7 Another education is possible
‘Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.’
Malcolm X
The neoliberal model of education may be dominant yet alternative approaches still exist. These are not just theories in the heads of educationists or experiments in other countries – they are being explored every day in classrooms somewhere near you by teachers and students who know that learning entails much more than passing tests.
Earlier chapters introduced some of the key debates around schooling. They have given examples illustrating the conflicts and dilemmas and showing how education remains contested terrain, fought over by governments and private businesses. There is no agreement about what knowledge is important, how learning happens, which teaching approaches work, or what the purpose of assessment is. In these debates, it has become common to marginalize the role of the teacher and to silence teachers’ voices, particularly when these voices attempt to speak as one, through organized trade unions.
The neoliberal model of education has become the dominant one. It has affected how teachers and students see themselves and each other, how their work is conceptualized and how it is measured, and it has subordinated processes of learning and interaction to narrowly defined outcomes. But neoliberalism’s even greater triumph has been to render its approach to education as mere common sense. It is this that makes it so hard to consider alternative values, practices and understandings of education.
Yet another school is possible. Alternative approaches to education have a long history – and they continue to exist today (and sometimes even to thrive).
That radical politics has tended to go hand in hand with a commitment to education is hardly surprising. From the 19th-century Chartists onwards, though, there has been a recognition that what is needed is not mere access to schooling but the development of properly emancipatory forms of learning. This is what informed the Chartists’ demand for ‘really useful knowledge’ – knowledge that could serve the interests of the working class, that would be enabling and liberatory. The contrast was with knowledge that merely served the utilitarian goals of capital, was subject to the hierarchies of the established church and was constrained by existing structures of domination and oppression.1
Working-class education did not start with the board schools that so excited Sherlock Holmes. Rather, the establishment of state education might more properly be seen as a response to already-existing forms of popular education. Viewed optimistically, the board schools marked an extension of this provision; a bleaker interpretation would be that the State intervened to take control of schooling.2
In other parts of Europe, too, the 19th and early 20th centuries saw the development of popular and radical alternative forms of education. The Danish ‘folk schools’, for example, were established in direct opposition to what their founder called the ‘schools for death’ – the traditional, authoritarian education on offer from the nation’s rulers. These folk schools, emphasizing democratic involvement and an orientation towards the world beyond the classroom, provided a template for similar developments in community education in Sweden.3 More radical was the Escuela Moderna, an anarchist ‘modern school’ that opened in Barcelona in 1904. Although it was closed down by the Spanish authorities within a couple of years, and its founder, Francisco Ferrer, was executed three years later, the school provided the inspiration for other ‘Ferrer Schools’ in London, New York and New Jersey – and for other ‘free schools’ around the world.4
For the past 50 years or so, the municipality of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy has been a beacon of progressive practice in preschool and primary schooling. Starting out in the aftermath of the Second World War as a direct and explicit response to fascism, the project was founded on values that were both ethical-political and pedagogic: the commitment to participatory democracy was inseparable from the commitment to child-centered education. Learning in Reggio Emilia is understood not as the reception of already-established content but as an active, dialogic, exploratory process in which children are the co-constructors of knowledge.
In this tradition, great emphasis is placed on the ‘hundred languages of children’. What is meant by this is an acknowledgement of all the resources of meaning-making that children have and acquire – not just the two languages (speech and writing) that are privileged in more formal, transmission-based systems of schooling, but all the semiotic means that are available: drawing, painting, pottery, photography, dance and drama.5
At the same time that the project in Reggio Emilia was beginning, an extraordinary experiment in democratic education was initiated in a secondary-modern school in the East End of London. From 1945 to 1955, St-George-in-the-East School flourished as a site of radically innovative practice.6 The conventional hierarchical, authoritarian organization of school was abandoned at a stroke. In its place, under the leadership of headteacher Alex Bloom, there developed an entirely different version of education, one in which staff were fully accountable to the students and in which the content of the curriculum was something to be jointly negotiated, jointly created. The idea of the school as a community has become a cliché that often masks, or fails to mask, deeply coercive routines; at St-George-in-the-East, though, this idea was taken seriously, its implications worked through in day-to-day practice. And it worked.
Freire and education for liberation
In more recent times, the work of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire has been massively influential, throughout Latin America but also across the world. Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed advances the idea of ‘banking education’. His arguments go beyond critiquing transmission approaches as educationally weak, as he explains how such pedagogies ‘mirror oppressive society as a whole’, reinforcing the existing power relations.
