Ritualization Of Progress

[Scott W.]

Ritualization of
Progress

The university
graduate has been
schooled for
selective service
among the rich of
the world. Whatever
his or her claims of
solidarity with the
Third World, each
American college
graduate has had an
education costing an
amount five times
greater than the
median life income
of half of humanity.
A Latin American
student is
introduced to this
exclusive fraternity
by having at least
350 times as much
public money spent
on his education as
on that of his
fellow citizens of
median income. With
very rare
exceptions, the
university graduate
from a poor country
feels more
comfortable with his
North American and
European colleagues
than with his
nonschooled
compatriots, and all
students are
academically
processed to be
happy only in the
company of fellow
consumers of the
products of the
educational machine.

The modern
university confers
the privilege of
dissent on those who
have been tested and
classified as
potential money-
makers or power-
holders. No one is
given tax funds for
the leisure in which
to educate himself
or the right to
educate others
unless at the same
time he can also be
certified for
achievement. Schools
select for each
successive level
those who have, at
earlier stages in
the game, proved
themselves good
risks for the
established order.
Having a monopoly on
both the resources
for learning and the
investiture of
social roles, the
university coopts
the discoverer and
the potential
dissenter. A degree
always leaves its
indelible price tag
on the curriculum of
its consumer.
Certified college
graduates fit only
into a world which
puts a price tag on
their

35 RITUALIZATION OF
PROGRESS

heads, thereby
giving them the
power to define the
level of
expectations in
their society. In
each country the
amount of
consumption by the
college graduate
sets the standard
for all others; if
they would be
civilized people on
or off the job, they
will aspire to the
style of life of
college graduates.

The university thus
has the effect of
imposing consumer
standards at work
and at home, and it
does so in every
part of the world
and under every
political system.
The fewer university
graduates there are
in a country, the
more their
cultivated demands
are taken as models
by the rest of the
population. The gap
between the
consumption of the
university graduate
and that of the
average citizen is
even wider in
Russia, China, and
Algeria than in the
United States. Cars,
airplane trips, and
tape recorders
confer more visible
distinction in a
socialist country,
where only a degree,
and not just money,
can procure them.

The ability of the
university to fix
consumer goals is
something new. In
many countries the
university acquired
this power only in
the sixties, as the
delusion of equal
access to public
education began to
spread. Before that
the university
protected an
individual's freedom
of speech, but did
not automatically
convert his
knowledge into
wealth. To be a
scholar in the
Middle Ages meant to
be poor, even a
beggar. By virtue of
his calling, the
medieval scholar
learned Latin,
became an outsider
worthy of the scorn
as well as the
esteem of peasant
and prince, burgher
and cleric. To get
ahead in the world,
the scholastic first
had to enter it by
joining the civil
service, preferably
that of the Church.
The old university
was a liberated zone
for discovery and
the discussion of
ideas both new and
old. Masters and
students gathered to
read the texts of
other masters, now
long dead, and the
living words of the
dead masters gave
new perspective to
the fallacies of the
present day. The
university was then
a community of
academic quest and
endemic unrest.

In the modern
multiversity this
community has fled
to the fringes,
where it meets in a
pad, a professor's
office, or the
chaplain's quarters.
The structural
purpose of the
modern university
has little to do
with the traditional
quest. Since
Gutenberg, the
exchange of
disciplined,
critical inquiry
has, for the most
part,

36 DESCHOOLING
SOCIETY

moved from the
"chair" into print.
The modern
university has
forfeited its chance
to provide a simple
setting for
encounters which are
both autonomous and
anarchic, focused
yet unplanned and
ebullient, and has
chosen instead to
manage the process
by which so-called
research and
instruction are
produced.

The American
university, since
Sputnik, has been
trying to catch up
with the body count
of Soviet graduates.
Now the Germans are
abandoning their
academic tradition
and are building
"campuses" in order
to catch up with the
Americans. During
the present decade
they want to
increase their
expenditure for
grammar and high
schools from 14 to
59 billion DM, and
more than triple
expenditures for
higher learning. The
French propose by
1980 to raise to 10
percent of their GNP
the amount spent on
schools, and the
Ford Foundation has
been pushing poor
countries in Latin
America to raise per
capita expenses for
"respect-able"
graduates toward
North American
levels. Students see
their studies as the
investment with the
highest monetary
return, and nations
see them as a key
factor in
development.

