A History of Education for the Many

Front matter

arn im coy

Curry Malott

A HISTORY OF EDUCATION FOR THE MANY From Colonization and Slavery to re Decline of

Part 4 History’s Future and the Role of the Many

11 A Unipolar Imperialist Power 12 An Emerging Counter-Force Conclusion: The Dialectics of History

Notes References Index

55 85 107 121 131

147 165

177 191 205

208 209 220 vi

Orienting a History of Education for the Many

A History of Education for the Many is similar to much of the literature in that it follows a chronological order. However, it is unique among history of US education survey textbooks in both scope and method. Rather than presenting the history of education’s chronological ordering as either a disconnected or loosely connected series of policies more or less passively following a changing society over time, the present volume examines change over time dialectically.

What this means is that educational policies, for example, are understood to be the result or outcome of a larger society-wide, highly complex balance of forces. That balance of forces, broadly speaking, for A History of Education for the Many, has been between the exploited, the colonized, and the enslaved, on one hand, and the enslavers, the colonizers, and the exploiters, on the other. The ongoing, back-and-forth, pushing-and-pulling between the balance of such forces moves historical development in different directions.

The present volume is therefore differentiated from the field because dialectics understands social formations to be finite entities that, without predetermination, rise and fall. Whereas mainstream history of education texts present US education and the larger society in which it is situated as almost inevitable entities that will deterministically forever exist, A History of Education for the Many charts educational development through the rise and now fall of US capitalism. Consequently, dialectics allows us to perceive a potential future beyond the system the current balance of forces finds expression.

Unlike mainstream history of education texts, A History of Education for the Many pays attention to the ways education has been mobilized as an instrument all sides of social antagonisms have employed to either maintain or end systems of oppression. Consequently, this book pays particular attention to social movements and collective action as the mechanism that advances collective interests.

Finally, A History of Education for the Many offers a unique view of the dialectical development of social control by examining the role of the police (i.e.

state violence) along with education or ideology over time. Again, what emerges is an understanding that the future of the history of education, along with the larger society in which it is a part, is not predetermined or guaranteed.

What follows is a discussion of the theoretical framework used to construct this history of education for the many. Beginning with the notion of orientation, this first chapter concludes with a more detailed discussion of dialectics.

Introduction

Histories are not simply mirror images of the past. Rather, histories are narratives or stories written from particular points of view or orientations. For example, the story of a conflict or contradiction can be told differently depending upon what side of the conflict or contradiction is doing the telling. Each side of a conflict or contradiction, in other words, has its own orientation. To be oriented is to know what direction one is facing and how to proceed accordingly. To be oriented is to be situated in space and time. How a particular thing relates to or is situated relative to other objects gives it an orientation. In this book, the history of education is understood as part of a larger conflict at the heart of the Spanish and then English colonization of what would become the United States of America.

This colonization was the product of particular social formations or state apparatuses at particular stages of their historical development. Challenging the assumption that the state is a neutral entity that either reflects the views of the polity or manages the conflict between competing social classes is the position that the state is an inherently repressive apparatus serving the interests of the class that is the ruling-class. For Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1971/2014), “the state is a repressive ‘machine’ that enables the dominant classes ... to ensure their domination over the working-class in order to subject it to the process of extorting surplus-value” (70) (i.e. exploiting workers).

However, theorists have pointed out that because of the relative autonomy of the state, there is no guarantee that “the political outcomes of the state will serve the needs of capital” (Jessop 2001). This approach has resulted in “more detailed accounts of the complex interplay of social struggles and institutions” (Jessop 2001: 5). Building on this approach Jessop (2004) notes that “instead of treating the state as a simple instrument of class power or as a unified rational subject, one must examine its institutional forms, how they shape the political class struggle, and the latter’s transformative impact on the state apparatus” (489). Similarly, Therborn (1978) theorizes the idea of mediation to articulate this complex dialectical relationship between the rulers and the ruled. However, for Therborn it is not necessarily the class character of the state that is indeterminate. Rather, it is the capitalist-class’s ability to maintain and enforce state rule that is indeterminant. Outlining this position Therborn (1978) elaborates:

