The Passing Show: The Congo (1961)

The Passing Show Column from the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Congo

U.N. officials report that 300,000 people are slowly starving to death in the Congo, with two hundred dying every day. This is still further proof, if it were necessary, that it is not enough to be merely against capitalism, or colonialism, or the rule of a particular imperial power; one must have constructive proposals as to what is to replace the system to be destroyed—one must, in short, work for the achievement of Socialism, not merely for the destruction of any other economic and social system. A year ago, there were those who criticised the Socialist Party because it would not join in movements for “colonial freedom”, such as the one that aimed to throw the Belgians out of the Congo. We pointed out that this would only entail the Congolese people exchanging one set of masters for another. And this is what has occurred. It would be hard to argue, in face of the mass-starvation, in face of the pictures of Congolese children who are nothing more than skin and bone, that the Congolese people are better off today than they were a year ago. In fact the new Congolese masters, to whom the Congolese people were exhorted to give their support, cannot even agree among themselves. And in the squabbling and fighting among the various sections of the new Congolese ruling class—each of which calls in help from foreign states, Russia, America, Ghana, and Belgium among them—it is the ordinary Congolese who suffer. The system of food-growing and food-distribution has in some parts (notably Kasai) almost entirely broken down. And every day more people starve.

Land of opportunity

Feeling depressed in a monotonous job? Worried about the endless struggle to keep the weekly budget down to the size of your pay packet? Thinking about emigration—perhaps to Canada, land of opportunity?

Before you go, have a look at MacLean’s magazine (it calls itself Canada’s National Magazine) for November 19th, 1960. It carries an article telling you about Canada’s rich. A favourite place for their holidays is Frenchman’s Creek in Jamaica, where millionaires and their wives can have peace and privacy for two thousand dollars a week. Last year a Calgary oil millionaire flew a party of his friends to England to watch his horse run in the Derby; the bill he paid covered a week’s stay at the Ritz for the party and Rolls-Royces for his friends’ trips. A Toronto manufacturer had two swimming pools put in his backyard, complete with lighted fountain, hi-fi music and Japanese teahouse, for 30,000 dollars. A Montreal construction business tycoon often flies to Florida or the Caribbean for weekends in one of the family’s two private planes (a DC-3 and a flying boat); once he couldn’t get a favourite Chinese dish in Miami, so he rang up his usual restaurant in Montreal and got them to make it and fly it down to him. A multi-millionaire distiller had his house festooned with fifteen thousand lilac blooms for his daughter’s wedding; the total wedding bill was reported at 100,000 dollars. Twenty-five upper class wives dress entirely in Paris and London creations at an annual cost of up to forty thousand dollars.

The other side of the coin

You’re keen to? Have a look at the next page. This carries the stories of some of the families of Canada’s 327,000 unemployed workers. (If we had the same percentage of unemployment in Britain there would be nearly a million out of work.) It tells of the bitterness of men trying to make ends meet on unemployment pay. “Today the boss wants a twenty-year-old man with forty years’ experience”, some of them said. A fifty-three-year-old steamfitter suggested, “Why don’t they shoot us old men? Digging graves for us would make jobs for the younger men”. The stories are much the same—mounting bills which cannot be paid, threatening letters from hire-purchase companies as the payments fall behind, the despair of men combing the town every day for jobs and being everywhere refused.

Still, there it is. In a system run by the capitalists you would expect the capitalists to be well off. And you would expect the workers to be badly off. In other words—capitalism in Canada works out much the same as capitalism in Britain. Emigration will give you a change of scenery, but it can’t change your class-position in society.

Unfair to the rich

In the current number of Oxford Tory, the Conservative undergraduate journal, there was a surprising item. One writer commented “To say that we have a just society would be, to say the least, an exaggeration”. Clearly a true statement, but what a place to find it. However, the very next words dispelled the astonishment. “Look”, the writer goes on, “at Schedule A, and the absurd level of death duties”. So it isn’t the ownership of all the country’s factories, and mines, and land by a small ruling class that this Tory finds “unjust”, nor the fact that the workers have to labour to support idlers in luxury: he was only concerned with the arrangements made by the capitalist class to pay for the State which looks after their interests. Perhaps if he examines the nature of society a little more closely, he will be able to find some more penetrating criticisms of the “just society”.

Flogging

Sir Thomas Moore, the Conservative M.P. for Ayr Burghs, is again agitating for the introduction of flogging for crimes involving violence. Sir Thomas said that “peace and justice” were the “keywords” of Hitler’s policy, and also that “Herr Hitler is absolutely honest and sincere,” at a time when Hitler had already set up a dictatorship and begun his campaign to “solve the Jewish problem” with every circumstance of brutality. Socialists do not join in the debate about how criminals should be punished: we go to the root of the problem, By attempting to end the society which gives rise to crime and to criminals. But if Sir Thomas thinks that a man who injures a single other man ought to be flogged, what does he think should be done with political leaders who support dictators whose declared policy is the “liquidation” of millions of their fellow human beings?

Alwyn Edgar

Blogger's Note:

"A year ago, there were those who criticised the Socialist Party because it would not join in movements for “colonial freedom”, such as the one that aimed to throw the Belgians out of the Congo. "

This is in reference to the 'Hackney 13' who resigned from the SPGB in 1960. Hackney is in reference to the fact that they were members of the Hackney Branch of the SPGB. From 'Kaz's paper on SPGB disputes down the years:

The Hackney thirteen, 1960 (13)

Thirteen members of Hackney appended their names to a circular, dated 25th May 1960, announcing their resignation. The letter noted that those listed were “deeply concerned about racialism, about South Africa, about the hydrogen bomb, living standards and other things” and that the resignations were a protest against what they saw as the “unconcern” of the Party with these issues and its “refusal to consider…the welfare of the working class.” 

Connolly, Leo (5929)

Coster, Mrs M (5075)*

Crome, Jack (5735)

Dane, S (5551)

Gleason, J (5856)

Ivimey, AW (5572)

Ivimey, F (5573)

Jarvis, R (5885)

Lawrence, JW (5835)

Temple, MF (5008)

Walby, Dennis (5906)

Walby, S (5292)

Wood, AH (4724)

One name missing from that list was Robert Barltrop ('R. Coster'), who was part of the same dispute within the Party, and resigned from its ranks around about the same time.

