School: The best days of your life?

School students have it tough: They are supposed to be enjoying unleashing their creativity ready for the 21st century knowledge economy; but when they are exercise their creativity – say by dying their hair – they are suspended.

While this might seem a fairly trivial example of the petty tyranny of a school authority over a student, it’s something that goes on day after day, week after week in schools with grinding regularity.
Schools are highly regimented. There is a bell that tells you when to start learning, when to stop, when to eat, when to play, when to stop enjoying yourself, when to be at school and when to leave. There are rules on what to wear and what not to wear. In many schools students have to stand when a teacher enters and sit only when given permission. Modern schools were modeled on the army and are organised on the same basic pattern as other big institutions like jails and factories.
Then there is the “learning” itself. Much of it is boring and irrelevant. Tests and exams are like jumping through a series of hoops to prepare you for “the real world”, though workplaces where you are sit silently for hours on end regurgitating masses of information are rare.
Much of schooling is about discipline and habits of obedience to authority. Indeed this was the motive of many ruling class advocates of a national education system. One such advocate declared that she would teach children to read but not write:
“They learn, on weekdays, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is…to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety… Beautiful is the order of society when each, according to his place, pays willing honour to his superiors.”
Many of these early education advocates were motivated by the need to ensure that the emerging working class had the skills to operate the machinery of the new factories and to accept the orders of foremen, bosses and policemen without question.
Of course, school is not all bad. Knowledge is power and learning is part of growing stronger. Passionate teachers strive to make learning interesting and meaningful and some innovative programs are challenging old methods of education. People make lifelong friends at school. Many students will look back with mixed memories of their school days – the good memories of learning and friendships tempered by bad experiences of clashes with authority, bullying or social exclusion.
But education is essential to human liberation and the drive to win an education for themselves and their children has always been a burning desire within the working class movement and in third world liberation struggles. Free public primary and secondary education is a great achievement but because it is within capitalism, our education system is marred by sexism, racism and bullying. Education can be transformed though by organizing groups to study together, to resist petty tyrannies and support teachers’ unions in their defence of public education.

David G