@cheerstary Commrades, I would tred VERY carefully with Russel's stuff, avoid it if there are alternatives. He is disingenuous about some things in his past,such as his dismissal from Columbia, as well as the political theories and understandings of socialists and marxists, often conflating liberals and the left. (Something a former socialist who is concerned with precise arguments would not do). In regards to education, his purpose is to discredit and destabilize one of the few universal public programs in the U.S. and open it up for more private profit. This is not suprising from someone who contributes to Reason magazine and is affiliated with Koch front groups. Of course this is not to mention his other faults like climate change denial (obfuscation really), light holocaust denial (it happened but he claims the Nazis were forced to do it by the Americans and they werent really that bad. They just wanted 'autarky') To letting fucking Kevin Williamson portray himself as some sort oppressed free speach warrior. All these among other problems he has. Russell's work is fundementally about expanding capitalist relations and entrenched power. This is covered up with Russell's oppositional disposition and antiwork attitude but at the end of the day its all window dressing. He doesnt care about equality, rights, or freedom from oppression. He's grifting. Stick with Freire.
No worries. I was unemployed for like 3.5 months and had ample time to listen to podcasts and snoop.
I wrote this entire comment yesterday but left it in an open tab and forgot, it is somewhat disorganized and I was going to just delete it.
But because @56GraNma posted about TR, and turns out TR is even worse than I had expected (never heard of him before), have decided to post anyway.
I'm not going to edit anything beyond what I had written yesterday, to save time and not color it with what I know now from 56GraNma's comment; so the following is somewhat rough, overstated, probably contains errors, etc....
It is a 'powerful' lecture because he oversimplifies things to make his points seem conclusive.
His views on this are really shallow, especially the 'breaking like a horse' part, I'm not gonna argue these things in any detail, but consider:
- If a student, at 16 or something, is told that they have been 'broken', it will not change their behavior in any significant way. So either you have to believe in behaviorism, or there are external reasons students act as they do.
- There are countless examples from ordinary life where people sit in rows and remain mostly silent: cinemas, classical concerts, opera, theater, lectures, public transport, political rallies.
- In groups of friends, most people systematically avoid talking over each other; there is nothing weird about being silent in order to hear others speaking.
- Khan academy is not at all radical, watching videos is the same sitting still and listening, and becomes entirely one directional. Kahn academy is most used just for cramming before exams.
- Teachers do not rule the classroom or police student behavior, other students do that. It is exactly like talking in a cinema, peers apply the social pressure, because the group wants better exam results. This is why disruptive students tend to be indifferent towards exam results and often social outcasts. They do not believe compliance gets anything they want from the peer group.
- Uncontrollable classes are almost invariably those where the subject matter or instruction is dull or useless and students do not believe their exam results matter. It is incentive not 'breaking' that mostly determines behavior.
- There is truth to the idea that many "do not know anything else to do" besides go to school, but this is not due to rote or habit, but rather they do not know of any good alternatives. They are thinking persons, not behaviorist machines.
Further nitpicking:
- He uses both Freud and Plato to make his 'superego' versus 'id' point. He talks of this as a false ideology, then swallows it whole in claiming that 'breaking' is a real and effective process, that some 'superego' does repress the 'id'; instead of putting forward any more sophisticated explanation involving human psychology, material conditions, and resulting behavior.
- Both Freud an Plato describe a three part soul, namely 'superego'/'ego'/'id' and 'reason'/'spirit'/'appetite'.
- Within Plato's Republic it is only guardian rules (philosopher-kings) and guardian warriors (auxiliaries) that are of the 'mind', the general population do not have to be repressed like that at all. The entire point of the three class system is that the guardian warriors are necessary to control the producers because they cannot be educated or control themselves.
- This mind-body or mind-desire idea comes from Aristotle. An attempted unification of these two comes from Ayn Rand's Objectivism (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/soul-body_dichotomy.html)
- Is worth noting that Hume expressed the idea that reason without desire is inert long before Rand. And he did this without conflation of psychology of reason-desire with the Cartesian dualism of mind-body as Ayn Rand does. Although one might argue that Rand was merely being descriptive of existing ideology in that regard.
I do agree that such a mind-body ideology is a strong force in American society; but obviously Plato is superior to Aristotle and 'spirit' or courage/loyalty is exactly why military and police are also held in high regard even if they are not 'of the mind'. Although in Plato's utopian Republic the guardian warriors would be much more educated and disciplined.
Socrates is dead, nobody should give a shit about Socrates. Plato wrote Socrates, it doesn't even matter if Socrates was a real person or not. The ideas of Socrates that we have were all expressed through Plato's lens anyway.
And no I'm not a teacher, I but have spent plenty of time in an extremely 'unbroken' classroom environment. Their attempt to 'break' students was entirely futile. I've watched teachers, one after another, being driven out of their jobs by classmates.
