3-D: Delegitimate, Disobey, Disrupt
About 10 Morton West High School students suspended over an anti-war protest at the school last week returned to the Berwyn school today to demand they be allowed back in classes.
The kids were accompanied by about 20 parents and anti-war activists at a press conference in front of Morton West. About 25 students were suspended and face expulsions after staging a protest against the Iraq war in the school cafeteria last Thursday.
District 201 Supt. Ben Nowakowski has insisted the students seriously disrupted… FULL STORY & Petition
Legume Sam:
Being expelled from a high-stakes standardized-test-controlled capitalist public school for participating in an act of civil disobedience in a world bent upon self-destruction; punishment or reward?
7 November 2007, 6:02 pmMike:
Sorry for the unrelated post, but has anyone got word of this? Interpretations??
(Re: House Dems voting to kill debate on Kucinich’s Impeach Cheney legilation (HR-777) with Repub’s switching sides to open debate they must know Dems don’t really want)
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/28469
8 November 2007, 5:19 pmLegume Sam:
Look, I’m as interested as anyone else in the “impeach Cheney” stuff, but this is a thread about a high school protest.
My question was intended seriously. As public schooling is (and has been) a preparation for lives to be spent in alienated wage labor, and given wage labor’s ongoing dispossession with the regressive movement we call “neoliberalism,” is it really that much of a punishment to be expelled for making waves?
11 November 2007, 3:10 pmStan:
Yes. If my own children had been expelled, the sequence of social consequences in the actually-existing system would have been hellacious. This is the trap of a system that is not yet destabilized, and for which there are no viable alternatives at hand.
Not being short, or glib. This is precisely the dilemma of feminist motherhood (in some cases parenthood), as well. How does one simultaneously prepare a child to live in the world as it is, and make a credible critique of it at the same time?
This is the nub of the whole question of ideological versus practical counter-dependency political practice.
A very common example: women shaving their axillae and legs. It is expected, and even if the individual woman objects to the norm, when it comes time to seek a job, these things matter. This is from the personal experience of someone with whom I am very close. It is the essence of systemic dependency. Add to that the responsiblity for children, infirm relatives or friends, whatever… and the question of what to do becomes infintely more complex than simply the ideological question of resisting oppressive norms.
One has no reasonable choice in many situations except to capitulate to the norms… or the norms would have fallen apart long ago. There is real power backing them up. A high school diploma is part of that game. And the ability to resist openly is a function — we have to be honest about this — of privilege.
We can disavow that privilege and hold ourselves above the fray; or we can face the reality of the majority and use whatever maneuver space (privilege) we might have to begin the practical construction of alternatives based on educated guesses about where the trajectory of history might be taking us.
Generalizing dangerously, I would say that social history operates in a Gouldian way… as punctuated equilibrium. Gradualistic systemic stability that increasingly develops internal constradictions (to use the marxian idiom), whereupon some fault line(s) slips along a social tectonic plate, with catastrophic consequences that create the conditions for new forms of social organization to take root. Meiditerranean soil exhaustion. European plague. Global deflation. Peak Oil. Whatever.
But we cannot will a new social organization into existence against a still-stable one with a political program. We might be able, however, to germinate new forms in the abandoned interstices. I hope so; because we are entering an epoch of unfathomable crisis… and I love my grandchildren.
11 November 2007, 4:26 pmLegume Sam:
Well, then, maybe they ought not to protest so loudly. On the other hand, where will these “interstices” appear if nobody tries to open them up? Isn’t that what it’s about, on one level: maintaining the tradition of protest, keeping the candle lit?
On another, similar educational note, Bryan Ward-Perkins’ book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization is about how civilization disappeared over large portions of the Roman Empire following its disintegration in the West. Ward-Perkins, of course, has an axe to grind against those (eg Peter Brown) who minimize the extent to which Europe underwent a “Dark Ages.” He argues that the production of basic necessities in the Roman Empire was mass production, and that, rather than making things themselves, people bought them. When the Roman Empire in the West was overrun, the mass production facilities went out of business, leaving behind large populations ignorant of how to make the stuff they were using. In places such as (especially) Brittania, some really basic skills went out of circulation, and civilization regressed to a pre-Bronze Age level.
