The aim of education should not be merely to reproduce things such as family and society as they are at present, but to use our energies to generate something better, argues Donald Moerdijk
Coline Serreau is a feminist film director whose work deserves more attention than it has so far received. In a series of elegant comedies that encapsulate the discoveries of 1968, she imagines new configurations for the family. She shows how they can be created by dedramatising tiresomely familiar situations. Two men and a woman, with one of the men playing the part of “housewife”? So what? Why not? (Pourquoi pas?, 1977)
The stressed white CEO of a multinational flips his lid and marries his black office-cleaner, a real mensch, the very opposite of the kugels he is used to. He founds a new family and lives happily ever after with her and her five black children, and their five black fathers, mixing in for good measure his former wife, their two children and her current lover, all of the latter whites, who gradually discover menschenhood (Romuald et Juliette, 1989).
In these fables Serreau suggests that interpersonal woes spring from the set roles and rules (gender, sex, race, status) that afford questionable satisfaction to some of those who accept them and cause untold misery to everyone else. These roles have obsessed Euro- (not to speak of Americano-) culture, providing literature, film and now TV with their big theme strategy and tactics of marriage and adultery and monopolising imaginative energies sorely needed elsewhere. Give up and be happy! Just let go!
What Serreau does for Family, others have done for School. David Gribble reports on this in Real Education: Varieties of Freedom (1998). Gribble’s round-the-world investigation reads rather like an 18th-century travelogue. But he deals with fact, not fiction. Like Serreau he finds that if freed from pressure, people tend to do of their own accord exactly what School and Family so unsuccessfully try to force them to do: that is, to live and learn and get on with one another.
If so much blood, sweat and tears are involved in familying and schooling, it is not because of the people involved, but because of the way in which these institutions have been set up.
Are such institutions all that necessary? Must they be so heavy: stone statues, as Baudelaire might have put it, rather than marvellous clouds? Couldn’t they be made more biodegradable, more soluble in life? Gribble doesn’t go into these theoretical underpinnings. He simply shows that in practice there are accessible alternatives to school, and that they work.
Gribble tells, like Osbert Sitwell, whom he cites, that his own “education took place during the holidays from Eton”. He could be described as a teacher but he is in fact a learner who has followed not a career but a vocation, a vision. It is a vision of what he calls “real education”, which enables children to make a world that is their own.
He sees school as a form of colonisation. It crushes children into conformity with the concerns of (at best) well-meaning adults who force them into a world of the past, reproducing their parents’ lives instead of living their own. The recent film Billy Eliot shows dramatically just how counter-productive this can be.
Education today is in a state of crisis. Why? Because of “spoilt children”? Discouraged teachers? The media? “Lack of funding”? No: because of the school system, which gives weight to these factors.
In any system based on authority, the line of command has to be clear. If action is to be legitimate, it has to be traceable to a superior authority. The educational system is part of a larger organisation, corporate and governmental whence its emphasis on norms and standard procedures, on the detection and correction of mistakes. Mistakes “weaken” the transmission of orders from top to bottom and of information from bottom to top.
Roland Meighan has pointed out that traditional education was designed to produce an “army of clerks” (and, one could add, a “nation of shopkeepers”). This logic tends to set up a vicious circle from which almost all the ills affecting conventional education have derived.
Education, in an authority-system, centres on the teacher. The teacher, as the agent of authority, is set apart. He knows, and has to correct those who don’t know. He has to concentrate authority in himself instead of spreading it in empowerment. This undermines solidarity with his pupils; he can only approve or disapprove of them.
This individualisation fosters individualism in teachers and pupils; difficulties are seen as individual, not systemic. The individual is “saved” if he is “good”; if not, there is “something the matter with him”. In teacher and pupil the sense of impotence can lead to violence.
Confronting this figure of knowledge and authority, children have two options. They can submit to the voluntary servitude that fits them for adoption into the power system, perpetuated by toadies of this sort; or they can reject it, resisting, or voting with their feet.
The school system sees such resisters and deserters simply as “troublemakers” or “dunces”, in much the same way as the army sees them, punishing and expelling them. Yet duncehood is usually simply a depressive reaction to school; just as troublemaking is manic.
In class, these bored dissidents tend to be either slow or agitated, and are easily distracted, “showing no interest in their work”. Winston Churchill was a typical troublemaker. Albert Einstein was something of a dunce. Both were mental absentees, waiting to do something else elsewhere.
We no longer need armies of obedient clerks. The call (admittedly ambiguous) is now for enterprise, imagination and creativity. Can these be generated by a system that concentrates on conformity, on the detection of weaknesses rather than the development of strengths? Can one teach enterprise, imagination, and creativeness?
No: they can’t be taught; but they can be learned. Gribble describes a Copernican revolution. In contrast to the drab and massive uniformity of conventional school, his book describes some of the variegated ways in which freedom can flower.