It is only when they became convinced that education had value that students stopped collaborating to 'break' their teachers and started policing each other instead.Although this peer policing was briefly initiated by teachers deciding to also punish cooperative students for the mistakes of disruptive ones; that did not help much given some sadistic students just thought it was funny getting everyone in trouble, eventually turning 'good' students against the teachers.
The same is true of society at large, what keeps the bourgeois in power is collaboration of the proletariat in their own oppression.
If we could change the collective behavior of the proletariat for just one day the revolution could be effectively complete.Again, this mind-body view is shallow, it describes only a fraction of the psychosocial dynamics that are actually occurring, both in society and in the classroom.
Schools are used for indoctrination, to equip students with skills to be exploited for profit, and can be an extension of the carceral state.
The function of schools is certainly not a behaviorist one, but rather a matter of filtering, finding the students that can be compelled into specific labor which is rewarded with accreditation.Fucking an-caps hate schools because they mostly prefer inheritance, 'business school' i.e. daddies connections, or just getting their grift on.
The school-to-prison pipeline doesn't even come up in their discussions because they are not anarchists.
Their attitude is entirely "fuck you, got mine" and opposition to schools on their part is almost entirely based on the fact they are privileged enough to have better options.Okay, that is all I'm going to write here, there is too much else to say about this topic.
Yeah, honestly I wouldn't even know half of that stuff if not for the privilege of going to a university in Europe that had good political theory classes.
Learning independently is a nice idea, and I quite liked the independence of distance learning before university; but in practice, it saves so much time if you have experts in the subjects giving lectures on things.
The real problem is not classrooms, but that teachers are too often underpaid, undereducated, oversized classrooms, and they don't have freedom to organize their classes as they want.I’m really sorry that I don’t have time to respond to it in detail,
There is no need to respond further, and if you wanted to respond to just one thing, that's fine too.
I tend to write far too much, to the point where arguing about things usually gets completely out of hand.
I once had a college course loosely based on problem posing education. It was amazing how much confidence in my abilities I gained from that course, and how well I still remember the things that were taught. The implementation was pretty low effort and would not have worked for a bigger or less motivated group, but it still demonstrated how the ways in which things are usually taught is fundamentally broken, or at least should not be used so universally.
I've always found a lot of enthusiasm for Freire and critical pedagogies in left spaces in real life and online, so maybe our definition of leftist differs here a little. I think the purpose of education is to create flourishing individuals who can work well in groups to meet their needs but can also be creative and self-actualised enough to be able to persue fulfilling projects. Political education should be of the utmost importance in leftists circles, it is impossible to have a revolutionary praxis otherwise. The ideal school system, and how much autonomy kids should have in education, is something that should probably be tailored to a group's specific context, but I think its important to give kids much more power in the classroom and within a schooling institution than they have right now (I really like what I've read in Freire, so maybe something like that).
Yeah I think that within the radical left the question is more of how to create the most humanistic education given different contexts. I feel like in highly technical fields the teacher-student dynamic will be more marked, but as it moves towards humanities, arts, and social sciences it should probably have more of that facilitator-group dynamic.
Yeah, teaching kids the contingency of all aspects of human society as well as the interconnections of all things with simple questions like that really primes them to become critical thinkers and eventually see the totality of existence dialectically.
Yeah I see what you're saying, I'm not trying to defend mainstream education. Definitely I agree with you that alternative education when done right places kids in the real world and has them think critically about real world issues more than our mainstream education ever could. I suppose the point I was trying to make is that in public school I was exposed to rigid authority structures, I felt alienation intensely and I recognized how little autonomy I actually had over my life. Obviously yeah thats a horrible system, and it doesn't actually "teach" anyone anything, it just forces children to suffer and destroys many of them (I only feel I learned anything from the experience because I was able to recognize those things, which most students don't). But I think any alternative education needs to recognize itself as existing within this system and confront those things like competition, hierarchy, alienation and a lack of autonomy which I was exposed to in public school yet never "taught" about. I suppose the idea of teaching children critical thinking and problem posing is good for having children grapple with these things, and an important part of alternative education for me would be giving children a space to learn about and critically examine things like hierarchy, violence, competition, alienation without forcing them to suffer in mainstream education. I guess it is a misconception, but I do worry that alternative education can often fall into the trap of escapism, when it should really be engaging fully with capitalist realities.
It's interesting as someone in school for education right now, many of my classmates and professors seem to be very interested in implementing alternative education models. Even in teaching science the main focus is on using collaboration, discussion, and inductive teaching. Our theory is largely based off the work of Piaget and Vygotsky, who used the ideas of dialectical materialism to develop an educational philosophy. With that said, it's striking to see the difference in the ideas presented in my school versus what actually happens in practice and leads me to believe the teachers would much rather use these alternative models but they are held back by the administration/politicians.
Am currently thinking about becoming an educator, I agree.
Read through the article, A Thousand Rivers, and damn it's good. Definitely reminds me of when I was looking into unschooling a few years back. I also love it's inclusion of indigenous people and different modes of thought, which resonates with me as I've been looking into stuff like that.
