Planning to Flee from Schooling
Picking up where my last dispatch left off, this dispatch introduces a project in fugitive planning that qualifies my propositions on alternatives to administration and supervision.
Why do we live in a deathly world of suffering in which schooling is considered to be more important than learning?
It is well understood that schooling is but one of many different forms of learning. What’s more, it is well known that schooling has never been proven the best form of learning. Nevertheless, schooling is undoubtedly the most privileged form of learning in our deathly world of suffering; all other forms of learning are considered suspect and those who learn otherwise than being schooled are prejudiced against.
Given that the benefits of schooling for learning are unproven, I would hazard a guess that privileges and prejudices favoring schooling and the schooled are part and parcel of the power formations prevailing over our deathly world of suffering — imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy being the most prevalent but by no means the only power formation that privileges schooling and the schooled.
Lest I be woefully misunderstood, let me definitively state for the record that I am not at all against learning (this should be obvious), nor am I always necessarily against schooling as a particular form of learning. I am chiefly against privileges and prejudices that favor schooling and the schooled.
Modern schooling is a highly administered and supervised form of learning. The primary purpose of subjecting individuals to compulsory schooling during their formative years is to get individuals into the unconscious habit of submitting to administration and supervision. Our deathly world of suffering privileges schooling over all other forms of learning for this very reason. The prevailing power formations that filter and channel those who are more schooled apart from those who are less schooled are, in other words, power formations that effectively filter and channel those who have proven themselves more often ready, willing, and able to submit to high levels of administration and supervision apart from those who have proven themselves more often unready, unwilling, and/or unable.
“Mastered academics 'cause your grades say you a scholar…”
Many readers will recognize that I am, once again, taking my cues from Ivan Illich here. Indeed, because I feel I cannot do him one better on this point, I will quote at length from Illich, some bits and pieces sutured together from the books Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality.
Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling. Yet to learn means to acquire a new skill or insight, while promotion depends on an opinion which others have formed. Learning frequently is the result of instruction, but selection for a role or category in the job market increasingly depends on mere length of attendance.
Age-specific, compulsory competition on an unending ladder for lifelong privileges cannot increase equality but must favor those who start earlier, or who are healthier, or who are better equipped outside the classroom. Inevitably, it organizes society into many layers of failure, with each layer inhabited by dropouts schooled to believe that those who have consumed more [schooling] deserve more privilege because they are more valuable assets to society as a whole.
[...] High consumers of education get postdoctoral grants, while dropouts learn that they have failed [...] [T]hey are schooled to [...] rationalize their growing frustration outside school by accepting their rejection from scholastic grace. [...] As Max Weber traced the social effects of the belief that salvation belonged to those who accumulated wealth, we can now observe that grace is reserved for those who accumulate years in school.
The modern university confers the privilege of dissent on those who have been classified as potential money-makers and power-holders. No one is given tax funds for the leisure in which to educate himself or the right to educate others unless at the same time he can also be certified for achievement. Schools select for each successive level those who have, at earlier stages of the game, proven themselves good risks for the established order. Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university coopts the discoverer and the potential dissenter. A degree always leaves an indelible price tag on the curriculum of it's consumer. Certified college graduates fit only into a world that puts a price tag on their heads, thereby giving them the power to define the level of expectations in their society. In each country the amount of consumption by the college graduate sets the standard for all others; if they would be civilized people on or off the job, they will aspire to the style of life of college graduates.
There is no question that at present the university offers a unique combination of circumstances which allows some of its members to criticize the whole of society. It provides time, mobility, access to peers and information, and a certain impunity — privileges not equally available to other segments of the population. But the university provides this freedom only to those who have already been deeply initiated into the consumer society and into the need for some kind of obligatory public schooling.
The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a full, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize it's fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education.
School is not only the New World Religion. It is also the fastest growing labor market. [...] If we add those engaged in full-time teaching to those in full-time attendance, we realize that this so-called superstructure has become society's major employer. [...] The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium and workbench during an increasing number of years of an individual's life. Deschooling is, therefore, at the root of any movement for human liberation.
In our deathly world of suffering, those who do not go to school find themselves “at risk” of never learning what they need to learn in order to realize their abilities. This is not because schooling is the only way for them to learn but, rather, it is because schools have a monopoly over access to most of the intellectual and material resources required for learning. In other words, “public policy” has made it so that going to school is the only accessible and affordable way for most people to learn what they need in order to realize their abilities.
Recognizing this, let us engage in some fugitive planning. To recap, we who refuse to go to school find ourselves “at risk” of never learning what we need to learn in order to realize our abilities and, given the many privileges and prejudices favoring the schooled, we also find ourselves “at risk” of unemployment and all that comes with it: homelessness, hunger, ruthless indebtedness. However, rather than submitting to administration and supervision, by way of schooling or otherwise, let us ask ourselves the following questions:
What forms of direct action might we engage in with others so that we may forage, cultivate, and fabricate what we need in order to live and learn otherwise than being schooled?
Which of these forms of direct action might enable further direct action?
Are these enabling forms of direct actions prohibited and punishable?
Are there any forms of defense by due process that might enable us to skirt prohibitions and ward off punishments while engaging in enabling forms of direct action?
Which of these forms of defense by due process might enable further defense by due process?
Those to whom I spoke and wrote of the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project before it launched will, no doubt, find these five questions somewhat familiar. This is because the project initially arose from my own planning to flee from schooling, and these questions outline the very practical problems that I have been seeking solutions for in and through this project.
Schooling and the privileging of the schooled do not make any sense without reference to statements, implements, and environments that furnish individuals with motives, means, and opportunities to submit to schooling and the privileging of the schooled. Recognizing this, any and all planning to flee schooling must involve (i) the deconstruction of the domineering statements, implements, and environments that privilege schooling and the schooled and (ii) the (re-)construction of convivial statements, implements, and environments that serve to (re)create confluences of different forms of learning and of people who learn differently.
In a previous dispatch on “convivial statements”, I began deconstructing the academic transcript insofar as it is a statement that motivates submission to schooling and the privileging of the schooled. I argued that, rather than regarding an academic transcript as measure of a student’s ability to learn, the academic transcript should be considered a measure of whether and how schooling has oppressed the student: it is the school system, rather than the student, that is to be evaluated by way of academic transcripts. Indeed, as I see it, the student with poor grades suffers from having been degraded by schooling, and they are owed artful reparations for suffering such degradation. The artful reparations owed to the student should take the form of access to resources that enable the student conduct their own experiments in learning otherwise than being schooled. To facilitate such artful reparations, I wonder how we might deconstruct transcripts that document students’ academic failures and use what remains to (re-)construct alternative statements that would enable students to conduct and log their own experiments in learning otherwise than being schooled.
