Monday, August 8, 2022

Education for wage-slavery (1991)

From the August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard
In recent months the sensationalist press has been full of horror stories about child abuse. These stories prompt a question. How would we react to parents who repeatedly threatened to burn their children alive, injuring and killing them with the aid of the most fearsome technology conceivable? What would we say to parents who sat back while their children went hungry, leaving some of them under-nourished and others starving to death while there was plenty of food in the house? What would we think of parents who contaminated the air that their children breathed, adulterated with chemicals the cheap food that their children ate, and allowed their children to dwell in wretched homes? What would we say about parents who denied their children the best possible health care when they were sick? What would we, as human beings with a consciousness that enables us to care for the weak and the innocent, think of such barbarous parental policies? Would we for one minute entrust the the safety of little children to such beasts?
The harsh reality is that the systematic abuse of children which has been described is exactly what happens every day as a normal and inherent feature of the capitalist profit system. Capitalism threatens to burn children alive. This policy is not called child murder, but military defence. War is not about Kate Adie dressing up in an Action Man outfit on the BBC or "Storming Norman" doing his impression of John Wayne: war is the legalised threat to frighten and injure and maim those who stand in the way of the onward march of profit. The babies who were killed in Baghdad were victims of child abuse.

Capitalism allows children to starve. Not just one child in a headline-making case who is mercilessly underfed, but millions of children are malnourished because of poverty. According to the United Nations Food anti Agricultural Organisation, 15 million children under the age of five die of starvation each year. But you do not need to be a child in Africa to go hungry. A report published last month by the National Children’s Home suggested that one in ten under-five-year-olds from British families on low incomes (and there are 2.5 million families on income support) go without enough to eat at least once a month because their parents could not afford to buy food:
Time and time again, families in the survey told us that they would go into debt in order to provide food for their children. yet despite this, many often did not have the money to buy enough, the fact that parents and children are going hungry every week, because the cupboard is quite literally bare, is a damning indictment of Britain in the 90s. (Quote from the Report, Guardian, 4 June)
The profit system, in its relentless drive for profits, ruins the environment for the next generation who are growing up into a polluted, unhealthy world. Capitalism regards it as economically rational to let kids sleep on the streets or in hopelessly unacceptable hostels for the homeless. The system denies decent health care to vast numbers of children who are in need, but too poor to push to the front of the health queue. In short, this worldwide profit-mad system under which we live looks upon children with all the compassion of a bank manager and all the support of a casino owner offering life membership to those who can never win because they were born with the cards stacked against them.

The record of the capitalist system in relation to the care of children is one of grotesque neglect. The corpses and wasted lives, which are proof of that record, are constantly available for inspection by those who doubt the inhumanity of the profit system. So, how does our society respond to this persistent and systematic child abuse? It says. “Thanks very much, Mr. Capitalist, here are our children for you to look after. Please take them into your schools and do with them what you will and teach them to become the right sort of people: adults created in the image of the profit system”. The system which persistently offends against the needs of children is given the task of telling them how and what to think. What could be more staggeringly perverse and offensive?

The capitalist view of kids
Capitalism needs children. It does not need them because they are playful and impulsive and innocent and full of creative potentialities. In fact, it needs to knock those childish inclinations out of them. How often do we hear children being chastised for acting childishly? They are told to “grow up" and stop behaving "like kids". It is like telling a ninety-year-old man to become youthful and stop pretending to be worn out. The Victorian age, the values of which are so revered by our rulers, was one which despised childhood and forced kids to repress their natural enthusiasm and zest for life. But, for all that, capitalists are pleased to see children being bor.

The principal and overriding objective of the capitalist is to accumulate profit. Labour power is the source of all profit. And children are the source of tomorrow's labour power. They are growing labour power. To the capitalists, children are what the fields of opium are to the drugs baron: the basis of future riches, profits in the making. So, just as the drug barons take care to look after their precious crops, treating them with the finest fertilisers, so do the capitalists in general take care to ensure the proper cultivation of children They too are treated with the best educational manure available, as a scrutiny of the crap taught in most schools will reveal.

