A Warning to
Students of All Ages
Raoul Vaneigem
[Note: this pamphlet was originally published in French in
1995. It was translated by JML with NOT BORED! in
August 2000.]
Chapter 1: A warning to students of all ages.
The school, the family, the factory, the barracks, and, by
proxy, the hospital and the prison, have been the inevitable passages by which
commodity society has bent to its profit the destiny of the so-called
"human" being.
The government that this society exercises over human
nature, which is still in love with the freedom of childhood, puts in their
proper places the growth and happiness that precede -- and delay to diverse
degrees -- the familial enclosure, the workshop or office, the military
institution, the clinic, the houses of the condemned.
Has schooling lost the repulsive character that it had in
the 19th and 20th centuries, when it broke spirits and bodies upon the hard
realities of efficiency and servitude, making it glorious to educate by forced
labor, authority and austerity, and never by pleasure or passion? Nothing is
surer, and it can't be denied that, in all the apparent eagerness of modernity,
a whole lot of archaic ideas continue to scandalize the lives of schoolchildren.
Hasn't the scholastic enterprise obeyed, up to this very
day, one dominant preoccupation: improve the techniques of training so that the
animal would become a profitable investment?
No child crosses the threshold of a school door without
being exposed to the risk of losing him or herself. Losing, that is, exuberant
life, filled with new knowledge and marvels, that
would be excited to receive nourishment, if it were not sterilized and made
hopeless under the boring work of abstract knowledge. What a terrible
affirmation, to see those shining looks so suddenly tarnished!
Here are four walls. The general consensus suits the
hypocrites; within these walls, one is imprisoned, constrained, blamed, judged,
honored, chastised, humiliated, labeled, manipulated, fondled, violated,
treated abortively and left begging for aid and assistance.
"What are you complaining about?" object the
makers of laws and decrees. "Isn't this the best way to initiate the youth
into the immutable laws that rule the world and existence?" Doubtless. But why should the young accommodate themselves
any longer to a society without joy and without a future, a society whose
adults have nothing but their defeated resignation, which they support with a
mix of bitterness and discomfort?
A SCHOOL IN WHICH LIFE BECOMES BORING TEACHES NOTHING BUT
BARBARISM
The world has changed more in the last thirty years than in
the last three thousand. Never -- in
However, intelligence remains fossilized, almost powerless
to perceive the mutation that is taking place before our eyes. A mutation
comparable to the ancient invention of the tool, which produced the work of
exploiting nature and engendered a society composed of
masters and slaves. A mutation revealing the real meaning of the term
"human": not the production of a feudalized survival within the imperatives
of a lucrative economy, but the creation of a reality favorable to a more
intense and rich life.
Our educational system used to pride itself on having
responded efficaciously to the exigencies of a society that was formerly under
the yoke of the all-powerful rule of the Father. In this aspect, such glory is
both repugnant and accomplished.
What does patriarchal power support itself on? the tyranny of the father? the
potency of the male? Not so much on these as on a hierarchical structure, the
cult of the boss, the scorn of women, the devastation of nations, rape, and
oppressive violence. History has abandoned this patriarchal power in an
advanced state of dilapidation: In the European Community, dictatorial regimes
have dissolved into the troubled waters of business; paternal absolutism has
become nothing but a memory of a puppet show.
We have to cultivate the silliness of a ministerial baking
party if we wish to save from oblivion this pedagogy, which is still perfectly
good for mixing with the ignoble yeast of despotism, forced labor and military
discipline; the resulting abstraction, the etymology of which (abstrahere, to pull out) speaks of the exile of humanity
from itself, the separation from life.
This society will agonize, in the end; this society in
which the individual never begins to live unless he or she is learning to die.
In that agony, life rekindles its rights timidly, and, as if it were for the
first time in history, life is inspired by eternal spring instead of withering
in an endless winter.
Hating yesterday, school is nothing but ridicule. It
functioned and functions implacably according to the machinery and gears of an
order that believed itself to be immutable. Its
mechanical perfection shatters exuberance, curiosity, and the generosity of
adolescents, for the purposes of better integrating them into the drawers of a
dresser, which the usury of work changes little by little into a coffin. The
power of things prevails over the desire of beings.
The logic of such a flourishing economy was still fallible,
however, like the dull clicking of the hours of survival, sounding constantly
the clarion call of death. The influence of prejudice, the force of inertia,
and the customary resignation, all rather commonly exercised their mastery over
the ensemble of citizens. Apart from the few who are unsubdued,
who are in love with independence, the majority of people find
their reckoning in the miserable waiting for and expectation of social
promotions and guaranteed careers all the way to retirement.
Excellent reasons, then, are not lacking to set the infant
on the righteous path of decencies and convenience, seeing that, when following
it, he or she blindly hands him or herself over to the professors' authority
and tries hard for the honor of that supreme compensation, the certitude of
employment and a salary.
Pedagogues write dissertations about the checkmate
schooling is in, but they don't worry much about what's checking it, nor about
the fact that the checkmater is encroaching on
everyday existence, advancing at every turn towards the dominion of the anguish
of worthiness and unworthiness, profit and loss, honor and dishonor. A dismaying
banality reigns over ideas and behaviors, over the strong and the weak, the
rich and the poor, the cunning and imbecilic, the lucky and the unfortunate.
Certainly, the perspective engendered by having to pass
away one's life in a factory or an office in order to make the month's rent
money is not one that is inclined towards the exaltation of dreams of happiness
and the harmony that nourishes infancy. Such a life produces instead a chain of
dissatisfied adults, frustrated by a destiny that they
would have wished to be more abundant, more generous. Deceived and instructed
by the lessons of bitterness, they often find no better outlet for their
resentment than in absurd problems and quarrels with others, sustained and
caused by the most wonderful reasons in the world. Their religious, ideological
and political confrontations procure for them their alibis and Causes, which
hide, in fact, the somber violence of the evil of the survival from which they
suffer.
And so their existence flows away into the frozen shadow of
an absent life. But when there are plague-ridden times, the exterminators make
the law. The inhuman despotic principles that administer teaching and inculcate
in infants the bloody vanities of adulthood, which Jean Vigo heckles in his
film Zero de conduite, participate in the coherence
of the dominant system. They respond to the imperatives of a society that
recognizes no other driving forces but power and profit.
Henceforth, if education refuses to obey the same motors
that drive the rest of society, the trash compactor will be put out of order:
there'll be less and less to win, and more and more life will sneak in to the
mix and steal from the deep hidden corners of the drawer.
The insupportable preeminence of financial interests over
the desire to live isn't going to wait anymore to give back the change. The
daily clanging of the attraction, the bait, the female charms of gain, resound
absurdly in proportion to the devaluation of money; in proportion to the common
bankruptcy of state capitalism and private capitalism; in proportion to the
circling toward the sewer drain of the patriarchal values of master and slave
and of the ideologies of right and left, collectivism and liberalism, all that
-- in the name of the all-holy, sacrosanct commodity -- is built upon the
violation and rape of human and terrestrial nature.
A new style is being born, which alone disperses the shadow
of a colossus whose feet of clay have already begun to break up. The school
remains confined in the anti-days of the collapsing
Is its destruction necessary? This is a doubly absurd
question.
First, the school is already destroyed. Since professors
and students are less and less concerned with what they teach and study -- and,
above all, with the manner in which they institute teaching and
self-instruction -- why aren't these people running to save the old pedagogical
passenger-boat, which is leaking water from all sides?
Boredom engenders violence. The ugliness of buildings
excites vandalism. Modern constructions, cemented with the contempt of real
estate agents, bask idly in the sun, crumble, and catch fire, according to the
programmed usury of their shoddy materials.
Next, the question of the destruction of the school is
absurd because the destruction-reflex is a registered part of the death logic
of commodity society, whose profitable and lucrative
necessities weaken, degrade, pollute, and kill the life of beings and things.
To accentuate the ruination does not only profit the
carrion crows otherwise known as property owners, their ideologues of fear and
security, and their parties of hate, exclusion, and ignorance; it pays the
wages of the real estate agents, who never seem to stop changing their
"new" habits and masking their nullity beneath reforms as spectacular
as they are ephemeral.
School is the center of a turbulent zone in which the young
years drown in moodiness, in which the conjugal neurosis of the teacher and the
student imprint their movements on the pendulum of resignation and revolt,
frustration and rage.
