No experience whatsoever in education. I don't know what you mean by expertise in the field in theory.
Keep in mind, I'm arguing that: "abolish school" is either ridiculous (because school is just "any institution at which instruction is given in a particular discipline") or, if there is some other sense of the word I'm unaware of, can mean something else but relies on terminology so much at odds with the common use of the word "school" that it is naturally going to sound ridiculous to the vast majority of people and so shouldn't be used.
I am not critiquing (or weighing in at all on here, not that it shouldn't be critiqued) any particular aspect of contemporary or historical education, or schooling under capitalism and colonialism, because my point is that the particular qualities of school under capitalism and colonialism aren't necessary features of school in a way that the vast majority would find recognizable.
It's a semantic argument.
Basically: actually, "abolish school" doesn't make any sense; "radical school reform" does.
No experience whatsoever in education. I don’t know what you mean by expertise in the field in theory.
Cause it is important to judge which elements guide for position. Naturally you had experience in some kind of capitalist school system by either being forced to participate in it or being home schooled (at least it is true for 99% of the people).
With theory I mean a framework or background in theory of - for example - education or the organization and history of the school system. Reading Paulo Freire or Focault or something like that, or even contemporary anarchist zines might do it, as would writing your PhD dissertation within that topic (lol as if the both of us could finance that). Academic education about school would also work - unlike academic education to become a teacher I guess.
Part of the questions about expertise were also to see if your point is something you came up individualistically or which was part of a collective exchange so that you sounded your ideas of various speaker positions (or if chapo's comment section about a - in my opinion quite good post by OP - is the place to do the sound boarding).
That said, I appreciate that you establish common ground by saying the sentiment here that school under capitalism and colonialism is bullshit compared to the utopist ideal of what you would call school - and what you imply is "common sense understanding of the word school for the vast majority".
What would interest me further more what your specific class position and social relations to generational wealth would be, what intersecting attributes determine you (e.g. gender or neurotypicallity etc.) - but lets skip those - even though they might lead to a situation in which you might think that your perspective is the singular true one e.g. telling others they should abolish the abolishment of school in favour of using terms like "radical school reform".
A white old liberal philospher - I believe it was Quine - said that you ought only to argue with people who actually hold believes and who argue about their believes, as speaking with people without a care in the world argue a position they don't believe in and switch it around is nothing but a waste of time (which is why on chapo hexbear we waste a lot of time), therefore I will try to write with you guessing that you want to write about important stuff that you believe in.
I believe talking about semantics in this case would be worth little and I think within your exclusion of the relevant parts of the material and social conditions of what school is, what the history of school is etc. you have a logical argument you believe in, which doesn't have much effect though as the debate isn't bound in that nice pond, but it is bound by the real existing conditions and history of what school is.
Therefore I rather not argue about that. Instead I say the recommended books and such are good and they make good arguments (also with regards to the history of school etc.) and say that it is right to say "abolish school" - even if we want to collectively educate children and enable them to grow. I believe it is hard to see that schools are as much a prison and system of oppression as the police sometimes, but redefining what words ought to mean in your opinion doesn't quite solve the real conditions our comrades are kept in. It doesn't describe how the unhoused kids and our punk friends who aren't in schools are educated and educate themselves - quite often actually with a more objective assessment of capitalism and society than that some random petit bourgeoisie kid would have, that goes to posh schools for 12 years before studying at a posh university for 6 years acquiring a PhD in telling the unhoused and working class how they are stupid and how they don't know things (but could, cause there is the promise of rising up classes by being educated!).
When you and your working class buddy sit in a bar and talk about how work sucks, that is education! When you talk about how the system is rigged cause the profit the workers generate goes to the class who doesn't work (but is living from the profits of their investments and the rent of the houses) that is education - and which liberal would say pubs are schools?!
When you are at your wage labour and you are forced to sell your body and lifetime to have food, that is education about the capitalist system - and who would call their work place a school!?
Is that enough, that randomly being educated about things of life? In my opinion not, in my opinion there ought to be collective concepts of educations, I wouldn't call the places those happen in schools though. I would rather have social centers and experts who are able to guide the learning processes and such. A word of warning though: What my wishes are doesn't mean those are a necessary result of changing the status quo.
What I tried to do is to say: There are people who looked at what school actually is and it isn't what we commonly associate with it. That abolish school is good and that when you abolish school you open up the perspective about what education - especially working class education - actually is.
