Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

They Say: “Reforming schools Is Possible/Schools Not Irredeemable”

1. Reforming schools is impossible:

A. Gradual change inevitably fails and reinforces a flawed system.

Gray 11 — Peter Gray, Research Professor at Boston College, Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Rockefeller University, 2011 ("Is Real Educational Reform Possible? If So, How?," Psychology Today, August 19^th, Available Online at https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201108/is-real-educational-reform-possible-if-so-how, Accessed 6-24-2017)

Real reform is not possible from within the existing conventional school system.

My friend and colleague, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, uses the phrase "You can't get there from here" to refer to a basic principle of evolution that applies to cultural evolution as well as biological evolution. Organisms, whether they are biological organisms like dinosaurs or cultural organisms like our compulsory schooling system, are capable of gradual evolutionary change, but they are not infinitely capable of such change. Sometimes you just can't get there from here. The existing structure is built in such a way that it cannot be modified in ways necessary to produce a desirable, adaptive outcome. Dinosaurs reached a point where they couldn't change to meet the new conditions of life, so they died out and their niches were replenished with new, highly adaptable little creatures called mammals. Our system of compulsory schooling--which arose originally for purposes of indoctrination and obedience training (see A Brief History of Education)--cannot be modified to serve effectively the function of real education.

There is no way that gradual change in our current schooling system can result in the kind of educational reform that I am calling real reform. The small steps in what would seem to be the right direction, urged on by the progressive educators, fail within this system. They fail because they don't work when taken one by one or just a little at a time. A little "freedom" in a system where success is measured by tests doesn't work, because free children don't choose to learn the test answers. "Play" in a setting where children are segregated by age and are constrained in what they can play at is not a particularly effective learning tool.

Moreover, like the dinosaur, the schooling system has by now grown so huge and cumbersome that it is refractory to forces for serious change. It is an enormous economic enterprise, employing many millions of people whose self-interest is to keep it going pretty much as it is. Since its customers are there by compulsion, not choice, it senses little need to change to please the customers. Instead, it operates for the self-interests of those who run it. And, because education has now been compulsory for several generations, nearly everyone has gone through the system and has difficulty imagining life without it. One thing that compulsory schooling teaches very well is the mistaken belief that we need compulsory schooling in order to learn.

For all these reasons and more, real reform within our existing school system is not possible. (For more on this, see Why Schools Are What They Are: Forces Against Fundamental Change.)

B. Schools inevitably reproduce institutionalized systems of value and increase dependence on schooled society – that’s Illich.

C. Modern schools inevitably reproduce the harmful effects of schooling.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

The school system today performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society's myth, the institutionalization of that myth's contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality. Today the school system, and especially the university, provides ample opportunity for criticism of the myth and for rebellion against its institutional perversions. But the ritual which demands tolerance of the fundamental contradictions between myth and institution still goes largely unchallenged, for neither ideological criticism nor social action can bring about a new society. Only disenchantment with and detachment from the central social ritual and reform of that ritual can bring about radical change

The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.

The project of demythologizing which I propose cannot be limited to the university alone. Any attempt to reform the university without attending to the system of which it is an integral part is like trying to do urban renewal in New York City from the twelfth story up. Most current college-level reform looks like the building of high-rise slums. Only a generation which grows up without obligatory schools will be able to recreate the university.

D. Hidden curriculum inevitably promotes institutional dependence and the logic of consumption.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

This objection, however, underestimates the fundamental political and economic nature of the school system itself, as well as the political potential inherent in any effective challenge to it. In a basic sense, schools have ceased to be dependent on the ideology professed by any government or market organization. Other basic institutions might differ from one country to another: family, party, church, or press. But everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect. Invariably, it shapes the consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional ministration of a neighbor.

Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will"" provide a better life. And everywhere it develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production, the tolerance for institutional dependence, and the recognition of institutional rankings. The hidden curriculum of school does all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken by teachers and no matter what ideology prevails. In other words, schools are fundamentally alike in all countries, be they fascist, democratic or socialist, big or small, rich or poor. This identity of the school system forces us to recognize the profound world-wide identity of myth, mode of production, and method of social control, despite the great variety of mythologies in which the myth finds expression.

2. Schools themselves are bad – these flaws aren’t reform-able:

A. The method of Schools is dehumanizing – education is deemed a process to be “delivered” to objectified students in the banking model of education and dehumanized if they don’t meet the standards of “good students”, only education that is universally accessible and voluntary is good – that’s Jandric.

B. Modern schooling serves as a panoptical state of perpetual surveillance – that legitimates and normalizes authoritarian monitoring.