Mediation, like representation, is traversed by the class struggle; how it functions in practice is determined by the constellation of forces arising out of the class struggle. But the state is never a neutral or passive mediator. Its fundamental class character is determined by the class character inscribed in the material rulemaking, rule-applying, rule-adjudicating and rule-enforcing apparatuses, as well as by the reproductive mechanisms of the ruling-class which circumscribe the radius of state intervention. Mediation here signifies not arbitration, by exercise of class power through the state. The class state does not go between the classes in order to separate fighters, but to connect them, in an asymmetric relationship of exploitation and domination.

(219-20)

Considering such detailed assessments of the state, it is clear that the state does not just consist of offices, departments, legislatures, and so on, but it also includes a population or citizenry and a physical geography or landbase, including bodies of water and air space. Nothing about states are static, permanent, timeless, or predetermined. Education, as an integral component of the state, has both developed as the state has developed, while simultaneously contributing to that development.

One of the primary functions of the state is to enact and enforce laws regarding everything from private property, who it regards and who it does not regard as its citizens, what constitutes its national boundaries, and how it monopolizes sanctioned violence. Central to this book is the issue of how the state compels people to submit to its laws and contribute to their functioning (Therborn 1978). For the purposes of this book, we can think of the means of control in two broad, interrelated categories: ideological and repressive. In two words, education and the police. Whereas the police serve no other major function outside of repression, public education not only manufactures social control and social reproduction (i.e. job training), it can also be mobilized to reveal and counter systems of oppression as a form of class struggle of the ruled. This book traces the balance of forces between the repressive state and people's resistance from colonial to contemporary times.

In 1976 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis acknowledged these two broad forms of social control and reproduction emphasizing the central role of education noting that “to attribute reproduction to force alone borders on the absurd” (127). In addition, Bowles and Gintis argue that “under normal conditions” state force remains a latent potential mobilized only during times of heightened class struggle. Historically situating this normalizing trend in state theory Jessop (2001) notes that “the modern state actually resorts less often to violence to control the populace: surveillance and disciplinary normalization do much of the work of regularizing activities in time and space” (15).

While these tendencies are perhaps more accurate in regards to the treatment of the white working class, for Indigenous, Latino, and Black working-class communities, police repression, despite the effectiveness of surveillance and disciplinary normalization (i.e. force), is a daily occurrence. Bringing the role of state repression back into the historical discussion of social reproduction and working-class resistance, as is done in this book, adds a layer of analysis into this history of education of the many.

Even though the development of the class contradiction/conflict since Columbus's arrival in 1492 has been complex, at its most general level we can describe it as a highly unstable system consisting of two broad sides, the few and the many. The few, or the 1 percent, came to the Western hemisphere as enslaving, capitalist European colonizers in competition with each other. On the other side, the many are the masses of workers and the oppressed and colonized from Indigenous peoples, African Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, European Americans, etc., or the 99 percent. A history of education told from the many’ side of the conflict reveals its orientation when situated next to a history of education told from the point of view of the few. Orientation, therefore, is first of all about locating a place of departure to begin from. The place of beginning impacts the appearance of what is there.

For example, from the point of view of the capitalist state apparatus the police are all who keep the chaos of criminality in check. The collective experience of the many, especially Black America, reveals the opposite. That is, the existence of the police plays a central role in preventing the emergence of safe and sustainable communities. Because the primary task of the police is to protect capitalist property relations and the so-called right of the 1 percent to appropriate the wealth produced by workers, entire communities are kept in deep poverty and patrolled daily by an occupying army of police. Guarding society as it exists the police are always ready to suppress periodic outbursts of rebellion (Correia & Wall 2018; Vitale 2018).