For the majority who
primarily seek a
college degree, the
university has lost
no prestige, but
since 1968 it has
visibly lost
standing among its
believers. Students
refuse to prepare
for war, pollution,
and the perpetuation
of prejudice.
Teachers assist them
in their challenge
to the legitimacy of
the government, its
foreign policy,
education, and the
American way of
life. More than a
few reject degrees
and prepare for a
life in a
counterculture,
outside the
certified society.
They seem to choose
the way of medieval
Fraticelli and
Alumbrados of the
Reformation, the
hippies and dropouts
of their day. Others
recognize the
monopoly of the
schools over the
resources which they
need to build a
countersociety. They
seek support from
each other to live
with integrity while
submitting to the
academic ritual.
They form, so to
speak, hotbeds of
heresy right within
the hierarchy.

Large parts of the
general population,
however, regard the
modern mystic and
the modern
heresiarch with
alarm. They threaten
the consumer
economy, democratic
privilege, and the
self-image of
America. But they
cannot be wished
away. Fewer

37 RITUALIZATION OF
PROGRESS

and fewer can be
reconverted by
patience or coopted
by subtlety for
instance, by
appointing them to
teach their heresy.
Hence the search for
means which would
make it possible
either to get rid of
dissident
individuals or to
reduce the
importance of the
university which
serves them as a
base for protest.

The students and
faculty who question
the legitimacy of
the university, and
do so at high
personal cost,
certainly do not
feel that they are
setting consumer
standards or
abetting a
production system.
Those who have
founded such groups
as the Committee of
Concerned Asian
Scholars and the
North American
Congress on Latin
America (NACLA) have
been among the most
effective in
changing radically
the perceptions of
the realities of
foreign countries
for millions of
young people. Still
others have tried to
formulate Marxian
interpretations of
American society or
have been among
those responsible
for the flowering of
communes. Their
achievements add new
strength to the
argument that the
existence of the
university is
necessary to
guarantee continued
social criticism.

There is no question
that at present the
university offers a
unique combination
of circumstances
which allows some of
its members to
criticize the whole
of society. It
provides time,
mobility, access to
peers and
information, and a
certain impunity-
privileges not
equally available to
other segments of
the population. But
the university
provides this
freedom only to
those who have
already been deeply
initiated into the
consumer society and
into the need for
some kind of
obligatory public
schooling.

The school system
today performs the
threefold function
common to powerful
churches throughout
history. It is
simultaneously the
repository of
society's myth, the
institutionalization
of that myth's
contradictions, and
the locus of the
ritual which
reproduces and veils
the disparities
between myth and
reality. Today the
school system, and
especially the
university, provides
ample opportunity
for criticism of the
myth and for
rebellion against
its institutional
perversions. But the
ritual which demands
tolerance of the
fundamental
contradictions
between

38 DESCHOOLING
SOCIETY

myth and institution
still goes largely
unchallenged, for
neither ideological
criticism nor social
action can bring
about a new society.
Only disenchantment
with and detachment
from the central
social ritual and
reform of that
ritual can bring
about radical
change.

The American
university has
become the final
stage of the most
all encompassing
initiation rite the
world has ever
known. No society in
history has been
able to survive
without ritual or
myth, but ours is
the first which has
needed such a dull,
protracted,
destructive, and
expensive initiation
into its myth. The
contemporary world
civilization is also
the first one which
has found it
necessary to
rationalize its
fundamental
initiation ritual in
the name of
education. We cannot
begin a reform of
education unless we
first understand
that neither
individual learning
nor social equality
can be enhanced by
the ritual of
schooling. We cannot
go beyond the
consumer society
unless we first
understand that
obligatory public
schools inevitably
reproduce such a
society, no matter
what is taught in
them.

