Grasp in your mind that well-hidden crime, that cruel and nefarious blow, that thing we call “education.” As swift as the bullet of the bloody executioner through the head of the criminal, simply measured out in years instead of milliseconds and put through the soul of the innocent instead.
Long rows of desks stretch to the solid concrete wall. A low ceiling bears down on us. Harsh florescent light illumines everything and worms its way into every crevice of our souls. We sit on hard plastic chairs bolted fast to hard plastic desks, and the bolts crush us to our work. All things are set in order with care—meals, seats, moments of conversation; all the elements of life. And we have no part in their planning. We come and go as clockwork; a burst of activity as we strike the hour, then stillness. We move and hurry and walk and end just where we started—another location to be sure, but not a different place—and the very act of regular motion lulls us into sleep. So we wake-sleep our days away and slowly lose the sense to dream. A dream is such a sprawling vista that flows and reflows, reverses and buoys along. Impossible possibility incarnate. Such has no place in a windowless world of cells where not even an hour is one’s own.
So it is that just as the prison takes the soul of the criminal in spoonfuls and the bullet in a single bloody splatter, school takes out a dollop of the innocent’s every day and replaces it with its own material. The dreadful fate we reserve for the lowest and most heinous is really no different than that act of education that we visit upon our youngest and most dear.
Yet the resounding moral voice of the classroom’s stage instills in the audience a different moral: that they are somehow creators and not creations, free and not constrained, the ascendent and not the damned. It demands them to believe in their agency even as they slide inexorably down the assembly-line towards citizenhood. It demands they be complicit, that they somehow identify with their endless slate of meaningless tasks and stipulations; that they even slide the bars into place and lock their own cell behind them and throw away the key with a brisk overhand toss. It is as ludicrous as to ask the knife under the blacksmith’s hammer to call itself so and say “I am a knife, and by that name all will know me henceforth.” The student must cry out “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. I do not know what it means, but I know that I must know it and walk into my grave knowing it.” And the creation of this determination within the person, the acknowledgement of the “must” without reason, is the very point and issue of this whole process.
The crime here is the production of obedience, of the feeling of the necessity of obedience. It is treating the human resource just as the natural resource by building processing plants and factories that make them ever more workable and useful. And in the end comes that most valuable of all products: the good citizen of society. This is the plain violation of freedom we sanction in the prison, but it comes again in the institution of education to prey upon the innocent.
My only crime was making my exit from my mother’s womb directly onto the ground of your motherland. Yet you came to me and said “I will now put you in order: freedom, rights and so on” all at the expense of myself. Yes, I am truly the privileged citizen: my privilege is to obey, serve, and shrink into the shadows. I am violated and made into the thing you desired; for you could not bear to look at my untransformed face; to treat me in my entirety. So you have made things easy for you, as is your nature, o state. Would that education was pointed to learning, an exchange instead of an extraction; that my ends were my own! Such a possibility would flip the whole system on its head. It would perhaps allow even the pursuit of knowledge. Alas.
Content is an arbitrary afterthought in the process. Nothing says this more than that I cannot remember half of what I learned, and the other half goes largely unused or is actively avoided. An endless swarm of tests, assessments, and corrections overwhelmed my soul, labeled me as righteous or lacking to no end, and by their very process made me internalize the process of my own definition so that it could be repeated again and again. So that I would never realize I was party to my own life and choices. So that I would melt away with ease time and time again. Such was your education: crutches we used to hobble to your goal rather than wings to grant me the freedom of the upper atmosphere. There I might look down and understand your world in its real and entire form; and you fear I might not like what I find. But lo’, through the process of learning rather than education I have since found my weapons and armor and brought to bear my mighty mind to penetrate the veil you had placed over my eyes. Truly education is a criminal act—the placement of the punishment of the criminal upon the innocent and the destruction of the person for the creation of the citizen—but learning (of which education had no part) has been a just salvation.