Corporal punishment (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most inner-city High Streets have an army-recruiting office where the raw are taken in (literally) to find themselves in plush surroundings; where the harvesting recruitment sergeant patronises the newly-germinated with smarmy small-talk about ski-ing and discos on far-off shores, using all the underhand skills and techniques of a sales representative for Cannon Fodder Incorporated. The process of recruitment from the High Street Office to the training camp can be as little as two weeks. During this period there is hardly enough time for the recruits to read the large-print in the glossy magazines, let alone the small-print surrounding their twenty-two-year contracts.

At the High Street Office the unsuspecting windfalls are tested in Arithmetic. English and Physical fitness, after which there is an interview. The Arithmetic and English are to ascertain the recruit's degree of simplicity. The medical decides whether the next in line can walk or hold a gun. The interview is perhaps more sinister. This is when the would-be soldiers are asked — prior to taking the Oath of Allegiance — if they are Communists. Have they ever been a Communist? Do they know any Communists? Answering "No" to these questions. they receive their one-way tickets to the training camp. Recruits are then trained like animals in a circus, with tit-bits for the good dog and a crack of the ringmaster’s whip (the Regimental Sergeant Major's pace stick) for those who don’t sit up and beg.

To obtain discipline and control the Army has more subtle methods than boot bulling and potato peeling. They have a long history of expertise in military psychology on which they can draw. The tools they use for processing the recruits are Conformity, Alienation and Competition.

Conformity

To impose Conformity the recruits must first be robbed of their individuality. This is done by inflicting uniformity of looks and behaviour on all soldiers. Uniformity of personal appearance is achieved at the first stop in camp, the barber's shop. The haircut and the clean-shaven look strips many young people of a part of their identity. If they were a little green in joining the Army in the first place, they become greener with a visit to the Quarter-Master's stores where they are issued with about six suits of varying sizes, just as many hats and the obligatory identity tag. informing them of their new name: an eight-figure number. Loaded with more new clothes than they have ever had at any one time, they set off to their accommodation having almost forgotten their frightening new hairstyle.

Impressed by the self-confidence of the reception Corporal, the new recruits are under the misapprehension that all they need to do is put on one of their new suits and they will be transformed into the new macho man. The dormitories each house twelve to twenty and are furnished in the most basic fashion — one bed, one locker and one chair for each person, laid out in a military style which is about as welcoming as a nuclear winter. With so little furniture you could think it easy to keep clean. The recruits soon discover that this isn't the case. For the forthcoming weeks they are cleaning the floor and removing dust from 5am to breakfast and then later from 5pm until lights out. with short breaks in between to clean their kit. Complete uniformity of behaviour is hammered into those with any remaining personality of their own during square bashing. Here marching, saluting and rifle drills are choreographed to such a degree that Lionel Blair would be envious.

Alienation

Alienation is another wrench in the mechanism of the military machine, used to twist the squaddies away from social interaction and to tighten the nut of docile acquiescence. Few of the trainees have much experience in letter-writing and many of their families cannot afford a telephone. so it isn't too long before they become isolated. This separation from family and friends, coupled with the confinement to barracks that most training camps impose. make it impossible to make new friends in the local community. The new soldier becomes so lonely and introverted, bullied helplessly into shape. For the smallest mistake the recruits are humiliated, bawled at and in some cases physically beaten.

A recent case of bullying was that of a new boy, or “sprogg" who, after a kangaroo court in the barrack room, was found "guilty” of not polishing his floor space to the required standard and was sentenced to be hung. He was beaten up by a dozen others, stood on a chair, blindfolded and a noose was tied around his neck. After a lengthy pause in which he broke down pleading for mercy, the chair was kicked from under his feet. Fortunately for him the rope was not secured to the rafters above.

Black balling is common among recruits. and many of the dangers they face in training are from each other, as each tries playing at soldiers with little more than an Action Man comic to go on, plus the stories learned from dad down the pub the night before they left. The recruits show a willingness to participate in any community pursuit and try to to impress anyone and everyone with their mixed-up league of priorities. They will take part in the humiliation of others, pleased that it is not happening to them. They have the childish notion of one who does not know right from wrong; if everyone else does something then it must be right. The alienating process has them so frightened that when they do join in group pursuits they often show their insecurity with violent reaction. 

Competition

Competition is the third bracket that straps the cogs to the tank tracks. Recruits are told from the outset that they must shape up to perform with team spirit in an endless cycle of competition that ends up like a game of snakes and snakes. Those who fail to perform well enough at individual and team skills are made to go back in training (back squadded). Competition strains at every level of the Army. At Battalion level there are about 600 men divided into four Companies, each of which has four Platoons of 30-40 soldiers. They are divided further into four sections of 8-12 and competition is intense for promotion and the cushy life. The sections are at loggerheads to be the best section in the platoon. The platoon is rife with the obsession to be top in the Company and the Company, predictably, is all-out for the coveted Battalion premiership. Of course the Battalion has its role to play at Garrison level and every Garrison goes all-out to be the best in the Army. The question is. where you go with the best Army in the world? Afghanistan? Grenada? or the Falklands?

Armies compete on behalf of the nation-states they represent for strategic positions on the trade map, areas rich in mineral resources and trade routes. In the name of defence they are often sent by governments to embark on expansionist imperialism. The sporting competitions of football and rugby, much advertised in the glossy brochures that could well have been composed by Saatchi and Saatchi, fall by the wayside when the Army enters the big league of politics at its sickening best. With such an extensive conditioning attack it is little wonder that the trainees soon appear to be the unthinking patriotic morons that the drill sergeants, non-commissioned officers and officers have set out to make them. The Army has disrupted everything that was important to the ex-civilian and imposed a new set of values. It is by treating the recruits in this way that governing them becomes easy and so effective.

