I do not blame teachers for this situation, but just as doctors' organisations have absolutely nothing to say about the objective production, and their maintenance, of depression in this society, so teachers' organisations have nothing to say about their role in capitalist reproduction... this failure to articulate the complicity of social managers by those managers indicates the identification of their true interest, their demarcated status within the system.
Education workers groups DO have something to say about their role under capitalism. The members of LEWG is explicitly critical of the role of educators as they currently exist, but the solution revolutionaries who want to transform society seek should not be one of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
As critical as we are of aspects of the medical and pharmaceutical industry we don't call for the abolition of medicine, or doctors, or nurses. We recognise that their roles as they exist under capitalism contain contradiction and tensions that such workers must confront - but the goal should be for workers to seize control of those industries in the service and the interests of all of society, not just the few.
There certainly should be. My son first punched a teacher at four... a terrible experience for everyone concerned, and yet the cause of it was fear and total confusion about what was expected of him, i.e. sit down, shut up, face the front. Since that time, despite his great intelligence, wit, grace and beauty he continues in the remedial classes at school (he is 8) – no matter how we try it has been impossible to communicate to teachers what an amazing person he is, for them he is simply a problem and disruptive influence who must sit next to the teacher, at the back of the class, or even in the corridor.
I live on an estate where perhaps 50% of the children (most often boys) are in some sort of revolving programme of exclusions from school and other forms of special disciplining because they just don't get what is expected of them. It is easy to predict how these children will end up in 10 or 15 years, it is easy because the production of such children is systematic.
I went to a secondary modern where our only preparation for life was military style drilling and learning by rote for working in the local mill (which then shut)... all of my life I have been surrounded by people who have been designated as failures by the education system. I have escaped my being sorted into the discard pile because I have the theory to enable me to understand how the education system was wrong about me (and all the others). But when I go back home and see the state of my old school mates, then I see how badly things could have gone – in the words of Hans Eisler, they are very much middle aged failures in loving, failures in living. They have been broken. Within any totalising system, some will always escape but escape to what exactly? But most do not escape at all and find it almost impossible to challenge the categories of success and failure which have been instilled into them.
I do not blame teachers for this situation, but just as doctors' organisations have absolutely nothing to say about the objective production, and their maintenance, of depression in this society, so teachers' organisations have nothing to say about their role in capitalist reproduction... this failure to articulate the complicity of social managers by those managers indicates the identification of their true interest, their demarcated status within the system.
Pro-revolutionary critique must begin from the point where the damage is being done – it begins with putting into words that traumatic experience which otherwise passes unspoken (how is it that teachers so often fail to put themselves in the position of the children who are bewildered and exhausted by the environment of school?) All this pain, all this mental illness, all these addictions and sense of failure and emptiness and boredom and worthlessness begins at school – because school is where you are prepared for work.