The project of
demythologizing
which I propose
cannot be limited to
the university
alone. Any attempt
to reform the
university without
attending to the
system of which it
is an integral part
is like trying to do
urban renewal in New
York City from the
twelfth story up.
Most current
college-level reform
looks like the
building of high-
rise slums. Only a
generation which
grows up without
obligatory schools
will be able to
recreate the
university.

The Myth of
Institutionalized
Values

School initiates,
too, the Myth of
Unending
Consumption. This
modern myth is
grounded in the
belief that process
inevitably produces
something of value
and, therefore,
production
necessarily produces
demand. School
teaches us that
instruction produces
learning. The
existence of schools
produces the demand
for

39 RITUALIZATION OF
PROGRESS

schooling. Once we
have learned to need
school, all our
activities tend to
take the shape of
client relationships
to other specialized
institutions. Once
the self-taught man
or woman has been
discredited, all
nonprofessional
activity is rendered
suspect. In school
we are taught that
valuable learning is
the result of
attendance; that the
value of learning
increases with the
amount of input;
and, finally, that
this value can be
measured and
documented by grades
and certificates.

In fact, learning is
the human activity
which least needs
manipulation by
others. Most
learning is not the
result of
instruction. It is
rather the result of
unhampered
participation in a
meaningful setting.
Most people learn
best by being "with
it," yet school
makes them identify
their personal,
cognitive growth
with elaborate
planning and
manipulation.

Once a man or woman
has accepted the
need for school, he
or she is easy prey
for other
institutions. Once
young people have
allowed their
imaginations to be
formed by curricular
instruction, they
are conditioned to
institutional
planning of every
sort. "Instruction"
smothers the horizon
of their
imaginations. They
cannot be betrayed,
but only short-
changed, because
they have been
taught to substitute
expectations for
hope. They will no
longer be surprised,
for good or ill, by
other people,
because they have
been taught what to
expect from every
other person who has
been taught as they
were. This is true
in the case of
another person or in
the case of a
machine.

This transfer of
responsibility from
self to institution
guarantees social
regression,
especially once it
has been accepted as
an obligation. So
rebels against Alma
Mater often "make
it" into her faculty
instead of growing
into the courage to
infect others with
their personal
teaching and to
assume
responsibility for
the results. This
suggests the
possibility of a new
Oedipus story-
Oedipus the Teacher,
who "makes" his
mother in order to
engender children
with her. The man
addicted to being
taught seeks his
security in
compulsive teaching.
The woman who
experiences her
knowledge as the
result of a process
wants to reproduce
it in others.

40 DESCHOOLING
SOCIETY

The Myth of
Measurement of
Values

The
institutionalized
values school
instills are
quantified ones.
School initiates
young people into a
world where
everything can be
measured, including
their imaginations,
and, indeed, man
himself.

But personal growth
is not a measurable
entity. It is growth
in disciplined
dissidence, which
cannot be measured
against any rod, or
any curriculum, nor
compared to someone
else's achievement.
In such learning one
can emulate others
only in imaginative
endeavor, and follow
in their footsteps
rather than mimic
their gait. The
learning I prize is
immeasurable re-
creation.

School pretends to
break learning up
into subject
"matters," to build
into the pupil a
curriculum made of
these prefabricated
blocks, and to gauge
the result on an
international scale.
People who submit to
the standard of
others for the
measure of their own
personal growth soon
apply the same ruler
to themselves. They
no longer have to be
put in their place,
but put themselves
into their assigned
slots, squeeze
themselves into the
niche which they
have been taught to
seek, and, in the
very process, put
their fellows into
their places, too,
until everybody and
everything fits.

People who have been
schooled down to
size let unmeasured
experience slip out
of their hands. To
them, what cannot be
measured becomes
secondary,
threatening. They do
not have to be
robbed of their
creativity. Under
instruction, they
have unlearned to
"do" their thing or
"be" themselves, and
value only what has
been made or could
be made.

Once people have the
idea schooled into
them that values can
be produced and
measured, they tend
to accept all kinds
of rank' ings. There
is a scale for the
development of
nations, another for
the intelligence of
babies, and even
progress toward
peace can be
calculated according
to body count. In a
schooled world the
road to happiness is
paved with a
consumer's index.