Banking education achieves this through certain practices and assumptions.
1 The teacher teaches and the students are taught
2 The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing
3 The teacher thinks and the students are thought about
4 The teacher talks and the students listen – meekly
5 The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined
6 The teacher chooses and enforces his or her choice, and the students comply
7 The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher
8 The teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it
9 The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she or he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students
10 The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.7
As this suggests, the role of the teacher is paramount. Banking education reduces complexity by ensuring the power relationships run only one way. There is no question as to who is right or wrong, what is to be learned, or how it is to be learned. There is no scope for critical dialogue. The teacher’s role is to control all educational events.
As Freire argues, this is dehumanizing for both teachers and students. The more the banking approach is used and accepted, the more passive students become. Criticism, questioning and drawing on the learners’ own realities are in effect no longer seen as a valid part of the educational process. More than that, it inculcates a way of behaving outside school, where, just as in the classroom, one accepts the status quo, takes for granted the explanations by the powerful that this is the way things should be. The banking education model was perfect for past totalitarian regimes but is also being widely adopted in the privatized and highly marketized systems of today. What Freire did was to provide an alternative.
Freire’s work emanated from his experiences teaching in Brazil. His arguments resonated with freedom movements and his published work has an enduring legacy as a revolutionary text (it was banned in apartheid South Africa). Although manifested differently from place to place, Freirean popular education has defining characteristics that mark it out as the polar opposite to GERM and the neoliberal versions of schooling.
Whereas the technicist, outcomes-driven approach of neoliberalism conceals its political orientation, popular education is overly political. It is an intervention aimed at the poor, the marginalized, the dispossessed, and its goals are never simply educational: it is about the emancipation of peoples and the egalitarian transformation of society.
Within Freirean practice, there can be no absolute distinction between curriculum and pedagogy, since dialogue provides both its method and its content. Education requires the critical analysis of the taken-for-granted, of the structures of domination and oppression that are so embedded that they come to seem natural; and it has a clear, strong orientation towards action. For Freire, as for Marx, the aim is not merely to understand the world but to change it.
Freire’s work has been hugely influential in Cuba. In the years following the 1959 revolution, Cuban society was transformed by a literacy campaign more effective than any other the world has seen. It is much more difficult to arrive at meaningful figures on literacy (or illiteracy) rates than newspaper headline writers, and even some educators, might have you believe. What is clear, though, is that the literacy brigades who worked tirelessly throughout rural Cuba in the early 1960s helped to reduce illiteracy to levels that would be the envy of the richest nations on earth.
In Cuba, about 2 per cent of adults are considered illiterate – as compared with about 12 per cent in the US.8 This was accomplished without sophisticated materials or highly trained literacy specialists. What made the difference was the application of Freirean techniques in circumstances that were conducive to their success. Freire’s emphasis on the dignity of the learner and on the vital importance of dialogue meant, and continues to mean, something different in the context of a society that is fundamentally committed to the values of egalitarianism and social justice.
Cuba was also able to export this success to other states in the Caribbean and Latin America – to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Grenada – because in all these cases the acquisition of mass literacy was inseparable from the revolutionary social movements within which these educational achievements were enacted.
Elsewhere in the region, Freirean approaches have not been so spectacularly successful; it would be a mistake, however, to imagine that nothing has been achieved. Even in less propitious circumstances, educational activity has been a salient characteristic of progressive social movements.
In Brazil, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) has around 1,800 schools for 200,000 children. It has developed its own (Freirean) approach to teacher education: when landless groups acquire land, they elect someone to become a teacher. That person then attends the MST residential course, where students conduct research into their own communities, find out what education is required and negotiate an appropriate curriculum.9
Elsewhere in Latin America, social movements have developed similarly impressive educational work. In Argentina, there is the Popular University of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo; in Colombia, the Universidad Campesina (Peasants’ University). In Ecuador, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador runs nearly 3,000 schools based on a model of community participation and has developed the Intercultural University for Indigenous Nationalities and Peoples. Better known still, perhaps, is the work of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, where the Rebellious and Autonomous Zapatista Education System for National Liberation has been established. In such versions of schooling, reading the word is inseparable from reading the world.10
All of the examples in this chapter are important in and of themselves. They constitute real achievements, often in the most adverse circumstances. They are necessarily specific to their own localities: fundamental to the democratic values that inform these projects is an attentiveness to local needs, priorities and experiences. As such, they would not be easily replicated everywhere.
