Education: Reform or Revolution?[1]

E. Wayne Ross

University of British Columbia[2]

 

 

Dualism of Reform/Revolution

As I contemplated what I might say on the theme of our conference—“Education Reform or Revolution?”—I was haunted by my readings of John Dewey and his consistent attacks on dualisms. Throughout his career, Dewey protested against false distinctions such as: humans and nature, mind and body, learners and the curriculum, and “traditional” versus “progressive” education. He was always searching for an inclusive perspective.

For example, in the early-to-mid 20^th century, Dewey tried to mediate the conflict between the conservative defenders of traditional teacher-centered pedagogy and the romantic advocates of child-centered education (see Dewey, 1938). A key distinction in this debate (and one that Dewey argued was false) was over “interest and effort,” with conservatives defending the virtues of imposing mental discipline on students and romantics calling for reforms that would make school more “interesting” to students.

Both groups advocated for external incentives—negative in the case of traditionalists, positive in the case of the romantics—to engage students in their schoolwork. Dewey argued, however, that providing such incentives was not only ineffective, but also pernicious, because it made for teaching and learning conducted for the sake of these external rewards and punishments alone. Educators had to realize that the subject matter of the curriculum was, like all accumulated knowledge, at one time the product of curiosity much like that possessed of active, if undisciplined children.

Consequently, Dewey reasoned, the internal link between the interests of the child and the accumulated knowledge of adults had to be forged through the creation of a problematic, educative situation in which the learner has a question of her own, and is actively engaged in seeking and selecting relevant material with which to answer it (Westbrook, 1991).

Reform, Revolution and Movements for Social Change

So, have we created a false dualism in offering a conference that presents the choice of educational reform or revolution? And, if we have, how can we overcome dualistic thinking about our efforts at educational change? This is not a new problem for movements aimed at social change. And it seems appropriate to reconsider the question of reform or revolution now, as it was 40 years ago, in 1968, that the world witnessed student uprisings in France which lead to a general strike of over 10 million workers and the collapse of the government there.

“May 1968” in France was a revolutionary moment aimed at transforming the social and moral aspects of the “old society” and was focused in particular on educational institutions. Hundreds of thousands of university students and their allies (including high school students, but not trade unions and established left, which took pains to distance themselves from the movement) took over universities and battled with police and the military while invoking Situationist inspired slogans such as:

“Be realistic, demand the impossible”

“No replastering, the structure is rotten”

“The boss needs you, you don't need him.”

1968 saw student rebellions around the world in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, across Europe and the United States. In many cases the state responded violently. In Mexico, police and military occupied UNAM, the largest university in Latin America, and massacred hundreds (perhaps thousands) of students at Tlatelolco. (Two years later, in May 1970, the Ohio National Guard would kill four and wound nine others during anti-war protests and Mississippi police would kill two and wound 12 student protesters at Jackson State College.)

Reform or Revolution: A Moral Choice with Pragmatic Considerations

Revolution as a Moral Choice

The recent establishment of the new Students for a Democratic Society as well as a spate of books assessing the original 1960s SDS and Weatherman—the small but influential group fraction within SDS that eventually destroyed it—also encourages us to consider again the question of “reform versus revolution.” Maurice Isserman, in a review of several such books for The Nation, quotes from Elinor Langer’s essay “Notes for Next Time: A Memoir of the 1960s” (1973) as part his argument that the student led movement for social change in the US was undone by revolutionaries who rejected a reformist agenda. Langer wrote:

Because revolution was effectively impossible one did not have to dirty one’s hands in compromise, nor mingle much with the hoi polloi (meaning the middle class; the un-Chosen) along the way. And it was also ahistorical and it mistook revolution, a rare historical event, for a moral choice.