41 RITUALIZATION OF
PROGRESS

The Myth of
Packaging Values

School sells
curriculum--a bundle
of goods made
according to the
same process and
having the same
structure as other
merchandise.
Curriculum
production for most
schools begins with
allegedly scientific
research, on whose
basis educational
engineers predict
future demand and
tools for the
assembly line,
within the limits
set by budgets and
taboos. The
distributor-teacher
delivers the
finished product to
the consumer pupil,
whose reactions are
carefully studied
and charted to
provide research
data for the
preparation of the
next model, which
may be "ungraded,"
"student-designed,"
"team-taught,"
"visually-aided," or
"issue-centered."

The result of the
curriculum
production process
looks like any other
modern staple. It is
a bundle of planned
meanings, a package
of values, a
commodity whose
"balanced appeal"
makes it marketable
to a sufficiently
large number to
justify the cost of
production.
Consumer-pupils are
taught to make their
desires conform to
marketable values.
Thus they are made
to feel guilty if
they do not behave
according to the
predictions of
consumer research by
getting the grades
and certificates
that will place them
in the job category
they have been led
to expect.

Educators can
justify more
expensive curricula
on the basis of
their observation
that learning
difficulties rise
proportionately with
the cost of the
curriculum. This is
an application of
Parkinson's Law that
work expands with
the resources
available to do it.
This law can be
verified on all
levels of school:
for instance,
reading difficulties
have been a major
issue in French
schools only since
their per capita
expenditures have
approached U.S.
levels of 1950-when
reading difficulties
became a major issue
in U.S. schools.

In fact, healthy
students often
redouble their
resistance to
teaching as they
find themselves more
comprehensively
manipulated. This
resistance is due
not to the
authoritarian style
of a public school
or the seductive
style of some free
schools, but to

42 DESCHOOLING
SOCIETY

the fundamental
approach common to
all schools-the idea
that one person's
judgment should
determine what and
when another person
must learn.

The Myth of Self-
Perpetuating
Progress

Even when
accompanied by
declining returns in
learning,
paradoxically,
rising per capita
instructional costs
increase the value
of the pupil in his
or her own eyes and
on the market. At
almost any cost,
school pushes the
pupil up to the
level of competitive
curricular
consumption, into
progress to ever
higher levels.
Expenditures to
motivate the student
to stay on in school
skyrocket as he
climbs the pyramid.
On higher levels
they are disguised
as new football
stadiums, chapels,
or programs called
International
Education. If it
teaches nothing
else, school teaches
the value of
escalation: the
value of the
American way of
doing things.

The Vietnam war fits
the logic of the
moment. Its success
has been measured by
the numbers of
persons effectively
treated by cheap
bullets delivered at
immense cost, and
this brutal calculus
is unashamedly
called "body count."
Just as business is
business, the never-
ending accumulation
of money, so war is
killing, the never-
ending accumulation
of dead bodies. In
like manner,
education is
schooling, and this
open-ended process
is counted in pupil-
hours. The various
processes are
irreversible and
self-justifying. By
economic standards
the country gets
richer and richer.
By death-accounting
standards the nation
goes on winning its
war forever. And by
school standards the
population becomes
increasingly
educated.

School programs
hunger for
progressive intake
of instruction, but
even if the hunger
leads to steady
absorption, it never
yields the joy of
knowing something to
one's satisfaction.
Each subject comes
packaged with the
instruction to go on
consuming one
"offering" after
another, and last
year's wrapping is
always obsolete for
this year's
consumer. The
textbook racket
builds on this
demand. Educational
reformers promise
each new generation
the latest and the
best, and the public
is schooled into
demanding

43 RITUALIZATION OF
PROGRESS

what they offer.
Both the dropout who
is forever reminded
of what he missed
and the graduate who
is made to feel
inferior to the new
breed of student
know exactly where
they stand in the
ritual of rising
deceptions and
continue to support
a society which
euphemistically
calls the widening
frustration gap a
"revolution of
rising
expectations."

