Joel Spring is the author ofseveral works on schooling and education, including How Educa-tionaI Ideologies are Shaping Global Society (Mahwah. N. j.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), Educating the Consumer-Citizen: A History of the Marriage of Schools. Advertising, and Media (Mahwah, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003). Wheels in the Head: Educational Philosophies ofAuthority, Freedom and Culture From Socrates to Human Rights (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), and Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). Thefollowing excerpts are taken from A Primer ofLibertarian Education (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1975).
THE WEDDING OF REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT to radical pedagogy had its roots in a profound pessimism, a feeling that revolutionary social and economic changes in the twentieth century had resulted in totalitarian states—the Soviet Union, for example, where revolutionary impulses were followed by a period of conservative dictatorship. Why the failure of this revolutionary endeavor? For people like [Wilhelm| Reich, [A. S.] Neill, and [Paulo| Freire the answer lies in its failure to provide radically new means of education and socialization by which all people could be brought into the revolutionary movement and become acting members of it rather than its objects.
From this perspective, a radical educational theory makes sense only ifit is seen as part of a total revolutionary endeavor. One of the most serious problems facing the present and future development of libertarian forms of education is the dangerous separation of educational methods from a political and social ideology. Radical experiments in education tend to be trivialized as fast as they are developed. Paulo Freire’s techniques are adopted by the Peace Corps and the free school methods of Summerhill are introduced into the classrooms of the public school without any relationship to their underlying radical ideology. What begins as a radical movement is quickly absorbed by the existing system; new techniques are used, but only to accomplish the old objectives of control and discipline...
All methods and content in education affect character and action. Consequently, all educational techniques reflect some ideological position. For instance, Paulo Freire has certainly shown that the teaching of reading and writing might be the most political act in education. If education is pursued without a conscious radical perspective, it will do nothing but serve the existing social order.
It should also be clearly understood that there are two distinct ways of talking about education’s potential to have a radical effect on society. On the one hand, educational systems such as Paulo Freire’s can provide a method which liberates individuals so that they will act to bring about a radical change in society. On the other hand, an educational establishment itself may directly affect society, as in the case of a day-care center which weakens the family structure. Both approaches can be combined within one system...
Any attempt to make a radical pedagogy part of a radical political and social movement must come to terms with [the] educational establishment. The neglect of attempts to change this educational establishment would mean the neglect of an entire generation which is held in the custodial control ofthe school... lfwe talk about change in our social institutions, we certainly cannot neglect one of the largest and most intrusive of them. In fact, it is the one public institution which has the most contact with all members of society.
The school, in short, must be approached first of all as a political and social institution. To give concrete meaning to theories of radical education—to that which can be—one must begin by coming to terms with that which exists. The one major shortcoming of radical educational theorists has been their failure to deal with the reality of existing educational systems and how their theories might be implemented. For instance, it is fine for A. S. Neill to establish a model like Summerhill, but Summerhill has little meaning unless it can be implemented throughout society... The failure of many free schools in the 1960s was a direct result ofnot making a concrete assessment of the political workings of public schooling and developing strategies to confront and change that system. Many of these schools just languished outside the system, without money or power. What this means is that if radical pedagogy is to be made part of a radical movement, it cannot act as if it were creating a new educational system in a vacuum. Strategies must be developed to confront the political realities of the existing educational establishment...
One of the first steps that could be taken would be the elimination of compulsory education... No radical educational plan can really be developed if all children are required to attend a school approved by the state government. But at the same time compulsoty education laws are attacked, it must be recognized that they were originally developed to solve certain social problems, namely child labour and juvenile delinquency. Compulsory education does protect children from economic exploitation and does serve the custodial function of occupying time. Thus, the end of compulsory education would have to be accompanied by a change in the economic structure which allowed for the financial independence of youth...
Economic independence would allow for the changing of other laws affecting youth. Child labour laws could be eliminated because youths would no longer be vul-
Nerable to exploitation on the labour market. Youths could choose jobs because of interest and desire to learn. There could also be a campaign to ensure adolescent sexual freedom. Not only could all restrictive laws be removed but birth-control devices and information might be provided. Economic independence and legal changes hopefully would overcome what Wilhelm Reich referred to as the “housing problems.” Independent residences might be made available to youths. Society, in short, could recognize the legitimacy of adolescent sexual activity.
The economic independence ofyouth would represent a major step in the liberation of women. Traditionally, girls and young women have been under the control of the family for longer periods of time than their male counterparts. Even marriage at an early age only results in a shift from the control of one head of the household to another. A major source of female dependence on the family is the lack of easy access to occupations which provide economic independence. Combined with this economic problem is the traditional attitude that women must be protected by the home and denied the social independence of their male counterparts. Providing women with equal economic independence would hopefully allow them the same type of social freedom and opportunity for development.
The elimination of compulsory education and the shifting of educational funding from the level of the school to that of the individual could break the power of the educational bureaucracy. It should be recognized that in the United States, control of the school does not really reside in the local boards of education. Such important educational issues as curriculum, content of textbooks, and requirements for teacher certification are decided within an interlocking educational bureaucracy which includes professional organizations, state officials, universities, and publishing companies—not to mention the new learning corporations... which represent the most important and rapidly growing parts of this bureaucracy.
One way to weaken the power of this educational bureaucracy would be to avoid any supervision of educational spending, leaving decisions about how the money should be spent completely up to the individual. That would mean parental supervision until the child was twelve or thirteen; after that, the individual youth would have absolute control over the spending of the money. If a government body were established to supervise the spending, it would be likely to fall under the power of the same social and economic influences which have surrounded the school. Instead, we could develop a democratic system which placed control in the hands of the individual. The practice of freedom is the best exercise in learning how to use freedom. What little money might be lost or squandered at an individual level would be nothing compared to the amount of money wasted and squandered within the existing educational structure. The history of government control and regulation in the United States has been one of creating what has been called a “socialism for the rich.” We could exercise a traditional American distrust for government organizations as sources of power for those in control, and instead place our faith in individual actions.