School is also the privileged place of rebirth. Pregnant,
it carries within it the conscience at the heart of our epoch, which is to
assure the priority of living over the economy of survival.
The school retains the key to wandering in a world without
dreams: the resolution to erase boredom from a luxurious landscape. The will to
be happy will banish polluting factories, intensive agriculture, prisons of all kinds, maggoty business offices, warehouses
of adulterated products, and the pulpits of political, bureaucratic,
ecclesiastic "truths" that call the spirit to mechanize the body and
condemn it to rot away in the inhuman.
Stimulated by experiences of revolution, Saint-Just wrote:
"Happiness is a new idea in
Thus, each infant, each adolescent, each adult finds him or
herself faced with a choice: check into a world that rings up the logic of
"sell it at any price," or create his or her own life by creating an
environment that assures him or her of plentitude in harmony. Everyday
existence cannot be confused any longer with this adaptive survival in which
people have been reduced to the production of commodities and to being produced
by them.
We do not want a school in which one learns to survive by
unlearning how to live. The majority of human beings have been nothing but
spiritualized animals, capable of putting technology at the service of their
predator interests, but incapable of refining humanly the art of living and
thus becoming truly worthy of being called a man, a woman, a child.
Following their frenetic paths towards profit, the rats in
jeans and three-piece suits discover that now there's nothing left of the earth
but a chunk of cheese that they've gnawed on all sides. These rats either need
to progress even further in their gnawing or undergo a mutation that will
render them human.
It is time that lived moments replace the dead memory that
has stamped acquaintance with the hidden restriction that nothing can ever be
experienced.
We have for too long allowed ourselves to be persuaded that
there is nothing to look forward to in life but common decay and death. This is
a vision of prematurely old people, of golden boys fallen into precocious
senility because they preferred money to youth. Let it be soon that these
phantoms of the present married to the past cease to hide the will to live that
searches out in each one of us the path of its sovereignty!
The new society begins where the experiencing of
omnipresent life begins. A life in which one perceives and comprehends in
rocks, vegetables and animals the rule that human beings have issued and
enforced, that they carry within themselves with so much unconsciousness and
contempt. But also a life founded upon creativity, not on work; on
authenticity, not on appearances; on the luxuriance of desires, not on
mechanisms of forcing ideas back and then pulling them out. A life free of
fear, constraint, culpability, exchange, and dependency, because it would be a
life that would be married to, and inseparable from, a consciousness and
enjoyment of the self and the world.
A woman who had the misfortune to live in a country that is
gangrenous with barbarism and obscurantism once wrote, "In Algeria, one
learns from childhood to wash a dead man's body; myself, however, I want to
teach him the gestures of love." Without writing such morbid verse, our
pedagogy has too often been, beneath its apparent elegance, nothing but a
toilet bowl full of corpses. Now it is a matter of finding, deep within the
check-writing of knowledge, the gestures of love: the key to exploration and
the key to the fields in which affection is offered without reserve.
Childhood is caught in the trap of schools that kill the
marvelous instead of exalting it. This indicates, well enough, the kind of
urgent situation in which teaching finds itself: the burden of creating a world
where it would be permitted to marvel at oneself, instead of sinking further
into the barbarism of boredom.
Watch out so that you are not tricked into waiting for help
or panaceas from some Supreme Savior. It would assuredly be in vain to accord
credit to a government or some political faction that is gathering together
people concerned above all with sustaining their own shaky power. Nor does it
make sense to trust in tribunals of masters of thought or media personalities
who multiply their images in order to consummate the nullity that the mirror of
their everyday existence reflects. But, above all, it would be self-betrayal to
kneel down and beg, stand at attention or think of oneself as inferior.
Education's goal, after all, should really be nothing but autonomy,
independence, the creation of the self -- without which there are no such
things as true mutual aid, authentic solidarity or collectivity without
oppression.
A society that has no other responses to misery but clientelism, charity and tricks is a Mafioso society. To
put school under the shrine of competitiveness is to incite corruption, which
is the morality of business.
The only dignified things one should be "in on"
are the things that one needs to move oneself by one's own means. If school
doesn't teach you how to struggle to unleash your potentially vibrant will, it
will condemn future generations to resignation, servitude, and suicidal revolt.
It will turn to the dust of death and barbarism the most living and human part
of each person.
I do not imply the establishment of any other educative
project, except that which creates itself in the love and exploration of the
living. Outside of a "school for truants" in which life looks for
itself and finds itself without end -- outside of the art of loving with
speculative mathematics -- there is nothing but the dead weight of a
totalitarian past.
Chapter 2: To have done with carceral
education and the castration of desire
Instilled since early youth, the feeling of guilt raises
around everyone the most sure of prisons in which desires are walled in. Over
the course of the millennia, the idea of a nature that would be exploitable and
capable of being made to do chores has condemned the simple inclination towards
enjoying all the pleasures of life to feelings of sinfulness, remorse and a
need for penitence, and to a bitter intake of ideas and a compulsive spouting
off of them.
What should the essential preoccupation of teaching be? To
help the child in his or her approach to life so that the child can learn to
know what he or she wants and want what he or she knows; that is, to satisfy
his or her desires, and not in some apathetic, animal doze, but according to
the refinements of human consciousness.
The opposite produces itself, however. Learning is
currently founded upon the repression of desires. The child is dressed in
angelic habits, beneath which he or she doesn't cease doing stupid things, and
denatured stupid things at that. How could one be surprised that schools
imitate so well, in their architectural and mental conceptions, the island
prisons on which the punished are exiled from the ordinary joys of existence?
A SCHOOL THAT HINDERS DESIRES STIMULATES AGGRESSIVENESS
The ancient school walls never seem to stop evoking the
walls of penitentiaries. The high-placed windows make sure that the student
sees nothing but a little bit of the sky, a unique space reserved for the
happiness of souls, if not bodies. The body, immobilized in a study hall that
quickly turns into a torture chamber, suffers its earthly destiny in the
ordinary style.
The opinion still prevails that in order to learn to learn
(or become beautiful), it is necessary to learn to suffer. To enter into adult
age ... wasn't that to renounce the pleasures of infancy in order to progress
into a valley of tears, decrepitude, and death?
The pedagogues have always affirmed that discipline and the
maintenance of order were the necessary conditions for all education. Today it
is easy to see the degree to which their pretend-science was really nothing but
a cover-up for an insidiously repressive practice: to encourage scorn of the
self and bully the "carnal appetites," so as to raise humanity to the
seventh heaven of spirit, all the while dragging it down to earthly
materiality.
Once the body is reduced to the state of being an object,
and in this case a piece of material to be schooled, the instructor is all the
better prepared to drive into schoolkids' heads the
respectable notion of respect for authority. Soliciting abstract intelligence
and "objective" reason contributes to the concealment of that
sensible and sensual intelligence which is tied to the desires of the little
light in the heart that flickers whenever the child, finding him or herself
again alone, asks him or herself the question, "How's all this knowledge I
got stuck in my head by constraint and menace going to help me feel good in my
own skin, live more happily, and become what I am?"
The educational method renounced corporal punishment at the
time when the slap and kick in the ass stopped constituting the essential part
of a familial education which, in the words of the torturers, had already
proved itself valuable. And how!
This does not mean that the body from then on escaped the
harassment, mortifying fear, and scorn heaped upon it. Isn't it true that the
senses are placed under rather high surveillance during the hours of study in
the rooms that are reserved for it? The eye has to rivet itself to the gestures
of the masters so homework can be done. The mouth never opens except at the
invitation of the mentor, and it had better be ever-wary as to what it dares to
utter! An incorrect response, a bad-sounding remark, and the volley of blows
from the green wood would be provoked: mockery, rebuffing, humiliation -- is it
any different today? At the same time, relevant or servile words attract the
praise that fills out the promotional balance sheets at the end of the year. In
the end, the hand raises itself politely to solicit the attention of the
scholar making needless and inopportune displays of his or her learning,
insisting upon the importance of trifling points in his or her scholarship. Not
so long ago, the hand that raised itself risked getting wrapped on the knuckles
with the ruler of righteous good sense.
One perceives, with the passage of time, that schoolkids have been treated according to the manufacturing
processes employed by the Stalinist savant Pavlov, who gave his laboratory dogs
compensatory bits of sugar for good behavior and would sanction bad behavior
with electric shocks. Wasn't it necessary that scorn be the norm of the age in
which pedagogues advocated an educational method that a single human being deserving of the name today would never inflict upon a dog?