The Queen's Regulations (the bible of the British Army) make interesting reading. For example, under Section 69(a) of the Army Act 1955 are listed offences against their god — good order and discipline — under which it is possible to charge someone with anything, including breathing. It is not uncommon for soldiers to be charged with “dumb insolence” when there is no better excuse than the face not fitting. Soldiers are caught by the jankers under these Acts. 'Frying to quote from the Queen’s Regulations in their defence can lead to another charge of insolence.

The ranks above are continually reminding the soldiers that they are not paid to think, with the old cliche:

Yours is not to reason why;

Yours is but to do or die.

This is shortly followed by a reprimand for not using their initiative. In recognising that the soldiers go through a very severe conditioning process we ask ourselves a few questions: Does it work in every case? Are there any long-term effects? and Is this conditioning a barrier to socialism? The answer to the first question must be that the conditioning of the soldier does work in most cases, proof of which can be found at the graves of Verdun or the Somme or Arnheim and the countless millions of nameless graves across the world where worker has killed worker for countries in which they had no stake. There are a few trainees who get out of the Army in the first few weeks but the majority feel compelled to stay, under the misbelief that it would be cowardice to leave. Secondly, are there any long-term effects? The sad answer is yes. We are familiar with the war wounded who were never hit by the enemy’s bullets, but were struck by a life in billets and camp songs for whom the last war has never ended. Many workers, however, have learned that no workers' interests are at stake when the capitalists make battle. Thirdly, what about the conditioning process? This is not a barrier to our achieving a socialist society. We have seen American soldiers conscripted to fight in Vietnam desert to the safety of Sweden. We have recently seen a film of the Russian soldiers defecting in Afghanistan and must conclude that as the individuals mature, so do the ideas and vice versa.

Jimmy Bob

Crime marches on (1950)

From the August 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

To flog, or not to flog? That is the question which the daily press recently thrust upon its readers as the burning issue of the day, and which it discussed at great length with much emotion and, in some instances, precious little consideration for the facts; probably with no other result than to make the public—including the potential delinquent—cosh conscious. That violence is a serious problem for which a solution is long overdue, few would deny; but is flogging the answer? Let us quieten the hysteria for a moment and, like all good scientists, take a look at the facts.

The first and most obvious fact which should come to mind is that until September 1948 flogging was used to deal with various types of violence. This was provided for by a number of Acts such as the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 as amended by the Garroters Act of 1863, so it cannot be said that flogging has not been given a fair trial. In spite of this however, violence is not only still with us, but since 1938 has increased rapidly. The number of robberies with violence increasing from 287 in that year to 1,101 in 1948 (News Chronicle 24/3/50). After flogging was abolished however, the number of cases decreased from 711 during the first nine months of 1948 to 597 in the corresponding period of 1949 (Daily Mirror 17/3/50). Conversely, during the six years that followed the introduction of the Garroters Act, viz. 1863 to 1869 there was, to quote Lord Aberdare who was at the time Under Secretary at the Home Department, “ a slight increase in these crimes.” (See “The Lawbreaker” by E. R. and T. Calvert, Routledge, 1933, p. 241). Another interesting example was the introduction of whipping as a punishment for procuration by the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1912 which resulted in a tremendous increase in the offence in 1913. The actual figures are as follows: —

Persons for trial for procuration

1910 25

1911 18

1912 14—Whipping introduced during this year

1913 73 

1914 41 

(see, “Social Aspects of Crime in England Between the Wars ” by Dr. Hermann Mannheim, Al!en & Unwin, 1940, p. 51)

From these facts it is obvious that flogging is not only a failure as a solution to violent crime but its effect as a deterrent is. to say the least, extremely dubious. Neither, of course, will the abolition of flogging solve the problem. No problem can be solved by ignoring it. These methods must fail because they leave the cause of the trouble untouched.

The first task for anybody seeking a solution is to understand the problem. Many instances of violence such as assaults on policemen or nightwatchmen are the result of hindering the burglar in the practice of his profession. We cannot, in fact, separate violence from the crime problem as a whole. We shall not, therefore, make the attempt.

Before seeking a clear insight into the causes of crime it is necessary—as with so many things—to clear away a big cobweb of misconception which clouds so many people's vision. This is the attractively simple but quite erroneous idea that the whole trouble is caused by a “criminal type"; a sort of biological monstrosity, like Siamese twins or two-headed giraffes; a mental monster whose criminal activities are the result of some inborn crime instinct. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and amongst those who have made a study of criminals the idea is generally discredited. Listen, for example, to Dr. Goring who, after making a careful examination of no less than 3,000 convicts, makes the following observations: —

“This anthropological monster has no existence in fact. The physical and mental constitution of both criminal and law-abiding persons of the same age, class, stature, and intelligence, are identical. There is no such thing as an anthropological criminal type." (“The Lawbreaker,” p. 44)

In fact the evidence tends to show that they are ordinary people like ourselves, a large number of whom possess many excellent qualities. For instance on page 54 of the same book, Mr. Justice du Parq is quoted as reporting a type of prisoner who is “young, determined, and adventurous," and Leo Page, who has a wide first hand knowledge of criminals, tells us in his book “Crime and the Community” (Faber & Faber, 1937 p. 99) that:

“One finds with a shock of surprise that they (professional criminals) can be courteous and well mannered, grateful and appreciative of just treatment or of a little kindness, or passionately fond of music or of flowers; they are often brave—a good burglar, for example, must of necessity be a man of nerve, courage and resource; some are well read, with a real love of books; others can be wonderfully loyal, in the odd distorted way in which they understand the meaning of the word; very many retain amongst all their troubles a smiling acceptance of fate and a keen sense of humour.”

It seems that we must look elsewhere for the causes of crime.

The law is a social institution made by man, it is not a biological product; so also is crime—its opposite pole or complement—a social phenomenon, and it is in society and not the individual that we must look for an explanation. Government and the machinery of state, which make and enforce the law, exist to conserve those private property institutions which are so vital to the interests of the ruling class and the continued smooth running of their capitalist economy. This being the case, we should expect to find some connection between crime and social conditions generally and economic conditions in particular. Let us put the matter to the test.

