The
Institution of Education
By Andy
Werner
Magis staff writer
In a classroom,
sitting as they want us to sit; staring as they want us to
stare; focusing as they want us to focus. The architects,
those great designers of the classroom and the prison, are
wondrous in their efficiency. The power of the room: all of
the desks facing the same way, all of the chairs making it
uncomfortable to look in any other direction but ahead. For
a student’s whole attention has to be on the teacher.
I wonder ay him who was of such a mind that could design such
an efficient mechanism for learning, such an effective means
of control.
Teachers hold adulthood before us as bait, bait that makes
us jump out of the waters of our childhood and into the searing
air of responsible adulthood. As we move through the school
system we grow less associated with what used to be the most
fun of activities for us: recess. The longer we stay within
the school system the less recess we are allowed. Teachers
insist that we are too old for such childish activities as
the monkey bars. So we are indoctrinated into the system.
They challenge us when we act ‘childishly’ by
saying they would treat us like an adult if we start acting
like one. And psychologically it is a very effective tool.
Children naturally want what they can’t have –
we all do. So by insisting that we aren’t adults, they
make us desire adulthood. But what do we gain from adulthood?
Worries about grades? Worries about money? Sure sounds like
a wonderful world to live in to me.
The school orders students into classes. I am a member of
the class of ‘06, a junior who is older and more experienced
than a sophomore, but not quite as experienced as a senior.
This division into classes allows them to play us off of one
another. Look to middle school. When you’re in fifth
grade, you get to lord your status over all of the other younger
grades and make fun of them. When you’re in eighth grade
you get to lord it over the rest of the school. These elevated
positions – still far below the exalted teacher of course
– make us desire to advance. Unfortunately, they also
make us draw distinctions between age. If I am older than
you, then I am better then you. And who is older then all
of the students in the school? The teacher is. And the school
system grows in power. And the conspiracy lives on.
In another technique, the school teaches us to pity. As a
student we can never forget that we are better off than the
poor homeless people who can’t go to school, or the
starving children who can’t even feed themselves. Because
of them we must never grow complacent of our advantaged position.
This reasoning has the side effect of reaffirming the school
system by casting it in an advantaged light. We judge those
homeless people and cast them down below the power of our
riches. So we are guilted into doing our best, and are forever
separated from the homeless people. For we are distinct and
different from them, and we are obviously better then them.
And the technique is unbelievably effective, because these
implications are never thought out. And by the system’s
logic they will never be thought out because we are children,
not adults.
School makes students compete with one another. The power
of the teacher and of the mythical 100 make us always strive
to do ‘our best.’ And, of course, it logically
follows – and they constantly remind us – they
don’t care what grade you get so long as you try your
hardest. But on every single grade the one hundred is our
best, and if we get less than a hundred then we’ve made
a mistake; a mistake which is certainly fixable. As Michel
Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish, “the school
became a sort of apparatus of uninterrupted examination that
duplicated along its entire length the operation of teaching.
It became less and less a question of jousts in which pupils
pitched their forces against one another and increasingly
a perpetual comparison of each and all that made it possible
both to measure and judge… The examination enabled the
teacher, while transmitting his knowledge, to transform his
pupils into a whole field of knowledge… the examination
in the school was a constant exchanger of knowledge; it guaranteed
the movement of knowledge from the teacher to the pupil, but
it extracted from the pupil a knowledge destined and reserved
for the teacher.” The flow of information goes both
ways: information is forced into us whether we like it or
not because we are afraid of the judgment of the teachers
and information is extracted from us so that the teachers
can more effectively learn how to force information into us.
But in going under, we are great. In going under, we pay homage
to the child, and we shower him with the grace of our bowing
down.
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