Johnathan Masters
A Theory on Education
December 17, 2013
Table of Contents:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau University…… 18
Democracy…….22
Governing Constitution…… 25
Summerhill…… 28
Waldorf….. 31
Sudbury Valley School…. 37
Montessori…. 38
St. John’s College of Annapolis….. 39
Free Skool…. 44
Reggio Emilia….. 47
Unschooling… 50
Black Schools… 54
Virtue is the Goal…. 58
Frederick Douglass…. 61
Jerry Farber 1…. 64
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1…. 65
Jerry Farber 2…. 66
B.F. Skinner…. 68
Hierarchy Destroys Everything… 72
Jerry Farber 3…. 73
Jerry Farber 4…. 74
Self-Education…. 77
Acceptable Johnny Masters’s Approved Management Tactics…. 83
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“Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended.” ~George W. Bush (Brainy Quote, 2001, September 11).
After 9/11, for the War on Terror, Baby Bush started his own doctrine of pre-emptive warfare, against Saddam Hussein, under the Orwellian-named Operation Iraqi Freedom. (History.com, 2001, March 19). When it became apparent that Saddam Hussein had no WMD’s, the emphasis of the war changed from self-defense, to Freedom and Democracy.
The child is wicked because he is weak:
“The Abbe de Saint-Pieree called men big children. One could, reciprocally, call children little men. These propositions have their truth as sententious phrases; as principles they need clarification. But when Hobbes called the wicked man a robust child, he said something absolutely contradictory. All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm. Of all the attributes of the all-powerful divinity, goodness is the one without which one can least conceive it. All peoples who have recognized the two principles, have always regarded the bad as inferior to the good; if they had done otherwise, they would have been supposing something absurd.” (Rousseau, 1762). “In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United Sates has none.” (Carmichael). “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings.” (Mandela).
“In graduate school the classroom became a place I hated, yet a place where I struggled to claim and maintain the right to be an independent thinker. The university and the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility. ... My reaction to this stress and to the ever-present boredom and apathy that pervaded my classes was to imagine ways that teaching and the learning experience could be different.” (hooks, 1994).
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the
light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with
it.” (Planck).
“Most of my professors were not the slightest bit interested in enlightenment. More than anything
they seemed enthralled by the exercise of power and authority within their mini-kingdom, the classroom.”
(hooks, 1994).
“In the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are
trying to solve.” (Planck).
I wanted to do more public speaking at my very expensive American teacher training school, and
to work on power points for my Social Studies classes I knew I would be teaching eventually, but nobody
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ever consulted me about what I wanted to learn. Instead, I freaked out for two years, hurriedly doing my
work, with most of my efforts focused on clinging onto a thread of dignity.
John Locke argues that children are capable of reasoning at a young age: “It will perhaps be
wonder’d, that I mention reasoning with children; and yet I cannot but think that the true way of dealing
with them. They understand it as early as they do language; and, if I misobserve not, they love to be
treated as rational creatures, sooner than is imagin’d” (Locke, 1779).
Education should be liberating. Education should be useful and meaningful, and it should
consolidate your autonomy. Education in America is not liberating. Not even at liberal arts institutions. In
college, in the Universities, high schools, middle, elementary, Kindergarten, and Head Start programs,
oppression is the name of the game, and my proposal, to counter this toxic environment of fascist
autocratic totalitarian dictatorships, I propose something simple, honest, and fair. I propose, we as a
people, staff, parents, children, community, city, state, country, and world, dedicate ourselves to the fight
for freedom, justice, democracy, peace, and humanity. That’s it.
“I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and
domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given,
they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.” (Chomsky,
2004).
On December 7, 2013, Noam Chomsky celebrated his 85th birthday.
Rudolf Ekstein was a German refuge from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and since he had a front
row seat to the aims of fascism, Ekstein explores what the fascist beast precisely is, and offers policy
recommendations for what America can do to avoid those same pitfalls. Rudolf Ekstein knows “the
enemy”—Fascism, and “his slogans of independence for suppressed nations and” … “his real deeds”
(Ekstein, 1939). Ekstein admits that Europeans did a bad job at “defending the culture of our fatherland,
defending the freedom of creed, political opinion, free press and free speech, freedom of religious and
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national minorities” (Ekstein, 1939). Rudolf then proceeds to precisely define fascism, as he saw it, a first
person narrative. Hitler was forcing everybody in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, to obediently
sing a song, sung by “kindergarten children, school children, boys and girls, Nazi Youth, storm troopers,
policemen, soldiers, war veterans and even war cripples” (Ekstein, 1939). The fascist song ends with all
of the Nazis singing gloriously: “We shall go on marching, even though all is falling to pieces; today
Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.” (Ekstein, 1939).
Ekstein continues.
“The educational goal of fascism is to have the youth willing for marching, fighting, killing; even though all is falling to pieces. The whole population in fascist states has to be ready for war, when the leader orders.” Fascism divides the strong from the weak. The strong half keeps on marching, fighting, killing, while the weak half are murdered in concentration camps. “The Youth has to be prepared, physically and mentally, to obey blindly the so-called leader.” (Ekstein, 1939). Adolf Hitler wants the youth to “suppress all intellectual impulses and to revive all aggressive, destroying instincts in young people.” (Ekstein, 1939). The government uses their absolute power to force all children into their schools. “All schools, all youth organisations, all kindergartens, all educational institutional institutions must be in the hands of the government. No private school, no religious school, no free school organizations of the workers.” (Ekstein, 1939). “They must not think, because the leader is thinking for them. They should not dare to be independent individuals, to look for the truth. They are not supposed to have their own opinion or their own faith.” (Ekstein, 1939). Fascist education requires the mini-dictator professor to remain autocratic, with absolute power. “He uses all his power to produce fear and anxiety in every individual; to suppress every independent emotion, to destroy all independent thinking. The teacher is not the children's helpful friend who tries as far as possible to work by intellectual means, but the powerful authority, who has to revive all aggressive emotions, gigantic fear of the single individual before the power of his leaders great and small.” (Ekstein, 1939). The people want peace, democracy, freedom, independence, and Fascism seeks to curb those impulses through lies, “suppression, propaganda, intolerance, aggression against helpless people, fear and concentration camps.” (Ekstein, 1939). Fascists believe in strict pyramidal patriarchy hierarchy. “Fascists want people always being little
children, in fear of the powerful severe father and hoping he will help, and be willing to follow him
blindly”, whereas Democracy wants “free children, free persons, able to think and to act alone, able to
protect themselves and to defend the liberty of their people.” (Ekstein, 1939). Fascist Oppressors “use all
means in family life, in school, in recreation time,—not to educate their people to become grown-ups, but
to remain helpless, fearful and minor children.” … “It is much easier to keep people immature and
childish in mind, than to go the long way of real education, and way of democracy.” (Ekstein, 1939).
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Fascist oppressors “conquered at first the heart to kill the brain, to destroy free thinking and free
action.” Fascists appeal to brute animalism in children. “All healthy boys like more or less warlike games,
uniforms, guns, danger and secret groups. All children in certain periods of their lives are very aggressive.
This is only natural and the task of education is to change these dangerous wishes to an attitude useful for
our society.” (Ekstein, 1939). Fascists honor “men of war” but Democracy honor the true heroes, the
“scientists, explorers, inventors, writers, artists, all together working for peace and freedom.” (Ekstein,
1939).
Democracy “is not yet finished and will never be finished. Democracy is an attitude to come
nearer to the final goal we see—Humanity.” (Ekstein, 1939).
By teaching our children to make their own decisions and use their own consciences, we see that
“pangs of conscience are a better protection for our society and our morality than the strongest laws.”
(Ekstein, 1939).
“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” ~Picasso
“We get educated out of creativity.” ~Sir Ken Robinson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
Exercise of the body is important to integrate into education. A feeble body has a feeble mind.
“It is courageous to defend the liberty of every member of the nation. It is courageous to destroy all remainders of inequality between the different groups in our nation. It is courageous and dangerous to work on the skyscrapers, on the great bridges and to build great dams. It is courageous to decide independently, to think and to act as a free man; but it is not courageous to follow a leader blindly like a small child. It is not courageous to beat and to torment helpless people. We have real ideals for our children. It is right to love, to trust and to imitate men, like the American officer who recently brought medicine on an airplane to the population of Chile after the earthquake; what he did was more courageous and better than to drop bombs on poor helpless Ethiopians. It is more courageous to risk one's life exploring the South Pole and to fight alone against nature, than to destroy the churches of defenceless and peaceful people. It is more courageous and better to fight for the freedom of slaves, than to burn scientific books and to close scientific institutions. The lives of our great inventors, explorers, writers are much more thrilling than the life of a watchdog in a concentration camp. Our children should understand that democracy means also, if necessary, to defend with all means our freedom and that a free and prepared nation can't be defeated.” (Ekstein, 1939).
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Recently, I attended an orientation about the student teaching I am required to do in the spring.
As a student teacher, I will be “co-teaching” with a teacher already hired on at school, and all throughout
the lecture, it was pointed out that there was no hierarchy between the two teachers; instead, we’re to be a
“dynamic duo”. While Kentucky law is making strides to prevent one teacher from dominating another
teacher, with the co-teaching model, they haven’t worked on the hierarchy between teachers and students.
Education should be for liberation, not oppression, but on every level of the American education system,
the students are required to “submit” themselves to their teachers, by sitting down quietly at their desks,
in their assigned seats, to not talk to each other, and to just blindly “follow orders”, all orders, as the Nazi
soldiers were brainwashed to do, to lose our humanity, as they have done. They want use to keep on
marching, even though all is falling to pieces. The oppressor prances around, all proud, with an
undeserved arrogant smugness, as if their oppressive tactics aren’t harmful to the child’s overall
development, and their real education. Classrooms are supposed to be safe and positive spaces for
learning, but who can safe and positive when an oppressor predator is roaming around, without
accountability?
Some pessimists, such as Thomas Hobbes believe that our human nature is constituted to being
evil, and hurting others. To put it succinctly, our Human Nature, as Hobbes understands it, is “solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes, 1651). Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed the exact opposite.
Rousseau believed that human beings were born inherently good, and then they were corrupted by the
external pressures of society. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think
themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.” (Rousseau, 1762). So begins The
Social Contract, which is most likely Rousseau’s most important political work. Rousseau believes in the
“noble savage”, where mankind is inherently good, and then the institutions turn him vindictive, and evil.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau “links freedom with moral significance: our actions can only be moral if those
actions were done freely. In giving up our freedom we give up our morality and our humanity.”
(Rousseau, 1762).
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While I was at this orientation lecture, some person I never seen before, or met before, just started
yelling at everybody, and giving out orders in English, like our generation of teachers, this new crop of
teachers at my graduate school, were just a bunch of nobody dogs. The would-be oppressor arbitrarily
ordered everybody to sit down on left side of the room, after we had been sitting comfortably for two
hours. I was already sitting on the left side of the room, so I figured the order did not apply to me. Then
the oppressor says this next: “Since you are adults, you should be able to follow instructions like adults. I
said to get on this side of the room, in the front two rows.” The oppressor never mentioned the front two
rows, and they were yelling right behind me, behind my back. The truth does not matter to the oppressor.
Only complete submissive obedience matters. Instead of complying, I walked out of the room. When I
came back, while there was one chair available in the front row, the oppressor lied again, and said that all
of the seats were filled up, and that I could sit in the third row. The oppressor wanted to pretend they were
still in charge, even though I totally disregarded the initial order, and did the opposite. Oppressors
rationalize their dictatorial power because they hold information that could be valuable to us, but do not
get it confused. Their goal is for your submission, not your liberation. They are psychopaths. They do not
empathize with you. They have no anxiety. They do not care about your life or future. The disrespect
from the oppressors I memorize long beyond any trivial random piece of information they gave me. And
I’m one of the smart ones. I go to class, wanting to learn, wanting to discuss important ideas… but the
oppressor doesn’t like others showing off their intelligence, because they are so insecure. They need to
believe that we are empty vessels, completely ignorant, and in need their direct orders to breathe, and not
as the complicated creative freedom-loving individuals we are.
I saw the other “students”, the student-teachers, the student-teachers who are going to act just as
rude and oppressive as their all-powerful autocratic totalitarian dictating professor oppressor molester
assholes in teacher training school, immediately submit, without question, to the loud mouthed stranger, a
random arbitrary oppressor, and were lined up in the first rows just like good obedient soldiers they are,
and have been, since I’ve been sitting in a classroom. They keep on marching, even though all is falling to
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pieces. This new crop of teachers, who need to get out into the workforce, to get good jobs, and provide
meaningful knowledge for the rest of society’s children, in order to do the same, have no comprehension
of solidarity, dignity, independence, morality, ethics, principles, peace, equality, or freedom. While my
“freedom, justice, democracy, peace, and humanity in the classroom” experiment may prove
unsuccessful, at least, however, I will attempt to treat my students as I would like to be treated myself. I
love the Golden Rule, and in the land of Christians, you’d think more folks would be like me. Regardless,
my colleagues will be entering school as immoral oppressors, as professors who have already mentally
dehumanized their future American students, and will implement their oppressive management plans on
top of the student’s heads, without giving their souls a moment’s chance to breathe, exist, manifest, and
shine, just as God made them. The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed
(Biko).
“Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about
changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt they can't afford the time to think. Tuition fee
increases are a disciplinary technique, and by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with
debt, but have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the
consumer economy.” (Chomsky quote).
When the oppressor disrespects me, my feelings are hurt, because I do not understand why
another person would want to hurt another, but even worse, because of my own silence and submission to
the psychopathic oppressor’s insanity, I, too, die on the inside. What can I do? What I am able to do? I
have $100,000 riding on my education too, just as my colleagues do, and also, I want to be on the
winning side. My inclinations towards my own liberation, as well as everybody else’s too, is constantly
and routinely checked by fascist oppressors, and the fascist oppressor’s obedient human pets, who tend to
be crueler than their master. If you criticize a wise person, they will thank you, since your correction can
only make their understanding about the world better. But if you criticize an idiot, they automatically
belly-up, and act the fool you had suspected they were, when they initially showed you their true colors.
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They are showing you their fish belly, and they are admitting that there’s a crack in the dam. When I say
“Santa Clause is not real”, just because you yell louder, and covered up the verbal distribution of truth—
public speaking—to prevent the truth from ever possibly penetrating the young minds of who you want to
lie to, that still doesn’t change the truth. My God, if the children knew that the adults were lying about
Santa Clause, what else could they be lying about? Could this entire educational system be built just for
teachers to justify their own pitiful and useless existence, by being manipulating, managing, bullying
buttholes? It’s no wonder that teachers do not see the epidemic of bullying in their school systems.
Studies show that bullies do well in life; it’s the weak and timid who don’t. It’s also logical. Bullies,
while displaying characteristics most would not say are virtuous, have at least figured out a way to get
power. You can get folks to do what you want, by choice, or by force. By force leaves no prisoners. Both
the bully and the oppressor lean on force, and fear, in order to get their students to submit to the all-
powerful sage on the stage diety, or to get the student to give you their lunch money. As an oppressor,
you must get order, and you must get order through micromanaging the hell out of your students. Get in
their face. Threaten them with in-school suspension, or calling their parents, or humiliate them in class, or
give them “the look”, as if you are going to punch them in the face repeatedly if they continue their
behavior, etc. As long as you do not cuss, or utter racial slurs, the oppressor is pretty much entitled to use
whatever means are at their disposal in order to get “order”, or complete domination in your mini-
totalitarian society. In the end, the police will support the “authority figure” in the room, and will
generally arrest the children, who are physically weaker, and have less ties and network support in the
neighborhood, as well as legal funds, no liability insurance, etc, even if the children are right, when they
declare that teachers should not be allowed to steal their $400 cell phones, their $400 property. Is that
what “adults” do? “Adults” rob each other of their phones? “Adults” belittle and demean children, to
force them into submission, and compliance? No no no… true adults, teaching a true and proper
education, do not behave like this. This is asymmetrical warfare. This is Christopher Columbus
genociding the Taino Indians, for his own selfish benefits, not for theirs. American Education is Hunger
Games, Battle Royale, Animal Farm, and Lord of the Flies, all wrapped up in one.
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“If a child lives with criticism, He learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility, He learns to fight.
If a child lives with ridicule, He learns to be shy.
If a child lives with shame, He learns to feel guilty.
If a child lives with tolerance, He learns to be patient.
If a child lives with encouragement, He learns confidence.
If a child lives with praise, He learns to appreciate.
If a child lives with security, He learns to have faith.
If a child lives with approval, He learns to like himself.
If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, He learns to find love in the world.”(Nolte, 1998).
Maybe it’s time to let the students, especially the super smart Kentucky students, dictate their
own curriculums, and pursue their own curiosities. “Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide,
and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” (Howard Zinn quote).
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great
feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” (Guevara).
Jerry Farber, in his 1969 zine The Student as Nigger, writes: “Students don't ask that orders make
sense. They've given up expecting things to make sense long before they leave elementary school. Things
are true because the teacher says they're true. At a very early age we all learn to accept “two truths,” as
did certain medieval churchmen. Outside class, things are true to your tongue, your fingers, your stomach,
your heart. Inside class things are true by reason of authority. And that's just fine because you don't care
anyway. Miss Wiedemeyer tells you a noun is a person, place, or thing. So let it be. You don't give a rat's
ass; she doesn't give a rat's ass.” (Farber, 1967).
I suspect capitalistic forces are to be blamed for this, but I cannot be sure. Working class people
are not expected to know what is going on in society. Some folks also think that children should be
developed to “fit into” society, instead of experimenting and venturing out on their own. Corporate
industries want obedient cogs to the machine too. We may be seeing the industrial model for education.
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Or perhaps we haven’t ventured beyond Plato. George Carlin says what the business community wants is
“obedient workers… people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just
dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours,
reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to
collect it” (Carlin).
I remember explaining/lecturing about the Learning Pyramid to a few of the teachers I was
observing, and they hated everything I said. They were combative, disagreeable, and argumentative.
Should I have threatened them with in-school suspension? To call their parents? To flunk them out of
society? I would love to see how well a classroom of teachers would be to an oppressive dictator, and I
guess I will get that chance soon enough, but I suspect, most are obedient, but those with strong
personalities, those who have an understanding of themselves, whose supposed to be King or Queen of
their classroom, may not be able to sit still for their master. They may have issue with being treated as
insignificant scraps of frogshit.
A study conducted a few years ago (NPR Staff. 2011, February 9) showed that 45% of American
college students weren’t learning critical thinking skills (“With a large sample of more than 2,300
students, we observe no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing
skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study.”), and Professor Arum, the man who conducted
the experiment, said the solution to the problem was more “rigor”, aka homework. Professor Arum’s
solution only increases the oppression, and therefore, the obedience. Domination and hierarchical
structures are the problem, so therefore it logically follows that by increasing the workload, school, once
again, stands opposed to a true and proper education.
Sugata Mitra, a present day revolutionary educational theorist, proves that education is “self-
emergent, and self-organizing” (Mitra, 2007, February). This means, if we were to leave a computer in a
classroom full of children, eventually, they would organize and educate themselves. A teacher can only
stop education from happening, and generally, they do. Oppressive fascist teachers have been planning to
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murder their student’s souls, with their classroom management plan, long before the students ever set foot
into their classrooms. Once again, we are doing the opposite of what is needed.
Freedom. Democracy. Humanity. Justice. Peace. Respect. Solidarity.