Institutions fit into one another. Each time one constraining capsule is dedramatised and dissolved, it reveals another, an onion within an onion, as the skins are peeled off. When? What? How? Where? Why? One after another the questions arise. Must children be sent to school if they are to learn anything? Should classes be obligatory?
No: children go to class of their own accord when they want to learn what they are taught there. This was the main discovery made by AS Neill, when he founded the world’s best-known “freedom-school”, Summerhill (England, 1924). It is still going strong; last year public support, national and international, prevented Britain’s Education Ministry from closing it down.
Neill found that children who go to class voluntarily draw real benefit from it: what they acquire is not an alien implant but something of their own. This changes their whole attitude not only to knowledge, but also to culture and to society as a whole.
Children feel ready for classes when they understand what classes are for. They understand this not by being told, but by finding it out for themselves. Understanding can obviously be learned; but it cannot really be taught.
The “free-school” movement develops this logic. What should children understand? Who decides? Neill removed constraint from study, but maintained the idea of “class” and a set course of study. Subsequent experiments went further, enabling children to learn and study not merely when but also what and how they wanted to. This dissolves the very idea of teaching and of school.
Satisfactory alternatives have been found in apprenticeship, which emphasises learning by practice (for example, in the Kleingruppe in Lufingen, Switzerland), and in clubs (such as at Sudbury Valley, near Boston), where learning is done at home, “school” being “the place where one meets one’s friends”, the role of the teacher being to give advice when asked.
This entails understanding the pupils. In real education teachers no longer teach: they learn. Like everybody else. Learning, for both pupils and teachers, develops into research.
What do children need? Simply to feel at ease and to develop self-confidence. If they have these, everything else will come as a matter of course. If not, it will all be a schlepp. Children need space of their own, arranged and managed by themselves (as street-sociologists also know). This enables them to learn how to manage both the space and their relationships within it.
In a non-authoritarian environment, relationships tend naturally to be democratic. Bullies reproduce the behaviour of authoritarian adults; when teachers become learners, relating to children simply as other people and not as authority figures, bullying tends to disappear. This is already an enormous gain.
Children will learn other things too, the things they perceive as relevant. They can be guided here and advised, but only on a basis of friendship and equality. They willingly make use of classes, libraries and workshops whenever these are seen as their own facilities and not part of an adult plot to set them on an alien course. Learning is a project: exploration, discovery, adventure the very opposite of a prescribed path, a career. The syllabus is replaced by research. To be real and not a mere simulation, education (like economic development) has to be endogenous.
The learning space has obviously to be protected from outside threats and interference from, for instance, the marketeers who in consumer societies have now set their sights on the “children’s market”. The children themselves phase the protection out as they learn how to cope. They don’t have to be “taught the rules” in order to deal with society. They learn about rules by making and breaking them, gradually expanding their ambit.
Pupils and staff decide together, on a one-person-one-vote basis, what will be allowed and what will not, and how offenders should be dealt with. To be meaningful, the rules have to be their rules, not rules imposed by outside authority. This also holds for sex, that bugbear.
The aim of education should not be merely to reproduce things (family, society …) as they are at present, but to use energies, sexual and other, to generate something better. Democracy begins at school. If it doesn’t, it becomes nothing but the power game we know only too well, with elected representatives behaving as owners of their borrowed authority: a mockery.
All schools can do is teach. They are failing even in that. Isn’t it time to set up learning facilities instead? And produce not just co-operative, smiling salespeople, updated shopkeepers for an updated socio-economic system, cogs, active and no longer passive, in some huge machine, but rather, for a change, real menschen? This takes real education, and not just neo-school.
Can we get real education? Cheaply, perhaps (money is not crucial to real education: it can buy marble statues, but marvellous clouds come free), but not easily. It is perhaps easier to set up in poor than in rich countries. But it involves radical change. Piecemeal reforms tend to produce strange effects. Put a teaspoonful of democracy into apartheid, and you get a bantustan. Systemic compromise is rarely viable. Systems have to be re-founded if they are really to be changed.
But can we afford not to change the system? Quite apart from the expense, can an authoritarian school system be maintained in a democratic society without perverting it? (Insistent teaching was one of the factors that undermined democracy in the Soviet Union.) Learning, on the other hand, creates a culture of equality and deepens democracy. If things are really to be changed, real education would seem to be a reasonable way of changing them. The only way? Well no doubt the only one that hasn’t yet failed.
Donald Moerdijk is a South African-born academic who has lived in France since 1955. Most of his teaching was at the Ecole Normale Suprieure, Paris. He also taught at universities in Canada and South Africa. He claims to have been the only boy who succeeded in playing several rugby matches for his school’s first team without ever getting or even touching the ball