Isn't it clear that school remains, as a result of the cowardice of a general
assent, a place of dog-training and conditioning, to which the culture of
pretext and the economy of reality are tightened like screws?
HOW CAN ONE GET TO KNOW THINGS WHEN OPPRESSION EXISTS?
Maintained by the fear of having to get around in a prison
of tetanus-ridden muscles, compressed emotions install between the oppressor
and the oppressed a logic of destruction and self-destruction that breaks all
forms of enlightened communication.
To the idiotic expected-salary of the master, who reigns
tyrannically over his class, responds with an equal idiocy the uproar and
hullabaloo that serve to release the students' repressed energies.
All over the prison and the ghetto, character-armoring
imposes its strategy of confinement, and the momentum of hopelessness prepares
the fist of the rioter. The hand of the schoolkid
avenges itself by mutilating tables and chairs, scrawling insolent marks on
insolent walls, ripping up the rags of ugliness, sanctifying a vandalism in
which the rage of destruction pays off the debt of feeling that you've been
violently destroyed, ransacked by the everyday pedagogical trap.
The students' mouths open in ferocious attacks of protest, their eyes draw from the challenge they've made the
glimmer of enthusiasm that they were denied. But these movements of
contestation periodically arouse the interest of the managers of bureaucratic
"unions" and government authority-figures, and these movements --
having found themselves, because of their dependency upon those managers, with
an absence of creativity -- sink into the same dullness and stupidity as the
doddering, buffoon-like, hierarchical power that originally provoked them. Why
wait for gregarious mass manifestations when the intelligence of individuals,
having failed to make a project of radical change, has been stifling itself
according to the common denominator of the crowd, at the lowest level of
comprehension?
To avoid explosions of desires acted upon without any
thought behind them, the authorities knew it would be necessary to prepare decompressive safety valves and controlled demonstrations.
When they cut you slack with a reform, it's not a breath of liberty,
it's the respiration of tyranny.
The playgrounds sported by prisons, barracks and schools
permit libidinal energies -- otherwise compromised by the rigors of discipline
-- to release themselves in leisure. This "exercise" preserves the
separation between the head -- the "boss" -- and the rest of the
body. On the "playing field," the body is submissive to the head in
principle, but the hierarchical order instituted during study time is in fact
reversed. The last becomes the first: The dunce and the muscled brute dominate
on the pavement, making the better students shake. Nothing is changed by the
reversal; it's just the oppressed urges of life relieving themselves in
death-urges.
Once the parenthesis of tolerated disorder is closed up
again, the spirit rekindles its rights and starts again its mission of reigning
over the chaos. Those whom professorial power has crowned with the holiness of
knowledge once again take their places at the head of the pack. Their
intellectuality vomits into the darkness the ugliness that lurks in the depths
of their beings, while their superiority affirms itself over the unruly, the
bad students, the dunces, the ones dismissed as idiots according to an insult
that deserves to be analyzed closer (as long as one is conscious of the fact
that to repudiate the animality of urges, instead of
refining them, doesn't so much give one a greater humanity, but rather a
bestiality with a human look to it).
Evidently there exists a natural rhythm of effort and rest,
concentration and relaxation, but the reigning social organization of work has
substituted for the simple alternation between contraction and release the
psychological mechanism of repression and release of thought. The ordinary
behavior of the exploiters, who accord to the exploited only enough relaxation
to render them fresh for the factory and office, is
precisely expressed in the statement of General de Gaulle, irritated by the
revolution of 1968: "It is time to whistle the dogs that their recreation
time is over."
TO LEARN WITHOUT DESIRE IS TO UNLEARN HOW TO DESIRE
The scorn of oneself and others is inherent in the
exploitation of earthly, human work. The fact that scorn is a part of common
practice in exchanges between professors and students explains why so few dream
of becoming indignant. It would be illusory to believe that a practice so
intolerable would cease before any kind of ethical choice, a will to courtesy,
of whatever formula or style, has taken place -- "I would remind you not
to speak to me in that tone of voice." A really good game would be the
radical overhaul of society and teaching methods that have still not discovered
that each child, each adolescent, possesses in a brute state the unique
richness of humanity: its creativity.
How can one excite curiosity when there are so many beings
tormented by the anguish of guilt and the fear of sanctions? There certainly
exist professors who are enthusiastic enough about imbuing their auditorium
with passion, and who make forgotten for an instant the detestable conditions
that degrade their job. But how many, and for how many years?
Enumerate, on the one hand, the bureaucrats who terrorize
their classes and are terrorized by them, and, on the other, the artists,
jugglers, and tightrope walkers of knowledge, who are capable of captivating
their students without ever having to transform themselves into guard dogs or
adjutant bosses.
We are not talking about judging people here, nor about entering into the imbecilic practice of awarding
merit and demerit by reviling the good students and praising the bad ones. No,
what is important here is to bring everything into play, so that teaching keeps
awake that curiosity, so natural and filled with life, from which Sheherazade was able to hold in check death, with which a
tyrant menaced her.
Over the centuries, the aberration of a world upside-down
has weighed heavily upon children's education.
That so many efforts and so much fatigue is required of
both master and student to revive the eagerness to learn, which has been
pointed out quite frenetically by observers of those of tender age, says enough
to prove that this is a brutally interrupted evolution. Curiosity is usually
suffocated, just as it tries to come out, at the most important points in the
child's ludic development, when it is amusing to ask
questions; the questions are answered in such a way that the basis of a happy
knowing is thrown away. All this because that happy knowing would be
incompatible with the vision of some austere adults, who say that science is
important because it endows one with the seriousness of business, and that
learning should be propagated with dry, boring, abstract truths.
Do you remember the thousands of questions that a child --
marveling without end -- asks about him or herself and about the world that he
or she discovers? "Why does it rain?" "Why is the ocean
blue?" "How come my brother stole my toys?" The responses that
he or she received were most often nothing but evasive words and abrupt
refusals. Eventually wearied by a conduct that makes him or her feel
unsuitable, the child lets him or herself becomes
susceptible to the impression that he or she is not worthy nor capable of
understanding. As if all steps of psychological development did not have their own adequate mode of comprehension!
Meanwhile, disheartened in the end by so many
interrogations judged without interest, the child enters in the cycles of
study, in which he or she looks for answers that he or she has deep-down-inside
lost the desire to find by him or herself. What the child passionately wished
to acquaint him or herself with a few years previously, he or she -- yawning
with boredom -- is today constrained to study today by force.
The diversity of happy and unhappy sensations created in
the child that experimental consciousness which permitted him or her to
cultivate certain of those sensations and avoid altogether certain others. If
that consciousness is maintained in the child by a parental teaching method
filled with attention, solicitude and affection, the child is filled with a
psychological motivation that enthuses him or her to
desire without end, to want to know more and more, to engage the world with a
curiosity without limits. All this for the simple reason that awareness then
obeys the most natural of solicitations: rendering oneself happy.
If teaching is received with reticence or repugnance, this
is because the knowledge filtered through school programs carries the mark of
an ancient wound; it has already had its original sensuality castrated.
Knowledge of the world without a consciousness of the
desires of life is dead knowledge. It has no use except at the service of those
mechanisms that transform society according to the necessities of the economy.
The artificial sweetness that dead knowledge brings to the fate of human beings
delivers them into the world begrudgingly, and
consistently menaced by new rigors that soon efface the pleasant aftertaste.
After having stolen from the schoolkid
his or her urge to live, the educational system starts artificially
force-feeding the student in order to send him or her on the path towards work,
along which he or she will continue to mumble, all the way to complete disillusionment,
the leit-motif of his or her young years: "let
the best man win!"
Win what? More sensible intelligence,
more affection, more serenity, more lucidity in self and circumstance, more
ways to act upon one's own existence, more creativity? No, just more
money and power in a world that uses money and power by being used by them.
ERROR IS NOT CULPABILITY
The educational system does not simply content itself with
containing the desires of childhood in character armor, in which clenched
muscles, a heart gone cold and a spirit impregnated with anguish don't really
favor exuberance and enlightenment. The system is not satisfied with cornering
the schoolkid in battles without joy, which
inevitably end in a whack on the head, in case that the student might forget
that he or she is not there to be amused. The system suspends above the
student's head the ridiculous and menacing sword of a verdict.
