For the last several weeks of my English class, the subject of our learning and analysis has been school itself: how we are educated and how we are not, how schooling is destructive--from the very ideological foundations on which it rests to the privilege echo chamber of elite colleges.
All of the suspicions or beliefs I have long held were reconfirmed, though in all honesty the institutional conspiracy of the US educational system is wider than I’d even realized. I wrote back in September on this blog that “the institutions that should be guiding and preparing us for what is really out there are instead programming us to react like trained seals, to balance on our noses the balls of standardized testing and whitewashed, watered-down US history, and the everyday inanity of attendance and dress codes. Our public schools are not safe places, and they are not teaching us all we need to learn.” What I’ve always chafed against in the school system is more expansive than I knew. What I was writing about is neither new nor unique, and, though I did not know it, already the target of shrewd reformers.
Paolo Freire, a Brazilian reformer whose essay, “The Banking Concept of Education,” was one of the texts read in my English class, touches upon a phenomenon I noticed: as I put it, “We are taught to sit still and swallow information, keep it down just long enough to regurgitate it for standardized tests. We are fill-in-the-bubble children, prefabricated for a world far less predictable than we are being readied for.” Freire contends that this style of teaching is predicated on a theory, a concept of education that takes students and “turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.” This method of education as “an act of depositing” makes reality “motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable”--thus rendering it impossible to teach history with nuance or context. Perhaps, when my teachers teach history as if it were suspended in formaldehyde, with no connection to the present or future, they are suffering less from personal ignorance than unchallenged deep allegiance to a dehumanizing and dysfunctional method of so-called education.
One of the questions I posed in September is particularly telling: “Why do we delay the time when we will have to really think?” I tended to place the blame on students who chose not to think, who chose to obey. I would like to amend that. What is more important to realize is that thinking is not the point of school. We delay the time when--if ever--we will have to really think because the entire educational system is designed to keep us from thinking.
John Taylor Gatto, in another of the essays we read, “Against School,” traces the genesis of the hyper-controlled, dehumanized educational system to the model taken from militaristic Prussia in the early 20th century. The goals of educating children within a militaristic machine are many, and alarming: mainly, to subvert the potential democracy and unity of the poorer classes of US society (part of the many efforts to keep that mass of people from enlightenment and uprising, to stunt their social consciousness and activism so as to protect the power of the elite--job quite well done). Gatto also references Alexander Inglis’s concept of school as a six-pronged machine with various “functions,” among which are developing habits of submission to authority, cultivating conformity, and funneling different kids to different career paths or lack of them. It’s all in the interest of creating a mass labor force for the corporatocracy, and keeping education to a minimum. As Gatto puts it, our schools are “laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.”
No wonder teenagers are faced constantly with disparagement. I have had teachers who call the students boneheads or who remark flippantly that “there is nothing any of you could say that would interest me,” but beyond obvious disregard for our intelligence, there is what YA fiction author A.S. King calls “systemic psychological hazing” which teenagers undergo in our “laboratories of experimentation,” our schools. We are trained through humiliation and disrespect that we are immature and pathetic, and as soon as we scurry up to the next level of almost-adulthood, we had better start looking down at the kids below us and ridiculing them. King says, “It’s in the mindset now—in our DNA. I see college students rolling their eyes at high school students, and graduates of both rolling their eyes at all beneath them. It’s a cycle of condescension and alienation. It didn’t always used to be like this. We’re eating ourselves.”
Why this internalized ageism? One reason, I believe, is the bizarre hierarchical importance age has been given in the educational system. Instead of teaching children as a group and allowing them to learn from each other regardless of age, as many non-Western cultures might or even the US did in the days of one-room schoolhouses, kids are cordoned into grades based on age, and largely seem to not cross those borders. Kids even one year older seem like towering giants, and the younger ones are just so little and pathetic and immature. It gives legitimacy to the work of the machine and its functions, dividing us and molding us, because if we believe that where and how we are now is wrong, we will gladly scurry along and look down at whoever we are told to look down on. It helps enforce a hierarchy instead of a mindset in which seeking help or even company from someone of a different assigned rank than you is discouraged. It helps entrench in us a dog-eat-dog mindset in which lateral cooperation is repudiated in favor of climbing social and power ladders. It’s a side effect of the production-line mentality, assembling children as fodder for the corporatocracy. Given the tolls this takes and the ways we are breaking, the surreality of our bomb-threatened and doublespeak-laden schools, but do we even comprehend what this system is really producing?
I wrote earlier that mine is “a school system from and for a specific social stratosphere, and it is excellent at churning out shiny graduates ready for a shiny career path.” But that same system operates on all socioeconomic levels, just with varying levels of gilding and militarism. The functions of school to produce phalanxes of identical products ready for use become clearer and more brutal the greater the distance from the softly glowing privilege bubble.
