Education to Govern: a philosophy and program for learning now! by Grace Lee Boggs

Education to Govern: a philosophy and program for learning now! Reviews

• 
  Natú

  Education To Govern begins with a welcome introduction from the Redspark Collective clarifying the context of the pamphlet, which was released in the early 70s, and its general goal, which are, respectively, the wave of struggles for community control of education rooted predominantly in radical urban Black and Puerto Rican communities, and the use of education not as a method of liberation per se (as with the self-proclaimed trend today), but rather, in order to form citizens capable of governing themselves; that is, citizens capable of seizing the time following a revolutionary victory and advancing the most difficult struggle of all, revolutionary governance. Or, simply, citizens capable of more effectively navigating the status quo.
  
  The text honestly took a while to get to a point where I felt it was interesting or insightful, but I chalk this up to the necessity of setting the scene for a pamphlet which would have assumed as a matter of course the reader's knowledge of present conditions and movements. That said, once the meat of the text gets rolling, Education to Govern presents a general path of development of the education system in the United States, from a European Style institution intended to prepare the upper echelons of society to rule over the masses, to an institution for both inculcating American ideology in a largely immigrant population and prepare the broader youth for jobs in the industrial sector, and finally to an almost carceral system, driven by its own profit incentives, pathologically incapable of providing a relevant education and cloaking it's own failures in a rhetoric which shifts the blame from the system to the individual.
  
  Those who succeed within this system reveal key truths about it, namely, that success within a settler, capitalist society largely follows fault lines of race, class and geographic affiliations, and that the educational system, by instilling a profound sense of individualism, maintains its own hegemony through "socially promoting" the "winners" right out of their neighborhoods and classes.
  
  Extracting through incentive the natural community leaders from their community, the US successfully defuses potential rebellion, covering its tracks by touting the "success stories" who, despite being the exception rather than the rule, provide plausible deniability to the system for its failure to live up to its own raison d'être: being the pipeline to monetary and social success for those who make it out the other side.
  
  Having presented their criticisms of the current system, the natural follow-up is their proposal for an alternative. What the authors propose is the following: "(1) to identify the needs or problems of the community; (2) to choose a certain need or problem as a focus of activity; (3) to plan a program for its solution; and (4) to carry out the steps involved in the plan."
  
  By inverting the current system of "learn and then find interest in a particular subject," the proposed method hopes to, firstly, promote the desire to learn by grounding the learning process in a foundational interest, and second, encourage students to develop the skills to be active, governing citizens through the process of running up against a wall, and developing the skills and tools necessary to overcome it.
  
  This had some interesting overlap with proposals for the education system of Tanzania that Julius Nyerere made in Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism, which I just read. He too proposed a system of work-oriented study to provide students with hands-on experience relevant to their future livelihoods, and importantly, teaching the abilities to think critically and learn independently that would be necessary for the citizens of ujamaa communes.
  
  The book is provocative in a few ways. As the authors point out, naysayers will undoubtedly cry child labor, but the authors argue that a) in a highly-automated and computerized world, many jobs can and should be performed by youth who would benefit more from the experience than from wasting away in custodial institutions masquerading as schools, and b) schools are indeed primarily intended (in a post-industrialized world) to be a dumping ground for youth who once upon a time would have been competing with other unskilled laborers for work.
  
  In addition, while teachers today and other professionals in education are uncritically lauded as heroes and (justly) recognized for the vast discrepancies between their labor and remuneration, The Advocators problematize such a view by pointing out that educators have a vested interest in the status quo insofar as the livelihoods they have cultivated would be challenged by a student-driven learning model in which the demand for teachers would be greatly reduced. Administrators, of course, are even more invested in maintaining the current model. This point, as well as the point that teachers, unwittingly or otherwise, play an important role in the maintenance of hegemony, are harsh but objectively sound, though this text makes teachers sound like CEOs raking in big bucks, which I doubt was really even the case 50 years ago, let alone today.
  
  My criticism of the text would be that, while in the Tanzanian example mentioned above, education reform slots comfortably into broader communalization of the means of production and new structures of socialized production, The Advocators envision their education reforms in the US not be within a revolutionary context, as evidenced by the hurdles they envision in the form of groups with vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Could such reforms happen within the context of racialized capitalist hegemony, and assuming they could, would the prospects awaiting students on the other side of the tunnel be any more promising to students for having gone through the experience? I doubt it.
  
  While the need to critically rethink education and give it a materialist analysis, one which understands it in the context of social reproduction and as a preparatory stage before entering the labor market, is clear, this text stumbles in many of its projections for the future of education in the US (which the gift of hindsight allows us to see). I would have liked to see more emphasis placed on the proposals for essential elements and procedures of a new system, which come towards the very end and are both interesting and appealing. Ultimately, many of the faults I find with the text are symptoms of the challenge of removing a practical text from its time and context, but regardless, it is one part of a broader, necessary intervention into the philosophy of pedagogy and education.
• 
  Jody Anderson

  As noted in the introduction, the view of teachers as firmly on the side of capital/administrators may have made more sense back then but either way (and especially today as teachers are more and more exploited) rejects a potential area of struggle. Clearly the struggle around education they believed would escalate in the 70s did not actually take place. I think it would be interesting to read any writing written by someone involved with the group since then, analyzing why that didn't happen. The argument for an education which doesn't split theory from practice, and an education that focuses on what the people need and want to learn is clear and not debatable. Education in the US is truly education to stop learning and curiosity.