Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

Impact – Violence against difference

Schooling causes violence against the abnormal.

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 institutionalized values school instills are quantified ones. School initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured, including their imaginations, and, indeed, man himself.

But personal growth is not a measurable entity. It is growth in disciplined dissidence, which cannot be measured against any rod, or any curriculum, nor compared to someone else's achievement. In such learning one can emulate others only in imaginative endeavor, and follow in their footsteps rather than mimic their gait. The learning I prize is immeasurable re-creation.

School pretends to break learning up into subject "matters," to build into the pupil a curriculum made of these prefabricated blocks, and to gauge the result on an international scale. People who submit to the standard of others for the measure of their own personal growth soon apply the same ruler to themselves. They no longer have to be put in their place, but put themselves into their assigned slots, squeeze themselves into the niche which they have been taught to seek, and, in the very process, put their fellows into their places, too, until everybody and everything fits.

People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening. They do not have to be robbed of their creativity. Under instruction, they have unlearned to "do" their thing or "be" themselves, and value only what has been made or could be made. Once people have the idea schooled into them that values can be produced and measured, they tend to accept all kinds of rank' ings. There is a scale for the development of nations, another for the intelligence of babies, and even progress toward peace can be calculated according to body count. In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer's index.

Impact – Panopticon/Authoritarianism

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.

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).