User:Eduen/Anarchism and education

Anarchism has had an special interest on the issue of education from the works of William Godwin and Max Stirner onwards. On the many writings on the subject of education by important anarchist theorists many themes have gained attention such as the role of education in social control and socialization, the inequalitites encouraged by current educational systems, the influence of state and religious ideologies in the education of people, the division between social and manual work and education and sex education. Various alternatives have been proposed from anarchists which have gone from alternative education systems and environments as well as self education and freethought activism.

William Godwin
For English enlightenment anarchist William Godwin education was "the main means by which change would be achieved." . Godwin saw that the main goal of education should be the promotion of happiness. For Godwin education had to have "A respect for the child’s autonomy which precluded any form of coercion", "A pedagogy that respected this and sought to build on the child’s own motivation and initiatives" and "A concern about the child’s capacity to resist an ideology transmitted through the school."

In his Political Justice he criticizes state sponsored schooling "on account of its obvious alliance with national government". For him the State "will not fail to employ it to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions." . He thought "It is not true that our youth ought to be instructed to venerate the constitution, however excellent; they should be instructed to venerate truth; and the constitution only so far as it corresponded with their independent deductions of truth." . A long work on the subject of education to consider is ''The Enquirer. Reflections On Education, Manners, And Literature. In A Series Of Essays.''

Max Stirner
Max Stirner was a German philosopher linked mainly with the anarchist school of thought known as individualist anarchism who worked as a schoolteacher in a gymnasium for young girls. He examines the subject of education directly in his long essay The False Principle of our Education. In it "we discern his persistent pursuit of the goal of individual self-awareness and his insistence on the centering of everything around the individual personality." As such Stirner "in education, all of the given material has value only in so far as children learn to do something with it, to use it". In that essay he deals with the debates between realist and humanistic educational commentators and sees that both "are concerned with the learner as an object, someone to be acted upon rather than one encouraged to move toward subjective self-realization and liberation" and sees that "a knowledge which only burdens me as a belonging and a possession, instead of having gone along with me completely so that the free-moving ego, not encumbered by any dragging possessions, passes through the world with a fresh spirit, such a knowledge then, which has not become personal, furnishes a poor preparation for life." .

He concludes this essay by saying that "the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight of the free person may be expressed somewhat as follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person." . Stirner thus saw education "is to be life and there, as outside of it, the self-revelation of the individual is to be the task." For him "pedagogy should not proceed any further towards civilizing, but toward the development of free men, sovereign characters".

Josiah Warren
Josiah Warren is widely regarded as the first American anarchist,. "Where utopian projectors starting with Plato entertained the idea of creating an ideal species through eugenics and education and a set of universally valid institutions inculcating shared identities, Warren wanted to dissolve such identities in a solution of individual self-sovereignty. His educational experiments, for example, possibly under the influence of the great Swiss educational theorist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (via Owen), emphasized - as we would expect - the nurturing of the independence and the conscience of individual children, not the inculcation of pre-conceived values. "

Mikhail Bakunin
On "Equal Opportunity in Education" russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin denounced what he saw as the social inequalities caused by the current educational systems. He put this issue in this way "will it be feasible for the working masses to know complete emancipation as long as the education available to those masses continues to be inferior to that bestowed upon the bourgeois, or, in more general terms, as long as there exists any class, be it numerous or otherwise, which, by virtue of birth, is entitled to a superior education and a more complete instruction? Does not the question answer itself?..."

He also denounced that "Consequently while some study others must labour so that they can produce what we need to live — not just producing for their own needs, but also for those men who devote themselves exclusively to intellectual pursuits . As a solution to this Bakunin proposed that "Our answer to that is a simple one: everyone must work and everyone must receive education...for work's sake as much as for the sake of science, there must no longer be this division into workers and scholars and henceforth there must be only men. "

Peter Kropotkin
Russian anarcho-communist theorist Peter Kropotkin suggested in "Brain Work and Manual Work" that "The masses of the workmen do not receive more scientific education than their grandfathers did; but they have been deprived of the education of even the small workshop, while their boys and girls are driven into a mine, or a factory, from the age of thirteen, and there they soon forget the little they may have learned at school. As to the scientists, they despise manual labour. So for Kropotkin "We fully recognise the necessity of specialisation of knowledge, but we maintain that specialisation must follow general education, and that general education must be given in science and handicraft alike. To the division of society into brainworkers and manual workers we oppose the combination of both kinds of activities; and instead of `technical education,' which means the maintenance of the present division between brain work and manual work, we advocate the éducation intégrale, or complete education, which means the disappearance of that pernicious distinction."

