An Anarchist Perspective of Australian High School Life

It’s Time To De-School

An Anarchist Perspective of Australian High School Life – For Those Who Suffer It (and those who don’t)

Let us analyse our school days. Let us dissect the pre-determined routine that is imposed upon us, regardless of our needs and desires. The unsolicited schedules and activities that we are forced to comply with. Though were we consulted? Were we asked if authority and obedience are beneficial to our pursuit of knowledge? Has anyone asked how you feel about being prepared for wage slavery – that is, exchanging hours of your life in return for humiliation, a greedy boss and a few dollars? Have you ever asked yourself if anyone has the right to dictate your life? Be it during school, work or the remainder of daily life where someone or something – be it armed police thugs or multinational corporations – decide your choices for you. What if we controlled our own destinies and lived in freedom and equality, in a society where we don’t have to sell our lives to survive. What if we learnt all the wonderful and enticing things there are to learn without coercion and compulsion, competition or punishment? Free from standardised exams and syllabuses. What if we said no to the alienation and poverty of coercive and compulsory education? What if we demanded self-managed schools, that is, schools operated by students and teachers together where hierarchy, oppression and uniformity cease to exist.

We are oppressed by the education system (and by authoritarian society, as authoritarian schooling is an expression of this – but more on that later) from the minute we wake up. Did you decide to awake in the dark at six thirty in the morning, or were your options already prescribed for you? From that very instant, your life is not your own. We wake, we shower, and we eat and then dress our selves in a uniform. That’s when the explicit humiliation begins. One of the single most degrading and enervating miseries anyone can suffer is being forced to wear a uniform. Uniforms are worn by prisoners, office workers, police and military personal - not by freethinking beings in a free environment. Despite what some apologists might say, a uniform is not a “tool for equity” that prevents children from being harassed - we can overcome trivial taunting and bullying ourselves. (Though how can we expect to eliminate authoritarian behaviour amidst a hierarchical institution that sanctions authoritarian relationships and teaching methods) A material uniform exists to repress our individuality, teach us discipline and preserve our docility – the very same thing we are to experience in the workplace and greater consumer society.

Upon arrival at school we are subject to rules, regulations and an institution that we exercise no control over. And they wonder why we don’t want to attend! It’s because this lack of control engenders a severe feeling of alienation. The feeling that school would continue to function and imprison with or without you there. The same alienation we will feel upon entering the market or by having demagogic leaders and unknown technocrats organize our society. When we sit down in class and are ordered (as it is an order disguised as a friendly request) to complete activities 1 to 9 we experience alienation. We did not participate in the decision to purchase these textbooks, textbooks that we are supposed to learn from. We were not even involved in deciding which activities to do, what subject to study or when and how to study it. Not only are we alienated from the schooling apparatus, but from each other and teachers alike. We rarely even know the first name of the teachers with whom we interact (albeit submissively) with for several hours a day. We rush past each other in the corridors, evading eye contact at all costs. This is alienation and we need not tolerate it.

Out side of and during school, we are taught to be submissive, to submit - by the family, by police, by teachers, (who are only submitting to an even higher authority) by employers and by the state. At times this enforced submission is discreet. Like when addressing a teacher by their last name, or - even more inhumanly – with Sir or Miss. At other times our subordination is as patent as possible, such as having to request permission to urinate. Our movement is also restricted, with permits being necessary to exit the classroom while being prohibited from leaving school grounds. How are we to learn in an elaborate cage, decorated with sordid colours and government propaganda, seemingly controlled by wage slave masters (teachers) who are as impoverished and wretched as us. This is slavery and imprisonment. What’s that you say? We don’t have to be here; ultimately we’re free to leave and get a job. Splendid. The world of forced labour. The world of servitude. Where we follow orders, where our productivity is appropriated, where our lives are stolen and where we are rewarded with identical commodities. That doesn’t sound like much of choice to me. In fact, that sounds like it’s just around the corner.

The part of ourselves that is possibly most mutilated by current schooling is our lust to learn. When we’re young, we rejoice at the opportunity to learn, to experience new and unique things. We would explore the bush for hours on end, talking to each other, learning free from constraints and the annoyance of bells. But somewhere along the way we began to recoil at the thought of learning, at the thought of knowledge and even at the thought of books. Is this an innate tendency or a natural progression? Or is it the consequence of years of authoritarian schooling, where we are punished and disadvantaged for failing to regurgitate textbook information. Is it the result of a system that fails to consider our unique and preferred modes of expression? Is our disinterest in learning due to a conditioning mechanism that forces us to compete against each other for university places, rather than support each other in the pursuit of balanced, self-motivated and healthy learning. There is an alternative. Modern Schools – schools free from authoritarian methods and relations that are managed by students, teachers and parents. These schools exist and have existed for hundreds of years. Modern Schools have been a part of and advocated by the international Anarchist movement since the beginning of the 1900’s. We can refuse to be indoctrinated by state and/or private institutions. We can create an environment that can assist our self-realisation, an environment that can help us reach our desires. We can create a “school” where classes are not only conducted by teachers and where we aren’t filed into grades according to our age. A school where we can read our own books or play actively without being reproached by teachers. A school that we control, not through false student governments (like the SRC) that replicate the fake democracies of larger society, but through exciting and colourful student assemblies where we all enjoy equal power, not over each other, but over our own educational experience and lives.

If we want to build these kinds of schools, schools that we voluntarily come to and enjoy being at, we must understand that the current educational system is an essential component of our capitalist and authoritarian society. It is here that we are regimented and reified (turned into objects) taught to obey authority and submit to the demands of others. It is here that we are instructed on the virtues of either working for somebody else or having somebody work for us. It is here, right now, that we are being prepared for a life of passivity and mediocrity. We are being prepared to accept willingly a life that is not our own, a life that is always controlled by someone or something else. In fact, we are being prepared for complete survival – life reduced to work and consumption. So the time for refusal is now, before we can be successfully assimilated into a society organized by capitalists and state and into a culture that portrays everything as something else. If we want to de-school, transform our lives and redefine the meaning of happiness and excitement, then we must destroy all forms of oppression and authority. We must destroy the civilisation that gives birth to and reproduces the schools we a forced to attend and the lives we are forced to lead.

By J Subjectivity

Anti-Copyright (though recognition would be cool)

(A work born of passion not pressure – see what can be done in a few hours of joyous learning and expression)