For many of us in Europe after hospitals, the school is the first institution we encounter and contend with in the first years of our lives. Apart from those who attend nurseries and kindergarten, our parents are mandated by the state to enroll us in primary school at around the age of 6. Depending on the country’s legislation, school is mostly mandatory until the age of 16/18. That’s 10/12 years of sitting at a table absorbing what is deemed knowledge which we will then have to vomit back on pieces of paper to be labelled “educated.”
The first time when I questioned whether being educated meant being smart was in my 4th or 5th year in elementary school. My former history teacher would brag about how smart one student in another classroom was. She was called in to show off her intelligence by going over a lesson. But all she did was repeat the words of the book ad verbatim (let me show off too). She had only learned the paragraphs by heart. That, to my teacher, was being a good and intelligent student. To me, it meant being a parrot.
Schools and teachers have never taught me to be a critical thinker, or a thinker at all. I was downgraded when I questioned things that were taken for granted and proposed alternative interpretations. All my teachers wanted was to stick to what the book said.
It’s been 10 years since I left that world, but I am reminded of its dangerous limits by my younger siblings.
First of all, whenever they get reported I ask them to tell me more about the teacher. We know that some of them target students regardless of the situation. Secondly, I ask them if they give others preferential or different treatment. Third, I listen to their version and remember my days as a student. As adults, we’re very unfair to younger people. We expect and demand from them what we, as grown-ups, can’t do. We scold children for “talking in the classroom” where they spend most of their days with their mates as if we could keep shut for 8 hours at work, in a factory, or office.
“Schools and teachers have never taught me to be a critical thinker, or a thinker at all”
After my sibling received a report and the reaction from my parents, I sat down and thought through what was being taught. He was told that he is chatty in the classroom and our parents told him not to entertain his classmates even if they needed help and to let them be because that would be a disadvantage for him. Here are the implicit teachings:
- Individualism: each student for themselves. School grades students individually, and you have to do all that it takes to get good grades even if it means leaving others behind to fend for themselves.
- Solidarity is punished: The “talkativeness” often comes from aiding your fellow mate to keep up with the lesson. Teachers see it as a disruption and will report you for being chatty and distracted. Parents will often double down and ignore the reasons reminding you not to talk (this also contributes to the culture of silence).
- Distrust: The teacher, as the authority, will instill seeds of discord among students who are each other’s peers. Student A is not going to talk to student B anymore (or way less) because they got punished because of them. On the other hand, student B will think twice about helping the former when the tables turn for fear of punishment too and as payback.
- The authority has power and shapes reality: teachers decide who is misbehaving and don’t care much for context. They can tell whichever version of the story they understand often without being questioned by parents.
Another insidious aspect is how much control teachers have over students’ body autonomy. They are the ones deciding when students can go to the bathroom. After 10/12 years of asking permission to go the loo, becoming Bezos’ slave and watching him time how long you stay in the toilet becomes less outrageous, and the ability to push back is less strong as the conditioning will have been complete.
Schools really teach us to fit into the capitalistic mold of society, to bow down to authority, and to blame the individual instead of the system. If a student gets bad grades, it’s their fault, not the classroom configuration which is not equipped to serve different types of people, talents, skills, and intelligences. How is this different from blaming homeless people by calling them lazy instead of capitalism, high cost of living, etc…?
“We leave school as unarmed passive recipients of pieces of information that were never meant to make us critique the world. Quite the opposite as the goal is to make us meek, submissive, and powerless zombies”
In order to condition us into becoming good slaves of society, the school, its architecture, and functioning have to mirror that of other prevalent institutions: the factory, which feeds off of our labor and time, and the prison which does pretty much the same but with more emphasis on liberty restriction and punishment.
All three institutions use bells to give time-based orders (entry, break, exit). They limit our freedom of movement because you can’t leave the classroom, workstation, or cell unless permitted by an authoritative figure or the bell. And in some schools, like factories and prisons, you wear uniforms. In extreme cases like in the UK and in the US, there is a physical presence of the police in schools.