Whether he or she likes it or not, each day the student
enters into a parole room in which he or she is to appear in front of judges
and in answer to the accusation of presumed ignorance. Then the child has to
prove his or her innocence by regurgitating on demand the theories, rules,
dates and definitions that contribute so much to his or her relaxation at the
end of the year.
The expression "undergo examinations," that is,
in criminal parlance, proceed with a suspect's interrogation and arraignment
when the charges are read, evokes well the judiciary reality of school, since
it is really the same thing when a student gets written or oral examinations
inflicted upon him or her.
No one these days would dream of denying the utility of
controlling a person's assimilation of knowledge, degree of comprehension and
experimental ability. But is it necessary to dress teachers and students, who
really just want to instruct and be instructed, in the garb of Judge and Guilty
Party, respectively? What despotic and outdated spirit do the pedagogues claim
authorizes them to erect a tribunal and then cut into such vibrant, lively
flesh with the double-edged blade of merit and demerit, honor and dishonor,
salute and damnation? What personal neuroses and obsessions do they obey when
they dare to blemish with fear and the menace of suspension from school the
progress of children and adolescents, who only need attention, patience,
encouragement and that affection which carries the secret of obtaining so much
by demanding so little?
Isn't it true that the educational system persists in
basing itself on the ignoble principle, descended from a society which assumed
that pleasure only exists on the screens of a sadomasochistic relationship
between masters and slaves, "I'm only punishing you because I love
you..."?
It is an effect of the will to power, not the will to live,
that motivates people to try to determine by judgment the fate of others.
Judging prevents one from understanding the person one
presumes to rehabilitate. The behavior of judges, who are themselves scared by
the fear that comes with being a judge, redirects to their own ends some of the
convicted student's indispensable qualities, which would have helped the
student in his or her long, poetic journey towards autonomy: that is, obstinate
determination, a sense of effort, an awakening sensibility, a nimble
intelligence, a constantly trained memory, the perception of the living in all
forms, and the attentive hold over his or her own consciousness that allows the
student to perceive what helps in his or her progress, what slows him or her
down, what his or her errors are, and what their corrections would be.
To help a child or an adolescent assure for him or herself
the greatest possible autonomy -- this implies without any doubt a constant
lucidity in the awareness of the degree of development of the student's
capacities and the orientation that will favor them. But what has this in
common with the control to which the student is submitted, once he or she is
ready to get through a period of learning, when he or she is put in front of a
professorial cross-examination? Leave, therefore, the culpability to those
religious spirits who do not dream of anything but tormenting themselves by
tormenting others.
Religions need misery to perpetuate themselves;
they maintain misery so as to lend more glamour to their acts of charity. Oh,
well. Could the educational system, which assumes in the student a constitutive
weakness, which is always suspicious of his or her supposed sins of laziness
and ignorance, and which refuses to dismiss the case until the student says
that the professor is a sacred being -- could this system do anything else but
perpetuate misery? It is time to finish with this puke of the past!!!
Each individual possesses his or her own creativity, and
that creativity is suffocated when mistakes are treated like punishable
offenses. This must no longer be tolerated. There is no such thing as guilt,
there are only errors; and errors correct themselves.
ONLY THOSE WHO POSSESS THE KEYS TO NATURE AND DREAMS WILL
OPEN THE SCHOOL TO AN OPEN SOCIETY
The perspective of marketability-at-any-cost is the iron
curtain of a world closed-in by the economy. The perspective of life opens upon
a world where everything is there to be explored and created. Today, the
institution of school belongs to the business crowd, who, cynically, would like
to manage it, without burdening themselves anymore with the old humanitarian
formalities. We'll see whether or not students and teachers allow themselves to
be reduced to the function of lucrative cogwheels. What if they, not foreseeing
anything good in the administration (to which they are invited) of a universe
in ruins, develop the desire to learn how to live instead of economizing on
themselves?
Today the game is staked entirely on a change of mentality,
of vision, of perspective.
Pinning down a butterfly is not the best way to get to know
it. The person who transforms the living into a dead thing, under whatever pretext,
only demonstrates that his or her knowledge has not made him or her a human being.
There exists, on the other hand, an approach that reveals
the radiance of life in the heart of a crystal, a poem, an equation, a chemical
formula, a plant, a manufactured object. It establishes between the observer
and the observed an osmotic relationship in which everything is distinct
without everything being separate.
Doesn't the consciousness of a living presence in the
subject and in the object naturally manifest what there is of the teacher in
the student and of the student in the teacher? Where there is a lack of the
intelligence of life, there is nothing but the relations of brutes. Whatever
doesn't come from and return us to the most vibrant and living part of us only
diverts us towards death, for the greater glory of armies and technologies of
profit. That's why the majority of schools are battlefields on which scorn,
hate, and devastating violence ring up the bankruptcy of an educational system
that constrains the teachers to despotism and the taught to servility.
What resignation exists in the supposedly studious
confinement in which the student takes the offer to sacrifice him or herself
and slams the door of renunciation on his or her own happiness! And how would
the educator, who is no more capable than his or her students of becoming a
child again by being reborn each day, instruct them? Whoever carries in his or
her heart the dead corpse of his or her youth never educates anything but dead
souls.
To dispense knowledge is to awaken the hope of a marvelous
world, which nourishes humanity and is nourished by the dreams of youth. At the
same time, it is still necessary to shatter the curse of received ideas and to
make fun of those accountants of power and profit who have excluded the
marvelous from their reality so well that infantile impatience relegates it to
the kingdom of fairies and the impotent marshes of utopia.
The human body, animal behaviors, flowers, philosophical
speculation, the cultivation of wheat, water, stone, fire, electricity,
woodworking, horseback riding, quantum physics, astronomy, music, a suddenly
privileged moment in everyday life -- everything becomes marvelous again, but
not due to contemplative mysticism, but because people, once they've made the
choice to give preeminence to the living, stop complying with the imperatives
of lucrative exploitation. When forests are the lungs of the earth and not
things to be purchased per acre or spaces to be devastated by real estate interests,
one gets the human sense of a Nature that energetically offers its resources to
whoever approaches but does not rape her.
Learning about life is a walk through the universe of
gift-giving, a certain kind of mycological stroll, on which the guide teaches
how to distinguish between edible mushrooms and others, unsuitable for
consumption, mortally poisonous in fact, but which, with proper treatment,
possess very healing qualities.
Instead of an entrenched camp in which reserve workers
sadly stagnate, why not make school an amusement park of knowledge, an open
place in which creative people come to discuss their practices, their passion
for their experiences, and what they hold close to their hearts? A luthier, a farmer, a cabinet maker, a painter or a
biologist surely have more to teach than those businessmen who come to advocate
adaptation to the random laws of the market.
It is clear that an awakening to the cultures of the world
would also be an awakening to the diversity of age groups! Why limit to the
young the right to be instructed and exclude those adults who are concerned
with their lack of knowledge about literature or mathematics? Doesn't everyone
feel the need to make that contact which shatters the artificial opposition
between age groups?
But there is no prescription nor
panacea. It is solely the job of each person's will to live to open that which
was closed by the violence of economic totalitarianism. It's on the level of
the individual that the imagination will make a show of its force.
Every year dozens of institute authorities and inventive
professors do not suggest new methods of teaching founded on new accords
between beings and things. You who complain about the number of bureaucrats who
are usurping the positions of teachers, and who throw out across the planet the
cold stare of statistical figures in order to limit their significance to
paycheck cards: when have you demanded that the ideas of Freinet
or any of the many others be taken further forward towards the erection of a generous
knowledge? When did you ever oppose the distillers of boredom who rule over the
constantly blooming projects of ludic and living
education? Have you never thought about undertaking a substitution of the
hierarchical connection between masters and slaves for a relation no longer
founded upon obedience, but on the exercise of individual and collective
creativity?
When politicians of dismaying mediocrity invite you to
submit to them your revindications, don't they have
the satisfaction of discovering that you are just as poverty-stricken as they
are, if not financially, then at least intellectually and in terms of
imagination? Do not doubt that the discount price at which you allowed yourself
to be sold gave them enough left over to accord you, without further
bargaining, the right to heckle them in grand, cathartic demonstrations.
The worst resignation is that which provides an alibi for
revolt. Do you respect yourself so little that you wouldn't even take the time
to figure out what your life's desires are, that you
don't even know what kind of existence you'd like to conduct? Do you not see
any other choice beside the one you are officially presented with, the
"choice" between the poverty of wealth and the misery of poverty?
