The Next Development in Education

By James Boggs
University of Adult Education,
Detroit, Michigan, February 28, 1977

I want to thank you for inviting me here to speak
to you, especially since I have not come to extol
you for the sacrifices which you are making in the
pursuit of knowledge. Actually, I believe that
the way most of you are pursuing knowledge is
incorrect because you are pursuing what I call
"received" knowledge. That is, you are trying
to absorb information, facts, theories, etc.,
which have already been discovered or created by
others, in the belief that if you can just absorb
enough of this knowledge, you will qualify as
"educated". This means that you think of education
as a "thing" which is stored up somewhere. All
you have to do is open the Pandora's Box, get a
good look at its contents - and presto, you are
educated.

Now I used to think that way myself - so don't
feel so guilty or unfinished for thinking that
way. When I was growing up, my mother kept
urging me to get an education, just as so many
mothers and fathers do today. In fact, in a
book I wrote in 1963, called The American
Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's
Notebook, I described how my mother wanted
me to go to school down South to get the ability
to read and write, which was what at the time
she considered an education. In order to
inspire me to do so, she used to tell me time
and again how, if only she had been able to
read and write, she could have gotten a job
cooking for some very rich white people, because
rich white people at that time wanted a cook
for whom they could leave a note saying what
to prepare for dinner that night.  Thus, for
my mother, education was the ability to read
and write.

Not only people like my mother down in Alabama
used to think that way. For many years in this
country, reading and writing were viewed by
most poor people and even some middle-class
people as the essence of education. Even today,
when many people say to their children, "You'd
better get you an education," what they are
thinking of, first of all, is being able to
read and write enough to fill out an application
form; and after that, enough skill to hold down
a job. In other words, for most Americans, black
or white, education is for the sake of getting
a good job by  which they mean one requiring
the least amount of manual labor. If you drive
around most cities, you see signs everywhere,
"Go to school to get a job," or "Go to college
to get a job."

The main difference between yesterday and today
is that to get a decent job today it is not enough
to be able to read, write, multiply and divide.
Now you need at least four years of college to
get a job done by people in the 1930s  who were
9th or 10th grade dropouts from high school, because
prior to World War II - which brought on the boom
in college education with the GI Bill of Rights -
most teenagers dropped out of school to go to work.
Only the children of the upper middle-class and
rich people went on to college. So a college
graduate was looked upon by most people in the
community as something very special. Today
almost everyone of college age who has the
desire to go to college and the stamina to stay
is in college. We have begun to tie our whole
identity to the degrees we have acquired in college
and to the status jobs which these degrees entitle
us to. People say, "I am a lawyer, or a doctor,
or a teacher, or a scientist," meaning that they
have the certificate or degree which entitles
them to call themselves such. We have reduced our
identities to the degrees which license us to work.
In other words, if you are a ditch-digger, you are
no more than a ditch-digger because you didn't go
to school to become something else.

On the other hand, I believe that a human being is
much much more than what he or she does for a
living, and that your job or profession (which is
what people call a job with a title) says very
little about the person behind the job or profession.
When I worked at Chrysler - where I worked  on the
line for 28 years - I used to say that I was a
factory worker, but I was also much more than just
a factory worker because I was concerned about the
society which I lived in and I was determined to
play a part in shaping the minds of those people
whom I related to, because I believe that the
world we live in has been made by people and
that it can be changed by those people who accept
responsibility for advancing Humankind.

So when we here today identify a person by what
he or she does for a living, we are being
narrow-minded because we are assuming that a
person is limited by what he or she does for
a living. It makes sense to have a limited
view of an animal like a fox or a squirrel because
animals live by instincts and shortly after birth
are able to do all that they will ever be able to
do as long as they live. Human beings, on the
other hand, are born with fewer abilities than
any other animal. But because they have a mind,
they can think and develop their minds. They
can reflect on the past and project ideas of what
they think the future should be.  They can change
their minds. If they have been moving in an
incorrect way, they can evaluate their mistakes
and change course. In other words, what others
in the past have decided and what we may have
gone along with without questioning, does not
have to continue. The world we live in is in
a process of constant change.  The material base
is constantly shrinking in some ways and constantly
expanding in others. People are constantly changing
as they discover that ideas which once worked, now
only cause deeper and deeper crises. You and I are
constantly changing. Everyone of us is a different
person from what we were last year at this time, and
the world we live in today as we approach the 1980s,
is very different from the world which we struggled
to change in the 1960s.

