[Father's bringing stuff from the back to school savings store]
Age segregation is a brutal control against us all regardless of our age. It has only one purpose. All the texts explaining that the 7 year old does this, the 13 year old does that, etc etc only garner plaudits to their authors.
But they're making it up. The results of their examinations of behavior are skewed to follow a system of regulation of us that disregards that we all always learn - and teach. Our alienation from doing that is the perfect example of Marx's explanation of alienation.
I have a list of some of the many renowned people who eschewed school for living.
Articles explode telling of another cheating action at school.
In my Berkeley voter pamphlet statement I tell you of a Harper's magazine and another on-line article describing the many falsifications of credentials successfully employed to attain recognition, position, high income through communities' believing what the person proves to be the case, that they can do the jobs they've so well lied to get even though they haven't been awarded the degrees documenting their passages through the uncomfortable, the oppressive institution, school.
School is one of the many institutions that serve this age old brutal system, the system of bodies owning the right to devastate Earth and us, people, through armed and legalized controls, legalized by governments our Owners buy.
Truancy is young people's recognition - sensed, barely argued - of this contradiction; the contradiction of the institutions whose impositions on us we accept as the way it's supposed to be: "The way it spozed to be" James Herndon, http://www.foti-peter.hu/thewayitspozedtobe.pdf.
Innumerable publications detail the problems of school. Jonathan Kozol is known for his work. Paolo Freire, another offering... In all cases the advised assistance has people retaining the system and ostensibly fixing it.
Like capitalism, it can't be reformed, repaired ... or as the t-shirt says: The system's not broken; it's fixed.
It's the system that's the overarching control against our best interests, against our tastes and comfort, against our communities' needs and requirements.
School does winnow out who goes where. You can tell. Not everyone can be a doctor. When it seems that MIght happen - get a good degree, become an established, well paid, highly regarded worker, the opportunity to do that is reduced. Not enough people are allowed to train to be medical practitioners; the costs are out of reach - the reimbursement by the monopoly-controlled systems challenges loan repayment ability.
School is an elitist arrangement. Students are passed through the many life-filters to create who fits into prison, into janitoring, into bank-clerking, into ...on and on.
Our Owners, the people who run the militaries around the world for their conquest, are not connected to this restraint. The ruling class, the electing class - they have a direct line for their progeny into the boardrooms. Boardroom crime is ignored. Street crime - (it's caused by boardroom crime) - street crime is a - well, you know about street crime - the distraction from acknowledging together cause of world-wide anguish, the distraction from understanding our use - our value - to our Owners, the cause of their profiteering, of their power.
Life is not supposed to be this uncomfortable arrangement - bad working conditions making even good jobs undesirable - too much time at the job, not enough with loved ones, or doing what one likes besides that job. It's not supposed to be about sitting in the classroom feeling and smelling the spring come in through the open window and having to deal with the classroom content no matter how much student feels compelled to be out and about.
There is the possibility to devise study in the way that feels good to do and is eminently the right way to do it. I want to create that seat on the board for that discussion. I want us to be able to stop thinking people need school's remediation. We are all teachers and students all our lives. I want us to look at the present structure, identify how it does what serves our Owners, and begin to work to live together substantially. Education occurs through our living life, given half a chance. The classroom needs to be an ADJUNCT to living. Compulsory education - school - is the opposite - the opposite of education, the opposite of community, of doing what we need and like together. The root of the word is educe. This means who comes has content that we respect. We exchange and expand our content together. We live together; we work - yes, 2 year olds and 90 year olds want to be part of work; we question - and answer. Those are our nature - if we're allowed it.
In Communitas Paul and Percival Goodman, devising city planning in 1947, explained that if the available labor force were allowed to work, a 4 hour work week!! would overproduce what we need and like.
I want us to work out how to be guided by that datum. It doesn't mean you'd only get to 'work' 4 hours a week. It does mean we'd be doing things VERY differently. How, is our challenge, how would we move toward ending the suppression and building the opposite - the comfort, the meaning for us all - no privilege; no stratification by work; no stratification by income; just enjoying ourselves in the effort to achieve this justice, and ultimately, in utilizing it.
Norma J F Harrison 1312 Cornell Av., 94702, 510-526-3968 normaha@pacbell.net candidate for Berkeley School Director position.
A list :::
- Age segregation is unnecessary and wrong.- School is the opposite of education.
- Fitting in to the capitalist system is the opposite of living well.
- Compromising with our discomfort, accepting it, is unnecessary.
- People hate school.
- YES we want our work to provide us constantly, securely our needs and pleasures, public services, we call them. We're taxed for them. However, while the school building, the teachers' and clerks' and janitors' and all's pay is purchased through our taxes, it is not education. It's regulation, as are our jobs, and the rest of the structure of our lives. Education, though, is our lives. That's altogether limited by our ability to pay for that privilege, that comfort, that ability to engage in depth with each other, age not the delimiter.