That’s probably where we’re headed, if we continue to support educational systems that do little besides teach basic literacy and numeracy skills while at the same time teaching children to disdain the use of same skills. The coming series of disasters will leave behind populations will little or no know-how.
11 November 2007, 6:25 pmDeAnander:
There is real power backing them up.
– tangential note –
this comment is also relevant to discussions of norm-enforcement via “humour” — insult, belittlement, etc. — directed from above to below. “words can never hurt me” but there is real, if random, force backing it up; that is to say, if you are an Afro-American journalist and you receive a lynching threat you can never dismiss the real possibility of an assault by organised racists; if you are a female blogger and you receive pornoganda threats, images of yourself or text about yourself being raped or murdered, you can never quite dismiss the real possibility of such an attack, since there is enough chronic attritional violence directed at women by men to produce an enforcing effect.
this kind of “unofficial policing” acts in concert with the kind of official but un-acknowledged policing of conformity, as in demerits for insubordination which over time add up to a “profile” that is then used to with-hold employment or housing, prevent advancement, prevent continuing education, bias law enforcement against the individual, etc.
and after that comes the naked power of the state, as in guns and riot sticks and helicopters… the “force backing it up.”
– back to topic –
I think Sam’s question is valid — if leaving our kids in school means leaving them at the mercy of brainwashing and disinformation and para-penitentiary discipline and bullying, then aren’t they better off outside?
the answer that many libertarians and religious zealots have chosen is home schooling and/or private schools. private schools are definitely a privileged option; homeschooling is available to any family in which one parent can afford to work at teaching the kids instead of at a day job; which in today’s capitalism means this is also a privileged option, though more accessible than the private school one. a more palatable option from my point of view is FreeSkool or similar, but authorities do not recognise this and thus if used for juvenile education it would produce a decredentialled young adult who will have difficulty slipping back into the machinery of state and capital.
it’s easy for me to theorise, I don’t have children so this is one moral and philosophical agony I have not had to face. mandatory education seems like A Good Thing (TM) in that it breaks the power of patriarchal fathers and grandfathers to prevent girls from learning to read, etc., and ensures that every child is introduced to certain basic concepts and skills; the potential for abuse if children never leave the context of the parental home is considerable. OTOH as we know, the potential for abuse in schools is considerable and seems to be growing daily. my solution is not original: smaller schools, more local to the neighbourhood, smaller classes, more parental involvement, less emphasis on “metrics” (turning kid brains into widgets and Taylorising their development). but there is bound to be a struggle over schools because in the end, if the State is run by capital, then the goals of the boss class in educating [training] the proles are not the same as the alleged goals of a “liberal education” or what parents might hope a child will get out of “education”. the last thing the boss class wants is a population of widely-read critical thinkers with inquiring minds…
11 November 2007, 6:49 pmStan:
And here is where the re-localization of political practice comes in… without dropping masswork, like feminism, like anti-war, like anti-racism. But somehow rationalizing them from the bottom-up.
Schools — and even local control issues around schools — have been the hobby horses of right and left. They are a volatile (therefore important) point because our kids spend a LOT of time there.
The fights over suspension policies, high-stakes testing, cirricula, et al, need to include struggles to ensure the elimination of junk food vending machines and wholesome food in the cafeterias (maybe gardens as pedagogical tools), broader community involvement in the interaction with students, work-study programs with mentors, local historical or environmental mapping projects, etc etc.
On the issue of these brave kids, they deserve our undivided backup. The fight for control over the existing space and the development of alternatives need not be mutually exclusive. Localization and tactical agility.
11 November 2007, 7:38 pmLegume Sam:
I’ve spent a certain amount of time as an accomplice in the project of the public schools, mostly as a substitute teacher. I found that in being a substitute teacher (especially at the elementary school level) I could subvert the normal “disciplinary” practice of the classroom to a certain extent, by introducing more playful forms of instruction/ activity than were normal with the regular teacher. My substitute teaching was, however, “normalized” by being regarded as a temporary “break” from the routine which cemented student bodies in their place as recipients of a curriculum reduced to “skills.”
As for this matter of “privilege,” I’m pretty painfully aware that my own status as an “intelligent intellectual” is due to my own accumulation of educational privileges. My attempts to spread some of this “privilege” around, as a schoolteacher and as a college professor, have had rather limited success. I suppose most of my observers have regarded me as some sort of eccentric. I’m now overqualified and unemployed, living off a bequest given me by a dying friend.
