I saw a thread elsewhere recently which was heavily critical of the idea of school as in institution, and where some people were directly comparing teachers to cops (one guy even compared them to death camp guards). That seems silly to me, as police obviously have far more power over both adults and children than do teachers, but it's made me wonder if there is some kind of leftist line of thinking when it comes to education which I'm unaware of. Defenders of the idea of school, such as myself, definitely seemed to be in the minority.
I have a feeling most of the people in that thread were American zoomers, which might go some way to explaining things. Maybe anarchists have different thoughts about this than MLs and the like too?
What do you guys think?
Edit: A lot of interesting responses here, and I'm glad to see that people are broadly in favour of education and sympathetic to teachers. Actually, a book I have - but haven't read (tsundoku be damned) - which some people here may find interesting is The Ignorant Schoolmaster by Jacques Ranciere, and I'll have to read Pedagogy of the Opressed and Education to Govern one day too.
Comparing teachers to cops is "bedtime is authoritarian" nonsense. Universal public education is cool and good. Every person has a right to as much education as they can stomach and their society can afford to furnish.
Hot take, or maybe not; public education should be compulsory and "home schooling" is a hotbed of reactionary programming and should be banned.
If public education wasn't so vital to the left the neoliberals wouldn't be so dead set on utterly destroying it. Even the shackled, sclerotic, and propagandized education system in the US is too much for them. Bill Gates et al spent decades pushing standardized testing and charter schools specifically to undermine and destroy public education systems, and I could go on.
“home schooling” is a hotbed of reactionary programming and should be banned.
I was homeschooled and 1000% agree. The program I used was from a private christian school in Florida and the two years I did was a crash course in libertarianism and evangelical theocracy and I know from the other people who went through the program that for the one kid who ended up skeptical like me there are a hundred others who fully took in the indoctrination.
To your point about home schooling, I think even under communism, there should be some kind of agreed upon curriculum that will apply to all communes in a given area. It can be created by sending representatives from each commune or something. It would be cool if there was time set to teach this curriculum, and then there was another set time where communes could create their own curricula to suit their local needs.
I feel like if every commune has full control to teach whatever they want, you're going to end up with a lot of weird, insular, and cliquish shit.
Hard agree. An important part of universal public education is the universal part. The last thing you want is every town spiralling off in to it's own bizarre schismatic cult.
The last thing you want is every town spiralling off in to it’s own bizarre schismatic cult.
It would be funny if we solved every other problem in the world and then just let this happen though.
True, although I think communism will make solving basically every other problem easier.
Over the past century communist countries have all launched massive literacy programs and expanded education programs as much as materially possible for them to do. In the USSR teachers were on the upper side of pay scales. In China the need for literate professionals and teachers was so great at the time of the revolution that they effectively pardoned many bourgeoisie and other elite professionals in order to bring them into the fold. Here's a Parenti lecture that focuses heavily on literacy (among other things) too.
The left is fervently pro-education, and that must loop into critiques of education under capitalist regimes: capitalist education is undermined by the ruling class and made exclusionary as much as possible; they only begrudgingly allow the bare minimum of public schooling to maintain a basically literate workforce and they seethe over even that allowance; capitalist educational institutions are also rife with racist stratification, abusive administrations, and collaboration with the police state to enforce racist and classist terror on their students to keep the rest in line.
When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor
I think every leftist interested in this should take a look at Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
It's not just a classic for teachers and parents alike, it's also a pretty damning critique of the educational institutions as they exist. Might not be the 'leftist consensus', but it's probably as close to that as you're gonna get
Education is good and a human right.
However schools as they are currently run under capitalism are an absolute joke.
Education and schools are good.
There's a chapter in Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? that covers the GDR's contribution to progressive education and how it's still the best model. Many other revolutionaries fought and died to build schools.
A lot of criticism I see about schools is on the level of the "bedtime" discourse where terminally contrarian lefties like to out-radical one another.
I'm reminded of when parenti talks about being accused of being a conspiracist and people ask, "you really think there's a group of people who meet in a room to make all the important decisions" and parenti responds, "well, yeah, they gotta meet somewhere"
If you want to educate an entire population, you might have to gasp meet in the same geographical place at the same time. It might also be mandatory, which, I know, is so authoritarian.
By all means, talk about how much schools currently suck, but the concept itself isn't going anywhere under socialism.
