The Anarchives =09=09=09=09Volume 2 Issue 2.2 =09The Anarchives=09=09=09Published By =09=09The Anarchives=09=09The Anarchy Organization =09=09=09The Anarchives=09tao@lglobal.com =09=09Send your e-mail address to get on the list =09=09Spread The Word Pass This On... --/\--=09=09=09Alternate / / \ \=09=09=09Forms ---|--/----\--|---=09=09Of \/ \/=09=09=09Education /\______/\=09=09=09 Power in the Classroom? A Plan for the Destruction of the Universities Last fall I spoke at Cornell and announced, "The food here is free!" and twenty of us went into the cafeteria, loaded our trays with hamburgers, Cokes, and pies, and walked out without paying. We sat in the dining hall laughing and slapping each other on the back stuffing our faces with Digger shit. I told them of epoxy glue and what a great invention it was. And at another school we asked them why they were there and they said just to get a diploma and so we passed out mimeographed sheets that said "T his is a diploma," and asked the question again.1=20 That this anecdote, from Abbie Hoffman's landmark essay "Plans for the Destruction of the Universities," strikes me as an amusing relic from a mythic era has something to do with the fact that it was written two years after I was born. But more important ly it highlights three important factors that must inevitably problematize the search for a truly critical pedagogy. First, the students in the universities I have attended and observed in the past seven years are well behaved. Monstrously well behaved.=20 Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind expresses outrage at the chaotic shambles he sees in modern university education and vehemently attacks the nihilistic and relativistic radical intellectuals responsible for this mess. I fully agree with King sley Widmer's response to Bloom, "I had not thought we had been so successful!"2 In fact, we haven't. Students are in many ways the most blindly obedient and uncritical sheep I have ever encountered. Not only would the events described by Hoffman above be entirely unlikely in 1991; most students would view the actions described with revulsion if not horror. Second, in the wake of the recent television miniseries "War in the Gulf" and the rather feeble attempts on the part of student demonstrations to direct media attention (that is, advertising blips) away from the yellow ribbons and the stunning array of sophisticated gizmos capable of lofting all manner of shit into the desert, Hoffman's piece indicates just how little student radicals have learned in the past twenty years. Today's student radicals understand nothing about the media because today's students know nothing about the media, because their teachers know nothing about the media. But the media have completely redefined the ways in which u niversity education must proceed if it is ever to resemble anything educational, intellectual, or critical. Finally, the title of Hoffman's piece suggests what in my mind is the only feasible path to a truly critical pedagogy: the destruction of the universities. Before teachers and students ever arrive in a classroom, they have certain "places" within a blind, faceless institution which mark them in ways which must somehow be overcome for a truly critical pedagogy to develop. It is the purpose of this piece to analyze some of the ways in which these roles are produced and reproduced ideologically and suggest some of the results of this reproduction. What these results add up to, in my mind, is something profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-educational that is literally built into the university system within which critical teaching methods must develop. Critical pedagogy must attempt to subvert these institutional constraints from within; an arduous but necessary approach which implies turning university edu cation against the essence of university education, an essence which I will argue is profoundly anti-educational. Thus, my plan for the destruction of universities attempts to sacrifice the university to what in my mind must be a higher goal, education. This would not entail the abandonment of some of the benefits of the university institutions; such as grants, fellowships, bookstores, conferences, parties. But it must entail the rejection of the codes and relationships of power that have indelibly mar ked the university as a place where education doesn't occur. Ivan Illich and Buckminster Fuller both offer far-reaching proposals for educational reform which at first seem irreconcilable. While Illich argues for "deschooling society,"3 Fuller argues for a university from which noone ever graduates.4 Both approa ches, however, stem from similar perceptions of the university as an intellectually bankrupt institution. Illich and Fuller sense what all students learn in the university; perhaps the only thing students ever learn in the university, that real life is e lsewhere. For Illich this is the result of the radical division established between "education" and "the world" by the system of compulsory education, such that "education becomes unworldly and the world becomes non-educational." (31) Widmer argues that the university embodies hierarchy, excessive bureaucratic compartmentalization, exploitative corporate subservience, and systematic mediocrity, (5). The insipid proliferation of distinctions and categories that confronts the university student heightens the absurdity of ever expecting an education out of a university. Widmer continues:=20 Start with the obvious bureaucratization. The petty corruption is pervasive + The character deformations from competitive hierarchy, however, are not the whole story + The problem must also include that the academic