The zero point of orientation, the here, defines the relative distance to there. From the relationship between here and there emerge this side and that side of the conflict or contradiction. For the police state and the capitalist-class it serves rebellions are unjustified riotous chaos. For this history of education for the many rebellions are an expression of the system's inability to solve its contradictions. From the logic of the police state rebellions are always to be pacified through the combined use of force and cooption (i.e. the ideological manipulation of cops taking a knee). On the other side of the antagonism rebellions are positive, and when successful, develop into revolutions capable of resolving the contradictions the capitalist state is unable and unwilling to resolve. The fate of rebellions, and the development of history more generally, is therefore determined by the complex interaction of competing forces and the tactical choices each side makes.

It is important to note that from a dialectical perspective nothing is fixed or static as all existing entities are in a perpetual state of development and change. Sides of conflicts are therefore not fixed or predetermined, or have independent existences apart from each other, as their interconnected movement and change are driven by a complex, multifaceted contest between forces, the outcome of which is historical development.

Relevant here is Harry Harootunian’s (2015) argument that historians tend to mistakenly replace history as the object with an incorrect idea of it. For example, he challenges conceptions of space that treat history as moving through predetermined stages. The idea that all social formations (i.e. societies) are basically the same, proceeding through identical and predetermined stages suggests that the way capitalism emerged in Britain from feudalism into capitalism would be replicated in other contexts. Harootunian also challenges the idea that so-called stages proceed linearly, each signaling a new beginning disconnected from previous stages, thereby distorting the continuity across time and space with no single social formation ever fixed, final, or complete. Lenin (1920/2016) contributes to our understanding of historical complexity noting that “history generally, and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and ‘subtle” than the most sophisticated commentators “imagine” (76).

Since orientation is so central to our understanding of the history of education, its meaning is explored further before proceeding to a focused engagement with dialectics.

On Orientation

To be in the world is to be objectively oriented in it, which is related to, but does not necessarily determine, one’s subjective orientation. The perspectives that emerge from orientations therefore are partial and not immovable. To be oriented is to tend to perceive one side of something and not others. What is hidden is not just the result of spatial or ideological issues that cause an inability to comprehend everything all at once. What is hidden also tends to be the result of temporal factors or what has already happened that accounts for the object’s arrival. If arrival is determined by the historical development of the larger totality,' then historical narratives are crucial for filling in the gaps of the past.

While the determinants that determined what is cannot be altered after the fact, how the past is understood and analyzed is an open debate. With this insight, we do not “take objects,” such as systems of capitalist schooling and the police, “as given,’ failing to account for the “conditions of their arrival” (41). This is another way to articulate the gap between an object and the idea of it. Replacing the object with the idea of it can create the illusion that the object has fixed, final, and inherent qualities.

The orientation of the many, in part, is determined by their awareness of the conditions of their arrival. The capitalist has advanced a historical narrative that would have the many believe they possess innate qualities rendering their status eternal. Similarly, Harootunian’s (2015) analysis of stagism is critical of the way it portrays the individual as self-made and without a history or conditions of arrival. Reorienting the historical narrative so the frame of perception is wide enough to capture the legacy of primitive accumulation,’ indoctrinating education, state repression, and the long legacy of the many’s resistance is fundamental.

Being conscious of one’s conditions of arrival suggests an awareness of self as an embodiment of “sedimented histories” (Ahmed 2006: 56). In other words, the policies and practices (i.e. suspending Black students at four times the rate as white students for the same things) that give schooling an orientation are the result of a long and ongoing contested history of conflict (i.e. outlawing literacy for enslaved Africans) that accumulates over time like sedimentation on the bottom of a lake. What it means to be a student, teacher, or administrator at any given time is an always contestable embodiment of this sedimentation. What makes this sedimented history contestable is that the future is never predetermined or already known. While sedimentation mediates the shaping of time, its ongoing influence is vulnerable to subversion, resistance, and revolutionary transformation.

Harry Harootunian’s (2015) metaphorical use of the palimpsest? points to a non-synchronous synchronicity, or a past that is contemporary. Rather than conceptualizing historical development as moving through separate, unrelated stages, Harootunian offers another way to think about how repetition creates continuity, thereby giving bodies orientation. The idea that the past is present can be mobilized to understand the ways in which the liberation movements of bygone eras become visible during times of crisis when the illusion of the permanence of capitalism is shattered.

