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rather than their life-stock which is being branded with an inscrutable sign.
This passage of Borges is fascinating, because it evokes the logic of irrational consistency which makes Kafka's and
Koestler's bureaucracies so sinister yet so evocative of everyday life. Irrational consistency mesmerizes accomplices
who are engaged in mutually expedient and disciplined exploitation. It is the logic generated by bureaucratic behavior.
And it becomes the logic of a society which demands that the managers of its educational institutions be held publicly
accountable for the behavioral modification they produce in their clients. Students who can be motivated to value the
educational packages which their teachers obligate them to consume are comparable to Chinese peasants who can fit
their flocks into the tax form provided by Borges.
At some time during the last two generations a commitment to therapy triumphed in American culture, and teachers
came to be regarded as the therapists whose ministrations all men need, if they wish to enjoy the equality and freedom
with which, according to the Constitution, they are born. Now the teacher-therapists go on to propose lifelong
educational treatment as the next step. The style of this treatment is under discussion: Should it take the form of
continued adult classroom attendance? Electronic ecstasy? Or periodic sensitivity sessions? All educators are ready to
conspire to push out the walls of the classroom, with the goal of transforming the entire culture into a school.
The American controversy over the future of education, behind its rhetoric and noise, is more conservative than the
discourse in other areas of public policy. On foreign affairs, at least, an organized minority constantly reminds us that
the United States must renounce its role as the world's policeman. Radical economists, and now even their less radical
teachers, question aggregate growth as a desirable goal. There are lobbies for prevention over cure in medicine and
others in favor of fluidity over speed in transportation. Only in the field of education do the articulate voices demanding a
radical deschooling of society remain so dispersed. There is a lack of cogent argument and of mature leadership aiming
at the disestablishment of any and all institutions which serve the purpose of compulsory learning. For the moment, the
radical deschooling of society is still a cause without a party. This is especially surprising in a time of growing, though
chaotic, resistance to all forms of institutionally planned instruction on the part of those aged twelve to seventeen.
Educational innovators still assume that educational institutions function like funnels for the programs they package.
For my argument it is irrelevant whether these funnels take the form of a classroom, a TV transmitter, or a "liberated
zone." It is equally irrelevant whether the packages purveyed are rich or poor, hot or cold, hard and measurable (like
Math III), or impossible to assess (like sensitivity). What counts is that education is assumed to be the result of an
institutional process managed by the educator. As long as the relations continue to be those between a supplier and a
consumer, educational research will remain a circular process. It will amass scientific evidence in support of the need
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for more educational packages and for their more deadly accurate delivery to the individual customer, just as a certain
brand of social science can prove the need for the delivery of more military treatment.
An educational revolution depends on a twofold inversion: a new orientation for research and a new understanding of the
educational style of an emerging counterculture.
Operational research now seeks to optimize the efficiency of an inherited framework--a framework which is itself never
questioned. This framework has the syntactic structure of a funnel for teaching packages. The syntactic alternative to it
is an educational network or web for the autonomous assembly of resources under the personal control of each learner.
This alternative structure of an educational institution now lies within the conceptual blind spot of our operational
research. If research were to focus on it, this would constitute a true scientific revolution. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]