"I never let my schooling interfere with my education." Mark Twain
You might have left formal education years ago. You might be involved in it now as a student or a teacher. What, though, is your opinion about the way education is organised? Is it a pleasurable, inspiring, challenging experience? Well, if you stop a group of young people making a swift exit from school at the end of their classes or a tired troupe of teachers and ask them about their day, "pleasurable" and "inspiring" are probably not the sort of words they will use to describe their routines.
Acquiring useful knowledge and developing new skills are pursuits that people can, in the right circumstances, greatly enjoy. Why, then, do millions of people involved in formal education find it such a boring and uncomfortable business? For an answer to this question it is worth considering what is contained in the text books and what is imparted in the classrooms and lecture halls. For a clearer understanding of what education is all about, however, it is reasonable to look out of the classroom window to consider the type of society which education is designed to prepare us for. What sort of person does the education system want to make? In order to understand the instruction manual you need to look at a picture of an ideal version of the finished product.
What is Education?
The word “education" derives from the Latin word educere meaning "to lead out”. It is seen as the process whereby young people are led out from states of inability and ignorance into the workings of the world beyond — their idea being that the older and more experienced generations will equip the members of the new generation with the knowledge and abilities required in order to cope with social life. In order for society to survive it needs to produce goods and services like food, clothes, accommodation and transportation. Human history has developed through different social systems, like slavery and later feudalism, and consequently the way in which young people have been prepared for the life ahead of them has varied according to the sort of society they are to inhabit.
The commercial society we live in today is a stage in history. There is no evidence to suggest that after thousands of years of change and development human history has ground to a halt and that the style of society we have now is something that will never change. The main characteristics of today's society are quite simple and they are the same all over the world. Society is divided between the wealth producers (the great majority) and the wealth owners (a small minority). Most people have to sell themselves to an employer like a company or the state in order to get a livelihood. A price is put on everyone as they flog their lives away in order to make someone else rich. How much are you worth? £3.25 an hour? £506.78 a month? £10,000 for one year of your life? Meanwhile a few men and women live in luxury with gigantic wealth which has been legitimately robbed from the people whose energies and skills have produced it. It is a society in which a man or a woman in a pinstripe suit can take a decision which will devastate a local community, ruining hundreds of lives, by deciding to "withdraw investments" from some local industry. A couple of days later the person who took the decision could be in drunken revelry at a chic nightclub, celebrating a successful £10,000 share deal made in ten minutes while mothers from the wrecked community are weeping over the new wasteland in which their children will be growing up.
We are living in a world where conscripts to the Argentinian military forces and economic conscripts to the British forces were ordered to massacre each other in the name of civilisation. What is reasonably described as an act of insane savagery when it is committed in Hungerford is called noble heroism when it is committed in Goose Green. In the same way, Russian soldiers in Afghanistan and American soldiers in Nicaragua are being ordered to murder people in "defence" of a "good" cause. How good is an argument or a cause that requires you to shoot someone with an exploding bullet in order to persuade them?
Above all, the economic principle which governs the way we live is that of profit. Although the world can easily produce more than enough food and drink for everyone, millions of people die of starvation while farmers are paid to burn wheat in order to keep its price high. Coffee is dumped in the oceans, mountains of beef and butter beshadow lakes of wine and milk while, according to the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), a child dies from poverty every two seconds. A network of well-intentioned campaigns like Live Aid and Sport Aid struggle to alleviate the plight of those on the borderline of survival but the problems remain. Workers in relative poverty, thinking twice about how they are going to pay the electricity bill, shelling out a few quid to the destitute will not solve any problems. Charity may prolong the agonies, though, by lulling people into the mistaken belief that the profit system can be humanised if people were simply to be a little more thoughtful to others. The profit system has to operate according to what is profitable, not according to what is in the best interests of the majority. Think about the priorities of the profit system. In 1986 Cancer Research in the UK tried to collect £1 million by begging from people. The research here is reasonably important because one in four people in industrial areas of the world die of cancer-related disease. During the same period the United States government spent $45,000,000,000 on military research and development and a similar sum was spent by the Russian government.
