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The Anarchives             Volume 2 Issue 2 Part Three Free

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        The Anarchives      [e-mail]



        Anarchy & Education

             The Canadian Student Strike



This transmission contains: Power In The Classroom?

                EKOPILOT

                Anarchy & Education

                Mr. Authority



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Power in the Classroom?



A Plan for the Destruction of the Universities

by Bernard Attias <[e-mail]>



Last fall I spoke at Cornell and announced, "The food here is

free!" and twenty of us went into the cafeteria, loaded our

trays with hamburgers, Cokes, and pies, and walked out without

paying.  We sat in the dining hall laughing and slapping each

other on the back stuffing our faces with Digger shit.  I told

them of epoxy glue and what a great invention it was.  And at

another school we asked them why they were there and they said

just to get a diploma and so we passed out mimeographed sheets

that said "T his is a diploma," and asked the question again.1



That this anecdote, from Abbie Hoffman's landmark essay "Plans

for the Destruction of the Universities," strikes me as an

amusing relic from a mythic era has something to do with the

fact that it was written two years after I was born.  But more

important ly it highlights three important factors that must

inevitably problematize the search for a truly critical

pedagogy.  First, the students in the universities I have

attended and observed in the past seven years are well behaved.

Monstrously well behaved.



Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind expresses outrage at

the chaotic shambles he sees in modern university education and

vehemently attacks the nihilistic and relativistic radical

intellectuals responsible for this mess.  I fully agree with

King sley Widmer's response to Bloom, "I had not thought we had

been so successful!"2 In fact, we haven't.  Students are in many

ways the most blindly obedient and uncritical sheep I have ever

encountered.  Not only would the events described by Hoffman

above be entirely unlikely in 1991; most students would view the

actions described with revulsion if not horror.  Second, in the

wake of the recent television miniseries "War in the Gulf" and

the rather feeble attempts on the part of student demonstrations

to direct media attention (that is, advertising blips) away from

the yellow ribbons and the stunning array of sophisticated

gizmos capable of lofting all manner of shit into the desert,

Hoffman's piece indicates just how little student radicals have

learned in the past twenty years.  Today's student radicals

understand nothing about the media because today's students know

nothing about the media, because their teachers know nothing

about the media.  But the media have completely redefined the

ways in which u niversity education must proceed if it is ever

to resemble anything educational, intellectual, or critical.

Finally, the title of Hoffman's piece suggests what in my mind

is the only feasible path to a truly critical pedagogy: the

destruction of the universities.



Before teachers and students ever arrive in a classroom, they

have certain "places" within a blind, faceless institution which

mark them in ways which must somehow be overcome for a truly

critical pedagogy to develop.  It is the purpose of this piece

to analyze some of the ways in which these roles are produced

and reproduced ideologically and suggest some of the results of

this reproduction.  What these results add up to, in my mind, is

something profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-educational that

is literally built into the university system within which

critical teaching methods must develop.  Critical pedagogy must

attempt to subvert these institutional constraints from within;

an arduous but necessary approach which implies turning

university edu cation against the essence of university

education, an essence which I will argue is profoundly

anti-educational.  Thus, my plan for the destruction of

universities attempts to sacrifice the university to what in my

mind must be a higher goal, education.  This would not entail

the abandonment of some of the benefits of the university

institutions; such as grants, fellowships, bookstores,

conferences, parties.  But it must entail the rejection of the

codes and relationships of power that have indelibly mar ked the

university as a place where education doesn't occur.



Ivan Illich and Buckminster Fuller both offer far-reaching

proposals for educational reform which at first seem

irreconcilable.  While Illich argues for "deschooling society,"3

Fuller argues for a university from which noone ever graduates.4

Both approa ches, however, stem from similar perceptions of the

university as an intellectually bankrupt institution.  Illich

and Fuller sense what all students learn in the university;

perhaps the only thing students ever learn in the university,

that real life is e lsewhere.  For Illich this is the result of

the radical division established between "education" and "the

world" by the system of compulsory education, such that

"education becomes unworldly and the world becomes

non-educational." (31) Widmer argues that the university

embodies hierarchy, excessive bureaucratic compartmentalization,

exploitative corporate subservience, and systematic mediocrity,

(5).  The insipid proliferation of distinctions and categories

that confronts the university student heightens the absurdity of

ever expecting an education out of a university.  Widmer

continues:



