the hopeful struggle: Consciousness, Liberation and the Global South:  Education

 

Genocide doesn’t mean only bombs (Vietnam Addenda, Lorde)

 

One day

the apolitical

 intellectuals

of my country

will be interrogated

by the simplest

of our people

They will be asked

what they did

when their nation died out

slowly,

like a sweet fire,

small and alone.

 (Apolitical Intellectuals, Castillo)

 

Education, the social institution known more precisely as ‘schooling’, is not real. It is an illusion.  Of course, I know that bricks and mortar exist (in the schools that aren’t falling down); I know teachers talk in the front of classrooms; and, I know there is a corpus of material to teach we call, charitably, curriculum.  These things seem real.  But I want to argue they are not.  They are not real to the degree that they do not accomplish the rhetoric we popularly ascribe to them: (critical) knowledge, (democratic) citizenship, equality of opportunity, etc.  In the way that rhetoric does not match reality, then, I call education “an illusion.”

 

[A former student sent this link of George Carlin (who recently passed) regarding his take on education.  He captures the essence of what I am about to say pretty well (but with much more colorful language, of course). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw&feature=related]

 

Not only do I mean to argue that education is an illusion in what follows.  But, I also posit this argument as a way of saying that our acceptance of this illusion is literally killing our kids: intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, and, sometimes, physically. “Genocide doesn’t mean only bombs.”  What we heap on our kids is nothing short of an atrocity—an atrocity with a silent citizenship (loading the gun) and bipartisan legislative support (pulling the trigger). Bang.

 

Before moving on, though, I want to ask the indulgence of the reader as I will be speaking in broad generalizations about schooling, teaching, and citizenship.  Of course, individuals demonstrate great resistance to the system toward which most act like sheep. I put myself and many I know in the category of resistance, though I know I also uncritically participate in the systems of oppression I seek to eradicate.  This dispatch is not intended to diminish the real courage often demonstrated, nor the strides gained. Yet, it is not a stretch to argue that we/these resistors, especially where the resistance has real impact, represent extreme exceptions to the rule. 

 

As well, I do not mean to add to the critique of teachers.  Much of the existing critique is bogus.  And, it certainly isn’t critical; nor is it constructive.  It usually amounts to scape-goating by frustrated people trying to find someone to blame for society’s ills. A female-dominated profession in a patriarchal society is as good a place as any, I guess, in their minds. Teachers are entrusted to do a great deal in our schools—definitely more than should be expected or what could be accomplished.  So, I position these remarks as a constructive critique for those educators—and other cultural workers who teach through their work—who actively engage their consciousness and challenge their socialization in order to seek liberation and humanization. The time for a ‘schooling enema’ has long since passed.  We can choose to be on a path toward part of that change. Or, we can choose the path of least resistance and be part of the obstruction.

 

Schools reproduce economic inequality

We don’t have to dig too far beneath the surface to see what our schools are producing/selling. In fact, it is hidden in plain sight.  The main purposes of schooling since the dawn of the Cold War and the launching of Sputnik in 1957 have been economic and jingoistic.  That is, the purpose of going to school is built around the prospect of future employability.  And, while in school, students/consumers will be indoctrinated with the great American narrative intended to produce a rather obedient, uncritical, flag-waving patriot.

 

Schools are socially-reproductive mechanisms that help to replicate current socioeconomic discrepancies.  By this I mean, if you start school poor, you will probably end up seeking out jobs at the bottom end of the economic ladder. If you start school rich, a job at the upper end of the economic ladder will probably find you.  And, middle class kids will find work on a rung somewhere in between the upper and lower end.  Schools do this through methods of what they call ‘academic’ tracking.  Turns out that ‘academic’ closely mirrors other social indicators like race and class.  Relatively poor kids and a majority of kids of color end up in comprehensive tracks, vocational education (where it still exists), and special education.  Relatively wealthy kids end up in college prep, honors, and AP tracks.  We can call it ‘intelligence’, ‘discipline’, ‘hard-work’, whatever you like (or helps us sleep better), as to the reason it ends up like this. However, what informs our perception of all these ‘concepts’ is not only socially conditioned, but their ‘reality’ is based more on structural constraints rather than individual achievement/effort/ability.