That said, I appreciate that you establish common ground by saying the sentiment here that school under capitalism and colonialism is bullshit compared to the utopist ideal of what you would call school - and what you imply is “common sense understanding of the word school for the vast majority”.
That's not quite what I'm saying. Again, my point is semantic. I'm saying that the capitalist and colonial elements of contemporary schooling are not essential features of school. This isn't envisioning a utopian form of school, but looking at the different kinds of things that are classified as school and looking for the most essential elements. What is it that makes people recognize something as school as opposed to something else? That where the “common sense understanding of the word school for the vast majority” is relevant. What things, if you got rid of them, would mean you'd need a new term to describe what's left. Semantics.
I'm sure we're both opposed to 99+% of the same material phenomena that are a part of the contemporary capitalist educational system - the propaganda, the school-to-prison pipeline, the institutionalized abuse, its use as a mechanism of genocide, the class, racial, national, gender and so on disparities in education, etc. I commented for three reasons: to clarify what exactly OP was talking about when he says "school", because it's clearly different from what I understand it to mean, without being directed to an entire book, and to push back against two things: what I see as the terrible communication built into the terminology of school abolition that relies on some grounding in anarchist/socialist theory, and the OP being condescending and insulting to people who don't immediately agree with a statement - "abolish school" - that seems on its face ridiculous to basically everyone who isn't already in the know.
My motivation for the last one is obvious: "Shut the fuck up, people here are making fun of it not because they're liberals who are incapable of thinking structurally about education, but because it sounds fucking ridiculous."
But what I think is wrong with the concept on the level of communication is not only that is sounds ridiculous and is thus alienating to normal people (i.e., not the small subset of socialists who are down with it), but that it sounds completely disconnected from their material needs. Not everyone cares about education, but most people do for themselves or their families. A school isn't the only or always the best means of education, but, especially for very complex subjects that aren't usually the most interesting to learn and that are extremely important practically or professionally, they're an extremely useful and reliable one. You couldn't replace all of what's taught by contemporary schooling with just self-education or unplanned or informal lessons, which happen to be really useful to organize on a community or societal scale. Now I'm gonna break off to clarify as much as I can what I think the conventional sense of the "school" is - or more like senses.
First I mentioned “an institution for educating children” and “any institution at which instruction is given in a particular discipline”, which I think are pretty good approximations of the things that make people think of schools, that differentiate them from non-schools. But then I brought up place, and used "institution" and "place" interchangeably, which was inconsistent. They're distinct senses of the word "school", in the same way that "socialism" can refer to socialism as a mode of production or as a social and political force in pursuit of that thing. There's school as institution, the particular social organization within which children are educated or instruction is given in a particular discipline, more specifically by other people (the teachers), and there's school as an environment in which that schooling is held. When I take online classes, I am "in school", but not "in a school". So:
Is your chair a school when you watch youtube or post on chapo?
If the educational content on YouTube or chapo hexbear is taught by someone (e.g., not just a pdf link) and is a part of some kind of educational institution (e.g., a group putting together an educational program, a class of some kind), it is going to be recognizable as "school". If a teacher posts lectures on YouTube as part of some kind of institution, that would count. Just watching a Hakim video would not. The difference is readily recognizable. A chair is not a school. My apartment could be if it actually housed the school as opposed to just myself. There are going to be boundary cases, and perceptions are going to vary here and there, but there's a consistency to what people regard as school and schooling. The harmful features of contemporary schooling, if they were stripped away, would still result in an educational program that would be readily recognizable as "school". Because that thing is, at its core, a very simple social arrangement.
When you and your working class buddy sit in a bar and talk about how work sucks, that is education! When you talk about how the system is rigged cause the profit the workers generate goes to the class who doesn’t work (but is living from the profits of their investments and the rent of the houses) that is education - and which liberal would say pubs are schools?!
No, because they're not educational institutions.
Why is this relevant?
