[lbo-talk] Thought's on Doug's interview with Ayers

[Carrol Cox]

Almost _all_ criticisms of education and/or the schools, past and
present, share a fundamental error: they implicitly treat education as
an independent facotor, with causation running from it to the society at
large. But schools cannot do other than serve the needs of the social
order in which they exist. For one thing, schools have no independent
source of funds, which has always guaranteed an overworked and underpaid
work force. And that in turn guranatees a workforce exceedingly
sensitive to social pressure (visible and invisible), even on the part
of the most independent and well-meaning teachers and scholars. Fifty
years ago at Michigan as grad teacher of freshman comp I 'imposed' an
individualist and anti-communist perspective on my students not because
I was consciously "serving capitalism" but because I fucking believed
what I was teaching. 

We simply come back again and again that it is only  _practice_,
political struggle, not "independent thinking" or some utopian-vision of
an educational system that can change attitudes in any effective way.
Thought emerges from practice.

Carrol