Anarchy 43/Reflections on parents, teachers and schools

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Reflections on
parents, teachers
and schools

JOHN ELLERBY

What anarch­ists are after is per­sonal and so­cial auto­nomy—the idea that in­di­viduals and their organ­isa­tions should be self-reg­u­lat­ing auto­no­mous bodies. It is this which makes us ad­voc­ates of workers’ control in in­dus­try and which makes us en­thusi­astic about such ex­amples as we find of so­cial organ­isa­tions spring up from below, from people’s urge to sat­isfy their own needs, as op­posed to those which depend on a struc­ture of hier­archy, power and au­thor­ity in which one set of people give in­struc­tions and another set of people carry them out.

  The the­or­et­ical ap­pli­ca­tion of our ideas to the organ­isa­tion of edu­ca­tion is clear enough. The auto­nom­ous self-govern­ing school is the aim, and in view of the ob­vi­ous limits within which chil­dren may be said to govern them­selves, this means in prac­tice a school con­trolled by teach­ers by virtue of their func­tional re­spons­ibil­ity to chil­dren, and by parents because of their bio­lo­gical re­spons­ibil­ity for them. But the issue is more com­pli­ca­ted, for in both prim­it­ive and com­plex com­mun­it­ies it is recog­nised that all adults have a re­spons­ibil­ity towards chil­dren, which because of the vagar­ies and vicis­si­tudes of in­di­vidual parent­age, may have to be exer­cised on its behalf or on the child’s behalf. Once that is ad­mit­ted, we have of course ad­mit­ted that edu­ca­tion is the con­cern of the com­mun­ity. But what com­mun­ity? The state as in France, the local au­thor­ity as in the United States, or a mix­ture of the two as in Britain? And where does the re­spons­ibil­ity of the com­mun­ity begin and end?

  Should edu­ca­tion be com­puls­ory anyway? (And is the com­pul­sion to be ap­plied to the child or the parent?) Bakunin saw the ques­tion dia­lect­ic­ally:

  The prin­ciple of au­thor­ity, in the edu­ca­tion of chil­dren, con­sti­tutes the natural point of de­par­ture; it is leg­itim­ate, neces­sary, when ap­plied to chil­dren of a tender age, whose intel­li­gence has not yet openly de­veloped itself. But as the de­velop­ment of every­thing, and con­sequently of edu­ca­tion, im­plies the gradual nega­tion of the point of de­par­ture, this prin­ciple must dimin­ish as fast as edu­ca­tion and in­struc­tion ad­vance, giving place to in­creas­ing liberty. All ra­tional edu­ca­tion is at bottom nothing but this pro­gres­sive im­mola­tion of au­thor­ity for the benefit of liberty, the final ob­ject of edu­ca­tion neces­sarily

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being the form­a­tion of free men full of re­spect and love for the liberty of others. There­fore the first day of the pupil’s life, if the school takes infants scarcely able as yet to stam­mer a few words, should be that of the great­est au­thor­ity and an almost entire ab­sence of liberty; but its last day should be that of the great­est liberty and the ab­solute aboli­tion of every vestige of the animal or divine prin­ciple of au­thor­ity.

  Eighty-five years later, Ethel Mannin in her utopian survey Bread and Roses took a more ab­solutely “liber­tarian” line:

  At this point you per­haps pro­test, “But if there is no com­pul­sion, what hap­pens if a child does not want to at­tend school of any kind, and the parents are not con­cerned to per­suade him?” It is quite simple. In that case the child does not at­tend any school. As he becomes adoles­cent he may wish to ac­quire some learn­ing. Or he may de­velop school-

going friends and wish to at­tend school because they do. But if he doesn’t he is never­the­less learn­ing all the time, his natural child’s creat­ive­ness work­ing in happy alli­ance with his free­dom. No Utopian parent would think of using that moral coer­cion we call ‘per­sua­sion’. By the time he reaches adoles­cence the child grows tired of run­ning wild, and begins to ident­ify himself with grown-

ups; he per­ceives the use­ful­ness of know­ing how to read and write and add, and there is prob­ably some special thing he wants to learn—

such as how to drive a train or build a bridge or a house. It is all very much simpler than our pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tion­ists would have us believe.

  Some of us think it is not that simple. But the point is aca­demic, for in prac­tice the deci­sion is that of the parents. Nowadays it is only highly soph­ist­ic­ated and edu­ca­ted people who bother to argue about whether or not it is desir­able that chil­dren should learn the three Rs. The law in this country does not in fact re­quire parents to send their chil­dren to school; it im­poses an obli­ga­tion on them to see that their chil­dren while within the com­puls­ory age, are re­ceiv­ing “an ap­propri­ate edu­ca­tion”. The oc­ca­sional pro­secu­tions of re­calcit­rant parents usually reveal a degree of apathy, in­dif­fer­ence or parental in­com­pet­ence that hardly pro­vides a good case for the op­ponents of com­pul­sion, though they do some­times rope in highly con­scien­tious parents whose views on edu­ca­tion do not hap­pen to co­incide with those of the local au­thor­ity. (Mrs. Joy Baker’s ac­count of her long and in the end suc­cess­ful struggle with the au­thor­it­ies will be re­viewed in a coming issue of anarchy). Usually, apart from a few of the rich, with their gover­nesses and tutors, there are not many parents with the time or skill to teach their chil­dren at home, and of those who could, many must feel it unfair to de­prive their chil­dren of the pleasures and so­cial ex­peri­ence of be­long­ing to a com­mun­ity of their peers, or may cherish the right of parents to have the kids out of their way for some of the time—and the recip­rocal right of their children to be outside the parental at­mo­sphere.