Dr. Mannheim tells us (Social Aspects etc., p. 123) that “the significance of economic factors in the causation of crime is fairly generally accepted," and farther on (pages 127 to 130) he reproduces statistics which show the figures for crime rising and falling through the years almost in step with those for unemployment; the only exception being after the slump of the early thirties when, although crime figures dropped for the older age groups, those for the younger groups continued to rise right up until the outbreak of war. This may be explained by other social factors; possibly the waning influence of religion during the inter-war period and the growing tendency of the rising generation to criticize hitherto accepted moral standards.

Another excellent example of the influence of economics upon lawlessness, which can be gleaned from pages 105-7 of the same book, is that of Germany whose terrific crime wave in the early twenties can be accounted for by the economic distress following her military defeat in 1918. It is also significant that whilst the figures for simple larceny had rocketed from 202,885 in 1920 to 308,005 in 1923, which was the peak year of her inflation, those for coining actually "slumped" from 341 in 1921 to 156 in 1923, so reflecting the instability of the Mark. Immediately after stabilization, however, there was a “boom” in the offence which resulted in no less than 1,094 convictions. In England where the economy had not been so seriously disturbed, crime increased far more steadily.

Lack of space makes over-simplification unavoidable and we fully recognize that all crime cannot be traced to economic factors so directly as this. We fully appreciate the importance of war and insecurity, and the effects of gross inequalities and the degrading position of the wage slave; all of them factors which themselves spring more or less directly from the capitalist nature of society. It could be argued that even the majority of sex crimes spring from the unnatural sexual institutions thrown up by property society; but as Dr. Goring tells us that 95 per cent, of all prisoners are convicted for acquisitive offences, (“The Lawbreaker", p. 39) we will not labour the point.

We live in an acquisitive society where we get our living in permanent competition with our fellows, and often at their expense; where periodic orgies of blood and violence such as we have recently experienced tend to instil a bias? attitude towards human suffering. Many people not only grow up in such a world and have the outlook which it engenders but they see also a few people living in a surfeit of luxury and ease without the necessity of work, whilst they are doomed to a life of toil; living in some overcrowded hovel in a sordid and ugly slum environment, through no fault of their own—other than choosing the wrong parents. Is it, then, not cause for wonder that so few take matters into their own hands and ignore those laws which enable a privileged minority to keep them in poverty and subjection?

Let us face it; there is no easy solution, the roots of crime go deep into the very basis of society itself. A vicious and competitive economy gives rise to vicious and anti-social behaviour. An economy based on a community of interests will give rise to co-operative and social behaviour; its establishment is the most urgent task confronting society today; and society includes you.

Meanwhile; crime marches on!

J. Trotman

On campus—USA (1984)

From the Winter 1984 issue of the World Socialist

The educational system functions to serve the needs of the capitalist society in which it resides. Its objective is to produce educated and competent workers, including managers and military personnel; in addition, knowledgeable, sophisticated members of the capitalist class. The subjects and training cover a vast complex field that assures the owners of a qualified work force that can do everything that is necessary to produce, distribute and market commodities for sale and profit, in line with existing technologies. And of vital importance is the fact that initially a working class is produced that has been subtly brain-washed and seduced into social and political acceptance of capitalism. The majority of students, when their formal education has been concluded, embrace the wages system without question. Their labour power is ready to be marketed. They, in turn, are willing to conform with docility and eagerness to all the standard norms of capitalist society which, in effect, will maintain their rulers in power in contrast to their own commitment to subservience. Although they have been informed of revolutions in the past, they enter into their new careers with a tacit acknowledgement that the existing society is the beginning and end all for them, and for everyone else; imbued with personal ambition which is devoid of a proper understanding of the social nature of their new environment. Sure, capitalism may always need improvement—but never elimination. This latter, they are not taught—nor ever will be within the boundaries of their formal education.

We do not imply that there has been some malevolent conspiracy at work engineered on an in-depth discerning level by the capitalist class and their agents. In most instances, both the rulers and the ruled are unaware of the economic causes and social consequences of the system they uphold. The superstructure of society, in this instance the educational system, is determined and conditioned by its economic base—the dynamics for its existence. Capitalism is a social organization wherein a minority own and control the means of production and distribution for the purpose of capital accumulation through the realization of profit based upon large-scale wage labour. The educational system is locked into this process in every conceivable manner, both directly and otherwise. There has never been a practical need for the capitalist class to properly understand their own system, notwithstanding the fact that Karl Marx in Das Kapital had most thoroughly accomplished the analysis. Capitalism, regardless of manipulation, follows its own pattern, and conditions the education of the working class to conform to all of its many requirements under the tutelage of the exploiters and their agents. This immense task is by no means an easy one, cut and dried, without its problems, complications and financial burdens. It is always an ongoing operation, subject to continuous reformation which revolves around the "quality" of the education supplied together with its costs and sources of revenue.

Political indoctrination 

Political indoctrination commences with millions of school children, throughout the land, starting the day by reciting in unison the patriotic litany:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

To quite literally add injury to insult (which such trivia is to a young, uncluttered mind) it was reported in a news item on January 2, 1983, in the Arizona Daily Star, and I quote:

Each year, 1.5 million school children in the United States are physically punished under the authorization of principals and other school administrators. This figure does not include informal slappings or beatings meted out by teachers, coaches, bus drivers and other school employees. The schools most inclined to punish are those in Florida, followed by those in Arkansas and Mississippi. In Florida, one out of eight public school students receives corporal punishment in a typical year. The national average is one out of 28. Black school children are victimized most often; one out of three is punished nationwide in a typical year.

An award of commendation goes to Hawaii's board of education, which refuses to allow corporal punishment.

I presume that this treatment prepares the recipients somewhat for the brutality of capitalism that they will eventually encounter in later life.

