I’ve been a teacher for about 12 years, and I’ve really started questioning the social function of public schools. The obvious—and in my opinion uncritical—answer is education. But is it really about education, or is that just the rhetoric?
Now, before I go on, I want to make it clear that I’m not against public education. There are countries in the world where people are thirsting for basic education. There are developing countries where people really want and need an education to build up their vital infrastructure and raise themselves and their families out of poverty.
But in developed countries, it doesn’t seem to me that a grade school, middle school, or high school education will do much of anything to raise you out of poverty. Hell, I’d even say that about half of university degrees won’t do much to help you in that regard. Aside from basic literacy and arithmetic, what are we teaching these kids that they really need?
So if public schools aren’t really about education, what are they for? I honestly think that the main function of public schools under capitalism is mass babysitting so that parents can be free to sell their labor for the majority of their waking hours.
Babysitting. That’s all it is. And teachers get paid jack shit for it. Would you take a minimum wage job as a babysitter for a family that had 30, 40, 100 kids? That’s what teachers have to do. Is it possible for a single adult to manage that many children in any meaningful way aside from preventing from leaving the building? Some of the kids may or may not have undiagnosed disabilities or mental illnesses that we aren’t qualified to diagnose.
You can’t really force kids to learn. You can try to trick them into cooperating by making the lesson fun, but some kids still won’t be into it, and it’s hard to blame them. In the old days they used to hit kids to keep them in line. Obviously we don’t do that anymore. So nowadays if kids act out, we just scold them and/or crush their self esteem by giving them bad grades and comparing them to one another. It’s pretty fucked up and I don’t like it.
Basically, it feels to me like public schools under capitalism are basically just child internment camps, and I don’t know what the solution is. I know that there are anarchist writers who were critical of the school system. I know that Foucault famously compared schools to prisons. I know that capitalism couldn’t exist without public schools as they are now. But on the other hand, I don’t want to just abolish public education entirely. Maybe I just want teachers to get more pay? Maybe I just think teachers shouldn’t have to take care of so many students? Maybe the whole system needs and overhaul? What do you all think?