Schools Of Procrustes
Monday Map
Introduction: The School of Procrustes
Having been obsessed with it for some time now, the bed of Procrustes is the best imagery I can use to communicate my grievance in this essay. So, to start with, here is a brief story on the Bed of Procrustes.
"Procrustes, also called Polypemon, Damastes, or Procoptas, in Greek legend, a robber dwelling somewhere in Attica—in some versions, in the neighbourhood of Eleusis. His father was said to be Poseidon. Procrustes had an iron bed (or, according to some accounts, two beds) on which he compelled his victims to lie. Here, if a victim was shorter than the bed, he stretched him by hammering or racking the body to fit. Alternatively, if the victim was longer than the bed, he cut off the legs to make the body fit the bed’s length. In either event,the victim died. Ultimately Procrustes was slain by his own method by the young Attic hero Theseus, who as a young man slew robbers and monsters whom he encountered while travelling from Trozen to Athens.
The “bed of Procrustes,” or “Procrustean bed,” has become proverbial for arbitrarily—and perhaps ruthlessly—forcing someone or something to fit into an unnatural scheme or pattern. 1 "
A thing is said to have a Procrustean nature if it requires that an entity that is independent of it is denatured to fit its specified scheme. By applying some damaging action to a thing so that it fits an existing pattern, we can arbitrarily say that such a thing is Procrustean.
I deem Standardised schooling (mostly but not limited to university) as Procrustean because students, most especially children, over the years, have faced the damaging effect of being bent or forced to fit the existing schooling system.
You probably do not know this but, school comes from the Latin word Skole, which means leisure. This etymology describes what schooling ought to be like. But can you imagine or describe school as leisurely? Skole describes a place where we celebrate the pursuit of knowledge. But you and I both know that the places where we celebrate knowledge are places- movie theatres, our living rooms, playgrounds, comedy shows, churches, discos, anywhere that we have fun; except school. It is odd that we experience pleasurable learning and the celebration of knowledge in random places rather than in school. Instead, school feels like a vehicle assembly plant where we are constantly being altered by robots, and where we are shoved through a giant social reactor to obtain specific products. It doesn’t fit the description of leisure.
For emphasis, let us reimagine the concept of leisure. When last did you feel scared that you missed out on leisure? Do you ever get anxious that you are not taking your leisure time seriously? Is there a haunting fear that you will “fail” your leisure test? If your answer is no to all these questions, you are a normal human being. If you answered yes to any of these (not to talk of all 3) questions, you need help. Fast! If you have no fear of failing leisure, then where is your anxiety of school coming from? Well, I know the answer. But just before I tell you, you should by this time already know that school is anything but leisure. And it is not only a localised experience. It is a universal one (source: my guts).
When Skole changed form from a place to celebrate the pursuit of knowledge to a place where citizens are prepared for the workforce (more like a factory that produces factory workers), the celebration of knowledge left and we were filled with crippling anxiety of “failing in life.” It lost its vitality, which then was replaced by high monetary costs and emotional terror.
You know schools (standardised as we know it) are Procrustean when a child knows that if he fail maths, and by consequence fail his class, and by any means drop out of school, he would become a useless fellow (in other words a failed product of the factory that produces factory workers). When a child knows right from his formative years that school helps him to secure “his future” rather than foster learning, we have a problem. Once a child thinks that passing in class is more important than learning, he would unconsciously adjust his priority to enable him to pass rather than learn. And no, the external incentive of grades and rewards does not always translate to people learning. All external incentives to learn are deformed the moment genuine curiosity dies. In all, it is a symptom of a subtle disease to see schooling as the only means for a child to succeed in life. We are in a bad place. Does this mean that the grading system enhances anxiety and the fear of failure?