- Children are not kids - kick-up-their-heels, happy-go-lucky, childhood's the best time of your life, kids. Children - a gentle word for a more innocent time..., a cradling word, as it should be...
- School is to fit us in to the job that'll keep The Rich going, the Ruling Class, the few people who send imperialism's armies to conquer everywhere, to maintain THeir position.
- Degrees are not necessary in order to get along. Many people have done VERY well without them.
- 1863 freed us all - not equally, but all - into enslavement here on our Owners' plantation. Black people are the most denied, by the numbers - schooling, income, security, health, social/political/economic position.
- Our Owners tell us 'the economy', politics, society. But we live a wholly trinity, not separated: all, political/social/economic... is the one factor of our lives. Bread - whether you have it or not, is all threeONE; social, political, economic.
- Testing belongs in the fields together - on the jobs, at the sites of our living, in the kitchen, the living room, where we're writing, changing the baby, playing the violin, catching and throwing the ball. Testing as it's institutionally done is abusive. It hurts us all. We test all the time: to reach satisfaction, try for improvement, show accomplishment of a goal. Judgment is the wrong relationship for us - judgment through external testing.
- The classroom needs to arise, not to be established peripherally to daily living. The classroom can appropriately be an adjunct to all our living.
- We are all teachers and students all our lives.
- School arranges the strata at which people will serve the system. This is not from whence come The Rich, the owning class. Their origin is like the aristocracies of old, from birth, from militaristic, murderous domination, inculcated into our laws.
- Warring is for the benefit of The Rich, not our benefit, regardless all the advertising to the contrary.
- Our wars of liberation are the opposite of the Owners' wars.
- School, like capitalism, works.
- Letting us work for reform of schools leaves our Owners laughing uproariously. They know school is fine. It's we who don't, and who keep replicating it.
- Zombie politics - those that didn't work, can't work, are employed over and over again, raised from the dead to confound and placate us/ourselves once more. See school reform.
- Families of students who use the system to good advantage are inclined to accept the school system - protecting 'their' territory. http://www.insidebayarea.com/news/ci_21452878/patrick-mattimore-disheartening-education-numbers-once-again-ignored. People make the best of things, whether bad or good circumstances.
- Truancy is the explanation that school is bad and that some people have a sense that's so.
- So much work in capitalism is leaching off others' work; insurance, real estate - rent, sale; sales of what should be in common: parks, books, vacationing, communications, energy supply ... and all.
- All work is equally necessary - all work in a just society. Changing the light bulbs in the street lamps is as essential as doctoring. Actually, the doctor can do both. No need to segregate work - stratify it.
- We need to change our street layouts so they work for comfortable use, not just for getting to shopping and work and our errands and maintenance. Infants need to be able to walk about to a friendly place and stay for some time, to be other people's child, too.
- School serves elitism, separation. It pretends it protects our children. It pretends it provides skill that cannot be gained through living together.
- School warehouses a stratum of people for whom there is no work - no jobs, so they are early curbed into that periphery, away from 'work'. This is perceived as the norm.
- People need to be able to put their hands in the dirt. It feels good to care - for plants, for people - old or young or otherwise physically limited, for an ill person, for our food, for flowers, for each other. We draw away, instead, when we are not permitted to care.
- Farming cannot be a 24/7 job. Many people can do it , like any work, together.
- Everybody's a genius, given the time and the healthy, secure environment. Genius is not a genetic factor. It's a function of our society.
- The requirement of excellence has surpassed pleasant living.
- Strive, compete, get ahead; those are not comfortable objectives.
- School requires roboticization - that it takes us time to get over. It depends on stratification, on objectives of elitism, on acceptance that some of us are better than others overall.
- School has adopted remediation as its way to retain preeminence. But we don't need to be fixed. We're fine. The system is what's wrong.
- Capitalism requires reducing labor costs and cutting benefits. If working conditions were equitable we'd be controlling it - we workers, and it'd be socialism communism.
- Teaching in order to build substantial, gratifying revolutionary struggle is a good use of more or less compulsory education, of classroom use.
- Yes, pleasant things go on at school. But the uncomfortable outweigh those by far.
- Educe, the root of the idea, of the word 'education'. But to educe means that who comes has content, is worthy of respects, doesn't need the repair that all that school offers.
It offers to repair all aspects of a person and to prepare them to fit in to the artificially glorified but inglorious imperium, the brutal warring, conquering, oppressing system we know. The compromised with it are intolerable.
Norma J F Harrison for Berkeley School Director
510-526-3968 normaha@pacbell.net
http://normaharrisonforschoolboard.info