is a "professional" (generally taken a s an accolade), a prostitute inclined to proneness. And what + has one sold out to? Often simply to institutionalization, that is, endless processing. But that processing expresses one of the more extreme styles of the division of labor -- division of t hinking -- that fundamental source of hierarchical sensibility and its falsities + One ends up thinking, and acting, in terms of specializations and their pyramidal structures. (6) Of course, life in postmodern consumer society requires such a state of affairs; in fact "the modern economic system demands a mass production of students who have been rendered incapable of thinking."5 Schools separate creative writing from literature s o that students specialize in one or the other, and we wonder why our writers don't read? Of course, college students have come out of years of such absurdity in their elementary and secondary educational institutions, so it should be no surprise that ev en at its best the university provides corporations with a new crop of semi-literate market researchers and promotional workers each year, turning out only the occasional artist, writer, or teacher who almost invariably ends up perpetuating the institutio n's bureaucratic inertia. "In this ornate, multi-leveled, however muddled, fucking-over of semi-literacy, few come out writing well, and even fewer with much critical perception of the culture and society in which they live." (Widmer, 7) Prince's brilliant admonition to parents in the media age"Don't let your children watch television until they know how to read or else all they'll know how to do is cuss, fight and bleed" -- is unfortunately an impossibility. Neil Postman outlines t he critical contradiction of traditional education in the latter half of the twentieth century:=20 There are some teachers who think they are in the "transmission of our cultural heritage" business, which is not an unreasonable business if you are concerned with the whole clock and not just its first 57 minutes. The trouble is that most teachers find the last three minutes too distressing to deal with, which is exactly why they are in the wrong business. Their students find the last three minutes distressing -- and confusing -- too, especially the last thirty seconds, and they need help. While they have to live with TV, film, the LP record, communication satellites, and the laser beam, their teachers are still talking as if the only medium on the scene is Gutenberg's printing press.6 Teachers cannot possibly hope to compete with the cathode ray tube when they regard their roles as transmitters of bodies of completely useless information. We ask students to be familiar with the standard texts of a given field rather than helping them to critically confront the endless barrage of information they encounter daily. Composer John Cage points out, "The reason I dropped out of college was because I was absolutely horrified by being in a class which had, say, two hundred members, and an ass ignment being given to have all two hundred people read the same book. I thought that if everyone read the same book, it was a waste of people."7 Moreover, do we really expect students to see the university environment as anything but a stultifying retr eat from everyday existence when we tell them to read Plato before McLuhan and Rousseau before Nietzsche? But it is not the content of education that my criticism is principally directed at; it is the form. McLuhan's formula "the medium is the message" applies as much to the classroom as it does to the fax machine. Material behavior in the classroom is, in my view, infinitely more important than the specific informational contents of a syllabus. This material behavior is inevitably circumscribed by se veral institutional conditions: classes "meet" at a given time, according to a schedule; students and teachers alike have to fill out papers daily in order to legitimize their existence in the institution; students are assigned one of a totally unimaginat ive array of five letters at the end of each semester and this letter tells them how good they are; everything is geared toward a tedious, ritualized monotony with no room at all for spontaneity or creativity. If we do our jobs correctly the monotony is compounded by a teaching style that hasn't progressed since the fourteenth century: students face a single teacher at the front of the room who crams an astonishing number of lists down their throat (the five steps in a good oration; the three principles of rhetoric; the seven stages of a political movement; the four causes of the American revolution; etc, ad nauseaum) while the students dutifully scribble and daydream. In a mediated society, educators can no longer be content in losing the battle for the student's mind to the faceless bureaucracy of the institution or the soundbites of television advertisers. Power in postmodern society is exercised blindly by bureauc racies and concentrated only momentarily in orchestrated spectacles. Guy Debord writes of the commodity spectacle: "Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the es sence and the support of the existing society."8 This is the aestheticization of politics a generation after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and television; a generation with an attention span of just under 28 seconds and to whom Madonna is more real than Socrates could ever be. The aestheticization of politics has not, however, been accompanied by a corresponding aestheticization of education, and the power of the spectacle has been monopolized by the advertising moguls of commodity society -- so much energy pou red into developing the perfect sound bite to make people buy; so little put into developing the perfect sound bite to make people think. How can we expect our students to be more interested in class than in television? The simple answer is that power i s always blind and bureaucratic; power seems irresistibly entrenched in the structure of society because the structure of society is taken for granted. Foucault argues, "Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from e verywhere."9 This can seem disheartening for anyone who wishes to honestly challenge the way society is; however, the very blindness of power may be the most effective avenue for resistance. Power is not centralized in the university or network news: "p ower + is not that which makes the difference between those who do not have it and submit to it. Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or ther e, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or a piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultane ously undergoing and exercising this power."10 As teachers we are all actively engaged in this vast network of power, reproducing the system where we do not challenge our given roles within the system.=20 The system of power is infinitely malleable, but changing it requires that we abandon the goals of university education and begin to develop the tools for education. This does not mean quitting our jobs or trying to shut down the university; rather, it means using the established institution against itself, creating spectacles in the university that might compete with those offered on television, and might thus help to bridge the gap between education and everyday life. Most emphatically, this gap nee ds to be bridged in both directions -- not simply opening education to the "real world," but also opening the "real world" to education. Being critical means constantly traversing the artificial boundaries between disciplines; emphasizing the learning pr ocess itself rather than the list of works required for a particular niche-like specialization. In today's world, the aestheticization of politics requires that teachers aestheticize the educational system; using the power of the spectacle as an educatio nal tool in ways that subvert the power of the spectacle as an economic tool. Teaching should be more performance than ritual; when it becomes routinized it's time to throw away the syllabus and give everybody an A. While the abolition of grades is a wo rthy goal it is not going to be accepted by most universities in the near future; the only possible response to the competitive hierarchies of higher education is contempt -- the goal being to eliminate the effects of grades if not the grades themselves. Of course, I have given little indication of what such an approach might look like if put into practice; while some examples are possible at this point much work needs to be done in terms of theorizing an academy without universities and an academic prac tice that effectively overcomes the routinization and compartmentalization inherent in the university system. But recognizing the problem means recognizing that this theorization must take place. Kingsley Widmer:=20 Obvious logic: To the degree that academicians can teach, they can also misteach. Learning is not a one-way street. And we misteach millions of inappropriate students the low arts of semi-literacy, trivialization, and uncritical spirit. That dominating vocation tends to denature the few things, the humanities and sciences, that the universities might be able to do well. As for the rest, from semi-pro sports to cultured marketing, from reinventing hierarchical sleaze to reblooming the ancient pomposity of resignation, from dull poets to deadly technocrats, bury them. Long live the university.... (12) 1 Abbie Hoffman, "Plans for the Destruction of the Universities," Revolution for the Hell of it (NY: Dial, 1968) 157.=20 2 "Anarchist in Academe: Notes from a Contemporary University," Social Anarchism 14 (1989) 11.=20 3 Deschooling Society (Manchester: Penguin, 1971). 4 R. Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation 5 "On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and especially intellectual aspects, with a modest proposal for its remedy," by members of the Situationist International and students of Strasbourg, November 1966; in Ken Knabb ed. and trans., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981) 321.=20 6 Teaching as a Subversive Activity (NY: Dell, 1969) 13-4. 7 Richard Kostelanetz, "John Cage on Pedagogy: An Ur-Conversation," Social Anarchism 14 (1989) 27.=20 8 Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1977) thesis 8. 9 The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume 1 trans. Robert Hurley (NY: Vintage, 1990) 93.=20 10 "Two Lectures," trans. Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (NY: Pantheon, 1980) 98.=20 EKOPILOT From: Hampus Brynolf (ingvar.brynolf@mailbox.swipnet.se) About the EKOPILOT project in Sweden. To understand this project, I have to explain a little about Swedish schools. In Sweden, you have the right to start a private-owned school, and you'll get as much money as a normal public school. Every student get a "money-bag" and then - it's up to him/her to choose school. The EKOPILOT (Echo Pilot) project is a part of public school, but still outside the ordinary public school system. This means that the headmaster of the school in S=F6lvesborg hasn't got any power over the project (they havn't got anything to say anyway...). The project started last autumn, that means that the first students has done one (of six) terms. Their school building is now ready (they have been in the ordinary school most of the time until now). The school is located about 