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.

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