By the time you’re out of school, getting into a working rhythm isn’t so unfamiliar (the exception being the absence of long holiday periods). Schools emphasize theory over practicality and detach us from life, community, and real consequential issues. I may know or remember who Paris and Hector are, but how am I going to fill out this paperwork at the post office?
We leave school as unarmed passive recipients of pieces of information that were never meant to make us critique the world. Quite the opposite as the goal is to make us meek, submissive, and powerless zombies.
After the news that Birmingham City University is shutting down the undergraduate Black Studies course, we have to remember that schools and universities alike will never provide us with the tools to destroy them and the oppressive apparatus they provide theory and justification for.
Paulo Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I suggest everybody read it so we can seek and spread knowledge and education that liberate.
Djeneba Deby Bagayoko’s analysis is spot-on. Compulsory education often seems a mere synonym for state indoctrination. If we examine schooling’s origins in England, we find it is a 19th century reaction to the suffrage-less 97% learning to read. Joseph Lancaster had pinched the Madras monitorial method and was single-handedly teaching one thousand kids in London to read. Elizabeth Fry was doing the same with women behind bars (when the 97% had no say in the writing of England’s laws, it was easy to end up in gaol).
Those with suffrage (a mere 3%) reacted to the disenfranchised classes learning to read by inventing state schooling. State schooling allowed the 3% to determine what they would read and how quickly they would learn to read. Compulsory state schooling was originally designed to be a governor on reading acquisition to slow it down. Further, the censuring of books, such as ‘The Rights of Man’ by Thomas Paine or ‘The Declaration of Independence’ by Thomas Jefferson, ensured the 3% would not be put to the guillotine as happened in France. This fear more than any other concern compelled the 3% to invent compulsory schooling.
This history gives us pause to consider W.E.B. Du Bois’ late 19th century post-graduate study in Europe (Germany) and his insistence that Marx and Engels’ prior analyses of England’s social class divisions during the 19th century were crucial to understanding another bourgeoisie invention – racism (1906). So-called British Empire was in reality the empire of the 3%. These were the speakers of Greek and Latin, whose discursive display of either entitled them to vote for Members of Parliament (MPs). Until 1867, they alone wrote the laws that the other 97% suffered along with the rest of the world.
Has their empire passed? Kwame Nkrumah did not see it in 1965, calling its camouflaged U.S.-powered form “neo-colonialism” (2004). Matt Kennard explained “The truth is the empire never died . . . The City of London’s role as the world’s financial capital which spreads neoliberalism around the world, the UK’s vast network of military bases, alongside its corporate giants like BP and BAE Systems, showed Britain still” doing empire, albeit US-powered . . . “an invisible empire, hiding in plain sight”, or more accurately, hiding in the shadow of its behemoth eldest ‘son’ (Kennard 2024: xxi-xxii)
At first glance, a call to read Paulo Freire’s ‘Liberation Theology’ might seem contradictory as Marx is known to have held a negative view towards religion. But once we understand that during Marx’s time in London, religion meant the institutions – the priests, brothers, monks, and nuns of the Church of England, not faith, Djeneba Deby Bagayoko’s call to read Freire’s ‘Liberation Theology’ becomes clear. Today religion has blended with faith to become synonyms but in Marx’s time they were two distinct things.
As long as compulsory state schooling in England has students reading history in modular form around empire rather than chronologically through empire, most students in England are unlikely to make this distinction. Others are unlikely to respond to W.E.B. Du Bois’ call to embrace Marx and Engels’ conflict perspective on social class inequalities for insights on monopoly corporate capitalism’s invention and propagation of racism.
Sources:
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1906). “L’Ouvrier Negre en Amerique”. Revue Economique Internationale, 3: 298-348.
Kennard, M. (2024). The Racket: A rogue reporter vs the American empire. Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Nkrumah, K. (2004). Neo-colonialism: The last stage of imperialism. Panaf.