By Chris Caston
What is the role of the education system in capitalist society? School is certainly not about helping to develop freethinking people with the courage to act on their convictions. The school system encourages competition more than cooperation, obedience to authority more than freethinking and rigid conformity instead of individual creativity. These are the values of dog-eat-dog capitalism. It prepares us for the work force.
A socialist education system would be radically different for a radically different society. It would teach students to work together and cooperate for the wellbeing of all rather than to compete and undermine each other in order, eventually, to maximise the profits of their employer.
Under the current education system, many students find that they are unable to learn or even understand what the textbook or the teacher is talking about. When this happens, it is very easy for students to become depressed and start thinking that they are stupid or inept and somehow less intelligent and less important than the other students.
Other students find the content easy to cover and the teachers' instructions straightforward and easy to complete. Capitalist society often claims that this is related to the intelligence or lack of it of the individual; at other times it is put down to gender or social or ethnic background. This is all part of a system, which works like a giant sorting bin, to divide and alienate the people in different social classes as a basis for repression and material inequality.
This is a system which, through strict rules, regulations and dress codes, crushes free thought, self-determination and social cooperation amongst students.
A socialist education system would recognise that all people have a part to play in the collective operation of society and that differences in physical abilities and types of intelligence do not provide the basis for a judgment of "superiority", but represent the different roles in society which people are suited for.
The capitalist education system does not cater for this. Take assignments for example. If there are 25 students in a class, each student is separated and given the same piece of work to do. The same piece of work is done 25 times, and the students are ranked according to who did the best job on that one job.
In the real world, if you want to build a bridge, you don't get 25 bridge builders to construct 25 bridges and then destroy 24 of them and only pay the person who built the best bridge. You split the builders up into the areas in which they have the most skill and have them work together to build the bridge through cooperation.
The capitalist education system is intent only on teaching students to compete with each other, compelling them to work harder and longer for less pay — cutting the value of their own labour power and the labour power of others in order create further gain for their employers.
This is the fundamental argument for a new type of education in which the entire class completes group projects by separating the work into modules. The students would not be marked on how well their module worked within the system, but the whole class would be marked on how well their system worked overall.
This would teach students to work in a team environment, sharing and consolidating skills and technical know-how. They would cooperate to ensure that each student has the resources, the support and the space to complete their work.
So while capitalist education continues to suppress and divide us, student radicalisation and active participation in class struggle will provide us with a way forward to do away with profits, bosses and class antagonisms. We should aim to build a society in which education and free and unfettered communication are the basis for democratic control of social services and the means of production.