Does it seem to you that the disappointing future of a life
passed making the month's rent money seems bright, because the shadow of
joblessness is growing longer everywhere under the mediated sun of full
employment? Nothing kills more surely than becoming content with survival.
Chapter 3: Demilitarize the teaching profession
The spirit of the barracks has reigned sovereignly
in schools. One marched at a snail's pace, complying with the orders of peons
who merely lacked uniforms and rank stripes. The configuration of the battlement
obeyed the laws of the right angle and the rectilinear structure. Thus was
architecture employed in the surveillance of spaces for controlled roaming by
the righteous, Spartan authorities.
Up to the sixties, the educational institution remained petrified
with its warlike virtues, preparing kids to go die at the frontier, just as
they began to devote themselves to love and happiness. Such an injunction would
drown in ridicule today, but, despite the mutation initiated in May 1968 and
the discredit into which the standing, combatless
army of Europe has fallen (though there are a few exceptional local wars into
which it disdains to intervene), it would be excessive to pretend that the
tradition of the vociferous injunction, the barked insult, orders without
responses and insubordination (which is the appropriate response) have become
outdated.
The nearly absolute authority with which the schoolmaster
is invested serves better the expression of neurotic behaviors than the
diffusion of knowledge. The law of the fittest has never made anything of
intelligence but a weapon of stupidity. Many, without doubt, are rendered
helpless by not having anything but the right to shut up. But as long as
communities of interests don't situate at the center of their knowledge the
inclinations, doubts, torments, and problems each person feels during the days
(that is, the most important part of their lives), there will be nothing but
the mortuary the educational system constructs around us and the scorn we have
for the institution's constant transmission of messages whose meaning has
nothing to do with desiring, living beings.
WHOEVER TEACHES WITH FEAR RENDERS KNOWLEDGE TIMID
The authority legally accorded to the teacher puts such a
bitter taste into knowledge that ignorance sneaks in to crown itself with the
bay leaves of revolt. Those who dispense their knowledge through pleasure don't
have to do anything to impose it, but the barracks-style warehousing of
education is such that it is usually considered necessary to instruct with
obligations, not charms.
Try, then, to extol the virtues of mutual comprehension
between professors entering their classes like they were going into lion cages,
and bunches of schoolkids, exhausted from dodging the
whip and ready to devour their trainers! It seems that autocracy has been
beaten all over
Nothing is more ignoble than fear, which belittles
humans-turned-beasts and keeps them at bay; and I do not believe that fear
should be tolerated by students or professors. Nothing breeds terror like
terror itself. When pedagogical directives wear themselves out, favor will come
to that principle which says that we should get rid of fear and give
reassurance, a principle which seems to me to be a condition for any true
learning about life. In order to apply this principle, it would be necessary to
make the school into a place where neither authority nor submission, neither
the strong nor the weak, neither the first nor the last, reign. As long as you
don't form a community of students and teachers that is actually devoted to
perfecting the creativity that everyone has inside themselves, you would be
smart to be indignant about all of barbarism's many
faces -- religious fanaticism, political sectarianism, the hypocrisy and
corruption of governments. And yet you will fail to chase away either their
mechanisms of integration or the drug and business mafias, because there is an
underhanded trick operating within the hierarchical organization of teaching
that predisposes us toward falling into the grasp of Mafiosos.
Now that the ideologies of left and right are melting in
the sun of their common lie, the only criteria of intelligence and action
resides in the everyday life of each person and in the choice between what
strengthens one's own life and what destroys it, which is a choice that is
confronted at every instant. If so many generous ideas have turned into their
opposites, this is simply because the behavior that was working in their favor
was negation. A project of autonomy and emancipation cannot base itself on the
will to power, which continues to impress upon gestures the furrows of scorn,
servitude and death, without wobbling and eventually falling.
I anticipate no other way to finish off fear and the lies
that result from it than by a ceaselessly revived will to enjoy oneself and the
world. To learn to untangle that which makes us more alive from that which
kills us; this is the first lucidity, the lucidity that gives its meaning in the form of knowledge.
The most elaborate techniques put at our disposition a
considerable amount of information. All this progress is not negligible, but it
results in nothing but a bunch of dead letters if a favorable relation between
teachers and little groups of students plugs into the web of abstract knowledge
through any other net-work than the one we are interested in: what every
individual wants to do with his or her life and destiny.
LIBERATE THE DESIRE TO KNOW FROM CONSTRAINT
The violent exploitation of nature has substituted
constraint for desire. It has propagated everywhere the curse of work, both
manual and intellectual, and has reduced to a marginal activity the true
richness of human beings, i.e., their capacity to recreate themselves as they
recreate the world.
By producing an economy that economizes on people until it
makes ghosts out of them, human beings have only impeded their own evolution.
That's why humanity still needs to be invented.
School carries the sensible mark of a break in the human
project. One perceives more and more how and when the creativity of children is
smashed by the hammer of work. The old familial litany "First work, you
can amuse yourself later" has always expressed the absurdity of a society
that calls for a renunciation of life in order to better consecrate toiling,
which drains life and keeps pleasure from resembling anything but the colors of
death.
One would have to possess the combined stupidity of all the
specialized pedagogues in order to be surprised by the fact that the prodigious
efforts and fatigues inflicted upon students have such mediocre results. What
is there to hope for, when there's no heart in it, or when there's no more
heart to put into it?
Charles Fourier, observing, during an insurrection, the
care and ardor with which rioters ripped the pavement from a road and put up a
barricade in a few hours, remarked that, to do the same work during
"normal times," it would have taken a team of terracers,
working under the order of a boss, three days. Wage-slave workers would have
had no other interest in the job besides the pay, while the insurgents were
animated by the passion for freedom.
Only the pleasure of being yourself and being for yourself
will give to your knowledge that passionate attraction which justifies the
effort without needing to take recourse in constraint.
To become who one truly is demands the most intransigent of
resolutions. It necessitates constancy and obstinance.
If we do not want to resign ourselves to acquiring knowledge that reduces us to
the miserable state of being consumers, we cannot ignore that we need -- in
order to leave the mire in which we are bogged down by the society of the past
-- to take the initiative to increase the pressure with a sense for the
contrary. But what? Are there still those of you who
would fight and crush others to obtain employment, and yet hesitate to invest
in life, which all of your efforts are designed to make something of?
We don't want to be "the best"; we just want to
experience the best parts of life to the fullest, according to that principle
of inaccessible perfection which revokes dissatisfaction in the name of the
insatiable.
Chapter 4: Make school into a center for the creation of
the living, not the antechamber for a parasitic commodity society
In December 1991, the European Commission published a
memorandum on higher education. It recommended that universities behave like
business enterprises, submissive to the rules of the market. The same document
expressed the view that students should be treated like clients, who should be
incited not to learn but to consume.
Courses thus become products; the terms "student"
and "studies" move aside to be replaced by expressions better suited
for the new orientation: "human capital" and "labor
market."
In September 1993, this same European Commission came back,
like a recurring symptom of disease, with a green book about European
education. It specified that it would be necessary, starting from maternity, to
accumulate "human resources for the exclusive needs of industry" and
to favor "a greater adaptability of behaviors in order to respond to the
market's demand for working hands."
We see here only too clearly how the clogged-up flows of
the present project into the radiant future the bygone efficiency of the past!
Once the remains of the only-halfway-marketable subjects of
yesterday -- Latin, Greek, Shakespeare & Co. -- are eliminated, students
will finally have the privilege of rising to the heights of saving gestures
that allow the lucky to balance the market's budget by producing and consuming
useless shit.
One is on the right track when one sees that, in whatever
diverse forms they are found, governments always adhere to the unanimity of the
principle: "Business enterprise should be in accordance with training and
training should be in accordance with the needs of business enterprise."
RECRUITS NEEDED TO MANAGE BANKRUPTCY
To aid in understanding our era, it isn't futile to
determine the processes by which the development of capitalism has successfully
completed its journey to the level of planetary crisis, which is actually the
crisis of the economy in its totalitarian functioning.
Since the start of the 19th century, the ensemble of
individual and collective behaviors has been dominated by the necessity to
produce. The organization of production with the aid of intellectual and manual
labor demanded a method managed by executives and an authoritarian, indeed, a
despotic mentality.
This was the period of the military conquest of markets.
The industrialized countries unscrupulously pillaged the resources of the new
colonies.