But growth conceived
as open-ended
consumption-eternal
progress-can never
lead to maturity.
Commitment to
unlimited
quantitative
increase vitiates
the possibility of
organic development.

Ritual Game and the
New World Religion

The school leaving
age in developed
nations outpaces the
rise in life
expectancy. The two
curves will
intersect in a
decade and create a
problem for Jessica
Mitford and
professionals
concerned with
"terminal
education." I am
reminded of the late
Middle Ages, when
the demand for
Church services
outgrew a lifetime,
and "Purgatory" was
created to purify
souls under the
pope's control
before they could
enter eternal peace.
Logically, this led
first to a trade in
indulgences and then
to an attempt at
Reformation. The
Myth of Unending
Consumption now
takes the place of
belief in life
everlasting.

Arnold Toynbee has
pointed out that the
decadence of a great
culture is usually
accompanied by the
rise of a new World
Church which extends
hope to the domestic
proletariat while
serving the needs of
a new warrior class.
School seems
eminently suited to
be the World Church
of our decaying
culture. No
institution could
better veil from its
participants the
deep discrepancy
between social
principles and
social reality in
today's world.
Secular, scientific,
and death-denying,
it is of a piece
with the modern
mood. Its classical,
critical veneer
makes it appear
pluralist if not
antireligious. Its
curriculum both
defines science and
is itself defined by
so-called scientific
research. No one
completes school--
yet. It never closes
its doors on anyone
without

44 DESCHOOLING
SOCIETY

first offering him
one more chance: at
remedial, adult, and
continuing
education.

School serves as an
effective creator
and sustainer of
social myth because
of its structure as
a ritual game of
graded promotions.
Introduction into
this gambling ritual
is much more
important than what
or how something is
taught. It is the
game itself that
schools, that gets
into the blood and
becomes a habit. A
whole society is
initiated into the
Myth of Unending
Consumption of
services. This
happens to the
degree that token
participation in the
open-ended ritual is
made compulsory and
compulsive
everywhere. School
directs ritual
rivalry into an
international game
which obliges
competitors to blame
the world's ills on
those who cannot or
will not play.
School is a ritual
of initiation which
introduces the
neophyte to the
sacred race of
progressive
consumption, a
ritual of
propitiation whose
academic priests
mediate between the
faithful and the
gods of privilege
and power, a ritual
of expiation which
sacrifices its
dropouts, branding
them as scapegoats
of underdevelopment.

Even those who spend
at best a few years
in school-and this
is the overwhelming
majority in Latin
America, Asia, and
Africa-learn to feel
guilty because of
their
underconsumption of
schooling. In Mexico
six grades of school
are legally
obligatory. Children
born into the lower
economic third have
only two chances in
three to make it
into the first
grade. If they make
it, they have four
chances in one
hundred to finish
obligatory schooling
by the sixth grade.
If they are born
into the middle
third group, their
chances increase to
twelve out of a
hundred. With these
rules, Mexico is
more successful than
most of the other
twenty-five Latin
American republics
in providing public
education.

Everywhere, all
children know that
they were given a
chance, albeit an
unequal one, in an
obligatory lottery,
and the presumed
equality of the
international
standard now
compounds their
original poverty
with the self-
inflicted
discrimination
accepted by the
dropout. They have
been schooled to the
belief in rising
expectations and can
now rationalize
their growing
frustration outside
school by accepting
their rejection from
scholastic grace.
They are excluded
from Heaven because,
once baptized,

45 RITUALIZATION OF
PROGRESS

they did not go to
church. Born in
original sin, they
are baptized into
first grade, but go
to Gehenna (which in
Hebrew means "slum")
because of their
personal faults. As
Max Weber traced the
social effects of
the belief that
salvation belonged
to those who
accumulated wealth,
we can now observe
that grace is
reserved for those
who accumulate years
in school.