Hern 98 – Matt Hern, Writer and activist based in East Vancouver, Founder of the Eastside Learning Center and Groundswell: Grassroots Economic Alternatives, Ph.D. in Urban Studies from the Union Institute & University, M.A. from the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfeild, Vermont, 1998 (“The Promise of Deschooling” Social Anarchism, Volume 25, Available Online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/matt-hern-the-promise-of-deschooling, Accessed 4-20-17)

A Pedagogical Argument

At root, any political or cultural arguments for deschooling have to rest on some specific pedagogical beliefs about the nature of learning and living. Years of considering pedagogy and five years of running a learning centre for young children has consistently shown me that kids and adults are perfectly capable of running and directing their own lives, given the opportunity and nurturing circumstances. The idea that there is an absolute body of knowledge that every child should access if they are to grow up healthily is a dangerous and debilitating one. Further, “it cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of the most worth”. Every individual is an enigmatic creation of circumstance, personality, environment, desire and much else, and their learning interests, styles and needs are equally unique. It is absolutely true that there is no body of theory explaining how children learn, since it is absurd to speak of ‘children’ in any unified way, any more than we would speak of women or men as homogenous groups. Individual learning patterns and styles come in infinite varieties, and the only way to fit a vast number of children into a single pedagogical program and a regimented schedule is with a severe authoritarianism. To maintain a modicum of order, schools are reduced to the kind of crude control unschooling advocate and author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook Grace Llewellyn describes:

The most overwhelming reality of school is CONTROL. School controls the way you spend your time (what is life made of if not time?), how you behave, what you read, and to a large extent, what you think. In school you can’t control your own life. ... What the educators apparently haven’t realized yet is that experiential education is a double-edged sword. If you do something to learn it, then what you do, you learn. All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship. In school you shut your notebook when the bell rings. You do not speak unless granted permission. You are guilty until proven innocent, and who will prove you innocent? You are told what to do, think, and say for six hours each day. If your teacher says sit up and pay attention, you had better stiffen your spine and try to get Bobby or Sally or the idea of Spring or the play you’re writing off your mind. The onimost constant and thorough thing students in school experience — and learn — is the antithesis of democracy.

This centralized authoritarianism is the core of schooling, and it reduces learning to a crude mechanistic process. Alongside a deep distrust of self-designed learning, schooling teaches children that they are always being observed, monitored and evaluated, a condition French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has named as panopticism. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault described the prison panoptical model as a thin circular building, divided into a vast number of cells, with a guard tower in the middle. The cells have a window on either end, but none on the sides, leaving the inhabitants of each small box effectively backlit for viewing from the tower, but fully isolated from one another. All the prisoners can thus be viewed fully at any time by any one single person in the central tower, “the arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes upon him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility.” The critical factor in this arrangement is that the prisoners do not ever know if or when they are being watched. They cannot see when the guards are in the tower, they can never know when they are being observed, so they must assume that it is always the case.

Hence, the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearer.

This is the essence of panopticism. The actual surveillance is not functionally necessary, the subject swiftly assumes responsibility for their own constraints, and the assumption of constant monitoring is internalized and they evolve into both the prisoner and warden .It is hardly a stretch to fit modern schools, hospitals, prisons or psychiatric institutions into this model. One of the cultural residues of mass compulsory schooling is a widespread panoptical imprint. People who have been rigorously schooled reflexively believe they are always being watched, monitored and evaluated. It is a condition many of us, myself certainly included, can recognize easily and identify working virtually constantly in our lives. Schools and schooling lead us to believe that we are always under surveillance, and whether or not it is actually true is insignificant, it is the impulse that the schooled person necessarily accepts, and adjusts their behaviour accordingly. The schooled panoptical mentality extends itself further into parenting and adult-child non-school relationships. At school children are always monitored, and schooled parents believe that they should similarly be constantly monitoring their offspring, in the name of safety. The last decades of this century has seen an exponential growth in concern for children’s daily safety, particularly in cities, and most parents I come into contact with want to keep a very close eye on their kids. This is a laudable concern, and one I share, yet I have a deep suspicion of the equation that safety = surveillance. There is a threshold where our concerned eye becomes over-monitoring and disabling, an authoritarian presence shaping our kids’ lives.