The state, which exists to preserve, maintain and administrate capitalism, bears the responsibility for the bulk of the educational system; in addition, there are schools, colleges and universities that are either privately or parochially endowed, in many cases receiving added subsidizing from the government. It is therefore surely obvious that such a structure can never be expected to allow or instigate any teachings that will directly challenge or threaten its position. All educational reforms will ultimately prove of prime benefit to the rulers, because to the extent that the educational system is successful in producing competency and political acquiescence within the working class, so to that degree profits will be generated and protected to the highest maximum possible, subject to general market conditions and the prevalent militancy of the workers. This does not imply that the education received by workers cannot be used by them for their own interests. In fact, the mandatory exposure that they receive, especially in subjects exclusive of the social sciences, provides the basis for their ultimate comprehension of the socialist case.

Subjects such as reading, writing, mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy, mechanics, geology, accounting, languages, law, medicine, computers, business administration, engineering, architecture, pharmacy, military science, aerospace, agriculture are all essential to the pursuit of profits and are approached scientifically within the confines of budgetary allowances. But the social studies such as history, economics, sociology, political science, theology, anthropology, are handled with biased restraint and the investigations are by no means impartial. Evidence unfavourable to the existing scheme of things is either suppressed, ignored or perverted.

Weeding-out process

The whole curriculum, from start to finish, is conducted within an atmosphere of competition and stress together with a weeding-out process which segregates those with supposedly superior talents from those less fortunate. This is accomplished through the use of tests, examinations, and grading, all of which have a direct bearing upon ultimate occupations and potential earnings. Such an environment prevents the pleasurable pursuit of education as a primary end in itself. The young find themselves involved in an intensive training programme, presented under the guise of education, which will ultimately affect the price of their labour power and in many instances can prove disastrous health-wise.

In an article on February 5, 1978, in the Arizona Daily Star, it stated that:

Why are child suicides increasing in Japan? Last year more than 700 children and teenagers took their lives there. Japanese authorities offer two reasons: (1) the country's fiercely competitive educational system in which the road to success in later life is linked to passing difficult examinations to leading universities; (2) the reaction of some children to the mounting pressures of excessively regulated lives.

A further quote in the same article stated:

The educational pressures in Japan are unremitting and not only cause ulcers in children but in many cases lead to suicide. Prof. Masayoshi Namiki recently told an international medical convention that he had come across 19 children, none older than 14, with ulcerated stomachs, "dramatic evidence of the unnatural life-style our children are forced into under the pressures of our educational system".

An article in the Wall Street Journal dated June 10, 1980, entitled "Why Are They Cheating?", written by a member of the Journal's Washington bureau which covers education, states:

In addition, statistics show that the rate of campus homicides, suicides, illegitimate births and drug abuse has been steadily increasing for more than two decades, says Edward Wynne, associate professor at the University of Illinois and editor of a magazine called Character. Cheating is just another indication of a "change for the worse", he says.

It is common knowledge that drugs and violence are two of the major problems to be found within the school system today—coupled with large numbers of students who are leaving school with an inability to properly read and write or perform well in simple mathematics. The International Reading Association in Newark, Del., estimates that some 20 million English-speaking, native-born American adults read or write so poorly that "they have trouble holding jobs or suffer loss of self-esteem." In the Wall Street Journal on January 22, 1981, Samuel Halperin, director of the Institute for Educational Leadership at George Washington University, was quoted as follows:

Schools can't teach drug abuse, sex education, driver's education and still teach reading, writing and arithmetic well. And you can't buy that much these days with $2.39—the average hourly amount spent last year on each public-school student.

The perpetual conflict within the educational system is the attempt to produce the desired results, at a budget price, within a competitive, stressful environment harmful to both students and teachers. The teachers themselves, in similar fashion to their students, have been graded and selected to perform at certain levels in different categories. Their own education has been, in many instances, limited by economic and material circumstances beyond their control. They find themselves frustrated by rigid guidelines that apparently do not bring out the best in their students, especially those who come from broken, badly poverty-stricken homes. In addition, just like their fellow workers, they are forced to eke out a marginal existence finely honed to a limited wage. And when they sometimes are forced to rise in protest and strike, they are criticized and condemned for having acted in a supposedly anti-social manner, ignoring the needs of their pupils.

Direct relationship with business world

The educational system abounds with a never-ceasing variety of seemingly insoluble problems which relate to the economic considerations of a cost-conscious administration where the individual needs of the student rarely, if ever, get priority. Instead, education receives the same approach as that given to commodities which have to be produced in a given period of time, at a certain price, for a particular market, with a quality-control that leaves much to be desired. In a Washington (AP) news item on February 1, 1978, Kenneth Clark, in an address sponsored by the US Office of Education, and I quote:

attacked the system of "tracking" in which talented students are steered to elite high schools or courses while the majority of young people are considered "educationally expendable". Clark said American high schools neither facilitate upward mobility nor promise equal opportunity. 

"In fact, under the guise of democracy in selection and the maintenance of standards of merit, they are very effective instruments for the maintenance of racial and class distinctions and the resulting discriminations and inequities," he said.

One might well ask, whose needs are being served here? Those of the students who have been discarded along the wayside, or those of the prospective employers who eventually will be presented with a selected so-called "cream-of-the-crop", the result of a weeding-out process accomplished on a cut-rate budget basis.

There is an interdependence, a direct relationship, between the educational system and the business world. The capitalist class are forever watchful that their source of future wealth, the embryonic working class, receive adequate preparation for the jobs that lie ahead, notwithstanding the prevailing shortcomings. Beyond this point, at the university level, business and higher education in many instances are inter-locked in associations that virtually incorporate the educational machine into the production process. The Associated Press, in an article on December 14, 1982, states:

Scores of universities have entered research contracts with big business, in partnerships that both sides believe will help America regain pre-eminence in world markets such as automobiles and electronics.

And further:

Industry-funded research centers are springing up at Princeton University, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford University and elsewhere. For business, it means a valuable source of brainpower. For cash-trapped universities, it means millions of dollars, new facilities, and a way to keep top faculty members in the thick of developments in their fields.

Starting with first grade children, a concept called "career education" has been used which in theory is supposed to permeate all academic subjects at all levels of education, from kindergarten through junior college. Typically, simple field trips are made into stores, etc.; workers are observed at their jobs, and high-school students sometimes have mock interviews with prospective employers in order to develop their job-finding skills. In an article in the Wall Street Journal dated November 26, 1976, it was stated:

Career education began taking hold five years ago when Sidney Marland Jr., then US Commissioner of Education, coined the phrase and gave the concept top priority. Since then, according to the American Institutes for Research, some 9,000 of the country's 17,000 school districts have launched programs.

