What lies out of grasp when we reach for the stars?

I think the question of education begins with the fact that all ethical decisions are about perceived consequences for any given decision maker, but that perceived consequences (self interest?) are defined by the situation and culture from which they arise. I think there is a particular material and social reality that constructs the perceived self-interest of students that allows them to ignore the social violence surrounding education while pursuing a degree.

When I went to the Washington State prison last week to talk about debate and immigration, one of the most striking things about the way the inmates spoke about the world was their focus on individual responsibility- they nearly adopted the pose of liberal-individualism, of every man [sic] for themselves on a playing field that, if not level, was at least every man’s responsibility to overcome their level. From my perspective, a white man (free, in many senses), for whatever reason standing at the front of a room filled with impoverished and imprisoned black men, I could only feel baffled. In retrospect, I think that this ethos – of personal agency, is something created by social institutions of evaluation. In opposition to some discourses of social institutions evaluating people on a level playing field, I think that the institutions create the view of the field for people. Prison is a world of harsh and brutal judgments and of unquiet desperation. An institution that exacts extreme physical violence upon the body of its participants also exacts a kind of force onto the mind, drawing it towards thinking about agency and responsibility.

It should be no surprise that I think of schools and prisons in one breath. Schools are built, run and maintained by the same groups that build run and maintain prison systems. Schooling has its own form of judgment, its own form of evaluation and transformation of bodies and minds. I think the parallel exists, through on a drastically different scale. School and education imposes its own system for evaluation – in more ways than may be thought. Clearly, the school system uses evaluations – grades, and other systems – to create self discipline and encourage the development of a self (and only self) help ethos. Also, the idea of liberal individualism as the true definition of equality underpins efforts at multicultural and pluralistic education and ultimately conflates them: because pluralism ensures all voices are heard, this creates a sense of equal opportunity, and then formally equal opportunity (with no guarantees for inclusion) can then become its own mode of pluralism. I feel that a systems of evaluation not only encourage this mode of self-reliance, self-centricism, and self-creation, but also abstraction and theorization.

Evaluation makes us theorists of ourselves. Evaluation always implies a hierarchy of judgment. The evaluation removes an act from its immediate context and orients it towards a goal: it becomes a process of accumulation of time and self that becomes deposited into a particular system of judgment. The mental process of writing and learning for evaluation places the writer into the mind of the evaluator constantly questioning each act, creating a theory of which action benefits you (the student) the most. You become a theorist of yourself: developing schemas, tools, mechanisms for self control and self advancement in the service of a goal developed by someone else. This develops a habit of a particular type of self theorization (as plotting, as strategy, of manipulation), through the ultimate evaluation system of school: the diploma, the ticket to the world beyond, the main ingredient to the formula for success in society. In the process of theorizing ourselves, we become separate from the lives we lead while theorizing. The foregrounding reality for theorizing, the habits of daily life, remain outside of consideration when in sight of the fetish object (grade/diploma). We develop a habit of deferring self-criticism and reflexivity for the ends of making the grade. So, I think the question is – who are we using as stepstools when we choose to reach for the stars? A dominant theme in my own education was the use of that education for some good, through a position of power or authority obtained by education. It makes self into strategy, and makes practice into a form of abstraction that separates school from politics, education from existence. This manifests itself in a variety of places where people talk about the implicit divisions in education that revolve around the difference between school and the real world not school. The place where we educate ourselves is a real place. People live there, they eat, they move, they rely. The prevalence of fetish objects and systems of evaluation that only question ideas and the ability to strategically negotiate a social reality established by someone else force that place out of the question in most situations in school.

Why do we have fetish objects? There is a logic of institutional inertia that habituates people to identify with the communication and meaning making symbols of institutions. A community that shares in common a system for valuing individuals and labor projects the value/symbol system onto social relationships as means of common currency between disparate individuals, and that symbol system acts as a socialization agent, that projects desire onto the discrete symbol systems developed in that particular context. They condition the soul (Foucault) but also the ego – self realization becomes explained by means of an institutional language. I think this creates the contradictions and injunctions against social activism for students. Because the institutional logic of school relies on differentiating strategies, within a school community, personal achievement not only becomes highlighted, but also more accessible in a personal sense. Fulfillment happens on a neat scale of 1-100, handy units of evaluation that structure self worth and provide documentary evidence for achievement. The negotiation between self and others gets painted in the starkest terms possible. Students may not even believe that their schoolwork matters – but enculturation into a community that shares and (on some level) values the means of evaluation in grades and discipline, which encourages prioritizing school work over social work. I’ve felt re-prioritization occur, moving between social spaces around campus. Coming back from the prison, or from the anti-abortion protests into an environment of school work, the things I know I valued at one point (grades, debate) just come to feel petty, incredibly small and even… flimsy as I attempted to manipulate them.

I think reforming school is a spatial project (in many ways – where we see boundries, and when we choose to cross the visible ones) as well as a structural project (re-orienting the subject of value, the position of a valuing authority). However, it must also be noted the project is an intensely economic one. Another source of inertia comes from the fact banks, governments and philanthropists only make available loans, scholarships and other incentives primarily to students of certain types of education – in a formal institutional college setting. Negotiating a way out of a ethical system that encourages self interest requires a transcendence of economic constructs as well as ethical, symbolic constructs.

Final note (metaphor): Today I attended an economic justice event that focused on securing worker’s rights in poultry plants around the south. The word of the day was ‘accountability.’ I considered what this word implied, and what it required from people as consumers and citizens. Formal accountability requires a level of sustained attention and focus not available to most people. At the very least, they believe themselves to be pressed for time, attention and money, and in most cases they are right. Accountability in this case involved addressing only the specific agents engaging in illegal labor practices, while drawing attention away from the way that most consumers encounter the processes in question, which is primarily through branding and brand image. One of the most successful workers rights campaigns has been the Coalition of Imolkee Workers, which targeted the brands Taco Bell and McDonalds, rather than the low level producers who specifically employed the workers advocating change. They used an analysis of the way consumers experience exploitive systems to leverage change. I think that changing education must begin with this same process: targeting how students experience and encounter exploitation, violence and oppression.

Duncan