On Education II

[My earlier musing on education is here.]

My children are bilingual, German and English. They both attend bilingual schools. In the case of our younger daughter, this is still a primary school (Grundschule) which insists the children are more or less locked in from eight in the morning till four in the afternoon. On top of this they receive plenty of homework. She is at home this week on holiday, but has three projects to complete, plus plenty of new French vocabulary to learn for a test on Monday morning, her first day back. Our elder daughter is at gymnasium, kind of like an English grammar school, and there it is much easier. The days are shorter, the homework load lighter. Odd, but true.

Both of our daughters had (our youngest still has) a particular German/maths teacher neither responds well to. Their grades were/are poor in both subjects. This sets up additional stress, because every child receives a recommendation from the primary school to go to the higher quality gymnasiums, if and only if their grade average is very high (2.3). Grading at primary school is far harsher than at the gymnasium. Under 98% is a 2. 98-99% is a 1-, 100% is a 1. So you need to be consistently in the high 90s to get a recommendation. I consider this to be a considerable amount of stress for eight- to ten-year-olds to bear. On top of that, it is only in rare cases the primary school teachers children are assigned to actually enjoy their job and are good at it. In the case of our younger child, my wife and I would like to home school her, at least in her weak areas, since we feel it would be better suited to her particular personality and needs. This is illegal in Germany. Parents have been sent to prison for keeping their children out of school, or had their children taken from them. In 2007, a German couple fled Germany to the US. The US granted them political asylum in 2008. I believe the pair are now US citizens.

This is a very odd and harmful situation, to my mind. In my post on health insurance, my main point was that the state is a clumsy machine incapable of dealing with individual situations. There are instances when parents are more harmful to their children than a state school would be, true. But there are occasions when the opposite is true, and the work of John Taylor Gatto, John Holt and Sir Ken Robinson suggests the latter far outweighs the former. It is my strongly held belief, that not one element of what I believe is necessary to change cultural direction—away from Consumerism and Growthism towards more sustainable and healthy social systems—is possible until education is aligned with what our future (and present, by extension) demands of us. Education is, for me, absolutely pivotal in our transition towards a more rational and less robotic human future. The Khan Academy (thanks for the tip, Farmgirl!) is one example of how we might begin opening up education, and allowing passion and fun to bring a juicy vitality back to life’s most fundamental process; learning.

Below is my translation of an article by Rainer Hank which appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Novermber, 2007. I hope you find it at least food for thought. One part of it which stood out for me was the (up to) $1000 a month given by the Canadian state to parents home schooling their children. This is how I imagine a guaranteed income might help ‘free’ people from the state, or minimise the depth to which it seeks to control our lives. It would also ‘privatise’ or ‘localise’ education down to community level, causing money to cycle through the community in both a GDP- and society-friendly way. The Internet might expand this out across the planet, and connect learners everywhere. The Canadian example demonstrates, to my mind, how a guaranteed income would not be about people no longer having to work, but freeing them to work in areas closer to their hearts.

On to the translation:

"School in Germany is a matter for the state. Whoever wants to open a private school must reckon with great difficulties. Whoever teaches their own children or sends them to a private tutor has the police to deal with. For they would be committing a misdemeanour.

In Germany, compulsory schooling is absolute and punishable. To most of us, that sounds natural, self-evident even. But it is not, neither historically nor on the European or even international stage. German compulsory schooling is, if we forget a few dictators, the exception and not the rule. In most other countries, there is instead a monitored compulsory education. Whether or not children go to school to cover the required curriculum is up to them (and their parents and caregivers).

Compulsory education, not schooling

Why is it in no other free country of this world, parents who would like to raise their children are as harshly criminalised as in ours? After the crimes of National Socialism there was, supposedly,  a quiet and amicable agreement between parents and state, that bringing up children to be democratically capable of cooperating in a successful commonwealth, was inalienable, and that this upbringing could only be organised through the state, (so argues Volker Ladenthin, a pedagog from Bonn). German parents have a deeper trust in the Caregiver State than our neighbours in other countries.

And they have every right to have it. But why are parents who want to raise their children themselves kept forcefully from their wish? Wouldn’t compulsory education be superior to state compulsory education? Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 to 1835), the German education reformer worried about the state as raiser of children. “If education is only there, irrespective of particular civic forms granted the people, to educate people, so it lies not in the remit of the state.” Compulsory state education, in Humboldt’s opinion, leads to parents delegating to the state their responsibilities to raise their own, for which there is a high price to be paid: instead of free and educated people, school children become state residents, that is, underlings.