The article further states that endorsements have poured in from numerous big organizations which have included the US Chamber of Commerce and several blue-chip companies. For those who support capitalism, such a program no doubt seems practical and worthwhile (although many teachers have been critical and have not jumped on the band wagon). However, to the socialist such exposures to the existing system that are obviously done in an uncritical, prejudiced manner, without an in-depth economic evaluation of the exploitive nature of present-day society, are a flagrant one-sided approach to reality.

Education true and false

It would be Utopian thinking to expect the educational system under capitalism to be different from what it is, or to anticipate anything radical in the way of change. It is a creature of its environment, tailored to the needs of the ruling class that it serves. A vast conglomeration of facts and misrepresentations have been assembled, masqueraded under the banner of "education". This knowledge, liberally interspersed with falsehoods, is crammed into minds that assimilate a proportion, become bored with much that is offered and quickly forget a great deal after examinations are over. Frequently, the unhappy student seeks escape in various unhealthy pursuits.

True education, whereby the pupil is taught in an environment without stress and competition, where time is not at a premium, where financial considerations are non-existent, where individual needs are in harmony with society's, has never been given an opportunity to work its potential wonders. Education, properly organized under these conditions, will become delightful— pleasurable, without undue burden. The process will be a continuous one that will not commence and finish at a given age, but rather will be recognised as a never-ceasing quest for individual improvement throughout the whole of our lives. Blueprints cannot be supplied until socialism has been established, but it should be obvious that education will not be prostituted to the needs of a class minority or the demands of a market place—because neither will exist. All healthy individuals will be able to satisfy their desire for knowledge unhampered by economic restrictions or barriers. The whole of society will in a sense become a perpetual seat of learning wherein schooling, travel and the productive process can become beneficially interrelated. In socialism, assuming intelligent organization, the world itself can become the classroom.

Samuel Leight

(World Socialist Party of the United States)

More about children and crime (1950)

From the June 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the past few months, popular newspapers have been giving a great deal of space to articles on crime, juvenile delinquency and more especially to crimes of violence. Some newspapers in fact, have been accused of giving “cosh cases” prominence in order to canalise public opinion in such a way as to make people demand the return of flogging. Although it is not the purpose of this article to either justify or oppose flogging, it is interesting to note that even so-called “experts” are divided as to whether this form of punishment is a deterrent. It is even more interesting, however, to read these “expert” opinions on the cause and cure of crime.

The Daily Express (April 25th, 1950) displayed on page 3 the following headline:—

“Glittering Toys Blamed for Theft” 

and reported the Mayor of Acton, Mr. A. E. Mitchell, when addressing a conference on juvenile crime at the Middlesex Guildhall, as saying:—

“Multiple stores are responsible for much of the petty thieving today. Glittering toys in easy reach are great temptation to children. . . . The Stores should co-operate by putting them out of reach.”

We may well ask Mr. Mitchell what sort of a world it is that can produce glittering toys in superabundance merely to lie in windows and on shelves out of reach. Is it so surprising that children unable to buy them, will take them?

What then of the older child? The child who is old enough to know that the taking of toys is forbidden and old enough to know that toys are not to play with, but only things at which to look and covet; the child who wants to amuse himself, who has no playroom, playground, or nearby woods in which to roam?

At the same conference Mr. A. T. Pike, Chairman of the Highgate Juvenile Court has something to say of this very child. He asks:—

“What causes children to trample down allotments, ill-treat old ladies, and do things of that kind?”

and then answers:—

“It is downright wickedness!”

It is evident that Mr. Pike has a remarkable insight and is aptly fitted to deal with the cases that come before him. No doubt he is a source of inspiration and guidance to those children whose misfortune it is to visit his Court. His suggestion for the cure, however, is one which is no less brilliant than his analysis of the cause, and must have been the result of painstaking research.

He says:—

“The sooner we get back to old-fashioned terms and remedies the better.”

We may also ask Mr. Pike what he expects in a world where Commando thugs and Dick Barton are the heroes, where violence, atom bombs and mass murder are the order of the day. Is it not to be expected that some children will react accordingly, emulate their heroes and become little toughs.

In speaking to the Annual Conference of probation officers at Cheltenham, Sir Hartley Shawcross seemed to be getting on the right track when he said, (Sunday Observer, 23/4/50):—

“In these days of economic uncertainty and, still more, of the fear and threat of war, many of us are tempted to a get-rich-quick attitude. . . . 'Let us live while we are alive; let us get what we can while we can.' Too often that is the modern philosophy ”

He goes on to say: —

“The basic factor is that the suppression of crime by adults consists primarily in preventing juvenile crime. Not only are virtually all habitual offenders people who committed their first offences when children; no less than a third of those convicted of indictable offences are children under seventeen. . . . The number of criminals to each 100,000 of the population is greater at the age of sixteen than at any other age. What an indictment of us! We may not be able to do much about those who have established themselves in a life of crime, except to keep them out of mischief. But we must stop the rot at the beginning."

If Sir Hartley Shawcross appears to be on the right track in his earlier remarks as to the cause, we are sadly disappointed later on, when he says of the cure: —

“I wish we could build up . . .  a uniformed youth organisation in the social services of the nation. Young people love uniforms.”

Then, to forestall any accusation of suggesting the building of a “Hitler Jugend,” he says:—

“That was the secret of the “Hitler Youth” a damnable organisation. But that love of uniforms and of the idea that they are doing something important can be developed for good ends, as well as base ones.”

It is difficult to see exactly where Sir Hartley’s youth organisation would differ from the “Hitler Youth” in either means or ends, but no doubt, being an “ expert ” he must be right when he asserts that there is a difference.

He goes on to say: —

“Just fancy, if you could enrol those over school leaving age in a junior section of the special constabulary, you might divert a lot of the spirit of adventure into stopping crime instead of creating it."