 

Beyond tracking, standardized testing (a multi-billion dollar profit-making machine) helps assure the economic hierarchy is not upset, as federal funding is contingent upon success on standardized exams.  Since students’ performance on the standardized tests is more closely linked with their parent’s income than any other indicator, guess which kids win and which kids lose this cruel game? Given that funding is tied to success on the tests (and dismissing the finding that parent’s income is the main indicator of success on the exams), schools who teach relatively poor students and/or schools comprised of a majority of kids of color endeavor to, uncritically, teach to the test, filling the kids’ heads with useless knowledge, teaching disconnected parts rather than a contextualized whole, and destroying any love of learning.  Relegating kids to this kind of teaching or the lower tracks where such pedagogy is employed, graduates (supposing they weren’t pushed out somewhere along the way) are prepared for little else than low wage employment, if they are lucky to find work at all.  As well, there is some fairly convincing evidence linking these kids with a future in the military (becoming front line fodder: see Faith Agostinone Wilson’s, as well as Rich Gibson’s work, at The Rouge Forum). We also know these kids are disproportionately represented in our prison population as adults. Do we, as teachers, understand the future financial impact we have on kids when we assist the ruling class in becoming their socially-reproductive agents by legitimizing standardized testing and/or sorting kids by rigid ‘ability’ and ‘academic’ grouping?

 

What we learn in schools

Acknowledging that there may be something worth learning in school, I maintain that the hidden curriculum (obedience, deference to authority, punctuality, putting up with boredom, social control) is the primary purpose of schooling. Of course, this hidden curriculum changes depending upon your social class or race, most easily differentiated by tracking.  Upper class kids, while still controlled receive a vastly different curriculum than kids from urban ghettoes or rural wastelands.  Beyond learning to read and performing particular mathematical functions, is there any content that is absolutely necessary in school?  I think there are processes that are important—procedures (like argument, deliberation, experimentation] that do something with the content, but it is fairly evident that standardized testing and most teaching evaluates regurgitation of content, not process.  So, I argue, there is really little worth learning in schools today.

 

Returning to the hidden curriculum, there is one set of curricula that we all learn regardless of our social class: how to be consumers.  The media, family/community, church, and school all teach us to consume (rather uncritically).  The messages and the evidence are everywhere. Advertising has polluted every public space.  Moreover, the competition moves in from all sides—whether it is for our brand loyalty, our favorite professional sports team, our particular religion (or shade of religion: Lutheran or Baptist, Shiite or Sunni, etc.), our school (public or private).  We are taught to consume, to consume well, and to consume often, ultimately, to our own peril since the average family maintains an obscene debt load.

 

This type of consumption and competition for our consumer identities is central to the project of Capitalism.  In Capitalism, everything is for sale. Everything is a commodity.  It seems ridiculous, but the system renders in rational.  In a recent article, “A Marxist Reading of Reading Instruction,” in Cultural Logic, Patrick Shannon provides some of the most coherent and comprehensive definitions of Marxist terms aimed at critiquing Capitalism.  Shannon argues, “Rationalization, then, treats human beings as variables to be manipulated along with materials, time, and space to ensure predictable products and profits from material, ideational or social manufacturing.” Providing a nice connection to standardized testing and scripted curricula noted above, he further asserts,

 

The conditions of life in contemporary elementary schools provide an example of this rationalization process. The justification for scripted lessons and high stakes testing is the logic of production. Scripts provide the division of function with teachers becoming factors in the implementation of the curricular designs of others; they fix the actions of teachers across classroom, schools, and districts; and they synchronize the actions of teachers and students toward the abstracted exchange value of student test scores. These scores now define teachers' success, become students' cultural capital, legitimize administrators' plans, and raise property values in communities. Using science as the objective and impersonal logic behind the rationalization of reading instruction in elementary schools, the entire process appears natural and inevitable. Inside the logic of rationalized reading programs it makes sense to follow the scripts in order to increase the chances of higher test scores, and few inside or outside of elementary schools object to the rationalization of reading instruction. Those that do object are dismissed as irrational or political.

