WHAT DID YOU LEARN IN SCHOOL TODAY?
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A satyrical analysis of compulsory schooling. It explores the ways in which school is designed to pacify and produce quiescent, compliant citizens who will not challenge the power status quo. For similar and related slide shows that can be downloaded free, please visit my website at www.tonywardedu.com.
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WHAT DID YOU LEARN IN SCHOOL TODAY?
- 1. SCHOOL & THE THINGS WE LEARN
- 3. Reaganomics San Francisco Homeless Food Not Bombs San Francisco Homeless Chicago Homeless 1990 Homeless & Unemployed
- 4. Lawyers Argue Against Second Attempt to Execute Man in Ohio
- 5. • THERE WAS NO LINK BETWEEN IRAQ AND AL-QUA’IDA • IRAQ HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11 • THERE NEVER WERE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION • IRAQ HAD NO STOCKS OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS • ALL WEAPONS INSPECTORS CONTRADICTED BUSH & BLAIR IF YOU TELL A LIE ENOUGH TIMES PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE IT.
- 6. 20 Lies About the War Falsehoods Ranging from Exaggeration to Plain Untruth Were Used to Make the Case for War. More Lies are Being Used in the Aftermath by Glen Rangwala and Raymond Whitaker The way we educate promotes public apathy and acceptance of Government deception.
- 7. FORMAL EDUCATION • The words of Tom Paxton’s 1963 song resonate with contradictions. • They point out the differences between the espoused goals and the realities of education: • Personal versus Custodial care
- 8. CUSTODIAL SCHOOLS Helene Guldberg - Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear (2009) claims convincingly that in our attempts to protect our children from the outside world’s dangers, we are stunting their development.
- 9. SCHOOL, PRISON OR FACTORY? Schools are looking increasingly like factories or prisons with few windows and no relationship with the (real) outside world
- 10. THE ENGAGED UNIVERSITY? Yea Right!
- 11. COLONIALISM AND THE PROFESSIONS © Tony Ward 2009 TRICK OR TREAT? For related work visit: http://www.TonyWardedu.com
- 12. PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF BUSINESS
- 13. HIDDEN CURRICULUM So how do schools reproduce a passive, quiescent population? By: • Selectively structuring the curriculum to exclude critical issues • Maintaining a myth of epistemic neutrality • Maintaining separate subject areas • Organising space, time and curriculum to unconsciously instill particular values.
- 14. EDUCATIONAL SPATIAL SYSTEMS Programmed Learning Research Learner seen as child Learner seen as adult Grad. Seminar PhD Grade School Lecture Decreasing Degrees of Control Control Cultural hurdles/barriers Freedom Talking Circle The State’s compulsory Educational spatial system is based upon the premise that at every stage until the last, the learner has limited prior experience, must pass through developmental stages (gates), must be “taught”, has no capacity for action in the real world until his or her head is filled with (legitimate) theory. It is a system of power relationships that promotes individualism, hierarchy, competition, passivity and quiescence to authority. It progressively insulates learners from everyday life and community and creates an elite system of experts who hoard their knowledge for sale to the highest bidder.
- 15. THE PASSIVITY CURRICULUM • Selectively constructing, presenting and requiring internalisation of the views of the dominant (white Euro- centric) culture framed as “facts” • Omitting or silencing competing viewpoints or areas of knowledge and/or experience • Framing and invalidating competing viewpoints or understandings as “myths”, “legends” or “opinions” • Restricting students to institutional knowledge by maintaining separation and seclusion from the wider community • Maintaining the illusion that dominant, “fact-based” knowledge is non-ideological, non-political compared to the “ideology” of critical views. • Separating theory from practice, thought from action • Placing the curriculum itself beyond the bounds of enquiry
- 16. THE INDIVIDUAL IS THE ULTIMATE SOCIAL UNIT AND KNOWLEDGE IS A VALUABLE PRIVATE COMMODITY
- 19. FEAR AUTHORITY AND NEVER QUESTION THE POWER TO NAME
- 20. WILL PHILLIPS Will Phillips is a ten year old schoolboy from Arkansas who gained national attention because he refused to stand in school to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He maintained that America was not a place where “freedom and justice for all” was a reality, particularly for gays. He was sent to the Principal, his teacher harangued him and his peers
- 21. BELIEVE THAT EXTRINSIC AUTHORITY IS SUPERIOR TO INTRINSIC AUTHORITY I will be the good that you demand
- 22. THE POWER OF THE STATE IS INACCESSIBLE/ UNQUESTIONABLE George Tooker. Government Bureau
- 23. KNOWLEDGE IS “OUT THERE” AND HELD BY EXPERTS WHO IMPART IT TO THE IGNORANT
- 26. Engaged Learning means more than: • “Engaging with the knowledge” • “Becoming a self-author” • “Becoming self-motivated” • “Being individually academically successful” Engaged Learning ought also to mean: • Engaging with the community • Engaging with the world’s problems • Speaking truth to power • Changing the world We need to change what we teach and the way we educate if we want our children to acquire the skills to face the immense problems that are looming ahead.
- 27. THE ISSUES OUR CHILDREN WILL CONFRONT REQUIRE THAT WE ABANDON: • Competition • Hierarchy • Individualism • Conformity • Epistemological neutrality • Regimes of punishment • Silence in the face of power
- 28. ISSUES
- 29. GENDER INEQUITY
- 30. INCREASING DISPARITIES The number of Americans living in severe poverty has expanded dramatically under the Bush administration, with nearly 16 million people Text now living on an individual income of less than $5,000 (ÂŁ2,500) a year or a family income of less than $10,000,
- 32. US. IMPERIALISM
- 33. CONSTRUCTED DISPARITIES Under capitalism, the acquisition of wealth requires the creation of poverty. These two photos were taken 100 yards apart in the SF Financial District.