*   *   *

  Histor­ic­ally, in this country, the strug­gle to make edu­ca­tion free, com­puls­ory and uni­versal, and out of the ex­clus­ive con­trol of reli­gious organ­isa­tions, was long and bitter, and the op­po­si­tion to it came, not from liber­tarian ob­jectors, but from the up­hold­ers of priv­ilege and dogma, and from those (both parents and em­ploy­ers) who had an eco­nomic inter­est in the labour of chil­dren or a vested inter­est in ignor­ance. The very reason why it had to be made com­puls­ory ninety-four

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years ago was because chil­dren were an eco­nomic asset. Read­ers of chap­ters 8 and 12 of Marx’s Capital will not dis­sent from the as­ser­tion that the in­dus­trial re­volu­tion was made by the chil­dren of the poor. As late as 1935 Lord Halifax, as Pres­id­ent of the Board of Edu­ca­tion, op­pos­ing the pro­posal to raise the school leaving age from four­teen to fif­teen, de­clared that “public opinion would not toler­ate an un­con­di­tional raising of the age” and the Bradford tex­tile manu­fac­turers as­sured him that “there was work for little fingers there.”

The no­tion that primary ecu­ca­tion should be free, com­puls­ory and uni­versal is very much older than the English Act of 1870. It grew up with the print­ing press and the rise of prot­est­ant­ism. The rich had been edu­cated by the Church and the sons of the rising bour­geoisie in the grammar schools of the Middle Ages. From the 16th century on arose a grad­ual demand that all should be taught. Martin Luther ap­pealed “To the Coun­cil­men of all Cities in Germany that they estab­lish and main­tain Christian Schools”, ob­serv­ing that the train­ing chil­dren get at home “at­tempts to make up wise through our ex­peri­ence” a task for which life itself is too short, and which could be ac­cel­er­ated by sys­tema­tic in­struc­tion by means of books. Com­puls­ory uni­versal edu­ca­tion was founded in Calvin­ist Geneva in 1536, and Calvin’s Scottish dis­ciple John Knox “planted a school as well as a kirk in every parish.” In puritan Mas­sachu­setts free com­puls­ory primary edu­ca­tion was intro­duced in 1647. The common school, writes Lewis Mumford in The Condi­tion of Man:

  … con­trary to popular belief, is no be­lated pro­duct of 19th century demo­cracy: I have pointed out that it played a neces­sary part in the ab­solu­tist-

mech­an­ical form­ula. Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, fol­lowing Luther’s pre­cept, made primary edu­ca­tion com­puls­ory in his realm in 1717, and foun­ded 1,700 schools to meet the needs of the poor. Two ordin­ances of Louis XIV in 1694 and 1698 and one of Louis XV in 1724 re­quired regular at­tend­ance at school. Even England, a strag­gler in such mat­ters, had hun­dreds of private char­ity schools, some of them foun­ded by the So­ci­ety for Pro­moting Chris­tian Know­ledge, which had been in­cor­por­ated in 1699. Vergerious, one of the earliest renais­sance school­masters, had thought edu­ca­tion an es­sen­tial func­tion of the State; and cen­tral­ised au­thor­ity was now be­lat­edly taking up the work that had been neg­lected with the wiping out of mu­ni­cipal free­dom in the greater part of Europe.

  All the ra­tion­al­ist philo­sophers of the 18th century thought about the prob­lems of edu­ca­tion, and of them, the two acutest edu­ca­tional think­ers ranged them­selves on op­pos­ite sides on the ques­tion of the organ­isa­tion of edu­ca­tion: Rousseau for the State, Godwin against it. Rousseau, whose Emile pos­tu­lates a com­pletely in­di­vidual edu­ca­tion (human so­ciety is ig­nored, the tutor’s entire life is de­voted to poor Emile), did never­the­less con­cern himself with the so­cial aspect, argu­ing, in his Dis­course on Polit­ical Eco­nomy (1755) for public edu­ca­tion “under regu­la­tions pre­scribed by the govern­ment”, for

  If chil­dren are brought up in com­mon in the bosom of equal­ity; if they are im­bued with the laws of the State and the pre­cepts of the General Will … we can­not doubt that they will cher­ish one another mu­tually as broth­ers … to become in time de­fenders and fath­ers of the country of which they will have been so long the chil­dren.

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