Schools teach us failure

SCHOOLS TEACH US FAILURE.

Why We Must Disestablish School

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for

them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a

new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation

leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade

advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to

say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value.

Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of

community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat

race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor

are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve

these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the

management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to

physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in

a process of global degradation and modernized misery. I will explain how this process of

degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for

commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological

healing are defined as the result of services or "treatments." I do this because I believe

that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further

increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which

would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of

technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous

interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by

technocrats. We need counterfoil research to current futurology.

I want to raise the general question of the mutual definition of man's nature and the

nature of modern institutions which characterizes our world view and language. To do so,

I have chosen the school as my paradigm, and I therefore deal only indirectly with other

bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state: the consumer-family, the party, the army

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