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The Anarchives Vol 2 Issue 2 Part 3
The Anarchives Volume 2 Issue 2 Part Three Free
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Anarchy & Education
The Canadian Student Strike
This transmission contains: Power In The Classroom?
EKOPILOT
Anarchy & Education
Mr. Authority
Forward, spam, post, print, or send this everywhere...
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Power in the Classroom?
A Plan for the Destruction of the Universities
by Bernard Attias <hfspc002@huey.csun.edu>
Last fall I spoke at Cornell and announced, "The food here is
free!" and twenty of us went into the cafeteria, loaded our
trays with hamburgers, Cokes, and pies, and walked out without
paying. We sat in the dining hall laughing and slapping each
other on the back stuffing our faces with Digger shit. I told
them of epoxy glue and what a great invention it was. And at
another school we asked them why they were there and they said
just to get a diploma and so we passed out mimeographed sheets
that said "T his is a diploma," and asked the question again.1
That this anecdote, from Abbie Hoffman's landmark essay "Plans
for the Destruction of the Universities," strikes me as an
amusing relic from a mythic era has something to do with the
fact that it was written two years after I was born. But more
important ly it highlights three important factors that must
inevitably problematize the search for a truly critical
pedagogy. First, the students in the universities I have
attended and observed in the past seven years are well behaved.
Monstrously well behaved.
Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind expresses outrage at
the chaotic shambles he sees in modern university education and
vehemently attacks the nihilistic and relativistic radical
intellectuals responsible for this mess. I fully agree with
King sley Widmer's response to Bloom, "I had not thought we had
been so successful!"2 In fact, we haven't. Students are in many
ways the most blindly obedient and uncritical sheep I have ever
encountered. Not only would the events described by Hoffman
above be entirely unlikely in 1991; most students would view the
actions described with revulsion if not horror. Second, in the
wake of the recent television miniseries "War in the Gulf" and
the rather feeble attempts on the part of student demonstrations
to direct media attention (that is, advertising blips) away from
the yellow ribbons and the stunning array of sophisticated
gizmos capable of lofting all manner of shit into the desert,
Hoffman's piece indicates just how little student radicals have
learned in the past twenty years. Today's student radicals
understand nothing about the media because today's students know
nothing about the media, because their teachers know nothing
about the media. But the media have completely redefined the
ways in which u niversity education must proceed if it is ever
to resemble anything educational, intellectual, or critical.
Finally, the title of Hoffman's piece suggests what in my mind
is the only feasible path to a truly critical pedagogy: the
destruction of the universities.
Before teachers and students ever arrive in a classroom, they
have certain "places" within a blind, faceless institution which
mark them in ways which must somehow be overcome for a truly
critical pedagogy to develop. It is the purpose of this piece
to analyze some of the ways in which these roles are produced
and reproduced ideologically and suggest some of the results of
this reproduction. What these results add up to, in my mind, is
something profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-educational that
is literally built into the university system within which
critical teaching methods must develop. Critical pedagogy must
attempt to subvert these institutional constraints from within;
an arduous but necessary approach which implies turning
university edu cation against the essence of university
education, an essence which I will argue is profoundly
anti-educational. Thus, my plan for the destruction of
universities attempts to sacrifice the university to what in my
mind must be a higher goal, education. This would not entail
the abandonment of some of the benefits of the university
institutions; such as grants, fellowships, bookstores,
conferences, parties. But it must entail the rejection of the
codes and relationships of power that have indelibly mar ked the
university as a place where education doesn't occur.