The demise of the existing educational structure could be accompanied by the recognition that the concept of the school is out of date in modern technological society. The school in the nineteenth century was viewed not only as a source of social control but also as a center where all the materials of learning, books and teachers, could be concentrated. With mass media and urban living there is no reason why a person should not be able to learn the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic just by growing and interacting within the community. Ivan IHich’s Deschooling Society has certainly offered path-breaking suggestions in this direction.
One ofthe immediate questions that occur when it is suggested that the school be eliminated is: What happens to the poor? Is not the school their only hope? How will they learn growing up in a culture of poverty? Without the school will there not be even greater social class differences? In response, it should be clearly recognized that schooling has not eliminated poverty in the past nor will it in the future. To use the school to solve problems of poverty is to seek a conservative solution without directly changing the social structure which created poverty. It should also be recognized that schooling as a system of social selection has tended to reinforce the existing social class structure. But to get rid of the school is certainly not going to eliminate poverty. In other words, having schools or not having schools is not going to make that much difference because schools are not at the heart ofthe problem of poverty. But if the school were eliminated and at the same time children and youth were given economic independence, the problem ofpoverty would be confronted directly. Poor children would have enough money to explore and enjoy the advantages now reserved for the middle class.
The next question, of course, is whether the culture of poverty doesn’t hinder and limit the type of choices made by the parents and youth. The answer, of course, is yes. But this “yes” must be qualified in two ways. First, the poor are better judges of how their educational money should be spent than the traditional leaders in the educational bureaucracy. Second, the legal and legislative campaign directed against compulsory education and educational funding could be accompanied by the radical-ization of the schools of education in major universities. This would provide a center for dealing directly with the problems raised by a culture of poverty by utilizing community education programs based on methods like Paulo Freire’s and by developing techniques of radical therapy...
As Wilhelm Reich suggested in the 1920s, nothing of major consequence can be accomplished by treatment at an individual level. If repression exists on a society-wide level, the solution is not individual treatment but changing those social conditions and institutions which cause repression. Individual therapy is essentially conservative because it leaves untouched the source of the problem. The same difficulty exists with schools and the faculties of education which have served those schools. Treatment of social problems has tended to be at an individual and conservative level. There is an attempt to overcome the culture of poverty by treating the child within the confines ofthe school. The real solution lies in directly attacking the social conditions which keep a person from learning and growing in our society...
Educational sociology and psychology could work together to accomplish what Wilhelm Reich called radical therapy. Both of these disciplines could begin to look at the problem of why certain people within our society cannot learn without relying upon the authoritarian structure of the school. If such dependency does not exist, we can safely abandon the school and rely on every individual to grow and learn in his or her own manner. But one suspects that at this stage, there are still many barriers to free and independent learning. This might be particularly true in cultures of poverty. The job for psychology and sociology would be to identity those barriers which create a state of dependency in the learning process. Is the problem, as Reich suggested, mainly centered around the existence of the nuclear family? Is the problem more directly related to the economic conditions of poverty? Is it a result of the structure and the conditions of our modern urban environment? These and a host of other questions immediately come to mind. Sociology and psychology could then go on to identity those social conditions which would allow people to live and grow in the world without the authoritarian control of the schools. They could develop a radical therapy which would result in major changes in our society. If children cannot learn, one must not stop with just helping them to overcome their immediate problem.
Tack those conditions...
One hundred years ago it would have been difficult to convince large numbers of people that changing educational institutions was a necessary part of political and economic change. Today this is equally true because social and economic forces have made schools one of the central controlling agencies in society. For this reason schools must become a part of any attempt at major social change. This does not necessarily mean an extension of schooling; it could as easily mean the limitation or elimination of schooling. What must be kept in mind is that mass schooling is a product of a particular set of historical forces which has made it into one of the major institutions for planned socialization.
What must also be kept in mind is the distinction between schooling and education. Schooling has been a planned method of socialization designed to produce obedient workers and citizens through a system of institutional controls. On the other hand, education can mean gaining knowledge and ability by which one can transform the world and maximize individual autonomy. Education can be a source of individual liberation. One of the internal contradictions within the present system of schooling relates to this distinction. Modern workers do need basic skills and some degree of understanding of the world and, consequently, must be given some education. It very often happens that this education raises the level of awareness enough to cause rebellion against the process of socialization or schooling. This has occurred in the last ten years in student protests and demands for protection of individual liberties and rights. Unfortunately this has occurred mainly in middle-class schools where there is still some semblance of education. Poor children have been primarily well schooled and not well educated.
Presently in the United States there is a movement to eliminate all vestiges of education in favour of something called “career education.” The career education movement holds as a basic tenet of faith that all learning must be directed toward the needs of some future occupation. Learning is made subservient to a future social role and the socialization process of the school. Knowledge is not presented as a means of understanding and critically analyzing social and economic forces but as a means of subservience to the social structure. “Career education” could represent the logical outcome of the controlling power of schooling.
What must be sought in the future is a system of education which raises the level of individual consciousness to an understanding of the social and historical forces that have created the existing society and determined an individual's place in that society. This must occur through a combination of theory and practice in which both change as all people work for a liberated society. There should not be a blueprint for future change but, rather, a constant dialogue about means and ends. Education should be at the heart of such a revolutionary endeavour.
World History
