I came to Berkeley in ’72 to participate in the left stands here, as reported to me by The Mime Troupe, which visited Hollins College where I lived, Roanoke/Salem, Va. Information also came from a local newly produced newspaper opposing the U.S.’s system. And I had been participating with the local brilliant women connected to the National Women’s Political Caucus.
Also, I was born Communist-Jew.
I’d been recruited to Roanoke, from my home town, Chicago, to do education organizing in the WOP/Community Action Program. Two years later I’d just had a baby and was working tutoring children who’d been put out of the public school + suspended for misbehavior, or because of illness or disability.
I learned of communal living arrangements on the West coast, and was having difficulty integrating women’s liberation into my home living situation; I was the mother and the father, my immensely admirable Jack, was out in the world being successful. So I took the trip to spend some time working things out.
Since then it’s been one discovery after another; how-why I’m committed to communism socialism, and soon after, how to live together, Jack and I, our peripatetic son, and our daughter.
Many efforts to deal with the discomfort that is school have led me to realize school does its prescribed task; it is solely an institution that serves the stratification of people in society. It cannot correct racism. It cannot correct income inequality. Higher education!!!; that furthers the separations. All education is higher + us all raising us all; not higher for some few people + so they can have more privileged positions in society.
All people need and like study at all levels. Yes, we can’t all engage in it if we have to shuffle off to our daily cubicle where we must produce some or other product-effort that qualifies as work, for a stipulated period of time, that pretty much has little to nothing to do with getting a needed job done.
The same confinement exists for children + and adults + who have to go to school.
I’m offering people to have a seat among the school directors that is other than to perpetuate the discomfort, the alienation, that is the way our lives are presently constructed. Ignoring these adds to our discomfort. We don’t want our children to continue to be made miserable, confined as they are by school. Just as we’d prefer ourselves not to have to be confined to the work(job) conditions + the kinds of work, the conditions in which it’s done.
School reform cannot fix school. The problem is school. Age segregation is a way to control us, not to help us.
We ALL need to live together, work together, 2-year-old or 90, everyone producing, working, a few or a bunch of hours a week at one or another needed activity that we like doing to help maintain the community, local or worldwide.
End age segregation. It serves capitalism. It has no other reason. Within all work all content of life is available for study, including using the skills it takes 8 years of school to disable people from using adequately.
Age segregation separates people who love each other. Our adaptation to this abnormality is antagonism, suspicion, furtherance of hostilities as defense mechanisms against this travesty. It supports the church’s notion that we are to suffer through life as punishment by some god THey administer, for us being sinful. What a crime!
We like work +all of us do. We are not allowed to enjoy the details of our lives in this system; our Owners profit as we slave here on their plantation.
I have spent 70 years trying to figure this out. Only in the last 10 or so have I begun to get a clue – this clue – as above.
normaha@pacbell.net
School Is The Opposite Of Education 