On Feb 6, 2011, at 2:57 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> so, are you answering my question or avoiding it?
You had a question?
> Is your strategy to improve schooling because this is a radical demand.
It's not a strategy, but yes, it should be a demand. As I recall, "free education for all children" was one of the ten demands in the Communist Manifesto.
> perhaps i didn't make myself clear: i don't think capital *wishes* anything. i think such vulgar functionalist metaphors and associated explanations were supposed to be what most of us here rejected.
Let me see. The official stand of the Republican party has been for quite some time to privatize the public schools and impose an idiotic testing regimen on nonelite kids. That has now become the stance of most of the Dem party. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg, who is about as perfect a personification of capital as one could imagine, has been pushing this agenda to international effect. So this bit of "vulgar functionalism" maps pretty well onto the configuration of education politics in the USA today.
> no, i don't think improving schooling is a radical demand. it's survival in a crap world. nothing wrong with that, we all make do in this shitty world, but i'd never mistake it for a radical demand on the system. it improves the lives of a minority, so everyone can knock themselves out. but i can safely say that, at least for me, any critical thinking skills that i got out of my rigorous education (10 200 page books each class, approximately 50+ page of writing each class) meant nothing without 1. the life experience of growing un in a deindustrialized economy much like Flint, MI in Roger and Me and 2. people around me who demanded that I carry on the radicalism of the sixties (high school teachers and college teachers - all of whom demanded those things in social movement activities *outside* schooling. school became the place where I was, in effect, recruited to social movement activities that took place elsewhere. Now, if teachers do *that* - bring people into critical social action? - then they're doing something radical.
If it weren't for the schooling, where would you be? Probably poor, isolated, and confused.
Doug