Isserman suggests a corollary to Langer’s assessment, that the 1960s New Left’s

“impatience with half-measures of liberal reformism, its lack of interest in creating a stable constituency or institutional base, and its promotion of a politics of confrontation and risk…revealed the movement as an exotic but recognizable descendant of the powerful Protestant antinomian tradition of radical individualism”—one whose adherents believed they were released by grace from the obligation of observing the moral law and thus “defied social custom and religious law to follow the inner promptings of God’s voice wherever they might lead” (Isserman, p. 34).

In contrast Isserman describes the reformist approach of Carl Oglesby, who was elected president of SDS in 1965, as the unfortunate path not taken.

[Oglesby] wanted SDS to focus on what it was good at: building campus chapters and opposing the war [in Vietnam], offering a radical critique of American foreign policy while forming alliances with liberals and even libertarian conservatives, wherever and whenever possible. New Leftists, he thought, “should stop being scared of being reformed out of things to do.” (Isserman, p. 38)

Oglesby himself wrote in a 1969 article “Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin” for Liberation, “we are not free to fight The Revolution except in fantasy.” Oglesby believed:

…it is not causes, however heroic, or martyrs, however fine, that our movement needs. It needs shrewd politicians and concrete social programs. Not theoretical (really theological) proofs that the The People Will Win in the End, but tangible social achievements now. Nor the defiance of a small isolated band of super-charged cadre who, knowing they stand shoulder to shoulder with mankind itself, will face repression with the inner peace of early Christians …(Liberation, August-September, 1969)[3]

            So, where does this leave us in regard to our choices of reform or revolution? First, let’s examine the heart of the Isserman/Langer critique (and rejection) of revolutionary thought and action based upon what they describe as its uncompromising stance of revolution as a moral choice. Making a choice between reformist or revolutionary action is certainly a normative question. And as philosopher Paul Taylor has pointed out “the truth of normative assertions depends on human decisions” (1958, p. 248).

            In his classic examination of normative discourse, Taylor describes the key differences between the truth of factual and normative assertions. 

A factual assertion is true if it corresponds to the way the world is regardless of whether we want the world to be that way … A normative assertion is true, on the other hand, only because we have decided to adopt a standard or rule as applicable to what we making the assertion about … And the way the world is does not logically determine what decision we must make. Our adoption of a standard or rule which the truth or falsity of our assertion depends does not itself depend on the way things are. We must decide what ought to be case. We cannot discover what ought to be case by investigating what is the case. (p. 248)

            Indeed if we look at the way the world is, with its injuries of class and the compounded miseries of the injustices and discrimination along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, ability etc. our decisions may not be determined, but what moral standard would allow us to turn away from critical examination of the root causes of the exploitation, subordination, dependence, and insecurity that mark global capitalist society today? Capitalism and the “logic of the market” which guide neoliberal social and economic policies in the world today ratifies, reproduces, and deepens the persistent inequalities of wealth, income, justice, health care, and education we find in North America and across the world today.

Here are some examples of the huge divides that exist across nations from Gapminder.com. The first graph, the World Education Chart, illustrates “school life expectancy by GDP” (http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/applications/world-education-chart-2003.html).  The second graph, the World Health Chart, illustrates “child survival beyond 5 years by GDP” (http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/handouts/world-health-chart.html).

 

 

 

           

Although some progress has been made in reducing the racial divides that mark per-capita income, poverty, homeownership, health, and education in North America, these gaps are so large that at the current rate of progress would take centuries to eliminate racial inequities in these areas:

Income/Wealth Divide

• At the slow rate of the black-white poverty gap has been narrowing since 1968, it would take 150 years, until 2152 to close.
• For every dollar of white per-capita income, African-Americans had 55 cents in 1968—and only 57 cents in 2001. At this pace it would takes Blacks 581 years to get the remaining 43 cents.
• Almost a third of Black children live in poverty—32.1 percent in 2002. The child poverty gap would take 210 years to disappear, not reaching parity until 2212.
• Although white homeownership has jumped from 65 to 75 percent since 1970, Black homeownership has only risen from 42 to 48 percent. At this rate, it would 1,664 years to close the homeownership gap—about 55 generations.
• For example, in BC—where the current government is a model neoliberalism in action—is home to both the highest average wealth in Canada and the largest gap between the richest and poorest households. The wealthiest 10% of family units held 55% of the province's personal wealth at last count and the top 50% held 96%. The bottom 50% of British Columbians hold only 4.3% of personal wealth. Average wealth for the richest 10% is almost $1.4 million, while the poorest 10% hold average net debt of $8,126, worse than in any other region except the Atlantic. The gap between richest and poorest in BC is significantly higher than in any other region in Canada.

Health Divide

• Fewer than 40 percent of Black and Latino households have “middle-class levels of wealth” although 70 percent of white households are middle class or higher.

• African Americans infants are at great risk of death than infants in much poorer countries (e.g., Bulgaria, Cuba, Jamaica, Uruguay, etc.)
• Of all major racial and ethnic groups Latinos have the rates of health insurance coverage and have significantly higher rates of some chronic and infectious diseases including diabetes, tuberculosis, and AIDS.

Justice Divide

• One in one hundred Americans are behind bars now. While one in 106 adult white men are incarcerated, one in 36 Hispanics and one in 15 African-Americans are behind bars, according to Pew's examination of Justice Department data from 2006. Younger black men fare even worse, with one in nine African-Americans ages 20 to 34 held in cells. Of over 2 million people incarcerated in the US, over 63% are Black or Latino, while these groups make up about one-quarter of the population.

Education Divide

• Whites are now the most segregated group in US public schools, attending institutions that on average are 80 percent White.
• Nearly a quarter of the students in the Midwest and Northeast attend apartheid schools—virtually all-non-white schools marked by poverty, social and health problems.
• High-stakes testing is not the great equalizer it is often portrayed to be in the mythical meritocracy of the US public schools. Rather standardized testing puts children of color and children of poverty at a disadvantage. A disadvantage that begins early in the school career of a child and repeats itself again and again. Black and Latino students are more subject to high-stakes testing—tests that have serious consequences attached to the results—than their White counterparts (35 percent of African American and 27 percent of Latino 8^th graders will take high-stakes tests compared to 16 percent of White students.)
• In the past two decades in Kentucky, there has been a nearly 10 percent decrease in the percentage of White students in schools attended by Blacks. Despite the decrease, Kentucky has had the highest level of Black-White exposure in schools of any state since 1980. This was largely the result of the racial desegregation plan here in Jefferson County, which as you all know was struck down by the US Supreme Court last year.

The struggle to reduce class and racial divides is made more difficult by the widely held, but erroneous belief that these inequalities are an anomaly in the otherwise egalitarian liberal democracy of the US as well as a common refusal to examine their root causes, which are found in the system of capital.

In sum, the moral basis for choosing revolution doesn’t rely on the inner prompting of some supposed deity (as implied by Isserman and Langer), rather critical analysis of the consequences of our capitalist present will certainly lead most people to the rational choice that our circumstances call for a revolutionary response.

Beware Reform from the Perspective of Power

            Organizing people for change is a key part of revolutionary action, and has Carl Oglesby observed revolutionaries “shouldn’t be scared of being reformed out of things to do.” Building organizations like SDS, The Rouge Forum, etc.; forming alliances with allies to achieve short-term goals; and generally being effective in our work in the social, educational, and political institutions as they currently exist are crucial parts of what it means to engage in revolutionary action.

            But our work within the institutions of capital (whether these are schools, universities, or other social and educational organizations) must be done with a keen eye on how, through our daily activities, we reproduce our social situations, the social relations and the ideas of the society.