It is no accident that the one item of expenditure on which the British capitalists spend more than the military-murder industry is education. If you want profit-churning wage slaves you have to train them. The function of schools is to train children to become skilled enough and socially passive enough and politically ignorant enough to take on the jobs of running capitalism from top to bottom whilst leaving the ownership and control of wealth production in the hands of a parasitical, capitalist minority.

What are schools for?
The earliest schools in Britain, in the 6th century, were set up to train priests. In a Church-run, totalitarian theocracy the only people who needed to be trained in special skills were the religious men. The agricultural peasants learned their useful skills as they grew up. They did not need schools to know what was useful. By the time of the Reformation in the 16th century the schools were under attack by the Church hierarchy because they were straying from pure religious dogma and teaching other subjects, including grammar which enabled children to read from other sources than the Bible. (These were the first grammar schools). As early, mercantile, capitalism emerged the schools started to teach new subjects, such as law and medicine. Oxford and Cambridge Universities, set up in the 11th and 12th centuries respectively, were originally monastic colleges for the study of Biblical nonsense, but as the range of skills demanded by the economy increased so were the tasks of Oxbridge teaching. From the start education reflected the needs of the economy.

The industrial revolution of the 18th century saw the emergence of a large, untrained working class with nothing to sell but their labour power. Many of them objected to the harsh exploitation and regimentation of factory existence and rebelled. morally if not politically, against the commercial age of which they were victims. It was quite clear to the bosses that these workers needed to be properly schooled for wage slavery. Bell, the inventor of a method for teaching the poor, called education "the steam engine of the moral world”. The task of organising education for wage slavery was given to the Church, both Anglican and dissenting. Who better to drive ideas of freedom out of the minds of workers, and train them for obedience to the market, than the Church which had spent the last thousand years frightening peasants into fearing their masters and upholding the deferential feudal hierarchy?

The Church went to work with eagerness: as Southey testifies, the Methodists were in no doubt what they were going to do to the children:
Break their wills betimes. Begin this work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, perhaps before they can speak at all. Whatever pain it costs, break the will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly; from that age make him do as he is bid. if you whip him ten times running to effect it . . . (R Southey. Life of Wesley and Rise and Progress of Methodism, London. 1890. p.561).
The Methodists even brought out special hymn books for children containing such verses as:
There's not a sin that we commit.
Nor wicked word we say.
But in thy dreadful book 'tis writ.
Against the judgement day.
At the same time there were text-books written for teachers on how to “bring up" children:
Just as soon as children develop awareness, it is essential to demonstrate to them by word and deed that they must submit to the will of their parents. Obedience requires children to 1) willingly do as they are told. 2) willingly refrain from doing what is forbidden, and 3) accept the rules made for their sake. (J Suizer. 1791)
Note the totalitarian aims of this cruel attitude to schooling. Not only must children submit, but they must learn to do so "willingly”; not only must they follow the rules of property society, but they must accept that such rules are "made for their sake". The principal objective of teaching working-class children to read was moral: as one Justice of the Peace put it in 1807:
It is doubtless desirable that the poor should be instructed in reading, if it were only for the best of purposes—that they may read the Scriptures.
Teaching in the early elementary schools, where the average working-class child would spend at most two years, was limited to preparing the children for the tasks of wage slavery. The educational methods were cruel in the extreme: indoctrination through fear. As one pupil recalled:
I never remember seeing my headmaster in school when he had not a cane hanging by the crook over his left wrist. Every assistant master had a cane and so had the pupil teachers . . . There were no backs to the desks and back of boys were straightened by means of a stroke of the cane. (G.A.N. Lowndes, The Silent Social Revolution, London. 1937. pp.16-17)
In the 19th century the state began to recognise the importance of education for the protection of the capitalist class. In fact, they regarded it as being too important to be left to the Churches. So began the long process by which control of education was taken over by the state. It is interesting to note that parliament's first entry into the field of educational control was a committee set up in 1816, under the chairmanship of Henry Brougham, called the Parliamentary Committee on the Education of the Lower Orders. They knew very well that education was a class matter. There were several attempts to set up a system of state education—which the advanced rulers of Prussia had already established—but there were early doubts as to whether state-run education would be seen as a means of government-controlled indoctrination. Brougham (by then the Lord Chancellor! told the 1834 parliamentary committee on education:
Suppose the people of England were taught to accept (state education), and were forced to educate their children by penalties, education would be made absolutely hateful in their eyes, and would speedily cease to be endured. They who have argued in favour of such a scheme . . . have betrayed . , , great ignorance of the nature of Englishmen . . . I do not well perceive how such a system can be established without placing in the hands of the Government, that is of the Ministers of the day. the means of dictating opinions and principles to the people.
Such dictating is precisely what the capitalists wanted, and still do, as the government manipulation of the newly-enforced National Curriculum has shown. In 1839 the Prime Minister. Russell, outlined the objectives of state education if it was to come:
In any Normal or Model School to be established by the Board, four principal objects should be kept in view: 1. Religious Instruction. 2. General Instruction. 3. Moral Training. 4. Habits of Industry.
Apart from the vaguely worded “General Instruction", by which was meant those basic skills required to keep wage slaves literate and numerate enough to work the machinery of production, this was a menu for moral control of the workers. That has always been the chief aim of state schooling. This was put clearly by Sir James Graham who was Home Secretary in 1843. Graham moved a Factory Bill (which became law) which included a provision for compulsory' elementary education for working-class children (which parliament threw out). Graham moved the Bill in response to the rise of the Chartist movement (workers demanding the vote) which he saw as a dangerous drift towards rebellious immorality on the part of wage slaves. Said Graham as he commended the Bill to parliament:
The police and the soldiers have done their duty, the time has arrived when moral and religious instructors must go forth and reclaim the people from the error of their ways.
This notion of the teacher as state trooper is at the heart of the capitalist view of education. When compulsory state education was introduced in the 1870s it was because workers had been given the vote by the 1867 Reform Act and it was considered politically necessary to educate them into acting as responsible citizens, i.e. passive slaves who would hand power to their bosses.