The drive to contest, more generally, stems from the nature of the arrival of the many whose “corporeal schema” has been “interrupted.” The laboring body of the many, or the body of labor, is a body not “at home” (Ahmed 2006: 157). The capitalist world is a world of capital. The laboring body provides the substance for all new capital while itself suffers from perpetual and fluctuating want. The capitalist who feeds off the labor of others, flush with capital, is a body at home in capitalism, while the worker is not at home here.

The mobilization of racialization has played a central role in dramatically increasing the severity of oppression. If colonialism makes the world white and therefore makes it home for those bodies made white, then the body not at home is framed as a body whose labor produces less value. Within this framework the so-called Black body is portrayed as not only less valuable, but deviant and criminally prone, and therefore subjected to the daily repression of the police as an occupying army.

The colonial basis of whiteness as justification for super exploitation and state violence represents the ideological orientation of physical space. The European ruling-class idea of “the East” as the object, as the horizon, or as the line marking the separation between so-called “civilization” or “Godly society” and “savagery” treats “the East” as if it “were a property of certain places and people” (113). The effect is the creation of an other whose history of arrival is grotesquely distorted to justify extreme abuse, violence, murder, dehumanization, and exploitation. Struggles around defining, re-defining, and policing orientation are therefore central to considerations involving the history of education for the many.

Dialectics

Dialectics is a theory of motion (i.e. change, movement, development, etc.). It is a theory that grasps how many of the competing social forces driving the movement of society are often hidden or mystified. Dialectics gives us a way of uncovering these hidden forces. The dialectic is powerful because it breaks through the illusion that isolated facts speak for themselves. Only by situating facts or ideas in the historical totality of society do they begin to make real sense. To comprehend the movement of time itself, we must conceive of the interaction of forces as much more than the interaction of static and independent entities. When the parts of the totality change, their relationship to the totality changes, and they themselves change. Dialectics presents reality as an ongoing social process; nothing is ever static or fixed. What follows is an introduction to the major components of dialectics, including the unity or interpenetration of opposites, sublation, and the negation of the negation.

The Interpenetration of Opposites

What compels entities to be in a constant state of non-deterministic motion are their internal contradictions, or the forces generated by the unity of opposites. The most central or essential contradiction within feudalism was between peasant and feudal lord; in slavery, it was between the enslaved and the enslaver; and in capitalism, it is between labor and capital.

Labor and capital are opposites because they have contradictory drives. For example, historically, labor has spontaneously sought to decrease the rate of exploitation by collectively bargaining for higher wages, better conditions, benefits, and so on. When successful, these decrease profit margins. Capital, on the other hand, seeks to always increase the rate of exploitation, and when successful increase the rate of profit.

Labor and capital are therefore compelled by opposite and antagonistic drives. This antagonism can be mediated by unions and state regulation on one hand, and police repression and anti-labor laws on the other, but it can only be overcome through the abolition of the relationship (i.e. the negation of the negation).

Labor and capital therefore do not have an independent existence apart from each other. To be a worker is by definition to be exploited by the capitalist-class, and to bea capitalist is by definition to exploit workers. The relationship between labor and capital is therefore internal. As a relation of exploitation, capital is a unity of contradictions. The dialectical development of this relationship over time is the movement of the balance of forces within capitalism.

Sublation

When something is sublated, it is both overcome yet preserved. In other words, something that has been sublated “retains even that which is negated” (Ford 2018: 1). Ford (2018: 9) explores a critique of the conception of sublation arguing it locks the subject into altering pre-existing options, alternatives, or outcomes. The notion of exodus, on the other hand, opens up possibilities unimaged within the narrow limits of what is. For the purposes of this book, we might note that the way in which capitalism might be sublated to better meet the needs of the many is not predetermined. What we can say, following Ford (2018: 8), is that “the possible,” in whatever way, “always encompasses its own negation” (Ford 2018: 8).