Reproduction of Everyday Life

In The Reproduction of Everyday Life (1969), Fredy Perlman argues that everyday life in a capitalist society systematically transforms the material conditions to which capitalism originally responded. In considering everyday life, Perlman argues that we must analyze “not only how practical activity in capitalist society reproduces capitalistic society, but also how this activity itself eliminates the material conditions to which capitalism is a response.” “The aim of the process,” according to Perlman, “is the reproduction of the relation between the worker and the capitalist.”

In short, within a capitalist system, people reproduce capitalism and the conditions of their own oppression. For Perlman, this is, at least in part, because the individual members of a capitalist society unknowingly “carry out two processes: [1] they reproduce the form of their activities, and [2] they eliminate the material conditions to which this form of activity initially responded” (p. 3). That they don’t see this, and that they continue to participate, relates in Perlman’s view to what represents perhaps the two most dominant features of modern everyday life: “alienation” and “fetish worship.”

Perlman argues “every time people perform an activity they have not themselves defined and do not control, every time they pay for goods they produced with money they received in exchange for their alienated activity, every time they passively admire the products of their own activity as alien objects procured by their money, they give new life to Capital and annihilate their own lives.”

Alienation implies that today the “work” of “laborers” is no longer authentically their own, but instead exists under the control of someone else—its “buyer.” To paraphrase Perlman, workers alienate their lives in order to preserve their lives. If people did not sell their living activity they could not get a wage and could not survive. “However, it is not the wage that makes alienation the condition for survival....It is people’s disposition to continue selling their labor, and not the things for which they sell it, that makes the alienation of living activity necessary for the preservation of life.”

Perlman argues that the mystification of one’s daily activities or what he called “the religion of everyday life” attributes living activity to inanimate things. For Perlman, fetish worship suggests that labor (the efforts of individuals) is a thing, and that “things live.” Under a fetishistic system, such as contemporary capitalism, people attribute their own power to things, inanimate things, and thus de–actualize/de-humanize their own roles—their own real power—in the (re)constitution of society. Under a fetishistic system, such as contemporary capitalism, people attribute their own power to things, inanimate things, and thus de–actualize their own roles—their own real power—in the (re)constitution of society. Perlman, put it this way:

[I]n other words, people are bought with the products of their own activity, yet they se[e] their own activity as the activity of Capital, and their own products as the products of Capital. By attributing creative power to Capital and not to their own activity, they renounce their living activity, their everyday life, to Capital, which means that people give themselves daily, to the personification of Capital, the capitalist.

To make use of Perlman’s work within the context of education, and everyday life, it helps first to locate schooling—classroom life,—within the setting of contemporary global capitalism. We must consider (1) that a product—a thing—is produced, distributed, consumed, bought, and sold (ostensibly “education” or “achievement”), and (2) that the major actors in the processes of schooling represent distinctive social classes—say the capitalist (or ruling, or powerful, or oppressor) class (e.g., school boards, politicians, bureaucratic management, corporations, and so on) and the working (or laboring, or teaching–learning, or oppressed) class (e.g., teachers, students, and parents). (Of course we recognize here the risks of reductionism, oversimplification, and overgeneralization.)

Perlman’s work implies, to the extent that schooling is a part of everyday life and that, in turn, everyday life is a part of schooling, that contemporary education is reproductive—it doesn’t work to transform or even “improve” society. It works to maintain it, to rationalize and mystify it, and to present it (and schooling itself, therefore) as right, natural, and neutral, but not as a means to promote, for example, social justice or radical democracy.)

Revolution of Everyday Life

In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem (1968/2001), a former Situationist International (SI) colleague of Guy Debord’s, argues that it is the dominant perspective of power—“power’s perspective”—that under girds all alienation in terms of modern everyday life. In sum, power (i.e., “the rulers”) alienates, oppresses, and exploits by demolishing any opportunity for participation, communication, and self–realization. It denies individuals the chance to build communities, to connect to one another, and to become who and what they might become. It isolates and fragments, passes off false relationships as human (i.e., as “real”), and defines subjective persons objectively—all in large measure as everyday life becomes less about joyous and creative and loving and playful interhuman experiences and more about the capitalistic imperative always to consume (if not also eventually to be consumed).