Change then is the order of society whether we like
it or not. We can sit back and just let it happen
to us - or we can decide that we are going to determine
what changes are made.

The concept of education has gone through many changes
in the last few thousand years, as human beings moved
from one stage of development to another. When the
Greeks used the word "education" 2500 years ago, they
thought of education as the development of young boys
to become philosophers who could then govern over
those whose entire lives were spent in making a living,
in other words, what we would today call "the masses".
Because it took so much time and human energy in those
days to provide for the material necessities of the
society, people thought that only a relatively few
could rule. Therefore the elite concentrated on
imparting wisdom to those few so that they could rule
wisely. The same concept of education prevailed among
the Romans who thought of education as leadership.
In fact, the Latin word "to lead" is at the root of
our word "education". Much the same practice of educating
a few people to govern prevailed in China where the
system of examination in the classics was used to
select out those individuals who would become members
of the bureaucracy or what they called mandarins.

In Europe during the feudal period, rule depended
more on the military or warlike skills which
enabled one feudal lord to protect his domain
from another. So the offspring of kings and queens,
lords and barons, only received a smattering of what
we would today call culture - while their main
training was in skills like swordsmanship and
riding horses. No one even thought of education
for the common people. They were only "masses",
that is to say, serfs who had not yet arrived at
the plateau of believing that they had the ability
to determine their own destiny - or as a sense of
peoplehood.

In the 16th Century a change takes place in the
concept of education with the Reformation, which
launched the idea that ordinary people had the
right to interpret the Bible for themselves and
should not be dependent on priests and bishops.
The people who launched this idea and made it a
reality were people who could read and write.
So reading and writing became terribly important
to people because if you couldn't read the Bible,
you couldn't govern yourselves in the congregations
which were the main social life in the communities,
and you had no voice in the Church which had enormous
power.

However, the greatest leap in the concept of education
comes with the American Revolution which proclaimed
to the world the idea of self-government or citizenship
for ordinary people. Education was for the purpose
of self-government. In other words, if people were
to participate in the ideological and practical
struggles which led to the American Revolution,
they had to be able to read and write the pamphlets
and broadsides which flooded the colonies. If the
Committees of Correspondence were to become a serious
factor in the struggle to unify the colonists around
common goals, people had to be able to write and read
the letters which were dispatched from one colony to
the other as fast as horses could take the carriages
and their riders.

Thus, we can see that for over 2000 years the concept
of education has been tied to the purpose of governing.
Not until the late 19th Century in the United States,
with the speed-up of the industrial revolution, side-
by-side with the tremendous surge in immigration into
this country of people from all over the world - does
the concept of education become tied to strictly economic
goals. For the first time education is conceived as
teaching the illiterate masses and their sons and daughters
to read and write so they could work in factories. And
for the first time we begin to create a huge caste of
teachers whose own livelihood comes from teaching these
illiterate masses to read and write so that they can get
and hold a job.

For the purposes of rapid industrialization and the
Americanization of immigrants, teachers had to be turned
out like sausages, so there was a rapid expansion of
teacher colleges of what were then called "normal
schools'. At first these teachers were mostly the sons
and daughters of the lower-middle classes, skilled workers,
farmers, shopkeepers, usually of Northern European or
Jewish descent. Not until the Great Depression does
emphasis begin to be placed upon keeping millions of
Italian, Slavic, and Afro-American children of the
working class in school because industry no longer needed
their labor in the factory. In 1900 only 6 percent of
high school age young people graduated from high school.
Now the majority are expected to stay in high school until
graduation and considered failures if they don't.
To keep these children from the working classes - who
were not considered material for higher education - in
school, a major part of the curriculum is devoted to
sports. And young people of Slavic, Italian, and Afro-
American descent begin to see the prospects for a good
livelihood for themselves in becoming teachers.

During the 1930s people still believed that a high school
education was enough to get you a decent job.  However,
with the end of World War II and the introduction into
the factories of the technology which had been developed
during the war, industry was automated to the point that
there were relatively few jobs for the millions of
children from the lower classes, black and white.
Therefore a host of junior colleges and community colleges
were built all over the country.  Now high school young
people were persuaded that a high school diploma was not
enough to get a decent job. You needed a college
education. To get the job of a salesman or a mechanic
or even a ditch-digger and hundreds of other jobs which
had formerly been done by people who could barely read
and write, you needed a certificate saying that you had
completed a course in that field.