11 November 2007, 8:56 pmaudrey:
Within that community involvement category, Stan, I’d add involvement with students at other schools in cooperative instead of competitive ways. In our educational culture we view other schools as rivals, which is excellent training for viewing the world in terms of us and them. We compete for enrollment, for dollars, for publicity, in sports, we even compete in the arts – and of course in test scores, because having knowledge is a competitive event.
It’s less common for public schools to work in cooperative ways with nearby schools, particularly in highly segregated cities. If we have a clean up day, it’s normally at “our” school, and our families and students participate in it (if we’re lucky). We had a cleanup day recently at one of our Detroit schools, and the teachers organizing it invited a network of students from other districts to help. We had kids from my school and several others in the suburbs join them at their high school, and spent the day scraping and painting, and breaking bread together afterwards. The idea is to have our teens develop a sense of ownership over “the schools” in a regional sense rather than just “my school.”
Going back to the original topic, it’s hard to develop any sense of ownership even in “my school” if the message the administration is sending to the students is that it’s the administration’s school, and the students’ voices are an inconvenience at best, something that cannot be tolerated, at worst. Looking at it from that perspective, the harm the administration did in this case extends beyond just the students being expelled. I think that’s what Sam was hinting at, that there may be so much damage done that the education itself may be doing more harm than good. I manage to sit on both sides of that fence, being both a high school drop-out and a high school teacher. Leaving high school is a better alternative if you have just that – a better alternative. In that way, it’s a bit like working in a sweatshop. It’s easy to look in from the outside and say it’s no big deal if you get fired from a sweatshop job, good riddance, it’s an awful life … but the people are there because they didn’t have better options. For these students, if they decide not to come back I’ll support them in that decision, but only if it’s their decision and not the administration’s. I see value in fighting for their right to come back even if every last one of them decides in the end they don’t want to – because that right also affects the other students who didn’t take part in the protest.
11 November 2007, 10:06 pmLegume Sam:
I agree with Audrey in all that she said in the above post, and that it should be the students’ decision — the main reason I got into the “education business” in the first place was that there was such a thing as “student-centered pedagogy” and I wanted to explore the possibility that it could exist in real life, and not just in books.
These days I’m beginning to imagine schoolwork as just another form of alienated labor, time put in for exchange-value, and not even exchange-value for money, but exchange-value for grades, units, and diplomas. So far, the main redemption for school life appears to me in the form of DIY semi-academic eco-projects such as the Pomona College Natural Farm; here is the rewrite of my essay on the Farm. I hope it explains in greater detail why I think the Farm is special.
12 November 2007, 12:24 amStan:
Sam, is it possible that we can — once we get the refit completed at IA — post this amazing essay about this amazing place there? With attribution and links, of course.
And do you live near Joel Kovel? I met him in NY once.
12 November 2007, 9:51 amLegume Sam:
I wish! I’m in California, a few blocks from the Pomona College Natural Farm
Yes, you may post the prefiguration essay.
12 November 2007, 10:52 amLegume Sam:
Betsy Angert’s excellent essay on high school life under NCLB is pertinent to any discussion of what school is today…
12 November 2007, 11:00 amTimor_Mortis:
I would consider any work by John Taylor Gatto required reading on any discussion of mandatory public schooling. (The Underground History of American Education is available online: http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm)
I, for one, plan to homeschool as I consider the state’s “medium security education facilities” as doing more harm (activley and puposely detrimental) than the “free” day care it provides is worth. It has only gotten worse under the Orwellian “No Child Left Behind” system. If my kid(s?) decides to get a cog/cubicle drone -type job at least he will go in with his eyes open and as free of “righthink” as i can manage.
I don’t really see the fuss about what difference a diploma makes. Those that still require a HS-level diploma (college, trade school, military) are happy to take the equivilant (GED). Once you’ve proven your academic abilities at the local community college, the state universities could care less about what sort of high school you did or did not attend. Jobs that pay more than minimum wage but don’t require at least an associates degree can usually be had via certifications (IT) or apprenticeships (electrician).
14 November 2007, 3:05 amLegume Sam:
btw, the Morton West students were allowed back…
14 November 2007, 9:09 pmLegume Sam:
Betsy Angert, again, on Morton High…
16 November 2007, 9:59 am