…and journey people, too.
A newspaper article the last of 2013 is headlined, “Experienced teachers critical to schools”. “In an effort to keep education costs in check, America’s cash-strapped states, local school districts and charter schools are hiring less costly, novice teachers…. “
As newspapers do, there’s been no follow-up of this report.
However, experienced or not, teacher quality, ability, experience has not been able to make schooling workable. Ohyes, people get through school – some do well, many do not, for most it doesn’t well serve human beings. A fault remains; jobs are the way of stratifying people to lower or higher place, better or less good ability to access the ‘fruit of our labor’, enjoyment of life, security, comfort.
We have woodworkers and machinists and architects and steel beam makers and shoe makers and dress makers and music makers and book writers and care takers and house cleaners and surgeons, Arctic researchers, linguists, bear scientists, fungi scientists, physicians, lightbulb changers – You get the picture. We have people knowledgeable and-or capable in sufficient degree in pretty much limitless fields, who’d rejoice to share their work. Yet we insist on putting everyone through the wringer (the reference to the old clothes washing machine of 150+ years ago), to make them sit through classrooms of instruction that everyone hates, instead of simply to participate in production, care.
Producing a table requires able and improving, expanding language skill; ability to calculate; ability to put pen/cil to paper to write stuff down – the three-r skills; and yet another communication skill, drawing; plus the hammer and nail – or peg – skills; and the rest of table-making skills. This is for a complete, up-to-date process; not a school-type faux work; not, for example, making a table out of milk cartons or popsicle sticks.
(Although, given now sufficient musical instruments are being made from garbage retrieved from hills of waste deposits in such as Paraguay, we can no longer categorically disparage trash.)
People would have to do the whole composite of what goes on in those six or eight elementary grades and those 6 or 4 high school grades by doing some production or other. People didn’t used to have to go to some four-walled hated institution to get trained to participate in the work necessary for our maintenance, including for our pleasure. 24month-old people, – and six month old people – , got taken with and were around production and care situations. 90 year-old people were part of production and care, as they wanted and were able.
Not being able to be around the activities people do makes people unhappy, encrazes them. (like that – encrazes? I do.)
I know we’ve allowed ourselves to be forced to ask The State to prepare people to make our stuff, take care of ourselves us all through passing grades in school and getting degrees, or diplomas, or certificates and appointments. So we can force – teach – ourselves to resist compulsory education – compulsory attendance where we don’t want to be. We don’t like school. ….for good reason. This goes along with disliking work – except for us teaching ourselves to like it for wrong reasons.
We don’t like it because it takes too much of our time for too little if any pleasure.
We don’t get to choose to be places we want to be, to do what we want to do – to try to do some things, to do things we’re able to do, like to do, get better at doing, get tired of doing so go on to do something else, perhaps to come back to do the work we are capable of, or have learned better to do…
We learn with masters. It’s a different environment from making detested work out of the great pleasure that is learning and teaching.
It’s NOT an eight hour day. Just because we won that, dying for it 100 years ago doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Again, we’ve learned here – I’ve quoted from Communitas – that allowing us all, the available labor force, to work we’d produce what we need and like in less than 4 hours a week at a job.
Given – we’d spend our weeks working – just on human time, not in competition with machines, not under the bosses’ lash.
Where’d that come from!?, having to divert ourselves from participation within the community, to go to school, to complete levels – grades – in order to be at a place where people are already doing what we’re itching to do, what they’re doing!?
Teachers are told ‘teach from where the student/s is-are’. We could instead allow people – children or older – to say I want to do that, and then let them fit in to quickly or slowly, do it. Or decide not to do it after all, meanwhile having learned a thing by trying it, finding it’s not for them. These people who change their minds haven’t only learned they don’t want to do that chosen activity; they’ve also learned about that activity. You choose to study a biological detail. You work at it and find at some point you no longer want to. But you’ve learned what’s involved by trying it out.
Then there’s the sloughing off of people. Children, old people, categories of people are disincluded from membership in the day’s activities, using the schooling formula. The teacher sent to monitor and instruct them is also set apart from the community at large. It takes a particular confinement of oneself to spend the major part of one’s day with gangs of people who don’t have similar interests – levels of interest.
