If you can control a man’s thinking, you don’t have to worry about his actions. If you can determine what a man thinks, you do not have to worry about what he will do. If you can make a man believe that he is inferior, you don’t have to compel him to seek an inferior status, he will do so without being told and if you can make a man believe that he is justly an outcast, you don’t have to order him to the back door, he will go to the back door on his own and if there is no back door, the very nature of the man will demand that you build one.
~Carter G. Woodson, The MisEducation of the Negro
There has been a recent flurry of comments regarding educational reform and I want to chime in with a bit of a clarification: Namely, that education and schooling are not the same thing. Furthermore, education and compulsory schooling are not the same thing either. In fact, it seems to me that adding compulsion to the equation makes them even more different. So, before we begin to tout this or that reform we ought to ask the originary question: What are compulsory schools for?
We seem to assume that schools are intentionally designed for educational purposes, but history doesn’t tell that story. If we look to the origins of compulsory schooling the US in the 1830’s Common School Movement, supported by Horace Mann and the Whigs, we find an experiment in mind control that was aimed directly at colonizing Catholics and later at the Negro, so on and so forth. Now, this doesn’t mean that nothing has changed, however, it should make us question why it is that we simply assume that schools are intended to educate the human person as some kind of magical destiny of the state-enforced compulsory schooling system.
This is not a matter of partisanship. From critical left to right we find these indictments from Chomsky-inspired leftists (see: David Gabbard et al) to libertarian-minded freemarketeers (see: John Taylor Gatto and friends). This all grows from a tradition of dissent that has been well-ignored by most. Especially “educators” and politicians who “care” about education.
From Ivan Illich’s “DeSchooling Society” to Pablo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and countless others (Neil Postman, John Holt, Jonathon Kozol, and don’t forget Jean-Jaques Roussaeu’s “Emile”!) the lessons learned from the past, and the current debacle of the standards movement, show that equating education and schooling as the same thing is the first step to forgetting about education altogether.
You see, we know that schooling today is stupid and non-educative, if not miseducative, and if education occurs it is the exception, not the norm. I am sure many of you are rushing to counter this with all your touching stories of this or that school or wonderful teacher, but first consider this: If those stories are true, then, you might be a survivor.
It is clear that Obama is not. He too has given in to the myth of the school, at least in public statements. I am no school abolitionist, like some the authors I named, but the school is nothing pretty or innocent and, as a parent, I could care less about its fate before I have had my say to my children (all of them, which includes my biological ones and as many other ones as I can find). Before I teach them to seek an education and know that I will do everything I can to see that they get one. This task, as I see it, puts all the reformist back-and-forth into the category of nonsense.
This is the radical nature of the Catholic idea of the parent as primary educator. You see, it understands that education is not a matter of strangers telling bits of data to kids who are forced to be there, and “learn” it. Education must be forced at times and others times it cannot possibly be forced, but with or without compulsion, it must be done with parental love. When the state functions in loco parentis, we should not be cracking our heads trying to figure out what’s wrong. The question is how do we extend parental love to those who have no parents to teach and love them? Here we find the task at hand.
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