Stasi State or Socialist Paradise is really good. Rather than writing an apologia for the GDR they just talk about projects and ideas that were successful, something you more or less never hear about.
There's a really funny annecdote where a bunch of post-wall german educators go to finland or something to find out why finnish schools are so successful and the finns are like "what are you dorks talking about we just copied what the gdr was doing".
It also talks extensively about how during the reunification/conquest of east germany the entire east german education system was dismantled and the entire east german community of professors and teachers was thrown out in to the streets with predictably disastrous results.
This is often a difficult topic to find consensus on even outside stubborn lefty communities because most people's experience with school is time spent in an utterly gutted, patchwork, barely-up-to-standard mess. It's got obvious parallels to work culture--its boring, stressful, seemingly pointless, and everyone above you tells you it's necessary for you while they otherwise neglect you.
But seriously now, imagine trying to become learned in a specialized topic in the sciences or the arts without being instructed and given the condensed learning that precedes the current year. I do not have much patience for the idea of kids becoming educated by just sort of gleaning their understanding of the world from watching mom and dad and the neighbors (assuming they aren't so atomized that they just get educated by YouTube and become cretins).
Tl;Dr education sits at the center of where many of America's sharpening contradictions meet, so don't let its battered appearance trick you into thinking it's rotten to the core, that's exactly what the brainworms want
There isn't a leftist concensus, frerian education, deweian, Reggio Amelia, and the east asian have all been used by leftists at different points in history.
One of the big struggles in China during the gpcr was over traditional vs progressive education methods.
Anarchists have advocated democratic schooling and unschooling as methods, relying on a students' desire to learn to drive curriculum and even attendance
Feel free to ask me about any of these if you don't know what they are
Anarchists have advocated democratic schooling and unschooling as methods, relying on a students’ desire to learn to drive curriculum and even attendance
This Catalan/Spanish theorist is one I find interesting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Ferrer
Education is good. Public schooling should be universal and mandatory under a dictatorship of the proletariat. In a capitalist setting, the personal takeaway is "Do your best."
I am the consensus.
Public education is good.
A lot of the problems with public education comes from schools being under-funded and plundered by profiteering companies, but that naturally goes away under communism.
The actual contents of education would change - pre-college history classes are mostly propaganda. Ideally they'd stop being propaganda, but they'd definitely end up being at least different propaganda.
Maybe anarchists have different thoughts about this than MLs and the like too?
As an anarchist, I think we need even more public education if we want to successfully do anarchy. Like an entire K-12 course on how to organize people, what organizational structures are good when, how to recognize a flawed organizational structure and change it.
Education as it is structured today is not liberatory. It is part of the capitalist system and inculcates pupils with the ideas of the dominant and ruling classes. Education is good and required for a successful revolution.
Zero consensus. Let me give you my perspective as a leftist who has personally dealt with basically every single model of education (public, private, charter, home school, et al) if not as a student then as a parent.
To paraphrase: public school is the worst model of education, aside from all the others.
The problems that plague public education are really symptoms of larger structural/societal issues.
In terms of academic achievement: the overwhelming factor with regard to school and student performance boils down to poverty. Kids in affluent neighborhoods do great in school. Kids in poor neighborhoods with food and housing insecurity do bad. Its really that fucking simple. You solve that with severe wealth redistribution and detaching school funding from property taxes.
In terms of them as being institutions of the state that promote the dominant ideology, let me be fucking blunt: I see that as being mostly unavoidable. There will never be a universal consensus on what the curriculum should be and even to the extent public schools teach things we disagree with, one could argue that there is value in learning the accepted conventional wisdom or knowledge by these institutions if only to provide people with a framework to work from. As a parent I'm committed to correct the record on a lot of things my son is taught in civics about how this shit actually works (and believe me I got receipts ready) but if anyone reading this is considering homeschooling your kids to try and keep them away from the brain worms then I can almost promise you its going to wind up fucking them up way worse than whatever public school you're zoned for.
School isn't just about facts and information. School is also about learning how to be part of a larger community outside of your own family and friend group among your peers.
No, the left is completely incoherent on education. Like it's a complete mess.
But honestly it's not just the left - like basically nobody has an informed conception on education. It's something everyone experienced and has an opinion on, but very few have actually had to think seriously about the hard problems and so everyone just sprays whatever dim shit comes to their head about it.
But yeah the "public schools are capitalist actually" bird-brained shit you see in left spaces makes my eyes roll back in my head.