If we want and expect our kids to grow up to be responsible creatures capable of directing their own lives, we have to give them practise at making decisions. To allow authority to continually rob our kids of basic decisions about where and how to play is to set our kids up for dependence and incompetence on a wide scale. Children who are genuinely safe are those who are able to make thoughtful, responsible, independent decisions. The panoptical society and schooling severely restricts individual self-reliance, and supports a disabling reliance on authoritarian monitoring. A deschooled antidote to this condition is trust. Parents have to trust their kids to make real decisions about their own lives, as Dan Greenberg, who founded the Sudbury Valley School in 1968 outside of Boston, describes:

We feel the only way children can become responsible persons is to be responsible for their own welfare, for their own education, and for their own destiny. ... As it turns out, the daily dangers are challenges to the children, to be met with patient determination, concentration, and most of all, care. People are naturally protective of their own welfare, not self-destructive. The real danger lies in placing a web of restrictions around people. The restrictions become challenges in themselves, and breaking them becomes such a high priority that even personal safety can be ignored. ... Every child is free to go wherever they wish, whenever they want. Ours is an open campus. Our fate is to worry.

If we are to truly counter the disabling effect of schools, this is indeed our fate. A genuine democracy, a society of self-reliant people and communities, has to begin by allowing children and adults to shape themselves, to control their own destinies free of authoritarian manipulation.

C. Panopticonal surveillance is a disciplining power which creates docile bodies reduced to units of information by the state – that destroys value to life.

Galič et al. 16 — Maša Galič, Ph.D. Researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Tjerk Timan, Researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Twente, M.A. in Media and Culture from the University of Amsterdam, Bert-Jaap Koops, Professor of Regulation and Technology at Tilburg University, Researcher in the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Ph.D. in Law from Tilburg University, 2016 ("Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation," SpringerLink, May 13^th, Available Online at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1, Accessed 6-22-2017)

The richness and variation within Bentham’s panoptic paradigm has been largely overlooked in surveillance studies. This is because the Panopticon is mainly understood through Foucault’s analysis and use of the concept. It is relevant to look into why Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon resonated in so many disciplines, for his analysis is not only rehabilitating (specific parts of) Bentham’s work, but also building upon and extending it into a broader perspective on power relations and networks in modern societies.

In analysing the Panopticon, Foucault drew exclusively on Bentham’s prison design. He used the architecture and idea of the prison-Panopticon as a diagram, projecting it onto other parts of society to analyse power relations and models of governing (Foucault 1991a). Being a historian, Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison explains that since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western societies can be defined by a new form of power that is capillary and affects ‘the grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives’ (Foucault 1980, 39). In simpler terms, the Panopticon penitentiary system of governing has become present and active in many or most aspects of Western societies. Yet, and this is what Foucault tries to show through compelling examples, these systems often remain hidden or unnoticed, precisely because they are found in the fibres of daily life, which is what makes them so powerful and ubiquitous.

Through an analysis of different institutions, such as the school, the military, the hospital and the factory, processes of action in daily life have been invaded with Panoptical mechanisms of watching and being watched and, consequently, of disciplining power. When everybody can potentially be under surveillance, people will internalise control, morals and values—discipline is thus a type of power, a strategy and a kind of technology. Accordingly, Foucault coined this type of society the disciplinary—or discipline—society, which (in the West) has seen a development towards technocratic approaches to governing. Foucault’s study of power consisted of formal and evident institutions, where the Panopticon was introduced as an ‘ideal’ system to discipline the individual. Why was this so evocative? Foucault shifted the perspective from the goal of governing to the mode of governing. The main goal is (still) to prosper as a society, delineated by geography or nation state. The mode of governance, however, shifts from a sovereign society (Foucault understood sovereign practices as seeking mainly to affirm control over a territory and secure the loyalty of subjects, in a somewhat static and rigid manner through binary prohibitions, see Valverde 2008) to one of discipline, which represents a shift in method as well as in object, from populations to individuals.

In feudal and later sovereign societies, the question of power is linked to questions of how to organise a population and its land to ensure continuity. By learning from previous years about crop income, for example, or the spread of famine or disease, a sovereign can learn and predict, either to invest in food reserves or trade more crop with neighbouring states, or to control disease by disallowing citizens to travel, whereby early forms of predictive modelling were used to rule the state (Foucault 2007). Statistics, after all, means numbers of the state. A key difference between modern Western societies that Foucault characterises as disciplinary and sovereign societies lies in the type of power at work. In the sovereign society, the sovereign is the one key decider and holder of power and (s)he is known and ‘visible’ in terms of power signals, such as ‘by decree of the King’. In the disciplinary society, power is dispersed and hidden in processes of conformity present in different places of society. Because of these characteristics, discipline is not an exclusive machinery of the State; rather, it moves across different institutions, it links and prolongs them, making them converge and function in a new way (Deleuze 2006). Although this power operates somewhat independently from the judicial and government apparatus, it nevertheless requires institutions and the state, since it works through them—‘the state, correctional institutions, and medical institutions [need to] be regarded as coagulations of practices’ (Valverde 2008, 18).