When the proletariat undertook a coordination of its revindications, it submitted to, despite its anarchist
spontaneity, the clutches of autocracy, which the preeminence of the productive
sector had already allowed to arise and become strong. Syndicates and workers'
parties took on a bureaucratic structure; soon enough these institutions
crippled the working masses, while at the same time they shouted that they were
emancipating the workers.
Red power installed itself even easier than it had squeezed
a few extra shares of benefits from the exploiting class. These
"shares" were translated as wage increases, the opportunity to plan
the time of work (the eight-hour-day, paid leave time), and social advantages
(welfare, health care).
The years 1920 and 1930 saw the centralization of
production reach its greatest heights. The passage from private capitalism to
state capitalism was conducted brutally in
In the countries in which a liberal tradition safeguarded
formal democracy, the monopolistic concentration of capital and the state's
ascension to a managerial position came about through a process that was
slower, more underhanded, and less violent.
It was in the United States that a new economic orientation
first manifested itself, when the country dived headlong into a development
that would considerably transform mentalities and morals, creating the
necessity to consume and making it equal to or even more important than the
necessity to produce.
Since 1945, the Marshall Plan, officially designed to aid a
The obligation to produce at any cost ceded its place to an
enterprise dressed up in the charms of seduction, beneath which was hidden a
new primary imperative: consume. It doesn't matter what, just consume.
We now come to an amazing stage of evolution: a hedonism of the supermarket and self-serve democracy, propagating
the illusion of pleasures and free choice, managing to undermine the sacrosanct
patriarchal, authoritarian, military and religious values that always favored
an economy dominated by the imperatives of production, but without having to
worry about retaliation from the anarchists of the past.
Today, one sees how much the colonization of the laboring
masses by the pressing invitation to consume a high-strung happiness has
replaced, and thus loosened, the stranglehold on
overseas colonies and has favored struggles of independence.
If the "freedom" of exchange and its
indispensable corollary of expansion have contributed to the end of the
majority of dictatorial regimes and to the collapse of the communist citadel,
they have also rapidly unveiled the limits of consumable happiness.
Frustrated by a happiness that doesn't coincide in the
least with increases in useless gadgets and adulterated products, consumers
have, since 1968, become conscious of the new alienation whose object they have
become. To work for a salary that one then invests in the purchase of
commodities with an uncertain use-value suggests less a state of bliss than the
disagreeable impression that one has been manipulated in accordance with the
exigencies of the market. Those who put up with working in workshops and
offices all day don't leave except to enter the factories of the consumable,
which are less coercive but more deceitful.
False needs prevail over real ones, the past practice of
selling "must have" products has led to a more and more aberrant
production of parasitic services, which attach themselves to the citizen with
the mission of securing, training, surrounding, counseling, supporting and
guiding him or her, in short to snare him or her in the trap of a constant solicitude
and dependency that likens him or her little by little to a handicapped person.
Thus, one has seen the primary sector sacrificed to profit
the tertiary sector, which sells its own bureaucratic complexity in the form of
aid and protection. Quality agriculture has been crushed under the weight of
monoculture food production, which overproduces ersatz cereals, meats, and
vegetables. The art of finding accommodations has been buried under dull
colorlessness, boredom, and the criminality of the acres of concrete that
assure revenues for the business crowd. As for the school, it has been called
to serve as a reserve of elite students, who are promised a good career in
profitable uselessness or in the mafias of finance. The belt is buckled. The
mantra "study in order to find a job," as aberrant as it may be,
simply voices the same demand to consume in the sole interest of an economic
machine that is jamming up every part of the western world -- although every
year, the specialists announce its triumphant re-start, because they have
supposedly cleared the jam.
We are drowning in the mire of a parasitic and
Mafioso-style bureaucracy in which money accumulates and gets caught in a
closed circuit, instead of getting invested in quality products, useful for
making life and the environment better. As the good teacher knows, money is
what we lack the least, contrary to what your elected representatives may tell
you, but teaching isn't a marketable sector anyway.
There exists, for all this, an alternative to the economy
of decline and its impossible throwbacks. By redirecting the ever-deepening gap
between the interests of commodities and the interests of living people, it
suddenly becomes plausible to reconvert to the service of humanity a technology
that lucrative imperialism has dehumanized -- and to expose things like nuclear
fission and genetic experimentation more clearly as the redoubtable menaces
they really are. This alternative demands that priority be given to the quality
of life and its basic activities of acquiring lodging, food, transport and
accommodations of all sorts, and the needs of health, education and culture,
which are exactly what the absurdity of archaic capitalism condemns to
self-dismemberment beneath the constant blows of budget restrictions.
A mutation is being primed for explosion before our eyes. Neocapitalism is getting ready to reconstruct what 19th
century capitalism ruined. Despite the varied resistance movements of the past,
natural energy is being replaced by polluting and devastating means of
production.
In the same way that the industrial revolution gave birth,
at the beginning of the 19th century, to a considerable number of inventions
and innovations -- electricity, gas, vaporizers, telecommunications, rapid
transport -- our age is in need of new creations that will replace those that
no longer serve life, but menace it: petroleum, nuclear energy, the
pharmaceutical industry, chemical pollutants, experimental biology . . . and
the plethora of parasitic services in which and on which bureaucracy
proliferates.
THE END OF FORCED LABOR WILL INAUGURATE THE ERA OF
CREATIVITY
Work is an aborted creation. The creative genius of
humanity has found itself trapped in a system that condemns it to the
production of power and profit, and that doesn't allow any restraints to be
placed upon its luxuriance, other than art and reverie.
Now this work of exploiting nature, so often exalted like
the Promethean power that transforms the world, today delivers to us its
invoices for sales in all accounts: a comfortable survival where all resources
and the heart are smothered in the vicious cycle of marketability.
How could a concept so useless and
harmful to life as work not be smothered in its turn? Yesterday it procured the
car and the television, at the price of polluted air and the palliatives of an
absent life. Work is today no more than an uncertain life-jacket in a society
paralyzed by bureaucratic inflation, where nothing is guaranteed anymore, neither salaries, lodgings, natural products, energy resources, nor
social acquisitions.
In an atmosphere made oppressive by the scarcity business,
the diminishing of work is evidently resented like a curse. Joblessness is just
off-peak work. The same resignation and the same necessity to wait for alms to
be given are seen when the worker waits for his or her paycheck to come
through, after devoting him or herself to a job that was boring (even though at
the time the worker would consider it imprudent to admit it).
While everything goes along with the current hopelessness,
which inspires an economically programmed planetary self-destruction, there is
an abandoned world waiting to be taken over and occupied so that it can be
rehabilitated, restored, divested of its nuisances, and rebuilt for our
well-being. As it shatters, the mirror of consumerist illusion puts happiness
within our reach, after showing us its deceitful reflections.
Reduce the duration of work in order to better redistribute
it? Very well. But from what
perspective, and with what conscience? If the aim of the operation is to
get the greatest number to produce more goods and services useful for the
market and not for life, then, in exchange for a salary that would pay for
one's increasing consumption, the old capitalism has done nothing but
recuperate to its own profit what it feigned having abandoned to the profit of
all.
On the other hand, if the same steps taken obey the
solicitations of a Neocapitalism searching out in
ecological investments a weapon against the property speculation of an
ownership without imagination, all that'll be lacking will be a change of
consciousness for a guaranteed salary and a reduced-time workday for the path
of free creation and the leisure to find and to be oneself, at last, to be
opened for everyone.
Despite the occultation that the bureaucrats of corruption
and the business mafiosos
carry around with them, there exists a socio-economic demand running counter to
the calls for help coming from the ordinary collapse. This demand clamors for
an environment that would better the quality of life, for production without
oppression and pollution, for authentically human relationships, and for the
end of the dictatorship that marketability exercises over life.
It falls to you -- and to the new school you'll invent --
to prevent creativity, objectively stimulated by the promises of jobs in the
public service, from going to hell because of economic alienation or because it
sliced itself open in trying to create itself.
If you forget what you are and what kind of life you would
like to lead, you can not hope for any other fate besides that of being a good
commodity that is discarded as soon as the toll booth is passed and the toll is
paid.
GIVE FAVOR TO QUALITY
Forced to obey the criteria of quantity,
the road to profit lapses into the absurdity of overproduction. Yesterday, to produce a lot augmented the surplus value
accumulated by bosses, who did not hesitate to destroy surpluses of coffee,
meat, wheat and corn, so that they could prevent a drop in market price.
