Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Thirteen

In this episode of The Climate Trials, the elementary and high schools are on trial.

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An excerpt from “Education Under the Microscope in The Climate Trials”, by Dr. Fred Whitehand, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, The Journal of Pedagogical Research, Vol 43, pp34-57.

Many academics were surprised when they saw a portion of the Climate Trials devoted to the public education system. It’s a rare thing indeed for someone to find their vocation and profession placed under an inquisitorial microscope---it is even rarer still to come away from the process both chastened and glad that it happened.

In a nutshell, the critique centred around the way primary public education has developed in the modern world and how the form of teaching has tended to twist the substance. The argument was outlined by Hank Whittle whereas the system was defended by Maximilian Shrike. As many commentators have mentioned about other parts of the Trials, Mikhail Bookchin had an uncanny ability to pluck individuals out of obscurity who turned out to have an absolutely brilliant grasp of the facts and who could summarize them in a way that anyone with average intelligence and a standard public education could easily understand. Whittle and Shrike were both excellent examples.

Whittle was, of all things, a plumber with a successful middle-sized business in Gary, Indiana. Shrike was a barber from Seneca, New York. Whittle’s main points were as follows:

1. The form of public education is hierarchical and based on the industrial system of production.

2. Its content is strongly biased towards assimilating facts instead of learning how to learn.

3. School children are managed through competition and submission to authority and this doesn’t teach them how to be good citizens in a democracy.

4. Manual skills and technical innovation are discouraged by a syllabus that focuses on theory instead of practice.

Taken together, these points create a large fraction of the citizenry that are ill-prepared to understand the complexities and magnitude of the Climate Emergency. This allows them to be easily manipulated by vested interests who actively conspired to sabotage any move towards preventing catastrophe.

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I wish everyone a good Yule. I hope things are going well you and yours. It's been a bit of a "ride" for me at the Back-Grounder this year. I've put out 64 posts, starting in January with a book review trying to explain why people online often seem to be so darn angry, and, an interview with Wellington County MP Michael Chong about Parliamentary reform. In between were a lot of other stories. I have a certain pride in my output. That's why I think people who can afford it should be willing to pay for what they read online. As little as a dollar a month helps, and it's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.   

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Whittle’s first point was that universal public education wasn’t created to help all children maximize their potential as human beings, but rather to make sure they are integrated into the economy and society that existed in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. If you read the literature of the time when universal public education was first introduced, it’s obvious that many of the most influential advocates were more interested in control than edification. This wasn’t exclusively about being able to willingly work in “Satanic Mills” either. It was understood that children who weren’t at school were living self-directed lives---which was then considered to be the first part of a life of crime.

Moreover, as technology became more and more complicated, industrialists found themselves in need of a increasingly sophisticated workforce---one where at least some of the workers need to be able to read, write, and, do some mathematics. The public school system was a mechanism for identifying particular “likely lads” and giving them the training they needed to get them on the road to becoming skilled tradesmen, shop foreman, clerks, secretaries, etc.

Equally important was the cultural framework of public education. Industrial production is ultimately more about how people work together in groups than it is about a type of technology. Modern people forget how odd it is to live according to clock time. In pre-industrial societies people weren’t expected to get up every morning at the same time and all get to a place of work at once. Instead, they lived their lives according to the vagaries of weather, climate, when the sun rose or set, etc. People showed up when they showed up. No assembly line could possibly work with people acting like this.

Similarly, people in pre-industrial societies had no real experience being ordered around by bosses. Instead, they were used to a more consensual approach to group activities. Leaders routinely emerged within agricultural communities---but their authority had to be earned instead of assumed. This meant that people expected to be consulted when group activities such as harvesting or barn-raising occurred. In addition, people routinely used informal mechanisms to limit the power of leaders. Sarcasm and ridicule, for example, were often used to keep leaders from becoming “too big for their britches”. This simply would not do when people were expected to literally work themselves to death in dangerous, unhealthy conditions so some industrialist could accumulate the profits needed to invest in the technology needed to put these folks out of work!

His next point was that in public schools children are not taught to pursue a passion at their own speed and in directions of their own choosing. Instead, a standardized syllabus was created by the state and enforced through regular testing that made uniformity the most important part of education, not curiosity. This meant that smart children were bored because they had to go at the same speed as the class, and, less intelligent students were encouraged to believe that they were “losers” because they always had to play “catch-up”. No one was allowed to pursue their own personal interests because a bureaucrat in the state capital had decided what was going to be tested, and all teachers had to “teach to the test” if they wanted their school to succeed in competition with all others.

The underlying result of this was all students were taught that education is an inherently painful and difficult process---like having a diseased tooth extracted. This goes against all evidence from the lives of successful people who almost universally enjoy the process of learning new ideas and skills. If people have been taught as children that learning is nasty, they aren’t going to get into the habit of engaging with the world around them to find out the truth behind conventional wisdom. Again, this ill-prepared entire generations of people to critically evaluate the propaganda coming out of the fossil fuel lobby.

Whittle’s third point was that the form of public schooling teaches children to compete instead of co-operate, defer to an outside authority, and, does nothing to educate them in the mechanics of how to come together as a group to build a collective decision through conversation and compromise. As he pointed out, there are few actual parts of the adult world where important issues are dealt with through competition---instead, what is more common is the need for people to work together in teams. It is true that in an old-fashioned, top-down workplace managers order people around. But increasingly businesses and institutions depend on a group of people with different specialized skills being able to develop a “business model” or “project plan” instead of a “boss” telling everyone what to do. Finally, the ability to bring together different points of view, negotiate compromises from different people with different needs and abilities, and, come to a collective, practical decision within a reasonable amount of time is essential to every group---from the family to the nation. And yet, it has never been part of the way public schools teach children.