After winning a $1 million grant from TED, Sugata Mitra is now establishing 7 “schools in the
clouds”: 5 in India and 2 in the UK. Most of Mitra’s schools are single-room buildings. There are no
teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups. Mitra only has 6 or so computers and a woman to
look after the kids’ safety. Mitra’s defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” (Davis,
2013, October 15).
The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed (Biko).
On page 59 of famed Brazilian education theorist Paul Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the
30th Anniversary edition with an introduction by Donaldo Macedo, with a red book cover, Freire quotes
Erich Fromm’s The Heart of Man (New York, 1966), p. 32:
The pleasure is complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very
essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of
sadism is to transform a man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by
complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life—freedom. (Fromm,
1966).
Freire explains what he derives from this passage:
“Sadistic love is a perverted love—a love of death, not of life. One of the characteristics of the
oppressor consciousness and its necrophilic view of the world is thus sadism. As the oppressor
consciousness, in order to dominate tries to deter the drive to search, the restlessness, and the
creative power which characterize life, it kills life. More and more, the oppressors are using
science and technology as unquestionably powerful instruments for their purpose: the maintenance
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of the oppressive order through manipulation and repression. The oppressed, as objects, as
“things,” have no purposes except those their oppressors prescribe for them.” (Freire, 1970)
“Other historians relate facts to inform us of facts. You relate them to incite in our hearts an
intense hatred of lying, ignorance, hypocrisy, superstition, tyranny; and the anger remains even after the
memory of the facts has disappeared.” ~Diderot, praising Voltaire (Uckung, 2013, April 3).
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very
existence is an act of rebellion.” ~Albert Camus
“Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists.” ~Tesla
It is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. An educational theorist is
anybody who has a theory about education, mostly especially, if they contribute to your overall
understanding of education.
“Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a constant state of learning.” ~Bruce Lee
Inspiring the students’ curiosity should be 95% of a teacher’s job (this idea originates from some
interview of Noam Chomsky’s, though the precise reference escapes me, and google; he also introduced
the idea of education being cultivated more like a “flower”, and not a glass to be filled up… though
Rousseau said that idea before Chomsky, so…. Shouldn’t the naked truth and the obvious be considered
general knowledge?). Inspiring that curiosity is the whole game. By inspiring curiosity, the student will
want to learn the subject material on their own. By subjecting the pupil to cruel oppressive games, one
could very well destroy their curiosity, and lose the whole game. Inspiring curiosity is the difference
between a real education and a fake one. Schooling and Education shouldn’t be opposed to each other. By
enabling the student to be themselves, we will learn to organize ourselves, in a meaningful and productive
way. Education is self-organizing, and self-emergent. Education should be for liberation, and it should be
useful, and important, and it should fit into one’s own paradigm, and understanding of themselves, and
how they fit into the world. Education is, and should be, many things; such as consolidating virtues.
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“A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.” ~Thomas Carruthers (Jenni,
2013, July 29).
Albert Einstein said, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one learned in
school.”
I remember when a teacher at a Louisville high school misidentified me as a student, since I was
sitting down at the teacher’s door, on the floor, with a backpack on, and immediately as she rounded the
corner, she snarks, “What are you doing here?” I told her what I was doing, and immediately asked her
the same question. Hot-headed, she declares, “This is my hallway!” Wow… why was she so defensive,
for me asking the exact same question she asked me? Hypocrisy is when folks demand higher standards
from you than they do from themselves. I was expected to comply with her uncivilized nastiness, but I am
an adult man, and eventually she backed down, and went scurrying into her classroom, because she knew
she was a cruel person, and to continue the argument, would have escalated into her going violent. But I
wondered, what if I was a student, basically, by her posture, demeanor, and tone, she did not care for the
reason why I was sitting there, but she was actually asking, “how come you have broke the rules, and
have came to class early, before the school officials have “open the gates”, so to speak”? By challenging
me, automatically, she is weighing her social authority against my own, as if she is allowed to be as cruel
as she wants to be, with no accountability, no matter what. Also, by being an oppressor, I highly doubt
she actually truly cares about the student’s themselves, their lives, and their ambitions. It’s assymetrical
warfare. The children do not stand a chance.
I also remember a female student in college raising her hand for 20 minutes, only to have the
professor burst out with, “Can’t I speak?” Uh… yeah. You’ve been speaking for 20 minutes straight,
while Jessica patiently waited for you to call on her. I finally confronted my fears, and suggested in
Democratization class, that we bring democracy into the classroom, and the autocratic totalitarian dictator
did not like that. Not. 1. Bit. I remember most of these disrespectful episodes, and I am resentful of each
and every one. It was embarrassing, to be humiliated in front of others, and it was a loud declaration of
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the oppressor saying, “I do like this person, and you all should not either.” When the oppressor has
absolute control of a classroom, even if they do not outwardly order others to be mean to the students they
hate, it’s clearly implied, and a power the butt-kissers can’t wait to abuse.
I also remember a professor who also taught Kindergarten, and the tone of the professor’s voice
seemed as though no transition from toddlers to adults had taken place. I also remember a Geography
class, where the entire class, the professor was talking down to us, like we were idiots, and like idiots, we
just sat there, taking the abuse, day-in and day-out. Nobody spoke up, and said a word, for 1 hour a day, 3
days a week, for 3 months total. Being a smart kid in grade school, I grew confident in my own reasoning
abilities, and was skeptical of even math books, since some of the math text books had listed a few
incorrect answers. One of my first awakenings was in High School in Northern Kentucky when a brand
new teacher, just recently graduated college, Mary Beth Flynn-Wilson-Herndon, told me my answer was
wrong when I said that the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was the Freedom of
Speech. When I brought a book up to her, and pointed it out to her, she brushed it off, and said that of the
many freedoms listed in the first amendment, freedom of religion was the important one. I would later
correct some misinformation she would give later, and instead of being thankful that she wasn’t passing
out false information, she grew angry with me. So I quit talking to her, and participating in class. She
would read directly of the book, just lecturing what the book said, and boring everybody. I was happy to
go to the Principal’s office. All day long, she can tell others that they are wrong, and we are supposed to
remain humble, but when she was told she was wrong, did she better herself? Did she appreciate the
feedback? Watch the Oppressors. They tell on themselves. They do not listen to their own standards.
They are hypocrites. Do not listen to them. Adolf Hitler used the spoken word as wonderful massive
distribution of propaganda of getting the masses to move. Those doing the speaking, giving the orders,
they are the ones to be most skeptical of. What is important is the event that happened, not the
explanation of the thing. If it appears to be a show, it probably is. Do not believe it. Shows only cover up
what’s truly happening. The Roman people were expected to watch and cheer for their favorite
Amerika’s Liberation Education 16
Gladiators; meanwhile, their government was imperializing the entire world, and overspending their
treasury, eventually leading the gullible and entertained populace to their downward spiral, and bottoming
out.
“Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him;
And even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.” ~ Frederick Douglass said, after
standing up to the nigger-breaker, Edward Covey.
While I remember many horror stories about my American education, this paper is not to destroy,
but to build. What lessons do I remember throughout my academic career? What knowledge has benefited
me, and what models for education are available that would enhance one’s inner spirit, their own
individuality, and to allow freedom to reign supreme?
“The great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their
oppressors as well [i.e. Nelson Mandela]. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of
their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only
power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both” (Freire,
1970).
At first, I began writing this paper as a theoretical framework for a large luxurious school, in a
building like the Taj Mahal, on top of a hill of gold, so that the availability of resources and funds were
plentiful. I would want initial control of the school, since it’s my school, at least my idea of one, and so I
would want to at least provide the theoretical framework, or the inspiration for democratic set-up, or the
spiritual mentor, from head start to high school, and perhaps college or vocation too. I would want the
school to be success, so I would want to be a part of the discussion until my Taj Hahal on top of a Hill of
Gold was institutionalized. Then I started to change my focus, to a single classroom, as I will be doing,
theoretically, when I get hired on at Jefferson County Public School Systems. This proved to be a fatal,
albeit, theoretical, undertaking. My tiny little class of freedom, democracy, and humanity, will be pressed
Amerika’s Liberation Education 17
on from all sides, to where I could not believe that the student I talked to one day would be the same
student I talked to the next day. I only get the student’s attention for one hour a day. Before they walk in,
and once they walk out, they are abiding by their many masters, and once a person is blindly obedient to
another person, they have no humanity. They do not think what is moral or virtuous for themselves. They
only behave to the satisfaction of the oppressors, regardless for morality. Obedience and Morality are
very much opposites. Just like Abraham Lincoln, I do not wish to be a slave, and I do not wish to be a
Master. Once a person is obedient to another, like a Drill Sergeant, their mind will have to rationalize why
they were obedient, and the game is over. Whatever curiosity or wonder I inspired in my short time span,
is thereby destroyed nearly immediately, when the minimum wage security guard harasses my student
over a hallway pass, and my student, the lowly insignificant speck of frogshit, are forced to concede that
their social ranking is even lower than the overweight, uneducated, ambitionless minimum wage
employee. Justification and rationalization follows behavior, so by micromanaging the student’s
behavior, we are crippling their inherently good nature. Most bad behavior in school comes from the
oppressive conditions. I would need to change an oppressive totalitarian school into a school that valued
liberation, autonomy, dignity, humanity, and democracy, for my teachings to take effect as I would hope
they would. Otherwise, I would be teaching a cadaver, a zombie, who, hopefully, many years from now,
will transform from a quiet obedient dormant spectator into participant in power. Cicero said that freedom
is participation in power.
So I will not only focus on my single classroom, having to compete with additional pressures of
their enclosed oppressive mini-dictatorship society. I will deal with the conditions of public education
when I get there. For now, I will dream of this wonderland of education, this 1,000 acre farm, with large
luxurious buildings, like a hotel off the beaches of Santa Monaco—a Taj Mahal sitting on a hill of gold—
where every student has a laptop, and access to the internet; all of the resources they could ever dream of
having, is here; and all of the students are all running around, active, busy, working on this or that project,
and have a sort of “organized chaos” type of environment. A few times, folks can change the system from
Amerika’s Liberation Education 18
within, but when a revolution of change is called for, starting brand new is easier. One can try to change
the system from within, but eventually, the Leviathan will end up changing you. So I must dream big, and
as idealistic as I possibly can, because I may not be the same person I am in a year’s time, after being
inside the belly of the beast. At least, at one point in my life, I held out hope to offer the very best
education for my future theoretical American students. Also, perhaps, this theory on education can serve
as a periodic reminder of my rebellious roots, to serve as a check on my own authority, to be used as a
primer for learning educational theorists, and other models of institutions currently operating on a
liberation education model. This document can also be used as a spiritual document, from which my
educational wonderland—Jean-Jacques Rousseau University—can be formed. Personally, I will continue
to use this document for my own foundational understanding and framework for how and what education
should be, and organized. Since education is “self-emergent and self-organizing”, there’s little risk with
failing at my school, for anybody, students, parents, or teachers. Backing off, getting off the student’s
backs, is the smartest, and easiest thing one can do… if they aren’t addicted to their sadistic power, to
control and dominant over others.
All any teacher today needs to do, in order to understand where I am coming from, is to merely
remember why they first chose to go into the teaching profession. Most teachers weren’t looking for the
easy lifestyle; instead, they wanted to do something worthwhile, to help educate society’s children. They
wanted to make a difference, and they wanted to help people. While the practical implications are the
meat and potatoes of an educational institutional, and I address some of those, briefly, this paper is being
written in order to provide an overall vision for a University, a liberation education, for a liberation
education to become consolidated, and institutionalized; for democratic structures to be formed, and for
each and every student empowered, to be all that they can be, from birth to adulthood. This paper is not to
destroy. Au contraire. It is to build. What is needed for American education to improve is first and
foremost, a framework of liberation, a theory on education. A strong, overarching educational vision, one
that liberates, is useful, and covers all the ground that an education is supposed to cover, is called for.
Amerika’s Liberation Education 19
This vision should be able to educate the evolved student geniuses of Kentucky, as well as information-
laden adults. We live in the Information Age, which makes many old institutions of education obsolete. I
read in the history books that America at one time liked freedom. It’s time Americans start to become
Americans again. A good vision would be one which survives longer than it’s author, and this pdf is that
attempt.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau University
While I understand that resources are finite, one of America’s major benefits compared
internationally, is our moderate wealth, such as running water, housing, clothing, food, etc. Many
Americans have computers, and Internet access. The Internet is clearly a game changer. The Internet is
the Gutenburg Printing Press Revolution multiplied by 7 Billion. This change needs to be embraced, and
institutionalized immediately. For those who do not have computers, computers should be purchased for
them. Sugata Mitra’s whole experiment rested upon only one singular crappy touch screen computer
embedded into an outside wall, and poor children. Clearly computers and the Internet is here to stay, and
to bridge the digital gap—the gap between those who have computers versus those who do not—all
students should be provided with computers, and access to the Internet. Afterwards, many institutional
changes can happen. All classes can be chosen online, grades can be posted online, blogs can be written,
and group discussions can happen online. Technology is just a tool which enhances our life, and we
should get used and accustomed to using tools as the masters of the Earth we the human race are, with us
controlling them, and not with them controlling us. Radio transmitters, facebook pages, twitter account,
their own webpage, youtube channel, some type of student run news media, are obvious firsts to be
established for the school. One of the students could also develop a website program for democratic tools
in school, get the invention patented, and make a boatload of money. Experimentation, innovation, and
invention will be a capstone at Jean-Jacques Rousseau University.
“I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know.” (Rousseau, 1762).
Amerika’s Liberation Education 20
The heart of a Jean-Jacque Rousseau University education, shall be to the liking of the children
and the parents, for they are the final arbitrator of their children’s life’s decisions.
I choose to name the University after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in spite of his failings (such as
putting his children into an orphanage… or, lying about having children, so his homosexuality wouldn’t
disgrace him, whichever story is true), because he marks an important break with antiquity—Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle, and Co, et al—into modernity, when it comes to enlightened thought. Strict
indoctrination of the classics, Greek, Latin, and the rest, as well as religious teaching, was the order of the
day in Rousseau’s time, 1700s France. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings is thought to have created the
French Revolution. Personally, his stream-of-conscious advice has value by itself, but I love Rousseau’s
intoxicating work mostly because of the thoughts his book inspires, dancing around in my consciousness.
Rousseau also believed that Emile was his “best and most important of all of my writings” (Rousseau,
1953). There’s 3 main periods for the education of Emile for Rousseau, and he organizes those periods by
the separation of his books. Books 1 and 2 are the Age of Nature; Books 3 and 4 are Age of
Transition/Adolescence; Book 5 is Age of Wisdom, and Education of Women (SparkNotes Editors).
Since Rousseau believes that humankind is born inherently good, then what is necessary for the
education of the kind gentle good human being, would be for them to be themselves, to understand
themselves, to learn about the world through discovery and observation, to play outside, to find out their
own ambitions, their own dreams, and likes and dislikes, and then for that goodness to be consolidated,
and to be made fit for civil society. The only book Rousseau recommends children to read is Robison
Crusoe by Daniel DeFoe (1719), in order to teach self-sufficiency, as well as inspire a sense of wonder, of
exploration; albeit, it should be noted that Robison Crusoe has been criticized for being a racist barbaric
imperialist, and is sort of the archetype for the European colonizing explorer during the 16 and 1700s.
Crusoe set up his slave plantation in Brazil, after earlier on, selling his best friend into slavery, after his
best friend helped him out of captivity from another oppressor.
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Rousseau’s Emile, his “best and most important of all [his] writings”, compares the education of
people to plants growing, specifically, a “nascent shrub”, and utilizing cultivation in order to help it grow.
“It is to you that I address myself, tender and foresighted mother, who are capable of keeping the
nascent shrub away from the highway and securing it from the impact of human opinions!
Cultivate and water the young plant before it dies. Its fruits will one day be your delights. Form an
enclosure around your child’s soul at an early date. Someone else can draw its circumference, but
you alone must build the fence” … “Plants are shaped by cultivation, and men by education”
(Rousseau, 1762).
The imagery that Jean-Jacques Rousseau paints up of human society is irreverent. Rousseau
criticizes the smothering effects of humans being bound up immediately as soon as they are birthed, like a
mental patient with a straight jacket on:
“Hardly has the baby emerged from the mother’s womb, and hardly has he enjoyed the freedom to move and stretch limbs before he is given new bonds. He is swaddled, laid out with the head secured and the legs stretched out, the arms hanging beside the body. He is surrounded with linens and trusses of every kind which do not permit him to change position, and he is lucky if he had not been squeezed to the point of being prevented from breathing and if care was taken to lay him on his side in order that the waters that should come out his mouth can fall by themselves, for he would not have the freedom of turning his head to the side to facilitate the flow.” … “I do not see what he gained by being born.” (Rousseau, 1762). Rousseau then points out how entire societies are formed improperly, because of silly birthing
rituals, which constrain the newborn baby, instead of allowing it to stretch out it’s limbs, and to make use
of their bodies right at once.
“The inaction, the constraint in which a baby’s limbs are kept can only hinder the circulation of the blood, of the humors, prevent the baby from fortifying himself, from growing, and cause his constitution to degenerate. In the places where these extravagant precautions are not taken, men are all tall, strong, and well proportioned. The countries where children are swaddled teem with hunchbacks, cripples, men with stunted or withered limbs, men suffering from rickets, men misshapen in every way. For fear that bodies be deformed by free movements, we hurry to deform the children by putting them into a press. We would gladly cripple them to keep them from laming themselves” (Rousseau, 1762).
Rousseau says that many societies keep the human being servile, and “bound up”, all throughout
their lives, because they make decisions based on their fear of death.
Amerika’s Liberation Education 22
“One thinks only of preserving one’s child. That is not enough. One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man, to bear the blows of fate, to brave opulence and poverty, to live, if he has to, in freezing Iceland or on Malta’s burning rocks. You may very well take precautions against his dying. He will nevertheless have to die. And though his death were not the product of your efforts, still these efforts would be ill conceived. It is less a question of keeping him from dying than of making him live. To live is not to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life. Men have been buried at one hundred who died at their birth” (Rousseau, 1762). J.J. Rousseau breaks down his understanding of the word education.
“This education comes to us from nature or from men or from things. The internal development of our faculties and our organs is the education of nature. The use that we are taught to make of this development is the education of men. And what we acquire from our own experience about the objects which affect us is the education of things” (Rousseau, 1762).
Jean-Jacques discusses how a virtuous man should behave.
“To be something, to be oneself and always one, a man must act as he speaks; he must always be decisive in making his choice, make it in a lofty style, and always stick to it. I am waiting to be shown this marvel so as to know whether he is a man or a citizen, or how he goes about being both at the same time” (Rousseau, 1762).
J.J. Rousseau believes that the way his society treats her own, it’s virtually slavery from birth to
death.
“All our wisdom consists in servile prejudices. All our practices are only subjection, impediment, and constraint. Civil man is born, lives, and dies in slavery. At his birth he is sewed in swaddling clothing; at his death he is nailed in a coffin. So long as he keep his human shape, he is enchained by our institutions.” (Rousseau, 1762).
After Rousseau published Emile, he had to flee France, for his safety.
“He who makes a beast of himself takes away the pain of being a man.” (Thompson, 1972).
For Rousseau, people are born good, and therefore, that goodness should be locked in at a young
age. “Form an enclosure around your child’s soul”, and let that child live. Children need to become super
individuals, whose will is strong enough to combat the will of the greatest meanest cruelest strongest
oppressors in the world. Also, mothers should breast feed their own cwrhildren, and children should be
allowed to play outside. If the noble savage does not have a proper education, then the noble savage shall
transform into a savage monster and assimilate in a world populated with savage monsters.