This puts such initiatives, of course, at the opposite pole from transnational edu-businesses such as Pearson, which are primarily interested in maximizing profits through ‘scalability’, replicating what is done in one place across different sites, countries and continents, in much the same way as the British Empire did in the 19th century.
Living Learning: a South African case study
In 2007 the Church Land Programme (CLP) offered Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Rural Network, two poor people’s movements working in KwaZulu-Natal, a chance to elect two members each to attend the University of KwaZuluNatal in Pietermaritzburg. Abahlali baseMjondolo is a shack dwellers’ movement founded in Durban and the Rural Network is an alliance of rural community organizations. The university program is an attempt to keep open a space for teaching and learning premised on liberatory assumptions.
Living Learning is neither an academic program nor a university degree – it is a space for reflecting on what it means to be part of two realities that are separate and often opposed. It tries to make it possible for activists to step into a formal university – which is mostly a machine for creating and sustaining inequality – without stepping out of a ‘living politics’. At the end of the year the students from these movements wondered if it would be worth talking about ‘achieving the “Universal University” – invading the academic one in order for it to benefit the people’.
In contrast to formal education, the Living Learning participants envisage a second kind of education, a ‘liberating education that starts with the people’s struggles to be fully human’. Yet things are not so simple.
There is also a third kind of education that appears progressive because it speaks the language of social justice rather than private profit. But instead of listening to the people, this education aims to discipline communities and even movements into becoming ‘stakeholders’ in ‘service delivery’. It denies the thinking and experience in communities and movements – ‘when an outsider comes, with their own language and culture and agenda, they can miss all the ideas that the people actually have’. This is a serious problem because ‘the people are the ones who know about their situation’. And in such approaches, the suffering of the poor is often blamed on their ignorance rather than the system that oppresses them.11
Different schooling, different society
There is, nonetheless, a sense in which the instances of radical, popular, democratic practice have a meaning beyond themselves. They are instances of ‘prefigurative practice’.12 They show that other ways of doing school are possible, not in some far-distant future but now. They remind us that neoliberalism’s version of education is not the only one, that other attitudes to learning and to learners are worth exploring. These alternative versions of education arise out of, and are embedded in, a different vision of society: one in which social relations are not determined by market values but by human values. They offer a different, much more direct and democratic version of accountability.
This chapter has focused less narrowly on schools than in the earlier parts of the book. Some of the examples (such as the work of the literacy brigades in Cuba or the Living Learning project in South Africa) are about adult education. All of the examples involve a different relationship between school and community, between school learning and out-of-school learning, between reading the word and reading the world. All challenge the notion that school learning and school curricula are neatly separate from lived experience. All are, in this, part of a rich tradition of progressive education that can be traced back to the early 20th-century American educator, John Dewey.
There is much to be learnt from this progressive tradition – the same tradition that the neoliberals have attack so vehemently because it continues to represent a threat to the authoritarian counter-revolution that they seek to accomplish. Dewey’s emphasis on the importance of experience – the practical experience of the learner – points to the importance of those subjects or areas of the curriculum that most conspicuously provide opportunities for learning by doing. More than this, though, the Deweyan emphasis on experience as central to learning calls into question the facile acceptance of a transmission model of teaching, as if all that were involved in educational processes was the inculcation, through rote learning, of a series of facts.13
The examples of progressive practice – from Reggio Emilia to Cuba, from St-George-in-the-East to the Zapatistas – certainly help us question the commodified commonsense of neoliberalism. Yet they can seem impossibly distant from the everyday realities of mainstream schooling. They can thus encourage the view that, other than in these exotic pockets of resistance, neoliberalism has won and outcomes-based, market-driven education is the only game in town. But that view would be wrong – and the reason why lies in the creativity of ordinary classrooms.
The creativity of ordinary classrooms
Absolutely fundamental to the success of the neoliberal version of schooling has been its capacity to affect how things are seen. In focusing attention on what is most easily measurable and commodifiable, it has rendered invisible everything that lies outside its tunnel vision.