Therefore, we have created today the second-largest industry
in the nation, a network of institutions called schools and
colleges, in which hundreds of thousands of teachers and
administrators have a vested interest. These schools and
colleges are for the purpose of sorting out the winners
from the losers, just as football and basketball tryouts
at the beginning of the school year sort out the winners
from the losers.

Now we all realize that if you have thousands of thousands
of high school students who are local stars on the high
school teams, only a few will make it to the "pros" because
there is just so much room at the top. But few people stop
to think about what happens to the hundreds of thousands of
losers who don't make it. Having spent most of their young
lives preparing to become "pros" to the point that they can't
even read the name of the street they live on, they suddenly
found themselves rejected. Then we wonder why they turn to
any form of "making it" that they can find, including pimping
off the young girls who flocked around them as  high school
stars or just vandalizing the communities in which they still
live.

Meanwhile, with millions coming out of college every year, we
find that it isn't just those who put all their eggs into the
basket of sports who are rejects. Thousands of those who
were sifted out as winners and went on to get degree after
degree from college find themselves out of jobs as the
military-industrial complex changes defense contracts.
Today even teachers find themselves looking for work,
any kind of work.

Yet few people are ready to recognize that the contradiction
of unemployment in the United States is not due to the
lack of schooling among the unemployed but is rooted in
a capitalist system which pursues rapid economic
development and expanding profits at the expense of
human development. As long as this society is based
upon giving priority to economic development and higher
profits over human development, we will continue to
install automation to replace human beings anywhere
and any time and call it progress, even though it makes
losers out of at least 25 percent of young people,
black and white. Meanwhile, just as for years the white
ruling class in this country justified the racial and
economic exploitation of black people by insisting that
we were inferior, the ruling class and the educational
establishment, which now includes administrators and
teachers of all ethnic groups, will continue to tell
young people that they are out of work because they do
not have enough schooling.

We must be clear that the power structure has not
brought on this situation all by itself. Most
Americans accepted the idea that blacks were inferior,
just as today most Americans accept the idea that
education is for the purpose of getting a job and
that if you don't have a job, it is because you
haven't gotten yourself an education. The fundamental
assumption in most people's minds is that if you get
enough knowledge and skill to perform a paying job,
you can earn enough money to solve all other problems.
So the goal of education is reduced to money, and
money becomes the key to solving all other social
and political problems.

Now I should not have to remind you that this is not
true because most of you can remember a time when you
didn't have as much money or as good a job as you have
now, and yet there was not the same deterioration in
all social and political relations as we have today.
Most Americans are better off financially than we were
forty years ago; yet all around us we are experiencing
a total crisis in our families, our communities and of
our local, state and federal institutions, as each
American goes his or her individual way, trying to get
enough dollars to purchase happiness.

Every day it is becoming more painful for us to cope
with the deterioration of our society because we continue
to believe in concepts that were created by people
at another state of history for completely different
purposes - for example, in this case the concept of
education to get a job which was begun in the late
19th Century as the Industrial Revolution was speeding
up. Now we have come full-circle on the concept of
education.  Not only do we believe that education is
something like money in the bank that you go to school
and get, but  we have lost touch with our own reality
because we believe that what was true at one time in
history remains true for all time -- instead of
recognizing that truth like everything else is
relative and that what was true at one stage in
history is not necessarily true at another stage.
In fact, there are very very few absolute truths,
and no static ones. Because most of us believe
that concepts created in the past are forever valid
and that all we have to do is keep acting in accordance
with those concepts even if they don't work, we don't
even try to exercise our own capacities for creating
new truths, new ideas and new concepts. So we don't
use our minds creatively and after a while, we find
that they don't even work to absorb "received" knowledge
because they have wasted away from lack of use in the
creative and reflective arena which is what keeps our
minds healthy and alive.

Today all we hear from both parents and administrators
and teachers is that we need to extend the right to
education to more people and that in order to pursue
this goal we need more money. In other words, we need
more of the same even if it is not working. We don't
stop to ask ourselves whether what we are doing is
correct or incorrect, whether it meets the needs of
our time or doesn't meet the needs of our time. Thus
we never face the reality that there is contradiction
in all things, or that there is a bad side even to
good things, and therefore that if you continue to
pursue any one thing single-mindedly, you are bound
to end up in crisis.