DEMOCRACY
Amerika’s Liberation Education 23
Jean-Jacques University will be doused in democracy, from head to toe. There shall be 5 branches
of government: Executive, Legislative, Judicial, Election, and Media. The first class of students will be
forming many of the firsts that will go down in history, and create traditions that will carry on into
eternity, such as the University Charter, or a Student’s Bill of Rights. All of the students will be free and
equal as the staff and parents. The students, parents, and staff all make up one large democratic bloc, upon
which all decisions within that school should be made.
“Making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is
a central goal of transformative pedagogy.” (hooks, 1994).
There’s a bunch of bragging about America’s democratic system, but it essentially just boils
down to voting one moment every four years to decide which one of representatives we want to be our
master ruler tyrants. There’s very little democracy in America; it’s mostly autocratic dictatorships
everywhere; in the workplace, the home, the political establishment, in the schools, etc. 28% of
Kentuckians in 2011 voted in their General Election, and that leaves a whopping 72% of Kentuckians
who did not see a reason to participate in their own democracy. In fact, the will of the people seem to be
“I ain’t voting” (Hewlett, 2011, November 9).
The lack of solidarity in America is directly attributable to the lack of solidarity that is fostered in
the autocratic totalitarian dictatorial American educational system. In America, for private-sector workers,
on 6.6% of them are unionized, and in the public sector, 35.9% were unionized. “In 2012, 7.3 million
employees in the public sector belonged to a union, compared with 7.0 million union workers in the
private sector.”(Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013, January 23). Rarely do students unite as a student body
in order to accomplish a common goal. Union rates are at 6.6%. This is because we Americans have been
conditioned to be obedient cattle herds, to just blindly obey the autocratic authoritarian dictator, in the
classroom, in the workplace, in the home, in the State, etc. professors use whatever means available to
manage and control their student's behavior, instead of observing “organized chaos”. This
Amerika’s Liberation Education 24
authoritarianism is forcefed, and ingrained in the young American’s mind, to a point to where real
democratic power, such as the mere discussion of politics, looks surreal and weird to them.
For some thoughts regarding democratic education, here’s excerpts of Amy Gutmann’s
Democracy and Democratic Education article in a Philosophy of Education anthology textbook. For
Gutmann, politics and education are synonymous. “Politics is the means by which educational authority
establishes and asserts itself in all but the simplest human societies.” (Gutmann, 1993).
Gutmann, opposed to the American system of democracy, understands democracy to be the
process, as well as the outcome, of society. “The most defensible conception of democratic education is
democratic in both its ends and its means. The end of democratic education is to create democratic
citizens, people who are willing and able to govern their own lives and share in governing their society”
(Gutmann, 1993). So American children need to understand how to “govern their own lives and share in
governing their society”, as well as “understand democratic education by the ends and means it opposes”.
In its commitment to critical deliberation, democratic education rejects inculcating blind allegiance to any political system and to any conception of the good life. In its commitment to pluralistic authority, democratic-education opposes claims to exclusive (or ultimate) educational authority by parents, professionals, philosopher-kings, or self-appointed vanguards who shield themselves from public accountability. (Gutmann, 1993).
Gutmann warns us to be wary of tyranny just as Ben Franklin did when he said “resistance to
tyranny is obedience to God”. Gutmann also encourages our adults to understand “practices of democratic
deliberation” and “decision-making” for its adult citizens, and for our children to only know “democratic
deliberation” (Gutmann, 1993). Gutmann continues rationalizing this hierarchy, where the students are to
not have any of the “decision-making” skills, when she praises John Dewey’s Laboratory School at the
University of Chicago, which attempts to be a “miniature community, an embryonic democratic society”
which teaches the children at “self-governance while they are being governed” (Gutmann, 1993). John
Dewey’s Laboratory School is not democratic because they do not they treat students as the intellectual or
political equals of their teachers. At John Dewey’s Laboratory School, “the most important curricular and
hiring decisions” are not decided by the students, but the students are allowed to “practice their political
Amerika’s Liberation Education 25
skills and to assume significant responsibilities in the school, skills and responsibilities that were
appropriate to their level of intellectual and social development” (Gutmann, 1993).
While I disagree with Amy about the separation of powers between students and teachers, I do
admire how eloquent and passionate she is about democracy in general. Here she discusses the value of
talking about politics:
“The most relevant result of such courses from the perspective of democratic education is not an increase in political knowledge, cultural literacy (in the narrow sense), or even political trust or efficacy, but an increase in the willingness and ability of students to reason and argue about politics, collectively and critically, respectful of their reasonable differences, a willingness and ability that is distinctively democratic.” Then Gutmann closes strongly by saying that “democratic government depends on democratic education for its full moral and political strength”(Gutmann, 1993).
There’s a whole list of democratic schools on Wikipedia, which lists democratic schools all over
the world, including the oldest surviving democratic school, Summerhill, in England, and 121 toher
democratic schools in the United States, though none was listed for Kentucky, since, like 3rd parties, and
the democratic tools of referendum by petition, and recall, it’s illegal in Kentucky to have charter schools
(List of Democratic Schools). There were several Sudbury schools, including the original one established
in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1968, several “Free Schools”, and Antioch College, in Yellow Springs,
Ohio, which had Horace Mann as it’s first President, and it’s motto is “Be ashamed to have die until you
have won some victory for humanity” (Antioch College).
“How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?” (Thoreau
quote).
Ekstein's definition of Democracy is that Democratic societies require to “bring up free men and
not blind subjects of a powerful machine” (Ekstein, 1939).
“We must understand the needs of our children and show them that all they want they can find in our democratic culture, but not in fascist barbarism. They want to be courageous and strong. They want to have ideals, good models they can love, trust, and imitate.” (Ekstein, 1939). “The father is the leader of the minor infant, help in danger and in troubles, but he should show his child how to solve all problems, how to think, how to be independent, how to become a real grown-up. The child loving his parents and wanting to be like them should imitate their independent thinking,
Amerika’s Liberation Education 26
their efforts to solve all questions and not to obey them blindly. The leaders of a nation should try to make all members of the nation more and more free and independent.” (Ekstein, 1939).
“Democracy believes in “freedom” of the individual, to enrich their lives as they see fit. Democracy also believe that “the state and its government should be the servant of the people. In fascist states every person is the slave of the power-hungry government. A government “of the people, by the people, for the people” can't exist without free speech, free press, free and secret vote, justice, tolerance, and reasonable solution of economical problems. Democracy insists therefore on having thinking people able to have their own opinion. Democracy is therefore interested in education for culture, peace and freedom. Our educational system tries to make every child able to live his own happy life without injuring the life of others. Democratic education tries to make every child understand the value of human solidarity enriching the life of all.” (Ekstein, 1939).
The Governing Constitution
Democratic societies should have their youth practicing democratic ways and means, as well as
developing the rigorous civic foundation for how their own school system should be structured. There
should be two “guiding principles” for the development of the most important document for Jean-Jacques
Rousseau University: it’s governing Constitution. The two guiding principles for Jean-Jacques Rousseau
University will be 1) Autonomy for each and every individual student, and; 2) Democracy. The governing
Constitution will draw up positions, and responsibilities for those positions, as well as developing a
democratic method, preferably with the very powerful Instant Runoff Voting system, of electing students
into those positions. The governing Constitution will need assume all power afforded to it, balancing
local, state, and federal interests. The governing Constitution will need to be a basic simplistic governing
document, one that allows some flexibility, one that hammers the processes, and procedures down, and
one that can allow for a peaceful turnover of power, so that the new crop of super smart and evolved
geniuses can assume the roles created for them, and manage the helm seamlessly, without a glitch
between transitions. The governing Constitution will need to develop the hiring and firing process,
curriculum development, as well as develop the duties for various administration positions, such as
faculty, teachers, principal, custodians, lunch workers, lawn workers, etc. The governing Constitution will
be created in democratic fashion, with democratic legitimacy, with 75% of the students, staff, and parents
approving it. The ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau University will not become bogged down with failing
to pay her bills, or other trivial practical matters, which should be cake for any true intellectual. While
Amerika’s Liberation Education 27
Jean-Jacques Rousseau University idealizes direct democracy as the best, most purest democracy, having
a planted obstructionist filibuster jerk in the group shouldn’t stop the entire process from developing into
a governing Constitution. So consensus-based democracy is strived for, because in a group of caring,
committed-to-the-community, individuals, if somebody has a sincere, heartfelt objection to a passage in
the University’s Constitution, or to future decisions of the University’s Executive Council, then that
group should be able to figure out a way to make all interests happy. Where making all ends happy,
within the constraints of time, looks to be impossible, a simple majority should be used for most
decisions, or perhaps, a super-majority (75%) can be called for in some cases. Robert’s Rules of Order
will be used as the guide for Parliamentary procedure for Executive, Legislative, and Judicial meetings.
“The Minority get their say, and the Majority get their way.” The governing Constitution should do all
things, including creating conditions which guide the development of the curriculum of curing Cancer,
and AIDS. The governing Constitution will schedule in Weekly Parliament\Town Hall Meetings for the
Whole Building. The Universal Zulu Nation has a list of principles they are supposed to abide by, and
could be used as a model for the student’s to draw up their own “general principles” of the first
Constitutional Convention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau University.
There should be a Student Bill of Rights drawn up. The first class, at Jean Jacque Rousseau
University, the first classes, will be starting many of the democratic traditions themselves, and eventually,
institutions will be formed, and the University will run as smoothly as any traditional authoritarian
oppressive organization out here. The first class will begin to establish norms, and institutions, but at Jean
Jacque Rousseau University, there is always an air of Revolution, of questioning the status quo, and
whereas the first year students could build a foundation at Jean Jacque Rousseau University that nobody
before them can ever match or top, or they could put together flimsy, silly, insignificant institutions, or
create bad Constitutions, or a poorly thought out Bill of Rights, or ruin any of the other governing
documents for the procedures of their beloved school.
Amerika’s Liberation Education 28
While I detest direct orders, I can follow rules, especially ones that seek fairness. Since only one
person can speak at a time, during a classroom meeting, we need uniform procedures for discussion, so
that the “minority get their say”. Most governmental bodies use the Parliamentary Procedures coming
from Robert's Rules of Order, especially since it’s specific purpose is to serve as a guide to democratic
“deliberative assemblies”. The principles underlying parliamentary law are based on a regard for the
rights: “of the majority; of the minority, especially a strong minority—greater than one third; of
individual members; of absentees, and; of all these together” (Robert, 1970). There should also be
uniform procedure for the complaint process, for due process, for the complaints to go through a fair and
impartial process, and be diplomatically handled. All governing branches should be completely
transparent.
Madison says that the American government needs the separation of powers, in Federalist Papers
47 through 51, because “tyranny” is defined as “the concentration of the legislative, executive, and
judicial powers in the hands of one, the few, or the many”. For Madison, the concentration of powers
itself constitute tyranny, not the ends for which those powers are used. (Carey, 2004).
“Tyranny exists wherever the potential for arbitrary and capricious government exists.” ~George
W. Carey (Carey, 2004).
In the world today, there are several promising school models which shall provide the “spirit” of
Jean-Jacque Rousseau University, and should be considered when developing her economics, which is the
main push throughout all of history. Here’s a list of the schools I will analyze in this document: 1)
Summerhill; 2) Waldorf; 3) Sudbury Schools; 4) Homeschooling/Unschooling; 5) Free Skool; 6)
Montessori; 7) Reggio Emilia Approach; 8) St. John’s of Anapolis; 9) Black schools; 10) Home
Schooling, and; 11) Self-education.
Summerhill School
Amerika’s Liberation Education 29
Alexandre Sutherland Neill was a Scottish progressive educator, and the founder of Summerhill
School in 1921, which still today follows Neil’s philosophy. Summerhill School is the oldest democratic
school in the world, and it’s established in Suffolk, England. Summerhill is the standard bearer for
democratic schools, with their idealistic notions of humanity (Summerhill). Distinctive features of
Summerhill is their voluntary class attendance, and having a student-run assembly, which is given vast
amounts of power.
Alexander Sutherland Neill writes in his book, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child-
Rearing (1960), that “the aim of life is to find happiness” and “education should be a preparation for life”
and that “our culture has not been very successful” at doing this (Neill, 1960). When it comes to
“education”, “politics and economics lead to war”; for “medicines”, we still have “disease”; for
“religion”, we still have “usury and robbery”. “The world’s social conscience is still primitive” (Neill,
1960).
Alexander Sutherland Neill poses 10 important questions for the world:
1) Why does man hate and kill in war when animals do not?
2) Why does cancer increase?
3) Why are there so many suicides?
4) So many insane sex crimes?
5) Why the hate that is racism?
6) Why the need for drugs to enhance life?
7) Why backbiting and spite?
8) Why is sex obscene and a leering joke?
9) Why degradation and torture?
10) Why the continuance of religions that have long ago lost their love and hope and charity?
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Neill explains that teachers teach facts about “French or ancient history” … “when these subjects
don’t matter a jot compared to the larger questions of life’s fulfilment – of man’s inner happiness” (Neill,
1960).
In Graduate school, I suggested asking the children how to cure cancer, more as a thought
experiment, not to pin the hopes on humanity on them, and immediately, the oppressor molester professor
quickly dismissed what I saying as just some absurd joke. The oppressor molester professor did not have
faith in children, or in me. I quickly looked up 15 year old Jack Andraka’s accomplishment. Jack Andraka
had a friend die of cancer, and so he started to look at the problems the field was having, and eventually,
came up with a solution. “I created a new way to detect pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer that costs
three cents and takes five minutes to run”, Jack Andraka said (Lemieux, 2013). 85% of all pancreatic
cancers are diagnosed too late, when a person has a 2% chance of survival. The current tests cost $800
and misses 30% of all pancreatic cancer cases.
Armed with google and Wikipedia, Jack Andraka developed a hypothesis about using a “dipstick
sensor” in his High School biology class when he was reading a paper about the analytical methods of
using carbon nanotube technology. Jack Andraka knew that antibodies fit like a lock and key into an
antigen bonding site. So Jack Andraka figured out, that in order to find the mesothelin protein in the
bloodstream, if the nanotubes were laced with the antibody, then the mesothelin protein would bind to the
antibody. Once the mesothelin protein was detected, then an electrical response would be generated large
enough to detect with a simple ohm meter (Lemieux, 2013). This process is “168 times faster, over
26,000 times less expensive, and over 400 times more sensitive than our current methods of diagnosis”.
Pancreatic cancer kills 19 of the 20 patients diagnosed within the first 5 years. The cost of these “dipstick
sensors” is 3 cents per strip.
“By the time we are born, we have all the neurons we will ever have, about 100 to 200 billion, and each neuron has about 2,500 synapses [for a total of 250 trillion synapses to 500 trillion]. However, the fibers that reach out from the neurons and the synapses between the fiber ends increase during the first years of life, perhaps into adolescence or longer.
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By age 2 or 3, each neuron has around 15,000 synapses [for a total of 1.5 quadrillion synapses to 3 quadrillion]; children this age has many more synapses than they will have as adults. In fact, they oversupplied with the neurons and synapses that they will need to adapt to their environments. However, only those neutrons that are used will survive, and unused neurons will be “pruned” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). This pruning is necessary and supports cognitive development. In fact, some developmental disabilities are associated with a gene defect that interferes with pruning (Cook & Cook, 2005).” (Woolfolk, 2010).
Children’s rights is a joke in America. During the 1960s, Mary Beth Tinker wore an armband to
school protesting the Vietnam War. American schools were so totalitarian and draconian, that the
armband was considered a distraction, and Mary Beth Tinker was suspended from school. The school
administration and officials did not care that were living in a war society, that choosing neutrality during
times of oppression, is choosing the side of the oppressor. Instead, they declared war on Mary Beth
Tinker, and forced her to take her case to the Supreme Court. Eventually, the Supreme Court declared
Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District in favor of Mary Beth Tinker, saying that
students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse
gate” (Tinker, 1969).
A.S. Neill continues: “How much of our education is real doing, real self-expression? Handwork
is too often the making of a wooden box under the eye of an expert” … “Most of the school work that
adolescents do is simply a waste of time, of energy, of patience. It robs youth of its right to play and play
and play: it puts old heads on young shoulders” (Neill, 1960). The students in traditional authoritarian
totalitarian schools have lots of knowledge, but regarding “their outlook on life”, “many of them are
infants”; these students have not “been allowed to feel”. “Their textbooks do not deal with human
character, or with love, or with freedom, or with self-determination. And so the system goes on, aiming
only at standards of book learning – it goes on separating the head from the heart” (Neill, 1960).
A.S. Neill talks about the education of Nijinsky, “a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer of
Polish descent, cited as the greatest male dancer of the early 20th century” (Nijinsky). Nijinsky could not
pass his school exams in St. Petersburg, and he couldn’t get into the State Ballet school without passing
those exams. “He simply could not learn school subjects – his mind was elsewhere.” Eventually, Nijinsky
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“passed” his exams, because the administrators “faked” an exam for him (Neill, 1960). “What a loss to
the world if Nijinsky had really to pass those exams!”
In all countries, capitalist, socialist or communist, elaborate schools are built to educate the young. But all the wonderful labs and workshops do nothing to help Jane or Peter or Ivan surmount the emotional damage and the social evils bred by the pressure on him from his parents, his schoolteachers and the pressure of the coercive quality of our civilisation.
The function of the child is to live his own life, not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best. All this interference and guidance on the part of adults only produces a generation of robots.
We set out to make a school in which we should allow children freedom to be themselves. In order to do this we had to renounce all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction. We have been called brave, but it did not require courage. All it required was what we had – a complete belief in the child as a good, not an evil, being. Since 1921 this belief in the goodness of the child has never wavered: it rather has become a final faith.
“A free school is not a place where you can run roughshod over other people. It's a place that
minimizes the authoritarian elements and maximizes the development of community and really caring
about the other people. Doing this is a tricky business” (Bull, 1970). “The curriculum is tailor made. The
school fits the child. That's Summerhill” (Neill, 1969).
Waldorf
Waldorf education, according to Wikipedia, is “a humanistic approach to pedagogy based on the
educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. The
first Waldorf school was founded in 1919 in Stuttgart, Germany. At present there are 1,026 independent
Waldorf schools, 2,000 kindergartens and 646 centers for special education, located in 60 countries. There
are also Waldorf-based state schools, charter schools and academies, and homeschooling environments”
(Waldorf). “Waldorf education is the largest independent alternative education movement in the world”
(Waldorf).
“Molt asked Steiner to design a school that would educate children to become free, responsible, and active human beings, able to create a just and peaceful society” … “Its explicit purpose was to create free, creative, independent, moral and happy human beings. Steiner summarized the school’s task: “Accept the children in reverence; educate them with love; send them forth in freedom” … “To understand Waldorf education as it is practiced at the kindergarten, elementary, and high-school level, one must understand Steiner’s view of the nature and development of the human being” (Koetzsch, 1997, June 2).
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The pedagogy of Waldorf, coming from Steiner’s book on child development, “distinguishes
three broad stages in child development, each lasting approximately seven years. The early years
education focuses on providing practical, hands-on activities and environments that encourage creative
play. Waldorf's path to literacy is through work and play. (Waldorf).
Here’s what staff and students think about their own Waldorf Education:
Karen Rivers, a Waldorf educator, and author, says, “Every aspect of the [Waldorf] curriculum
that’s introduced in each grade is brought based on the knowledge on how the child’s inner life is
unfolding at that stage” (Marin Waldorf).
Another Waldorf teacher says, “What happens in a Waldorf School is that the approach is artistic,
and it is also rigorous” (Marin Waldorf).