Just fancy, if only children would grow up with a spirit of adventure, law-abiding enough to be honest and conscientious workers in peacetime and ruthless enough to be cold and efficient killers in war. Unfortunately for Sir Hartley and his whole tribe of “experts” he can't have it both ways, and all the psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, child guidance clinics and other “specialists” can rack their brains and hold conferences from now until the cows come home but until the economic system that causes crime is fundamentally changed, they might just as well knock their heads against the wall.

It may be argued, of course, that all children do not react in the same way to the same conditions, but let us compare the country child with the slum child. It is generally accepted that there is less “delinquency” among the former as compared with the latter. But the former has many more facilities for occupying his spare time in a “ law-abiding ” manner—open spaces, trees to climb, and the thousand and one things the country can offer—but the slum child, hemmed in with brick walls, in most cases unwanted in the house all day because of lack of space, has to play in the streets and in finding an outlet for his energies often resorts to destructive behaviour.

What conclusions are to be drawn then? The workers the world over produce those very toys and all the other goods that they and their children want. The development of science in production has proceeded far enough for all their demands to be satisfied providing the world were run in a sane manner. As things are however most people are unable to buy everything they want and are, in fact, often unable to obtain all the basic necessities of life. Some therefore take what appears to be the easy way out and resort to what is known as “dishonest ways” of obtaining those things. The number who succeed in this way and stay unapprehended is probably small. Those who do succeed most likely spend their time wondering how long it will be before they are caught. There is one way in which robbery can be successfully carried out and yet at the same time be legal. This is what is generally known as robbing the workers of the fruits of their labour, and to do this only one condition is required—that of being an employer or capitalist. As, however, this is impossible for most of us, we are back where we started. The solution to the problem, however, does exist.

Seeing then, that the mass of the people produce those goods they need, why can’t they have them? This is what our comrades in America probably call the sixty-four dollar question.

The Socialist solution is one that would remove crime, poverty and slums in one fell swoop. We hold that all the evils of the modern world including war, are a result of that very way in which the world’s wealth is produced and distributed, and of the fact that approximately one-tenth of the people own nine-tenths of that wealth. We do not call for the equal distribution of that wealth, but for the abolition of private or State ownership of the means of life and the making of production and distribution and making them the common property of every man, woman and child on the earth. Everybody who is able will work to produce the things that we need and everybody will have equal access to those things.

We argue that the need to “cosh” a man on the head for his watch or his wallet would no longer exist because watches would be freely available to all who needed them, and money would be a thing of the past. Even today, who would bother to steal water from another man’s tap? Nobody dreams of doing so because water is freely available to everybody.

Under Socialism the same condition would apply to all our needs—they would be freely available to all.

Those who prattle about “human nature” being the cause of crime and making Socialism impossible, should be reminded of a few facts. According to the calculations of scientists like Gordon Child and Julian Huxley, man has probably existed on this planet for a period of at least 500,000 years. Of that period the greater part was lived in primitive communism, where money was unknown, where such property as existed was commonly owned and where the distribution of the wealth produced was in accordance with the needs of the community. A fine example is given by De Poncins in his book “Kabloona.” During his stay among the Eskimo untouched by civilisation he was amazed to find that in spite of the severity of the climate and the consequent scarcity of the means of life, stealing was unknown and that there was no word for stealing in the Eskimo language. He found, in fact, that in this condition of rude communism crime was virtually iron-existent.

Let those who talk so glibly about “human nature,” appear in the dock and plead like the German War Criminals that “human nature” is the cause of their crimes. The court that passes sentence will be no more lenient and the rope that hangs them will be no less deadly.

In conclusion; when the working class decides to solve its own problems instead of leaving it to the “experts,” society will no longer need prisons, nor indeed will it need “experts” on the cause and cure of crime.

S. J. Burton.

Books Received. (1906)

From the July 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

My Right To Work: Free Trade, Protection or Socialism? by R. B. Suthers, Clarion Press, 72, Fleet Street, E.C.  Paper 6d,. Cloth 1/-

The Ethics of Corporal Punishment, by H. S. Salt, Humanitarian League, 53, Chancery Lane. One Penny.

Violence at School: Contradictions in the classroom (2003)

From the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every ruling class has a two-faced attitude to violence. When the members of a ruling class think their interests require it, they will use violence of a most extreme kind, dealing out death and injuries to “enemy” soldiers and civilians, and destruction to “enemy” cities. The American and British invasion of Iraq is a recent example. In its own territory, however, a ruling class will often aim at preventing physical violence. The more non-violent its own home society is, the fewer interruptions there will be to the steady production of surplus value for the ruling class – the more peaceful will be the labours of the waged and salaried workers for the benefit of the owning class.

Children, of course, learn much more from example (when they see how adults behave) than precept (when adults tell children how to behave). So they will probably grow up to be more docile workers in capitalism’s factories and offices if they are not beaten at home or school. That, at any rate, is how the British ruling class sees it, and thus there has been a “statutory ban on the infliction of corporal punishment in schools” (Times, 18 December 2002).

Shortly afterwards the same Government which had kindly stopped teachers hitting children joined with America to attack Iraq, with the result that some thousands of adults, and children, were killed or badly injured: like Ali Abbas, the boy whose family was killed, while he was left with many burns and no arms. It is also the same Government that locks up families who have come here without official permission – such as the Kurdish Ay family, a mother and four children, who were kept imprisoned for over a year before being forcibly sent out of the country (Independent on Sunday, 22 June, Times 15 August). (The father of the family, sent back to Turkey despite Turkey’s repression of the Kurds, has not been heard of since.)