 

This process is not naturally accomplished. It takes mechanisms to pit us against each other, to divide ourselves, to believe our labor is a commodity for someone else’s profit, to desire things that can bring us ultimately no pleasure, no joy.  This process is called alienation.  It is worth quoting Shannon at length, once again, as he continues to flesh out the standardization and scripted curricula example:

 

Alienation is the process of separation between people and some quality assumed to be related to them in natural circumstances. This process can be consciously recognized (subjective alienation) or be beyond the control of the individual (objective alienation). If you begin with the assumption that reading, teaching and learning are human processes, which are natural qualities of teachers and students, then, the rationalization of reading instruction requires both types of alienation. The script's standardization of teachers' actions requires that the totality of teaching someone to read is "divided, fixated and synchronized," objectively separating teachers from teaching reading. The definition of learning as test scores separates students from the totality of their learning. Reducing teachers and students to factors in the scripted system of test score production requires that they lose, at least officially, emotional, cultural, and social attachments to the process of teaching and learning and to each other. Such detachments demand a subjective separation of teachers from teaching and students from learning. This does not mean that alienated teachers are uncaring or that alienated students lack engagement. Rather it means that the nature of that engagement is subsumed under the process of rationalization and the possibilities of teaching and learning are artificially directed and severely restricted.

 

We could make similar connections to mathematics, of course.  But, we can also make connections outside of teaching, too.  All workers in a capitalist system experience this alienation—where our work is less about intrinsic meaning for ourselves, but profit for someone else.  We seek competitive advantages (those of us that can) through specialization (which further disconnects us as we lose site of the whole as we get more particular). Additionally, this specialization often creates efficiency (i.e., more profit for the ruling party). We also experience a subsequent loss of agency, becoming convinced that nothing can be done to change the system since we know little about it (given the focus on our specializations).  Since the world can’t be changed, then, and our work no longer provides meaning for our lives (other than competitive ego in bourgeois working situations, which is fleeting), we need something to replace that power and meaning.  Reenter commodities. Marx called it the “fetishism of commodities.”  Shannon explains it this way:

 

…[C]apitalism organizes production in such a way to reduce costs of production to a minimum (in order to maximize profits). This profit motive impels capitalist manufacturers to rationalize production -- seeking a division of labor -- a historically specific method of reducing individualized and differentiated work into routine and regular acts, creating new efficiencies. . . . Under capitalism, even labor becomes a commodity -- a thing that individuals possess, develop, and sell in order to survive, and perhaps, thrive. Despite their simple appearance as objects, commodities represent all these invisible social relationships.

 

Marx called the invisibility of these relationships the fetishism of commodities. By this he meant that we lose sight of the social character of commodities and act as if the physical properties of the commodity command a price. Many, even some economists, believe that the thing itself has the power to establish an object's price and to be productive, and not the human labor or the social construction of exchange value. . . .Capitalism's moral character is based on this fetishism of commodities -- this distortion of reality to make profit off of the work of others.

So, our labor and the products we create are fashioned as commodities to be priced, sold, and bought.  Our labor is specialized and disconnected, distancing ourselves from the final product and any sense of intrinsic value in what we do.  Our work lives are rendered valueless in the process. So, to replace human value, we replace this with ‘things’ that some ‘other’ has created and for which some ‘one’ has profited.  This is the system and logic of capital.  This is the dehumanizing game we play. 