In reaching a larger segment of the populace, the
development of consumption has permitted the absorption, up to a certain point,
of an increasing quantity of commodities conceived of less for their practical
uses than for their effect of bringing in money. The quality of a product has
been treated in such an off-handed manner that it is no longer the quality that
determines the sales tag, but rather the bullshit publicity that dolls up the
commodity to seduce the client.
But as the highest price goes to the one that washes the
whitest, so does the lie use itself when its turn comes. Outraged by the excess
of scorn, the clientele is finished balking. It arms itself with critique, and
refuses to swallow blindly the little spoonfuls of slogans that are fed to him
or her at every instant through the eyes, the mouth, the ears, the head.
Many have decided not to let themselves be consumed by an
economy that mocks their health and intelligence. In demanding the quality that
was offered them, these people find that it's their own quality of being that
they discover or rediscover, that their specificity as lucid individuals was
occulted by this reduction to the alienated, artificially gregarious state that
provokes and maintains consumerist propaganda.
But now that consumers' defense organizations have
organized boycotts against products that have had the nature ripped from them
by an agriculture that inundates the market with force-grown cereals,
fertilizer-ridden vegetables and meats coming from martyred animals in
concentration-camp farms, it seems that the individual would be well advised to
see that, in the junior and high schools, culture has taken the same path taken
by the worst agricultural practices.
If politicians nourished the good intentions with respect
to education that they never cease proclaiming, wouldn't they get down to business
by assuring its quality? Even if they did, it's a little late to be decreeing
the two measures that determine the most important conditions of human
learning: an increase in the number of teachers, and a decrease in the number
of students per class, so that each person can be treated according to his or
her specific needs, and not in the anonymity of a crowd.
Apparently, the concept of "interests" has more
of an economic connotation for the politicians than the simple human one. If
governments favor the intensive production of students, so that students end up
consumable objects for the market, then the principles of a sane administration
require that the greatest possible number of heads be stuck into the smallest
possible school area and tended by the fewest possible number of personnel. The
logic is unanswerable and seemingly unstoppable, and no Society for the
Protection of Animals rises up against the forced consumption of knowledge
submissive to the law of supply and demand, nor against the morals of the horse
dealers who reign over the stables at job fairs.
Resign yourself, then, to the political party, busy with
stupidities and tied to the gregarious state, since I can't see how it's
possible to educate a class off 30 students without iron rule or tricks.
This is not to declare the material impossibility of
promoting a personalized pedagogy. Wouldn't the sophistication of audiovisual
techniques permit a large number of students to receive individually what
schoolmasters used to repeat over and over until the students had it memorized
(orthography, elementary grammar, vocabulary, chemical formulas, theorems,
music theory, declination...)? Couldn't one test the degree of assimilation and
comprehension in the form of a game?
Liberated from a thankless, mechanical occupation, the
teacher would have nothing to do but devote him or herself to the essential
part of his or her job: to assure the quality of globally received information,
to help in the formation of autonomous individuals, and to give the best of his
or her knowledge and experience in helping each person learn to read themselves
and to read the world.
Information to the greatest number,
training in little groups. Working at
the center of a vast irrigation network that diverts the multiplicity of ideas
and things that can be known so that it flows toward each student, the educator
will have at last the freedom to become what he or she has always dreamed of
becoming: the revealer of a creativity to which no one possessed the key, since
it was hidden so deeply beneath the weight of the constraints of the past.
Chapter 5: Learn autonomy, not dependence
Over the centuries, the school has extended the
sequestration of the child imposed by the authoritarian, patriarchal family.
Now that a rough sketch of mutual understanding, fashioned from affection and
progressive autonomy, is being developed between parents and their offspring,
it would be regrettable to see that the school ceases to be inspired by
familial community.
Paradoxically, the educational system, which teaches
youths, i.e., those who change the most, has been the institution that has
changed the least of all.
The traditional family would prefer to produce children in
a line rather than offer life to two or three little beings to whom it would confer its love and attention without reserve.
Those children who do not die at an early age most often hide a secret wound
from view. Tyranny, culpability and emotional blackmail engenders the same
sorts of mercenaries who, hiding behind their hardness of character an
infantilism that enjoins them to look for a substitute for the father and
mother in the families-on-loan that constitute all the churches, political
parties, sects, "national gregariousness," and army corps of all
genres. For all its humanity, history is filled with showoffs who need help. Some cynicism would be necessary to evoke the
concept of "natural selection," proper to the animal species; just
look at our production of dead flesh, which fills the factories and is spat out
by guns. The nature of this "production" implies that we need to
correct the statistics coming from this "natural selection," as well
as recognize the fact that the economy of familial procreation carries a flaw
whereby death settles its accounts.
The evolution of morals makes us regard as a monstrosity
today that bestial proliferation of lives irredeemably condemned to be absorbed
beneath the blows of the machete of war, massacre, famine and sickness. This
evolution does not prevent the stigmatizing of overpopulation in countries
where religious obscurantism feeds off of the misery that it knowingly
maintains, nor the acceptance in
The overpopulation in classes not only causes barbarous
behaviors, vandalism, delinquency, boredom and hopelessness, it moreover
perpetuates the ignoble criteria of competitiveness, the concurrent struggle
that eliminates whoever doesn't conform to the exigencies of the market.
Ambitious brutes get the better of sensible and generous beings; we see the
shadow of the sharks of power calling themselves high-sounding things, as if
they were trying to be the brilliant thinkers of olden days, as if they were
trying to prove that they were a part of some "natural" selection.
There are no stupid children; there is nothing but
imbecilic education. Forcing students to heave themselves up onto the top of
the heap contributes to the laborious progress of animal rage and cunning, but
surely not to the development of a creative and human intelligence.
You say that nothing is comparable nor reducible to who one
is, to what one is. Each individual possesses his or her own qualities; his or
her only responsibility is to cultivate them for the sole pleasure of having
one's feelings of oneself be in agreement with one's
manner of living. The individual must cease, then, to exclude from the
educational path the child who is more interested in hamsters and dreams than
in the history of the
Yesterday, it was necessary to identify with the father,
whether he be was a hero or a cretin (such sweet sarcasm came from that
ambiguity). Now that fathers notice that their independence progresses with the
independence of their children, now that fathers feel enough love for
themselves and others to help adolescents get rid of their images -- who could
still support what the school still proposes as models of accomplishment, i.e.,
the efficient and maggoty financier, the energetic and senile politician, the
Mafioso reigning with clientelism and corruption, the
businessman making his final profits from pillaging the planet?
All this is designed to condemn you to never attaining
anything, to constantly looking for yourself and your identity in a religion,
an ideology, a nationality, a race, a culture, a tradition, a myth, an image.
Identifying with the most living facets of your own being and self is the only
way to emancipation.
AN
Violence exercised against the child by the patriarchal
family participates in the rape of nature by work and the commodity. The
consciousness of planetary pillage has gone from an uncompromising defense of
the environment to a nonviolent defense of natural resources, but has not
contributed much to the shattering of the yoke that economic exploitation makes
weigh so heavily upon man, woman, child, fauna, and flora.
The sentiment that we all issued from a common womb, which
is the earth, and whose memory is revived during training in the maternal
belly, has fed so well the nostalgia for a Golden Age and original harmony that
one realizes suddenly that forced labor separates us from nature and from
ourselves with a ripping up felt inside, a discomfort that we had for so long
perceived as an existential torment, a suffering of being itself.
The failure of a ransacking, polluting economy and the
emergence of a project for the symbiotic recreation of human beings and their
natural habitat will henceforth get rid of our paradise lost, the ghost of
which has haunted a history that was powerless to construct itself humanly: the
myths of the good savage, primitive communism and apocalyptic millenarianism,
which, after appearing in the glory days of nazism,
reappeared in the name of integrating us better into contemporary society.
At least we will have learned that life is not a regression
to some protoplasmic stage, but a process of refinement and the establishment
of an organization of desires.
The idea long prevailed that, in the struggle against
cancer, it was important to destroy those cells that a sudden and frenetic
proliferation had condemned to wither away and die. It is preferable today to
reinforce the life-potential of healthy peripheral cells and to favor the reconquering of what is still alive before annihilating
those that death has already snatched away. I would be satisfied if such an
attitude sovereignly determined our dealings with
ourselves, with our fellow human beings and with the world.