Every time I read a suggestion online that critical thinking should be taught in schools to students, I roll my eyes in my head at the naivety of the speaker. The Procrustean nature of schools is so strong that its products unknowingly embark on this campaign of squeezing everything to fit the system. Where the original story had one Procrustes and multiple dead victims, our own Procrustean schooling doesn’t kill its victims. Instead, it transforms its victims into brain-dead Procrustesus too. It is a zombification. And it is so bad that we look down on self-motivated learners who do not operate or gain their credibility from within academia. We view dilettantes as knockoffs of what academia produces. Inmates – the product of factory-style schooling cannot contemplate the legitimacy of an endeavour that does not have its roots within the school system. You know that victims of Procrustean schooling have become Procrustes themselves when you hear comments like "why are we learning this? How does it help me make money?" It is always in hindsight, and after a clash on Twitter (where someone misunderstands their claims) that folks insist that critical thinking should be taught in schools. Of course, schools (mostly universities) have succeeded in convincing us that all things knowledge originate from them. It is a lie.
School as a Factory that produces Factory-workers
In answering why schools come with terror rather than the celebration of knowledge, the answer is simply that owing to the need to mass-produce workers who will keep the economy running, schools have become a factory where we produce factory workers.
I am not the first to complain about the shrivelling effect of school on self-motivated learning. So, to those of us who have been silently or visibly decrying this pain, it seems as if school is failing. But David Albert upon reading the works of John Gatto realised otherwise; that school is not failing. It is succeeding as planned. He wrote in the Introduction to Dumbing us Down by John Gatto that
“[Gatto provided], and continues to provide the key to comprehending this conundrum. Central to this understanding is the fact that schools are not failing. On the contrary, they are spectacularly successful in doing precisely what they are intended to do, and what they have been intended to do since their inception. The system, perfected at places like the University of Chicago, Columbia Teachers College, Carnegie-Mellon, and Harvard, and funded by the captains of industry, was explicitly set up to ensure a docile, malleable workforce to meet the growing, changing demands of corporate capitalism — “to meet the new demands of the 20th century,” they would have said back then.”
It is a brand new world when you realise that a harmful phenomenon within the system is a feature and not a bug in the system. He continued that
“The Combine (whoops, slipped again!) ensures a workforce that will not rebel — the greatest fear at the turn of the 20th century — that will be physically, intellectually, and emotionally dependent upon corporate institutions for their incomes, self-esteem, and stimulation, and that will learn to find social meaning in their lives solely in the production and consumption of material goods. We all grew up in these institutions and we know they work. They haven’t changed much since the 1890s because they don’t need to – they perform precisely as they are intended.”
While I certainly agree with Mr David Albert about the effects, I cannot ascertain that the effect no matter how pernicious it is, is a direct effect of a deliberate and malicious plan to keep the people docile and shrivelled. It doesn’t make the effect any better if it was malicious or not. But it matters how we approach it. How you approach unintended consequences is not the same as how you approach a ruthless monster. But we are focusing on neither here. What we are doing is finding a vivid description of this reality.
Speaking of description, what we now have is a technocracy; not a celebration of knowledge. And speaking of technocracy, Neil Postman writes
“Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization. Technocracy also speeded up the world. We could get places faster, do things faster, and accomplish more in a shorter time. Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost.”
Does the economy need to be kept alive? Yes. But is this soulless system of education a worthy substitute for what we could achieve otherwise? I don’t think so. When you set up a system, whether innocently or not, that is intended to produce workers for the economy, you will get that. But at the expense of something else. I am not willing to give up that something else. But do you know the downside to that? The downside to not agreeing to be a factory worker is hyperbolically equivalent to being a normie in a zombie apocalypse - you get hunted down.
Why I am Not a Fan of Kumbayaism
The observation of the non-linear behavior of humans in groups has done a good job of letting me know that “just be kind” is not the solution to the problem of evil.
This non-linear observation is the type where you see that the behaviour emanating from a group of 20 is not two times what behavior comes from a group of 10. Sometimes, it shoots high, and other times it is just totally different behaviour. Holding hands around the fire cannot account for the uncertainty in human behavior.
Because the effects of human interaction change as the scale changes, we need a more robust measure that “just be kind” cannot solve.
We need strong institutions at different scales and different levels. We need to keep our ethics real more than we theorise about ethics. Kumbayaism is great only in imagination; always terrible in reality. From such I desist.
Of course, here is your picture:
