pinkfloydpsw's Blog

On the position of Kaczynski, Pedagogically

 In an educational society but not of that society, the dissent of a tutor based on such paradigmatic reasoning as trying to act as if we were educationally free in a system that simply labels itself free but stands up to no scrutiny of this postulate. This is the awakened individual that sees beyond the subordination of their position and understands the mechanisms that cause their lack of purpose. This individual will rally against bourgeois pedagogy and against the march of supposed progress. He knows that technology first appears as optional, then as a preference and then finally, when it is much much too late to resist it and the time for reasoned argument has long since passed, it is mandatory. Those tasks that were once so possible become impossible without technology, even the simplest endeavors of learning and communication are enculturated and transferred into data that can be analysed and used to produce predictive models of consumptive interest. The individual who does not embrace fully the move toward these, apparently liberating, devices of progress will be encouraged in quite devious ways to justify their existence as “productive entity” by means other than throughput. Much in the same way that food is “better with salt” results are “better with technology” even when they aren’t.

Technological enslavement in this way produces subordination, a teaching workforce of individuals doing individuated tasks where industrial society and mass production remove the Autonomy of initiating goals, the Mastery of craftsmanship and the Purpose associated with the fulfillment of a worthwhile task that meets real need. When humans are redefined by such measures they may lose their notion of self and move to find themselves in pursuits other than that of work, but seeking a surrogate task outside the workplace such as a hobby leads only to widen that detachment from the defining part of an individual’s role in a mass industrial society, that of their labour. Put simply, you are what you do and if someone wants to know who you are you will likely promote yourself in terms of what you do for a living, where you come from and where you live now (if these things indicate affluence, or at the very least, some progression), what college you attended and how many qualifications you have, these are indicators of possession, of success measured by capitalist means only, they don’t speak to the inner person, the self. The individuality of the individual is pushed aside by corporate motivations that pursue every avenue in turning the self into a hegemonized automaton. It may be justifiably said that the goal on the part of the controllers is to get the, increasingly machine-like, workers happily striving toward the development of the very machinery that brings about their own obsolescence, like a man furiously digging his own grave as fast as he possibly can in an attempt to gain the praise of the swine that will inevitably cover him with the very dirt he has just moved. To pretend that there is sincerity in the pretend sincerity of our headmasters for our part in achieving something that is utterly pointless while all the time being aware both of its pointlessness and our headmaster’s awareness of its pointlessness seems insensible but becomes the only goal that is achievable; therefore an achievement…….. Or possibly not?

The Example

• The tutor is expected to, and does, work hard to adjust toward bringing technology into their classroom. This is not an option now as it once had been.

• The motivation for this comes from management; whose goals are not the education of the individual but the business of the school as a business, purely numbers.

• The perception is created (and remains unchallenged) that technology will bring an improvement in outcome to the student and, as a by-product of this necessity of change, makes mockery of the system of learning that the tutor was taught with by causing it to be now perceived as archaic or obsolete in the face of this shiny new technological system.

• The standards for achievement are set by private organisations who are responsible for and motivated by the maintenance of the relationship between education and the workplace (where radical or free-thought is actively discouraged), so learning as a goal in itself or as a means of self actuation (see Maslow) is clearly not the desired outcome, definitely not Socratic inquiry, Cartesian doubt nor is it Nietzschean suspicion. It is sophistry plain and simple; education will produce what industry requires and no more.

• The tutor becomes only the operator of the machine, this removes the stumbling block that may be their own intellect from the classroom, they are more replaceable and forced into accepting their lower status and commercial value. Teachers are replaced by lower paid classroom supervisors that facilitate the technological needs of the student (working the propaganda machines).

• Sophistry reigns supreme over the world of education. We are taught by flag wavers to the OFSTED paradigm, those who stand attentive at the monuments to conformity. We are not the beneficiaries of an education but become the victims of it, our curiosity has been tamed and we have been taught to thank the very people who have tamed it.

The goal is this…….  Create a system of subordinated school workers with just enough education to be part of the means of production but not enough to realize how exploited they are by it, how little they are in control of their own lives and how much they have accepted the values of their masters without the ability to question them, happy slaves with poo-eating grins engaged in a drudgery that serves others. After the role of parent was shifted to being simply those persons who earned the money to have others raise their children (childcare professionals, interestingly also regulated by OFSTED), the teachers remained the last hope for the production of self-actuated free-thinking individuals capable of autonomy, creativity and endowed with the tools and motivation to equalize the system or even realize their power to change it, this is why they have been all but eliminated!

Paul Simon Wilson