Start with the obvious bureaucratization.  The petty corruption

is pervasive + The character deformations from competitive

hierarchy, however, are not the whole story + The problem must

also include that the academic is a "professional" (generally

taken a s an accolade), a prostitute inclined to proneness.  And

what + has one sold out to? Often simply to

institutionalization, that is, endless processing.  But that

processing expresses one of the more extreme styles of the

division of labor -- division of t hinking -- that fundamental

source of hierarchical sensibility and its falsities + One ends

up thinking, and acting, in terms of specializations and their

pyramidal structures.  (6) Of course, life in postmodern

consumer society requires such a state of affairs; in fact "the

modern economic system demands a mass production of students who

have been rendered incapable of thinking."5 Schools separate

creative writing from literature s o that students specialize in

one or the other, and we wonder why our writers don't read?  Of

course, college students have come out of years of such

absurdity in their elementary and secondary educational

institutions, so it should be no surprise that ev en at its best

the university provides corporations with a new crop of

semi-literate market researchers and promotional workers each

year, turning out only the occasional artist, writer, or teacher

who almost invariably ends up perpetuating the institutio n's

bureaucratic inertia.  "In this ornate, multi-leveled, however

muddled, fucking-over of semi-literacy, few come out writing

well, and even fewer with much critical perception of the

culture and society in which they live." (Widmer, 7)



Prince's brilliant admonition to parents in the media age"Don't

let your children watch television until they know how to read

or else all they'll know how to do is cuss, fight and bleed" --

is unfortunately an impossibility.  Neil Postman outlines t he

critical contradiction of traditional education in the latter

half of the twentieth century:



There are some teachers who think they are in the "transmission

of our cultural heritage" business, which is not an unreasonable

business if you are concerned with the whole clock and not just

its first 57 minutes.  The trouble is that most teachers find

the last three minutes too distressing to deal with, which is

exactly why they are in the wrong business.  Their students find

the last three minutes distressing -- and confusing -- too,

especially the last thirty seconds, and they need help.  While

they have to live with TV, film, the LP record, communication

satellites, and the laser beam, their teachers are still talking

as if the only medium on the scene is Gutenberg's printing

press.6 Teachers cannot possibly hope to compete with the

cathode ray tube when they regard their roles as transmitters of

bodies of completely useless information.  We ask students to be

familiar with the standard texts of a given field rather than

helping them to critically confront the endless barrage of

information they encounter daily.  Composer John Cage points

out, "The reason I dropped out of college was because I was

absolutely horrified by being in a class which had, say, two

hundred members, and an ass ignment being given to have all two

hundred people read the same book.  I thought that if everyone

read the same book, it was a waste of people."7 Moreover, do we

really expect students to see the university environment as

anything but a stultifying retr eat from everyday existence when

we tell them to read Plato before McLuhan and Rousseau before

Nietzsche?  But it is not the content of education that my

criticism is principally directed at; it is the form.  McLuhan's

formula "the medium is the message" applies as much to the

classroom as it does to the fax machine.  Material behavior in

the classroom is, in my view, infinitely more important than the

specific informational contents of a syllabus.  This material

behavior is inevitably circumscribed by se veral institutional

conditions: classes "meet" at a given time, according to a

schedule; students and teachers alike have to fill out papers

daily in order to legitimize their existence in the institution;

students are assigned one of a totally unimaginat ive array of

five letters at the end of each semester and this letter tells

them how good they are; everything is geared toward a tedious,

ritualized monotony with no room at all for spontaneity or

creativity.  If we do our jobs correctly the monotony is

compounded by a teaching style that hasn't progressed since the

fourteenth century: students face a single teacher at the front

of the room who crams an astonishing number of lists down their

throat (the five steps in a good oration; the three principles

of rhetoric; the seven stages of a political movement; the four

causes of the American revolution; etc, ad nauseaum) while the

students dutifully scribble and daydream.



In a mediated society, educators can no longer be content in

losing the battle for the student's mind to the faceless

bureaucracy of the institution or the soundbites of television

advertisers.  Power in postmodern society is exercised blindly

by bureauc racies and concentrated only momentarily in

orchestrated spectacles.  Guy Debord writes of the commodity

spectacle: "Lived reality is materially invaded by the

contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing

the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness.