Farther down the privilege ladder, the idea of social mobility becomes more and more a bitter farce. One of Inglis’s functions states that schools serve to sift through their students and determine just how far they will be allowed to progress. The majority of kids, above all inner-city minorities, are groomed for menial labor in the same social stratum they came from. As Jonathan Kozol’s essay, “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” examines, segregated schools have entrenched themselves ever deeper while white liberal society wants to consider itself postracial, and the kids in these still-segregated, still-neglected schools are being trained with appallingly militaristic methods of discipline to never exceed their social station or threaten the corporate status quo. These crumbling schools are not places for education, but are rather assembly lines, which break apart and rebuild children as effective robots, where somewhere far above, their wealthier counterparts are trained in a vastly different style, for a different purpose.
Since both history and the present are narrated by those with the power and the airwaves, the work of deliberate inequality remains out of sight and out of mind. The amount of freedom allotted to kids in schools increases in proportion to their wealth. This isn’t to say that privileged schools truly foster an environment in which thinking is encouraged or real knowledge gained, but the function of education according to Inglis for people like me, in higher socioeconomic strata, skews more towards grooming us to assume the reins of this massive corporate matrix.
This takes its toll. We may be high-value banks entrusted with larger denominations of bills, but we are still fundamentally not people in the eyes of the educational system. Perhaps the goal is to train us to act enough like people that by the time we graduate we will be very good candidates for jobs in which humanity is questionable but power is a necessity--politics, corporate officialdom, etc. I have the requisite academic intelligence, excellent memory, and more or less neurotypical ways of processing information and regurgitating it, so I have learned to play this system perfectly. The farther I get and the more honors classes I prove myself capable of taking, though, the more I lose motivation and any remnants of the belief that any of this is worthwhile.
The other day my friends and I were asking a deck of tarot cards questions about our lives and souls and such, and when the deck was asked to describe my past, present, and future, I received the card “stagnation” for my present state. I quipped, “Well, I am stuck in the educational system right now,” which does feel like stagnation. Sometimes I do think it’s all a mind trick that I can’t handle anymore--trying to convince myself that what I’m “learning” will be applicable and helpful in the rest of my schooling and beyond, and that there really is a point to shelling out all that college money. Bitter, jaded, and exhausted, I end up believing that my educational experience has largely been a series of inanities, indignations, absurdities, anxieties, and yes, stagnation. Why? I like to learn. I love facts and unusual words and logic and reading and writing and analyzing history. But school isn’t teaching me how to think, except by accident, when I became frustrated enough to understand that none of this inanity and slogging through testing and ennui was actually making me better-rounded, happier, or even smarter.
We’re living in an absurd matrix, whose dysfunctions seem to be in the same mold as those of the war on drugs: it’s not that the system isn’t working, it’s that it’s working all too well with terrible fallout. We are the fallout, my generation. Those who came before us are also victims of the industrial school system, but we stand at a point more crucial than ever, when we need to be educated more than ever, when we need to be thinking--and we’re not. Sometimes we are, but we’re not supposed to be. We know we’re suffering; we know we’re ridiculously stressed and that there’s ridiculous privilege and wealth disparity in our society. But the big picture, the insidious whole, is hard to see from inside, and even harder to dismantle.
It goes far beyond individuals, either students or teachers. Creating individuals is not the goal of schooling any more than is teaching us to think. Even in my September blog post, I acknowledged, “The teachers, on the whole, are not the problem, or at least, not the enemy. The enemy is the system that locks them into delivering the sort of worthless, classist, irrelevant education that will leave us unfit to handle the future for which we are the last chance.” Who knew that a class within a school within this system would actually come to teach about this enemy, to help us identify how and why we are being controlled and screwed over? (How many of my classmates will believe or realize the gravity of what they’re reading?)
I’m grateful to have taken this class, but the ironies are plenty, as well as the epiphanies. In order to take a class in which I feel that the students are actually thinking, actually analyzing and applying arguments and theories to our own lives and the world around us, I had to be a top-level, masochistic student willing to take on the pressure and course load of an AP English class. That it’s at the AP level only that this curriculum is offered ensures that the students taking it will be mostly white or Asian, on the wealthier side of things, extremely driven, and equipped with the support (emotional or academic) to take such a demanding class. Even in this best of classes I’ve taken, it is serving the function of divide and conquer: as I wrote in September, “Honors and AP classes do not winnow out the students who are brightest. They winnow out the ones who can best fit in the hamster-wheel framework we have been strapped to.” There are kids in my class who admit that they took it only because of those two little letters, AP, and there are friends of mine who declare their lower-level classes insults to their intelligence, but are daunted by the course load of an AP English class. This is a very tricky and very clever strategy: reserving the few classes where thinking might actually take place as the domain of students who have proved themselves so successful within the system that thinking might be a habit so unfamiliar that they are at little risk of developing it.
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