Back to the other thing, when revolutionaries build classrooms and train and distribute either professional teachers or their own party members to educate the people, they're bringing school. The revolutionaries in Cuba weren't just doing one-on-one tutoring, they were building schools. They built schools. They have school with buildings and desks (which maybe suck, I dunno) and teachers. The same was true of the USSR and China from the beginning, the same is true of Vietnam and the DPRK and so on with other Marxist states. The Zapatistas have created and operate schools. These revolutionary movements are meeting the educational needs of the masses of largely colonized proletarians by creating these "institution for educating children or giving instruction in particular disciplines". That's how they teach people to read. These schools, which I'm sure vary wildly and have varied wildly in every way, aren't something that's been forced on the proletariat. Most people want good schools, for themselves and their families. The task of revolutionaries, as has been carried out in the global periphery for decades, in providing education is to create schools with decolonized curricula, stripped of the capitalist and imperialist propaganda, stripped of the racial and class and ethnic and national and gender boundaries that previously existed, equipped with all the material resources they need.
These revolutionaries aren't "some random petit bourgeoisie kid ... that goes to posh schools for 12 years before studying at a posh university for 6 years acquiring a PhD." And it's real convenient how you assume the hypothetical opponent of "school abolition" is a petit bourgeois grad student.
Please inform me if there are significant revolutionary movements around the world that have sought to "abolish school". I'm sure there are plenty of punks who want to abolish school, and I know that loads of punks are good comrades, but they're not universal representative of the poor and oppressed, especially if you're thinking of the ones in the imperial core, and what they want is not some special insight into the desires of the global proletariat. What the vast majority of people, besides most of the bourgeoisie and extreme reactionaries, everywhere in the world, is "good schools". Telling everyone else, "No, you fucking liberal moron, you imbecile, we're going to abolish school." is a bad fucking look, to say the least. You can say, "We're going to radically reform school [with X, Y, and Z relevant issues fixed], available to everyone, free of charge, free of institutionalized oppression, because we can create and have good things and a decent society", and I think this thing that just about everyone will just call "school" will look awfully similar if not identical to whatever alternative to social education school abolition proponents have in their heads, but we're not going to say "We will ABOLISH. SCHOOL." because 99.99+% of the people we're trying to establish solidarity with are going look at us like we're saying we're going to abolish healthcare, because there's no material difference whatsoever once we get down to actually effecting things in material reality, and because we're not actually "abolishing" schooling in any meaningful or useful sense.
Anyway:
Bonus obligatory Parenti about education in Cuba and his Dad
Cuba made schools. Cuba has schools. Cuba is unabashedly pro-school.
A video about Freire which doesn’t quite get his dialectis but is animated like south park
This is literally just a video critiquing the concept of philanthropy. All true but irrelevant.
And I'm also gonna say that it would be really swell if you could just respond to my arguments and share your ideas and maybe recommend reading or viewing materials and not spend so much of your post trying to dissect me on a personal level.
First a question. Do you have any expertise in the field, in theory, practice or education?
No experience whatsoever in education. I don't know what you mean by expertise in the field in theory.
Keep in mind, I'm arguing that: "abolish school" is either ridiculous (because school is just "any institution at which instruction is given in a particular discipline") or, if there is some other sense of the word I'm unaware of, can mean something else but relies on terminology so much at odds with the common use of the word "school" that it is naturally going to sound ridiculous to the vast majority of people and so shouldn't be used.
I am not critiquing (or weighing in at all on here, not that it shouldn't be critiqued) any particular aspect of contemporary or historical education, or schooling under capitalism and colonialism, because my point is that the particular qualities of school under capitalism and colonialism aren't necessary features of school in a way that the vast majority would find recognizable.
It's a semantic argument.
Basically: actually, "abolish school" doesn't make any sense; "radical school reform" does.
Cause it is important to judge which elements guide for position. Naturally you had experience in some kind of capitalist school system by either being forced to participate in it or being home schooled (at least it is true for 99% of the people).
With theory I mean a framework or background in theory of - for example - education or the organization and history of the school system. Reading Paulo Freire or Focault or something like that, or even contemporary anarchist zines might do it, as would writing your PhD dissertation within that topic (lol as if the both of us could finance that). Academic education about school would also work - unlike academic education to become a teacher I guess.
Part of the questions about expertise were also to see if your point is something you came up individualistically or which was part of a collective exchange so that you sounded your ideas of various speaker positions (or if chapo's comment section about a - in my opinion quite good post by OP - is the place to do the sound boarding).
That said, I appreciate that you establish common ground by saying the sentiment here that school under capitalism and colonialism is bullshit compared to the utopist ideal of what you would call school - and what you imply is "common sense understanding of the word school for the vast majority".