We might think of Harootunian’s use of the palimpsest metaphor as another way to describe sublation, thereby critiquing linear, stagist conceptions of history. That is, the faded, ancient text on the palimpsest with new writing transcribed on top of it has been overcome yet preserved in an altered form. The old text, in other words, has been sublated and is therefore characterized by both continuity and newness.

It is precisely because social formations, such as capitalism, do not develop automatically, mechanically, or in a predetermined fashion, even though their internal logics orient their development in particular directions, sublation will always retain an element of indeterminacy.

Ideas, such as histories of education, and education itself, as well as the police violence of the state organized to repress the peoples movement toward sublation, are fundamentally important as they impact the balance of forces either stalling or advancing sublation.

The Negation of the Negation

The tendency toward the negation of the negation is arguably at the heart of dialectical development. It refers specifically to the way that phenomena and structures produce their opposites. However, the idea that the internal development of entities produces their opposites should not be misunderstood as a form of stagism or predetermination. In regards to oppressive systems from feudalism, slavery to capitalism, the oppressed have an interest in transforming them into their non-oppressive or less-oppressive opposites whereas the oppressors have an interest in preserving or extending them. When something undergoes the process of the negation of the negation, it has developed into something qualitatively distinct from what it was. Things can only develop out of things.

Approaching the history of education dialectically this book examines how education itself is always the product of a particular balance of forces between and within the primary and antagonistically related social classes in capitalist society. How have teachers and other workers leveraged power and control over their work when the existing state is an apparatus of capitalist-class power? Unions, mass movements, and successful, prolonged uprisings come to mind.

It is the intention of this text to demonstrate how each era and therefore each chapter develops from each other as a result of a fluid and shifting balance of forces. The story told here begins at the dawn of the sixteenth century.

Part One Turning the World Upside Down

A History of Education for the Many charts the development of education through the rise and fall of US capitalism. This is the story of the quantitative development of a society inching ever closer toward the negation of the negation. What these United States of America will be sublated into is unknown. However, we do know that it will be the dialectical product of a struggle between competing class forces.

Our place of departure is the struggle for dominance between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and English colonialism mediated by the resistance of manacled Africans and Native Americans.

“Although we come across the first beginnings of capitalist production as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth century, sporadically, in certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalistic era dates from the sixteenth century” (Marx 1867/1967: 715).

The story here begins at the dawn of the capitalist era at the end of the fifteenth century in the European Mediterranean from which Christopher Columbus would engage in four voyages west to the so-called new world. Revolutionizing the Columbus narrative, historian Gerald Horne (2020) departs from both the discovery myth and the lost-at-sea myth and in the process obliterates all fantasies of European supremacy. Recontextualizing the desperation thesis Horne (2020) demonstrates how the superior Ottoman forces drove Madrid and Western Europeans to the Western hemisphere. Horne (2020) brings attention to the role of the Ottoman Empire as the premiere, dominant global force of the sixteenth century, even after being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century.

Painting a picture of an era engulfed in a whirlwind of human movement, migration, and enslavement, Horne (2020) unveils a sixteenth century where European powers, far from dominant, are struggling to survive. For example, as the Ottoman Empire rose to dominance “Christians, sensing the directions of the prevailing winds, began defecting to the Ottoman side” (Horne 2020: 22). The Ottoman fleet, Horne (2020) reports, reflected the larger composition of the Ottoman Empire with Turks serving as commanders, Greeks and Bulgarians as oarsmen, and what Horne (2020) calls “specialists” drawn from “the heart of Christian Europe: Genoese, Catalans, Sicilians, Provençals [and] Venetians” (22).

As Madrid was moving to repress and enslave Africans for the so-called new world by the mid-sixteenth century the Ottomans had essentially conquered Eastern Europe, North Africa, and today’s Middle East. Even though fleeing west opened the door for further Ottoman expansion, ultimately, the wealth accumulated in the colonies was so vast that it “allowed Madrid and their immediate neighbors to reverse what appeared to be insuperable advantages enjoyed by the Ottomans” (Horne 2020: 23).

