So, the education system....

[Jennifer]

As a few of you may have read in my introduction thread, I'm really passionate about education so this is something deeply important to me. What changes would be made to the education system under socialism? I know it would focus more on cultivating talents, interests, and skills of students, rather than for a standardized test "preparing" you for job XYZ to make $$$ money; but how would it be organized? Or maybe no structural school system like now (primary, secondary) and rather "learning centers", whatever that could mean...hey, I'm just spitting off ideas here. Also, universities and institutions of higher learning...would they be necessary? So, anyone care to clarify what a new education "system" would look like and some crucial changes that would have to be made? I realise there may be no right or complete answer for this, so what do YOU think is important to change? Thanks!

[cenv]

I think this is a really important issue. It's impossible to overstate the importance of bourgeois education in psychologically preparing students for lives as obedient, well-behaved workers. More than anything, the current education system instills an overwhelming passivity in students. We all know that the education system as it stands conditions people to follow orders and toe the line in capitalistic hierarchies through an intense regimen of grades, discipline, etc. etc, but this only scratches the surface.

Far more disturbing is that bourgeois education teaches people to engage ideas passively; ie. instead of prompting them to actively formulate their own world view, to experiment with ideas and turn them inside out, it teaches them to consume concepts. The process of grappling with ideas to better understand the world is mediated by a predefined structure -- the textbook, the organization of the lecture, the requirements of the exam, whatever.

Essentially, students learn to engage ideas through a filter supplied by someone else. What exactly constitutes this filter is irrelevant because once students internalize this mindset, their relationship to their own ideas becomes defined by passivity. From the perspective of revolutionaries, this is problematic because making the conceptual leap necessary to question capitalism in a totalizing and empowering way is next to impossible in the context of this passive attitude towards learning; but from a more general perspective, it's a problem because it prevents people from experiencing the full breadth and depth of their own minds. Thinking is an exciting and rewarding activity when it's approached as an unconstrained adventure, but bourgeois education straight-jackets thought.

So, to finally answer your question, I think the most important task of schools in any hypothetical post-revolutionary society will be not to teach students, but to teach students how to teach themselves. To provoke them to engage ideas actively, formulate their own ideas, and discover the power of their own minds. I don't know the exact form this will take, but there are a few traits that will be indispensable:

- Test- and grade- centric education will be a thing of the past. Students and teachers alike will look back at our schools, with the high premium they place on "getting an A," and they'll laugh and say "what was wrong with those stupid fucks?"

- Once ensuring everyone passes / gets a good grade stops being the highest priority in education, teachers will be free to really challenge students to expand their perspective and understanding instead of shoring everyone up to a common level of mediocrity and moving on to the next test.

- Instead of teaching students discipline, passivity, ideological dependence, and obedience, education will prompt students to empower themselves through their thought.

Basically, this amounts to a complete reversal in the underlying structure and function of education. It's hard to guess the specifics of how to best structure the education system because the social and psychological role of school is vastly underresearched right now. There are serious questions to be answered about how education shapes people's fundamental approach to understanding the world around them, and I suspect that the answers to these questions would shake capitalism to the core.

[Jennifer]

Thanks for the excellent response, I couldn't agree more. What you've posted kind of makes me think of educators being more of tutors than "teachers". I like it. It'd be a wonderful way for students to have more one-on-one time with an educator, allowing them to enhance their own personal growth in whatever area they choose. School should only be responsible for providing the resources and materials, which includes educators, to help students enrich their own independent education:D Now THAT would be such a rewarding job for me!


Agh, and set curriculum. Needs to go, I can't stand it.



...the social and psychological role of school is vastly underresearched right now. There are serious questions to be answered about how education shapes people's fundamental approach to understanding the world around them, and I suspect that the answers to these questions would shake capitalism to the core.

Well said! :)

[hatzel]

I would make a 'proper' post, but it might be easier to just say that I pretty much agree with Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html) in its entirety. In the interests of giving this post some substance, however, I'll just quote a section from that:


A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree--public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available.

[...]

At their worst, schools gather classmates into the same room and subject them to the same sequence of treatment in math, citizenship, and spelling. At their best, they permit each student to choose one of a limited number of courses. In any case, groups of peers form around the goals of teachers. A desirable educational system would let each person specify the activity for which he sought a peer.

School does offer children an opportunity to escape their homes and meet new friends. But, at the same time, this process indoctrinates children with the idea that they should select their friends from among those with whom they are put together. Providing the young from their earliest age with invitations to meet, evaluate, and seek out others would prepare them for a lifelong interest in seeking new partners for new endeavors.

A good chess player is always glad to find a close match, and one novice to find another. Clubs serve their purpose. People who want to discuss specific books or articles would probably pay to find discussion partners. People who want to play games, go on excursions, build fish tanks, or motorize bicycles will go to considerable lengths to find peers. The reward for their efforts is finding those peers. Good schools try to bring out the common interests of their students registered in the same program. The inverse of school would be an institution which increased the chances that persons who at a given moment shared the same specific interest could meet--no matter what else they had in common.

[...]

The right of free assembly has been politically recognized and culturally accepted. We should now understand that this right is curtailed by laws that make some forms of assembly obligatory. This is especially the case with institutions which conscript according to age group, class, or sex, and which are very time-consuming. The army is one example. School is an even more outrageous one.

To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another person to attend a meeting. It also means recognizing the right of any person, of any age or sex, to call a meeting. This right has been drastically diminished by the institutionalization of meetings. "Meeting" originally referred to the result of an individual's act of gathering. Now it refers to the institutional product of some agency.I've also mentioned Postman and Weingartner's Teaching as a subversive activity (which cenv may have read, considering many of the ideas in their post are almost verbatim citations from that text...) before when this issue has been brought up on the forums, and feel that their inquiry education has a certain amount in common with Illich's proposals, inasmuch as both are most definitely learner-centric. I think that will have to be the buzzword here: learner-centric. How exactly this will be achieved (be it through Illich's "learning webs," inquiry education or any other conceivable method) is mere details. Admittedly Postman and Weingartner's proposals may be easier to implement, insofar as they retain the idea of the classroom as a gathering point, merely modifying the dynamics of education within said classroom, but I find Illich's deschooled society - should it prove feasible - more beneficial. It may not be unreasonable, however, to suggest that a classroom-based education system may be provided alongside a more decentralised model.

[Jennifer]

Interesting excerpt, bookmarked the link. I'll get around to reading it soon. :)

[ZeroNowhere]

You may be interested in this article (http://communiststudents.org.uk/?p=7089) on Marx and education by James Tansey. My comment after that may or may not also be of use.

[cenv]

Thanks for the excellent response, I couldn't agree more. What you've posted kind of makes me think of educators being more of tutors than "teachers". I like it. It'd be a wonderful way for students to have more one-on-one time with an educator, allowing them to enhance their own personal growth in whatever area they choose. School should only be responsible for providing the resources and materials, which includes educators, to help students enrich their own independent education:D Now THAT would be such a rewarding job for me!
An increased emphasis on one-on-one tutoring also allows students to have an experience that's more in sync with their personal learning styles. One of the things I realized when I did volunteer work as a tutor was that a lot of very smart kids go through school thinking they're "stupid" because they can't force themselves to structure their thought processes to align them with the way information is presented in class. And the longer they stay in school, the more they internalize this mindset.


which cenv may have read, considering many of the ideas in their post are almost verbatim citations from that text...
Actually, I haven't, but thanks for the recommendation.