Objective reality is present on both sides.  Every notion fixed

this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite:

reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is

real.  This reciprocal alienation is the es sence and the

support of the existing society."8 This is the aestheticization

of politics a generation after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and

television; a generation with an attention span of just under 28

seconds and to whom Madonna is more real than Socrates could

ever be.  The aestheticization of politics has not, however,

been accompanied by a corresponding aestheticization of

education, and the power of the spectacle has been monopolized

by the advertising moguls of commodity society -- so much energy

pou red into developing the perfect sound bite to make people

buy; so little put into developing the perfect sound bite to

make people think.  How can we expect our students to be more

interested in class than in television?  The simple answer is

that power i s always blind and bureaucratic; power seems

irresistibly entrenched in the structure of society because the

structure of society is taken for granted.  Foucault argues,

"Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but

because it comes from e verywhere."9 This can seem disheartening

for anyone who wishes to honestly challenge the way society is;

however, the very blindness of power may be the most effective

avenue for resistance.  Power is not centralized in the

university or network news: "p ower + is not that which makes

the difference between those who do not have it and submit to

it.  Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or

rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain.

It is never localized here or ther e, never in anybody's hands,

never appropriated as a commodity or a piece of wealth.  Power

is employed and exercised through a net-like organization.  And

not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are

always in the position of simultane ously undergoing and

exercising this power."10 As teachers we are all actively

engaged in this vast network of power, reproducing the system

where we do not challenge our given roles within the system.



The system of power is infinitely malleable, but changing it

requires that we abandon the goals of university education and

begin to develop the tools for education.  This does not mean

quitting our jobs or trying to shut down the university; rather,

it means using the established institution against itself,

creating spectacles in the university that might compete with

those offered on television, and might thus help to bridge the

gap between education and everyday life.  Most emphatically,

this gap nee ds to be bridged in both directions -- not simply

opening education to the "real world," but also opening the

"real world" to education.  Being critical means constantly

traversing the artificial boundaries between disciplines;

emphasizing the learning pr ocess itself rather than the list of

works required for a particular niche-like specialization.  In

today's world, the aestheticization of politics requires that

teachers aestheticize the educational system; using the power of

the spectacle as an educatio nal tool in ways that subvert the

power of the spectacle as an economic tool.  Teaching should be

more performance than ritual; when it becomes routinized it's

time to throw away the syllabus and give everybody an A.  While

the abolition of grades is a wo rthy goal it is not going to be

accepted by most universities in the near future; the only

possible response to the competitive hierarchies of higher

education is contempt -- the goal being to eliminate the effects

of grades if not the grades themselves.



Of course, I have given little indication of what such an

approach might look like if put into practice; while some

examples are possible at this point much work needs to be done

in terms of theorizing an academy without universities and an

academic prac tice that effectively overcomes the routinization

and compartmentalization inherent in the university system.  But

recognizing the problem means recognizing that this theorization

must take place.  Kingsley Widmer:



Obvious logic: To the degree that academicians can teach, they

can also misteach.  Learning is not a one-way street.  And we

misteach millions of inappropriate students the low arts of

semi-literacy, trivialization, and uncritical spirit.  That

dominating vocation tends to denature the few things, the

humanities and sciences, that the universities might be able to

do well.  As for the rest, from semi-pro sports to cultured

marketing, from reinventing hierarchical sleaze to reblooming

the ancient pomposity of resignation, from dull poets to deadly

technocrats, bury them.  Long live the university.... (12)



1 Abbie Hoffman, "Plans for the Destruction of the

Universities," Revolution for the Hell of it (NY: Dial, 1968)

157.



2 "Anarchist in Academe: Notes from a Contemporary University,"

Social Anarchism 14 (1989) 11.



3 Deschooling Society  (Manchester: Penguin, 1971).



4 R. Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation



5 "On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic,

political, psychological, sexual, and especially intellectual

aspects, with a modest proposal for its remedy," by members of

the Situationist International and students of Strasbourg,

November 1966; in Ken Knabb ed. and trans., Situationist

International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets,

1981) 321.



6 Teaching as a Subversive Activity  (NY: Dell, 1969) 13-4.



7 Richard Kostelanetz, "John Cage on Pedagogy: An

Ur-Conversation," Social Anarchism 14 (1989) 27.



8 Society of the Spectacle  (Detroit: Black & Red, 1977) thesis

8.



9 The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume 1 trans.

Robert Hurley (NY: Vintage, 1990) 93.



10 "Two Lectures," trans. Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale

Pasquino, in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected

Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (NY: Pantheon, 1980)

98.



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EKOPILOT



From: Hampus Brynolf ([e-mail])



About the EKOPILOT project in Sweden.