What would interest me further more what your specific class position and social relations to generational wealth would be, what intersecting attributes determine you (e.g. gender or neurotypicallity etc.) - but lets skip those - even though they might lead to a situation in which you might think that your perspective is the singular true one e.g. telling others they should abolish the abolishment of school in favour of using terms like "radical school reform".
A white old liberal philospher - I believe it was Quine - said that you ought only to argue with people who actually hold believes and who argue about their believes, as speaking with people without a care in the world argue a position they don't believe in and switch it around is nothing but a waste of time (which is why on
chapohexbear we waste a lot of time), therefore I will try to write with you guessing that you want to write about important stuff that you believe in.I believe talking about semantics in this case would be worth little and I think within your exclusion of the relevant parts of the material and social conditions of what school is, what the history of school is etc. you have a logical argument you believe in, which doesn't have much effect though as the debate isn't bound in that nice pond, but it is bound by the real existing conditions and history of what school is.
Therefore I rather not argue about that. Instead I say the recommended books and such are good and they make good arguments (also with regards to the history of school etc.) and say that it is right to say "abolish school" - even if we want to collectively educate children and enable them to grow. I believe it is hard to see that schools are as much a prison and system of oppression as the police sometimes, but redefining what words ought to mean in your opinion doesn't quite solve the real conditions our comrades are kept in. It doesn't describe how the unhoused kids and our punk friends who aren't in schools are educated and educate themselves - quite often actually with a more objective assessment of capitalism and society than that some random petit bourgeoisie kid would have, that goes to posh schools for 12 years before studying at a posh university for 6 years acquiring a PhD in telling the unhoused and working class how they are stupid and how they don't know things (but could, cause there is the promise of rising up classes by being educated!).
When you and your working class buddy sit in a bar and talk about how work sucks, that is education! When you talk about how the system is rigged cause the profit the workers generate goes to the class who doesn't work (but is living from the profits of their investments and the rent of the houses) that is education - and which liberal would say pubs are schools?!
When you are at your wage labour and you are forced to sell your body and lifetime to have food, that is education about the capitalist system - and who would call their work place a school!?
Is that enough, that randomly being educated about things of life? In my opinion not, in my opinion there ought to be collective concepts of educations, I wouldn't call the places those happen in schools though. I would rather have social centers and experts who are able to guide the learning processes and such. A word of warning though: What my wishes are doesn't mean those are a necessary result of changing the status quo.
What I tried to do is to say: There are people who looked at what school actually is and it isn't what we commonly associate with it. That abolish school is good and that when you abolish school you open up the perspective about what education - especially working class education - actually is.
Bonus obligatory Parenti about education in Cuba and his Dad
A video about Freire which doesn't quite get his dialectis but is animated like south park
Is your chair a school when you watch youtube or post on chapo?
That's not quite what I'm saying. Again, my point is semantic. I'm saying that the capitalist and colonial elements of contemporary schooling are not essential features of school. This isn't envisioning a utopian form of school, but looking at the different kinds of things that are classified as school and looking for the most essential elements. What is it that makes people recognize something as school as opposed to something else? That where the “common sense understanding of the word school for the vast majority” is relevant. What things, if you got rid of them, would mean you'd need a new term to describe what's left. Semantics.
I'm sure we're both opposed to 99+% of the same material phenomena that are a part of the contemporary capitalist educational system - the propaganda, the school-to-prison pipeline, the institutionalized abuse, its use as a mechanism of genocide, the class, racial, national, gender and so on disparities in education, etc. I commented for three reasons: to clarify what exactly OP was talking about when he says "school", because it's clearly different from what I understand it to mean, without being directed to an entire book, and to push back against two things: what I see as the terrible communication built into the terminology of school abolition that relies on some grounding in anarchist/socialist theory, and the OP being condescending and insulting to people who don't immediately agree with a statement - "abolish school" - that seems on its face ridiculous to basically everyone who isn't already in the know.
My motivation for the last one is obvious: "Shut the fuck up, people here are making fun of it not because they're liberals who are incapable of thinking structurally about education, but because it sounds fucking ridiculous."
But what I think is wrong with the concept on the level of communication is not only that is sounds ridiculous and is thus alienating to normal people (i.e., not the small subset of socialists who are down with it), but that it sounds completely disconnected from their material needs. Not everyone cares about education, but most people do for themselves or their families. A school isn't the only or always the best means of education, but, especially for very complex subjects that aren't usually the most interesting to learn and that are extremely important practically or professionally, they're an extremely useful and reliable one. You couldn't replace all of what's taught by contemporary schooling with just self-education or unplanned or informal lessons, which happen to be really useful to organize on a community or societal scale. Now I'm gonna break off to clarify as much as I can what I think the conventional sense of the "school" is - or more like senses.