For this reason, a vital task for those holding out a vision of another kind of education is to make visible those practices and aspects of practice that the dominant neoliberal discourses of education policy have sought to efface. These more humane ways of doing school can still be found, even within systems of schooling that are governed by regimes of surveillance and test-based accountability, by commodification and privatization. The Cultures in Contact project described in Chapter 2, or the ‘transformed’ school visited in Chapter 3, are indications of what remains possible, even in contexts that are largely inimical to progressive practice. They are instances, however modest, of schools offering possibilities of development and emancipation.
Despite the best efforts of neoliberalism, classrooms – all classrooms – remain extraordinarily complex places. What causes this complexity? The short answer is people. Classrooms are full of students, teachers and sometimes other staff. They all come with varied experiences, histories, backgrounds, abilities, disabilities, inclinations – even in a school that does not appear to have a diverse intake. The students are not clones of each other; they will have a range of aptitudes, personalities, interests which the teacher needs to work with and work on.
Classrooms are also busy places, with myriad interactions taking place, many of them simultaneously. These interactions are public, available to the gaze of other participants in the lesson and open to scrutiny by outsiders (parents, school managers, inspectors and journalists, all of whom may feel that they have a legitimate interest in what goes on). There is, moreover, no neat separation between the formal learning that is accomplished and the personal or social lives of teachers and students. Events in these spaces are unpredictable.
For all these reasons, the teacher’s role is far from straightforward. Teachers need to become adept at interpreting situations, organizing learning and managing events. They need to be proactive, to know their subjects and their students, to motivate, facilitate, communicate, organize and plan. They develop the ability to know what is going on in all areas of the classroom (as if they had eyes in the back of their head). They become multi-taskers. They need to create structures, clarity and momentum.
These are not skills that are arrived at easily or quickly. Teachers learn and develop strategies over time; very often this is partially intuitive and based on what feels right at the time with a particular group. They need to seek advice from a range of sources. The immediacy of events and specificity of context means school colleagues are often the most available and credible source. Thus teachers are learning and developing their practice all the time through a form of what we would call situated learning. This situated learning takes place within the school community but it also includes wider networks – professional associations and trade unions – that are both a source of professional learning and development and a vital means of resisting the neoliberal tide.
Classrooms are rich in interaction. This manifests itself in many ways. Teachers have to frame, explain, present. This could be to the whole class, smaller groups or individuals. Students ask questions of the teacher and of each other. Students need to develop the social skills to make the best of the busyness of classrooms. For example, getting used to being one of many, learning to wait, finding other sources of help. Dialogue between participants is key to what is happening. The classroom is a site of joint activities, of joint endeavor; it is a collaborative community. In this busy and complex environment, building relationships with the learners is very important. Relationships cannot exist without dialogue and dialogue creates relationships.
Teachers and classrooms are often represented, in film and on television, in a very limited (and stereotypical) way. There is the ‘teacher as a performer’, entertaining the students as if they had attended the circus. There is the ‘charismatic teacher’, the ‘authoritarian’, the ‘intellectual giant’ who knows everything.
Classrooms are also often presented with students sitting in rows facing the teacher. Even with the recent rise of ‘reality’ TV situated within schools, the work is highly edited, focusing on ‘entertaining’ highlights (such as misbehavior). The whole of a school week is captured in a 60-minute episode. The filmmakers tend to foreground a teacher-centered transmission approach to learning with the implicit power relations this requires.
If in today’s classrooms, under the pressure of high-stakes testing, there is a fair amount of what Vygotsky called ‘empty verbalism’, there is also a great deal else happening that is much worthier of attention. Classrooms remain rich sites of cultural production. The work that teachers do is much more complex than the official script might suggest. And, even in the unfavorable context of an obsessive concern with measured outcomes, the everyday world of classrooms is one in which learners work together in complex acts of meaning-making.
Noticing these unremarkable and largely unremarked processes is vital: this is, in itself, a way of contesting the reductive version of schooling that neoliberalism peddles. It is also important that such processes – with pupils themselves as meaning-makers – are seen as work.
Classrooms are not mere sorting-houses, ensuring the appropriate reproduction of class difference (even if that is one of the functions that schooling fulfills). Nor are they merely places where children and young people are prepared for adult life, fitted up with the right skills to thrive in the new knowledge economy. Classrooms are places where work gets done, where transformations happen. What gets transformed is both the learners and knowledge itself. So, in an English classroom, Hamlet becomes a new text with every fresh reading (interpretation) of it, and every class that reads it is transformed in the process. And every time a History class explores the Russian Revolution, or the Peasants’ Revolt, or the Mughal Empire, new history is being constructed.
