It is good to see people beginning to lay out positions prior to the
Fresno gathering, meaning we are taking this moment seriously.
So, let us stake out areas of agreement and disagreement and see
where we may, or may not, coalesce.
At the outset, I want to restate my respect for anyone engaged in
resistance to the regimentation of schools via regulated curricula
and high stakes exams, in beating back the military, and especially
those who want to overcome the system of capital that lies behind
all that. Disagreement is not disrespect and, so far, many of us
have found that friendship over the long haul arches over our differences.
That said, I disagree with those who want to disconnect capitalism,
imperialism, war, and the trends in school that capital creates,
like the Big Tests and the military recruiters.
I disagree with those who see this US government as anything but a
weapon for the rich, and executive committee for the wealthy. Urging
people into electoral work, into the courts, etc. merely lends
credence and support for a state, a government, that is flatly on
the other side, the enemy of the mass of people including most students.
That teachers are largely unaware of the nature of government speaks
to their own mis-education, especially in colleges of education, but
also to the limited privileges teachers have, like health benefits.
I am interested in building a mass base of class conscious people
(who, for example, recognize that the working class and the owning
class have only contradiction in common), people within a caring
community, people who are willing to take serious risks and at the
same time are willing to see that discipline and organization are
necessary to reach into a world where we can live reasonably
creative, more or less equitable, free lives. I want people to
become less alienated, more responsible for our own histories, if
not our birthrights. I want to get rid of capitalism. That is a
pedagogical and practical project.
I put the question to all other reformers: Toward What End? If that
question is unanswered, then all that happens is more of the same,
perhaps in new forms, running on capital's many treadmills:
nationalism, hierarchy, mysticism, racism, sexism, irrationalism,
more wars, etc.
Opposition to curricula regimentation, high-stakes exams, child
abuse, can only be carried through if it is connected to the source
of those problems, to capital and its need for a docile, uninformed,
work force and witless military. Winning gentler Big Tests and more
"progressive," scripted curricula, without building a base of people
opposing capital itself, is not winning. Even abolishing the NCLB
(which is not going to happen) without an educational project that
takes on capitalism is a hollow victory.
I see work in schools and in the military as central to that work
for peace and justice in the de-industrialized US. There are other
key places, like the immigrant worker rights movement, but schools
and the military are important because they are anchors to daily life.
Any plan of action, tactics, needs to be rooted in a careful
examination of our current situation, both in general (an
international war of the rich on the poor intensifying, and within
that imperialist wars), and in specifics (in San Diego, for example,
the heavy presence of the military, the connections of all schooling
to the military industry, and the racist border, etc, or In Detroit
the racist collapse of the entire city). The general cannot be split
apart from its particularities; they interact.
Of course, there are some answers in history to our current
situation, but those answers are very limited, and are especially
useful only in our criticism of past movements. Our situation is
quite different from what people have faced in the past. We are in
the midst of a technologically powerful empire that is not about to
give up its domain with a whimper.
This is not the British Empire (which went out with fewer bangs but
plenty of massacres in Africa) that had the US to hide behind and
manipulate. It is not Germany in the thirties when people could look
to the USSR or the US. It is not Japan in the thirties when people
could look to the Chinese Red Army. It is not the US mired in
Vietnam in the sixties; the Iraqis are not the sane peasant
nationalists of Vietnam. Rome did not have the Bomb.
While there are some similarities to our context in the past, we are
mainly in a unique, and very difficult, position. The emergence of
fascism in the US as a popular movement is quite real (80 million
Christian fundamentalists, a historically illiterate population, a
culture industry thriving on the "300," misogyny, racism, the
celebration of violence, coupled with nationalism and the direct
rule of the rich).
The civil rights movement and the freedom schools of the 50's and
60's are good examples of both what can be done, and what should not
be done. After all, the civil rights movement, as Bob Moses honestly
portrays in Radical Equations, was easily diverted from a mass
movement for jobs, against racism, to a voting rights project
directed by foundation grants. While it would not be hard to find a
dozen movements that turned out to be what they claimed to set out
to oppose, surely the US civil rights movement would be one of them.
All those movements, from the Soviets to the civil rights movement,
lost sight of the project of going beyond, transcending, the
inequality and exploitation that capital requires. Why do that again?
ACORN today is little more than a Rockefeller Foundation
diversion--hardly an exemplary movement.
Myles Horton was, I think, more honest. I suspect he would argue
that we must connect the particularities of people's lives today
with the larger realities, like war and the emergence of fascism. Or
perhaps not. It is hard to tell, Myles Horton was a reformer, above
all, but he was not blind to his surroundings, and he was usually
surrounded by Marxists of one kind or another. What are the social
conditions that might change Myles from a reformer to one who wants
to transcend the system of capital? Well, maybe the reality of the
brink of WWIII, financial collapse, the eradication of civil
liberties, the clear exposure of all governments as corrupt,
violent, unable to serve the need of masses of people, and
impervious to reformist change.