The phoney education debate
Ever since schooling has been compulsory a heated debate has gone on about how best to run it. Liberal reformers have made various proposals for making schools more effective. What none of them have asked themselves is what it is that schools are supposed to be effective at doing. The fact is that the liberal-humanitarian concern of producing well-rounded, creative, critical, thoughtful adults is almost entirely at odds with the capitalist concern to produce well-trained, unquestioning wage and salary slaves.

The liberal reformers have argued against the public schools where rich people send their children to learn how to be superior. What this misses is that under capitalism the children of the rich are superior: they will end up in the top social positions; they will inherit great fortunes. Public schools are an effect of class privilege, not its cause. The public schools provided 92 percent of the current top company directors, 89 percent of the Law Lords, 83 percent of the high court Judges, 69 percent of ambassadors and still over 50 percent of current MPs. Of course these institutions of class arrogance must go, but not unless the class which they serve is removed from power will this make any difference.

Again, the liberal reformers sought to end educational segregation on the basis of state-defined intelligence and to put all children into comprehensive schools. This reform came about, but children are still put into higher and lower streams on the basis of what sort of future jobs they are likely to be suitable for. and in 1991, after the “success” of the Comprehensive Schools reform, there is now more testing of children going on than ever, including the notorious seven-plus tests whereby children are being classified as successes or failures four years earlier than they were in the pre-comprehensive days.

Liberal reformers have attempted to abolish corporal punishment, which has always been one of the main means by which socially ignorant adults have been able to bully vulnerable children. Even though beating children is now illegal (which certainly does not mean it that does not go on, with children too scared to report it), new forms of punishment have been brought in: teacher sarcasm, detentions, suspensions, sin bins, statementing—not to mention the worst excesses of the liberal school. the friendly educational psychologists who see every happy child as a potential mind disease.

In the years after the Second World war the liberal educationalists saw scope for changing society by reforming schools.The idea was that the harsh ethos of the capitalist market could be countered by the benign principles of welfare-based education. Some well-intentioned teachers worked hard to bring about this utopian transcendence of the law of the capitalist jungle within the confines of the school gates. It was, of course, a rather authoritarian concept of reform: it was to come about from the top, with enlightened educationalists as the social improvers and children as the inactive beneficiaries.