Leo Tolstoy
The Russian christian anarchist and famous novelist Leo Tolstoy established a school for peasant children on his estate. Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded thirteen schools for his serfs' children, based on the principles Tolstoy described in his 1862 essay "The School at Yasnaya Polyana". Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police, but as a direct forerunner to A. S. Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed to be the first example of a coherent theory of democratic education.

Tolstoy differentiated between education and culture. He wrote that "Education is the tendency of one man to make another just like himself... Education is culture under restraint, culture is free. [Education is] when the teaching is forced upon the pupil, and when then instruction is exclusive, that is when only those subjects are taught which the educator regards as necessary". For him "without compulsion, education was transformed into culture".

Ferrer and the Modern schools
In 1901, Spanish anarchist and free-thinker Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia established "modern" or progressive schools in Barcelona in defiance of an educational system controlled by the Catholic Church. The schools' stated goal was to "educate the working class in a rational, secular and non-coercive setting". Fiercely anti-clerical, Ferrer believed in "freedom in education", education free from the authority of church and state. Murray Bookchin wrote: "This period [1890s] was the heyday of libertarian schools and pedagogical projects in all areas of the country where Anarchists exercised some degree of influence. Perhaps the best-known effort in this field was Francisco Ferrer's Modern School (Escuela Moderna), a project which exercised a considerable influence on Catalan education and on experimental techniques of teaching generally." La Escuela Moderna, and Ferrer's ideas generally, formed the inspiration for a series of Modern Schools in the United States, Cuba, South America and London. The first of these was started in New York City in 1911. It also inspired the Italian newspaper Università popolare, founded in 1901.

Ferrer wrote an extensive work on education and on his educational experiments called The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School.

Emma Goldman
In an essay entitled "The child and its enemies" Lithuanian-american anarcha-feminist Emma Goldman manifested that "The child shows its individual tendencies in its plays, in its questions, in its association with people and things. But it has to struggle with everlasting external interference in its world of thought and emotion. It must not express itself in harmony with its nature, with its growing personality. It must become a thing, an object. Its questions are met with narrow, conventional, ridiculous replies, mostly based on falsehoods; and, when, with large, wondering, innocent eyes, it wishes to behold the wonders of the world, those about it quickly lock the windows and doors, and keep the delicate human plant in a hothouse atmosphere, where it can neither breathe nor grow freely." Goldman in the essay entitled "The Social Importance of the Modern School" saw that "the school of today, no matter whether public, private, or parochial...is for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the soldier — a place where everything is being used to break the will of the child, and then to pound, knead, and shape it into a being utterly foreign to itself."

In this way "it will be necessary to realize that education of children is not synonymous with herdlike drilling and training. If education should really mean anything at all, it must insist upon the free growth and development of the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way alone can we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community, which shall make interference and coercion of human growth impossible."

Goldman in her essay on the Modern School also dealt with the issue of Sex Education. She denounced that "educators also know the evil and sinister results of ignorance in sex matters. Yet, they have neither understanding nor humanity enough to break down the wall which puritanism has built around sex...If in childhood both man and woman were taught a beautiful comradeship, it would neutralize the oversexed condition of both and would help woman's emancipation much more than all the laws upon the statute books and her right to vote."

Later XX century and contemporary times
Experiments in Germany led to A. S. Neill founding what became Summerhill School in 1921. Summerhill is often cited as an example of anarchism in practice. However, although Summerhill and other free schools are radically libertarian, they differ in principle from those of Ferrer by not advocating an overtly political class struggle-approach. In addition to organizing schools according to libertarian principles, anarchists have also questioned the concept of schooling per se.

Paul Goodman was an important anarchist critic of contemporary educational systems as can be seen in his books Growing_Up_Absurd and Compulsory Mis-education. The term deschooling was popularized by Ivan Illich, who argued that the school as an institution is dysfunctional for self-determined learning and serves the creation of a consumer society instead.