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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Militancy in the schools

Militancy in the schools

Notes on education: for my fellow adults between thirteen and seventeen

1.

If you feel happy at school, it may be a sign you are a volkwit who would be happy in Buchenwald. You could be a slave-minded volkwit. Or you could be an authoritarian fascist volkwit in the making who wants to learn the style from those teachers skilled in the style. Either way, I don’t really give a stuff about it. Good luck to you. Who am I to interfere with the happiness of another unless he is actually treading on the scrotum of myself or a friend.

If you loathe being at school, and feel the boredom may soon shove you round the bend, don’t go round the bend just to please the volkwits. You may feel it’s your fault you’re going round the bend. It is up to a point. You have two choices open to you: either to split from school or to become a controlled intelligent militant within the school. If you split from school, you may do a long term in a mental hospital (not insane, but regarded as a social nuisance) or in a borstal, for no crime except being young. Under seventeen you have no civil rights at all.

If you become a controlled intelligent militant, you may enjoy school as the bullfighter enjoys the bullfight.

2. Don’t feel too sorry for the teachers. It is a deadly profession. They are paid to educate the middle class young adults in the prejudices of the middle class. But they can split without going to borstal or to a mental hospital.
3. The present education system is admirably designed to spiritually castrate the young adult militants by robbing them of the power of free choice in all matters that concern them at a gut level. If you learn to lick arses at school, how many arses will you lick by the time you reach forty?
4.

Most male teachers are probably heterosexual in temperament. In a mixed school one of the deeper perverse jobs of school-teaching is open to them. They can annoy, frustrate, hamper, dominate and humiliate young chicks with the blessing of the system. In a single sex school they are denied this joy unless they happen to be homosexual in temperament. Then they can have the even deeper joy of hitting young male adults on the buttocks.

In a mixed school female teachers can also do to young chicks what the page 559 male teachers can do, with the added joy of frustrating young chicks in their developing love life. They can do this even better in a single sex school. I don’t know so much about their attitudes to young male adults. I know they can regard them as louts and treat them as such. Sometimes they regard them sadly as erring children.

As Germaine Greer points out, authoritarian personalities are sexually confused. Authoritarian personalities are attracted to teaching as flies are attracted to the jam pot. Nobody else would put up with their antics. But the young adults can often be forced to put up with them. They can project their sexual confusions on the young adults. The commonest myth among teachers is that young adults are by nature cynically lascivious and have to be kept behind bars like baboons. It could be exploded by their getting to know the young adults. But people with authoritarian personalities don’t get to know other people. They are too busy telling them what to do.

Young chicks get twice as bad treatment in the schools because they belong to two oppressed groups at one and the same time: the group of the young and the female group. They have to work on themselves twice as hard to get the bull out of the mind and nervous system.

5.

In our society the principal public role of the secondary-schools is to prepare young adults to become bosses and under-bosses for the capitalist pyramid-builders. If bosses are total idiots they are useless. They have to have the capacity to make minor decisions. But if they acquire the capacity to use their minds and hearts freely, and look at our society with free men’s eyes, they may refuse to be bosses at all. Therefore the schools have to produce half-idiots. It is a delicate procedure. It can be done with the carrot of self-interest, the whip of moralism – ‘Don’t be lazy’ – and blinkers manufactured by the education system itself. But the teachers need long holidays, because telling lies is very hard on the human mind.

Slaves are made slaves by fear. The fear of economic deprivation, and the fear of not being accepted by any group other than the middle class – Maori working class people, for example – are generally enough to keep the young middle class adults in a state of slavery in the school. They are fed and clothed and housed. Should they be grateful for this? I think not. The bullock does not feel happier about being castrated because he has a stall to sleep in and hay to eat.

6.

Vanity is also an incentive. You can be told you are clever. But it shows a grievous lack of social intelligence to accept as truth the bullshit served out in the schools.

A doctor or scientist can get their early training in the schools, because medicine and technology and so on are instrumental sciences. But artists and sociologists and communal leaders have always to go outside the schools page 560 to get their basic training, because the social lies told in the schools are an impassable fog barrier.