Ivan Illich and Buckminster Fuller both offer far-reaching
proposals for educational reform which at first seem
irreconcilable. While Illich argues for "deschooling society,"3
Fuller argues for a university from which noone ever graduates.4
Both approa ches, however, stem from similar perceptions of the
university as an intellectually bankrupt institution. Illich
and Fuller sense what all students learn in the university;
perhaps the only thing students ever learn in the university,
that real life is e lsewhere. For Illich this is the result of
the radical division established between "education" and "the
world" by the system of compulsory education, such that
"education becomes unworldly and the world becomes
non-educational." (31) Widmer argues that the university
embodies hierarchy, excessive bureaucratic compartmentalization,
exploitative corporate subservience, and systematic mediocrity,
(5). The insipid proliferation of distinctions and categories
that confronts the university student heightens the absurdity of
ever expecting an education out of a university. Widmer
continues:
Start with the obvious bureaucratization. The petty corruption
is pervasive + The character deformations from competitive
hierarchy, however, are not the whole story + The problem must
also include that the academic is a "professional" (generally
taken a s an accolade), a prostitute inclined to proneness. And
what + has one sold out to? Often simply to
institutionalization, that is, endless processing. But that
processing expresses one of the more extreme styles of the
division of labor -- division of t hinking -- that fundamental
source of hierarchical sensibility and its falsities + One ends
up thinking, and acting, in terms of specializations and their
pyramidal structures. (6) Of course, life in postmodern
consumer society requires such a state of affairs; in fact "the
modern economic system demands a mass production of students who
have been rendered incapable of thinking."5 Schools separate
creative writing from literature s o that students specialize in
one or the other, and we wonder why our writers don't read? Of
course, college students have come out of years of such
absurdity in their elementary and secondary educational
institutions, so it should be no surprise that ev en at its best
the university provides corporations with a new crop of
semi-literate market researchers and promotional workers each
year, turning out only the occasional artist, writer, or teacher
who almost invariably ends up perpetuating the institutio n's
bureaucratic inertia. "In this ornate, multi-leveled, however
muddled, fucking-over of semi-literacy, few come out writing
well, and even fewer with much critical perception of the
culture and society in which they live." (Widmer, 7)
Prince's brilliant admonition to parents in the media age"Don't
let your children watch television until they know how to read
or else all they'll know how to do is cuss, fight and bleed" --
is unfortunately an impossibility. Neil Postman outlines t he
critical contradiction of traditional education in the latter
half of the twentieth century:
There are some teachers who think they are in the "transmission
of our cultural heritage" business, which is not an unreasonable
business if you are concerned with the whole clock and not just
its first 57 minutes. The trouble is that most teachers find
the last three minutes too distressing to deal with, which is
exactly why they are in the wrong business. Their students find
the last three minutes distressing -- and confusing -- too,
especially the last thirty seconds, and they need help. While
they have to live with TV, film, the LP record, communication
satellites, and the laser beam, their teachers are still talking
as if the only medium on the scene is Gutenberg's printing
press.6 Teachers cannot possibly hope to compete with the
cathode ray tube when they regard their roles as transmitters of
bodies of completely useless information. We ask students to be
familiar with the standard texts of a given field rather than
helping them to critically confront the endless barrage of
information they encounter daily. Composer John Cage points
out, "The reason I dropped out of college was because I was
absolutely horrified by being in a class which had, say, two
hundred members, and an ass ignment being given to have all two
hundred people read the same book. I thought that if everyone
read the same book, it was a waste of people."7 Moreover, do we
really expect students to see the university environment as
anything but a stultifying retr eat from everyday existence when
we tell them to read Plato before McLuhan and Rousseau before
Nietzsche? But it is not the content of education that my
criticism is principally directed at; it is the form. McLuhan's
formula "the medium is the message" applies as much to the
classroom as it does to the fax machine. Material behavior in
the classroom is, in my view, infinitely more important than the
specific informational contents of a syllabus. This material
behavior is inevitably circumscribed by se veral institutional
conditions: classes "meet" at a given time, according to a
schedule; students and teachers alike have to fill out papers
daily in order to legitimize their existence in the institution;
students are assigned one of a totally unimaginat ive array of
five letters at the end of each semester and this letter tells
them how good they are; everything is geared toward a tedious,
ritualized monotony with no room at all for spontaneity or
creativity. If we do our jobs correctly the monotony is
compounded by a teaching style that hasn't progressed since the
fourteenth century: students face a single teacher at the front
of the room who crams an astonishing number of lists down their
throat (the five steps in a good oration; the three principles
of rhetoric; the seven stages of a political movement; the four
causes of the American revolution; etc, ad nauseaum) while the
students dutifully scribble and daydream.
In a mediated society, educators can no longer be content in
losing the battle for the student's mind to the faceless
bureaucracy of the institution or the soundbites of television
advertisers. Power in postmodern society is exercised blindly
by bureauc racies and concentrated only momentarily in
orchestrated spectacles. Guy Debord writes of the commodity
spectacle: "Lived reality is materially invaded by the
contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing
the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness.
Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed
this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite:
reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is
real. This reciprocal alienation is the es sence and the
support of the existing society."8 This is the aestheticization
of politics a generation after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and
television; a generation with an attention span of just under 28
seconds and to whom Madonna is more real than Socrates could
ever be. The aestheticization of politics has not, however,
been accompanied by a corresponding aestheticization of
education, and the power of the spectacle has been monopolized
by the advertising moguls of commodity society -- so much energy
pou red into developing the perfect sound bite to make people
buy; so little put into developing the perfect sound bite to
make people think. How can we expect our students to be more
interested in class than in television? The simple answer is
that power i s always blind and bureaucratic; power seems
irresistibly entrenched in the structure of society because the
structure of society is taken for granted. Foucault argues,
"Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but
because it comes from e verywhere."9 This can seem disheartening
for anyone who wishes to honestly challenge the way society is;
however, the very blindness of power may be the most effective
avenue for resistance. Power is not centralized in the
university or network news: "p ower + is not that which makes
the difference between those who do not have it and submit to
it. Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or
rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain.
It is never localized here or ther e, never in anybody's hands,
never appropriated as a commodity or a piece of wealth. Power
is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And
not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are
always in the position of simultane ously undergoing and
exercising this power."10 As teachers we are all actively
engaged in this vast network of power, reproducing the system
where we do not challenge our given roles within the system.
The system of power is infinitely malleable, but changing it
requires that we abandon the goals of university education and
begin to develop the tools for education. This does not mean
quitting our jobs or trying to shut down the university; rather,
it means using the established institution against itself,
creating spectacles in the university that might compete with
those offered on television, and might thus help to bridge the
gap between education and everyday life. Most emphatically,
this gap nee ds to be bridged in both directions -- not simply
opening education to the "real world," but also opening the
"real world" to education. Being critical means constantly
traversing the artificial boundaries between disciplines;
emphasizing the learning pr ocess itself rather than the list of
works required for a particular niche-like specialization. In
today's world, the aestheticization of politics requires that
teachers aestheticize the educational system; using the power of
the spectacle as an educatio nal tool in ways that subvert the
power of the spectacle as an economic tool. Teaching should be
more performance than ritual; when it becomes routinized it's
time to throw away the syllabus and give everybody an A. While
the abolition of grades is a wo rthy goal it is not going to be
accepted by most universities in the near future; the only
possible response to the competitive hierarchies of higher
education is contempt -- the goal being to eliminate the effects
of grades if not the grades themselves.
Of course, I have given little indication of what such an
approach might look like if put into practice; while some
examples are possible at this point much work needs to be done
in terms of theorizing an academy without universities and an
academic prac tice that effectively overcomes the routinization
and compartmentalization inherent in the university system. But
recognizing the problem means recognizing that this theorization
must take place. Kingsley Widmer:
Obvious logic: To the degree that academicians can teach, they
can also misteach. Learning is not a one-way street. And we
misteach millions of inappropriate students the low arts of
semi-literacy, trivialization, and uncritical spirit. That
dominating vocation tends to denature the few things, the
humanities and sciences, that the universities might be able to
do well. As for the rest, from semi-pro sports to cultured
marketing, from reinventing hierarchical sleaze to reblooming
the ancient pomposity of resignation, from dull poets to deadly
technocrats, bury them. Long live the university.... (12)
1 Abbie Hoffman, "Plans for the Destruction of the
Universities," Revolution for the Hell of it (NY: Dial, 1968)
157.
2 "Anarchist in Academe: Notes from a Contemporary University,"
Social Anarchism 14 (1989) 11.
3 Deschooling Society (Manchester: Penguin, 1971).
4 R. Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation
5 "On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic,
political, psychological, sexual, and especially intellectual
aspects, with a modest proposal for its remedy," by members of
the Situationist International and students of Strasbourg,
November 1966; in Ken Knabb ed. and trans., Situationist
International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets,
1981) 321.
6 Teaching as a Subversive Activity (NY: Dell, 1969) 13-4.
7 Richard Kostelanetz, "John Cage on Pedagogy: An
Ur-Conversation," Social Anarchism 14 (1989) 27.
8 Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1977) thesis
8.
9 The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume 1 trans.
Robert Hurley (NY: Vintage, 1990) 93.
10 "Two Lectures," trans. Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale
Pasquino, in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (NY: Pantheon, 1980)
98.