Pediatrician Christopher Lind-White says, “The Waldorf approach is to really wait for when they
are ready for it, even hungry for it, and when you introduce it to them, they take it up with enthusiasm,
rather than feeling pressure to go there” (Marin Waldorf).
Ex-student Bonnie Campbell says, “It’s never really a command. It’s never do this, or do that, or
this is what you should think, ever. These are the possibilities. This is one way to look at it. What do you
think?” (Marin Waldorf).
While Waldorf is a holistic education, with some freedom, to sing and tell stories, to allow the
students to discovery knowledge, and there’s a fundamental philosophy of developing a child’s inner
goodness, beauty, and truth, Waldorf’s Rudolph Steiner influenced curriculum exists as a middle ground
between the ultimate complete freedom of Summerhill and traditional authoritarian schools. Waldorf does
not “belong clearly to the traditional-religious or progressive-humanistic stream of educational theory and
practice. It has elements characteristic of both, and many elements unique to itself” (Koetzsch, 1997, June
2). Kim John Payne, Author of Simplicity Parenting, says of a Waldorf Education: “This pairing of
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introducing the world with the developmental capacity means that the child is not overwhelmed, but
always stretched” (Marin Waldorf).
Amy Gutmann pointed that John Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago played
a middle ground between complete freedom and authoritarianism, when she explained that the adults have
both the power to deliberate, and to make decisions, whereas the students only had the power to
deliberate, Waldorf too, also represents a compromise on freedom. Summerhill is better, because
Summerhill was willing to fight for their freedom to attend classes voluntarily, when the British
government tried to bully Summerhill out of existence, in the 1990s (Summerhill). The best explanation
of why Waldorf doesn’t match up to the standards set out by the democratic schools of Summerhill, or
Sudbury, was given by Daniel Greenburg, an educator at a Sudbury democratic school. According to
Daniel Greenburg, educational institutions have an either/or decision to make, when it comes to
empowering their own students autonomy and individuality. To Greenburg, a school either is free, or it
isn’t; it’s all or nothing. “Traditional schools that are rigid, at least 90% of the people who go there hate
them and they know the enemy. A school that is allowing you to a little bit of freedom, seduces you into
thinking that the little bit of freedom, where you’re really being manipulated, is the real thing, that allows
you to be manipulated all of your life” (Sudbury Model School).
Robert Robertson Rusk compared and contrasted many of the great educational theorists of all
time, and his understanding of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “natural or negative education” was as a
“preventive education”. Rousseau’s education “is not a preparation for life but rather a preparation against
the social conditions in which, Rousseau fully realises, Emile must later play his part” (Rusk, 1972).
“Rousseau does not aim at producing an unsocial creature; he hopes to establish in Emile an ethical constancy before his inevitable entrance into society” … “The ideal of the superman of Plato, Quintilian and others gives place with Rousseau to the ideal of the common or natural man; the great souls, he believes, can find their way alone” … “The art of teaching,” Rousseau further explains, “consists in making the pupil wish to learn.” … “We learn nothing from a lesson we detest.” … “Surround him with all the lessons you would have him learn without awaking his suspicions” (Rusk, 1972).
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“Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.” ~unknown
Rousseau want the possibilities of each stage of life to be fully exploited before proceeding to the
next, “a principle assumed later by Froebel and Montessori, although generally associated with the name
of Dewey” (Rusk, 1972). B.F. Skinner totally opposes any thought of stages in child development.
The rationalization for the current American education system, is that one day, the plethora of
mundane activities will eventually lead to creating a whole person, who will need the knowledge later on
in life. Rousseua believes that this education is “cruel” since it “sacrifices the present to an uncertain
future”, and only prepares “him for some far-off happiness which he may never enjoy” (Rusk, 1972).
Again: “What a poor sort of foresight to make a child wretched in the present with the more or less
doubtful hope of making him happy at some future day” (Rusk, 1972). Children should be free because
childhood was fun and wonderful.
“Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes
regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace? Why rob
these innocents of the joys which pass so quickly, of that precious gift which they cannot abuse? Why fill
with bitterness the fleeting days of early childhood, days which will no more return for them than for
you? Fathers, can you tell when death will call your children to him? Do not lay up sorrow for yourselves
by robbing them of the short span which nature has alloted to them. As soon as they are aware of the joy
of life, let them rejoice in it, so that whenever God calls them they may not die without having tasted the
joy of life” (Rusk, 1972).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s fundamental maxim is “that man is truly free who desires what he is
able to perform, and does what he desires”, and “apply it to childhood, and all the rules of education
spring from it” (Rusk, 1972). Rousseau’s influence would be carried by Montessori, just as Rousseau’s
aim of a “well-regulated liberty”. The doctrine of innate goodness of the young human is inherited “by
Fichte, Hegel and Froebel” (Rusk, 1972).
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While Rousseau believes that the “first impulses of nature are always rights; there is no original
sin in the human heart, the how and the why of the entrance of every vice can be traced”, he warns against
spoiling the child, and makes a distinction between liberty and license, which will result in a “merry
child”, or a “spoilt darling”, respectively, so “let them learn to discriminate” (Rusk, 1972).
When Rousseau speaks about putting constraints on the child, he sounds more like Waldorf
Education, than the idealized Summerhill, though it’s hard to tell for sure. Rousseau doesn’t want a
“spoilt darling” for obvious reasons, and therefore sets to put down structure for the child. However, if the
child falls for the trap of accepting the “freedom” that you have gave them, then they will fall for illusions
of freedom, and will be manipulated, everywhere they go. Waldorf puts pressure on the students to learn,
without breaking them. Watching Sudbury Schools and Summerhill videos, I am annoyed at the inherent
lazy nothingness the students seem to be manifesting in, and at Waldorf, there is poking and prodding, a
nudge in some direction, which can lead to where the teacher wants it to go, or the child’s education may
take an entirely different direction that the one you had designed for them. Rousseau has a curriculum for
the student, but he also realizes how students want to be free, and to do as they choose to do, so he says
that instruction and curriculum has to be given to them without them knowing it. The student can never
know, that like The Truman Show, their entire educational world was created for him/her to be a super
citizen of the world. Towards the end of Ender’s Game, Ender confronts the school administration, and
says that he quits the game. He confronts the teachers, because he starts to view them as the enemy, and
not the buggers. Just for Summerhill students to understand the pressures of life, the bills the University
has to pay, the teachers’ lives… but I would rather air on the side of caution, and be idealistic like
Summerhill. Perhaps scientific achievement can happen better without these constraints. Besides, real life
constrains us all, and is a most relentless teacher.
Rousseau would train his pupil to be “as self-reliant as possible”, whereas he contends that the
ordinary educator “teaches him everything except self-knowledge and self-control, the arts of life and
happiness” (Rusk, 1972). The psycho-analysts pointed out by Robert R. Rusk said that without “the
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reforming influences of education”, the individual “would remain a selfish, jealous, impulsive,
aggressive, dirty, immodest, cruel, egocentric and conceited animal, inconsiderate of the needs of others,
and unmindful of the complicated social and ethical standards that go to make a civilised society” (Jones,
1913). So Rousseau is confronted with a paradox. Jean-Jacques says that his only rule for his pupil is that
he must obey, and all the power of the parent, absolute dominion, to be given to him, but then later on, he
says, for the pupil to understand that there are no rules. “If the voice of instinct is not strengthened by
habit, it soon dies.” Rousseau's paradox: “The only habit the child should be allowed to contract is that of
having no habits.” Later he says of Emile: “No doubt he must submit to rules; but the chief rule is this—
be able to break the rule if necessary” (Rusk, 1972).
Rousseau wants to push the young Emile far, as BF Skinner calls for, to see what “man can make
out of man”; but, unlike B.F Skinner, Rousseau retains the child’s soul, and inner dignified natural being,
of which B.F. Skinner has a great disdain for, since he cannot a “child’s soul”. “The only useful habit for
children is to be accustomed to submit without difficulty to necessity, and the only useful habit for man is
to submit without difficulty to the rule of reason. Every other habit is a vice” (Rusk, 1972).
Rousseau teaches us to “Give your scholar no verbal lessons; he should be taught by experience alone.” (page 183). “Reading is the curse of childhood... When I thus get rid of children's lessons, I get rid of the chief cause of their sorrow.” ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.” … “I am pretty sure Emile will learn to read and write before he is ten, just because I care very little whether he can do so before he is fifteen.” … “Never substitute the symbol for the thing signified unless it is impossible to show the thing itself.” (page 184)” (Rusk, 1972).
Dewey agrees with Locke rather than with Rousseau maintaining: “If a person cannot foresee the
consequences of his act, and is not capable of understanding what he is told about its outcome by those
with more experience it is impossible for him to act intelligently.”(Rusk, 1972, pg. 185).
“In contrast to Plato, who advocated beginning with the false first, Rousseau protests against young children learning fables. “Men may be taught by fables; children require the naked truth.” … “The positive education of the childhood period comprises physical and sensory training. The physical education is modelled on that of Sparta. “This was the education of the Spartans; they were not taught to stick to their books, they were taught to steal their dinners. Were they any the worse for it in after life? Ever ready for victory, they crushed their foes in every kind of warfare, and the prating Athenians were as much afraid of their words as of their blows.” … “A feeble body creates a feeble mind.” … “All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only
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because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm.” … On curriculum: “Rousseau's attempt to shift the centre of gravity from the curriculum to the child may be regarded as a parallel revolution in education.” … “In society”, Rousseau maintains, “a man either lives at the cost of others or he owes them in labour the cost of his keep; there is no exception to this rule... Man in society is bound to work; rich or poor, weak or strong, every idler is a thief.” (Rusk, 1972).
“The Consultative Committee's Report of The Primary School repeats: “the curriculum is to be
thought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be
stored.” (Rusk, 1972).
Sudbury Valley School
I am equally pleased with Sudbury Valley School as I am with Summerhill School. It may be said
that I’m being redundant by including both on the list, since both have democratic governance, and
complete autonomy for each and every student. However, Sudbury schools are more plentiful in America,
and by providing another model for democratic governance, we can compare and contrast, and take the
best of both worlds. Like Jerome Bruner, Sudbury schools believe in Constructivism and Discovery
learning. The School Assembly Meeting, based from the New England town hall model, manages all
aspects of the school, including staff hiring and facilities. There’s no set curriculum, or compulsory
attendance; there’s age mixing; and there’s autonomous governing power. Sudbury Valley School was
founded in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1968. Beginning in the 1980s, several dozen schools opened
based on Sudbury Valley (Sudbury School).
Two guiding principles for the establishment of all Sudbury Schools are:
1) “The educational belief that children are extremely good at (and therefore don't need to be taught) the main behaviors needed by adults, such as creativity, imagination, alertness, curiosity, thoughtfulness, responsibility and judgment. What children lack is experience, which can be gained if adults simply stay out of the way”, and;
2) “The sociopolitical belief that having full democratic rights in childhood is the best way to become an adult who is comfortable functioning within a democracy” (Sudbury School).
“The fundamental premises of the school are simple: that all people are curious by nature; that the
most efficient, long-lasting, and profound learning takes place when started and pursued by the learner;
that all people are creative if they are allowed to develop their unique talents; that age-mixing among
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students promotes growth in all members of the group; and that freedom is essential to the development
of personal responsibility.” (Sudbury School).
Montessori
Marie Montessori believed in children’s innate “lifeforce”. Children are smart, and experience is
how they best learn. Montessori schools offer the illusion of freedom. Ultimately, all of the choices are
presented by the educator, and the children can only choose what is presented in front of them. Maria
Montessori stresses the development of a child’s own initiative and natural abilities, as Johann Heinrich
Pestalozzi and Jean Piaget both believe, which she called the “Follow the Child” model. Albert Einstein
spent a year at a Pestalozzi-inspired school, and Einstein gave it credit for giving him the freedom to
begin his thinking about the theory of relativity. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page claim their
creativity and spirit of independent came from their Montessori education (Koetzsch, 1997, June 2).
Rousseau proposes to design the curriculum around the child, but he also maintains that he must
give the illusion of freedom, because one does want they want to do. So Montessori method would be
good with children. The parents can set the environment up, and creatively play along with their children,
learning and teaching in the process, and by allowing the child to choose which station they want to go to,
they will be more involved, since they will believe that it was them who made the ultimate choice. Once
they have broke out of their Truman Show encapsulated world, then the old-fashioned model of
persuasion is the only way to win the child back. The Montessori method can be an effective curriculum
if executed properly, and we can only hope that the child isn’t resentful of the trickery that was played
upon them, at such a young age, when their synapses were reaching peak point.
Alexander Sutherland Neill said that the Montessori System was “well-known as a system of
directed play”, but it is “an artificial way of making the child learn by doing.”
“Every time we show Tommy how his engine works we are stealing from that child the joy of life – the joy of discovery – the joy of overcoming an obstacle. Worse! We make that child come to believe that he is inferior, and must depend on help” (Neill, 1960).
St. John’s College
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St. John’s College’s (Annapolis, MD; Santa Fe, NM) curriculum is unique enough to be analyzed.
At St. John’s, there’s no teachers, and no tests. Instead, there’s mentors, and there’s pass/fail oral exams.
The mentors are in the classroom to facilitate discussion, but the students are expected to have read the
material, and to discuss those ideas they have read to their colleagues. The mentors do not give out
traditional grades, but instead, does oral exams where the students are expected to speak about the ideas
the course offered. This organization encourages students to develop meaningful and important
relationships with each other, as well as taking the pressure of rote memorization off of them.
The fundamental purpose of St. John’s College is to develop a strong mind, by reading “Great
Books” program, where they have developed a reading list of the “greatest minds” in the Western World.
One of their publications headlines “The following teachers will return to St John's next year”, and then
proceeds to list their “teachers”: “Homer, Euclid, Chaucer, Einstein, Du Bois, Virgil, Augustine,
Aristotle, Washington, Woolf, Plato, Tocqueville, Austen, Newton, Cervantes, Darwin, Mozart, Galileo,
Tolstoy, Descartes, Freud,” etc. Listed below is the reading list for students of St. John’s College:
“FRESHMAN YEAR
HOMER: Iliad, Odyssey
AESCHYLUS: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound
SOPHOCLES: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes, Ajax
THUCYDIDES: Peloponnesian War
EURIPIDES: Hippolytus, Bacchae
HERODOTUS: Histories
ARISTOPHANES: Clouds
PLATO: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
ARISTOTLE: Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals
EUCLID: Elements
LUCRETIUS: On the Nature of Things
PLUTARCH: Lycurgus, Solon
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NICOMACHUS: Arithmetic
LAVOISIER: Elements of Chemistry
HARVEY: Motion of the Heart and Blood
Essays by: Archimedes, Fahrenheit, Avogadro, Dalton, Cannizzaro, Virchow, Mariotte, Driesch, Gay-Lussac, Spemann, Stears, J.J. Thompson, Mendeleyev, Berthollet, J.L. Proust
SOPHOMORE YEAR
HEBREW BIBLE
THE BIBLE: New Testament
ARISTOTLE: De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
APOLLONIUS: Conics
VIRGIL: Aeneid
PLUTARCH: "Caesar," "Cato the Younger," "Antony," "Brutus"
EPICTETUS: Discourses, Manual
TACITUS: Annals
PTOLEMY: Almagest
PLOTINUS: The Enneads
AUGUSTINE: Confessions
MAIMONIDES: Guide for the Perplexed
ST. ANSELM: Proslogium
AQUINAS: Summa Theologica
DANTE: Divine Comedy
CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales
MACHIAVELLI: The Prince, Discourses
KEPLER: Epitome IV
RABELAIS: Gargantua and Pantagruel
PALESTRINA: Missa Papae Marcelli
MONTAIGNE: Essays
VIETE: Introduction to the Analytical Art
BACON: Novum Organum
SHAKESPEARE: Richard II, Henry IV, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Sonnets
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POEMS BY: Marvell, Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poets
DESCARTES: Geometry, Discourse on Method
PASCAL: Generation of Conic Sections
BACH: St. Matthew Passion, Inventions
HAYDN: Quartets
MOZART: Operas
BEETHOVEN: Third Symphony
SCHUBERT: Songs
MONTEVERDI: L'Orfeo
STRAVINSKY: Symphony of Psalms
JUNIOR YEAR
CERVANTES: Don Quixote
GALILEO: Two New Sciences
HOBBES: Leviathan
DESCARTES: Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
MILTON: Paradise Lost
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Maximes
LA FONTAINE: Fables
PASCAL: Pensees
HUYGENS: Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
ELIOT: Middlemarch
SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise
LOCKE: Second Treatise of Government
RACINE: Phaedre
NEWTON: Principia Mathematica
KEPLER: Epitome IV
LEIBNIZ: Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay On Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace
SWIFT: Gulliver's Travels
HUME: Treatise of Human Nature
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ROUSSEAU: Social Contract, The Origin of Inequality
MOLIERE: Le Misanthrope
ADAM SMITH: Wealth of Nations
KANT: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
MOZART: Don Giovanni
JANE AUSTEN: Pride and Prejudice
DEDEKIND: "Essay on the Theory of Numbers"
"Articles of Confederation," "Declaration of Independence," "Constitution of the United States of America"
HAMILTON, JAY AND MADISON: The Federalist
TWAIN: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
WORDSWORTH: The Two Part Prelude of 1799
Essays by: Young, Taylor, Euler, D. Bernoulli, Orsted, Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell
SENIOR YEAR
Supreme Court opinions
GOETHE: Faust
DARWIN: Origin of Species
HEGEL: Phenomenology of Mind, "Logic" (from the Encyclopedia)
LOBACHEVSKY: Theory of Parallels
TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy in America
LINCOLN: Selected Speeches
FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Selected Speeches
KIERKEGAARD: Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
WAGNER: Tristan and Isolde
MARX: Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
DOSTOEVSKI: Brothers Karamazov
TOLSTOY: War and Peace
MELVILLE: Benito Cereno
O'CONNOR: Selected Stories
WILLIAM JAMES; Psychology, Briefer Course
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NIETZSCHE: Beyond Good and Evil
FREUD: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON: Selected Writings
DUBOIS: The Souls of Black Folk
HUSSERL: Crisis of the European Sciences
HEIDEGGER: Basic Writings
EINSTEIN: Selected papers
CONRAD: Heart of Darkness
FAULKNER: Go Down Moses
FLAUBERT: Un Coeur Simple
WOOLF: Mrs. Dalloway
Poems by: Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Valery, Rimbaud
Essays by: Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Millikan, Minkowski, Rutherford, Davisson, Schrodinger,
Bohr, Maxwell, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Mendel, Boveri, Sutton, Morgan, Beadle & Tatum, Sussman,
Watson & Crick, Jacob & Monod, Hardy” (St. John’s College).
While St. John’s College offers an alternative form of education, one I would greatly enjoy
myself, it’s not democratic, and doesn’t offer the same freedoms as Sudbury and Summerhill does.
Free Skool
Free Skools are an extremely novel and radical idea. Free Skools says that education can happen
anywhere—in the streets, in homes, in public parks, in buildings, anywhere, and all that is needed, is folks
who want to teach, and folks who want to learn. Bloomington, Indiana has a website up for a Free Skool,
which hasn’t been updated for two years (Bloomington Free Skool). So while Bloomington, Indiana
cannot brag about having a Free Skool in their vicinity, their idea cannot be ignored. The point of a Free
Skool is to provide an education, completely made-up of volunteers, for no tuition. Free Skools are
literally “free”. In an article about Free Skools, specifically Ithaca Free Skool in New York, some of the
types of classes offered were “Mushroom Hunting, Bike Repair, Know Your Rights with Debtors, and
D.I.Y. Movie Making” (Gershon, 2010, September 16). The Anarchist Free School in Toronto is
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described as “a volunteer-run, autonomous collective offering free courses, workshops, and lectures”
(Anarchistic Free School).
