A RADICAL REASSMENT OF EDUCATION;
The case for community learning instead of institutionalized education

English version of texts written for Mac Pariadka.

A lot of emphasis is put on education these days if only because education should help one entering a highly competitive job market. More and more, education for Polish students means paid education, either private tutoring or private universities and the class aspect to economic mobility, long a reality in many countries ruled by the market, has become a reality here.

A critique of institutionalized education which maintains that we need less of it rather than more may therefore seem absurd to people for which more and more education is perhaps the key to economic survival. In order to understand these ideas, one must understand that we are also against the structure of the current economy - which should become clear in the course of the essay. In my opinion, educating oneself to gain a better position in the rat race is not really an attractive option. At least not when you consider the alternatives.

The arguments against institutional schooling can be divided into political, sociological and pedagogical but really all of these arguments are somehow interlinked.

Sociologically, instituionalized schooling has replaced community and family-based schooling. Communities are less reliant on each other to school their children. Instead of organizing themselves, parents work longer and longer hours and pay taxes to the state which ultimately does a poor job of providing education. In fact, in many places parents have to organize part of their children's education themselves. This is yet another area of social life which people have resigned from organizing themselves, forced to place trust in the state which forces tax money from its citizens in order to mediate and manage such social affairs. The political implications of this are also clear.

The state tries to standardize all learning but never really questions why, despite their more or less standard education, individuals have a strong will to ignore certain subjects or specialize in others. The assumption is that certain types of knowledge are necessary - others not. Students are forced to endure hours of physics, calculus and so on but may never be taught about contraception, about decision-making, critical or empiral thinking, about how to fix a refrigerator or any of a million things that might be infinitely useful for them or the community at whole. They are forced to sit in class for a requisite number of hours per day - a mechanism of early social control and training - when all the knowledge they really need may be learned through other methods --- through discussion, independent study, hands-on work or any of hundreds of ways that would not necessarily include the traditional classroom methods. It embeds a passive and hierarchical sensibility in its pupils and, at its worse make them feel inadequate, agressive and turned off learning.

Thousands of parents are aware of the oppressive environment their children have to endure but send them to school anyway. For some it's there to teach children that their future life will be full of unpleasant responsibilities that they must shut up and fulfill, a way to break the will on the demand of the system's conformity.

Instiutionalized schooling is the triumph of the state over community.
Deconstructing it would force the community to take a better look at how children are educated, how much money is spent in doing this and how community-based education can be much more focused and rewarding than the present system. Adopting creative alternatives to coercive schooling would force the issue of the coercive nature of our society.

Further political arguments can center around education as a business. These arguments are admittedly much clearer in countries where it is a big business like my USA. About basic education, somebody once said, "Schooling is "a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state". (Don't ask me to remember who. I steadfastly refused to develop memorization skills in school.) Statistics prepared by critics of the public school system in NYC have shown that for every dollar allocated to education, 75 cents (that's 75%) goes into some form of bureaucracy. Public schooling in effect costs twice as much money as private schooling but the state wants to make it seem as if it costs nothing, as if it were a gift to people, not something that your tax money is paying for.

In the US, an extremely high proportion of people have higher education. It's extremely big business.Universities are an industry and education of one sort or another is available for anyone who can pay. Although this looks quite democratic on the face of it, many people are in fact not really inclined to pursue such a level of education - many are simply looking for intellectual stimulation or job skills. (Others are spending 4 years partying or putting off work at rich mom and dad's expense.) In terms of intellectual stimulation, society could easily replace the university with a discussion circle and save working people thousands of dollars of hard-earned money. In terms of job skills, mentor programs and apprenticeships would certainly do just as well. The fact that many businesses prefer to get already-trained people rather than teaching people is more due to cost-cutting than effectiveness.

Politically, the state and education business (using it's licensing and accreditation mechanisms) have a vested interest in keeping a tight control over people's educational possibilities. It's all part of what keeps them in business.

Pedagogically, I already mentioned the idea that there is only one correct body of knowledge that each person should possess. This may weaken the individual's will to learn and may prove totally debilitating to a child, especially is her or his area of special talent is different than what is expected academically. People have different learning styles but the authoritarian nature of institutionalized education leaves little room for teachers and children to experiment with different possibilities. Foucault spoke of panopticism, a condition in which you are constantly monitored, assessed and observed. This condition is extremely stressful to most human beings and often discourages people from taking chances in independent learning. The result is something of a panoptical imprint. The process of learning becomes inferior to being successfully assessed. Self-development becomes secondary.
One of the worst pedagogical consequences our schooling system has it what is does to individuals who are not successful at it, who don't meet its rather limited standards. Often convinced they are not capable of learning, they often are thrown aside and find it difficult to find a place as a valued member of society.

If we truly want people to be capable of running their own lives, decision making and autonomy has to be encouraged in early life. If we are to create a world without strict social hierarchies, we have to challenge some of the assumptions instutionalized education instills in society. If we want work to be more integrated with community and based on fulfilling community needs instead of being an instrument to make rich bastards richer, then workplaces would play a greater role in educating the people who might work there. And all of this is exactly what the state and its institutions don't want.