(en) Workers Solidarity Movement Irish Anarchist Review #8 - Horizons of our imaginations: Anarchism and Education

Tom Murray looks at anarchist principles of education and argues that autonomous, 
co-operative learning is central to our finding new ways of challenging authority and dis- 
covering freer, more equal ways of being in the world. ---- In their own words, the Free 
Skool at Santa Cruz, California is ?a completely grassroots effort, a collection of folks 
who decided to act collectively and autonomously to create a skill-sharing network?.[1] 
Groups meet regularly to learn about hacktivism, bike maintenance, arts and crafts, 
singing, local his- tory and philosophy among other things. Underpinning these activities 
is Smokey?s message (opposite) of self-reliance: ?only you can prevent an empty calendar?.

Simply by their existence, free skool initiatives like these raise important questions 
about who controls what you learn as well as how we might collectively organise or 
institutionalise cooperative learning. Education is always conditioned by the kind of 
society in which it takes place, invariably to produce the men and women it needs. In 
capitalist societies, learning to be productive and toe the line, whether through 
schooling or the wider experience of everyday life, has far-reaching and deeply rooted 
implications, particularly for popular understandings of what is possible politically.

Anarchists have not just opposed educational forms associated with compulsion but have 
created humane and reasonable alternatives in doing so. In this article, I want to map 
some of the early critiques and ideals of education that have emerged from the ever 
flowing river of anarchism, partly out of curiosity and partly to suggest their ongoing 
relevance today. I am going to argue that the impulse to defy authority is bound up with 
an individual?s intrinsic motivations, the kind that cannot be generated for someone on 
their behalf, and that these instincts for revolt are best discovered and nurtured through 
a culture and practice of mutual aid.

Learning to Toe the Line
Historically, Church, State and Capital have all used people?s formal and informal 
educational systems to propagate authoritarian morality, coercive discipline and 
mechanical work, with varying degrees of intensity and success. The specifics of these 
familiar despotisms need not detain us. Generally characterised by a hierarchical division 
of labour, these institutions? enforced emphases on unintelligible jargon, discipline, 
morality and marketable skills come at the expense of independent reasoning, emotions, 
creativity or wider sensibilities. ?Instruction? smothers the horizon of our imaginations. 
It is through the school, Paul Goodman observed, that people learn that ?life is 
inevitably routine, depersonalized, venally graded; that it is best to toe the mark and 
shut up; that there is no place for spontaneity, open sexuality and free spirit?.[2]

Beyond the school, of far greater importance to our education is the far greater realm of 
everyday life. [3] It is here that we really learn, consciously or unconsciously, through 
our experiences, notably of family in the private sphere or of civil society associations 
in the public. Here too is the terrain where collective learning for revolutionary 
organisation and social transformation must take place. Yet how busy people?s lives are, 
perhaps too crowded for them to engage in the labour of collective self-organisation? Work 
and family commitments matter here. So too does living in a relatively affluent, consumer 
society where a great many needs can be met through the market and where the motivation 
for collective action presents itself less frequently.[4] Finally, with mass media 
dominated by private corporations and the state, ?the political? is invariably defined by 
their interests and understood more generally in fairly remote or unchangeable terms. In 
these ideological, material and behavioural circumstances, popular capacities for 
collective action tend to be displaced by a grim fatalism towards existing conditions. 
Politics becomes like the weather: something we tend to talk about a lot but can do little 
about personally.

Unsurprisingly, authoritarian educational practices and pathologies of this sort tend to 
resurface, consciously or unconsciously, among groups or organisations claiming to 
challenge exploitation and oppression. I find Leo Tolstoy?s argument convincing here: 
reversions to compulsion in education occur either through haste or insufficient respect 
for the other. Speaking with leftists-who-know, to take a well-worn example, often 
resembles conversations with religious evangelicals, eager for converts to a fixed canon 
of beliefs.[5] To varying degrees, conversations are based less on listening than on 
waiting for the other to stop speaking so as to assert one?s identity as a believer and 
testify to the true doctrine. Organisations that promote class analyses like leftist 
answering-machines invariably isolate themselves, partly because reasonable people tend to 
dislike obedience and partly because revolutionary
analyses will struggle to establish ideological hegemony on the terrain of everyday, 
capitalist-consumerist life. So what?s the alternative?