2 km from S=F6lvesborg (a town with 15000 citizens.) In the classroom, every student got his own writing table with a computer on. (They=DDre going to have INTERNET access in the future) Every monday the students take either agriculture,domestic science or technique (they learn to install a toilet, how to build with bricks, how to paint your windows, etc.); everything that you need in the real life. But the founder of the project, Mats Holm_n means that the most important is to give the students comprehensive view of life, society etc and give every student a possibility to find his own way towards the future, NOT meaning the way to a profession. Today it's very important that you give the students the possibility to decide what they want with their lifes. The=20 school must give the students a comprehensive view if we ever want a better world. Therefor they try to link all subjects together, reading subjects in blocks, you use alot of days (weeks) for a project including different subjects instead of the ordinary way when you read the subject isolated from the other subjects and from reality. They don't want to give report to their students, but the Swedish law demand them to do it anyway. Don't know yet what will happen. This sounds nice, doesn't it? It is - BUT everything is not good. Everything I've written is what Mats Holm_n has told me but unfortunately does not all the other teachers share his opinion about pedagogics. It is not a political project! They don't say: This is the leftwing way of education. Official they just question the normal way of teaching, the power over peoples that a normal school got and the one track minded education you get in a normal school. Mats Holm_n writes in a letter: "I took the ECHO-pilot intiative two years ago. I have always been involved in educational experiments of one kind or another for more than 20 years and one starting-point was of course my teaching experience (Swedish, English, French). Another was the current discussion in Sweden and elsewhere about fundamental changes in the welfare society: at present Sweden is rocked by the worst crisis since the 1930's. The future seems more chaotic than ever... In this situation I formed a group with seven colleagues who set out to create an education that would give the students maximum freedom of action after having completed their studies. =20 So what are the main characteristics of the Echo Pilots project? I would like to point out the following: -Integration of theoretical and vocational subjects, the latter including basic carpentry, masonry, engineering, organic farming and cookingIntegration of humanities and science in joint projects - teachers working together in team.Three profiles: 1. Ecological profile 2. Small-scale enterprising profile 3. International profile (electronic communication, student exchange etc) Half of the time the Echo Pilots will be in a new-built schoolhouse in a tiny village just outside S=F6lvesborg. We will be very independent of the rest; a sort of private school within the system. 37 boys and girls announced their interests. To finace the project, the students for example clean their school. The most interesting with this project is not the idea; the interesting is that it is working! It's not a something that our enemys can say: "Sounds nice, but it doesn't work" about; this project is actually working!! ----FIGHT ON! ----- Subject: Re: Anarchy & Education From: bob dick Dear Jesse I think this may count as "random late-night opinion", though I have thought about it a lot. For that matter, I do try to practise what I preach. It's in a university classroom, which is not the same as, e.g., the early years of education. But I think many of the same principles apply. School, I think, is to equip people with the skills, knowledge and understanding to take part in society. For an anarchist society, I think the most important skills are those required to maintain a collaborative culture in which individuals are guaranteed freedom. I assume people learn more from the _process_ of education than they do from the content. This implies that best results would be attained if each class were run as an anarchist (i.e. collaborative individualist) society. (I don't know if this matches your definition of anarchism or not. It's the one I'm using.) I may return to this issue if I have more time later today. For now, I'll content myself with mentioning the most important skills, in my view: the ability to establish and maintain good relationships; and, within those relationships, the ability to use collective decision-making processes which genuinely try to meet the needs of _all_. Regards -- Bob From: Bryan A Case Our local anarchist reading group is working through Neill's SUMMERHILL, from which we learn much. The book is not without problems, however: the author recognizes his school's class bias (yet another underground current in anarchism, THE DISPOSSESSED vs. the Abbe de Theleme); sexism and conservative gender construction...=20 I taught freshman comp this fall from a decentralized perspective. As I am an employee of the University of Michigan, a major research institution with rightwing cash-rich alumni (heck, I even had to sign an oath of loyalty to the state of Michigan - I'm not kidding), I rapidly found my limits: I had to assign one (final) grade; I could not significantly alter the time and place of our meetings... Yet I tried some experiments:=20 -Each student received a grading sheet during the first week. Two questions: 1. Would you like to receive grades during this semester? (y/n) 2. Please weight the percentage of your final grade that you would like per category [4 categories of work...]