Jean Anyon's work has been pivotal in understanding education
policy. Her comment that "doing school reform without doing social
and economic reform in communities is like washing the air on one
side of a screen door," stands as a lighthouse for beginning any
discussion about education reform. Her political economy of the
Newark schools was path-breaking. But her hopeless thought in
"Ghetto Schooling," that the only way out of the schools/community
crisis is for the rich to give up their money makes no sense---as it
is the result of a failure to really critique capitalism and its
transformation. The rich are not going to give up their money, and
they are far less positioned to do that than they were in the
1960's, when the US was still an ascendant capitalist nation. Now
the US is in rapid decline, badly positioned against imperialist
rivals like China.
What is possible in Newark and Detroit and elsewhere is that people
are positioned so they must fight to live, as in the California
Grocery Strike, in the Detroit teachers' wildcats, the student
walkouts against this war, and the massive Mayday strike last year.
At issue is whether people will be able to make sense of the fights
they must make, or will they make the same errors and lose, again?
That is a question of education and organization.
Organizing 101 is not merely listening to people and synthesizing
their problems as social, not merely individual, problems; but also
having a sense of where you want to go, and being able and unafraid
to communicate that. A good part of the reluctance to talk about
capitalism is the fear that people will either not understand, or be
scared off by it, that they have to be walked through to the reality
of capital on baby steps.
That's not true in my experience. This process of one-step-at-a-time
teaching and learning surely seems odd when it comes from people
steeped in Whole Language, ie, a desire to withhold the real Whole
(capitalism) from people in order to walk them through a process
(sound out the parts of the social system but never view the whole
of it) which it is assumed they cannot understand in discussions or in reading.
The idea of hiding one's politics (if that is the case, and if it is
not, then just what are one's politics?) is commonplace on the left.
To make a small leap, it winds up with the people who need to know
about left politics not knowing, and the people who do not need to
know, like the cops, knowing all about it. Such was the CPUSA, the
SWP, and many others.
I agree with Kathy Emery (whose book with Susan Ohanian says nearly
all that needs to be said about capitalism and education) in that we
need to build close personal ties with people, real principled
friendships, especially anti-racist friendships, and that the
Education Roundtable petition is a good starting point for
organizing. It can, as we have seen, expose the absolutely corrupt
leadership of the NEA and AFT, for example.
The petition does not, however, ask people to take control over
their own lives, to be truly class conscious. Instead, it asks
others (corrupt politicians on the Gates' payroll for example) to
act for us and, at the end of the day, that will not happen. Nor is
it an especially good idea to have an mass of education school grads
writing the national curriculum, especially not when more than 90
percent of them are white and middle class. There is not going to be
a good national curriculum until there is sufficient strife to cause
an elite retreat, as in the sixties when the curriculum got briefly
interesting. In the absence of a social movement, of organization:
nothing. Power only bends to power.
The US ruling class is not going to be voted out of the Iraq oil
fields and it is not going to be petitioned out of the school
mind-fields, the pipelines for wars, militarism, and voluntary
nationalist servitude.
It is possible that civil strife will hasten the retreat of the
empire, in schools and out. Surely the invasion of Detroit by the
82nd Airbourne, recalled from Vietnam in 1967 to fight Americans,
would be a good historical example. Thousands of jobs, indeed tens
of thousands of jobs, were won as a result of that uprising.
Even so, however, this situation today is much different, the
empire's rulers much more desperate and even more ruthless because
of that. Witness what was done to New Orleans when racism merely
connected to nature. Imagine what would happen if Detroit went up
again. It might. For black people in the US, the situation is
already nearly intolerable. What will educators do?
There are debates about how organizing is done. One can seek the
lowest common denominator of complaints that an organizer finds in a
community, build a centrist base around that, and see where it goes.
This, however, abandons a broader outlook and typically winds up
with, at best, very short term effects, a la Alinsky.
The better way to organize is to organize the left, find the more
antiracist, more militant, more internationalist, more dedicated
people, organize them and have this left move the center.
Boycotts of the tests and driving military recruiters off
campuses--all that has already happened without sophisticated
structures and lines of communications---though surely it would be
better if those elements were in place, and if we could successfully
link the boycotts to freedom schooling on or off campuses.
Test boycotts, or driving military recruiters off campuses, do not
happen because they are simply announced, but are the product of
many factors, including working with parents and students over time,
walking door to door in communities, building reputations, taking
smaller actions like demanding toilet paper and books in Detroit or
exposing the recruiters' lies in San Diego. But any action at some
point requires some one to get it going, and far too few teachers
have been willing to gird up the courage to halt what is obviously
child abuse.
Teachers do not have to be missionaries for capitalism, and schools
its churches. School workers have far more freedom than most other
workers. Self-censorship, however, remains powerful in schools where
freedom is typically overwhelmed by (often unwarranted) fear; a real
inversion of any educational effort.