To understand this project, I have to explain a little about

Swedish  schools. In Sweden, you have the right to start a

private-owned school, and  you'll get as much money as a normal

public school. Every student get a  "money-bag" and then - it's

up to him/her to choose school. The EKOPILOT  (Echo Pilot)

project is a part of public school, but still outside the

ordinary public school system. This means that the headmaster of

the school  in S÷lvesborg hasn't got any power over the project

(they havn't got  anything to say anyway...).  The project

started last autumn, that means that the first students has done

one (of six) terms. Their school building is now ready (they

have been in  the ordinary school most of the time until now).

The school is located about  2 km from S÷lvesborg (a town with

15000 citizens.) In the classroom, every  student got his own

writing table with a computer on. (They▌re going to have

INTERNET access in the future)         Every monday the students

take either agriculture,domestic science or  technique (they

learn to install a toilet, how to build with bricks, how to

paint your windows, etc.); everything that you need in the real

life. But  the founder of the project, Mats Holm_n means that

the most important is to  give the students comprehensive view

of life, society etc and give every  student a possibility to

find his own way towards the future, NOT meaning  the way to a

profession. Today it's very important that you give the students

the possibility to decide what they want with their lifes. The

school must give the students a comprehensive view if we ever

want a better  world. Therefor they try to link all subjects

together, reading subjects in  blocks, you use alot of days

(weeks) for a project including different  subjects instead of

the ordinary way when you read the subject isolated from  the

other subjects and from reality. They don't want to give report

to their  students, but the Swedish law demand them to do it

anyway. Don't know yet  what will happen. This sounds nice,

doesn't it? It is - BUT everything is  not good.  Everything

I've written is what Mats Holm_n has told me but unfortunately

does not all the other teachers share his opinion about

pedagogics. It is  not a political project! They don't say: This

is the leftwing way of  education. Official they just question

the normal way of teaching, the power  over peoples that a

normal school got and the one track minded education you  get in

a normal school.



Mats Holm_n writes in a letter:



"I took the ECHO-pilot intiative two years ago. I have always

been involved  in educational experiments of one kind or another

for more than 20 years and  one starting-point was of course my

teaching experience (Swedish, English,  French). Another was the

current discussion in Sweden and elsewhere about  fundamental

changes in the welfare society: at present Sweden is rocked by

the worst crisis since the 1930's. The future seems more chaotic

than ever...



In this situation I formed a group with seven colleagues who set

out to  create an education that would give the students maximum

freedom of action  after having completed their studies.

So what are the main characteristics of the Echo Pilots project?



I would like to point out the following:



-Integration of theoretical and vocational subjects, the latter

including  basic carpentry, masonry, engineering, organic

farming and cookingIntegration of humanities and science in

joint projects - teachers working  together in team.Three

profiles:        1. Ecological profile        2. Small-scale

enterprising profile        3. International profile (electronic

communication, student exchange  etc)



Half of the time the Echo Pilots will be in a new-built

schoolhouse in a  tiny village just outside S÷lvesborg. We will

be very independent of the  rest; a sort of private school

within the system. 37 boys and girls  announced their interests.



To finace the project, the students for example clean their

school.  The most interesting with this project is not the idea;

the interesting is that it is working! It's not a something that

our enemys can say: "Sounds  nice, but it doesn't work" about;

this project is actually working!!



----FIGHT ON! -----



Subject: Re: Anarchy & Education

From: bob dick <[e-mail]>

Dear Jesse



I think this may count as "random late-night opinion", though  I

have thought about it a lot.  For that matter, I do try to

practise what I preach.  It's in a university classroom, which

is not the same as, e.g., the early years of education.  But  I

think many of the same principles apply.



School, I think, is to equip people with the skills, knowledge

and understanding to take part in society.  For an anarchist

society, I think the most important skills are those required to

maintain a collaborative culture in which individuals are

guaranteed freedom.



I assume people learn more from the _process_ of education than

they do from the content.  This implies that best results would

be attained if each class were run as an anarchist (i.e.

collaborative individualist) society.  (I don't know if this

matches your definition of anarchism or not.  It's the one I'm

using.)



I may return to this issue if I have more time later today.  For

now, I'll content myself with mentioning the most important

skills, in my view:  the ability to establish and maintain  good

relationships;  and, within those relationships, the  ability to

use collective decision-making processes which  genuinely try to

meet the needs of _all_.