 

To conclude this rather lengthy section, I am reminded of a provocative example offered by Michael Lebowitz in Build it now: Socialism for the 21^st century. He describes the continued distancing of producer and consumer as a way of explaining why it is so easy for injustice to roll on: “The coat’s price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all they particular relationships they had.  And, if we buy the coat we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside.”  What would happen if we created much more evolved consumer identities that linked ours and others production with our consumption? How would we look at Mexicans in maquiladoras?  How would we envision child Chinese laborers?  How would we greet immigrant field labor from Central America?

 

Schools of education may be enemy number one

In an attempt to throw myself under the bus, I argue that schools of education are one of the main reproductive mechanisms of the status quo and do little (if anything) to train teachers for how to change society.  This is not surprising since teacher educators are no more trained in how to change society (which would begin with a critique of Capitalism) than anyone else.  As well, teacher education is a female dominated profession training a future dominated workforce in our patriarchal society.  In many ways, we become a convenient scapegoat. 

 

That said, it does not excuse the relative power we could exercise given our positions in universities with tenure.  We appropriately embody Saul Alinsky’s concept of the ‘do-nothings’ in Rules for Radicals: "[They] profess a commitment to social change for ideals of justice, equality, and opportunity, and then abstain from and discourage all effective action for change." 

 

Similar to the dearth of what we actually learn in school (the content), schools of education also offer a menu of rather banal and vacuous course offerings that are either impractical to what actually happens in schools or, more likely, offers no roadmap or example for how to change what is going on.  From classroom management courses to curriculum to assessment to technology, little is offered that won’t be relearned on the job.  And, again, schools of education (painting with pretty broad brush strokes here) will offer little in the way of resisting the dehumanizing trends in schools that they will rail against from their lecturns/pulpits.  Succumbing to the marketplace themselves (NCATE, ETS, textbook manufacturers, etc.), teacher educators may represent the worst type of model—claiming their allegiance to social justice, doing nothing of value about it, but encouraging others to go out and do the work. 

 

So, I am a teacher, what do I do? (Or, so I teach in a school of education, am I just screwed? Or, I don’t teach, can I not be part of the revolutionary change? )

Again, there are people resisting this.  There are teachers, if given the lower tracks, who do better by their students than simply delivering scripted curricula intended to boost standardized test scores. There are teacher educators who are becoming conscious and engaging in radical activities to subvert the status quo. There are people I work closely with in the PrESS Network.  There are people that travel to Jamaica with my partner and me desiring to make real change.  The fact remains, though, that kids relegated to these lower tracks, special education, or poor schools are simply not going to compete at a high level in the economic marketplace.  Capitalism sees to it that they can’t.  So, while we may help one kid get ahead—that’s just one more player in the game, as the late Sekou Sundiata noted in his 2007 address at the Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed Conference.  The goal, in his mind (and mine and others) is to fundamentally change the game.  I was a beneficiary of this game, since I had the appropriate cultural capital to excel at it.  As a teacher, I also helped a few people navigate this game, but I did much more of maintaining the status quo.  I definitely didn’t change the game, then.  I was only coming to consciousness when I left that game.  This process, of which I am still a part, is one that many of you find yourself engaging.  It is not a comfortable place.  It shouldn’t be, frankly.  Yet, we have to live. We have to act in the world, not live in our heads.  Once theory becomes action, it is imperfect.  It rarely has the impact intended.  That doesn’t make it bad, though.  If we act with consciousness, we will reflect, and act again (with greater consciousness.)  The purpose of my ongoing dispatches is to help engage this process by connecting theoretical and historical dots toward more revolutionary action, which begins with revolutionary thought—a belief that things can, things will, change.  And, they will change because I/we will enter the transformative process. I/We will embody the change.  Through me/us, others will change.

 

So, let’s get practical. 