Teachers now participate in the oppression of kids, and themselves,
as we see wages and benefits attached to test scores---as we
predicted a decade ago. Part of the reason for that is that thinking
teachers have few people to talk to, are isolated, and they know
they do not have the power to defend putting real critical thinking
into classroom reality. Isolation and fear can be answered by organization.
The Rouge Forum is the only organization in the US that has not only
linked capitalism, war, and schooling, but has also led conferences
that include school workers, profs, k-12 nd university students,
parents, community and cultural activists, and rank and file labor
leaders---and led test boycotts, massive walkouts against the war,
helped organize demonstrations against the wars and racism. Take a
look at the recent Rouge Forum conference in Detroit
http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/%7Ergibson/rouge_forum/EducationActionPostConference.htm
There are many voices inside the Rouge Forum: Democrats, anarchists,
libertarians, marxists, Greens, four troops in Iraq, profs in the UK
and South Africa, teachers in the Caribbean, students from the US
now in Oaxaca, unaligned students and teachers, etc.
The leadership of the Rouge Forum is shifting to younger people and
a more open, transparent, structure is under discussion.
We have organized people across the divisive boundaries of union
membership, race, age, occupation, and nation. We created a
community where educators can meet with others who share similar,
intelligent, views---and where passionate debate is mediated by friendship.
We have conducted action-research about the US unions, especially
the school unions, and demonstrated how the organizations are
structurally incapable of meeting the crisis at hand (dividing
people more than uniting them), why it is their leadership is
completely corrupt (bribed by the high salaries, more than $450,000,
that imperialism offers them in exchange for promoting the
nationalist idea that school workers, politicians, and the US
Chamber of Commerce have common interests), and most importantly, we
helped people work inside the unions, and out, for justice and peace.
We have led strikes in schools and supported strikers (like the
California Grocery strikers) outside schools. We recognize that
without the working class, a schools-based movement cannot sustain
itself. But students can surely initiate resistance, as can school
workers, especially when hope is eradicated from schooling: France, 1968.
With an "injury to one only goes before an injury to all," outlook,
we have learned how to defend our friends (as the unions surely will
not) on the job and off. Our collective, online and in person, has
helped school workers keep their ideals and still teach.
We already have a more than a decade of experience of how that can
be done. We have also offered self-criticism about where we went
wrong. We have joined a variety of community groups in coalitions
against the war and in developing real, practical, strategic plans.
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~rgibson/strategicplanningSD.htm
We have attempted to link test boycotts with freedom schooling, with
only a little success.
We've had fun, using guerrilla theater to disrupt the workings of
the Testistos, organized regular social gatherings around films and
books, promoted artists and musicians in the movement.
We have researched the tests, the scripted curricula, and published
extensively in books, the popular press, and academic journals. Our
web page gets 32,000 "hits" a month and serves as a useful research
tool (www.rougeforum.org).
We have supported Substance News, edited by George Schmidt, as a
central voice for education and community activists, a voice of our
own. We can never rely on the good graces of the corporate press.
We continue to work in many community based groups. Many if not most
of us recognize that coalitions that seek to combat a ruthless enemy
that has a centralized command system can be shattered like glass
under pressure and will not prevail; nor do we support the
identity-politics movements that reduce social movements to the
lowest denominators of human life, divided along lines of nation,
sex/gender, etc. We recognize the need to fight racism and to
demolish the divisions among us, before they are used to demolish us.
We struggled to combat the individualism and careerism that is
endemic in the academy and among middle class school workers,
resulting in a fear of organization and, hence, more powerlessness.
The founders of the Rouge Forum have demonstrated in practice that
we are not out to be somebody, to become icons, but rather we have
sacrificed to collectively do something important. We recognize that
organizing is always humbling.
There is room in the Rouge Forum for nearly any educator, student,
community or cultural activist, and parent who wants to find a place
where they can exert the creativity they cannot exercise in other
parts of life, and where what we do actually counts.
You are welcome to join us. Just email rgibson@pipeline.com
Should the US choose to attack Iran, and many indications are there
that say the ruling class will as they must have that oil and
regional control
(http://www.umich.edu/~twod/writing/z_iran_28apr06c-wkg.pdf) , then
our situation will probably change dramatically, with an even more
rapid attack on civil liberties coupled with sharpened economic
assaults on life in schools and at work, that is, a draft becomes
more likely, freedoms to teach or organize on campuses will
diminish, wages and health benefits come under attack, as the war
costs come home. That could lead to a profound economic crisis, or
not, and it could also rachet up propaganda for a fascist mass movement.
Such is our current situation.
There is a story about a frog in a well who became an expert on what
it believed was all of the sky. Our current context demands an
organization that can see a larger sky than the one viewed from the
bottom of a well.
All the best, r