A few weeks ago, the folks at
ZEMOS98
invited us to write a short text for the Educación Expandida blog, which they opened on the occasion of the
11th ZEMOS98 International Festival
held in Seville last year; and which we talked about here as a result of our participation presenting the
Open-roulotte
project. The text, entitled
A Monster-School
, is now published and you can read it here.
The text starts from an observation that often surprises us: it seems to us that the debate on education often ignores the function of educational institutions in the general framework of society. School rituals, pedagogical proposals of one kind or another, are then presented as ideologically neutral devices whose value can be measured objectively.
To say that there have not always been schools is to state the obvious, however, many times that debate to which we referred is established outside of this obviousness. What is the origin of the school? For what purpose was it instituted? Are the same conditions present today as at the time of its institution? If we accept that the school responded, among other things, to the demands of the enlightened project and industrial capitalism as an instrument of social reproduction, what function does the school currently have? Has its operation been modified according to the modes of production, forms of governmentality, and contemporary regimes of truth? To what extent do one or another pedagogical proposals conform to these conditions? Is it possible to think of a pedagogy that is not co-opted by a system of production based on the flexibilization of work and the extreme economization of life, an emancipatory pedagogy in the face of living conditions in cognitive capitalism?
The school is an archetypal example of the functioning of modernity: dividing knowledge into disciplines, classifying individuals, determining which are “valid” and which are not, assigning fixed positions to each of them… these are all procedures typical of modernity. Each thing in its place, adjusting to the category that corresponds to it: the child separated from the adults, the learning separated from life and production, mathematics separated from the natural sciences, the computer room absurdly separated from the rest of the classrooms (also separated from each other)… The school continues to function like this even though contemporary social, cultural, and economic formations adopt hybrid forms and are organized in decentralized networks.
We have already talked about all this on other occasions (here, on this same blog) and one has the feeling of repeating oneself more than scrambled eggs, but in reality it is nothing compared to the insistent insistence of headlines on every page like this one that assaulted us last Sunday from the cover of El Periódico de Catalunya.
On the other hand, in the text we point out that an educational action cannot be truly transformative if it does not aim towards a transformation of the school itself and its role in the set of social, cultural, and production relations. We have always thought that the school should be a place of discourse production and that those who “inhabit” it should play an active role in the construction of their environment. Is it possible to think of a monster-school with all kinds of mutant recombinations of the type students-urban planners-hackers, teachers-seamstresses-activists or neighbors-cyclists-teachers? We borrow the expression ‘monster-institution’ (which we also talked about here on this blog some time ago) from the people of the
Universidad Nómada
, who use it to refer to hybrid institutional formations between autonomous projects integrated into social movements (e.g. Self-Managed Occupied Social Centers) and public institutions (the University, the Museum…).
In short, to present the text on the blog of l+s ZEMOS98 has not come out one almost as extensive, so better leave it here and jump to their blog to read A monster-school.