Question about education

[Naroc]

Hey there, fellow comrades!
I have a question about the education of kids/teenagers in a communist society.
What would be the largest differences to our current educationsystem? Would there still be "Authority" in it? Because i've heard a lot of discussions about the anti-authoritan education and if it will work. Besides that, would it make sense in an anti-authoritan society to teach kids with the "authority of a current teacher"?
I just want to hear your stance on this topic.

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

Hey there, fellow comrades!
I have a question about the education of kids/teenagers in a communist society.
What would be the largest differences to our current educationsystem? Would there still be "Authority" in it? Because i've heard a lot of discussions about the anti-authoritan education and if it will work. Besides that, would it make sense in an anti-authoritan society to teach kids with the "authority of a current teacher"?
I just want to hear your stance on this topic.

Who's to say we would even be educated? Food for thought, or digestion.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Hey there, fellow comrades!
I have a question about the education of kids/teenagers in a communist society.
What would be the largest differences to our current educationsystem? Would there still be "Authority" in it? Because i've heard a lot of discussions about the anti-authoritan education and if it will work. Besides that, would it make sense in an anti-authoritan society to teach kids with the "authority of a current teacher"?
I just want to hear your stance on this topic.

I don't think the authoritarian/anti-authoritarian dichotomy is particularly useful, to be honest. Presumably there would be no coercion, but teachers would have a sort of "authority" based on their knowledge and respect accorded to them. This is pretty much how university education is supposed to work, even in the capitalist society.

And presumably there would be need for some sort of education, since humans need socialisation and education. How this education will be organised is an open question - obviously schools as they exist now are not the only option. Community education, study and reading groups, learning through work etc. are all options.

[jake williams]

- We have almost no idea. Everything else equal, the difference would basically be that the management of schools and of the education system as a whole would be democratized, and involve more participation in decision-making by teachers, maybe parents, maybe students. What they would do with that democratic control, we could make some guesses, but we don't know.

- One of the interesting features of late capitalist education (and this is a hypothesis, but I think it holds) is that as institutions become more and more liberal, and less and less authoritarian, bourgeois ideology is nonetheless better and better reproduced. It's as if the absence of explicit, superficial authority assists in the transmission of bourgeois ideology.

- That said, while I have considerable sympathies for anti-authoritarian education, at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly old man, educational standards are getting lower and lower and it's less and less the case that kids are simply told "sorry, you actually do need to learn how to read, write, and do math". There's no reason not to teach kids calculus when they're 12-13 years old.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Hey there, fellow comrades!
I have a question about the education of kids/teenagers in a communist society.
What would be the largest differences to our current educationsystem? Would there still be "Authority" in it? Because i've heard a lot of discussions about the anti-authoritan education and if it will work. Besides that, would it make sense in an anti-authoritan society to teach kids with the "authority of a current teacher"?
I just want to hear your stance on this topic.

I could only imagine it would be strikingly different because the whole point of social education would be different. Modern schooling is pretty directly linked to capitalism and public education itself even more specifically connected to industrial capitalism. In the US we basically still have a "Prussian model" so it's more or less education as devised by state-capitalists who wanted to turn various populations of provincial people into a German labor force. In the US, mass education is also connected to creating labor pools: specifically how to "integrate" Irish immigrants in industrial areas (again how to turn agricultural people into workers) and during reconstruction (how to turn slaves into "citizens" and also probably workers of some sort, but most people in the south were pushed back into semi-forced agrucultural conditions).

So capitalist mass education is full of contradictions and is never about "education" in the abstract but education in a class sense. When artisans are need, education was intense practical experience more or less on a one to one basis (same with independant farming - both artisans and farmers would pass on the skills and knowledge they developed and learned). When general labor was needed and public schooling was developed, it was enough that people could learn basic reading and math and following instructions. Today it's more or less the same but with an economy of a lot of service workers and white collar type positions so you see more things like group-work and standarized testing. But it's basically the same: can you do assigned tasks, can you do what is demanded of you... sometimes with "teams" sometimes alone somtimes at a computer.

Education for elites tends to be much different. While some dicipline is necissarily taught, they are also educated to lead, to have confidence in their ideas and leadership, to compete, and to think critically. In earlier times elietes would have also be taught upper class culture: a common philosophical/thological exposure, the classics, etc.

So education where the point wasn't to condition and manage a mass of people to become cogs for business would have to be different because the goals and measures of sucess would be different. In terms of what society would need from the educated population would be for everyone to be able to think creativly, to have confidence to voice their views and argue them, to have the resources and skills to continue to enrich themselves. I couldn't imagine that "teaching to the test" and repetative learning or learning based on some random pre-decided age-based development would have any place in education if the point was for people to be able to develop themselves. As a start I think we could say that we'd want education in some ways like how elietes today are educated (i.e. full resources, not over-worked educators, access to arts and play and professionals who can help guide students in more induvidualized education paths). But that's just because my imagination is limited to what's bad about education for workers today and wanting to eliminate that. How it develops from there is anyone's guess in my view, but I think a certain level of voluntaryness would be part of education beyond, say, learing how to read and some other really general skills. I think there still would be educators/mentors but what they look like might be much different. I definately don't think people will sit in rows, 30 students to 1 teacher, repeating solutions to problems that are totally alienated and abstract over and over all day.