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EKOPILOT
From: Hampus Brynolf (ingvar.brynolf@mailbox.swipnet.se)
About the EKOPILOT project in Sweden.
To understand this project, I have to explain a little about
Swedish schools. In Sweden, you have the right to start a
private-owned school, and you'll get as much money as a normal
public school. Every student get a "money-bag" and then - it's
up to him/her to choose school. The EKOPILOT (Echo Pilot)
project is a part of public school, but still outside the
ordinary public school system. This means that the headmaster of
the school in Sölvesborg hasn't got any power over the project
(they havn't got anything to say anyway...). The project
started last autumn, that means that the first students has done
one (of six) terms. Their school building is now ready (they
have been in the ordinary school most of the time until now).
The school is located about 2 km from Sölvesborg (a town with
15000 citizens.) In the classroom, every student got his own
writing table with a computer on. (TheyÝre going to have
INTERNET access in the future) Every monday the students
take either agriculture,domestic science or technique (they
learn to install a toilet, how to build with bricks, how to
paint your windows, etc.); everything that you need in the real
life. But the founder of the project, Mats Holm_n means that
the most important is to give the students comprehensive view
of life, society etc and give every student a possibility to
find his own way towards the future, NOT meaning the way to a
profession. Today it's very important that you give the students
the possibility to decide what they want with their lifes. The
school must give the students a comprehensive view if we ever
want a better world. Therefor they try to link all subjects
together, reading subjects in blocks, you use alot of days
(weeks) for a project including different subjects instead of
the ordinary way when you read the subject isolated from the
other subjects and from reality. They don't want to give report
to their students, but the Swedish law demand them to do it
anyway. Don't know yet what will happen. This sounds nice,
doesn't it? It is - BUT everything is not good. Everything
I've written is what Mats Holm_n has told me but unfortunately
does not all the other teachers share his opinion about
pedagogics. It is not a political project! They don't say: This
is the leftwing way of education. Official they just question
the normal way of teaching, the power over peoples that a
normal school got and the one track minded education you get in
a normal school.
Mats Holm_n writes in a letter:
"I took the ECHO-pilot intiative two years ago. I have always
been involved in educational experiments of one kind or another
for more than 20 years and one starting-point was of course my
teaching experience (Swedish, English, French). Another was the
current discussion in Sweden and elsewhere about fundamental
changes in the welfare society: at present Sweden is rocked by
the worst crisis since the 1930's. The future seems more chaotic
than ever...
In this situation I formed a group with seven colleagues who set
out to create an education that would give the students maximum
freedom of action after having completed their studies.
So what are the main characteristics of the Echo Pilots project?
I would like to point out the following:
-Integration of theoretical and vocational subjects, the latter
including basic carpentry, masonry, engineering, organic
farming and cookingIntegration of humanities and science in
joint projects - teachers working together in team.Three
profiles: 1. Ecological profile 2. Small-scale
enterprising profile 3. International profile (electronic
communication, student exchange etc)
Half of the time the Echo Pilots will be in a new-built
schoolhouse in a tiny village just outside Sölvesborg. We will
be very independent of the rest; a sort of private school
within the system. 37 boys and girls announced their interests.
To finace the project, the students for example clean their
school. The most interesting with this project is not the idea;
the interesting is that it is working! It's not a something that
our enemys can say: "Sounds nice, but it doesn't work" about;
this project is actually working!!
----FIGHT ON! -----
Subject: Re: Anarchy & Education
From: bob dick <bd@psych.psy.uq.oz.au>
Dear Jesse
I think this may count as "random late-night opinion", though I
have thought about it a lot. For that matter, I do try to
practise what I preach. It's in a university classroom, which
is not the same as, e.g., the early years of education. But I
think many of the same principles apply.
School, I think, is to equip people with the skills, knowledge
and understanding to take part in society. For an anarchist
society, I think the most important skills are those required to
maintain a collaborative culture in which individuals are
guaranteed freedom.
I assume people learn more from the _process_ of education than
they do from the content. This implies that best results would
be attained if each class were run as an anarchist (i.e.
collaborative individualist) society. (I don't know if this
matches your definition of anarchism or not. It's the one I'm
using.)
I may return to this issue if I have more time later today. For
now, I'll content myself with mentioning the most important
skills, in my view: the ability to establish and maintain good
relationships; and, within those relationships, the ability to
use collective decision-making processes which genuinely try to
meet the needs of _all_.