According to the great Wikipedia, an anarchistic Free Skool is “a decentralized network in which
skills, information, and knowledge are shared without hierarchy or the institutional environment of formal
schooling” (Anarchistic Free School). Many times Free Skools operate on a “gift economy”, where one
gives gifts for their education, if they so choose. There is no obligation to give. Free schools have their
roots in the anarchist Escuela Moderna (Spanish for “Modern School”), founded in Barcelona, Spain by
Francesc Ferrer I Guàrdia in 1901. The goal of the school was to “educate the working class in a rational,
secular and non-coercive setting” (Escuela Moderna). Free Skools are “at heart, non-institutional, non-
authoritarian, and counter-cultural” (Anarchistic Free School). Eventually, the Escuela Moderna failed in
1906, while Francesc Ferrer I Guardia was in prison, and then, in 1909, Francesc Ferrer I Guardia was
executed by firing squad in Barcelona in 1909 for sedition (Escuela Moderna).
One year before Francesc Ferrer I Guardia was murdered by Spain, he wrote The Origins and
Ideals of the Modern School (Guardia, 1908). Other influential educational theorists for Free Skools were
“Paul Goodman, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Herb Kohl, Jonathan Kozol, and James Herndon”, and major
books that influenced the Free Skool movement during the 60s and 70s countercultural revolution in
America were “A. S. Neill's 1960 Summerhill, George Dennison's 1969 The Lives of Children, and
Jonathan Kozol's 1972 Free Schools” (Free School Movement).
Free Skools opens up so many possibilities. Right now, major Universities offer free courses
online for the general public to view. Wellesley College, MIT, Harvard U., Tufts U., Boston U., Stanford,
UC Berkley, Penn State, Yale, Ohio State, Oxford U, and many others offers courses such as Roman
Architecture, Photography, Human Evolution, Biology, Mechanics, Philosophy, Physics, Poetry, and
Web Design. Robotics, Poetry, Guitar lessons, and so much more (Marcus, 2013, August 25) (800 Free
Online Courses). If folks are serious about their education, they can gather together, and watch these
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online web series, from prestigious Universities for free. Too bad hierarchies destroy relationships… or
perhaps, my colleagues aren’t as serious about education as I am. That’s definitely possible.
In Graduate school, I feel as though the ideas I am “learning” are ideas I could have found
myself, or had already known, and since I am not allowed to talk to other students in class, I cannot
network, then there’s no point to Graduate school. I am paying thousands of dollars just to create enemies.
Just to let these dictators ruin my reputation, by subordinating me, and smashing any ties I have with any
other student, especially the beautiful ones. The professor molester oppressors, by ensuring their
dictatorships with classroom management tactics, create a culture that is toxic, and is not safe and positive
environment for learning. Maybe for children, I can see some justification for “management”, but in
Graduate school, most folks are alert, and wanting to interact with others, and are prepared and ready to
learn. By focusing only on their power, and with the rest of the other students immediately walking
lockstep behind their Master, this forces me into isolation, and confusion. Do I risk the vitriol and scorn
of the professor molester oppressors by standing up to them, and allowing for the Uncle Toms easy
attacks upon my character? Or do I go along with the other students, and lose my soul in the process, just
to “get by”, and get my piece of paper diploma, so I can get a good job, and move on with my life? While
I can’t sit still in a professor molester oppressor’s class, and I offer some minor resistance, the latter has
so far been my choice. I try to blend in, and not ruffle any feathers. I was Valedictorian of my High
School, maxing out on Math classes, since nobody had gone as far as I went, and graduating with the
highest G.P.A of anybody else (since it was above a 4.0, and weighted classes were first offered for my
class). I know how to appease oppressor molester professors. While I sit next to the Uncle Toms in class,
because of their blind obedience to authority, they cannot understand me. This isolation used to bother me
greatly, because I want to socialize with my colleagues, create new friendships, etc. We are all going to be
doing the same things in school, when we get there, and will have similar experiences. Also, we are all
students, so we have plenty in common to start a relationship. Hierarchy demands that they are King, or
Queen, and all the rest are subjects, and the subjects comply with the stupidest, most ridiculous orders.
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Eventually, we will be the “King” or “Queen” of the classroom, and I expect my colleagues to go into the
schools where they will be teaching, and they will teach the same way, but it will not be the same, since
Grade School students aren’t as willing to participate and work at their education as the adults are. In fact,
one teaching candidate already complained that one of her students said that she was the “worst teacher
they’ve ever had”. The only solace I get, is by thinking, if I was King of the classroom, and they were my
students, then they would be kissing my butts as they have kissed all of the oppressor’s butts since I’ve
been there. They may look at me as different, or radical, or whatever, but I look at them as all the same—
immoral, soulless, and obedient. The indoctrinal nature of “higher education” is so unanimous, and
complete, it leaves me wondering… am I the only freedom-loving American here? Am I the only one
with a moral core, with a set of principled values to live for? Am I the last Mohican?
“The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master , unless he transforms strength into
right, and obedience into duty.” ~Jean Jacques Rousseau
“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its
duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible
with man's nature; to renounce all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.” ~Jean
Jacques Rousseau
Free Skools are like Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers’ Breakfast Program, since it’s an
institution created outside the State, which carries with it, great revolutionary potential. A major downfall
is that the teacher’s aren’t being paid. Paying the teachers seem to go against the creed of anarchistic free
skools, but it doesn’t. We live in a capitalist society, and we all need to make money in order to eat, to
pay the electric bill, and survive. While I love Ralph Nader’s work, I would not have collected 15,000
signatures for him, if I was not being paid. Paying somebody to do something they want to do voluntarily,
is the dream of America; to be paid for what one loves to do is the goal. So if Free Skools can figure out
some way to finance great quality teachers, then perhaps Bloomington, Indiana’s Free Skool would still
be in operation.
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A Free Skool that holds a series of free lectures, where educators and students alike learn from
each other, has much potential. Many educated folks like an informed lecturer, and I can stomach most
anybody for about 5 or 10 minutes. Some classes I would like to teach, are Educational Theory, 48 Laws
to Power, US History (Zinn), Civics, Bill of Rights, Kentucky History, Kentucky Constitution, Robert's
Rules of Order, Geography, World Civilization (Chris Harman), a Great Books program, etc.
Here’s a link to Harvard’s free courses: http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-
initiative And Yale’s: http://oyc.yale.edu/ . Other online learning websites: http://academicearth.org/
http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses http://www.onlinecourses.com/lectures/
The Reggio Emilia Approach
The Reggio Emilia Approach gets it’s name from a city in Italy, and it’s “an educational
philosophy focused on preschool and primary education”. Waldorf, Montessori, and Reggio Emilia
educations all rest upon child development psychology, to the chagrin of B.F. Skinner. Loris Malaguzzi
founded the Reggio Emilia Approach right after World War II. The philosophy going into the Reggio
Emilia Approach shares a “theoretical kinship” with John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Vygotsky and Jerome
Bruner (Reggio Emilia).
The Reggio Emilia philosophy is based upon the 4 following set of principles:
1) Children must have some control over the direction of their learning; 2) Children must be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, seeing, and hearing; 3) Children have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world that children must be allowed to explore and; 4) Children must have endless ways and opportunities to express themselves (Reggio Emilia).
The Reggio Emilia approach to education is to treat children as individuals, since their
personalities develop during childhood development, based “on the principles of respect, responsibility,
and community through exploration and discovery in a supportive and enriching environment based on
the interests of the children through a self-guided curriculum” (Reggio Emilia).
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Loris Malaguzzi believed that children had “a hundred of languages” already embedded in them,
and it was the educator’s job to help the child express themselves effectively to others their ideas the best
way they know how. “Reggio teachers provide children different avenues for thinking, revising,
constructing, negotiating, developing and symbolically expressing their thoughts and feelings. The goal is
for the adults and children to better understand one another” (Reggio Emilia). “Another characteristic that
is counter to the beliefs of many Western educators is the importance of the child's ability to negotiate in
the peer group” (Reggio Emilia). In America, all power goes to the dictator, and the hordes of obedient
immorals follow along, hook, line, and sinker. Malcolm X made a distinction between House Negroes,
and Field Negroes. House Negroes didn’t understand why the Field Negroes wanted to run away, because
they had it so good. They loved their masters, more than the masters loved themselves. They would
wonder, “Why would we live this big house? This nice food, and good clothing?” But the Field Negro
was out in the fields, and had no such luxuries. The Field Negro was being forced to hard labor in the
sunshine the entire day, at the threat of violence. Even though both the Field Negroes and the House
Negroes were slaves, forced to be somebody’s else’s bitch, the House Negroes loved their chains, and
would be more aggressive, and shittier than the masters themselves. Think of Samuel Jackson’s character
in Django. Hierarchy destroys relationships, because once the Master tells you to jump, you aren’t
allowed to love when you please, you aren’t allowed to foster other meaningful relationships; you must
jump immediately, without even asking “How high?” Good communication between teachers and
students aren’t even a priority in traditional American schools. Only obedience, and submission is. The
Reggio Emilia Approach works on getting all children’s one hundred languages spokely well and clearly,
so that communication can be established, between students and teachers and parents. The children are
encouraged to play, creativity, with others. Childhood is when one develops their personality to begin
with, and to have proper social relationships is absolutely key to being well-adjusted into society. But
traditional American education does not do this. Instead, it’s the opposite. Many critics of home-
schooling say that those who are being home-schooled will not be properly socialized… the only thing
the American educational system is socializing, is obedience to authority, and if you are a child stuck in a
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traditional American educational system, being “properly socialized” will be detrimental to your soul,
your innate goodness, and your relationships, since you will not know yourself, your morals or ethics,
which are doubtful that you have them, because once you submit, all of your thoughts about the world
cease to exist. You aren’t an expert in History, or Mechanics, or Science… you’re a slave, an intellectual
slave, who is going to be manipulated for the rest of your life. The teachers in traditional American
schools do not care if you will succeed and do well in life; they do not care for the daily troubles and
struggles one goes through. They expect you to regurgitate the information you could have gotten from
Wikipedia, and they do not allow you to network with anybody else, because that type of socialization
will eventually expose the professor molester oppressors for who they are. Both Piaget and Vygotsky, two
psychologists who form the bedrock of Educational Child Development theory, believed in practical
activities in a social environment too. Vygotsky even believed in creative play, just like Loris Malaguzzi
(Vygotsky). Rousseau believed that children should play outside, and become one with nature again. To
discover as the caveman, as the aboriginals did.
John Dewey, the so-called father of progressive education, did not view school as an institution to
prepare for future living. He believed that that school was “primarily a social institution and a process of
living” (Dewey, 1897). To Dewey, education and learning are social and interactive processes, and the
school itself should reflect this. Dewey believed that student thrive in an environment where they are
allowed to experience, and interact with the curriculum, in order to take part in their own learning. Dewey
notes that “to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train
him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities” (Dewey, 1897).
Both Rousseau and the notorious behaviorist B.F. Skinner both highly valued the environment of
one’s learning. The physical environment of a Reggio Emilia approach to education is also crucial.
The preschools are generally filled with indoor plants and vines, and awash with natural light. Classrooms open to a center piazza, kitchens are open to view, and access to the surrounding community is assured through wall-size windows, courtyards, and doors to the outside in each classroom. Entries capture the attention of both children and adults through the use of mirrors (on the walls, floors, and ceilings), photographs, and children's work accompanied by transcriptions of
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their discussions. These same features characterize classroom interiors, where displays of project work are interspersed with arrays of found objects and classroom materials. In each case, the environment informs and engages the viewer (Reggio Emilia).
Groups of children will stay with one particular teacher for a three-year period, creating
consistency and an environment where there are no added pressures from having to form new
relationships.
Unschooling
Home schooling is simply the keeping of one’s children at home, and to teach them yourself.
Some folks have the time and resources to do this, and everybody should consider this option. The
proposition is a simple one, and in order for a school to “win” over the children, they would have to offer
a wonderful curriculum, a friendly and welcoming culture. Competition helps public education. Rousseau
writes Emile directly to “mothers”, to protect the children from outside opinions. The problem with home
schooling, is that the children will only become as smart as their parents; the children who are only home
schooled will never exceed the knowledge level of their parents, when each generation should build upon
the last, to grow and progress, to move civilization forward. Our children should be smarter and better
than us, if we properly educated them. Jean Jacque University would give your child more options than
you could ever dream of, and you are stupid if you do not send your child there.
John Holt is an author that is associated with home schooling. Holt even coined the term
“unschooling” in the 1970s, and is considered the father of the “unschooling movement” (John Holt).
Unschooling is the rejection of the compulsory attendance and participation of public education. John
Holt believed that “The children in the classroom, despite their rich backgrounds and high IQs, were, with
few exceptions, frightened, timid, evasive, and self-protecting; the infants at home were bold adventurers”
(John Holt).
“The primary reason children did not learn in schools was fear: fear of getting the wrong answers, fear of being ridiculed by the teacher and classmates, fear of not being good enough. [John Holt] maintained that this was made worse by children being forced to study things that they were not necessarily interested in.” (John Holt).
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Unschoolers “learn through their natural life experiences including play,game play, household
responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective
classes, family, mentors, and social interaction.” (John Holt). John Holt authored How Children Fail,
How Children Learn, Escape from Childhood: The Rights and Needs of Children, and Instead of
Education. Unschooling is also called “radical parenting”.
As you can see, National Training Laboratories from Bethel, Maine drew this pyramid of
retentions rates. Aspiring educators, of a real authentic proper education, can learn all they need to know
just by looking at this picture—The Learning Pyramid. Current American schools have loudly and
proudly chosen to “teach” using the absolute worst possible teaching method, through “lecture”. Hitler
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would admire the abuse of the spoken word to manipulate the masses. Jim Jones also used the spoken
word to brainwash, manipulate, and exploit all those underneath his dictatorship too. Lectures only have
the students retaining 5% of the lectures given. Reading has a 10% retention. So instead of lecturing the
entire class, the teacher could have all of the students read the chapter in the book, and they would have
gotten a better education. They would have learned more material. Teachers in America would double
their student’s learning if they would just shut the fuck up, and just merely administered and enforced
strict silent reading. Much can be inferred from The Learning Pyramid. Demonstrations is how folks
learn. So I can learn about Simon Girty by reading a book about him, but when you make me give a 1
minute speech/synopsis to the entire class, that “demonstration” increases my retention rates, 6 times
more than lecture. Now the bottom three are the most important, since they hold the most retention, and
therefore a greater deeper understanding will be gained by an educator’s students if they would focus on
the participatory methods of teaching: 1) Discussion; 2) Practice, and; 3) Teaching others.
Nobody should ever listen to me, or anybody else, for that matter. Only their consciousness shall
be their guides. Because I tell you the truth, and because I have no inclination to rule over you, you
should listen to me. At least you would know that I am telling you the truth. Dialogue teaches us, not just
because information is shared between communicators, but also because their worldviews collide. When
one speaks, Topic A is presented to the listener. When the listener speaks back, Topic A becomes imbued
with the listener’s perspective, and therefore becomes a different animal altogether: Topic B. Topic B is
the collision of worldviews between two individuals. Because Topic B exists, now the original speaker of
Topic A has to agree or disagree with Topic B, and digest what has been heard with their own
understandings of things, just as the listener had to do in the beginning. The new reality created between
two communicators is how they learn, since they will have to accept or reject the other person’s premise,
or conclusions. When folks are speaking, say if I can get some of the popular children speaking about the
War of 1812, because they are dialoguing, they are retaining that information better than any power point
demonstration, or speech to the class, or any reading or lecturing could teach.
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Practice doing is also experience, and virtually all educational theorists say that experience is true
education. Albert Einstein said that education is only experience, and that everything else, is information.
Since teaching others claims the highest rate of retention, then getting all of the students teaching
each other is the ultimate goal. While not everybody will learn with a lecture, by everybody in the class
giving a lecture, they all have learned what they lectured on… though it’s clear that everybody giving a
lecture to the class is not a great use of the class’s time. Maybe a short 5 minute speech about some topic,
but not like a whole class lecture. Especially since teachers don’t even talk to each other, when educators
can get the students teaching each other, they have succeeded beyond measure. Generally, the only person
getting a real education, is the teacher, since they are teaching, aka “lecturing”, they retain 90% the
knowledge the speak of; meanwhile, the poor children are expected to retain 100% of the boring drivel
spewing forth the oppressor’s stupid mouth, when science says they can only retain 5% of it. It’s amazing
anybody learns anything in school.
Black Schools
bell hooks is an educational theorist from Christian County, Kentucky. Christian County is
located on the southwest edge of Kentucky, bordering Tennessee. Christian County is the birth county of
the President of the Southern Confederate rebels: Jefferson Davis. Christian County is named after
William Christian, a notorious Indian genocider, fighting in the 7 Years War, and against Dragging Canoe
and the Cherokees during the American Revolution. William Christian married Patrick Henry’s sister.
William Christian established Fort William plantation with a 9,000 acre plot of ground in Louisville, and
plenty of African slaves to do all of William Christian’s work for him. The next year, 1786, one year after
he established Fort William Christian’s 1785 African Slave Plantation, from funds secured from the State
of Virginia for the countless murders of native Amerindians during the the 1754 French, British, and
Amerindian War, William Christian was killed in southern Indiana by Wabash Amerindians. (Christian
County).
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bell hooks, aka Gloria Jean Watkins, was born in Hopkinsville on September 25, 1952 to a
working class family. Her teenage years would have been during the turbulent 60s. bell hooks attended
The Booker T. Washington Colored School, which was located on 2nd street (Christian County History).
bell hooks graduated from Stanford University in 1973, earned her Masters in English from the
University of Wisconsin, did her dissertation with Toni Morrison, and hooks also taught at Yale
University. While segregation in Christian County has ended, there’s still a Booker T Washington Middle
and Elementary School in Christian County today. Christian County touts a 32% Black population.
Both bell hooks and Paulo Freire see education as the practice of freedom. hooks sees herself as
“a subject in resistance”, and that gives her the right to “define reality”. (hooks, 1994). For hooks,
“teaching is a performative act... that offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can
serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom,” instead of the typical “assembly-
line approach to learning”. hooks encourages students and teachers to “transgress”, and to seek more
ways to collaborate in order to make learning fun. For hooks, teaching is “a catalyst that calls everyone to
become more and more engaged”. … “To engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin as
teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers to cross boundaries.” (bell hooks, 1994).
bell hooks theoretical framework, at least when it comes to observing America, is through a
“white supremacist capitalist patriarchal lense” (hooks, 1994). “For black folks teaching—educating—
was fundamentally political because it was rooted in antiracist struggle. Indeed, my all-black grade
schools became the location where I experienced learning as revolution.” (hooks, 1994). bell hooks was
on the front lines of integration in America. Right before he died, Martin Luther King wondered if
integrating into a burning building was a good idea. Bell hooks looks upon her “Black” elementary school
experience with a high degree of fondness, and her “integrated” white high school experience as lacking.
“Almost all our teachers at Booker T. Washington were black women. They were committed to nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers—black folks who used our “minds.” We learned early that our devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of white racist colonization. Though they did not define or articulate these practices in theoretical terms, my teachers were
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enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial. Within these segregated schools, black children who were deemed exceptional, gifted, were given special care. Teachers with and for us to ensure that we would fulfill our intellectual destiny and by so doing uplift the race. My teachers were on a mission.” … “To fulfill that mission, my teachers made sure they “knew” us. They knew our parents, our economic status, where we worshipped, what our homes were like, and how we were treated in the family.” … “Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.”