We’re told otherwise; we’re told that being in that separated group is being part of the community. That’s capitalism – it has its lies well formed, its deceptions necessary to maintain itself. You can tell because you, student or teacher are so-o-o-o bored! yearning for – well, you know not what, since you’re not permitted to recognize your exclusion or to go find out what other interests you have. Like the mother, you’re to love being plopped into and forced to remain in your role. Mothering gets SO wearing just being what it is.
The necessity that can be met is to accommodate all levels of skills, as well as of interest.
The job is not to be in a hurry.
The hurry is just an element of profit-making.
Our loved ones are beloved by us as they manifest feeling strong, self-respecting, which come to us by being PART of society, not set aside for being too young or too old to have equal place in the community, not being PUT into school, or old people’s facilities, sent off to do old or young people’s things, instead of the actions that are central for us all. We slough off categories of people while we usual people, adults, spend inordinate amounts of time at a job, – necessary or not, but doing a job, regardless its use for us.
School in its present form arose with the industrial revolution. Children were not being well indoctrinated into knowledge of their masters – the King, the State, the need not to question their misery but to accept the right of the business owner to utilize their virtual enslavement. Children also quickly had to learn that many slackers did not deserve the salvation that having a job is. School preached these rules as well as reading.
School then took up the whole range of additional course work our work-makers have decided we need in order to be compartmentalized, corporatized, making what could have been satisfying work into an experience like having to sit in church every day, listening to lists of rules, being told how much we love doing that.
School teaches us to love competition. In it we’re forced to compete against each other.
The system has to judge and grade us, exclude us from continuing in a chosen field because we’re judged lacking at it – get bad grades at the class, instead of being allowed to continue and become able at it, to be able to do a project we think we’d like to do – doctoring, for instance.
Competition with other producers of like products cause us to be in a hurry to complete our assigned segment of the production when we’re at the job.
So, let’s arrange to end that hurry.
We could.
That would help to reduce – END!!! – danger at the job site. Then the 3year old, or 90 year old wouldn’t have to be prohibited from coming to the job site for fear they’d get hurt. They wouldn’t. People going to work are no more suicidal or likely to be self-damaging than the general population – well, except for these ‘going postal!!!’ times – which can only be mitigated by letting people live lovely lives – which is altogether possible – if we end the profiteering.
The easier life that comes from us all being members in a social milieu of people taking care of us all is the life that lets us coddle each other, get coddled – cared for, cradled, treated gently. These will even reduce to ending accidents (– which is about to be ended we’re told, by these terribly complex vehicles we’re going to have to drive – the accident-proof cars – unfixable when they break down, by any but the most specialized mechanic!)
People see their children do a move and say stop it you’ll hurt yourself! Please disparage that to where you’ll never react that way. It’s wrong. Children at the job know they’re respected and will be just as careful as you – anyone. What we have to be sure to convince that worker, the worker that no longer sits in painful hours of instruction before being a productive member of society, but just comes in and makes, now, …what we have to be sure they know is that we’re NO LONGER in a hurry to finish the product – that we have time to do it right including carefully. I don’t need to site the figures here of how many workers are hurt and killed by accident at the job.
For all people to be able to be at work sites, we have to be sure a worker is confident to say I can’t do this – I’m unable – I’m not strong enough; I need more people lifting with me, or a tool by which to lift. Or people have to feel confident to say I don’t know – or I don’t remember – how.
People on the job need to be able to enjoy showing someone how to read so to read the instructions. Reading takes no time to learn. Everyone can teach it – and get the pleasure of helping someone learn a skill. We need many people on the job – labor intensive – the opposite of the present production aim. Besides the obvious, getting jobs done while doing the work in kindly ways, we’d be taking time to be friendly with each other.
A fine broadcast on Pacifica looked at CUBED A Secret History of the Workplace By Nikil Saval recent – 2014. For all the reasons you know, we’ve been put into cubicles. Work has been made simple, dull. We all know we could be replaced by machines tomorrow – well, soon. By breaking work down into repetitive minutiae, our Owners have claimed our work – control of our work; they’ve taken from us the satisfaction of completing a job.
So many of us specialists could teach so many jobs with so many students. What a pleasure!
And the journey-people could teach, too!
normaha@pacbell.net
School Is The Opposite Of Education 