It costs roughly the same to school both the rich and the poor in the same dependency. The increased funding enabled schools to cater disproportionately to the satisfaction of relatively wealthier children who were "disadvantaged" by attending school in the society of the poor. In the United States, the per capita costs of education have risen almost as fast as the cost of medical treatment.
In the United States it would take eighty billion dollars a year to give what. Casual education can no longer return to the forms that learning took in the medieval village or town. He opposed the proposal for the sake of the young people's education, which could only be done at work.
Phenomenology of School
Children appeared in Europe along with the pocket watch and Christian moneylenders of the Renaissance. Only with the advent of industrial society did the mass production of "childhood" become feasible and within the reach of the masses. Neither the extended universal childhood nor the suffocating classroom atmosphere could exist without schools.
We are not directly concerned here with the hidden curriculum of the ghetto streets that brands the poor or with the hidden curriculum of the salon that favors the rich.
Ritualization of Progress
In order for a scholastic to advance in the world, he first had to enter it by joining the civil service, preferably the church. The structural purpose of the modern university has little to do with the traditional search. Others recognize the schools' monopoly on the resources they need to build a counter-society.
However, a large part of the general population regards the modern mystic and the modern heretic with alarm. Their achievements add new force to the argument that the existence of the university is necessary to guarantee the continuation of social criticism. But the ritual that requires the tolerance of fundamental contradictions between myth and institution still largely persists.
The American University has become the final stage of the most comprehensive initiation rite the world has ever known. Educators may justify more expensive curricula based on their observation that learning difficulties increase in proportion to the cost of the curriculum. The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both a supplier of opium and a desk job during an increasing number of years of an individual's life.
The weapons of the off-duty police officer and his allies in the courts and employment agencies could take very cruel measures against an individual. Repression will be seen as a missionary effort to hasten the arrival of the mechanical Messiah.
Institutional Spectrum
It will become clear that men of the left are not always characterized by their opposition to manipulative institutions, which I find on the right of the spectrum. At the opposite extreme of the spectrum are institutions distinguished by spontaneous use - "quiet" institutions. At both ends of the spectrum we find service institutions, but on the right the service is imposed manipulation and the client becomes a victim of advertising, aggression, indoctrination, imprisonment or electroshock.
Psychological addiction, or habituation, occurs when consumers become addicted to the need for more and more of the process or product. These rates are relatively small and can be reduced without changing the nature of the system. Schools create a demand for the whole range of modern institutions that are on the right side of the spectrum.
Freeways result from a perversion of the desire and need for mobility in the demand for a private car. Schools are not just on the right of highways and cars; they belong to the extreme of the institutional spectrum occupied by total asylums. On the other hand, school is a perfect system of regressive taxation, where privileged graduates ride on the backs of the entire paying public.
All of these institutional processes tend to accumulate at the manipulative end of the spectrum. These bureaucracies everywhere seem to focus on the same task: promoting the growth of right-wing institutions.
Irrational Consistencies*
It therefore appears that the attempt to produce specific behavioral changes that can be measured and for which the processor can be held accountable is only one side of a coin, the other side of which is especially the pacification of the new generation within. This custom in society is well described by Dewey, who wants us to make each of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, imbuing it with the spirit of art, history and science." In this historical perspective, it would be a serious mistake to interpret the current triangular controversy between the school institution, the educational technologists and the free schools as the prelude to a revolution in education. Even the apparently radical critics of the school system is unwilling to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young, especially to the poor, an obligation to process them, whether through love or through fear, into a society that needs disciplined specialization. as much from its producers as from its consumers and also their full commitment to the ideology that puts economic growth first.
Established teacher unions, technological wizards, and the educational liberation movement reinforce the commitment of the entire society to the basic axioms of an educated world, somewhat in the way that many peace and protest movements reinforce the commitments of their members—black, women, young or poor - to seek justice through increased gross national income. It is easy for a society founded on such principles to create a sense of its responsibility for the education of the younger generation, and this inevitably means that some people can set, specify and evaluate their personal goals. others. All educators are ready to conspire to remove the walls of the classroom, with the goal of transforming the entire culture into a school.
Only in the field of education are such scattered articulate voices demanding a radical de-education of society. It will gather scientific evidence to support the need for more educational packages and their lethally more precise delivery to the individual client, just as a certain kind of social science can support the need to provide more military medical treatment. The educational revolution depends on a double inversion: a new direction for research and a new understanding of the educational style of the emerging counterculture.
A syntactic alternative to this is an educational network or web for the autonomous compilation of resources under the personal control of each student. For technocrats, the value of the environment increases when more contacts can be programmed between each human and their environment.
Learning Webs
A political program that does not expressly recognize the need for unschooling is not revolutionary; it is demagoguery asking for more of the same. They can be guides to the right questions to be raised among peers and to the shortcomings of the answers they arrive at. An example of the former is the special right to operate or disassemble a machine in a garage.
A more radical starting point would be the realization that in the city, both the rich and the poor are artificially removed from most of the things that surround them. Money now spent on the sacred paraphernalia of school ritual could be freed up to give all citizens greater access to the real life of the city. In fact, many real skills of practical importance can be tested this way.
However, this is precisely what the development of the first three educational exchanges would result in - and what would be necessary. The establishment and operation of educational networks would require some planners and administrators, but not in the number and scale required by school administrations. The teaching profession should be easier to reform, and not only because it is of recent origin.
School teachers are overwhelmingly underpaid and frustrated by the tight control of the school system. Finally, the dependence of the registered student on the certified teacher can be broken more easily than his dependence on other professionals - for example that of a. The dissolution of our current professional structure may begin with the fallout of the teacher.
The first would be the expansion of the pedagogue's mandate and his increasing control over society, even beyond the school.
Rebirth of Epimethean Man
From time immemorial the Earth Goddess was worshiped on the slope of Mount Parnassus, which formed the center and navel of the earth. Man took responsibility for the laws under which he chose to live and for shaping the environment in his own image. The primitive initiation of Mother Earth into mythical life was transformed into the education (paideia) of the citizen who would feel at home in the forum.
The child of the city cannot expect anything beyond the possible development of institutional processes. If combustion continues to increase at its current rate, we will soon consume the oxygen from the atmosphere faster than it can be replaced. But while the barbarian's chaos was continually ordered in the name of mysterious, anthropomorphic gods, today only man's planning can be given as the reason for the world as it is.
The myth of the Bushman and the myth of the American are made of inert, inhuman forces. The event places him under the spell of the laws of mechanics, which govern physical, social and psychological events. Even for the social reformer there is no way back to the assumptions of the forties.
Even the laws of economics seem unconvincing outside the narrow parameters that apply to the social, geographic area where most of the money is concentrated. The education that makes you need the product is included in the price of the product.
