What is education about, anyway? It's about learning things, gaining knowledge, broadening your experience, and so forth. It's not the same as job training or indoctrination, and while policyheads will never use those words, that's what they are effectively devising with their education policy. For a society like America to function, you need a managerial (ruling) class and a employee (working) class. And that's just for the peons -- the really rich just glide on by, nearly invisible and seemingly untouchable. Their wealth allows them to gain a true education, more often than not.
But for the vast majority of you, "education" amounts to narrowing your options, closing your mind, getting you to accept the status quo as the "best of all possible worlds" and to know your place in it. The parts of education that aren't outright indoctrination are compartmentalized and specialized, so you learn to think in narrow terms, and not broadly -- small picture versus big picture. You're trained to do a job, or at least be able to get a job and work reasonably well. You're taught not to run with scissors.
Educators call this "life adjustment" education, which basically holds that you're too dumb to waste a liberal education on, so what the schools need to teach are things that will let you get on in life as a productive, obedient citizen.
This fits in the scheme of things, too -- we're educated to lead lives of political spectators, able to contribute to the wealth of our bosses but not really to have much in the way of control over our lives. To fill that gaping hole in our lives is a paycheck that lets us go out and seek transitory gratification in our consumer "culture." That's the "ideal."
Of course, this may seem unduly cynical; but I'm a cynic, so what can you expect? Do you know who the original Cynics were? Check it out on your own.
Education doesn't have to be indoctrination -- you can work against that, and the way to do it is to learn how to think creatively and critically. That is what education should truly seek to do; it should get you looking around you and deciding for yourself what is good and bad.
This kind of education is utterly lacking in our current system, and its omission makes sense -- those in charge don't want freethinkers around. Better to have educated fools than troublesome freethinkers. And freethinkers are always troublesome.
I am most certainly NOT against education -- I am against indoctrination. The important thing is to know the difference between the two, and that means having a discerning, inquisitive, critical, skeptical mind. This is not encouraged, for the reasons I indicated above.
So, you'll have to develop it on your own. King Mob's piece on "Zen anarchism" got me thinking about the drive for personal development as a way of fighting this convenience-addicted, consumerist culture. While I think KM's plan is good, I think it is too easy to turn inward in a narcissistic game of self-improvement and not apply that self-improvment to the world around you. Maybe I'm off-base about that; it's just my opinion, anyway.
To me, enlightened individuals need to work with each other to bring about desired social change -- it doesn't mean becoming full-time activists, but it does mean (re)creating a civil society, something that has been all-but-obliterated the past 30 years in this country. Yes, the personal is political, but the result of this ethos is that the political sphere (at least that of the Left) has evaporated.
What we need is a new dialogue among freethinking people who value ideas like freedom, liberty, democracy, and anarchy. And to be able to engage in that kind of dialogue, we need to be able to think logically and creatively, and to be articulate and persuasive.
In short, we need to recover our humanity, which means studying the humanities.
I sought a "back to basics" approach to rekindling the necessary critical spirit to rebuild our society, and dug into Renaissance history, because of the rise of city-states and republics, and the rediscovery of the ideas of the Ancient World, particularly Classical Greek civilization, the very foundation of Western ideas. Anarchism itself has roots that trace back to Zeno of Citium and some other Greek thinkers. I was also interested in Medieval communes and free cities, something Piotr Kropotkin explored.
What I was seeking was a workable model on which to envision anarchic societies functioning, and what it required was an educated public of critical thinkers. I thought a thorough understanding of logic, rhetoric, and philosophy would be important building blocks for a would-be critical thinker.
Logic: To assist with rational ordering of thinking
Rhetoric: To understand how to persuade (and, more important, how others
try to persuade you)
Philosophy: To understand the "big picture" -- if there is any
I consider the above three vital core components to a would-be freethinker. And these things are precisely what are missing from high schools, unfortunately (some might say "speech" or "debate" is akin to studying rhetoric, and it may have some aspects of it, but it's hardly considered a staple for every student). So it falls to the person seeking to free their mind to study it themselves.
With my own love of history, I did some digging and saw that these areas of study paralleled some of the older curricula: I saw the basic coursework undertaken in earlier times -- law, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, history -- and the original seven "liberal arts" -- grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music.
In this, I couldn't help but notice that some core areas of study have gone by the wayside in capitalist society -- indeed, the humanities or "liberal arts" are gradually dying out; that which doesn't directly translate into more money for the rich is being starved out of existence as "nonessential."
We're being trained to be drones, and not encouraged to think and act for ourselves. But the so-called "liberal education" remains for the lucky kids who (or whose parents, more like) can afford it. It seemed to me that a seditious idea would be for people to study and interact around these areas of study on their own, an to become freethinkers (*gasp*)!
I was pleased with this idea, and then I discovered that some liberal folks have been doing this formally (the Clemente Course in the Humanities). Their goal was the political empowerment of the poor by means of educating them in the humanities.
Good for them; I think it's a worthy project. I also think that anybody can undertake the life of the mind if they are so inclined. If anything, it's more vital than ever, given the way our society is going. We have to have more critical thinking people, people who can order their minds and articulate their anger, and that means a long process of self-education.
Socrates said that wisdom was in knowing how little you knew, seeking wisdom and knowledge, and living honorably. It's what we need to do, if we are going to change society for the better. The dolts who run things aren't going to do it, that's for sure.
If you're pressed for time and unable to dig out all of the above, you might also look to anthologies. Below are a few that are useful, part of the Viking Portable Library series (although I think no excerpts or anthologies can possibly do justice to the full works, but they give you a sampling of ideas of thinkers you might want to further explore):
Again, anthologies are no substitute for actually reading the full works, but it's better than nothing. What's most important it beginning to develop critical thinking skills, and that comes with a good understanding of logic, rhetoric, and philosophy -- arts of thinking, communicating, and reflection. In an age of ideologues, this is more vital than ever.
Also, there are some good (cheap) paperback collections of some of the above authors, from Bantam Classics. It's a good way to get a lot of the above works in one handy book: The Dialogues of Plato (ISBN 0-553-21371-7); The Complete Plays of Sophocles (ISBN 0-553-21354-7) -- they have a whole bunch of them.
Fundamentalists do this with their Bible and prayer groups, so I think young anarchists should do it with reading the humanities! Get some friends who aren't afraid to learn something new, and read those books!
Some might see this as a departure from anarchism, but I don't. I want more philosophical anarchists out there, not more ideologues -- ideologues are enslaved people. We need more freethinkers! Many more freethinkers, if we are to have an anarchist society. Some might think the above books will simply assimilate people into the status quo, but I don't agree. For example, reading The Republic from an anarchist perspective is quite revolutionary -- I don't think Plato ultimately refutes the arguments offered by Thrasymachus (that "justice" is what the strong call "justice"), for example. And, certainly, Plato's model for an ideal republic should give any libertarian considerable pause.
What makes studying the humanities interesting is not only that it helps develop your critical faculties and broaden your education, but it also shows you what founding thinkers strongly influenced Western civilization (and Eastern, in the case of Confucius and Lao Tzu). By coming to understand that, you can better understand your own anarchism.
Also, what makes this valuable is you are pursuing knowledge for its own sake; not for a grade, or for anything else -- but rather, for broadening your own mind. This is certainly not encouraged in our education system, despite the rhetoric to the contrary.
Once you get these works under your belt, then the next step, engaging in dialogue and action, comes into play. But first, get yourself educated!
a4a
01/01/01