Notes towards a political ontology

On “trickling down” and the intrinsic value of education

Notes towards a political ontology

Thanks for the posts. I’ll start with Phil’s question, on whether education is a public good or a private good? I think that first we have to ask ourselves in what kind of society will this public or private good be inserted. High modernity did in fact view education as a public good, whereby a recalcitrant population could be turned into a compliant workforce that could serve the needs of industrial bourgeois society. One only needs to think of the techniques we learn at school: timekeeping, discipline (mental and physical), fitness, a system of rewards and punishments, respect for authority, deference, love of country, etc. Anyone who fails in these requirements is usually classed as someone who is unruly, and has ‘behavior’ problems. Yet, there was another side to this coin. Education was also designed to teach a sensibility (e.g. appreciation of the arts for their own sake). That is, one went to school and university to be educated and cultivated (acquiring an education to be able to perform one’s role as a citizen). One could develop an ethos. The culture wars (cf. Taylor’s post on Newfield) in fact emerge from this contradiction. While on one side bourgeois society had to ‘train’ the future workforce for compliance, it could not prevent the educating side from creating individuals who would question the very basis on the society. Nor could it prevent this “trickle down” effect (cf. Phil’s post on Domina), where this cultivation was passed down from generation to generation. Consequently, the activists of the sixties, those who would question the very basis of modernist interpretations, are themselves very much the product of modernist education (see Sheldon Wolin ‘Elitism and the Rage against Postmodernism’ in The Presence of the Past). However, the backlash started quite quickly with the 1975 publication of the Trilateral Commission report, ‘The Crisis of Democracy’. The crisis of democracy meant according to the authors, too much democracy in society, and the failure of schools and universities to indoctrinate the young. It’s almost worth quoting at length:

At the present time, a significant challenge comes from the intellectuals and related groups who assert their disgust with the corruption, materialism, and inefficiency of democracy and with the subservience of democratic government to "monopoly capitalism." The development of an "adversary culture" among intellectuals has affected students, scholars, and the media […] In some measure, the advanced industrial societies have spawned a stratum of value-oriented intellectuals who often devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority, and the unmasking and delegitimation of established institutions, their behavior contrasting with that of the also increasing numbers of technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals. In an age of widespread secondary school and university education, the pervasiveness of the mass media, and the displacement of manual labor by clerical and professional employees, this development constitutes a challenge to democratic government which is, potentially at least, as serious as those posed in the past by the aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and communist parties.

These “adversary culture” refers exactly to the social movements that emerged in many parts of the world post WW2 (though the Trilateral Commission is mainly concerned with the US, Europe and Japan). The crisis of democracy had to be countered by the gradual defunding of education, or rather their reorganization because of the inherent contradiction in the modernist project. The culture wars were basically an outgrowth of the elites’ hatred of democracy (starting with Plato). The crisis of democracy was not only about an adversarial culture among intellectuals, but also, the fact that this adversarial culture was translated into concrete demands from women and ethnic and sexual minorities for a more just society, which inevitably destabilized the old power arrangements. It took until the late 80s/early 90s for this to be coined as ‘culture wars’ (incidentally just as the new social movements lost its momentum and identity politics became entrenched) and for the gains to be reversed. Yet the ideology was laid out very early on.

Sorry for going on at length, but back to Phil’s question. So, into what kind of society do we want this public good to be inserted? Are we going to go back to the modernist project; public education for all in a capitalist society (albeit a tamed capitalism)? Or are we going to try to reimagine public education while we are reimagining our own societies?

Change versus transformation

One ongoing sub-category of our project should be related to the political community we want to see and how the university that we want will reflect that. What is needed is an organic relationship between the community and the university rather than a feeder of technocrats for a neoliberal society. By organic, I don’t mean that a narrow relationship whereby the university will reflect the needs of the political community in its economic, cultural and social needs. This is given. But also, that the university will remain a site of critique for society, operating as a subversive institution. But, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

One of the key things, that I have been trying to argue is that going back to the modernist project, with education as a public good is not going to work. As I argued above, the contradictions that emerge out of the public project probably sets it on course to become a target for neolibralization. This is because of the democratic deficit at the heart of public education. The modernist project is still too much centered around the idea of control, discipline and authoritarianism (different to authority, but that is another debate). Hence, our task is to create a space where democracy can flourish. To quote from the preamble of the IWW, “we are creating the new society within the shell of the old one.” As it is now, the modern university is but a shell of its old self. It has been gutted and transformed into a technocratic institution that responds to economic and military needs of the state and corporations. Yet, to make changes, we need institutions. Here we see the key mistake of the sixties where they thought they could do without institutions (a nihilistic tendency however well-intentioned it is). The second strategy was encapsulated in the rhetoric of “Turn on, tune in, drop out”. Those who followed that line, sought to build alternative institutions outside the whole system; communes, social centers, etc. These alternative institutions sought to create the utopia that they had imagined right here on the margins of society. This is what Foucault called ‘heterotopias’, or existing utopias. We can call this strategy ‘resistance’. On the other hand, to have substantive changes in society, we need a different strategy. Call it ‘transformation’. This involves creating subjects and institutions who reflect the type of society that they want but within the old society. We can’t go to the margins again, nor can we just kick down everything we have, no matter how rotten they are. We need to start building from the floor down and move up.

Vision as a political ontology

The question then centers around vision. What will the new society look like, and what will the new university that we seek to build look like? How is it to be arranged? For, example, Phil’s point about the size of classrooms, group work, all these practical issues have to be debated democratically and included as part of the vision of the future. These things matter considerably if we want to create a new type of institution. Also, what type of class architecture do we set up; are we going to continue with the traditional lecture setup with the professor as the dispenser of knowledge from the front of the class, or are we to have a more open approach? What type of decision-making processes will we have? Are we going to continue with the managerial approach where a few people do all the interesting work, while the rest execute? How is the curriculum to be designed, what kind of deliberative space can we create so that the curriculum can be debated, contested, and open? It is not only a question of course design, but the whole issue of pedagogy must be factored in. How has pedagogy suffered under neoliberalism, and what type of pedagogy can we see for the future? It is in that sense that we need to have vision as our political ontology. For let us not beat about the bush, because all this is a political project, just like neoliberalization. But, before anything else, two caveats. Firstly, this vision cannot be elaborated as a blueprint that can be used ad infinitum, but it should be one that is always open to debate and questioning. Secondly, we need to start somewhere. Nothing in terms of transformation is happening in the UC system (well at least in UCI and from what I can gather from meetings), where the strategy towards budget cuts revolves around resistance. As such, we are in a good position to start envisioning our project.

Some reading ideas:

Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, Something from Henry Giroux on pedagogy, Christine E. Sleeter, Peter McLaren ’s Multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and the politics of difference