Toward the Destruction of Schooling

Description

Chapter 1. The Role of Schooling in Society

Chapter 2. The History of Schooling

Chapter 3. Theories of Schooling

Chapter 4. Notes on the Poverty of Student Life

The most important life-skill taught in schools is subservience. It is absolutely essential to all hierarchical social systems. Education, as William Torrey Harris (U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the century) once defined it, is “the subsumption of the individual.”[2] Nobody is absolutely free of social pressures, material forces, outside influences. But it does not follow that we should submit to the ideal of the individual’s “adjustment” to the social terrain: behavior modification administered by the guardians of the Republic. There is an essential tension here: the tension between unique individuals and the social institutions that prevent their self-determination.