minister he became a darling of the Labour Left by promising to put an end to privileged schooling. It will be worth watching his efforts in this direction if he becomes Prime Minister. The fact is that reformists have played around with the form of schooling. but none has proposed to revolutionise the function of education. This cannot be done in isolation from a socialist transformation of society, for it is only when commodity society has been transcended that commodity-based schooling can be removed. There have been a few inspired and brave efforts at establishing non-conventional schools ("free schools") within capitalism but they have had an uphill struggle within a social environment which cannot cope with freedom.
A socialist society will not need to mould children into servants of an omnipotent production process. In a world where the producer’s quality of life and the quality of the product will be equally valued there will be no requirement of a person but that they learn to live well, for part of living well is to live creatively and to give as well as to take. In a society of production for use the experience of education will cease to be a process which takes place in an institution under compulsion.
Whether the word "school" will survive or not we cannot forecast but that any socialist school would be unrecognisable in comparison with those of today is a matter of certainty. There will be no teachers who are not learners also; there will be no end to education but the satisfaction of human needs — a process which will not stop at eighteen or eighty. In chapter five of William Morris's News From Nowhere there is one great vision of what education might be like in a socialist society. It will be for the workers (and that includes children) who establish socialism to decide how to educate themselves and it will be for each generation to reexamine methods of learning and to assess their worth in the light of what it has produced in their elders.
The ultimate condemnation of capitalist "education" is that it has played a key role in producing capitalist-minded people. A society of people who love nations which they do not own. hate foreigners, are willing to kill in wars, offer themselves as victims to the profit system and obey those who abuse them, is a society of badly educated inhabitants. In a book called The School That I'd Like, compiled as a result of essays on the title submitted by school kids for a competition run by the Observer in December 1967. one girl of fifteen wrote that
I am tired of hearing that the hope of my country lies in my generation. If you give me the same indoctrination . . . how can you expect me to be any different from you?
Steve Coleman
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