Regards    --  Bob





From: Bryan A Case <[e-mail]>



Our local anarchist reading group is working through Neill's

SUMMERHILL, from which we learn much.  The book is not without

problems, however: the author recognizes his school's class bias

(yet another underground current in anarchism, THE DISPOSSESSED

vs. the Abbe de Theleme); sexism and conservative gender

construction...



I taught freshman comp this fall from a decentralized

perspective.  As I am an employee of the University of Michigan,

a major research institution with rightwing cash-rich alumni

(heck, I even had to sign an oath of loyalty to the state of

Michigan - I'm not kidding), I rapidly found my limits: I had to

assign one (final) grade; I could not significantly alter the

time and place of our meetings...  Yet I tried some experiments:



-Each student received a grading sheet during the first week.

Two questions: 1. Would you like to receive grades during this

semester?  (y/n) 2. Please weight the percentage of your final

grade that you would like per category [4 categories of

work...].  They discussed these options in class for one

meeting, then handed 'em in to me.  I copied 'em and handed the

xeroxes back.  At the end of the term i calibrated their final

grade based on their own percentages.  Some students complained,

but in terms of their own choices and self-awareness, not

against the system.



-Final grades were determined in one-on-one conferences between

myself and each student.  We each worked things out with our

copy of the individual grading system.  On the average, each

person graded themself in perfect agreement with my assessment.

A few (4 out of 22) were a notch or two too high; we talked

things over and either I gave in or they were convinced.  A few

(again, ca 4) were a notch or two too low; 2 I boosted up to my

grade, the others were convincing and remained.



-The class determined the syllabus as much as I could create.  I

arbitrarily set up four units of read (Narrative, Argument,

Analysis, Critique).  During the week before each unit

commenced, on Monday I would hand out copies of a summary of

each possible reading selection (from our text and coursepack);

I tried to be as impartial as possible, listing title, author,

page length, subject and approaches summarized.  On Wednesday

they discussed the choices available, debating the merits of

subjects, some authors, etc.; then turned in their ballots.  I

totaled the results then passed the decision back: number of

choices averaged, then assigned in slots during the next weeks

based on page length vs.  writing assignments.  Friday was this

new syllabus, for which Monday would be the first day and

reading.



-Essay workshops.  One student would be the Author for the day.

They would pass out copies of their draft for each reader (21

other students, plus myself).  We, the Audience, would annotate

and read our copies, then write a one page reaction and

evaluation.  Class discussion would be a lengthy critique of the

essay, looking at various aspects of writing: grammar, strategy,

use of evidence, etc.  I was usually the board-writer, never the

Critic.



My students ended up as better writers; finely-honed critics;

highly energetic class participants; nearly manically active

beings.  I had some problems with scheduling and timing, which

need tinkering.



The only painful problem was a case of plagiarism.  One student

clearly borrowed the work of someone else.  I could not come up

with a good way of dealing with this anarchistically.  If this

were a class that met at my house, for which I was the local

teacher, I would have asked the person to leave.  But I was and

am - bound up with a massive institution that forbids such

exclusion.  I could think of no fair (or nonviolent!) way of

letting the student's classmates handle this.  The plagiarist

refused to agree with me, insisting on the orginal nature of the

work.  I could see no other way out than to turn to the Dean and

initiate a trial process.  This *hurt*.  I felt as if I were

betraying my anarchist principle, as I was deliberately invoking

some of the worst elements of the authoritarian school.  As of

now, this is still ongoing...



Any advice or recommendations?



Bryan N. Alexander a/k/a [e-mail]--



"There is always an official executioner."  -Lao Tze





Mr. Authority

by Michael Stec <[e-mail]>



When authority becomes comical, the illusion of the necessity

for authority becomes visible.  Recently while attending a free

evening lecture at the local university, I encountered Mr.

Authority acting authoritarian. He was there to control the

question and answer session at the end of the lecture (as if it

needed control).  I found the old grey-haired gentlemen rather

comical.  He would tell people that if they had a question you

were to raise your hand , he would indicate to you in what order

you could ask your question ( just like kindergarten).  If Mr.

Authority held up one finger at you , you were the first person

who could ask a question, two fingers the second person who

could ask a question, etc.  Of course Mr. Authority would remind

people that they must ask a short question.  Mr. Authority also

seemed to be concerned that a dialog might develop between the

questioner and the lecturer.  If that happened, he would cut off

the questioner and point to th