A poorly justified monopoly

The state’s education monopoly is indeed poorly justified—as with most monopolies. Financially, we are asked to believe it is more efficient to teach children in classes than for families to seek private tutors and governors (for a statistical 1.3 children), or to prevent parents from teaching their young. State-trained teachers guarantee, it is claimed, a certain professionalism in the manufacturing of the education “product.”

But not only do repeated Pisa Studies speak against the quality of the state’s performance, so too does a growing emigration into private schools. Were there the freedom to teach children at home, no doubt parents would take advantage of it. At the latest, it would be clear where the better education was to be found after prescribed tests. In all countries where education has been decentralised, such freedom has been met with approval, albeit with a three to four percent of parents actually “home-schooling”—although with a strongly rising trend. Even in Austria, home-schooling has recently been allowed. Parents in Canada receive up to $1000 a month to educate their children at home. Such largesse helps level the playing field, reduces the state’s advantage.

What should be the rule, what the exception?

Originally, compulsory schooling was not the rule, but the exception. “Compulsory schooling was introduced, because those classes who saw the least need for school kept their children at home to help with digging up potatoes and harvesting the grain”, says the pedagog Ladenthin. This was damaging to their children. The offer of subsidiarity, which in Germany receives high praise in commemorative speeches, says: The state need only intervene when the private sphere fails. The state may only protect schoolchildren from their parents when it fears education is kept from them, or when they are being dangerously indoctrinated.

And with that a weighty objection to home-schooling can be swept to one side. Many contemporaries fear radical or religious groups could abuse home-schooling, and raise their children as enemies of European values and the rule of law. But the fear of parallel worlds is there and cannot be dismissed. Even if we overlook that state schools don’t prevent parallel worlds (Neukölln [a rough part of Berlin]), the state retains the power to take children from parents who abuse or fail them.

And anyway, it will be the educated elite and not the lower classes who make use of the freedom to home school. Yes, even this assumption is tossed into the ring as an objection. Growing inequality and the increasing privilege of rich kids raised by private tutors would be the outcome, apparently. But today we have the intellectual bourgeoisie pampering their young with cello lessons, language courses and other private lessons. Or they send them off to foreign shores. That in Germany talents lie fallow, and money and social background determine educational success, is true. But state education cannot prevent that misery."

On Education

Over at Golem’s blog, under his latest post, I made a couple of comments referencing David Graeber’s perception that we are culturally suffering from a failure of nerve, a failure of imagination. This is the reason our outlook appears bleak. Not because it is bleak, but because we can’t see a way out. Writing for the Guardian about the Occupy movement in September this year, Graeber said:

But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible. [ ... ] Even the Economist was running headlines like “Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?” [ ... ] Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.

Why did this happen? Obviously there are far more reasons than a mere blog post can address, but one of them is surely rooted in the education system. We are not put through that system to become critical thinkers, to question, to carry on learning. We are compulsorily put through that system to have our independence of spirit broken, to be made compliant, obedient, susceptible to advertising, propaganda, to fail to care enough about the indignity of factory-line work and consumerism. Consequently, faced with the challenge of creating a new model, we balked. We don’t have it in us. Not after our ‘education’ knocked it out of us, that is.

Now, those are aggressive and sweeping words, but I suggest they hold generally (there are always exceptions). Before I go on, I’d like to point out I do not believe in ‘control’ by supremely gifted puppet masters of some lumpen mass. I do not believe in Us and Them projections. As far as I’m concerned, it’s “We, the 100%,” at least, as a mode of perception more constructive long term than “We, the 99%,” as important as that perception is right now. Our predicament, our reality, is far subtler than Us and Them. Nevertheless, it does serve to look at broad brushstrokes sometimes, especially by way of guidance and as a process for encouraging critical thought.

John Taylor Gatto wrote a paper back in 2003 called, “How public education cripples our kids, and why.” He has written books too, which I strongly recommend. Gatto thoroughly researched the origins of public education, in particular the sort of thinking behind its design and purpose. He singles out Alexander Inglis and his 1918 book, “Principles of Secondary Education”. For Inglis, public education was to be “a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table.” Gatto then describes the six core functions of public education as understood by Inglis:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

And it makes sense to the mindset of that era. Sir Ken Robinson campaigns vigourously for a revolution in the education system, as his talk to the RSA a short while ago attests. In the talk I link to, he says:

It [the education system] was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment, and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. [ ... ] I believe we have a system of education which is modeled on the interests of industrialism, and in the image of it. [ ... ] We still educate children by batches, we put them through the system by age group. Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are?