Feudalistic State Power

The form of state power that served as the model in the colonies was that which was dominating Europe at the time—a form of feudalism based on inherited power with the Roman Catholic Church as its international center. In fact, the Catholic Church, which held “one-third of the soil of the Catholic world, but was nevertheless being threatened by Ottoman supremacy, served as Europe's “most powerful feudal lord” (Engels 1892/2007: 28).

The feudalistic state maintained power in a number of fundamental ways. First and foremost, dominance was achieved through the “centralization of the resources of the ruling-class” (Therborn 1978: 219). As a result, the ruled, in this case the peasantry, had to face not only local members of the ruling-class, “but a formidable apparatus in which the acquisitions of that class have been pooled” (Therborn 1978: 219). For Marxist philosopher Göran Therborn (1978: 219), the state is not just a concentrated form of external power wielded over the ruled, but it also “comprises them”. In other words, both peasants and lords “were subjects of the feudal king” (Therborn 1978: 219).

The state is therefore designed to be an all-encompassing social entity. Central in the pursuit of complete control the feudal state sought to be a singular power with undivided representation. A highly concentrated repressive apparatus ran by a system of courts, bailiffs, henchmen, and prisons codified and enforced the feudal state's class character.

But the development of capitalism in London led to a split in the Christian state apparatus, resulting in England breaking from Rome and the Roman Catholic Church in a series of Parliamentary acts between 1532 and 1534. For example, the 1534 Act of Supremacy declared that the King of England, Henry, was the supreme head of the Church of England. This was a clear rupture from the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrine proclaiming itself to be the rightful representative of the one true God, and therefore supreme ruler of the entire world. Because this split resulted in the fracturing of the feudal ruling-class’s centralized resources and thus power, at first glance it seemed to indicate an opportune moment for the Ottomans to surge ahead.

Deteriorated Conditions in the Late Feudal State

The misery plaguing fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe suggested that a major political split in the Christian ruling-class state was an indicator of further decline. The instability and economic crisis of the Spain from which Columbus departed was so severe that the slightest fluctuations in food prices would cause thousands more than usual to starve to death. Regularly occurring famine in the countryside would cause an influx of desperate peasants into the cities in search of relief, which would in turn trigger epidemics and thousands of more fatalities. Sanitation was virtually non-existent with human feces and discarded animal remains rotting in the streets, and massive graves of the poor laying open, festering, waiting for an unceremonious layer of turf. For the vast and desperate peasantry, it was a virtual hell on earth.

The stench of the cities was so vile it lacks a modern comparison. Not only was bathing rare, many people never bathed their entire lives. Contributing to the putrid air was the commonplace smell of those desperately clinging to life, overtaken with oozing scabs, festering wounds, decaying teeth, and deformations left by ravenous diseases such as smallpox. Lawlessness and street crime were rampant amongst the living. Food riots were frequent and often broke out into prolonged warfare, leaving vast revolutionary traditions amongst the many in their wake. The suppression of the Peasant War in Germany between 1524 and 1525 left more than 100,000 of the 300,000 armed peasants slaughtered.

Slower to develop than England and France, Germany had no central hub of commerce. Individual princes sought increasingly more burdensome taxes to fund their luxuries, standing armies, and costs of government, which primarily fell upon the peasantry. The knights too increased their plundering of the peasants as industry and modern artillery increased their own expenses but with little if any new sources of income. In addition to the princes and knights, the clergy too served as feudal lords exploiting their dependents just as ruthlessly. Engels (1870/2006) notes that “in addition to the rack” the clergy “applied the fear of ex-communication ... to wring the last penny from their subjects” (5). Towns also exploited the peasants to fund their growing expenses. Summarizing this situation Engels concludes that “no matter whose subject the peasant was ... he was treated by all as a thing, a beast of burden, and worse” (10). However, despite this crushing oppression peasants were scattered over a large geographical area making “a single general national peasant revolt,” before 1524, extremely difficult, even though “many local peasant insurrections” (11) were common.