Regards -- Bob
From: Bryan A Case <godwin@umich.edu>
Our local anarchist reading group is working through Neill's
SUMMERHILL, from which we learn much. The book is not without
problems, however: the author recognizes his school's class bias
(yet another underground current in anarchism, THE DISPOSSESSED
vs. the Abbe de Theleme); sexism and conservative gender
construction...
I taught freshman comp this fall from a decentralized
perspective. As I am an employee of the University of Michigan,
a major research institution with rightwing cash-rich alumni
(heck, I even had to sign an oath of loyalty to the state of
Michigan - I'm not kidding), I rapidly found my limits: I had to
assign one (final) grade; I could not significantly alter the
time and place of our meetings... Yet I tried some experiments:
-Each student received a grading sheet during the first week.
Two questions: 1. Would you like to receive grades during this
semester? (y/n) 2. Please weight the percentage of your final
grade that you would like per category [4 categories of
work...]. They discussed these options in class for one
meeting, then handed 'em in to me. I copied 'em and handed the
xeroxes back. At the end of the term i calibrated their final
grade based on their own percentages. Some students complained,
but in terms of their own choices and self-awareness, not
against the system.
-Final grades were determined in one-on-one conferences between
myself and each student. We each worked things out with our
copy of the individual grading system. On the average, each
person graded themself in perfect agreement with my assessment.
A few (4 out of 22) were a notch or two too high; we talked
things over and either I gave in or they were convinced. A few
(again, ca 4) were a notch or two too low; 2 I boosted up to my
grade, the others were convincing and remained.
-The class determined the syllabus as much as I could create. I
arbitrarily set up four units of read (Narrative, Argument,
Analysis, Critique). During the week before each unit
commenced, on Monday I would hand out copies of a summary of
each possible reading selection (from our text and coursepack);
I tried to be as impartial as possible, listing title, author,
page length, subject and approaches summarized. On Wednesday
they discussed the choices available, debating the merits of
subjects, some authors, etc.; then turned in their ballots. I
totaled the results then passed the decision back: number of
choices averaged, then assigned in slots during the next weeks
based on page length vs. writing assignments. Friday was this
new syllabus, for which Monday would be the first day and
reading.
-Essay workshops. One student would be the Author for the day.
They would pass out copies of their draft for each reader (21
other students, plus myself). We, the Audience, would annotate
and read our copies, then write a one page reaction and
evaluation. Class discussion would be a lengthy critique of the
essay, looking at various aspects of writing: grammar, strategy,
use of evidence, etc. I was usually the board-writer, never the
Critic.
My students ended up as better writers; finely-honed critics;
highly energetic class participants; nearly manically active
beings. I had some problems with scheduling and timing, which
need tinkering.
The only painful problem was a case of plagiarism. One student
clearly borrowed the work of someone else. I could not come up
with a good way of dealing with this anarchistically. If this
were a class that met at my house, for which I was the local
teacher, I would have asked the person to leave. But I was and
am - bound up with a massive institution that forbids such
exclusion. I could think of no fair (or nonviolent!) way of
letting the student's classmates handle this. The plagiarist
refused to agree with me, insisting on the orginal nature of the
work. I could see no other way out than to turn to the Dean and
initiate a trial process. This *hurt*. I felt as if I were
betraying my anarchist principle, as I was deliberately invoking
some of the worst elements of the authoritarian school. As of
now, this is still ongoing...
Any advice or recommendations?
Bryan N. Alexander a/k/a godwin@umich.edu--
"There is always an official executioner." -Lao Tze
Mr. Authority
by Michael Stec <ax995@freenet.carleton.ca>
When authority becomes comical, the illusion of the necessity
for authority becomes visible. Recently while attending a free
evening lecture at the local university, I encountered Mr.
Authority acting authoritarian. He was there to control the
question and answer session at the end of the lecture (as if it
needed control). I found the old grey-haired gentlemen rather
comical. He would tell people that if they had a question you
were to raise your hand , he would indicate to you in what order
you could ask your question ( just like kindergarten). If Mr.
Authority held up one finger at you , you were the first person
who could ask a question, two fingers the second person who
could ask a question, etc. Of course Mr. Authority would remind
people that they must ask a short question. Mr. Authority also
seemed to be concerned that a dialog might develop between the
questioner and the lecturer. If that happened, he would cut off
the questioner and point to th