7. To be blamed for boredom is like being blamed for being unable to stomach coffee made with sawdust. Deep boredom is a sure subconscious sign that you are being fed bullshit. Truth is always interesting.
8. The schools are crucifying a great many young adult Maoris and Islanders by denying them any formal access to their own cultures. This is necessary because the values of Polynesian culture are non-capitalistic. The blood of the Polynesians who go to the jails and hospitals is on the head of those who taught them they had to be brown pakehas.
9. The greatest deformations of religion occur in the schools. Religion is turned into a whip or an aspirin for the teachers to use to frighten or stupefy the young adults. Try to get a good Buddhist training. It can help you to keep your cool.
10. A small minority among the teachers wish to abdicate their authority and deal as fellow adults with the young adults in the schools. They deserve love and support. They are like honest miners working up to the armpits in sludge. The hope of an honest education system lies in their hands and in yours. It would be better to have no schools than the schools we will have if they lose the battle. If the authoritarians triumph the schools may eventually resemble those built by Stalin and Hitler.
11. Every time you go against your fears you will get a little stronger. Every time you are led by fear in making a decision, you will get a little weaker. The Belsen-minded among the teachers are simply people who have always been ruled by their fears. They look strong but are pitifully weak.
12. The militant style is never to limp with the lame. It does the lame no good and puts you out of shape. If you walk upright some of the lame may learn to walk upright with you.
13. Love is the key of morality. Love means adult choices made on behalf of others. If it seems unloving to be a militant against a pattern foisted on you by older fellow adults – remember, love is anger on behalf of those who are being hurt, hatred is anger against persons. Don’t be angry with persons. Be angry against lying or dead or destructive patterns.
14. There are no adolescents. Adolescents are young adults who have been falsely persuaded that they are still semi-children. Those who are oppressing page 561 a group always lie to the members of that group. The oppression of young adults by older adults is like the oppression of one race by another race. You know it is happening because you are constantly accused of being bad, mad, inferior, stupid, incapable, if you don’t fit in entirely with the wishes of the oppressing group. Oppression reaches its full strength when the oppressed begin to believe these things about themselves.
15.

The finest flower of authoritarian sadism is to punish and blame people for the reactions induced by authoritarian sadism – ‘What’s wrong with you? Why do you tell me lies? Why don’t you look me straight in the eye?’

Chronic boredom may make a young male adult masturbate a lot. Then he can be blamed for being sexually obsessed. Fear of a teacher may make a girl inarticulate. Then she can be rubbished for being stupid.

The answer is to assess one’s social performance always on one’s own terms, never on those of the authoritarian sadist. Be polite with them and as hard as steel. They will go mad before you do.

16. You can occasionally afford to overlook an injustice against yourself. But never neglect militant protest against any injustice against a friend. Anyone is a potential friend who doesn’t lick the arses of the school authorities. And if you stick together, some of the weak brothers and sisters who do this will be able to stop doing it.
17. Don’t be browbeaten by the old lie that you are inexperienced. Authoritarian personalities are notoriously incapable of learning anything from experience. Your knowledge of your own life and deepest actual needs is always greater than anybody else’s knowledge of these things. When you see through your friends’ eyes you extend this experience.
18. Failures don’t matter, as long as you are making your own decisions. People learn by their mistakes. They don’t learn by the mistakes other people make in making decisions for them.
19.

Judge the tree by its fruits. It is not accidental that the most spirited and intelligent young adults are yearly expelled from the schools, while the sad little arse-lickers are being honoured and given badges. It is the same society that honours Sir James Wattie for making money out of the dispossessed Maoris whose eardrums are being damaged in the can-making room of his factory while Tim Shadbolt gets months in jail for telling young adults that what they are being taught is bullshit.

I have lain down in the flats of the PYM, where they teach boys who have been beaten up by Maori gangs not to become counter-racist. I have slept in the homes of the rich, and heard the woman of the house say, about the page 562 unemployed and the confused Maori militants, ‘Some people are like horses that go wrong. You have to shoot them.’

Judge the tree by its fruits. My heart is full of joy to have from time to time the privilege of the company of the young militants of the schools, people who are learning to become themselves, people who are acquiring social insights, friends I am proud to talk with. What can I feel but sick sadness to meet the parrots of the school establishment inching their way with their beaks up the wire of their cages, screeching ‘Pretty Polly!’ They will grow up to be mutton-headed men and women like sacks of spuds. The militants are men and women already.

20.I do not like the educational system that is crucifying the best of the young. It is cynical, cowardly, blinkered and dishonest. Get out of the schools then, or else change them from the inside. Don’t worry if they try to smash you. The living win over the dead just by being alive.

1972 (708)