 

The banning of corporal punishment didn’t please everybody. Some devout Christians felt that the Act took away their religious freedom. A number of “independent schools providing a Christian education based on biblical observance” (Times, 18 December 2002), supported by parents of children at the schools, went to court to establish their right to continue beating their pupils. They argued that the law took away their religious liberty to hit children, and so broke the European Convention on Human Rights, which established that “everyone has the right to freedom of . . . religion”. (Why shouldn’t children claim to belong to a religion that outlaws physical violence? And shouldn’t their right not to be hit take precedence over adults’ “rights” to hit them?) The schools asserted that “physical discipline” was “an integral part of the teaching and education of their children, whether in school or in the home”, and “citations from the Book of Proverbs were provided in support of the claimants’ beliefs, those being regarded as biblical precepts”. The Court of Appeal rejected these arguments, so the Christian schoolteachers will sadly not be able to thump their scholars. They won’t be able to bring back the days the present writer can recall – when the Scripture teacher lost his temper with a boy who could not remember the next verse in the Bible passage the class was supposed to memorize, and attempted to knock it into his pupil physically – “The next verse, you blockhead, is ‘God is love’!”, whack! “God is love!” whack! – and so on.

But of course teachers are in many ways the first line of capitalism’s propaganda army: at least they are the first organized part of that army that many of us come across. So they cannot avoid the many inconsistencies and contradictions which are inherent in capitalist propaganda. I remember standing in the school playground in the thirties, in the rain, facing the flag on Empire Day, while the headteacher explained to us how lucky the other countries in the British Empire were that Britain was ruling over them. Then, when the war broke out in 1939, the head explained that we had to go to war to prevent one country ruling over other countries. What was very good when “we” did it was all wrong when others did it.

At the same time the teachers (although they would have indignantly refused to accept that they were part of “the working class”), were – as workers – under the constant strain of having to produce results in order to justify their salaries. One “Assembly”, at the beginning of morning school, when we had a religious service, as required by law, ended with the headmaster praying piously “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us . . . Amen”. Then his face became red with anger, and he shouted – “I saw some boys out of my window yesterday playing round my car, and they deliberately scratched it! Who was it? Who was it? I’ll get them!” When the miserable miscreants had been terrorized into owning up, they were sent to the head’s study to be caned immediately after Assembly, and the head clearly had no idea that there was any discrepancy between praying “as we forgive them that trespass against us”, in theory, and his rampant desire for revenge, in practice.

It is strange that it is only the more vulnerable members of the human race, children, who are supposed to gain from being beaten. Why did not these Christian schools claim that the headmaster could beat the house-masters, and the house-masters beat the ordinary teachers? Or why shouldn’t all the teachers beat the parents who haven’t paid their bills on time? It is quite true that texts from the Book of Proverbs advocate the beating of children, but there is no reason to stop there. If these Christian schools insist on following biblical instructions, why don’t they insist on their right to execute from time to time some unfortunate eccentric old woman, on the ground that the Bible (Book of Exodus, chapter 22, verse 18) says “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”? Not to mention another half-dozen denunciations of witches and witchcraft in the Bible. And don’t say there aren’t any witches: how could the Bible mention witches, and lay down what ought to happen to them, if there weren’t any?

Alwyn Edgar

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

Letter: The Harsh Realities of School (1973)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Harsh Realities of School

The following has been received from a correspondent who is a teacher, and is published without comment by us since it largely speaks for itself.

If the schools I have taught in are fairly typical of English schools (and I have no reason to think that they are not) then they certainly operate under the same social stratification as capitalism itself whose essence is that of privileged and subject orders.

“Keep them (i.e. the students) properly in their stations” (the words of one learned headmaster). “Don’t reason with ’um just thump urn.” (A teacher’s approach in the event of any difficulty). Recently one child complained to the head of a department about one of the teachers. The result was not any questioning by the teacher about himself or the head of the department about the teacher, but rather a disgust and indignation on the part of these two and other members of the ruling élite about the fact that this child should have dared to complain (where is his respect? etc.) and a caning for the child. These actual examples, by no means unusual as far as I can see, seem to sum up the approach of most of the hierarchy (i.e. staff) of today’s schools. Now by no means all teachers would follow these principles if confronted with them directly by some questioning person, but when it comes to practice, my experience says that they are not untypical.

The strict and cruel discipline practised in most schools today is explained away on the grounds that it is good for the students. I find this hard to believe. Most teachers lead in this cruelty, but a sub-strata of bullies exists in the form of prefects. The attitude of “we got pushed about when young and it did not harm us” seems to be the only justification for making life a torment in schools by the ruling bullies. Why is it good for a child to stay out of doors when the staff run inside complaining of the cold? Why should a child not eat in class? What harm does that do? (alright, crisp packets do rattle, but that’s an extreme). Why should students be made to walk down the corridor in regimented fashion? Why is chatting when work has been set not allowed? Surely young people have got a lot to learn purely from discussion with each other. There are a multiplicity of whys in mind and in the minds of those unfortunate ones subject to the fetters of school.

There are of course many answers that can be given to these questions. At school children are being regimented and trained to accept the system of society as it exists at present. This involves disciplining oneself to hard work. Hence homework every night is given. Examination success is claimed as an indicator of one’s intelligence and therefore aptness for certain jobs. What good the passing of a history exam does for one working in a tax office I have yet to ascertain, apart from disciplining one to sit there and work for a goal. People at school do not learn or enjoy themselves to any large extent because the teachers are forced to keep a syllabus (most of them agree with this). Young people in school may train in their minds to recite that piece of work in an exam at the expense often of ruining any enjoyment in that subject. School seems to have the knack of being able to ruin any genuine or potential enjoyment a person may have if allowed to follow his/her own interests.

Adults often say that their school days were the best days of their life if only they had been old enough to appreciate them. This is, however, only a comparative analysis. School days seem good only in the light of what work is like after leaving school, and then probably only because of the compensation of long holidays. School as it exists is to the child much like work is to the adult. The school attender however has probably more pressures upon him/her. Students at school are pressurised by parents, teachers and the law to go to school each day. They have no choice. Neither, until they attain the age of 14/15 in most schools, do they have a choice in the subjects they study. This constitutes the best years of one’s life? Society, one feels, to throw up such value must be in a mess.

As one child said in a debate in school “just put bars on the windows and then people will believe it’s a prison.” Hopefully, however with the coming of Socialism the shackles now upon both students (young workers) and workers will be released and freedom for the individual (after all, teachers, let us not forget that under-16-year-olds are individual human beings) will replace it.

Cath.