For bell hooks, Black school was an exciting promising place, to think freely, and to participate in
freedom she did not get from her home.
“School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority.” … “When we entered racist, desegregated, white schools we left a world where teachers believed that to educate black children rightly would require a political commitment.” (hooks, 1994).
In Black schools, hooks speaks about a “political commitment” the educators had, to be realistic
about our education, because during the time of Black schools, while they represented promise and hope
for Black children, for the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal establishment, Black schools
represented a threat to their status quo. So for Black folks, Black schools offered a slim hope for Black
folks to be able to educate some of their children, the Talented 10th, a leadership vanguard, in order to
“uplift the race”. Since American schools block education from happening, we can learn much from the
struggle of the now non-existent Black schools.
Abraham Maslow developed “Maslow’s Hierarchy”, which is a pyramid that was created in 1943,
which diagrams what our human needs are, and how they rank in order of priorities and importance. On
the bottom of the pyramid are our human basic needs, such as food, water, clothing, housing etc.
(Maslow, 1943). After our basic human needs are met, then we advance up the pyramid, to more
complex, important needs, such as Safety, Love/Belonging with Others, Esteem, and then finally, the last
need, Self-Actualization.
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Maslow’s Hierarchy is the second pyramid which laughs directly in the face of America’s fake
and oppressive and toxic educational system. We have poverty in America. Over 10,000 JCPS students
are homeless. That’s 11%. How can we expect a child to learn to solve quadratic equations when they
have no permanent sense of self? There’s hunger, violence, and crime. Little Emily lives with her mother
and little sister in the living room of her aunt’s, her mother’s sister’s, house, and her father’s in prison for
some non-violent offence, for 20 years, more years were tacked on, due to confrontations with prison
guards. This Christmas they were robbed of the few presents their mother was able to get for them. And
when little Emily is having to deal with these issues, American schools expect her to come to school,
prepared, alert, and ready to learn in the overcrowded oppressive classrooms for the day. This makes no
sense. If American schools were held to account for the communities they reside in, then those schools in
impoverished areas would be working on poverty issues in the community. If Maslow’s Hierarchy is to be
used properly, we cannot begin to teach our children until they are ready to be taught. They need to eat,
sleep, and be living in safe environments. They need to be healthy, have good health insurance, and
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belong to a loving group, such as a family. They need to have self-esteem, and they need to be actualized.
Until we have allowed for an individual to grow up and form themselves, we cannot expect to properly
educate them. Once they live in safe neighborhoods, aren’t be bullied, stalked, robber, and have plenty of
food, then we can expect higher scores on their tests. Until the adults have gotten their issues straightened
out, there’s no reason to expect the children to be able to overcome the oppressive institutional structures
that have been firmly situated in place for millennia. Do not expect a child being beat up daily to pick up
Calculus, and to become an engineer overnight. If that child doesn’t leave the toxic environment, it’ll kill
him or her. Their life should be safe and secure before the direct order obedience brainwashing. This is
obvious. What isn’t obvious, is why would adults force expectations on children living in dire straits
when those same expectations aren’t required of the adults?
“In graduate school the classroom became a place I hated, yet a place where I struggled to claim and maintain my right to be an independent thinker. The university and the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility.” … “My reaction to this stress and to the ever-present boredom and apathy that pervaded my classes was to imagine ways that teaching and the learning experience could be different.” … “The first paradigm that shared my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring.” … “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” (hooks, 1994).
Virtue Is The Goal
Many educational theorists speak about creating a “good” person, or a virtuous child, as their
final objective for a true and proper education. In this regard, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is no different.
“Rousseau points out many instances of when ancient peoples failed with the increase of their knowledge, to argue his point that “the days of their poverty, simplicity and ignorance were also the days of their strength, their happiness and their innocence, that, as Hegel later said, ‘the owl of Minerva—the bird of wisdom, does not begin its flight till the evening shadows fall’. This argument is a defence of the supremacy of the moral life, for making virtue ruler. With Milton would he plead—‘Love virtue, she alone is free.’” (Rusk, 1972: 161).
“The end that one should set before oneself in the education of a young man, states Rousseau in the Project, “is to form his heart, his judgment, and his mind—in the order in which I have named them”, thus echoing the precept in Locke's Thoughts: “Tis virtue, then direct virtue, which is the hard and valuable part to be aimed at in education.” (Rusk, 1972: 158).
Children by the age of 2 to 3, have 3 quadrillion synapses (Woolfolk, 2010). By the time they are
10, their synapses have substantially been “pruned” down, to where most of the synapses have been
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destroyed, and only the ones that were used and made strong survive. This is the reason why it’s
encouraged to teach young children several languages when they are young, because when they are older,
they may not have the capacity to pronounce all of the necessary sounds of another language. Also, by
having so many neurotransmitters and synapses in their baby brains, this suggests that children are
literally smarter than everybody else. Children are in the process of growing and understanding life, so
while overall, adults may have more knowledge than children, in terms of intelligence, however, of using
brain power, of being able to learn new languages, children have better brains for soaking in new
knowledge, and they have a greater potential for higher order thinking than adults.
We do not want little weak students who are bullied by everybody in the world, who are always
naively convinced of the most ridiculous gullibilities of scheming schoolyard bullies, who are fucked
over, or robbed, raped, assaulted, or murdered. We want education to be meaningful and useful. Students
should learn to be strong, to understand themselves, to never surrender, to always be suspicious of those
barking orders, to have strong principled autonomy, an ethical soul, that sours with dignity, pride, and
self-respect, which comes from a good life, one that practices it’s virtues, that puts it’s morals into
practice, and through practice, efficacy is developed, and self-esteem is soon to follow.
“In his Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Men (1775), Rousseau wrote: “nothing can be more gentle than him [Man] in his primitive State, when placed by Nature at an equal Distance from the Stupidity of Brutes, and the pernicious good Sense of civilized Man; and equally confined by Instinct and Reason to the Care of providing against the Mischief which threatens him, he is withheld by natural Compassion from doing any Injury to others, so far form being ever so little prone even to return that which he has received. For according to the Axiom of the wise Locke, Where there is no Property, there can be no Injury… The more we reflect on this State, the more convinced we shall be, that it was the least subject of any to Revolutions, the best for Man, and that nothing could have dranw him out of it but some fatal Accident, which, for the public good, should never have happened. The Example of the Savages, most of whom have been found in this Condition , seems to confirm that Mankind was formed ever to remain in it, that this Condition is the real Youth of the World, and that all ulterior Improvements have been so many Steps, in Appearance towards the Perfection of Individuals, but in Fact towards the Decrepitness of the Species.” (Gregory, 1971).
Rousseau describes how folks tried to impress a North American Indian chief with European
“relics” of their civilization. Rousseau said,
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“Our Arms appeared heavy and inconvenient to him; our Shoes pinched his feet; our Cloaths incombered his Body; he would accept of nothing; at length, he was observed to take up a Blanket, and seemed to take great Pleasure in wrapping himself up in it. You must allow, said the Euroepan about him, that this, at least, is a useful Piece of Furniture? Yes, answered the Indian, I think it almost as good as the Skin of a Beast.” (Gregory, 1971).
Marina Abramovic in 1974 conducted a performance piece of art that she called Rhythm Zero.
Abramovic placed 72 objects on a table, and a sign nearby that told the audience they were allowed to use
the objects anyway that they choose, all the while, Abramovic laid completely still and passive, sitting on
a chair, in the middle of a large room, in Studio Morra, Naples, Italy. For six hours, from 8pm to 2am, the
audience members were allowed to do anything to Marina Abramovic that they wanted to do. The items
laying on the table included: a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, scissors, a gun, a single bullet, blue paint,
comb, bell, lipstick, pocket knife, fork, perfume, spoon, cotton, flowers, matches, candle, water, scarf,
mirror, drinking glass, polaroid camera, chains, nails, needle, safety pin, hairpin, brush, bandage, red
paint, white paint, scissors, pen, book, hat, handkerchief, sheet of white paper, kitchen knife, hammer,
saw, piece of wood, ax, stick, bone of lamb, newspaper, bread, wine, honey, salt, sugar, soap, cake, metal
pipe, scalpel, metal spear, box of razor blades, dish, flute, band aid, alcohol, medal, coat, shoes, chair,
leather strings, yarn, wire, sulphur, grapes, olive oil, rosemary branch, and an apple.
The audience members did virtually everything they could get away with. They cut Marina’s
neck, drank her blood, and covered up the gash with a piece of plastic. One of the audience members put
the bullet into the gun, and then put the gun into Marina’s hand, and was going to put pressure on her
finger on the trigger, to see if she would resist him manipulating his actions. Marina believed that she
should would have been raped if the wives were not there. They stuck rose thorns into her stomach. The
women would tell the men what to do to her. One audience member picked up the handkerchief and
wiped away her flowing tears, which she wasn’t able to control, because of an unbearable pity of those
suffering in humanity, because of the damned human race. The audience members ripped her shirt open.
They cut her hair. They carried her around. They lai her on the table, and stabbed the knife right between
her legs. Another person took the pistol, and threw it out of the window. After the 6 hours were finished,
Marina stood up, and immediately, everybody in the audience ran away, in order to avoid any type of
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confrontation. When Marina went home that night, she saw that some of her hair turned grey. Marina’s
lesson from this: “If you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.” (Abramovic, 1974).
“Washing ones hand of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with
the powerful, not to be neutral.” ~Paulo Freire
“Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him;
and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.” (Douglass, 1845).
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass tried to run to his former master’s house, and tell him about how Mr. Covey
had been treating him. His former master did not care. So Frederick Douglass was afraid of going back to
Mr. Covey, but he didn’t see any other choice. So Frederick Douglass stumbles back towards Mr. Covey,
who is well-known as being a “nigger breaker” in Maryland. At first, Mr. Covey acts as though
everything is normal, and doesn’t mention Douglass’s absence. Then, while Douglass was in the stable,
Mr. Covey sneaks up on Douglass, trying to get a rope around his legs.
“Whilst I was obeying his order to feed and get the horses ready for the field, and when in the act of going up the stable loft for the purpose of throwing down some blades, Covey sneaked into the stable, in his peculiar snake-like way, and seizing me suddenly by the leg, he brought me to the stable floor, giving my newly mended body a fearful jar. I now forgot my roots, and remembered my pledge to stand up in my own defense. The brute was endeavoring skillfully to get a slip-knot on my legs, before I could draw up my feet. As soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a sudden spring (my two day’s rest had been of much service to me,) and by that means, no doubt, he was able to bring me to the floor so heavily.”
“The fighting madness had come upon me, and I found my strong fingers firmly attached to the throat of my cowardly tormentor; as heedless of consequences, at the moment, as though we stood as equals before the law. The very color of the man was forgotten. I felt as supple as a cat, and was ready for the snakish creature at every turn. Every blow of his was parried, though I dealt no blows in turn. I was strictly on the defensive, preventing him from injuring me, rather than trying to injure him. I flung him on the ground several times, when he meant to have hurled me there. I held him so firmly by the throat, that his blood followed my nails. He held me, and I held him.”
“Well, my dear reader, this battle with Mr. Covey–undignified as it was, and as I fear my narration of it is–was the turning point in my “life as a slave.” It rekindled in my breast the smouldering embers of liberty; it brought up my Baltimore dreams, and revived a sense of my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW. It recalled to life my crushed self-respect and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed determination to be A FREEMAN. A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of
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humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.”
“He can only understand the effect of this combat on my spirit, who has himself incurred something, hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. Covey was a tyrant, and a cowardly one, withal. After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the dust, but, my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of manly independence. I had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form. When a slave cannot be flogged he is more than half free. He has a domain as broad as his own manly heart to defend, and he is really “a power on earth.” While slaves prefer their lives, with flogging, to instant death, they will always find Christians enough, like unto Covey, to accommodate that preference. From this time, until that of my escape from slavery, I was never fairly whipped. Several attempts were made to whip me, but they were always unsuccessful. Bruises I did get, as I shall hereafter inform the reader; but the case I have been describing, was the end of the brutification to which slavery had subjected me.” (Douglass, 1845).
Frederick Douglass taught himself to read and write, by trading items from the farm for reading
lessons with the neighborhood boys, after Hugh Auld ordered his wife to stop teaching him how to read
and write. The reasons why Hugh Auld told his wife to not allow Douglass to read was precisely what
Douglass needed to hear in order to figure out how to get his freedom. Hugh Auld didn’t want Douglass
to become educated because then he wouldn’t accept this station in life, and would, perhaps, run away.
From Douglass’s Chapter 6:
“Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me that A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just as this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it. Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistess, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was
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uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.” (Douglass, 1845).
Many times, other subjects of the oppressor become crueler to the other slaves—horizontal
violence—in defense of their master, because it pleases the master to do so.
Chapter 7: How slavery makes the slave mistress ugly.
“My mistress, who had kindly commenced to instruct me, had, in compliance with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by any one else. It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did not adopt this course of treatment immediately. She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of responsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute.”
“My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and in the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when I first went to live with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another. In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness.”
“The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband's precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a safe made all up of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that fully revealed her apprehension. She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.”
“From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this, however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell.”
“If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy. ” ~ Alvin Toffler. “You’ve
got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right
direction.” ~Alvin Toffler. “Change is not merely necessary to life—it is life.” ~Alvin Toffler.
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Bullies are able to manage through society, but those who cower and are victimized, are never
told to stand up for themselves, to punch back if need be, who are never taught any type of assertiveness,
are going to have issues throughout their entire lives. Rousseau’s noble savage would know if somebody
was trying to bully them. D.H. Lawrence’s Self-Pity poem points out what I feel: “I never saw a wild
thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough; without ever having felt sorry for
itself”. (Lawrence).
“All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him
strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm.” ~Rousseau in Emile.
I learned 5 Leadership Skills when working for Working America, a canvassing organization, and
those lessons, as well as the experience, taught me how to talk to people, and convince them to do what I
wanted them to do. This empowered me to be able to attempt to persuade somebody of something.
Learning about eye contact, and confident language proved invaluable for my actual life.
Jerry Farber 1
“How does sex show up in school? First of all, there's the sadomasochistic relationship between teachers and students. That's plenty sexual, although the price of enjoying it is to be unaware of what's happening. In walks the teacher in his Ivy League equivalent of a motorcycle jacket. In walks the teacher -- a kind of intellectual rough trade -- and flogs his students with grades, tests, sarcasm and snotty superiority until their very brains are bleeding. In Swinburne's England, the whipped school boy frequently grew up to be a flagelant. With us the perversion is intellectual but it's no less perverse.”
“Sex also shows up in the classroom as academic subject matter -- sanitized and abstracted, thoroughly divorced from feeling. You get "sex education" now in both high school and college classes: everyone determined not to be embarrassed, to be very up to date, very contempo. These are the classes for which sex, as Feiffer puts it, "can be a beautiful thing if properly administered." And then, of course there's still another depressing manifestation of sex in the class room: the "off- color" teacher who keeps his class awake with sniggering sexual allusions, obscene titters and academic innuendo. The sexuality he purveys, it must be admitted, is at least better than none at all.”
“What's missing, from kindergarten to graduate school, is honest recognition of what's actually happening -- turned-on awareness of hairy goodies underneath the pettipants, the chinos and the flannels. It's not that sex needs to be pushed in school; sex is push enough. But we should let it be, where it is and like it is. I don't insist that ladies in junior high school lovingly caress their students' cocks; however, it is reasonable to ask that the ladies don't, by example and stricture, teach their students to pretend that those cocks aren't there. As things stand now, students are
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psychically castrated or spayed -- and for the very same reason that black men are castrated in Georgia: because they're a threat.”
“So you can add sexual repression to the list of causes, along with vanity, fear, and will to power, that turn the teacher into Mr. Charlie. You might also want to keep in mind that he was a nigger once himself and has never really gotten over it. And there are more causes, some of which are better described in sociological than in psychological terms. Work them out, it's not hard. But in the meantime what we've got on our hands is a whole lot of niggers. And what makes this particularly grim is that the student has less chance than the black man of getting out of his bag. Because the student doesn't even know he's in it. That, more or less, is what's happening in higher education. And the results are staggering.” (Farber, 1967).
Passive consumption of knowledge, through osmosis, or watching other people living life is an
antiquated method of education that equates education with the acquisition of predetermined static
knowledge, in a vacuum.
Jean-Jacque Rousseau 1
“To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all
the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not
he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.”(Rousseau, 1762).
“Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long.”… “Ambition, avarice, tyranny, the mistaken foresight of fathers, their neglect, their harshness, are a hundredfold more harmful to the child than the blind affection of the mother.”… Rousseau’s enthusiasm for breastfeeding led to him to argue “but let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled.” … “The only moral lesson which is suited for a child--the most important lesson for every time of life--is this: ‘Never hurt anybody’.”. … “A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.” (Rousseau, 1762).
Immanuel Kant read Emile from the beginning to the end when he first got his hands on it.
(Rusk,1972). “[Emile] was condemned by the Archbishop of Paris immediately after publication as an
irreligious work and ordered to be torn and burnt in Paris by the Public Executioner.” … “Rousseau
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nevertheless stands to modern education as Plato to ancient education; the heading of almost every
chapter in The Schools of To-morrow is a quotation from Rousseau.” (Rusk, 1972).
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” ~Maya
Angelou. Do the same with wealth and power.
Rousseau believes in nature. “Nature suffices for what she demands. Luxury has turned her back
upon nature. A thatched roof once covered free men; under marble and gold dwells slavery.” … “The
spirituality of man's soul is displayed” … in liberty... free agency...
B.F. Skinner does not care about freedom or dignity. As a Scientist, he only cares about what can
be proven, and since we can see behaviors the easiest, that’s where most of his studies exist. B.F. Skinner
is known for “Operant Conditioning”, which is similar to Pavlov’s dog. Whenever Pavlov would ring the
bell, the dog would salivate, with or without the food on it’s way, since the dog has come to associate the
ringing of the bell, with the giving of food. B.F. Skinner says that learning happens where there is a
stimulus, a stimulus which the learner obtains a new or changed behavior. B.F. Skinner likes to use
rewards versus punishments in order to get submission of those underneath his control. B.F. Skinner ends
his 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity with his infamous line: “We have not yet seen what man can
make of man” (Skinner, 1971). For the behavioralist B.F. Skinner, whatever proding, or punishments, or
threats, or whatever means necessary, one has to use, to get the child to comply, is acceptable. For B.F.
Skinner what one desires and feels is irrelevant. It is only what one can do, when they are motivated by
external stimuli.
According to B.F. Skinner: “But again the struggle for freedom is mainly directed toward
intentional controllers—toward those who treat others aversively in order to induce them to behave in
particular ways”. (Noll, 1971).
