Do We Want School or Education?
By Robert J. Burrowes
31 July, 2013
Countercurrents.org
As our world continues to unravel in response to the impact of our
uneconomic activities on ecological systems, it is obviously worth asking
searching questions about the nature of modern society. By doing this we
can make intelligent decisions about the direction in which we should move
as we thoughtfully respond to the interrelated crises we face.
For many people, the central question is this: Will tinkering with human
society be enough to get us out of this mess? Many people think not and I
am one of them. For the moment, however, rather than focus on the nature
of the economy, political systems or other aspects of modern societies, I
would like to discuss the issue of education.
For a long time, people in different parts of the world have struggled to
expand access, including access for girls, to school. This struggle still
takes place in many countries. But I want to add my name to the list of
people who question whether school is the best way to get an education.
And there are many reasons why I believe it is not.
In essence, schools are designed to teach a disintegrated set of
'knowledge' and skills that are useful to those businesses and
corporations which provide employment, however menial, in the mainstream
economy. This schooling is taking place even now when there is little
evidence to suggest that the mainstream economy is capable of providing
full employment and, more importantly, there is a great deal of evidence
to suggest that this economy will need to be utterly transformed if we are
to survive the interrelated ecological threats to our survival.
Let me briefly state some problems with school: it is highly damaging
physically, sensorily, intellectually and emotionally. Schooling requires
the child to spend six hours each day sitting in a school classroom, for
up to 13 years. Physically, the classroom utterly destroys posture and
movement patterns because the human body is designed to move regularly. If
you have ever witnessed the grace of movement of a village African who has
never been to school, then you know this too.
Sensorily, the best classroom is devoid of stimulus compared to nature and
this exacts a heavy cost by dramatically curtailing the child's learning
opportunities as well as stifling the development of its sensory
capacities themselves. Have you ever been awestruck by what an indigenous
person raised in a natural environment can learn from a smell, a touch or
a breath of wind, or how they can track an animal?
Intellectually, the school classroom offers a mind-numbingly boring and
incredibly limited range of topics all taught in lock-step as if each
child was identical and had the same interests and learning rates.
Most importantly of all, however, the school classroom helps to destroy
children emotionally because it requires the child to be submissively
obedient to its teachers. This means it must consciously and
unconsciously, all day, every day, fearfully suppress its awareness of the
feelings that evolution intended would guide its behaviour at that time,
including those that would guide its self-directed learning.
Do you remember being stuck in a classroom, feeling utterly bored while
staring out of the window wishing you were running around free outside?
The problem is that as we grew older our fear made us learn to suppress
our awareness of our feeling of boredom, which was telling us an important
truth about how we were spending our time. But this feeling of boredom (as
well as the fear that suppressed it and the anger that it 'acceptably'
represented) still lives deep in our unconscious playing an unconscious
part in shaping our behaviour even today (including by making us able to
'tolerate' a host of other boring activities, including those at work).
Many other suppressed feelings are similarly stored. If you had the power,
what do you wish had been your childhood now? What do you want for our
children?
I wonder, therefore, if we might not usefully take some time to reconceive
our concept of education and how it might be delivered in the world that
must now rapidly emerge, so that education might play a useful role in
shaping that emergence.
So here is my idea. First, I am going to assume that each child has the
potential to achieve self-realisation and to define this, simply, as the
capacity to reach its full potential. To do this, it will need to develop
a powerfully integrated mind in which mental functions such as sensing,
thoughts, feelings, memory and conscience work together seamlessly so that
the child can act with initiative, conviction and courage. And, of course,
this can only happen in an environment in which the child is nurtured as a
whole person. This child will be able to engage in a deep critique of
society and to then courageously participate in the nonviolent struggle to
renew human civilisation in accord with our highest ideals however these
manifest in each society, given its unique history, ecological foundation
and set of cultural relations.
'This is ambitious', you are thinking pessimistically. Of course it is, if
you are still trapped in that childhood classroom. But let’s get out of
it!
Each child is genetically programmed to be highly functional: able to
sense an enormous amount from its surroundings, to feel, to think, to use
memory and conscience as necessary. And to learn at an incredibly rapid
rate; for example, children in many parts of the world learn several
languages simultaneously at a very young age (without going to school to
do so). But, mostly, we get in the way of children learning, without
meaning to do so. How? Simply by not listening when a child tells us what
it needs and wants. Given a choice, I believe that no self-aware child
would go to school for more than a day (unless it was doing so to escape a
more dysfunctional environment at home).
If we lived in communities, rather than nuclear families, that nurtured
each child by listening to it, provided it with opportunities to learn
knowledge and skills that enhanced individual and community self-reliance
relevant to its future (such as permaculture, participation in group
decision-making and conflict resolution processes), and which gave it the
chance to learn contextually (whether reading, writing, relevant
mathematics, geography, agricultural practices, political economy,
tool-making, healthcare or anything else) as it participated in community
activities, then each child would be spared the boredom we suffered and
have the opportunity to realise its 'true self'. Moreover, by living in a
wider community, our own shortcomings as parents and teachers (including
any tendencies to be violent) would be diluted by the immediate presence
of other adults/teachers. And we would dilute any shortcomings of theirs.
Do you think your street and neighbourhood could be a community? If you
would like to consider one model for this type of future, which takes into
account ecological imperatives, you are welcome to consider participating
in 'The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth' -
http://tinyurl.com/flametree.
The tragic reality of human life is that few people value the awesome
power of the individual Self with an integrated mind (that is, a mind in
which memory, thoughts, feelings, sensing, conscience and other functions
work together in an integrated way) because this individual will be
decisive in choosing life-enhancing behavioural options (including those
at variance with social laws and norms) and will fearlessly resist all
efforts to control it or coerce it with violence.
Biodata: Robert has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending
human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to
understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist
since 1981. He is the author of 'Why Violence?' -
http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence. His email address is [email protected]
and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com
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