Schooling in the Coronavirus Era: What Future Are We Creating Now?
LOS ANGELES (USA), April 6 – “Starting to hear about colleges not hiring part-time faculty for the fall and telling full-timers they have to teach more,” posted an instructor. “How do we fight this?”
Another shot back: “General strike. Or guillotines.”
Here, schools and colleges closed first. They “reopened” on-line. Teachers and students struggle to cope. Especially parents who are supposed to be “home- schooling” their kids. Especially single mothers.
Teachers are stressed, fearful and angry.
“The denial of reality and of socioeconomic inequities is making me feel outraged,” a teacher posted to a group of 20,000+ teachers.
“What if we all went on strike?” asked another. “Enough is enough and this is not human or humane.”
The COVID-19 pandemic exposes just how inhuman and inhumane capitalism is. A forced internal migration of millions of starving day-laborers in India, with constant fascist propaganda blaming Muslims. Bangladeshi garment workers – 80% of the workforce – thrown onto the streets. Tens of thousands of immigrants and millions more prisoners locked in death-traps in the USA.
Yes, heads should roll. The world desperately needs revolution – to replace deadly capitalism with a communist society. “From each according to commitment and ability. To each according to need.” That’s communism – there’s no other word for it.
A general strike for communism – not reform – could be a step forward. Toward the health care and food and housing, the work and education we need. Toward the social relationships that can unite and sustain us without oppression or exploitation.
This is not a time to chill, aiming simply to survive. Nor a time to burn ourselves out trying frantically to “do it all” as if there were no crisis, or one that will soon pass.
This is a time to use every opportunity to engage in practice that builds the consciousness and relationships necessary to create the communist world we need. The young comrades in Delhi, India are showing the way.
Schools and the Intensifying Capitalist Crisis
A comrade teacher posted: “The crisis exposes the fault-lines and fundamental wrong-headedness of our whole system of schooling. An assembly-line model of education separated from work, packaged into components, motivated by extrinsic rewards. All within a market system where our ability to sell ourselves to an employer determines our very survival.”
More teachers are questioning this system. Why grades? What “standards”? What do students really need to know? Aren’t relationships more important than “course content”?
For a “human and humane” educational system we need a human and humane social system. No labor markets. No gulf between the masses and a ruling elite. Instead, we’ll organize ourselves to produce what’s most needed and get it to those who need it the most.
With capitalism utterly failing us, many are coming forward to act on this communist principle, though most don’t yet see it that way. It will take mass communist practice/consciousness to fully unfetter our generosity, creativity and solidarity. It will take revolution, and communist education starting now.
The alternative is a system more unequal, more exploitative, more racist and more fascist than it already is.
More online schooling: What happens to those lacking computer resources at home? Or internet. Or help. Or privacy. Or those with no home.
Online schooling sharply reduces the social dimension of learning. Social media and Zoom are no substitute for sharing a classroom – or a meal.
“Acknowledging that we need each other is an essential ingredient,” said a new comrade. “If we cannot defend the importance of physical presence and if we pretend that doing it all via remote is good enough, then our goose is cooked.”
The massive move to online speeds up the de-skilling of teaching and increased top-down control. It intensifies exploitation, especially of part-time instructors. It “doesn’t work without lots of UNPAID LABOR by the employed and the unemployed, by students and often other members of students’ families,” a teacher warned.
Some universities have “partnered” with the publishing giant Wiley to “manage” programs. Professors create online classes and teach them a few times. Then the classes are turned over to lower-paid instructors to run without being able to change it at all. “This online learning experiment may serve as a catalyst,” one professor wrote.
There’s no going back. The future will be very different from the past. It’s up to us: Intensified corporate control and fascism – or communist revolution?
NOTE: The final version of this article incorporated suggestions made in an on-line meeting of four co-workers as well as ideas of other comrades.
READ OUR PAMPHLET:
“Communist Education for a Classless Society”
Available at icwpredflag.org/epe.pdf
Front page of this issue