Learning Compliance
What role does formal education play in all this? Primarily it is a dull and restricting process by which people are gently indoctrinated to accept a highly undesirable, difficult, dangerous and insecure way of life. The indoctrination today is not always delivered in a stark, crude way (although it was at one time) but the net result of someone going through ten years of schooling is. generally, the acquiring of a frame of mind and a set of prejudices that make for a willing wage-slave, a follower of leaders and in many cases a military recruit. "Education", according to one writer, "is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught" (George Halifax). Certainly, judging by the dreary content of most formal education courses there is every reason for young people to quickly forget most of what has been taught. The hang-over effect though is the production of people who, give or take a complaint or a wish to reform something, are generally compliant to the type of society we have. In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens introduced the character of Uriah Heep who refers to his education as a young boy.
They taught us a deal of 'umbleness . . . not much else that I know of, from morning to night we was to be 'umble to this person, 'umble to that; and to pull off our caps here and make our bows there; and always to know our places and abase ourselves before our betters.
Local and national employers recently attended the college where I work to organise lectures and workshops for the students as prospective employees and the message was subtle but clear: the people who taught Uriah Heep had the right idea. Today's bosses have a wide vocabulary of terms to avoid being openly offensive. "Be obedient" becomes "Could you co-operate?" but the relationship of "master" and servant has not changed even if it is labelled as that between employer and employee. An official at the Department of Education and Science recently said.
We have to ration . . . educational opportunities so that society can cope with the output of education . . . People must be educated once more to know their place.[The Listener 4 September 1986]
In Britain today the children of the owning class attend costly private schools where they are trained in the techniques of pomposity, arrogance and the social hierarchy. Only 6 per cent of young people attend such schools while the other 94 per cent are learning how to know their place. It should not be forgotten, though, that the minority who own and control the society we live in (the owners of the factories, offices, newspapers and so forth) do not occupy their positions of power because they had expensive and élitist educations. On the contrary. They have expensive and élitist educations because their parents occupy positions of power. A person's class position pre-dates their education and continues regardless of whether they performed well or badly in school. You do not get to own landed estates or a string of factories or oilfields because you worked hard at school or college. The Duke of Westminster owns 138,000 acres including some of the most lucrative sites in London like Oxford Street, Belgravia and parts of Westminster. He owns estates in America. Australia. Wales and England including a 14-bedroom house set in 19,000 acres in Lancashire. That house alone is worth over £5 million. The Duke has one O' Level. It is interesting to note the disgust and indignation that the news media have today regarding acts of organised thuggery, plunder and looting because it was precisely by those methods that the early aristocrats acquired their estates, including the ancestors of the Duke of Westminster.
Finding Out the Hard Way
Many people who believe that you can get rich by working hard discover the real nature of class-divided society the hard way. Some may get jobs as £30,000 a year executives or become successful yuppies. Nevertheless, unlike the fully-fledged social parasites who live extravagantly from the unearned incomes of rent, interest or dividends, the upstarts with the company BMWs rely on a salary or commission for their dosh. Consequently. if the company they work for closes or goes insolvent (the closure of the London Daily News is a good recent example) they land with a bump on the floor of the economic class they have never really left. This fall will necessitate a rapid change of lifestyle and. ironically, one of the expenses which may no longer be possible in this situation is often the cost of sending their children to fee-paying schools.
Social problems like poverty and disorder are endemic to the profit system which puts the minority's acquisition of wealth above all other considerations. An economic recession aggravates these problems and it is in this social context that the government has decided to introduce a national school curriculum. Governments of whatever political complexion have to act as executive committees for the owning class. A national curriculum. whereby the same courses sanctioned by the government are taught uniformly across the country, is seen as a way of brain-washing tomorrow's wage-slaves and dole-queuers in a more efficient fashion than is achieved by today's methods. Bear in mind, though, that governments (not just in the UK) are opting for more thorough and systematic methods of "educating" young people into acquiescence but not necessarily because the ideology of the profit system is blossoming. Consider the instances from the past where centralised powers have used programmes of education to bolster their ethics and principles. At the time of the ancient Greek empire with the conquests of Alexander, the Greek curriculum was established all over the Hellenic colonies to explain and promote the culture of that empire which involved institutional slavery as an integral part of its so-called civilisation. Centuries later the Roman Catholic church was organising in a similar way. The Jesuit schools were originally intended for members of a special religious order but the schooling system was extended to cover the lay élites of medieval Europe. This extension and the social circumstances which caused it are similar to those which caused the expansion of early Greek schools. It was the insecurity, not the dominance, of the Greek colonies of Alexandrian times which prompted them to build and depend on schools to produce support for their social hierarchy. Similarly it was the insecurity of the Roman church in the time of Ignatius which accounts for the formation and rapid growth of the Jesuit schools. In both examples the school was regarded as a way of preserving a set of social values which were losing their dominance.