The Coming Kingdom:

The Universalization
of Expectations

School combines the
expectations of the
consumer expressed
in its claims with
the beliefs of the
producer expressed
in its ritual, It is
a liturgical
expression of a
world-wide "cargo
cult," reminiscent
of the cults which
swept Melanesia in
the forties, which
injected cultists
with the belief that
if they but put on a
black tie over their
naked torsos, Jesus
would arrive in a
steamer bearing an
icebox, a pair of
trousers, and a
sewing machine for
each believer.

School fuses the
growth in
humiliating
dependence on a
master with the
growth in the futile
sense of omnipotence
that is so typical
of the pupil who
wants to go out and
teach all nations to
save themselves. The
ritual is tailored
to the stern work
habits of the
hardhats, and its
purpose is to
celebrate the myth
of an earthly
paradise of never-
ending consumption,
which is the only
hope for the
wretched and
dispossessed.

Epidemics of
insatiable this-
worldly expectations
have occurred
throughout history,
especially among
colonized and
marginal groups in
all cultures. Jews
in the Roman Empire
had their Essenes
and Jewish messiahs,
serfs in the
Reformation their
Thomas MŸnzer,
dispossessed Indians
from Paraguay to
Dakota their
infectious dancers.
These sects were
always led by a
prophet, and limited
their promises to a
chosen few. The
school-induced
expectation of the
kingdom, on the
other hand, is
impersonal rather
than prophetic, and
universal rather
than local. Man has
become the engineer
of his own messiah
and

46 DESCHOOLING
SOCIETY

promises the
unlimited rewards of
science to those who
submit to
progressive
engineering for his
reign.

The New Alienation

School is not only
the New World
Religion. It is also
the world's fastest-
growing labor
market. The
engineering of
consumers has become
the economy's
principal growth
sector. As
production costs
decrease in rich
nations, there is an
increasing
concentration of
both capital and
labor in the vast
enterprise of
equipping man for
disciplined
consumption. During
the past decade
capital investments
directly related to
the school system
rose even faster
than expenditures
for defense.
Disarmament would
only accelerate the
process by which the
learning industry
moves to the center
of the national
economy. School
gives unlimited
opportunity for
legitimated waste,
so long as its
destructiveness goes
unrecognized and the
cost of palliatives
goes up.

If we add those
engaged in full-time
teaching to those in
full-time
attendance, we
realize that this
so-called
superstructure has
become society's
major employer. In
the United States
sixty-two million
people are in school
and eighty million
at work elsewhere.
This is often
forgotten by neo-
Marxist analysts who
say that the process
of deschooling must
be postponed or
bracketed until
other disorders,
traditionally
understood as more
fundamental, are
corrected by an
economic and
political
revolution. Only if
school is understood
as an industry can
revolutionary
strategy be planned
realistically. For
Marx, the cost of
producing demands
for commodities was
barely significant.
Today most human
labor is engaged in
the production of
demands that can be
satisfied by
industry which makes
intensive use of
capital. Most of
this is done in
school.

Alienation, in the
traditional scheme,
was a direct
consequence of
work's becoming
wage-labor which
deprived man of the
opportunity to
create and be
recreated. Now young
people are
prealienated by
schools that isolate
them while they
pretend to be both
producers and
consumers of their
own knowledge, which

47 RITUALIZATION OF
PROGRESS

is conceived of as a
commodity put on the
market in school.
School makes
alienation
preparatory to life,
thus depriving
education of reality
and work of
creativity. School
prepares for the
alienating
institutionalization
of life by teaching
the need to be
taught. Once this
lesson is learned,
people lose their
incentive to grow in
independence; they
no longer find
relatedness
attractive, and
close themselves off
to the surprises
which life offers
when it is not
predetermined by
institutional
definition. And
school directly or
indirectly employs a
major portion of the
population. School
either keeps people
for life or makes
sure that they will
fit into some
institution.

The New World Church
is the knowledge
industry, both
purveyor of opium
and the workbench
during an increasing
number of the years
of an individual's
life. Deschooling
is, therefore, at
the root of any
movement for human
liberation.