For example, the discourse of “social justice” in education (whether based on “liberal” or “conservative” ideologies) has been framed almost completely within the “perspective of power” and as a result offers little or no opportunity for transcending the deleterious effects of the power perspective with regard to the “idealism” of social justice. (In addition, mainstream/liberal” conceptions of critical pedagogy are constructed from the power perspective and thus suffer from the same problems.)[4]

People may perceive differences among “liberal” or “conservative” visions of social justice, but there is in fact more similarity than difference in our discussion of multiculturalism, class, diversity, race, poverty, difference, equity, social change, equality, oppression, democracy, the collective good, etc.—that is, almost all these views are constructed from the perspective of power whether they represent “liberal” or “conservative” politics. To paraphrase Marx on wage labor[5] one form of critical pedagogy may correct the abuses of another, but no form of critical pedagogy constructed from the perspective of power can correct the abuses of the perspective of power. Although the critical pedagogy that emerges from the perspective of power may, in fact, assist in the construction of “bigger cages and longer chains.”

Perhaps obviously, then, Vaneigem’s “revolution of everyday life” calls for a “reversal of perspective,” one opposed to the hierarchical workings of power, one he designates “The unitary triad: self–realization, communication, [and] participation,” a perspective incompatible with what he calls “survival sickness” and “spurious forms of opposition” or what we might call reformism from the perspective of power.

A Examination of consequences… the dance of the dialectic

My aim here has been to illustrate how the question of reform or revolution does not have to be understood as an “either/or” proposition. The decisions we make in these circumstances are clearly moral decisions—we must decide what ought to be case. And our action plans need to be practical in the sense that they are based upon critical analysis of the consequences we can observe. Moreover, we must always take care that in our work in schools and other social spaces is done with a keen eye on how through our daily activities, we reproduce our social situations, the social relations and the ideas of the capitalist society and resist the perspective of power that would shape our understanding of problems and necessary responses to them, while undermining or blocking self-realization, communication and participation.

Engaging in efforts aimed to transform both education and society is not without risks and as Noam Chomsky has pointed out “asking serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant.” It is difficult because:

The answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are often not only ugly…but also painful. To understand the truth about these matters is to be led to action that may not be easy to undertake and that may even carry significant personal cost. In contrast, the easy way is to succumb to the demands of the powerful, to avoid searching questions, and to accept the doctrine that is hammered home incessantly by the propaganda system. This is, no doubt, the main reason for the easy victory of dominant ideologies… (Chomsky, 1982, pp. 9-10)

The “Dance of Dialectic” (Betell Ollman’s representation of Marx’s method of investigating the social world) is a useful strategy for guarding against the deleterious effects of the perspective of power and dominant ideologies on our work:

Step 1—Analyze: Look for connections in the capitalist present!

Step 2—Historicize: Look for the preconditions of the most important of these connection in the past!

Step 3—Visionize: Project major social contradictions forward from the past, through the present, to their resolution and beyond in the future!

Step 4—And Organize: Look for preconditions of such a future in the present and sue them to develop your political strategy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Chomsky, N. (1982). Towards a new Cold War: Essays on the current crisis and how we got there. New York: Pantheon.

Isserman, M. (2008, February 11). Weather reports. The Nation, 286(5), 32-38.

Langer, E. (1973). Notes for next time: A memoir of the 1960s. In Center for the Study of Public Policy (Ed.) Working papers for a new society. Cambridge, MA: Center for the Study of Public Policy.

Oglesby, C. (1969). Notes on a decade ready for the dustbin. New York: Liberation.

Perlman, F. (1969). The reproduction of everyday life. Detroit: Black & Red.

Taylor, P. (1958). Normative discourse. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.