Age segregation is an anomaly

By Norma J F (Fox) Harrison

School, inaccurately called education, is besieged by accepted anomalies, age segregation being a basic one.

All that research showing that 5 years olds do this or that, 7 year olds that and this, 40 year olds this, 70 year olds that, cause successful careers for their authors. But they're not the result of scientific research. The variables cannot reconstruct actual living in order to create controls.

It has however, been shown that genius arises in genius environments. People living together, doing their music and dance and growing and researching and maintenance and ...living - these are learning, and teaching, and institutionalized respect of people's knowledge. Classrooms contradict what people bring, making education, the root of the word being educe, meaning that people come knowing, ...education is not school, not compulsory attendance at school.

When the Chicago school teachers announced their plan to strike the next day, a 'news announcer' told us, 'Chicago's children will not be learning tomorrow', a perfect encapsulation of the generally accepted place of school - that we are not learning unless we're attending school.

That embodies these fallacies:

People must learn to teach creative thinking.

People must be taught creative thinking.

History, geography, gym, English (in English-speaking schools), reading, art - and all the subjects should be taught separately from each other.

People must attend school and get degrees in order to be qualified for employment - to do one or another job.

This is commodification of knowledge, purveyed by the sales people - the teachers and staffs, in the stores, schools.

These methods are employed to enforce our acceptance that only by schooling can we know, learn, and become properly qualified. This forces one or another degree of elitism upon us. First it separates people from the community; people do not spend their time among each other. People in school, the compulsory classroom, are in an exclusive environment.

But the fact is people critically think from the time they come out of their mother. That someone doesn't agree with someone else - or with the teaching or job or schooling, doesn't mean they're not 'critically thinking'. But this is how critical thinking is assessed by our institutions, and now also by our neighbors and families.

There is no reason to create 'subject matter'. All knowledge is integrated. That degrees and jobs are given on the basis of specializing in a subject doesn't prove that the subject needed to be separated from the body of knowledge, or of study.

School is the opposite of education. Pleasure is remote from our lives. Even jobs we like to do are commanded to be done in variously uncomfortable conditions. Security is impossible for most of us to achieve, in capitalism. Our Owners' rules can controvert and take our achievements any time.

We are our Owners' enemies; even THeir comprador class is suspicious for THem.

All that's necessary now is our unity, to take THeir power to all of us; THeir control; in particular, to take control of production, then control of distribution. We need to control what's produced how, and how it's distributed. In this way can we at least try to retrieve Earth from the ruination capitalism insistently wreaks upon it.

We will never have gentle care of Earth in capitalism.

These conditions, us ending boardroom crime, among other advantages, will eliminate street crime. ...not in a minute, but over time. This last is the high hurdle - giving ourselves the time to build the conditions for our benefit, which is socialist, communist + no profit; all work equal to all work; no social strata; all participant.

I'm a candidate for the school board http://normaharrisonforschoolboard.info in order to provide a seat at which people can liberate us from the accepted forms that serve our divisions between each other, and that serve our ignorance that keeps us in a slave relationship to the ruling class, the beneficiaries of our work. I of course, have ideas we could try out to see if they serve our intentions. So do other people. We need to have the conversation.

These ideas do not obviate our need to use the classroom as an adjunct to our living. People will want training to do particular work. ...or to share ideas and materials. We are all teachers and students all our lives. The clear example of Marx's meaning of alienation is found in our not enjoying that facet of ourselves. Classrooms or any form for study of any content, of asking and answering any questions that want some time spent on them need to arise on site. Testing too needs to be an outgrowth of doing whatever. Written tests are angry at us. Outside of the classroom we employ testing constantly.