By the mid-1960s this new model of schooling was dominant in most of Europe and the USA. Children were allowed to organise their own repression via Summerhill-based school councils; instead of fear of the cane there was a new moral orthodoxy whereby wage slaves were not beaten but talked into co-operation by trendy headmasters—who were still the masters. Rioting became unnecessary: everyone could talk about anything—even masturbation, if not revolution. Long-haired art teachers let the students call them Bob and in school assemblies folk songs were sung about peace and sermons were given about respect for Hindu traditions. The Victorian gaol had given way to the “progressive" open prison. All you need was love. O-leveIs and a job at the end of it all.

The problem was that the capitalists were paying for all this through taxation and they were not happy with a schooling system which was not delivering obedient enough wage slaves. Out of all the multicultural dance and “free debates” about The Bomb were coming students who were thinking too much, not deferential enough, inordinately critical, articulate enough to cause trouble. By the late Seventies capitalism was in an economic crisis and the government was getting worried. Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister who was later to be given a peerage in return for his cringing support for the ruling class, announced that what was needed was a “Great Education Debate". The schooling of the working class was to be re-assessed. This was a preparation for the tighter state control of young workers’ minds. After all, the early Eighties were witnessing some important acts of resistance (usually futile) by the workers: there were strikes, anti-racist demonstrations and then riots in such places as Brixton and Toxteth. As one Department of Education official has been reported as saying:
We are in a period of considerable social change. There may be social unrest but we can cope with the Toxteths. But if we have a highly educated and idle population we may possibly anticipate more serious social conflict. People must be educated once more to know their place.
Once again the teachers were being brought in to finish the job of the cops. The case for what is ridiculously called "good old-fashioned schooling" was trumpeted by well-funded advocates. Capitalism has taken a bite at the idea of freer education and found it non-cost-effective. So we have seen the backward-looking education reforms of recent years. This is not a new phenomenon, but capitalism returning to its normal service.

Schools in crisis
British schools are currently in a state of crisis. Teacher morale is low after years of relatively low pay and being treated as the cause of educational failure. A recent report from the Association for Science Education stated that one in four science teachers do not feel qualified to teach the subject they are teaching: they are forced to do so because properly qualified teachers are not being appointed. The bogus anti-statists of the Tory right have shown just how pro-state they really are by introducing all kinds of centralised educational policies which place the curriculum in the hands of government-appointed ideologues rather than teachers, and less still students.

The National Curriculum is a detested method of forcing teachers to follow the state's line—and more importantly, to exclude from the timetable those aspects of free expression which are contrary to the capitalists interest. The Labour Party has no brighter ambition than to turn schools into industrial training centres churning out masses of well-oiled robotic wealth-creators. Labour admires the German model for producing well-trained victims for industry. Pity the budding poet or critical historian in the educational future being mapped out by John Smith and his utilitarian mob.

The new emphasis throughout education is upon facts (come back Gradgrind, all is forgiven and there is a job waiting for you in the Ministry of Education). Even the universities, once the homes of critical learning and research, are being turned into factories for facts: academics for the study of increasing the profit accumulation of the parasite class. Teachers are fed up; school students are less interested and more regimented than they have been for years; and a poll in The Independent (3 June) showed that a majority of parents think that their children are getting a bad deal from school.

In fact, the bad deal in question is the capitalist system. Under the profit system it would be crazy to hope for education for a creative and free life. Children of the working class will not be leading creative or free lives. Children are not polled in the womb as to whether they will be born rich or poor: threatened with nuclear extinction or destined to live in a peaceful world; free to be exploited or free to have access to all of the abundant goods and services of this rich planet. Children do not elect the impotence of childhood; it is a cultural role which is imposed upon the young. In a society where workers will only be respected if they are producing profit (and the respect given to the wage slave is nothing to write home about) those who are too old or too sick or too young to work will be treated like dirt. This is the position of children under capitalism.

A secure, non-repressed or non-repressive society could learn a lot from children. Their lives are spontaneous and unawkward as ours should be. They have the capacity to be individualistic and also to co-operate. They do not think of money; they are far to childishly wise for that. The social order which reveres City thieves will never properly comprehend the mysteries of the adventure playground. The school sirens sound the start of a new term of confinement and those to be taught will be schooled more than educated. But the rulers have a problem: the raw material of tomorrow’s profit have minds of their own which they might just use for their own interests.
Steve Coleman

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