. They discussed these options in class for one meeting, then handed 'em in to me. I copied 'em and handed the xeroxes back. At the end of the term i calibrated their final grade based on their own percentages. Some students complained, but in terms of their own choices and self-awareness, not against the system.=20 -Final grades were determined in one-on-one conferences between myself and each student. We each worked things out with our copy of the individual grading system. On the average, each person graded themself in perfect agreement with my assessment. A few (4 out of 22) were a notch or two too high; we talked things over and either I gave in or they were convinced. A few (again, ca 4) were a notch or two too low; 2 I boosted up to my grade, the others were convincing and remained.=20 -The class determined the syllabus as much as I could create. I arbitrarily set up four units of read (Narrative, Argument, Analysis, Critique). During the week before each unit commenced, on Monday I would hand out copies of a summary of each possible reading selection (from our text and coursepack); I tried to be as impartial as possible, listing title, author, page length, subject and approaches summarized. On Wednesday they discussed the choices available, debating the merits of subjects, some authors, etc.; then turned in their ballots. I totaled the results then passed the decision back: number of choices averaged, then assigned in slots during the next weeks based on page length vs. writing assignments. Friday was this new syllabus, for which Monday would be the first day and reading.=20 -Essay workshops. One student would be the Author for the day. They would pass out copies of their draft for each reader (21 other students, plus myself). We, the Audience, would annotate and read our copies, then write a one page reaction and evaluation. Class discussion would be a lengthy critique of the essay, looking at various aspects of writing: grammar, strategy, use of evidence, etc. I was usually the board-writer, never the Critic.=20 My students ended up as better writers; finely-honed critics; highly energetic class participants; nearly manically active beings. I had some problems with scheduling and timing, which need tinkering.=20 The only painful problem was a case of plagiarism. One student clearly borrowed the work of someone else. I could not come up with a good way of dealing with this anarchistically. If this were a class that met at my house, for which I was the local teacher, I would have asked the person to leave. But I was and am - bound up with a massive institution that forbids such exclusion. I could think of no fair (or nonviolent!) way of letting the student's classmates handle this. The plagiarist refused to agree with me, insisting on the orginal nature of the work. I could see no other way out than to turn to the Dean and initiate a trial process. This *hurt*. I felt as if I were betraying my anarchist principle, as I was deliberately invoking some of the worst elements of the authoritarian school. As of now, this is still ongoing...=20 Any advice or recommendations? Bryan N. Alexander a/k/a godwin@umich.edu-- "There is always an official executioner." -Lao Tze Mr. Authority by Michael Stec When authority becomes comical, the illusion of the necessity for authority becomes visible. Recently while attending a free evening lecture at the local university, I encountered Mr. Authority acting authoritarian. He was there to control the question and answer session at the end of the lecture (as if it needed control). I found the old grey-haired gentlemen rather comical. He would tell people that if they had a question you were to raise your hand , he would indicate to you in what order you could ask your question ( just like kindergarten). If Mr. Authority held up one finger at you , you were the first person who could ask a question, two fingers the second person who could ask a question, etc. Of course Mr. Authority would remind people that they must ask a short question. Mr. Authority also seemed to be concerned that a dialog might develop between the questioner and the lecturer. If that happened, he would cut off the questioner and point to the next questioner to speak. Apparently, if you disagree with the answer you got, you were not to question it. Mr. Authority wanted you to ask your question, listen to the answer and then shut-up. Mr. Authority seemed to think that because the lecture was in a university, the Q&A session needed order at all cost, I almost forgot, Mr. Authority thought it a great sin, to the academic order if a person was to ask a question to a pervious questioner. A discussion between people in the audience was forbidden by Mr. Authority. That would be Anarchy and you can't have that at a university. (Comments were also forbidden, question only but they must be short). Thank God, When I was at university there was no Mr. Authority in any of my classes. We managed to have Q&A sessions without a Mr. Authority, you could even question comments made by people questioning the prof or even question comments made by the prof, also you could just ask a question. No need for Mr. Authority telling you when to speak and for how long. What Mr Authority doesn't realize is that a rigid Authoritarian discussion, limits that knowledge that can be gained. An Anarchistic form of dialog, like those that took place in my university classes is much more enlightening (and fun too). Attending that free evening lecture made me realize that I was fortunate in not encountering a Mr. Authority when I went to university. If you encounter a Mr. Authority at University or anywhere, do what you can to get rid of him.=20 -Michael Stec ax995@freenet.carleton.ca