Due attention needs to be paid to these processes that are evident in classrooms, processes that are both mundane and extraordinary. And, from this perspective, the fetish of knowledge as something that exists in hermetically sealed boxes, like the notion of the curriculum as the transmission of the ‘best that has been thought and said’, is hopelessly inadequate – and downright misleading. As the Bullock Report announced, over 40 years ago, ‘It is a confusion of everyday thought that we tend to regard “knowledge” as something that exists independently of someone who knows. “What is known” must in fact be brought to life afresh within every “knower” by his own efforts’.14
Yet the emphasis here on the individual learner is also misleading – or at least provides only part of the picture. These efforts are accomplished socially, in the interactions between learners and teachers and in their interactions with the cultural resources at their disposal. Once we recognize this, we are in a better position to dismiss as hopelessly inadequate the notion that one could get an accurate picture of such learning by setting traditional end-of-course examinations in particular subjects, however ‘rigorous’ the neoliberals want to make them.
An alternative vision of schooling sees classrooms as sites of knowledge-construction. This vision is built on the reality of what already happens, day by day, in classrooms, but is neglected, almost invisible, because it does not fit into dominant discourses of accountability and assessment.
This vision:
• focuses on learning rather than knowledge, and acknowledges the messiness, unpredictability and elusiveness of the learning process.
• encompasses the irreducibly social nature of learning – an often uncomfortable dialogue involving competing voices, interests and understandings.
• resists the reductiveness of the neoliberal version of education, with its inputs and outputs, its testing and league tables, its production-line payment by results.
• knows that education is never merely a means to an end: it is an end in itself, a mark of what it is to be human, and to be valued as a full member of human society.
This vision is a starting-point that is rooted in current realities but it is inevitably no more than a beginning. The forces of neoliberalism are powerful, wealthy and well-organized. They have already done a great deal to deform the landscape of schooling, but theirs is an unfinished project. It is likely to remain unfinished because the Gradgrindian, bean-counting, facts-and-factory model of education is so profoundly unsatisfying for both teachers and children – and because it will not help build the more equal and sustainable world that we unquestionably need in the 21st century.
We will need to work together to resist these forces and to win broad support for our alternative version of what schools are and what they are for.
1 Richard Johnson, ‘Really useful knowledge’: radical education and working class culture, 1790-1848. In J Clarke et al (eds), Working-Class Culture: studies in history and theory (pp 75-102), Hutchinson, London, 1979.
2 Brian Simon, Studies in The History of Education, 1780-1870, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1960; Phil Gardner, The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England: The People’s Education, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1984; Keith Flett, Really Useful Knowledge and the Politics of Radical Education with reference to the working-class press 1848-1870, unpublished PhD thesis, Institute of Education, University of London, 2002.
3 Sarah Amsler, The Education of Radical Democracy, Routledge, London & New York, 2015.
4 Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective, PM Press, Oakland, 2015.
5 Michael Fielding & Peter Moss, Radical Education and the Common School: a democratic alternative, Routledge, Abingdon, 2011; Loris Malagizzi, I cento linguaggi dei bambini/The hundred languages of children (exhibition catalogue), Reggio Emilia: City of Reggio Emilia Department of Education, 1987.
6 Fielding and Moss, op cit, 2011.
7 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin, 1972, p 46.
8 Théodore MacDonald, Schooling the Revolution: An analysis of developments in Cuban Education since 1959, Praxis Press, London, 1996.
9 Liam Kane, ‘Forty Years of Popular Education in Latin America: Lessons for Social Movements Today’, in Hall et al (eds), Learning and Education for a Better World: The Role of Social Movements, Sense, Rotterdam, 2012.
10 Paolo Freire & Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1987.
11 From Lindela Figlan et al, Living Learning, Church Land Programme, Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 2009, abahlali.org/files/Living_Learning.pdf
12 Carl Boggs,’ Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control’, Radical America, 11.6/12.1, pp 99-122, 1977/8, nin.tl/radicalamerica. See also: Fielding and Moss 2011; Amsler 2015, op cit.
13 Richard Pring, The Life and Death of Secondary Education for All, Routledge, Abingdon & New York, 2013.
14 Department of Education and Science, A Language for Life, HMSO, London, 1975, p 50.