Deschool Yourself: Excerpt From A Language Older Than Words

Excerpt from A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen

I've since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years. It takes that long to sufficiently break a child's will. It is not easy to disconnect children's wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure. Less time wouldn't do it, and in fact, those who are especially slow go to college. For the exceedingly obstinate child there is graduate school.

I have nothing against education; it's just that education--from the Greek root educere, meaning to lead forth or draw out, and originally a midwife's term meaning to be present at the birth of--is not the primary function of schooling. I'm not saying by all this that Mrs. Calloway, my first-grade teacher, was trying to murder the souls of her tiny charges, any more than I've been trying to say that individual scientists are necessarily hell-bent on destroying the planet or that individual Christians necessarily hate women and hate their bodies. The problem is much worse than that, it is not merely personal nor even institutional (although the institutions we've created do mirror the destructiveness of our culture). It is implicit in the process, and therefore virtually transparent.

Take the notion of assigning grades in school. Like the wages for which people later slave---once they've entered "the real world"---the primary function of gradesis to offer an external reinforcement to coerce people to perform tasks they'd rather not do. Did anyone grade you when you learned how to fish? What grades did you get for pretending, shooting hoops, playing pinball, reading good books, kissing ("I'm sorry, dear, but you receive a C-"), riding horses, swimming in the ocean, having intense conversations with close friends? On the other hand, how often have you returned, simply for the joy of it, to not only peruse your high school history textbook, but to memorize names and dates, and, once again for the joy of it, to have a teacher mark, in bright red, your answers as incorrect?

Underlying tests as given in school are the presumptions not only that correct answers to specific questions exist, but that these answers are known to authority figures and can be found in books. Tests also generally discourge communal problem solving. Equally important is the presumption that a primary purpose of school is to deliver information to students. Never asked is the question of how this information makes us better people, or better kissers, for that matter.

Systematically---inherent in the process---direct personal experience is subsumed to external authority, and at every turn creativity, critical thought, and the questioning of fundamental assumptions (such as, for example, the role of schooling on one's socialization) are discouraged.

If you don't believe me, pretend for a moment you're once again in school. Pretend further that you have before you the final test for a final required class. If you fail this test, you fail the class. While you may have enjoyed the process of schooling, and may even have enjoyed this class, you enjoyed neither enough to warrant repetition. Pretend the test consists of one essay question, and pretend you know the instructor well enough to understand that if you mimic the instructor's opinions you'll get a higher grader. If you disagree with the instructor---pretend, finally, that you do---you'll be held to a higher standard of proof. What do you do? Do you speak your mind? Do you lead with your heart? Do you take risks? Do you explore? Do you write the best damn essay the school has ever seen, then return next year to retake the class? Or do you join with thousands---if not millions---of students who face this dilemma daily and who astutely bullshit their way through, knowing, after all, that C stands for Credit?

Grades, as is true once again for wages in later life, are an implicit acknowledgment that the process of schooling is insufficiently rewarding on its own grounds for people to participate of their own volition. If I go fishing, the time on the water---listening to frogs, smelling the rich black scent of decaying cattails, holding long conversations with my fishing partner, watching osprey dive to emerge holding wriggling trout---serves me well enough to make me want to return. And even if I have a bad day fishing, which, as the bumper sticker proclaims, is supposed to be "better than a good day at work," I still receive the reward of dinner. The process and product are their own primary rewards. I fish; I catch fish; I eat fish. I enjoy getting better at fishing. I enjoy eating fish. No grades nor dollars are required to convince me to do it. Only when essential rewards disappear does the need for grades and dollars arise.

It could be argued that I am missing the point, that the product of the years of homework and papers and tests are not the physical atifacts, nor the grades, nor the bits of information, but instead the graduates themselves. But that's my point exactly, and we must ask ourselves what sort of product is that, from what sort of process.

A primary purpose of school---and this is true for our culture's science and religion as well---is to lead us away from our own experience. The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings---as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture---but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiousity, interior lives, and time. This lesson is crucial to individual economic success ("I love art," my students would say, "but I've got to make a living"), to the perpetuation of our economic system (What if all those who hated their jobs quit?), and it is crucial, as should be clear by now, to the rationale that causes all mass atrocities.

Through the process of schooling, each fresh child is attenuated, muted, made---like aluminum---malleable yet durable, and so prepared to compete in society, and ultimately to lead this society where is so obviously is headed. Schooling as it presently exists, like science before it and religion before that, is necessary to the continuation of our culture and to the spawning of a new species of human, ever more submissive to authority, ever more pliant, prepared, by thirteen years of sitting and receiving, sitting and regurgitating, sitting and waiting for the end, prepared for the rest of their lives to toil, to propogate, to never make waves, and to live each day with never an original thought nor even a shred of hope.

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