The Revolutionary
Potential of
Deschooling

Of course, school is
not, by any means,
the only modern
institution which
has as its primary
purpose the shaping
of man's vision of
reality. The hidden
curriculum of family
life, draft, health
care, so-called
professionalism, or
of the media play an
important part in
the institutional
manipulation of
man's world-vision,
language, and
demands. But school
enslaves more
profoundly and more
systematically,
since only school is
credited with the
principal function
of forming critical
judgment, and,
paradoxically, tries
to do so by making
learning about
oneself, about
others, and about
nature depend on a
prepackaged process.
School touches us so
intimately that none
of us can expect to
be liberated from it
by something else.

Many self-styled
revolutionaries are
victims of school.
They see even
"liberation" as the
product of an
institutional
process. Only
liberating oneself
from school will
dispel such
illusions. The
discovery that most
learning requires no
teaching can be
neither manipulated
nor planned. Each of
us is personally
responsible for his
or her own
deschooling, and
only we have the
power to do

48 DESCHOOLING
SOCIETY

it. No one can be
excused if he fails
to liberate himself
from schooling.
People could not
free themselves from
the Crown until at
least some of them
had freed themselves
from the established
Church. They cannot
free themselves from
progressive
consumption until
they free themselves
from obligatory
school.

We are all involved
in schooling, from
both the side of
production and that
of consumption. We
are superstitiously
convinced that good
learning can and
should be produced
in us-and that we
can produce it in
others. Our attempt
to withdraw from the
concept of school
will reveal the
resistance we find
in ourselves when we
try to renounce
limitless
consumption and the
pervasive
presumption that
others can be
manipulated for
their own good. No
one is fully exempt
from the
exploitation of
others in the
schooling process.

School is both the
largest and the most
anonymous employer
of all. Indeed, the
school is the best
example of a new
kind of enterprise,
succeeding the
guild, the factory,
and the corporation.
The multinational
corporations which
have dominated the
economy are now
being complemented,
and may one day be
replaced, by
supernationally
planned service
agencies. These
enterprises present
their services in
ways that make all
men feel obliged to
consume them. They
are internationally
standardized,
redefining the value
of their services
periodically and
everywhere at
approximately the
same rhythm.

"Transportation"
relying on new cars
and superhighways
serves the same
institutionally
packaged need for
comfort, prestige,
speed, and gadgetry,
whether its
components are
produced by the
state or not. The
apparatus of
"medical care"
defines a peculiar
kind of health,
whether the service
is paid for by the
state or by the
individual. Graded
promotion in order
to obtain diplomas
fits the student for
a place on the same
international
pyramid of qualified
manpower, no matter
who directs the
school.

In all these cases
employment is a
hidden benefit: the
driver of a private
automobile, the
patient who submits
to hospitalization,
or the pupil in the
schoolroom must now
be seen as part of a
new class of
"employees." A
liberation movement
which starts in
school, and yet is
grounded in the
awareness of
teachers and

49 RITUALIZATION OF
PROGRESS

pupils as
simultaneously
exploiters and
exploited, could
foreshadow the
revolutionary
strategies of the
future; for a
radical program of
deschooling could
train youth in the
new style of
revolution needed to
challenge a social
system featuring
obligatory "health,"
"wealth," and
"security."

The risks of a
revolt against
school are
unforeseeable, but
they are not as
horrible as those of
a revolution
starting in any
other major
institution. School
is not yet organized
for self-protection
as effectively as a
nation-state, or
even a large
corporation.
Liberation from the
grip of schools
could be bloodless.
The weapons of the
truant officer and
his allies in the
courts and
employment agencies
might take very
cruel measures
against the
individual offender,
especially if he or
she were poor, but
they might turn out
to be powerless
against the surge of
a mass movement.

School has become a
social problem; it
is being attacked on
all sides, and
citizens and their
governments sponsor
unconventional
experiments all over
the world. They
resort to unusual
statistical devices
in order to keep
faith and save face.
The mood among some
educators is much
like the mood among
Catholic bishops
after the Vatican
Council. The
curricula of so-
called "free
schools" resemble
the liturgies of
folk and rock
masses. The demands
of high-school
students to have a
say in choosing
their teachers are
as strident as those
of parishioners
demanding to select
their pastors. But
the stakes for
society are much
higher if a
significant minority
loses its faith in
schooling. This
would endanger the
survival not only of
the economic order
built on the
coproduction of
goods and demands,
but equally of the
political order
built on the nation-
state into which
students are
delivered by the
school.