Anarchist Visions of Education
Anarchists try to ?teach? people as little as possible. In general, the golden rule is 
that successful learning flows from intrinsic motivations and natural talents. The 
anarchist vision of education thus begins and ends with trusting in the individual?s 
capacities not just to think for herself but to relate to others as equals and develop a 
social consciousness.[6] William Godwin, the 18th century anarchist thinker, argued that 
the ultimate aim of education was happiness. Godwin strongly identified this with forming 
a critical, independent mind. Emma Goldman developed this idea more explicitly. The goal 
of education, she claimed, was for the individual to develop through ?the free play of 
characteristic traits? and, in so doing, to discover herself as ?a social being?. 
Similarly, for Herbert Read, this goal of ?individuation of the self? required that the 
individual?s sense of uniqueness was informed by a social consciousness (and vice 
versa).[7] Both Goldman and Read recognised the neglected role of the emotions and 
emphasised how important it was to encourage the individual?s self-confidence, primarily 
in order to overcome residual fears of using natural talents.

On the question of means to achieve these ends, Tolstoy makes a useful distinction, this 
time between ?education? and ?culture?. ?Education? he defines as essentially coercive. 
Everything that does not spring organically from your will to educate yourself is an 
imposition of some sort by an external body, disassociated from your real needs and 
aspirations. In practical terms, compulsion, whether through haste or insufficient 
respect, not only retards would-be students? ability to learn but also their desire to do 
so. Conversely, Tolstoy argues that ?without compulsion, education is transformed into 
culture?, associated with a more lively will to self-educate. Beyond terminology, what is 
important here is the precise observation that success in developing anarchist ideas and 
practices will ultimately depend on the individual?s intrinsic motivation to learn and on 
the existence of conditions of trust and mutual aid where guidance can be offered if 
requested. Hence, to paraphrase Godwin, the anarchist as educator can excite curiosity, 
warn, inform, even instruct - but never inculcate. In practice, developing conditions of 
trust and mutual aid is a very time-consuming process, rooted in regular contact, dialogue 
and co-operation as well as example - which Goldman described as ?the actual living of a 
truth once recognised?.

Unsurprisingly, anarchist forms of education do not have a checklist of operations or easy 
?how to? guides. Instead, I think they begin to resemble Japanese martial arts where 
participants are instructed in a kata or ?way of doing? - only free of charge and without 
authority figures (hopefully). Here, regular, systematic practice is aimed not at 
transmitting rigid techniques but developing natural reflexes, principles of movement 
capable of infinite adaptation to one?s self and circumstances. Three principles of 
development seem to recur throughout and may be consiered fundamental. The first of these 
Colin Ward has described as ?believing in your own experiences?, or starting from your 
needs, experiences and aspirations for life and discussing how anarchism relates to and 
emerges from those. Obedience to authority, often contingent on the threat or practice of 
coercion, also tends to get smuggled into our everyday lives almost unconsciously, 
occurring at a level resistant to articulation. Naming the world ? attempting to choose 
consciously how we think about and relate to it ? is central to developing a critical 
understanding of it.[8] Doing so in dialogue with others is central to developing 
capacities for independent thought.

Hence, the second principle is listening. The general attitude ? ?nothing you say 
surprises me? ? stems from a culture that tends to value having strong opinions and 
winning arguments, typically associated with patriarchy and patron-client relations 
whereby powerful men (e.g. politicians, bishops, economists) are accustomed to passive and 
respectful audiences. Contemporary capitalist society fosters these tendencies.[9] 
Anarchists thus have to take seriously the creation of conditions for thoughtfulness, 
fostering collective listening, attentiveness and dialogue in civil society. Horizontal 
dialogues constitute the slow, molecular transformations necessary to develop co-operative 
practices and, ultimately, confidence in both individual and collective effort. The third 
principle is ?example? or ?learning by doing?. Anarchists have traditionally disliked 
abstract scholasticism, a product of the division of labour into manual and mental work. 
So, in the present instance, we cannot simply learn these ?ways of doing? by reading about 
them. Ultimately, that which we must learn to do, we learn by doing.

The Politics of Education: Then and Now
True to this last principle, anarchists? visions of education did not stem from the 
library alone but rather emerged from a much broader, popular contestation of both church 
and nation-state systems of education. Conventionally, opposition to compulsory education 
has been interpreted as evidence of working class parents? unwillingness to lose the extra 
wages provided by their children. Recently, however, social historians in Britain have 
shown that working-class neighbourhoods overwhelmingly preferred community-owned schools 
to charitable, religious or state schools. These schools used individual as opposed to 
authoritarian teaching methods, wasted no time on religious studies or moral uplift and 
successfully conveyed useful skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic.[10]

More directly, anarchists across geographies and generations developed co-operative 
educational principles in the course of setting up and vigorously defending experimental 
schools of their own. Today?s free skools have distinguished predecessors, including the 
Free School movements in the United Kingdom and the United States as well as the ateneos 
or cultural centres of pre-Civil War Spain. In particular, Francesco Ferrer, founder of 
the ?modern schools?
in Spain, inspired the advance of secular education more widely. The effects of these 
patient revolutionaries have been profound. Ward attributes to them a quiet revolution in 
the classroom insofar as their example undermined some of the worst authoritarian 
practices in the state schooling system, notably corporal punishment.[11] We can and 
should take heart from these early, ongoing and sometimes un-seen successes as we face 
into contemporary battles over education.