We know, after having seen so many idiotic generations make
sensibility into a weakness and take up arms only to become bloodthirsty, that
love for the living awakens an intelligence that cannot be measured against the
underhanded spirit reigning over the totalitarian universes.
A highly respectable ethic -- the respect for living beings
-- prescribes that one not kill a stupid person, and not knock over a tree
without being ready to avoid it when it falls. Nevertheless, what such
recommendations assume about tricks and constraints will never spirit away
conviction like they spirit away the awareness that the prejudice one holds
towards the living one also holds towards oneself -- that is, if the individual
doesn't stand guard, because the living is not an object, but a subject, who
merits being treated according to the unalienable right of having been born to
live.
FROM INDISPENSABLE AID TO THE REFUSAL OF PERMANENT ASSISTANCE
The road to autonomy follows the example of the infant who
is learning to walk.
Progress doesn't take place without tears and efforts. The
risk of falling, bumping into a wall, suffering
additionally in the first few steps the shackles of fear. Nonetheless, the
existence of affection that encourages you to get back up again, to start
again, to devote yourself and to coordinate gestures, demonstrates that mastery
of movement is acquired better and faster when you are not locked in the
ancient conditions in which one worried, not only about the crusading fires of
a mocking vanity, diffuse menaces and the anguish of not being loved anymore if
one didn't apply oneself, but also about a certain sickness that is
underhandedly maintained by the ambiguity of parents who both desire and doubt
that their child will make his or her first steps towards an autonomy that
could then be subtracted from their tutelary authority, thus removing from them
the feeling of being indispensable.
The teaching of the very young has taken up without
difficulty the same familial disposition that put everything into work in order
to assure happiness in independence, just as parents only recover happiness,
lost since adolescence, when they discover control. Filling
themselves with that osmotic comprehension in which one educates by letting him
or herself be educated as well, nursery schools have first crack at giving the
gift of affection and the opportunity to explore. That affection, which
is an invaluable quality in the existence of individuals and collectivities,
should supposedly be indebted to the lowest paid governmental businessmen says
enough as to what heights of scorn for public utility the logic of profit
climbs.
The rupture is brutal from the moment you enter the school.
There one regresses into the archaic family, in which the infant can not even
learn how to get by alone without signaling the act of eternal recognition for
those who had been in charge of his or her training. Confidence in yourself is
undermined and compensated for by insolence; school reconstructs the repugnant
mixture of the morgue and the servility that composed, in the past, ordinary
social behavior.
In the sincere desire to make the adolescent a human being
in the full sense, the teacher overtaxes him or herself in a truly
uncomfortable exercise of power to which the hierarchical structure constrains
him or her. How could teachers not be tempted to make themselves
indispensable and to maintain in the student a weakness that renders domination
more comfortable? Crutch-sellers have a need for cripples.
If we escape this society, we do so barely and with
difficulty. This society has never believed in individuals, and individuals
place their belief in the powers that cripple them by forcing them to walk.
God, churches, the state, fatherlands, political parties, leaders, and little
Fathers of the People -- all of them have had enough pretext
not to live for themselves. The children who were never told
about anything unless it might have made them fall down -- it is time to teach
them how to teach themselves. In the end, teachers such as ourselves can
break the habit of being in demand and start to be on offer. We hope that this
miserable society of people, which is on permanent benefits whose passivity
gives the corrupt their force, becomes nothing but a thing of the past.
PUBLIC SERVICE FUNDS SHOULD NOT BE AT THE SERVICE OF MONEY
Education has to do with the creation of human beings, not
with the production of commodities. Will we have revoked the absurd despotism
of gods if we have tolerated the fatalism of an economy that corrupts and
degrades life on the planet and in our everyday existence?
The only defense available to us is the will to live,
allied with the consciousness that propagates it. Judging by the capacity of
human beings to subvert what kills them, this will can
be an invincible weapon.
Endeavoring to govern us, the logic of business demands
that all remuneration, grants, and charity be paid off with the greatest
possible obedience to the commodity system. You have no other choices than to
follow it or to refuse it by following your desires. Either you enter like a
client into the world market of lucrative knowledge -- in other words, like a
slave to a parasitic bureaucracy that is condemned to collapse beneath the
growing weight of its uselessness -- or you will fight for your autonomy, come
up with the fundamentals of a new school and a new society, and recuperate the
money squandered each day by the ordinary corruption of financial operations in
order to invest it into the quality of life. In France (a country much like
ours [i.e., Belgium]), "The national union estimated that taxes evaluated
at 230 billion francs, being close to the amount of the budget deficit, were
instances of fraud imputable to the business milieu; this scandal lifts the
veil covering the corrupt practices of the large industrial and financial
groups." It is no different here.
The money stolen from life is placed at the service of money
itself. Such is the reality hidden by the absurd and menacing shadow of the
large economic institutions: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the General Agreement
on Trade and Tariffs, the European Commission, the Bank of France, the Bank of
America, and many others.
Their support for foundations and university research
centers implies that, in exchange for support, the evangelism of profit should
be propagated, easily transfigured into a universal truth, by the bloody
mercenaries of press, radio, and television.
But, as formidable as it may seem, the machine rots from
its emptiness, and goes out of order slowly: it will finish, as in Kafka's
Penal Colony, by engraving its Law into the flesh of its master.
Do we not see a few courageous magistrates, motivated by
the desire to gain the favor of an ethical reaction, who are smashing the
impunity that financial arrogance has guaranteed? The taxation of huge fortunes
-- 1% of French people own 25% of the national fortune, whereas 10% own 55% of
the wealth; it is worse in America, where 5% of the population, last time I
checked, owned 90% of the wealth -- and the prosecution of the most obvious
examples of corruption, and only the perceived ones, of course, committed by
businessmen, the denunciation of the scandal of representation fees (a scandal
ignored in the U.S., where court costs and lawyer costs are higher than
anywhere), the fining of corrupt administrators, and the blocking of assets of
international fraud -- all this indicates well enough, on a card everyone can
read, the means of access to the treasure, which the citizens have created and
sustained, and from which they are systematically kept. It is no less true that
the path gets lost beneath the devastating effect of resignation, that is, if
money isn't seized and invested in the only domain that would truly be in the
general interest: the quality of everyday life and its environment.
Without doubt, however, the honest magistrates are wearing
the robes of justice; you, on the other hand, have nothing, because you have
never created anything that could sustain you. You do, however, possess over
repression -- no matter how just it wants to make itself look -- an advantage that
it will never be able to prevail over: the generosity of the living, without
which there is no creation or human progress.
Teaching has found itself trapped in a realm of unoccupied lodginghouses that the owners have preferred to abandon and
leave to rot, since empty space is marketable, but space that welcomes shelterless men, women and children isn't. Thus The
Economist states that "the subordination of commerce to the rights of men
will have a cost more than it's worth" (
What you get out of yourself won't really be yours unless
you make it better, in the sense that "to live" means "to live
more." Occupy your school; don't let them appropriate you for their
programmed dilapidation. Paint the walls, make them beautiful and to your
liking, because beauty incites creation and love, and ugliness attracts hate
and annihilation.
Transform the schools into creative workshops, into meeting
places, into parks of attractive intelligence. Let's make the schools into
fountains of happy knowledge, following the example of the vegetable gardens
that the homeless, jobless, and the most deprived have occasionally had the
imagination to plant in the big cities, after they've smashed up the asphalt
and concrete.
The errors and gropings of
whoever undertakes to create and to be created are nothing in the face of the
privilege that such an undertaking confers, i.e., the revocation of the fear of
being oneself, which the forces of repression secretly nourish and solicit.
We are born, said Shakespeare, to tread upon the heads of
kings. The kings and their armies of executioners are nothing but dust and ashes.
Learn to march alone, and you will walk proudly over those who, in their dying
world, have nothing but the ambition to die with it.
In collectives of students and professors, the task of
snatching the school from the glaciation of profit
and changing it to a place of simple human generosity reappears. Sooner or
later, the quality of life will attain the sovereignty denied to it by an
economy reduced to selling and valorizing its own collapse.
From the instant that you form the project of a pedagogy
founded on a natural pact with life, you will no longer have to beg money from
those who exploit and scorn you by marketing you. You will demand that pact
because you will know how and why you can seize the freedom that it implies.
One doesn't live as long as expected if one doesn't fully
develop one's capacities.