Jerry Farber 2
“For one thing damn little education takes place in the schools. How could it? You can't educate slaves; you can only train them. Or, to use an even uglier and more timely word, you can only
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program them.” … “I like to folk dance. Like other novices, I've gone to the Intersection or to the Museum and laid out good money in order to learn how to dance. No grades, no prerequisites, no separate dining rooms; they just turn you on to dancing. That's education. Now look at what happens in college. A friend of mine, Milt, recently finished a folk dance class. For his final, he had to learn things like this: "The Irish are known for their wit and imagination, qualities reflected in their dances, which include the jig, the reel and the hornpipe." And then the teacher graded him, A, B, C, D, or F while he danced in front of her. That's not education. That's not even training. That's an abomination on the face of the earth. It's especially ironic because Milt took that dance class trying to get out of the academic rut. He took crafts for the same reason. Great, right? Get your hands in some clay? Make something? Then the teacher announced a 20- page term paper would be required—with footnotes.” … “At my school we even grade people on how they read poetry. That's like grading people on how they fuck. But we do it. In fact, God help me, I do it. I'm the Commandant of English 323. Simon Legree on the poetry plantation. "Tote that iamb! Lift that Spondee!" Even to discuss a good poem in that environment is potentially dangerous because the very classroom is contaminated. As hard as I may try to turn students on to poetry, I know that the desks, the tests, the IBM cards, their own attitudes towards school, and my own residue of UCLA method are turning them off.” (Farber, 1967).
The noble natural savage man that Rousseau described in his 1762 The Social Contract is
precisely the noble natural savage man he wants to educate in his 1772 Emile.
BF Skinner is against the “literature of freedom and dignity”, such as Jean Jacque Rousseau, and
Immanuel Kant. Jean Jacque Rousseau believed in the supremacy of the ideal of the free man. Socrates
was murdered because he was corrupting the youth by asking too many questions, not because he was
having sex with the children. BF Skinner says Homunculus is what studying the freedom and dignity of
man should be called, to compare it to alchemy [wikipedia/homunculus]. He says there is no little man
inside our brains or bodies or souls. (Brumbaugh, 1963).
In High School, if you get into a fight, you are suspended, even if you are the victim. It does not
matter if you did absolutely nothing. Once, at my rural Kentucky High School, I got hit several times, in
the back, and I was completely shocked, that I just stood there, and let the boy go about his way, without
reacting, or saying a word back. I went by the stairwell, and cried. I eventually told the Principal, and
instead of suspending the violent psychopath, he got 1 hour detention, and had to stay after school for one
hour. If I would have fought back, we both would have been suspended. But since I did what I thought I
had to do, and take the random arbitrary pummeling, neither one of us were suspended, and he only
received a detention afterschool for an hour. It just wasn’t fair. Instead of tattling, I would have rather
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have defended myself, as Frederick Douglass did with Edward Covey. Instead, I was hit, and I snitched,
and very little was accomplished. Suspending both students involved in a fight makes no sense, especially
when any person can just lash out at another, for no apparent reason.
The professors like empty vessels—tabula rasa—nice clean slates, to teach to. And of course I
must be ignorant of the great wisdom of the sage on the stage, because if I actually knew something, then
the professor/teacher would have no purpose….
You can never beg your oppressor to let you be free. If you have to ask somebody to be free, then
you will never be free. That person will always keep you in chains. Even if they like you, the power they
have over you is valued more.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was mentioned in my African-American history class, and I wanted
to mention something I remember Malcolm X saying in one of his speeches, about how we’ve passed 4 or
Civil Rights Acts in American history and to think that the last one would work was ridiculous. Instead, I
never go that chance to share that nugget of knowledge with the class, and we were all deprived.
B.F. Skinner
B.F. Skinner said this, regarding his own life: “I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never
made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.” (Salter, 2008). B.F.
Skinner was just like a feather in the breeze, being dictated by the forces of his environment, and had no
control over his eventual destination… he could control his own children, and students, but himself, he
was unfettered.
B.F. Skinner hated Freedom and Dignity, and “Autonomous Man”. (Skinner, 1971). “We have
moved forward by dispossessing autonomous man, but he has not departed gracefully.” … “Two features
of autonomous man are particularly troublesome. In the traditional view, a person is free. He is
autonomous in the sense that his behavior is uncaused. He can therefore be held responsible for what he
does and justly punished if he offends.” (Skinner, 1971). According to Skinner, claiming that one has
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autonomous freedom is dangerous because then they themselves alone were to be held to account for their
own actions, instead of pulling a Skinner, and blaming your life’s decisions solely on nature, and society.
John Stuart Mill’s definition of liberty is the best definition: “Liberty consists in doing what one
desires”. (Skinner, 1971). There’s other “literature of freedom” B.F. Skinner quotes. Leibitz says,
“Liberty consists in the power to do what one wants to do” … Voltaire says, “When I can do what I want
to do, there is my liberty for me.” But B.F. Skinner seems to discount the definitions of liberty of greatest
thinkers of Western Civilization… ones that helped Western Civilization to escape from the Dark Ages,
and into the Enlightenment Era. B.F. Skinner maintains that his environment dictated his life. “The
environment not only prods or lashes, it selects.” (Skinner, 1971). B.F. Skinner doesn’t understand why
“characteristic villains of the literature are tyrants, priests, generals, capitalists, martinet teachers, and
domineering parents.” (Skinner, 1971). It’s as if Skinner never experienced oppression.
B.F. Skinner is a behaviorist and only cares about rewards and punishments can be administered
in order to gain compliance. BF Skinner explains that he understands how coercive, mean, cruel,
dehumanizing behavior can be justified if compliance is obtained. When a slave is whipped, and works
harder in response, the slave reinforces the slave driver's behavior of whipping the slave by working
harder. “The success of a blackmailer, or a parent's nagging on a child, or a teacher who threatens failure”
or corporal punishment to get his student to pay attention, all reinforces the oppressor's behavior.
(Skinner, 1971).
B.F. Skinner maintains that freedom is “the avoidance of or escape from so-called “aversive”
features of the environment”. (Skinner, 1971). B.F. Skinner uses Jean-Jacques Rousseau to prove to his
detractors that even “one of the great figures in the literature of freedom... did not fear the power of
positive of reinforcement” (Skinner, 1971). Even a broken clock is right two times a day. Here Skinner
references Emile:
“Let [the child] believe that he is always in control, though it is always you [the teacher] who really controls. There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom,
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for in that way one captures volition itself. The poor baby, knowing nothing, is he not at your mercy? Can you not arrange everything in the world which surrounds him? Can you not influence him as you wish? His work, his play, his pleasures, his pains, are not all these in your hands and without his knowing.? Doubtless he ought to do only what he wants; but he ought to want to do only what you want him to do; he ought not to take a step which you have not foreseen; he ought not to open his mouth without your knowing what he will say.” (Skinner, 1971).
To B.F. Skinner, having autonomy assumes that a person is free, is the “traditional view”
(Skinner, 1971). Both Rousseau and Skinner realize how vulnerable our nation's youth are. Rousseau calls
them “poor baby” (Rousseau, 1762), and Skinner says “Society attacks early, when the individual is
helpless” (Skinner, 1948).
B.F. Skinner is a homophobe. On page 66 of Skinner’s 1971 Beyond Freedom and Dignity,
Skinner explains, “It proved to be impossible to control the supply of alcohol during prohibition, and
segregation of the sexes may lead to unwanted homosexuality.” B.F. Skinner refers to homosexuality as
being “unwanted”, and then right afterwards, issues this powerful quotable: “It should be possible to
design a world in which behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs. We try to design such a
world for those who cannot solve the problem of punishment for themselves, such as babies, retardates, or
psychotics, and if it could be done for everyone, much time and energy would be saved.” (Skinner, 1971).
Skinner seems reserved during this passage, because Skinner will not limit himself to only positive
reinforcements.
B.F. Skinner coined the term “Operant Conditioning”, which is the training of humans to conform
to desired habits, after doing experiments on rats and winged rats, aka pigeons. Using whatever means
available to see what “man can make of man” can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Jim Jones is a prime
example. Hitler and Mussolini are other examples. The Ludovico Technique was used in the Stanley
Kubrick movie Clockwork Orange, where the main character, a rapist, is hooked up to a machine where
he’s forced to watch images and listen to music, which would be his “external stimuli”, and “negative
reinforcement”, that’s used to associate thoughts of sex and violence with pain. While the thought sounds
promising, what happens to the main character is that he is unable to defend himself when he gets jumped
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by a gang, since he has a complete aversion to sex and violence, through shock therapy, and the forcing of
watching brainwashing images, and sounds.
B.F. Skinner ignores feelings and thoughts and motivations, and is only concerned with the
behavior itself, and the physical and social environment which created it. “The issue has recently been
raised by the possibility that many criminals show an anomaly in their chromosomes.” (Skinner, 1971).
For behaviorists, their heads must dance with dreams of Clockwork Oranging these criminals, who are
deficiency in their chromosomes… this justifies eugenics, and we may even be able to pinpoint a
“criminal” before that “criminal” ever engages in “criminal” behavior by his chromosome anomalies.
William Glasser believes that there’s no such thing as insanity. Folks who seem crazy, only act that way,
because they cannot communicate to those they love.
““The human child requires discipline” because “it desires to be free.” ~Kant [Education, p. 4
(Rink 4)]”. (Brumbaugh, 1963)
Here Skinner’s at his most encryptic: “The balance of goods received by controller and controllee
will remain unfair or unjust. If the problem is simply to correct the balance, any move which makes
control more effective is in the wrong direction, but any move towards complete individualism or
complete freedom from control is in the wrong direction too.” (Skinner, 1971: 118-119). For Skinner, to
oppress, or to liberate, is both the wrong choice for an individual. Skinner’s students are expected to go
along with whatever whim Dr. Skinner hiccups.
“What must be changed is not the responsibility of autonomous man but the conditions,
environmental or genetic, of which a person's behaviour (sic) is a function.” … “We have not yet seen
what man can make of man.” B.F. Skinner is planning on manipulating a person’s genetic, environmental,
or social conditions, in order to get the desired compliant behavior or habit, in order to push him as hard
as we can, like a bully, enslaving the child to our ends, and our means, in order to see “what man can
make of man”. (Skinner, 1971).
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau believes that Emile or “Juniper” (since the education designed for the boy
is just as good for the girl; “Sophie”, while intellectually stimulating, is not needed) should become a
carpenter. For Rousseau, since education is experience, then being a carpenter is also being a philosopher.
“‘Remember, I demand no talent, only a trade, a genuine trade, a mere mechanical art, in which
the hands work harder than the head, a trade which does not lead to fortune but makes you independent of
her.’ The trade which most completely satisfies Rousseau’s demands is that of the carpenter: ‘It is clean
and useful; it may be carried on at home; it gives enough exercise; it calls for skill and industry, and while
fashioning articles for everyday use, there is scope for elegance and taste.’ Not content with this,
Rousseau contends that technical training has a transfer value: ‘If instead of making a child stick to his
books I employ him in a workshop, his hands work for the development of his mind. While he fancies
himself a workman, he is becoming a philosopher, if he is not to be as idle as a savage. The great secret of
education is to use exercise of mind and body as relaxation one to another.” (Rusk, 1972: 191).
“The general principle … governing Emile's education during these transition years is that of learning by doing. ‘Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing is out of the question.’ ‘Let all the lessons of young people take the form of doing rather than talking; let them learn nothing from books which they can learn from experience.’” … “There is nevertheless a significant exception, the one books which to Rousseau's thinking 'supplies the best treatise on an education according to nature'. It is Robinson Crusoe. “This is the first book Emile will read; for a long time it will form his whole library and it will always retain an honoured place. It will be the text to which all talks about natural science are by the commentary.” (Rusk, 1972: 191).
“Books are the least important apparatus in a school. All that any child needs is the three R’s the
rest should be tools and clay and sports and theatre and paint and freedom.” (Neill, 1960).
“Rousseau had condemned Plato's communistic scheme, contending that the home was the best
training ground for governing the state.” (Rusk, 1972: 193).
Hierarchy Destroys Everything
The tenacious relentless resilient audacious obedience of the American student are troubling, but
they are clearly the effects of an autocratic absolute totalitarian dictatorship of the school system.
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Hierarchy destroys democracy and solidarity; souls, self-respect, and dignity; relationships; morality and
humanity; autonomy and individual power; reputations; and education.
“Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for
completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that
completion.” ~Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who
cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” ~Alvin Toffler
Here’s an excerpt from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty:
“The only principle for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him, must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of any one for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.” (Mill, 1859).
Those who can't, teach.
The Professor/Student is locked into a Master/Slave relationship.
Jerry Farber 3
“Even more discouraging than this master-slave approach to education is the fact that the students take it. They haven't gone through twelve years of public school for nothing. They've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing during those twelve years. They've forgotten their algebra. They've grown to fear and resent literature. They write like they've been lobotomized. But, Jesus, can they follow orders! Freshmen come up to me with an essay and ask if I want it folded, and whether their name should be in the upper right hand corner. And I want to cry and kiss them and caress their poor tortured heads.”
“Students don't ask that orders make sense. They've given up expecting things to make sense long before they leave elementary school. Things are true because the teacher says they're true. At a very early age we all learn to accept "two truths," as did certain medieval churchmen. Outside class, things are true to your tongue, your fingers, your stomach, your heart. Inside class things are true by reason of authority. And that's just fine because you don't care anyway. Miss Wiedemeyer tells you a noun is a person, place or thing. So let it be. You don't give a rat's ass; she doesn't give a rat's ass.”
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“The general timidity which causes teachers to make niggers of their students usually included a more specific fear -- fear of the students themselves. After all, students are different, just like black people. You stand exposed in front of them, knowing that their interest, their values and their language are different from yours. To make matters worse, you may suspect that you yourself are not the most engaging of persons. What then can protect you from their ridicule and scorn? Respect for authority. That's what. It's the policeman's gun again. The white bwana's pith helmet. So you flaunt that authority. You wither whispers with a murderous glance. You crush objectors with erudition and heavy irony. And worst of all, you make your own attainments seem not accessible but awesomely remote. You conceal your massive ignorance -- and parade a slender learning.” (Farber, 1967).
Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what you are
told regardless if you are right. Julian Assange says that we train our souls to accept injustice when we
witness it, and do nothing about it.
Jerry Farber 4
“Students are niggers. When you get that straight, our schools begin to make sense. It's more important, though, to understand why they're niggers. If we follow that question seriously enough, it will lead up past the zone of academic bullshit, where dedicated teachers pass their knowledge on to a new generation, and into the nitty-gritty of human needs and hangups. And from there we can go on to consider whether it might ever be possible for students to come up from slavery.”
“First, let's see what's happening now. Let's look at the role students play in what we like to call education. At Cal State L.A., where I teach, the students have separate and unequal dining facilities. If I take them into the faculty dining room, my colleagues get uncomfortable, as though there were a bad smell. If I eat in the student cafeteria, I become known as the educational equivalent of a niggerlover. In at least one building there are even rest rooms which students may not use. At Cal State, also, there is an unwritten law barring student-faculty lovemaking. Fortunately, this anti-miscegenation law, like its Southern counterpart, is not 100 percent effective.”
“Students at Cal State are politically disenfranchised. They are in an academic Lowndes County. Most of them can vote in national elections -- their average age is about 26 -- but they have no voice in the decisions which affect their academic lives. The students are, it is true, allowed to have a toy government run for the most part by Uncle Toms and concerned principally with trivia. The faculty and administrations decide what courses will be offered; the students get to choose their own Homecoming Queen. Occasionally when student leaders get uppity and rebellious, they're either ignored, put off with trivial concessions, or maneuvered expertly out of position.”
“A student at Cal State is expected to know his place. He calls a faculty member "Sir" or "Doctor" or "Professor" -- and he smiles and shuffles some as he stands outside the professor's office waiting for permission to enter. The faculty tell him what courses to take (In my department, English, even electives have to be approved by a faculty member); they tell him what to read, what to write, and frequently, where to set the margins on his typewriter. They tell him what's true and what isn't. Some teachers insist that they encourage dissent but they're almost always jiving and every student knows it. Tell the man what he wants to hear or he'll fail your ass out of the course.”
“When a teacher says "jump", students jump. I know of one professor who refused to take up class time for exams and required students to show up for tests at 6:30 in the morning. And they did, by God! Another, at exam time, provides answer cards to be filled out -- each one enclosed in a paper
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bag with a hole cut in the top to see through. Students stick their writing hands in the bags while taking the test. The teacher isn't a provo; I wish he were. He does it to prevent cheating. Another colleague once caught a student reading during one of his lectures and threw her book against the wall. Still another lectures his students into a stupor and then screams at them in a rage when they fall asleep.” (Farber, 1967).
Ignacio Estrada says: “If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way
they learn.” Horace Mann says: “A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a
desire to learn is hammering on a cold iron.” Emma Goldman says: “No one has yet fully realized the
wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true
education should be to unlock that treasure.” William Glasser says: “We Learn…10% of what we
read…20% of what we hear…30% of what we see…50% of what…we see and hear…70% of what we
discuss…80% of what we experience 95% of what we teach others.”
“Another result of student slavery is equally serious. Students don't get emancipated when they graduate. As a matter of fact, we don't let them graduate until they've demonstrated their willingness -- over 16 years -- to remain slaves. And for important jobs, like teaching, we make them go through more years just to make sure. What I'm getting at is that we're all more or less niggers and slaves, teachers and student alike. This is a fact you might want to start with in trying to understand wider social phenomena, say, politics, in our country and in other countries.” (Farber, 1971).
Poor whites got the illusion of power when they were made overseers of the Black slaves. The
same is true with teacher training. They accept their insignificant roles because eventually, one day,
they’ll hold the gauntlet, they’ll have the power, and demerits will be passed out for those do not obey!
The Kentucky Constitution guarantees the people’s “peace, safety, happiness”, and their
“protection of property”. Section 4 of Kentucky’s Constitution reads:
“All power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their peace, safety, happiness and the protection of property. For the advancement of these ends, they have at all times an inalienable and indefeasible right to alter, reform or abolish their government in such manner as they may deem proper.” (Section 4, 1891).
Noam Chomsky speaks:
“Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them.
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Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times. Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production. It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, [that] they ought to control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and … democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society. And then, you know, ideas are worked out about how exactly that should manifest itself, but I think that is the core of anarcho-syndicalist thinking. I mean it’s not at all the general image that you described — people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none.
A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth:
“It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!” (Nietzsche, 1886).
“Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.”
~Benjamin Disiraeli
John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky all believed in Constructivism.
B.F. Skinner is against any type of lifespan theory. For B.F. Skinner, there are no child development
stages. B.F. Skinner discounts Piaget, Montessori, Rousseau, Erikson, Dewey, Bruner, and Bandura.
W.E.B. Dubois wanted liberal arts education, which we aren’t getting, and Booker T. Washington
wanted Industrial Education, aka Vocational Education. By learning trades, we would be acquiring more
marketable job skills, so we can survive after we graduate. Louisville doesn’t offer any Vocational
School. Gallatin County Schools, the smallest county in Kentucky, bus their students to the vocational
school in Carroll County. So rural students are provided with a vocational training, but city students are
not. While I’m more of a W.E.B. Dubois man, I do not discount the genius of Booker T. Washington. The
liberal arts institutions aren’t allowing for the free space that’s requires for creativity to form and flourish.
They are being strict hierarchists. This strict hierarchy smothers what use W.E.B. Dubois would want to
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get from a liberal arts education, and since Louisville schools are smothering creativity, autonomy, and
independence, in addition to not offering any vocational classes, this leaves the Louisville student with
poor choices. They either have to dropout, and do something meaningful with their lives, or they choose
to go through the oppression that is a higher liberal arts education. Both roads are difficult, though with a
piece of paper from a University may still mean something to somebody, and it could help get you a
better job than if you did not have that piece of special credentialed paper.
