BY JACK BARNES
The excerpts below are from the question and answer
period following an April 1993 talk by Socialist Workers
Party national secretary Jack Barnes in Greensboro, North
Carolina. The presentation, titled "Capitalism's Deadly
World Disorder" was part of a regional socialist
educational conference. It is published in full in
Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the
Millennium. The book is copyright (c) 1999 by Pathfinder
Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the
Militant.
Capitalist society promotes the myth that education is a youth question. But any society that sees education as a question just for young people can never have education that is meaningful for human beings, including youth. Social solidarity will never exist in such a society.
The working class cannot begin with how to change things so that youth get a better education. We have to begin with how to transform the values of society, not just the economics; it cannot be reduced simply to an economic problem. To be meaningful, education has to create the possibilities for society as a whole to advance, instead of reinforcing the exploitation of the majority by the few. Until then, the only "liberal education" available to any fighter who wants one is political education within the workers movement.
What is taught in most schools today is largely worthless. There are a handful of skills that provide some preparation for life - learning to read, learning to write, learning to compute, practicing to increase our attention spans, learning the discipline necessary to study and use our minds. Reading and studying are extremely hard. It takes discipline to sit still for three hours, two hours, even one hour - not moving, not jumping up - and to work through ideas. Working through ideas is hard; we all have to learn how to do it. But it is part of taking ourselves seriously. It is part of taking humanity seriously. We have to learn how to read and study by coming to better understand how other people live and work, whether they are older or younger than we are.
Capitalist education won't be reformed
But most everything else we are taught in school,
especially in the so-called social sciences and related
"disciplines," are things we need to unlearn. Civics
courses, social studies courses - these are all
obfuscation....
Don't underestimate young people's moral yearnings, their openness, human solidarity, and sensitivity. Perhaps they cannot put what they see into words. Perhaps they cannot theorize it. But they know a lot about what's going on. What does this kind of education have to do with the human race?
To really discuss education is not to discuss how to reform the seventh grade in Canarsie. The seventh grade in Canarsie is not going to be reformed. Or in Louisville. Or anywhere else. I guarantee it, because the rulers have no need, and thus no desire, for workers to be educated in this society. It is not true that the capitalist class needs for workers to be educated; it is a lie. They need for us to be obedient, not to be educated. They need for us to have to work hard to make a living, not to be critical. They need for us to consume all we make each week buying their products. Above all, they need for us to lose any desire over time to broaden our scope and become citizens of the world.
But the employing class does not need for us to be disciplined. In fact, indiscipline in life puts us more in their grasp. Obedience on the job, yes; discipline in life, no. That is what the employers want from the working class.
Most of you in the audience here tonight are workers. Do you have to be literate to do your job - not intelligent, but literate? Think about it. Do you have to be literate to work on the railroad? In an auto plant? Do you have to be literate to be a worker in an oil refinery? I don't think so; everything is color-coded, or number- coded. You don't need to be literate. Let alone be educated. Let alone have pride, self-respect, and initiative. Let alone to work together with fellow human beings to do things collectively, and to derive pleasure from it. That kind of education would be a danger for the rulers. Can you imagine people like that - fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old - coming into the workforce? They would take not only to union solidarity, but also to historical materialism and its revelatory and liberating character, like fish to water.
Only by looking at education this way can we understand the depth of the crisis. There is no meaningful education in this country under capitalism's school system, and there won't be. There will be some elementary reading, writing, and arithmetic. Certain people will be steered into technical specializations and a few will be drawn over time into the lower ranks of better-off social layers, in order to demonstrate to all other workers that we don't "merit" being rewarded.
A thin layer of young people - most from economically privileged backgrounds, plus a handful of lucky individuals from the working class - will even be given a chance to find their way to more creative work. That is a very thin layer, however, one that everyone would love to be a part of....
What do workers have to know for what they do on the job? It does not make any difference, does it? But in a society that is worth a damn, it would make a difference. There would be continual education. There would be a continual connection between work and education, between work and creativity. Work would not be organized around competition to sell the labor power of our muscle and brains for eight hours a day to one of the highest bidders. And the greatest reward from work would be increased human solidarity, the pleasure and celebration that come from what we have accomplished together.
That is why the working class has such a stake in getting rid of the notion that education is a children's question instead of a social question. The former is a petty-bourgeois, sentimental cover-up for the true crisis of education. There will be no real education, including above all for children, in a society where working people who are supposedly being educated know that a day will come when their education simply stops. Under those conditions, young people grind away until that day comes - whether at age sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, or twenty-one. And then their "education" ends.
Work must become an activity through which a human being's desire to continually widen his or her scope - the desire to educate ourselves - can be realized. Professors and certain other professionals have something called a "sabbatical." It is a very good practice, even if it is often not used very well (that's another story that is not our concern). Every seven years, they take some time off -sometimes a half year at full pay, sometimes a full year at half pay. They go somewhere and study something new, broaden their experiences, improve their knowledge, meet people in other countries. That's the idea. Go to Italy, go to Japan, go to Mexico. Go to Asia, go to Nigeria, go to South Africa. It is a wonderful concept. Workers should have the same opportunity. Every worker should have a sabbatical every three years - get half the year off with pay to go to another country, or to another part of this country; to study something, to make further strides in another language, to broaden our scope. This should be a lifetime perspective.
Work should be the way Che Guevara talked and wrote about it. Read his talks to factory workers during the early years of the Cuban revolution; read "A New Attitude toward Work" and other writings and speeches in Pathfinder's collection, Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. Factories and other workplaces should be organized to promote continual requalification and ongoing education, Che said. The goal of communist workers in the factories, he wrote, is "to assure that productive labor, training, and participation in economic matters of the [production] unit become integral parts of the workers' lives, gradually becoming an irreplaceable habit."(1)
1. "Planning and Consciousness in the Transition to Socialism (On the Budgetary Finance System)," in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, pp. 217-18.