Today we have to ask ourselves some very different
questions if we are to create new answers which can
be the basis for solving our crisis. The questions
we ask are going to be very difficult for us to ask
because for so long have we gone on believing that
education is the road to economic success that we
have not even begun to evaluate what happens to a
people who treasure economic benefits and economic
development more than they treasure human relations
and human benefits.

Today I would like to suggest to you that we need to
change our concept of education from the concept of
education for earning to the concept of education for
the purpose of governing. I hope that when you hear
this, you don't jump to the conclusion that I am proposing
that we need education for the purpose of becoming or
electing mayors or state senators. Because as we
should be able to see today, we have all kinds of
mayors and state senators who are not prepared for
governing , and we have all kinds of electors whose
only concept of governing is the mechanical one of
going to the polls every few years to elect somebody
else to look out for their interests. By governing,
I mean the activity of governing, that is the continuing
exercise of our distinctively human capacity to make
meaningful choices: between policies that will benefit
our communities and our posterity, and those that serve
only our immediate self-interest. In other words, I
am taking about preparing ourselves to use that all-around
capacity that only human beings have: to think about the
society we live in, determine what will advance our
society: and then join with others to make the
politically-conscious and socially responsible
decisions that will help mold and shape our society
in the direction that we believe it should go.

Before we can entertain the idea of a new philosophy
of education, we have to be very clear that American
education for nearly 100 years has been based upon
the philosophy of individualism. According to this
philosophy the ambitious individual of average or
above average ability from the lower and middle
classes is encouraged to climb up the social ladder
out of his or her class and community, leaving behind
them those who are less ambitious or less unscrupulous
or less able. If in this process they conduct themselves
in a way that meets the social standards and value-free
philosophy of those in power (who are always observing
them and grading their behavior) they will be rewarded
by promotion into higher echelons of the system. Thus,
in the final analysis, the American system of education,
like all systems of education, has served to perpetuate
the present system by constantly absorbing new individuals
into it.

If we recognize that this is what American education has
been, then we won't just blame the system. Instead we
will be wondering how we can change it, since we see
that it no longer works, and how can we create another
system, another reality, which will be a better way
to advance humankind. That is the starting point of
all philosophy.

In order to develop the concept of education to
govern, we have to begin with the recognition that
the foundation of good government is the moral
development of young people. This moral development
must begin in the home or family where the child
learns in practice and in face-to-face relations
certain values and principles, such as the importance
of telling the truth and of doing one's share of
work around the house - because truth-telling and
doing one's share are the basis of trust and
cooperation, without which no family and no
community can long survive. The school must
uphold these values and not see itself as a
value-free institution. But the instilling of
these values must begin in the family.

Next comes the development in the child of the skills
which are necessary for people to make a productive
contribution to the whole society. Particularly
in a highly technical society such as we live in
today, it is necessary that young people, female
and male, be trained in technical skills. But
training in technical skills should not take
place as it does today, chiefly through books
and in the schools.  Instead young people, from
an early age, should have the opportunity to do
some kind of productive work that will contribute
to the overall society both because this Is the
est way to learn and because it is impossible to
keep young people as parasites in school for
5-20 years and then expect them to be responsible
citizens.

After we have understood clearly the need for these
two essentials, i.e., the need for moral development
of young people and the need to train them in technical
skills through the process of actual work, we can then
begin asking ourselves some more concrete questions as
to how to reorganize our schools.

Questions


These are just some of the questions that we must now begin
to ask ourselves. We have never asked them before, not because
our minds were not capable of answering them, but because we
didn't realize that our minds were for the purpose of asking
and creating the answers to questions like these. Instead we
thought that our minds were like cameras, only reflecting theories,
facts, information that had already been created by others.
Now we must recognize that knowledge is not something static.
It is something that human beings like ourselves create through
our reflections and practice.

Of course, I can't begin to raise all the questions that we
have to ask ourselves as we approach the end of the 20th
Century and the beginning of the 21st. What I would
suggest to you is that after the discussion, you look
at some of the materials that my comrades and I have
brought with us.  We are both members of Advocators who
in the last few years have been asking ourselves some
of these fundamental questions because we recognized
that after a society has begun to rebel against old
values on the scale of the rebellions of the 1960s,
it is useless to try to build a new society unless
you are ready to think seriously about the next
development of Humankind.