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My hypothesis regarding schools is the following:
Schooling is the process by which centers of authority mold citizens with a particular vision of what they ought to be. All creative progress is made in spite of the attempts by educational authorities to direct students' diverse creative impulses into rigid mechanical processes.
That this is true of all centers of authority is the fundamental tenet of anarchism, and I hold this tenet to be true both because of empirical evidence and because of necessary truths about the function of the state.
As Nietzsche pointed out, throughout history, the periods of greatest cultural development have been periods of political decline. For example, during the English Civil war, when the power of the monarchy and the feudal lords were weakened, uneducated homeless people and soldiers developed brilliant political and theological ideas through open discussion. In doing so, they produced some of the most profound analyses of democratic theory in history, and also many anti-authoritarian theological doctrines, which involved examination of such things as the political purpose of the idea of hell and salvation. Another example would be the period of tremendous cultural development in the late sixties, when the moral status of traditional centers of authority was weakened.
The reason that the state and other centers of authority restrict human creativity is that by their very function, permanent structures of authority are not designed to cope with the vicissitudes of the creative passions of their subjects.
Even if it is true that many teachers teach counter-culture views, my hypothesis stands. For it is not primarily the content of a curriculum that gives it its purpose as a tool for controlling students, but the method and the context in which the information and ideological analyses are delivered. For example, a student can not learn to freely develop his creative faculties by being subjected to the whims of a teacher who grades his assignments and whose approval of the student's activity determines the students success, even if the teacher is teaching the student that anti-authoritarianism is good. In this environment, the student must consciously or unconsciously mold his psychological habits to suit the demands of the permanent classroom setting and of the authority of the teacher, who operates within an academic institution not prone to continuous alterations in its fundemental structure. It is not what facts a person knows that makes him creative, but the way in which he absorbs facts and the realationship of his habits of learning to his individual intelectual freedom.
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Posted by julio on 2008-09-14 21:42:46 | Rating: | Views: 62
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