Can communities of resistance and transformation be born from the social context of school?

Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2003 by Gibson, Rich

Given the demonstrable failure of socialism, especially in the sense that socialism failed to create a mass of critically conscious people able to unravel and change their circumstances, failed completely to go beyond capitalist social relations, it would also seem that the very function of school goes to the key problem of our age, a pedagogical question: What do people need to know, and how do they need to come to know it, in order to lead reasonably free, friendly, inclusive, connected, equitable, democratic, lives? Or, to put it another way: What does it take to create the change of mind to call off the industrialized slaughter of millions of people? How do we break the modem habit of scientific murder and create social systems that allow people to care for one another?

The centrality of schools was clear in the early 1980s, when powerful liberals and conservatives joined hands with corporate leaders to seize control of the schools. Key to that was to gain control of the curriculum, both the process and product of school work, and the way to that is easy to see - and it was then, via standardization/regulation of school knowledge and high-stakes standardized tests, promoted by the velvet glove of egalitarian projects to save the children of superexploited workers, people labeled "At Risk," but in fact the iron fist of a combination of market forces and systematic designs for social control, factors which are always under contest in every work place every day, where the bosses seek to subsume the minds of the workers, and the workers persistently try erode that control in creative ways (Ross, 2000, http://www.pipeline.com/-rgibson/ trsesummer.html).

Schools in developed capitalist society serve several related functions. They are huge markets (busses, architects, textbooks, consultant fees, etc.). In their role as markets, schools tend to commodify people - and set them apart. For example, results on high-stakes tests, mistaken inside schools for some form of human value, quickly also become markers for real estate operators, churning the housing market. The market profoundly influences every aspect of school, including the struggle for jobs and pay that teachers face at every level.

Schools also warehouse kids, saving the expense of corporate day care. They teach practical skills (reading, writing) and limited critical intellectual skills to select groups of kids. There are, after all, five or six easily identifiable "public" school systems in the U.S., each one largely serving the caste represented by the parents of the children in the school. Freedom to teach is commonly choked as one travels down income scales, with dissimilar methods and different substance taught in each of the systems. At the bottom, we witness the development of pre-prison programs.

Kids may choose to come to school to socialize with other kids, but usually in self-segregated groups inside a segregated community, not unlike many of their teachers. Still, parents send kids to strangers in schools, educators, out of trust and hope, false or real. In a society that has less and less to offer its citizens, one formal function of school would be to tamp down expectations for hope, while many educators still strive to fashion hope that is real. Such is the conflict every day for school workers, with some battling in the open, some working quietly, and others, many others, unthinkingly cooperating in the destruction of social wisdom (Gibson 1998, http://www.pipeline.com/-rgibson/anyon.htm).