The Oppressive Functioning of Present School Systems
The present school systems’ basic function is to condition people to play their assigned roles in society. Communicating accurate information to students, or “allowing” them or assisting them to learn, is, at best, an incidental or accidental process in these present school systems.
Different kinds of education are organized for people who are expected to do heavy, boring, repetitive work as members of the working class; for people who are expected to be skilled workers as members of the working class; for people who are expected to become “middle class,” that is, people who are expected to use more or less of their intelligence in the service of the owning-class people; and owning-class people, who are expected to rigidly play the role of enforcing oppression, maintaining the system, and acquiring wealth and power to be used for maintaining the oppressive structure.
In schools at the present, the students, the teachers, the administrators, the parents are basically good human beings, but they have all been conditioned to play certain roles in the class society. The pressure on all sections is to conform and to force the individuals to conform to the existing oppressive and increasingly unworkable society and its economic structure. This all leads to putting a great deal of pressure on the students.
Students are basically very eager to learn but have already been hurt and made discouraged about themselves in many ways; have been trained to be antagonistic to each other, to compete instead of cooperate, and to treat each other with invalidation and violence.
Teachers have been conditioned to believe that submission, “composure,” and “order” are the first requirements for their classrooms. They, in general, will be pulled to “teach” students in the same ways that they were mistaught.
Parents are under such heavy pressure in their lives as to feel required to support the same policies being applied to their children as the ones that interfered with their own learning when they were young.
As a result of all the destructive, patterned policies which are acting on all of the people who are involved in schools, the schools tend to function more and more poorly or desperately, and their misfunctioning is one of the sharpest indications of the imminent collapse of the oppressive society.
Movements are underway for liberation activities for students, for teachers, for administrators, and for parents, and these movements are playing a very encouraging role in exploring the possibilities of rational functioning of schools. What they are learning will constitute programs and policies for the schools under the non-oppressive societies which inevitably will replace the present poorly functioning structures.
From pages 207 to 208 of The List
(Present Time 209, October 2022)