- 34. GLOBAL CRISIS • Global Warming • Sea rise • End of Oil • Resource scarcity • No heating • No Air conditioning • No work • End of Suburbia (50%+ pop.) • Food shortages • Water shortages • Mass migrations • Increased social unrest • Increasing repression • Continuing war & conflict
- 35. THE ROLE OF EDUCATION Unless we allow our children the opportunity to confront and overcome their fear, to take risks, they will never: • Speak truth to power • Address issues of injustice and inequity • Dialogue and settle differences • Learn to make and maintain peace Our current form of education got us into this mess. It is shaped primarily for custodial care and does not or promote the ideals and skills that we need to survive: • Co-operation • Collective creativity • Respect for personal integrity • Ability to dialogue • Sensitivity to otherness • Questioning of authority • Concern for equity and justice • Social and political activism
- 36. WHERE DO THE CHILDREN PLAY?
- 37. THE WARD METHOD When Over the last 40 years I have been involved in more than 100 projects in which students have been “engaged” to the max. My colleagues used to ask me how I managed to get my students to work through the night and to demonstrate such commitment to their work. The fact is, that I did nothing except engage them in the community and in real and critical social problems. After that it became impossible to stop them. The so-called Ward Method (http://www.tonywardedu.com/ content/view/355/40/) is merely a refinement of all of the things my students have taught me over the years. I believe that the normative concept of Engaged Learning - stressing individualism, competition, discrete knowledge expertise is seriously deficient, and prepares our children poorly for the impending crises that they and their children will face. They need to unlearn a great deal.
Editor's Notes
- , Compare this with the Maori/Lakota/Iroquois Talking Circle, where learning is leaderless, accretive, cooperative, mutually supportive and consensus-based and where the freedom (and power) to speak is universal. Knowledge is not the property of the individual to be used for personal ambition or profit but is collectively created and owned.
- Schools promote competition. We are told that the competitive spirit is good. We speak of the survival of the fittest as though it were some natural law applying to all human relations. Competition is actually corrosive. It results in people feeling bad, in losing or diminishing their wairua. Most indigenous peoples have very strict tapu around competition because it can be so dangerous to good social relations. Competition under capitalism is intended to promote a strong sense of individualism.This in turn, separates the person from their social environment and makes them easier to manipulate. The capitalist system of production relies upon workers behaving as individuals rather than collectively. Note that while there are many systems in schools which promote a love of competition, there are few that successfully promote a love of co-operation.
- In Western philosophy, the individual has usually been taken to be the irreducible element of identity. It has also been taken in economic theorizing, as being the indivisible element of ownership and of wage-labour. These two understandings are not unrelated. In broader terms, individualism refers to the ideology, prevalent in western society, that achievement of and by the individual is the paramount value in social relations. This ideology stands in stark contrast to the beliefs in pre-colonial or indigenous societies in which the well-being and success of the social collective operates integrally with the well-being of the individual, Such views call into question the western concept of progress in a world that is experiencing global warming, potential environmental, social and economic catastrophe.
- A critical understanding of Education really begins with the Brazilian educator Paulo Freireʻs notion of the Banking Concept of education where the teacher starts from the belief that the students have empty heads that must be filled up, like bank accounts, with knowledge. Freire maintains that this generally accepted position does violence to the studentsʻ own capacity for critical enquiry, their creativity and their learning. It presumes, for instance, that there is only one kind of “right” knowledge - thus denying the experience of the learner. It presumes the right and power of the teacher to “name the world”. The banking system is based upon the establishment and maintenance of power relationships in the classroom. Itʻs underlying purpose is the maintenance of the power status quo and the continues oppression and dominance of the poor, disempowered and oppressed. In its place, Freire promoted education as a dialogical relationship between learners. Teaching, in his estimation was oppression.
- One of the chief functions of compulsory Education is to create a fear and awe of and a respect for authority. It teaches us not to question authority Where does it come from? Who possesses it? How did they acquire it? Can it be taken away? Who bestows it? How did they get that power? Schools teach us to obey authority, never to question it, and always to accept it. Critical Theory always asks the question who stands to benefit from such an arrangement? Invariably, the answer is: those already with or in authority. One of the key elements of critical education theory is the belief that this school-based acceptance of authority is designed to produce compliant workers for the capitalist job market.
- As individuals it is very difficult to resist authority or to make changes happen. One of the reasons for the promotion of individualism is to create a sense of hopelessness in the face of (usually faceless) power. By creating the conditions for passive acceptance of “the way things are” those who wield power do not need to resort to force to achieve their aims - the reproduction and augmentation of their own power over others for their own economic gain. In this sense, the State operates as the partner of business in creating the conditions for profitable development. Schools play a crucial role in engendering a sense of passivity in the face of power. In school, resistance to the authority of the teacher is useless, and the child learns early that the faceless system cannot be easily faced-down. For the schoolchild, there are no appropriate avenues of complaint without the danger of being labeled a “trouble-maker”, a “malcontent” or a “problem child”. One learns early to keep one’s head down and to stay quiet.
- The two photographs were taken less than 100 metres apart in the Financial District of San Francisco - one of the wealthiest cities in the World. On the left is the landscaped seating area to serve the lunching executives. Above, an unemployed mother of three whose sign reads, “HARD TIMES!” Capitalist mythologies maintain that there is no essential relationship between wealth and poverty, that within the free-market it is possible to create wealth without a cost to anyone, that the creation of wealth is a personal achievement with no negative consequences. Against this, Socialists note that the creation of wealth requires the creation of a corresponding poverty. That under Capitalism, the creation of poverty is an essential prerequisite for the creation of wealth, that unemployment and low wages are a necessary part of high profits, and are created to maintain investment and production.