Today, many young people are deeply dissatisfied with what society has to offer them. Not just those who are rioting on the streets of places like Belfast. England and Sweden but also the classrooms full of people whose potential skill and creativity is being deliberately under developed because there are either no vacancies for them after school or work of a very limited kind. Some at least are healthily less reverential to authority today than they were in previous generations. It is harder than it used to be for the profit system to con young people into believing that it works in their interests, especially during a recession. So, one thing for Kenneth Baker to ponder is how long a system of indoctrination can succeed when its message runs against people's experience — you cannot make castor oil taste nice by teaching someone to call it syrup.
It was the development of the education systems in the emerging nation states of Europe last century which produced the earliest models of the school system of today. A national education system with schools teaching common subjects and with teachers produced by uniformly organised training colleges was first established in nineteenth century Prussia. The aim was to produce multitudes of workers tailored to meet the specifications of the architects of the German state. With the industrial revolution came the need for the new owners of industry to get a workforce which was equipped with rudimentary skills, the habit of obedience. servility to the bosses and there was also the need for many workers who had competence in elementary literacy and numeracy. The education system was developed accordingly to manufacture factory workers and clerks.
Education Today
Today most people who work are employed in commercial or service industries. The latest available figures show that whereas there are 6,368,000 people working in the manufacturing and construction industries there are 8,221,000 people engaged in service areas like distribution, transport and finance. (An Economic Profile of Britain 1986 — Lloyds Bank.) So schools and colleges need to prepare a workforce for these areas and to condition young people to accept the social scenery by referring to it in terms which make it seem sensible and unchangeable although it is neither. Maths and Statistics syllabuses are riddled with questions about companies, profits, redundancies and productivity where the desirability of a class-divided society is assumed as a self-evident truth. Accounting, commerce and Business Management courses ask sober questions about the economic laws which cause such misery. History courses focus on the affairs of monarchs and politicians and encourage people to grow up with a narrow, nationalistic and ethnocentric viewpoint. Some economics courses are entirely founded on the quite false assumption that there is an unavoidable scarcity of goods for the people of the world to consume. Education could be organised so very differently. It could be what it should be: stimulating and imaginative. Anyone, though, who sought to achieve those aims by simply reforming the methods or content of the current system would be faced with a frustrating and ultimately impossible task. From primary to postgraduate levels, education is geared to the economic system of which it is a part. What is the point in devoting time and energy to obtaining a few more scant resources for education when its entire stocks are overwhelmingly outstripped in scale and sophistication by those of the murder industry (the official one)? Time and energy spent on quickening the end of the social system which creates the perverse priorities is a much sounder investment.
The only way to achieve a real change in education is to change the social environment for which education prepares people. A society which converts the means of producing and distributing wealth from the private ownership of companies and state machines into the common property of the whole community would be able to direct production to one aim and one aim alone — the satisfaction of human needs. A society which abandons the division between a few who own and control and a majority who do not will be able to operate on the basis of the principle — from each according to her/his abilities, to each according to her/his self-defined needs. There is no problem with people behaving co-operatively, even on a huge scale, as was demonstrated by the millions of people who organised the monumental Live Aid across the world. No one working in any of the thousands of different tasks which needed to be done for this project worked for money. The 80,000,000 people who participated in Sport Aid with exemplary organisation testify to the same point.
Education in Socialism
Education in a classless society would not have to regiment, discipline and inculcate young people with rubbish the way it does now. Teachers are often authoritarian today as a result of the disagreeable disciplinary work the system demands they perform. In a social setting which does not create the need for people to be authoritarian, education will not need to be the flow from a "teacher" to a "learner" that it so often is now. People will be much less inhibited about venturing to teach someone who is teaching them or learning from someone they are teaching. More importantly, though, no-one would have to become "a teacher" and be lumbered with performing that function to the exclusion of other, more creative occupations. Today it makes sense to the profit system to make you into a mechanic or a nurse or a carpenter or a computer programmer and that's you done. There is no need, however, for anyone's creativity and usefulness to be restricted in this way in a society that puts human satisfaction as its top priority and profitability nowhere. Instead of being a series of unpleasant experiences foisted on people between the ages of six and sixteen education should become an exhilarating project continuing throughout life for everyone who wishes to maintain the mental vitality they enjoyed as a child.
Ignorant people are easy to fool and manipulate just as knowledge is strength. Don't let your schooling interfere with your education.
Gary Jay
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