Gatto would answer that it serves the interests of industry. Lewis Mumford would point out that the ‘owners’ of the machinery hold the machinery in higher regard than the people it is supposed to serve. Chaplin’s “Modern Times” is replete with imagery conceived and composed in angry reaction to this basic truth.


Buckminster Fuller’s account of a childhood experience demonstrates clearly that mode of thinking (scarcity- and fear-based, mixed with what I think of as paternalistic and patrician pragmatism):

Just before I went to Harvard University in 1913 [ ... ] an “uncle” gave me some counsel. He was a very rich “uncle.”[ ... ] “Young man, I think I must tell you some things that won’t make you very happy. [ ... ] Those few of us who are rich and who really have the figures know that it is worse than one chance in one hundred that you can survive your allotted days in any comfort. It is not you or the other fellow; it is you or one hundred others. [ ... If] you have a family of five and wish to prosper—you’re going to have to do it at the expense of five hundred others. So do it as neatly and cleanly and politely as you know how and as your conscience will allow.”
“Utopia or Oblivion”, pp161-2

If you have the responsibility of keeping things going, if you know for certain there’s not enough to go around, of course you need to control the beast that is The Proletariat. The alternative is anarchy and revolution, a bloody waste of time since the outcome can only ever be the rebuilding of the same system with a different ‘elite’ at the helm.

I see no evil here, only people working with what they have. And that’s what we all do. Only, for various reasons I won’t go into here—apart from to again mention that nothing lasts forever, not even paradigms—we are confronted with the challenge of changing course. Our dying (or dead) paradigm is causing terrible damage to the environments which sustain us, social and ecological, and we need new tools and technologies (I use those words in the broadest possible sense) that were not taught us in a school system designed not only to perpetuate the status quo, but also to prevent critical thinking, as well as retard emotional and political maturity.

At the moment I’m studying to become a teacher (oh, the irony). The coursework has brought me again to my John Holt books. In “Instead of Education”, Holt has this to say:

You cannot have human liberty, and the sense of all persons’ uniqueness, dignity, and worth on which it must rest, if you give to some people the right to tell other people what they must learn or know, or the right to say officially and “objectively” that some people are more able and worthy than others. Let any who want to make such judgments make them privately and in the understanding that such judgments can only be personal and subjective. But do not give them any permanent or official position, or the liberty and dignity of your citizens will soon be gone.
pp8-9

For these reasons and others I often shout that we must self-educate, and support each other in our efforts. This is not an easy undertaking, and of course people will, and must be free to wander different paths. While we are engaged in this stage of our journeys and encouraging others to leave the existing paradigm and join us in creating the new, we must bear in mind that we are like a walking wounded, that self-education is also self-healing; that it must be, in some way, about community, and that we need each other too.

Meanwhile, we need not beat ourselves up about not having a ready plan to kick into gear, that our nerve failed, that our beaten down imaginations are having a hard time seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Nor need we despair (though that is part of growing out of the safety of the devil you know), for we can create, we can think critically, we are intelligent, we can find friends and like minds; wisdom is something we can all develop.

Indeed, there is wisdom everywhere we look. We just need to acquire the imagination to see it.

Schools are economic madness!

"Building schools is not the answer when the cost of education is too high already. Building a school creates jobs one time. Everyone has to pay through the nose for it for years to come in staffing and administration costs in addition to paying back the bondholders with interest for the upfront money to build the schools.

Such proposals are economic madness." Michael Shedlock

This struck an emotional nerve. I respect Mike Shedlock as someone who calmly analyses the data, and perhaps I am over-reading this statement, but to argue that building schools is economic madness says to me that economics is madness. If there is a need for better education in Utah (I take that as a given -- everywhere on Earth needs a better education system by the way) the good people of Utah cannot afford not to invest in education. If they wait -- and it could be the best part of a generation if things are as bad as Mike Shedlock suggests -- and thereby hope to save money, that uneducated or poorly educated generation won't know shit from shynola, will probably be bad parents with a negative attitude to education generally, will not be able to compete in the increasingly global market place, and will reduce chances of building a better future considerably. Utah will have more money (maybe) and fewer properly educated people. Doesn't sound like a win win to me.

How can money be so very important that everything takes second place to it!? To think so is insanity. I hope I am misreading the man...

Anyway, I had to get that off my chest. In my opinion there is nothing more important than education (apart from the ecosystem). That money-glasses can see it otherwise tells its own story.