[Thirsty Crow]

I'd say that the grading system will get scrapped. Anyway, I'd surely advocate it. Other than that, I don't see how teaching could proceed without a teacher.
The aspect with non-basic education concerning enrollment quotas will also probably be eliminated, with the general rise in people knowledgeable in a field, and concerning the fact that more labor time might be expended for education, I'd say that more and more people would be provided access to such courses.

I'd also expect the overall scientific culture to more easily, and comprehensively, penetrate the entire society. No strict formally structured institutions are really necessary for that though.

[ckaihatsu]

These days options for learning extend all the way to a limitless autonomous, learner-directed studying through the use of Wikipedia, the web, etc.

I'll hold this up as an increasing 'de-specialization' of education, a trend that I think would only *increase* with the full de-privatization of society's means of production.

The real question, though, is whether the larger socialist society would have a collective interest in some kind of a 'core curriculum' being part of the norm for education, or not -- would today's standard canon (of reading, math, whatever) still be considered as 'the essentials' once capitalist hegemonic culture is no more -- ?

I'd say that a collectivist-type society would have a common interest in propagating its own historical record of achievements -- the worldwide revolution over capitalism -- as well as a norm of cooperative labor over public implements.

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

I am going to elaborate on this and state that the definition of education is to provide *systematic instruction*. This might frame my original post better.

[ckaihatsu]

I am going to elaborate on this and state that the definition of education is to provide *systematic instruction*. This might frame my original post better.


Hmmmmmm, interesting that it would have to be both 'systematic' and 'de-specialized' for it to be communism -- but as soon as something is systematized it encourages specialization since people will orient themselves to the standard of what's known and routinely expected.

So 'systematic' implies a 'core curriculum' (consistent standards over subject matter), and probably even 'professional standards' for education workers, yet at the same time we wouldn't want 'career professionals' since that would lend itself to a bureaucratic elitism.

In the direction of resolving this all I have right now is that perhaps loose, general 'profiles' could be used, to reach the widest pool of prospective education workers, for actual participation -- participation that would adequately cover the material required for the core curriculum. In this way the process of education would be *socialized* as broadly as possible, while keeping it relatively focused to a certain consistent core curriculum.

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

Hmmmmmm, interesting that it would have to be both 'systematic' and 'de-specialized' for it to be communism -- but as soon as something is systematized it encourages specialization since people will orient themselves to the standard of what's known and routinely expected.

So 'systematic' implies a 'core curriculum' (consistent standards over subject matter), and probably even 'professional standards' for education workers, yet at the same time we wouldn't want 'career professionals' since that would lend itself to a bureaucratic elitism.

In the direction of resolving this all I have right now is that perhaps loose, general 'profiles' could be used, to reach the widest pool of prospective education workers, for actual participation -- participation that would adequately cover the material required for the core curriculum. In this way the process of education would be *socialized* as broadly as possible, while keeping it relatively focused to a certain consistent core curriculum.

We could see part of Ivan Illich's 'Anarchist' de-schooling notion being applied here, a learning web of men and women who have a degree of authority in whatever tasks they engage themselves in and are able to take the time to help people learn what they need/want. The learning can be done in a methodical and systematic way (in terms of arranging content), but the 'structure' is not specialised.


Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education--and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.

[ckaihatsu]

We could see part of Ivan Illich's 'Anarchist' de-schooling notion being applied here, a learning web of men and women who have a degree of authority in whatever tasks they engage themselves in and are able to take the time to help people learn what they need/want. The learning can be done in a methodical and systematic way (in terms of arranging content), but the 'structure' is not specialised.





I am going to elaborate on this and state that the definition of education is to provide *systematic instruction*. This might frame my original post better.


I'll go so far as to say that the *logistics* you're outlining -- use of the Internet as a communications medium -- is far from controversial, but I'd be interested to know how you'd reconcile this decentralized communications with the purpose / framework of a 'systematic instruction', on a society-wide scale.

(In other words, a 'learning web' of volunteer educators is hardly 'systematic' in its approach to curriculum.)

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

I'll go so far as to say that the *logistics* you're outlining -- use of the Internet as a communications medium -- is far from controversial, but I'd be interested to know how you'd reconcile this decentralized communications with the purpose / framework of a 'systematic instruction', on a society-wide scale.

(In other words, a 'learning web' of volunteer educators is hardly 'systematic' in its approach to curriculum.)

I will respond in more detail later, but I would like to point out that education and learning are different. Education can involve learning, yet it tends to train rather than promote learning and nuanced understanding.