“The vast majority of our professors lacked basic communication skills, they were not self- actualized, and they often used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power. In these settings I learned a lot about the kind of teacher I did not want to become.” (hooks, 1994: 5). … “My commitment to learning kept me attending classes. Yet, even so, because I did not conform—would not be an unquestioning, passive student—some professors treated me with contempt. I was slowly becoming estranged from education. Finding [Paulo] Freire in the midst of that estrangement was crucial to my survival as a student.” (hooks, 1994: 17). … “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy. For years it has been a place where education has been undermined by teachers and students alike who seek to use it as a platform for opportunistic concerns rather than as a place to learn.” (hooks, 1994: 12). … “Most of my professors were not the slightest bit interested in enlightenment. More than anything they seemed enthralled by the exercise of power and authority within their mini-kingdom, the classroom.” (hooks, 1994: 17).
bell hooks had trouble with “resisting” students, those who were comfortable in the traditional
classroom, and didn’t want the classroom to be the lively educational center she wanted it to be.
“To these students, transgressing boundaries was frightening. And though they were not the majority, their spirit of rigid resistance seemed always to be more powerful than any will to intellectual openness and pleasure in learning. More than any other class I had taught, this one compelled me to abandon the sense that the professor could, by sheer strength of will and desire, make the classroom an exciting, learning community.” (hooks, 1994: 9).
“I wanted to become a critical thinker. Yet that longing was often seen as a threat to authority.” ...
“Nonconformity on our part was viewed with suspicion, as empty gestures of defiance aimed at masking
inferiority or substandard work.” (hooks, 1994: 5).
“Students are niggers. When you get that straight, our schools begin to make sense. It's more important, though, to understand why they're niggers. If we follow that question seriously enough, it will lead up past the zone of academic bullshit, where dedicated teachers pass their knowledge on to a new generation, and into the nitty-gritty of human needs and hangups. And from there we can go on to consider whether it might ever be possible for students to come up from slavery.” (Farber, 1967).
Self-Education
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Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Ben
Franklin, Henry Ford, Tecumseh, Shakespeare, Mark Zuckerburg, Walt Disney, Colonel Harland Sanders,
Charles Dickens, Ray Kroc, and Henry Adams were all self-educated, and extremely successful. For
Einstein, the supreme art of the teacher was to “awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” Isaac
Asimov claims that all education is self-education.
Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass were all slaves (or were indentured
servants) before becoming lovers of liberty. Ben Franklin dropped out of Boston Latin School at 10 years
old, after attending for two years, to work for his father, and then his brother, an apprentice by contract, as
a printer, until he was 21 years old (Dropouts). Abraham Lincoln only had 1 year of formal schooling,
and he was an indentured servant for his father, when they moved away from Kentucky. Frederick
Douglass came straight out of the most barbaric slave system ever in the world: the American slave
system.
William Shakespeare was a middle school drop out, and he was able to invent over 1,700 words.
(Dropouts). Albert Einstein dropped out of high school at 15 years old, and at first, failed his college
entrance exams. Walt Disney dropped out of high school at 16 years old to join the army. Disney was too
young to enlist, so he forged a birth certificate, and joined the Red Cross instead. Colonel Harland
Sanders dropped out of elementary school. Charles Dickens, after his father was imprisoned for debt, at
12 years old, left school and began working child slave labor jobs—ten-hour days—in a boot-blacking
factory. Ray Kroc dropped out of high school at 15 years old, and like Walt Disney, Kroc lied about his
age, and became a Red Cross ambulance driver. (Dropouts).
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of college, and got rich off of
revolutionary technology advancements. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year. Steve Jobs
dropped out of college after 6 months of attending. (Listverse). Mark Twain dropped out of school at 13
years of age. (Dropouts). Even without a formal education, Mark Twain wrote the “great American
novel”, Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn hated the Widow Douglas trying to “sivilize” him. Huck Finn says:
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“The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.” (Huck Finn quote).
The last lines of Huckleberry Finn: “But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the
rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
(Huck Finn quote).
Henry Adams, a self-educated man, gave much credit to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “As educator,
Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first.” (Adams, 1918: xxxviii). Henry Adams then gives Ben
Franklin high praises for his ability to educate himself. The overall purpose of Henry Adam’s book was
partially autobiographical in nature, but the other part, was analyzing the American education system, and
how the education system failed to teach him successful, considering the rapid changes of his era. Henry
Adams was educated through his conversations, experiences, friendships, and reading. (Education).
“I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and
philosophy, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting,
poetry, music, architecture, tapestry, and porcelain.” ~John Adams, 2nd President of the United States.
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning
stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” ~Henry Ford
Einstein says that experience is education, and that everything else is information.
The Indiana Centinel editorialized Tecumseh, saying, “Every school boy in the Union now knows
that Tecumseh was a great man”; even bragging that Tecumseh was “a statesman, a warrior, and a
patriot;” “[Tecumseh’s] greatness was his own, unassisted by the science or the aids of education” (Wolff,
2009). Abraham Lincoln was reading that “The Shawnee who had shot his grandfather was becoming a
hero, admired because he wasn’t civilized, for his lack of education” (Wolff, 2009). For Lincoln, reading
and writing is what distinguished the whites, and the red. “[Reading and Writing] we owe everything
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which distinguishes us from savages. Take it from us, and the Bible, all history, all science, all
government, all commerce, and nearly all social intercourse, go with it” (Wolff, 2009).
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the
conviction… that immigration is suicide” (Wolff, 2009).
“[The wisest writers] are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is
before he becomes a man.” (Rousseau, 1762: 3). While the current Classical Education system is bad,
“yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot be made by halves. Under
existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest. Prejudice,
authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which we are plunged, would stifle nature in
him and put nothing in her place. She would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the highway,
bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by.” (Rousseau, 1762: 5).
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move my thoughts begin to flow--as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper. A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought--burst forth and fertilize my brain. . . . Only while we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical wooden dull to read. (Thoreau, 1851, August 19).
“Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.” ~Thoreau
Frederick Douglass said: “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say
something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.” ~Noam Chomsky
Do not submit, do not obey, do not go quietly, do not go gently into that good night, do not lie
down, do not comply, do not roll over or shut up. Never ever surrender.
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well
preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out,
and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!” ~Hunter S. Thompson
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“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you
astray.” ~Rumi
“Just last week during the first meeting of a class, one girl got up to leave after about 10 minutes had gone by. The teacher rushed over, grabbed her my the arm, saying, "This class is NOT dismissed!" and led her back to her seat. On the same day another teacher began by informing his class that he does not like beards, mustaches, long hair on boys, capri pants on girls, and will not tolerate any of that in his class. The class, incidentally, consisted mostly of high school teachers”.
“Even more discouraging than this master-slave approach to education is the fact that the students take it. They haven't gone through twelve years of public school for nothing. They've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing during those twelve years. They've forgotten their algebra. They've grown to fear and resent literature. They write like they've been lobotomized. But, Jesus, can they follow orders! Freshmen come up to me with an essay and ask if I want it folded, and whether their name should be in the upper right hand corner. And I want to cry and kiss them and caress their poor tortured heads” (Farber, 1967).
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was
and never will be.” ~Thomas Jefferson (Tanner and Tanner, 2007: 4). In a 1776 report to the Virginia
legislature about changes in the government necessary for independence, Thomas Jefferson called for a
public school system. Thomas Jefferson wanted informed citizenry for public policy, and for individuals
to be able to optimal development. (Tanner and Tanner, 2007: 4).
“Discovery or insight was formalized into the inquiry-discovery method. Budding elementary
school scientists (it was hoped) would learn how to make discoveries that would one day contribute to
national supremacy in space. Be that as it may, the conception of learning itself as a problem-solving
activity was sound and a desirable alternative to the view of the learner as a responding mechanism,
which had dominated educational psychology during the early twentieth century (Mayer, 2001, p. 65).”
(Tanner and Tanner, 2007: 47).
Social connections are vital for learning to happen. Lev Vygotsky assumed that:
“Every function in a child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level and later on the individual level: first between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child, (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals. (1978, p. 57)” (Woolfolk, 2010).
Amerika’s Liberation Education 82
Nelson Mandela died this year, on December 5, 2013. “During my lifetime I have dedicated my
life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought
against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons
will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to
see realized. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” (Gibson, 2013,
December 5).
“People think only of preserving their child's life; this is not enough, he must be taught to preserve his own life when he is a man, to bear the buffets of fortune, to brave wealth and poverty, to live at need among the snows of Ireland or on the scorching rocks of Malta. In vain, you guard against death; he must needs die; and even if you do not kill him with your precautions, they are mistaken. Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.” … “Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, contraint, compulsion. Civilized man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life man is imprisoned by our institutions.” (Rousseau, 1762: 11). … “Fix your eyes on nature, follow the path traced by her. She keeps children at work, she hardens them by all kinds of difficulties, she soon teaches them the meaning of pain and grief. They cute their teeth and are feverish, sharp colics bring on convulsions, they are choked by fits of coughing and tormented by worms, evil humours corrupt the blood, germs of various kinds ferment in it, causing dangerous eruptions. Sickness and danger play the chief part in infancy. One half of the children who are born die before their eighth year.” (Rousseau, 1762: 16).
By being super individuals, by knowing exactly who they are, by having a strong moral core, the
child can enter into society strong, and not be swayed by the vultures and demons.
“Want to help stop the bullying epidemic? Don't act like a bully. Don't hit, threaten, ignore,
intimidate, isolate, ridicule, or manipulate your child. Children learn what they live.” ~LR Knost
“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt
them.” ~Dalai Lama
A true and proper education is when a person learns a useful skill, or useful information, that adds
knowledge into their constructed worldview, as it makes sense to them. Real education happens when a
person follows their natural intrinsic inclinations towards freedom, and towards one's own personal
curiosities, and allows their biology to unfold. Education is experience, demonstrations, teaching others,
Amerika’s Liberation Education 83
and teaching others how to teach others. Education is discussion and dialogue, and the social bonds which
connect us, help to prioritize that which we deem important in our constructed worldviews. Gardner
points out 7 different intelligences, so there's a multitude of intelligences, of ways to learn. How one is
educated is not necessarily how another will be educated. Howard Gardner’s “bodily kinesthetic” would
enlighten many athletes about their intelligence. Education is many different things, unique for
everybody. Hierarchy is the problem. I have seen some classes where the teacher is just an administrator,
and they get the students working on some software program, where they practice their skills. In some
respects, that is all a teacher should be, an administrator, one who moves the student along, and as long as
they are progressing, then we can consider ourselves successful. But really, with professor lectures
available online, from Yale, Harvard, and other lesser prestigious schools, the ultimate goal would be to
get the students to do the work, without an administrators. We can plug students into computer programs,
in order to get them to memorize a bunch of random facts… teachers, as today, are obsolete… only
Vocation Education matters. Industrial Education. Education that is useful. Yes, it’s good to dream, and
browse Wikipedia, google News, facebook, but that’s no basis for an education.
It seems to me, most folks either want children to be trained to be placed into society, into
carefully chosen slots, and others think we should be educated to pursue our highest potential. School
should be a transformational space, where all are maximizing their freedoms, and are exercising them. In
many ways, I pity the fascist oppressors, because they have to put so much time into controlling
everybody’s behavior that they forgot to take time to get to know their students, or to have fun activities,
and to provide genuine knowledge and feedback. Fascist oppressors drunk with their petty amount of
authority rarely educate.
Acceptable Johnny Masters’ approved “Management” Tactics
1) Earning the student’s trust. 2) Natural consequences. 3) Unlimited positive reinforcement. 4) Being prepared. 5) Super fun and exciting Lectures.
Amerika’s Liberation Education 84
6) Super fun and exciting Activities. 7) Dependency on resources.
By earning your student’s trust, the students will want you to approve of them, which gives you
influence. (Canter and Canter, 1993: 11).
Natural consequences is allowing things to happen as they normally would, without your
presence. For example, if I do not clean my dishes, then cockroaches could find my leftover food
delicious. Nobody directly tells me to wash the dishes. I just know that if I do not, I will have to deal with
the “natural consequences”. “Children should never receive punishment as such. It should always come as
the natural consequence of their fault”. … “He must never act from obedience, but from necessity.”
(Rousseau, 1762: 184).
Both B.F. Skinner and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were big proponents of “positive reinforcement”.
“Dignity concerns positive reinforcement. When someone behaves in a way we find reinforcing, we make
him more likely to do so again by praising or commending him. We applaud a performer precisely to
induce him to repeat his performance, as the expressions “Again!” “Encore!” and “Bis!” indicate. We can
attest to the value of a person's behavior by patting him on the back, or saying “Good!” or “Right!” or
giving him “a token of our esteem” such as a prize, honor, or award.” (Skinner, 1971: 44-45). While I
believe in positive reinforcement, I do not believe in negative reinforcement, in any shape or form. The
most negative reinforcement I would be willing to give, is a silent disapproval, or a clear compliment of
another attribute of the student which I consider professional and smart.
With good preparation, say an organized lecture and a power point demonstration, I can maintain
the pace of the classroom with the educational materials that are available to me. With a fast paced
lecture, with smooth transitions, the students will be too captivated by the show.
If school was fun, more students would be engaged, and there would be less dropouts.
While keeping folks dependent on resources is not an objective to be gained, but since the
struggle in our capitalist country pressures us all, in different ways, by allowing the students to feel the
Amerika’s Liberation Education 85
same pressures vicariously, this can only increase their understanding of the world they live in. Jean-
Jacques Rousseau University is a rich school, situation on top of a hill of gold… but somebody needs to
exchange that gold for greenbacks, and then somebody else needs to mail that electric bill in so that
everybody can enjoy electricity at Jean-Jacques Rousseau University. While sheltering the students of
these economic woes is what most universities do, our students will understand the mechanisms that are
at work in our own school. By having the students thinking about the financial situation of their school,
they are more cosmopolitan, and intimate with their educational buildings, but also, if push comes to
shove, the students may be called upon to save the school from the ditch it’s in.
“To attain liberty, education must act both negatively and positively. The negative training consists in restricting the child's desires, the positive in supplying the pupil with the strength he lacks so far as it is required for freedom, not for power.” Rousseau effects the former by keeping the child dependent on things. ‘Keep the child dependent on things only’ is his prescription. ‘By this course of education you will have followed the order of nature.’” (Rousseau, 1762).
Hierarchy Destroys Relationships
Hierarchy destroys relationships. The oppressor had noticed that I whispered something to the
colleague sitting next to me, and immediately gave me “the look”, which is “mean mugging”, where one
forms an angry expression upon their face. The oppressor then uses their “scowl and growl” expression as
a soft threat, where the unlimited potential of a meaningless soft threat “scowl and growl” can manifest in
the student’s hearts and minds others ways in order to scare them into compliance, and to get the expected
submission. In fact, many teachers try as hard as they can to maintain that the culture of the classroom as
being in a perpetual state of terror, to micromanage every little tiny behavior, to make sure that no single
individual ever ruined their absolute authority, and to make sure nobody gets a true and proper education.
A few important relationships have been destroyed because of hierarchy, and it was a
combination of having a fascist oppressor around, and them being blindly, stupidly, obedient. Then later
one, in order to maintain their dignity, they would lash out at me. The colleague that I had whispered to in
the beginning of my teacher training school and I could have had a beautiful wonderful symbiotic
relationship. Instead, we were pitted against each other. We weren’t allowed to talk, but we were allowed
Amerika’s Liberation Education 86
to argue with each other, all to the oppressor’s glee. That’s how that relationship went down. Instead of
ever getting to know the real me, instead, I was forced to be the “sit down and shut up” student, who
would resist in small ways, just to maintain a shred of dignity. Fascism is so prevalent and normalized in
America, that one who doesn’t blindly follow orders, or doesn’t boss others around, are looked as though
they are from Neptune.
Another colleague/ex-friend of mine came from University of Louisville. Before and after class,
we would talk, laugh, debate, etc. During class, it was awkward. He would pretend like I wasn’t in the
room. Only the oppressor mattered. And when the oppressor was in the room, I was not. We rarely even
acknowledged each other’s presence in class. Eventually, my friend and I got a job at a camp in Vermont,
and while I had my questions with fascism, and liberty, m ex-friend always pretended like he understood
the world, what was going on, and had it all together. But he didn’t. It was all a show. My ex-friend
walked by and saw that I was “taking the lead”, and was delegating tasks to the campers, and he laughed,
and called me a “dictator”. I did not respond to him then, though if I would have, I would have said
something on the lines of, “How come the first moment I put on a “leader” hate, you criticize me, when
we’ve been around many other “leaders”, who never once got skewered by his liberating words.
Many other discussions we had, where I would mention my questions, with relationships, on
justice, on fairness, on democracy, etc, But he would play stupid with me. He understood what I was
talking about, the whole time. He pretended as though he didn’t understand “questioning authority” with
authority figures we were both being exposed to, but he saw it clearly when I decided to gain a little
backbone, and took charge of the team of young men. With all others in the world, he would allow them
to continue their oppression, which he was fine with. But for me, no way Jose. He could not allow that.
He can submit to an entire world of oppressors, but all of a sudden, he sees a problem with authority when
authority was in my hands. This type of situation is becoming a pattern. I understand the situation, but
there was no room around my ex-friend. For both of these cases, I was “weak”. I was a dumb intellectual
slave student, who sat next to them. To the King, massive butt-kissing, but to their colleagues, their
Amerika’s Liberation Education 87
“friends” even, nothing but disrespect. The juxtaposition of the limitless irreverent idolatry of all fascist
oppressors everywhere, and the complete dehumanization and disrespect of me, was too much to bare. I
witnessed this same ex-friend threaten to “separation” two of the campers if he saw them talking again.
That’s hierarchy stopping a relationship directly. Essentially my ex-friend was saying, “If you continue to
have a relationship with your friend, instead of idolizing me, or the fascist vanguard, then I will make sure
to punish you hard enough to where your relationship will be immediately severed, and after the
embarrassment and humiliation of punitive measures, hopefully, the relationship will be completely
disintegrated.” He didn’t speak truth to power. He spoke lies to the powerless. He didn’t care about any of
those students. He only cared about his authority. He used divide and conquer tactics, just like how a Lion
waits for a weakling wildebeest to fall away from the pack, to dine on some feeble prey.
“Great spirits always encounter violent opposition from mediocre minds.” ~Albert Einstein.
“Submerged in reality, the oppressed cannot perceive clearly the “order” which serves the interests of the oppressors whose image they have internalized. Chafing under the restrictions of this order, they often manifest a type of horizontal violence, striking out at their own comrades for the pettiest reasons.” (Freire, 1970: 62).
Franz Fanon points out the same phenomenon I have been witnessing. Franz Fanon points out
how the oppressed and colonized loves, admires, and idolizes their oppressor, yet they are willing to
strike or lash out at some other poor colonized person for the slightest offense.
“The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the period when the niggers beat each other up, and the police and magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced with the astonishing waves of crime in North Africa... While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native; for the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-a-vis his brother.” (Fanon, 1961: 52-54).
Paulo Freire rationalizes the “horizontal violence” among the oppressed by the “duality” mental
framework of the oppressed. This duality, of love of self, and love for the oppressor, shifts back and forth
with differing varying degrees among the oppressed. “It is possible that in this behavior they are once
more manifesting their duality. Because the oppressor exists within their oppressed comrades, when they
attack those comrades they are indirectly attacking the oppressor as well.” (Freire, 1970: 62).
Amerika’s Liberation Education 88
To combat this vicious cutthroat backstabbing amongst the oppressed, it’s important that the
students can work cooperatively together. We can have more pair-and-shares, more quality circles,
jigsaws, and classroom meetings. It’s important for every classroom to foster respect for themselves and
each other, as well as having solidarity, and meaningful relationships.
Eleutheromania.
Amerika’s Liberation Education 89
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