 

(1) Teachers, as Gibson notes in his address at the Rouge Forum, 2008, are centripetally-located, right at the choke point of the system of capital. Schools:

·         offer a multibillion dollar marketplace of profit

·         provide a baby-sitting, warehousing mechanism

·         fashion hope—whether real or false

·         supply skill and ideological training, and

·         schools create the next generation of the army, workforce, and, quite frankly, the prison yard [where 1 out of every 100 adults is imprisoned in our country]

 

We can really f things up if we collectively organize.  What small scale organizational activities can we take up, and act upon, that may provide courage for larger organizational efforts?  Or, how might our organization inspire others to organize?  How can those of us with the most protection (tenure, years of experience, etc.) take the first steps to lay the path for other to follow?  How can we connect our organizational efforts with those whom we profess to serve? Relationships.  Connections.  Community. Build the network. Create alliances to challenge power. The PrESS Network.  The Rouge Forum.  Marxist/Feminist/Anti-racist reading groups.  Professional learning communities in our schools.  In our workplaces.  In our neighborhoods.  Do we know who we are going to be in solidarity with when the economy crashes and/or when the oppressed find their footing and right the wrongs of the past?  Is it worth considering where we will live, how we will eat, how we will financially support each other, how we will get around (considerations that most of the world has to deal with daily, but that we have the luxury to put off to the future)?

 

(2) We can become conscious. We can end our collusion and unconscious complicity with the capitalist system (and other systems of patriarchy, racism, heterosexism, nationalism, etc.). “It is not a matter of ‘struggling for others,’ which suggests paternalism and reformist objectives, but rather of becoming aware of oneself as not completely fulfilled and as living in an alienated society. And, thus, one can identify radically and militantly with those who bear the brunt of oppression” (Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, p. 82). How can we be sure to carry on this process of self-awareness in a system that endeavors to alienate us from ourselves?  How can we be constructively critical without beating ourselves up?  How can we understand yet attempt to move beyond our imperfect actions?  Praxis. Language. Lens-crafting.  Can we commit to spending time on our consciousness rather than the petty distractions set up to keep us from what is real and just?  What will that look like? How can we hold ourselves accountable?  What should we read?  How should we talk about it? How can we talk about it with others (that is, drawing the circle large enough to invite others in)?

 

(3) We can choose to become political agents and we can hope—have a voice and be visible. At some point, we will have to muster the courage regardless of our position—as student, as teacher, as professor, as social worker, as physical therapist—to do something.  We have no choice but to choose justice, to choose right over wrong, to choose what is moral and ethical based on consciousness.  Gutierrez calls it social praxis: “Social praxis makes demands which may seem difficult or disturbing to those who wish to achieve—or maintain—a low-cost conciliation. Such a conciliation can be only a justifying ideology, a device for the few to keep living off the poverty of the many” (Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, p. 31).  Indeed, we need a public education, but not the public indoctrination that we have going on in schools.  That is, we need to end the practice of current public education while preserving its promising potential.  And, we won’t know what we can rebuild until we get rid of what we have—the revolution is dialectical—built in the experience, not as a result of it.  All of us will have to step up to end it.  Leave our safe harbors.  Have hope.  Decipher the irrational from the rational.  Understand the social constructedness of what is before us.  It is not natural.  It is designed by the ruling class and kept in place through the unconsciousness of the middle class and the oppression of the poor class.  Break the silence. Demand more from your teachers.  Demand more from your fellow students. Practice your voice and be visible.

Castillo concludes Apolitical Intellectuals by observing, “A vulture of silence / will eat your gut. / Your own misery / will pick at your soul. / And you will be mute / in your shame.”  We can stave off the vulture, but only if we act in community, with consciousness, and with courage. We can create a new humanity.  We can create a new society.

“Only a radical break from the status quo, that is, a profound transformation of the private property system, access to power of the exploited class, and a social revolution that would break this dependence would allow for a new society” (Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, p. 17).  Our present educational system does not give us this.  It is only an illusion, a dangerous mind-numbing illusion.  Let’s take the power back.