First I mentioned “an institution for educating children” and “any institution at which instruction is given in a particular discipline”, which I think are pretty good approximations of the things that make people think of schools, that differentiate them from non-schools. But then I brought up place, and used "institution" and "place" interchangeably, which was inconsistent. They're distinct senses of the word "school", in the same way that "socialism" can refer to socialism as a mode of production or as a social and political force in pursuit of that thing. There's school as institution, the particular social organization within which children are educated or instruction is given in a particular discipline, more specifically by other people (the teachers), and there's school as an environment in which that schooling is held. When I take online classes, I am "in school", but not "in a school". So:
If the educational content on YouTube or
chapohexbear is taught by someone (e.g., not just a pdf link) and is a part of some kind of educational institution (e.g., a group putting together an educational program, a class of some kind), it is going to be recognizable as "school". If a teacher posts lectures on YouTube as part of some kind of institution, that would count. Just watching a Hakim video would not. The difference is readily recognizable. A chair is not a school. My apartment could be if it actually housed the school as opposed to just myself. There are going to be boundary cases, and perceptions are going to vary here and there, but there's a consistency to what people regard as school and schooling. The harmful features of contemporary schooling, if they were stripped away, would still result in an educational program that would be readily recognizable as "school". Because that thing is, at its core, a very simple social arrangement.No, because they're not educational institutions.
Why is this relevant?
Back to the other thing, when revolutionaries build classrooms and train and distribute either professional teachers or their own party members to educate the people, they're bringing school. The revolutionaries in Cuba weren't just doing one-on-one tutoring, they were building schools. They built schools. They have school with buildings and desks (which maybe suck, I dunno) and teachers. The same was true of the USSR and China from the beginning, the same is true of Vietnam and the DPRK and so on with other Marxist states. The Zapatistas have created and operate schools. These revolutionary movements are meeting the educational needs of the masses of largely colonized proletarians by creating these "institution for educating children or giving instruction in particular disciplines". That's how they teach people to read. These schools, which I'm sure vary wildly and have varied wildly in every way, aren't something that's been forced on the proletariat. Most people want good schools, for themselves and their families. The task of revolutionaries, as has been carried out in the global periphery for decades, in providing education is to create schools with decolonized curricula, stripped of the capitalist and imperialist propaganda, stripped of the racial and class and ethnic and national and gender boundaries that previously existed, equipped with all the material resources they need.
These revolutionaries aren't "some random petit bourgeoisie kid ... that goes to posh schools for 12 years before studying at a posh university for 6 years acquiring a PhD." And it's real convenient how you assume the hypothetical opponent of "school abolition" is a petit bourgeois grad student.
Please inform me if there are significant revolutionary movements around the world that have sought to "abolish school". I'm sure there are plenty of punks who want to abolish school, and I know that loads of punks are good comrades, but they're not universal representative of the poor and oppressed, especially if you're thinking of the ones in the imperial core, and what they want is not some special insight into the desires of the global proletariat. What the vast majority of people, besides most of the bourgeoisie and extreme reactionaries, everywhere in the world, is "good schools". Telling everyone else, "No, you fucking liberal moron, you imbecile, we're going to abolish school." is a bad fucking look, to say the least. You can say, "We're going to radically reform school [with X, Y, and Z relevant issues fixed], available to everyone, free of charge, free of institutionalized oppression, because we can create and have good things and a decent society", and I think this thing that just about everyone will just call "school" will look awfully similar if not identical to whatever alternative to social education school abolition proponents have in their heads, but we're not going to say "We will ABOLISH. SCHOOL." because 99.99+% of the people we're trying to establish solidarity with are going look at us like we're saying we're going to abolish healthcare, because there's no material difference whatsoever once we get down to actually effecting things in material reality, and because we're not actually "abolishing" schooling in any meaningful or useful sense.
Anyway:
Cuba made schools. Cuba has schools. Cuba is unabashedly pro-school.
This is literally just a video critiquing the concept of philanthropy. All true but irrelevant.
And I'm also gonna say that it would be really swell if you could just respond to my arguments and share your ideas and maybe recommend reading or viewing materials and not spend so much of your post trying to dissect me on a personal level.