Don’t Be Another Brick In The Wall
Hello and welcome to EduCo™!
Here at EduCo™ we have been striving to create the most efficient, pragmatic, and easily moldable students. With over 100 years of experience in the industry we have consistently refined our production method and can report with great pleasure that turnout is at its highest! With our roots in business we understand the greatest requirement any modern companies needs, the docile worker. With roughly 17 years of schooling we have found that your ideal worker is produced, regardless of profession. Rigorous control of nearly every aspect of your future workers life is meticulously taken care of from an early age, conditioning them to customizable compliance. We’re confident that you’ll be satisfied with our product, guaranteed!
Though EduCo™ is entirely fictional, the sarcastic message intended was to step back and take a look at schooling the the 21st century so that we may assess its true nature by peeling back all the political correctness, buzzwords, and societal ideologies regarding it. Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk video provides some unique insight to the problems we face today as a result of our education system.
In Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment the concept of docility, the notion that one “may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved…and that this docile body can only be achieved through strict regiment of disciplinary acts”. As Foucault details, despite non-involvement with various institutions whether they be slavery, military, or monastic humans are still subject to strict disciplining whether they are aware of it or not. The principles that he details from “The Control of Activity” draw parallels to the modern education system seen across the United States. The first step in controlling activity is to create a timetable, a process which has become increasingly refined over time in schooling. Every hour is meticulously planned out and scheduled so as to maximize its efficiency, and punishments are set in place as a result of disobeying the mandated schedule. Show up tardy to class? Chances are you’re getting detention or worse. The notion of a schedules and set timetable reinforces habit, as a result of numerous repetitions students and teachers alike are accustomed, or trained (Pavlov returns?) to conform.
Not only does the addition of a rigorous timetable enforce mind numbing compliance it seeks to consistently regulate, monitor, and “correct” behaviors that seek to disrupt it. Removal of distractions whether they be material or immaterial is heavily enforced by means of taking away devices, limiting what is spoken, and who interacts with who in certain cases. In this way the first step is laid out in churning out docile bodies. The following two steps are closely related; the temporal elaboration of the act and the correlation of body and gesture. Here Foucault details that the act is broken down into its elements, each with a specific duration, length, and order. As well as the fact that to maximize the efficiency of an act the very gesturing of the body must be painstakingly curated so as to increase utility. The relation to these two points in an educational setting is seen through the positioning and placement of students in a classroom, “The teacher will place the pupils in the posture that they should maintain when writing, and will correct it either by sign or otherwise, when they change this position” (Foucault 152). The next and arguably most important of all these principles is that of exhaustive use, through the comprehensiveness of a fixed timetable the body is able to extract a larger quantity of productive, useful moments — thus creating as Foucault describes “a positive economy”.
“The sole aim of these commands .. . is to accustom the children to executing well and quickly the same operations, to diminish as far as possible by speed the loss of time caused by moving from one operation to another” (Bernard).
With the increasing demand and complexity of education many institutions nowadays seek to apply all the aforementioned principles to bring a body to utter exhaustion, but what’s the point? If a student is busy dealing with learning, understanding, and synthesizing information in order to prepare for the next day of class, homework, testing in its multiple capacities (quizzes, in class tests, standardized testing, projects, etc) among other activities to “round them out” such as extracurriculars no further time exists to look beyond the system. No time exists to realize the soul-less mechanical tendency of the education system. Though some may argue, “But this isn’t the case at MY child’s school!” or something along those lines — there is some truth to that, there are probably some fantastic schools out there using modern techniques to individualize and positively impact children’s lives however, the reality is that the tendency towards this monolothic processing factory of education still haunts us to this day. Maybe Pink Floyd put it best…just another brick in the wall.