Our options are
clear enough. Either
we continue to
believe that
institutionalized
learning is a
product which
justifies unlimited
investment or we
rediscover that
legislation and
planning and
investment, if they
have any place in
formal education,
should be used
mostly to tear down
the barriers that
now impede
opportunities for
learning, which can
only be a personal
activity.

If we do not
challenge the
assumption that
valuable knowledge

50 DESCHOOLING
SOCIETY

is a commodity which
under certain
circumstances may be
forced into the
consumer, society
will be increasingly
dominated by
sinister pseudo
schools and
totalitarian
managers of
information.
Pedagogical
therapists will drug
their pupils more in
order to teach them
better, and students
will drug themselves
more to gain relief
from the pressures
of teachers and the
race for
certificates.
Increasingly larger
numbers of
bureaucrats will
presume to pose as
teachers. The
language of the
schoolman has
already been coopted
by the adman. Now
the general and the
policeman try to
dignify their
professions by
masquerading as
educators. In a
schooled society,
warmaking and civil
repression find an
educational
rationale.
Pedagogical warfare
in the style of
Vietnam will be
increasingly
justified as the
only way of teaching
people the superior
value of unending
progress.

Repression will be
seen as a missionary
effort to hasten the
coming of the
mechanical Messiah.
More and more
countries will
resort to the
pedagogical torture
already implemented
in Brazil and
Greece. This
pedagogical torture
is not used to
extract information
or to satisfy the
psychic needs of
sadists. It relies
on random terror to
break the integrity
of an entire
population and make
it plastic material
for the teachings
invented by
technocrats. The
totally destructive
and constantly
progressive nature
of obligatory
instruction will
fulfill its ultimate
logic unless we
begin to liberate
ourselves right now
from our pedagogical
hubris, our belief
that man can do what
God cannot, namely,
manipulate others
for their own
salvation.

Many people are just
awakening to the
inexorable
destruction which
present production
trends imply for the
environment, but
individuals have
only very limited
power to change
these trends. The
manipulation of men
and women begun in
school has also
reached a point of
no return, and most
people are still
unaware of it. They
still encourage
school reform, as
Henry Ford II
proposes less
poisonous
automobiles.

Daniel Bell says
that our epoch is
characterized by an
extreme disjunction
between cultural and
social structures,
the one being
devoted to
apocalyptic
attitudes, the other
to technocratic
decision-making.
This is certainly
true for many
educational re-

51 RITUALIZATION OF
PROGRESS

formers, who feel
impelled to condemn
almost everything
which characterizes
modern schools-and
at the same time
propose new schools.

In his The Structure
of Scientific
Revolutions, Thomas
Kuhn argues that
such dissonance
inevitably precedes
the emergence of a
new cognitive
paradigm. The facts
reported by those
who observed free
fall, by those who
returned from the
other side of the
earth, and by those
who used the new
telescope did not
fit the Ptolemaic
world view. Quite
suddenly, the
Newtonian paradigm
was accepted. The
dissonance which
characterizes many
of the young today
is not so much
cognitive as a
matter of attitudes-
-a feeling about
what a tolerable
society cannot be
like. What is
surprising about
this dissonance is
the ability of a
very large number of
people to tolerate
it.

The capacity to
pursue incongruous
goals requires an
explanation.
According to Max
Gluckman, all
societies have
procedures to hide
such dissonances
from their members.
He suggests that
this is the purpose
of ritual. Rituals
can hide from their
participants even
discrepancies and
conflicts between
social principle and
social organization.
As long as an
individual is not
explicitly conscious
of the ritual
character of the
process through
which he was
initiated to the
forces which shape
his cosmos, he
cannot break the
spell and shape a
new cosmos. As long
as we are not aware
of the ritual
through which school
shapes the
progressive
consumer--the
economy's major
resource--we cannot
break the spell of
this economy and
shape a new one.

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