Whittle suggested that the reason why competition is so strongly valued over co-operation in public schools is for ideological rather than pedagogical reasons. While it is true that our economy is rife with co-operation, the ideology of capitalism is based on the notion of competition. Indeed, the only real justification for our present economic system is that as a general rule, individual companies competing in a free marketplace encourages lower prices, innovation, efficiency, and so on. If people ever began to realize how much this “conventional wisdom” is artificially manufactured in order to hide the fact that human beings are essentially co-operative, eusocial animals---it could result in enormous political change.

The final issue he identified was that manual skills are not encouraged at public schools. He pointed out that sometimes this is such a ingrained habit of thought that teachers are often reprimanded for encouraging children to pursue apprenticeships in the skilled trades---even though there is high demand and very good pay in many of them. Shop, home economics, art, and music are often the very first programs to be cut during budgetary crises. (In contrast, phys-ed and sports are retained and generally encouraged---probably because they emphasize competition.) Even where they still exist, students with strong academic skills are generally forbidden to take them.

This is a very bad idea because manual dexterity and physical creativity are tremendously important for the development of new technologies as well as scientific research. Scientists and engineers generally have to have the “hands on” skills necessary to build experimental apparatus and prototype machines. Tradespeople increasingly need theoretical skills such as higher mathematics if they are going to work with the modern processes. In addition, cross-training in multiple fields is increasingly important. For example, a pipe fitter installing a modern zone-controlled heating system in a home will still have to know the traditional skill of how to make joints that will not leak natural gas or water---and he will also need to know how to install a complex electronic thermostatic control system and trouble-shoot a circuit board using a laptop-based analytic tool. Trades never have been the reserve of “stupid people who can’t learn”, but increasingly they should be as highly regarded as doctors or lawyers. The rigid separation between “academic” and “vocational” streams in a public school is about as obsolete as the need to learn the Confucian classics was to the mandarins of the 19^th century Manchu Empire.

Shrike’s “rebuttal” pointed out that public schools have always been products of the society that they inhabit and it is asking too much to expect that the people administering and teaching would have the sort of subtle analysis that Whittle laid out. Moreover, social reformers have a tendency to fall for the “liberal fallacy” that says the key to any reform is education.

As he explained it, if a group identifies a specific problem they generally also realize there are powerfully-organized constituencies that will oppose any attempt to deal with it. If they want to directly change government policy, they would have to mobilize and fight against them---either through politics, public opinion, or even in the streets. This is enormously unpalatable to most middle-class liberals, who want to avoid any upset to their lives. The “easy out” is to simply suggest that children be taught about the problem so parents and grandparents can “kick the can down the road” and expect future generations to fix it.

Ultimately this is the foundation of the old saw that gets repeated ad nauseam “it’s going to be up to young people like you to deal with that problem”. What people generally won’t admit is that there is a unspoken second part to this saying “because all my friends and I are too damned lazy and selfish to take responsibility for the mess that we’ve created”. Most children would probably have a hard time articulating this message, but they have an instinctual gift for identifying hypocrisy and can easily sense when people are saying “do as I say, not as I do”.

Shrike enumerated the long list of issues that school teachers were expected to deal with because mainstream society refused to address:

1. Sex education

2. Environmental destruction

3. Segregation

4. Physical fitness

5. Nutrition

6. Poverty (just consider how many poor children depend on free meals from schools?)

7. Identifying children at risk in their home environment

8. Vocational training

9. Learning how to use new technology as it gets introduced to society

Shrike said the list could probably be added to with more thought, but this is a good start.

Whenever the public education system attempts to actually do something about this long shopping list of social problems, it immediately ends up the focus of outrage by various parts of the community. Trying to teach sex ed? There will be a religious group that responds with tremendous outrage. Try to integrate class rooms? Middle class whites immediately pull their kids and put them in a private school. Try to educate children about climate change? People who’ve been brainwashed by the fossil fuel lobby immediately accuse teachers of “political indoctrination”.

Added to this insane list of social problems is the fact that we live in a society that profoundly undervalues education. Children are routinely taught in our popular media to look down on people who are interested in “book learning” as being “nerds”, “pointdexters”, etc. Instead, the “cool kids” are the ones who excel at sports. This is especially problematic for girls, who will often try to hide their scholastic abilities because they feel that this would make them “unpopular”.

Indeed, many children only have to look at the example of the person in front of the class to get the message that studying hard won’t lead to much success. Many jurisdictions routinely pay teachers very poorly. Children can see that professional ball players are millionaires whereas their algebra teacher drives a rusty car and moves furniture to make a few extra bucks on the weekends and summer break. Deeds speak louder than words, and the deeds of our society tells children that education is for losers. Indeed, if you look at the highest paid people at American universities they are almost invariably sports coaches---not professors. (Not that full professors are poorly paid---if you want to see that, look at the sessional lecturers or adjunct professors who teach many courses. They routinely make less than the minimum wage and are treated like casual labourers by university administration.)

Think, for example, about the enormously popular television series Breaking Bad. The “hero” is a brilliant high-school chemistry teacher who ends up working at a car wash to make ends meet and who doesn’t have any medical insurance. When diagnosed with terminal cancer, he decides to spend his last years alive making and selling crystal meth so he can amass enough money to support his wife, young family, and disabled son after his death. What message is this sending about how our society values education and teachers?

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!