The latest crisis of capitalism, occasioning greater pressures towards making our 
societies less democratic and less equal, is reshaping formal education systems the world 
over. Public education is under attack as new measures are introduced to bolster 
discipline, including tuition increases, managerialism and corporatisation.[12] In 
response, student protests have been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Tai- wan and 
elsewhere. In Ireland, where similar pressures are readily apparent, there appear to be 
two key clusters of opposition. The first centres on those fighting to make more 
democratic and more equal the existing educational system, encompassing students? unions 
as well as more radical groups such as F.E.E. (Free Education for Everyone) explicitly 
opposed to neoliberalism. The second involves the example of autonomous or popular 
educational forms provided by such diverse groups as Seomra Spraoi (Dublin?s premier 
social space), community-based People?s History Projects or even the WSM?s annual 
Anarchist Bookfair.

More generally, experience of recent struggles has demonstrated the enduring need to 
challenge ?capitalist realism?, the pervasive ideological hegemony of the capitalist 
class, and the apparent necessity of austerity. (For what is austerity if not a ruling 
class ?blaming its victims? for their own excesses?)[13] If we want to challenge those 
ideas and the practices they justify, then we have to pay attention to popular education. 
Anarchist principles have an important role to play here. The horizontalist squares of 
late 2011 indicated the potential of assemblies as sites for autonomous learning, a 
potential that often fell victim to state hostility, resource constraints and sectarianism 
among other things.[14]

More recently, the success of Quebec?s ?Red Square? student movement suggests a new and 
possibly better synthesis of the two oppositional forms mentioned above: ?occupy?-ing a 
single issue. Here, reglar, popular assemblies were an important means of mobilising, 
learning and confidence-building among students challenging university tuition hikes.[15] 
The consequences of their example for wider social struggles may yet prove enduring. As 
one banner in Chile?s earlier wave of student protests proudly declared: ?Those who fight 
to learn soon learn to fight?.

References:
[1] http://santacruz.freeskool.org/
[2] education and The Community of Scholars, Mis- p. 23. Paul Goodman, (1962) Compulsory
[3] See generally Paul Politics of Everyday Life, an of the practical barriers to 
mobilising politically in contemporary societies.
[4] Wolfgang Streeck, (2012) ?Citizens as Consumers: Considerations on the New Politics 
76, pp. of Consumption? in New 27-47. Left Review,
[5] The doctrine sounds something like: sacrifice and obedience to the party (faith and 
good works) in the here and now to promote working class revolution (divine judgment and 
vengeance) with the promise of salvation in communist society (afterlife).
[6] Unless otherwise stated quotes are from Peter Marshall?s (2008) History of Anarchism. 
Demanding the Impossible: A
[8] See Paulo Oppressed. Freire (1968) Pedagogy of the Ginsborg (2005) The excellent 
summary ????Politics of Everyday
[10] Philip Gardner (1984) The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian Britain.
[11] Colin Ward, (2004) ?Freedom in Education?
[9] Ginsborg Life, pp. 139-145. (2005) The in Introduction
[12] Noam Indoctrinated to Obey?. Available at: http://www. 
alternet.org/story/154849/chomsky%3A_how_the_ young_are_indoctrinated_to_obey?paging=off
[13] Mark Fisher (2009) Capitalist Realism. David Graeber, ?There?s no need for all this 
economic sadomasochism? in The Guardian, 21.04.2013.
[14] On the Irish experience of Occupy as a popular educational form, see Cathal Larkin, 
(2012), to Anarchism, pp. 73-4. Chomsky (2012) ?How the Young are ?Unveiling Capitalism at 
Occupy? in Irish Review: 6.
Anarchist
[15] The WSM is currently organising a speaking tour in Ireland?s universities of Vanessa 
Vela, a CLASSE delegate and feminist organiser during the mass student strike in Quebec. 
For background to the student strike, see http://www.studentstrike.net