Foucault explains that a phenomenon closely linked and resulting from the disciplining process, is normation. By this, he means the processes that force and create habits, rituals and how things are done, thereby creating norms of behaviour.6 In normation processes, the norm is central. It constitutes what one has to conform to and strive for; it is both standard and ideal. Being regarded as normal is to conform to the norm, hence to occupy the position of the invisible, i.e. unmarked by difference construed as abnormality, and putative universal subject. The abnormal is the one deemed deficient and inferior in relation to the norm(al) (Dalibert 2013). This is specifically linked to the individual body, as Foucault argues that disciplining the individual body is a governmental utopia, where discipline produces subjected and practiced, ‘docile’ bodies (Foucault 1991b). As the body is subjected to discipline, it is ordered, subjected to normation. In Foucault’s understanding, normation is intrinsic to mechanisms disciplining the body, in which technologies are central (Foucault 2007, referred to in Dalibert 2013, 69).

The process of individualisation in disciplinary societies is what Foucault called descending, as opposed to ascending, in feudal or sovereign societies (Foucault 1980). He explains that in the latter, the overall status of a society, e.g. its total production or health, was an aggregated, collective rather than an individual concern, thereby leaving room for individuals to diversify and develop within the parameters of collective ideals. In contrast, in disciplinary societies, processes of administration focus on individual rather than aggregated actions, rituals and habits, leading to a de-diversification of individual behaviour. Through the shifting focus, individuals are continuously measured against the norm; they become fictional, representative, as they have to be registered and held against a fictional norm. The sovereign power as the key decider and holder of power becomes less visible, and power structures are relocated and replaced by different institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.) in which behaviour is being watched.

Foucault continues that one method and a key indicator of disciplinary societies is found in many institutions that uphold and apply the norm: the exam. The exam incorporates the power of discipline because it tests according to a ‘scientific’ method the suitability of individuals against a norm. Through different methods of bureaucracy and sequences of how to do things, bodies get disciplined. For instance, the army applies extensive training and testing on using guns, hospitals on procedures of treatment and schools on writing and handling a pen correctly. The product or goal of these disciplining methods is to create docile bodies. This makes for even more predictive and plannable societies in which docile bodies have become units of information, not communication. Here, the link becomes clear with Bentham’s prison architecture: it is a one-way street in which individuals are mouldable and re-mouldable.7 Modernity then, in the form of disciplinary societies, is formed by the advent of scientific methods of registration, record-keeping and normation through exams. Docile individuals are no longer governed as actors with whom they communicate, but as units of information that can be moulded. Surveillance is a key concept here because this moulding and re-shaping is a result of the visibility of individuals’ ‘competencies’ through exams and record-keeping of their progress. Foucault briefly mentions, but does not elaborate upon, resistance to disciplining power, by stating that the entanglements of power also give rise to scattered points of resistance that have no cause but power itself, which they resist (Foucault 1998).

D. Schooling is immoral – the classroom warps children, denies rights, and blurs our values.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.

Teachers are by no means the only professionals who offer therapy. Psychiatrists, guidance counselors, and job counselors, even lawyers, help their clients to decide, to develop their personalities, and to learn. Yet common sense tells the client that such professionals should abstain from imposing their opinion of what is right or wrong, or from forcing anyone to follow their advice. Schoolteachers and ministers are the only professionals who feel entitled to pry into the private affairs of their clients at the same time as they preach to a captive audience.

Children are protected by neither the First nor the Fifth Amendment when they stand before that secular priest, the teacher. The child must confront a man who wears an invisible triple crown, like the papal tiara, the symbol of triple authority combined in one person. For the child, the teacher pontificates as pastor, prophet, and priest-he is at once guide, teacher, and administrator of a sacred ritual. He combines the claims of medieval popes in a society constituted under the guarantee that these claims shall never be exercised together by one established and obligatory institution--church or state. Defining children as full-time pupils permits the teacher to exercise a kind of power over their persons which is much less limited by constitutional and consuetudinal restrictions than the power wielded by the guardians of other social enclaves. Their chronological age disqualifies children from safeguards which are routine for adults in a modern asylummadhouse, monastery, or jail.

Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one. The distinctions between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple offense. The offender is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself down. A pupil who adroitly obtains assistance on an exam is told that he is an outlaw, morally corrupt, and personally worthless.

Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious. School could not create such an enclave within which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory. The attendance rule makes it possible for the schoolroom to serve as a magic womb, from which the child is delivered periodically at the school days and school year's completion until he is finally expelled into adult life. Neither universal extended childhood nor the smothering atmosphere of the classroom could exist without schools.