Education: The only tool for real social change

Over recent days in response to the riots taking over London and other parts of the UK I have been driven to write this blog about the importance of educating young people into making the changes they need in society in a productive, reasonable and coherent way.

　

We face an unprecedented crisis. A social crisis, and an ecological crisis. I believe that they’re linked, and that if we are to find solutions to those interrelated crises, those solutions will only come out of education – and it has to be education of a particular type.

I would suggest that traditional education is not really education at all. What passes for education in our public schools and in most of our private schools, certainly in our universities and colleges today, is in fact a sort of training. It has very little to do with allowing for the unfolding of potential within the individual, which I see as the basis for real education. It is, rather, an attempt to create and to reproduce the structures of hierarchy and domination that are shown in the larger culture. It is an attempt to train willing young minds to meet the needs of capitalism and industry by producing students who can unquestioningly go out and join the work force and become so-called “productive” members of society.

I feel that given the direction in which society is moving today, the ecological crisis and the social crisis, the last thing we need to do is reproduce that system.

We need instead to generate forms of education that help to transform that system, change its basic structures in ways that can address these problems. We have to understand that traditional education operates on three levels, and that those three levels reinforce each other. First there is the form of traditional education, which of course is intended to instill students with obedience to authority. They’re taught to sit in orderly rows in classrooms, they’re taught to respond to bells and whistles, they’re taught to never question the authority of the teacher. The teacher’s primary role in education is maintaining order in the classroom. It has very little to do with learning at all. Actually, that attempt to reproduce order, to create order, to create obedience to authority, to create compliant students who become willing workers is extremely destructive. It’s related to the second level of traditional education, which has to do with the content – what students are actually being taught. Undeniably it’s useful for young people to learn how to read and how to write, how to do basic mathematical calculations. These are all things that will serve them well. But beyond that, there is a hidden curriculum, which is really an attempt to create in these students an unquestioning acceptance of our current culture and its having a devastating effect.

I can tell you, as a student, about the impact of our education system, both the structure and the content. It’s been very detrimental to me, as it has been for generations of children and it’s through the reproduction of hierarchy, through the acceptance of authority that our society protects it’s own survival. And it’s not something that’s going to change. I’ve been sharing my ideas about education for a couple of years at various events and I can tell you that within professional education today there is not a great deal of understanding around these ideas. Though there is wave after wave of reform, those reforms are largely driven by the needs of industry.

This brings us to the third level of traditional education, and that is the individuality with which children are educated today. Its about the individual students and their needs and their well being and the unfolding of their particular potential. But currently it’s a ‘one size fits all’ model of education, which is intended to reinforce the agenda of obedience.

So what is the alternative? If we accept the idea that meaningful social change will only come about through a process of education, which is of course one of the underlying beliefs of anarchism, then we need to look very carefully at what constitutes a radical education. What would be an education that’s adequate to bring about the kind of social change necessary to stop this destruction? What would constitute a radical education? I would suggest that the same categories that we use in understanding traditional education have to be applied in our understanding of radical education. For an education to be truly radical we need to examine the form that that education takes. We need to examine the content of that education. What it is that is being taught. And we have to understand the indvidual needs of students.

There is not a single solution or a single model that would constitute a radical education. As we know from looking at people who have examined childhood development, early childhood development, and adolescent development, there are various developmental stages at which particular kinds of education are appropriate.

Certainly at the level of primary education I would suggest that the primary developmental need of students is the type of free development.

As Jerry Mintz has pointed out in his work,
“there are oases around the world, there is a free-school here or a free-school there. But in general these noble experiments are isolated and the number of children that they reach is extremely limited. And that’s very unfortunate, because at this formative stage in children’s development the most valuable thing that we can offer them is freedom to explore, and resources they can use in that exploration. But this is not something that figures largely in the scheme of traditional education at all.”

As we progress we can begin to also look at ways in which the content of the education becomes important. At secondary school I was taught about how britain ruled the world, but very little is taught about the oppresion and slaughter of the natives of those countries. We have to ensure that our students are exposed to a history that reflects a critical views and the development that we assume to be inevitable. Students need to know the history of movements like anarchism. Students need to be exposed to the lives of people like Emma Goldman, and this is not a part of a standard curriculum in any secondary school that I know of today.

This question of content is closely linked to the form of the education. And if we are truly to create students who are able to think critically, draw their own conclusions and then contribute to a larger project of social change, it will only happen if they are given an adequate grounding in this kind of history, if they’re given the tools that they need to be able to critique the contemporary economic system. In this Biodiversity Hall, for example, at the Museum of Natural History, there was a little mention made of over-consumption. That was really put on the individual – we are all greedy consumers and that is why we have an environmental crisis. It’s because each one of us consumes too much. It’s because the world is becoming overpopulated. But there was no mention of the fact that the world today contains 500 billionaires, and that those billionaires have an annual income equal to the poorest 45% of the world’s population. That’s quite an omission, and it suggests an analysis that is inadequate, that does not prepare young people, or anyone for that matter, to make sense out of the mess that we’re in today. In fact, it mystifies it and ensures the continuation of the system in which the elite benefit from the continuation of that system. And that’s very much the intentionality of modern traditional education.

We need to develop educational processes and curriculums that encourage freedom, that encourage unfettered development, and that give students exposure to the ideas, the concepts, and the critical understanding that will allow them to begin to deconstruct the myths supporting the current system, if we are ever to deconstruct that system and replace it with something positive and life-affirming.

That brings me to the final level on which I think a radical education has to operate. And that is intentionality. We have to be very intentional about what we are doing. I’m not suggesting here that we have to be dogmatic or ideological, that we have to limit expression or limit inquiry. Rather, we have to ensure that students are allowed to explore these subversive and radical ideas, that they’re given access to the resources they need to sort things out, and that they come away with an understanding that they can make sense out of a system that thrives on the fact that it’s incomprehensible! And there are ways to make sense out of it. If we fail to provide our students, our young people today, and ourselves for that matter, with this kind of outlook, with the ability to think critically and to think independently, to question authority and to view themselves not as passive consumers but as active agents of social change, then we’ll be making a tremendous mistake. We will be condemning the world to simply reproducing, in ever-deepening levels of degradation, the system that exists today. And I think that is our task. It’s not a simple task, it’s not an easy task, but it’s a vitally important task.

In closing I would simply ask that you keep the faith. That we continue to spread these ideas, that we recognise that social change will only come about through a process of education, that education is not limited to the classroom or to institutions of higher education, and that each of us, as an individual, has a responsibility.

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