VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 16, SECTION 2
Illich and Foucault, Two Who Saw More Fiercely
The last section called out three who each walked half the way. This section brings in two more, who went further, and saw more fiercely. One means to abolish the school outright. The other set school and prison and barracks and factory down on one table. Does that sound familiar? The first section of the fourteenth chapter set the school and that other place down together too. So this second one, is he saying the same thing this book says?
The first is Illich, who in 1971 wrote Deschooling Society. The name is the claim. Take the school away. What did he see? He saw that the school draws three equal signs. It sets being educated equal to attending school, having learned equal to having sat through classes, and being able equal to holding a diploma. And once those three signs are drawn, a thing follows. A person who does not attend counts as uneducated. A person with no diploma counts as unable. And so every person becomes an unfinished half-product, to be worked on by the school to twenty two, to twenty six, through a stack of certificates with no end. A man of fifty who has done carpentry for thirty years, whose hand can read the grain of a board, has no diploma, and so on the ledger of this society he is low-schooled, while a man of twenty two who has never held a chisel, because he holds a piece of paper, can stand over him and give him orders. Illich called this a robbery. It takes from people the power they always had, to learn a thing on their own, and then, having taken it, sells it back to them as a commodity. He saw this with great accuracy. And is it not the very thing of the last chapter? Teaching swollen to a weight it never had, and steeping drained away, the child from three to twenty two held in the position of being worked on. Illich saw it more than fifty years ago.
And where did he stop? At the cry he raised. Abolish it. Recall the five layers of work from the first section of the fourteenth chapter. Minding the children, keeping them out of trouble, grinding them against one another, sifting them, and teaching. Abolish the school, and who takes up the five? Bring it down to four actual people. First, two parents both at work, out from half past seven in the morning to seven at night, and their eight-year-old, those eleven and a half hours, where does he go? Hire someone to watch him? At what cost? They cannot afford it, and so one of them, mostly the mother, quits and goes back to the stove. Illich did not think of this. Second, a boy of sixteen, out of school, his family with no money to apprentice him to a trade, waking each morning with nothing to do, and where does he go, and with whom, and where does that unspent strength go? Third, a girl of eight, teaching herself at home, bright, faster than the school, and yet across these twelve years, whom has she queued behind, fought for a seat with and made up with, split a cake with, been wronged by and swallowed it? Her books are better than anyone's. Her person has never once ground against another. Fourth, this society has to hand positions downward. Who does the surgery, who flies the plane, who is trusted with the money. With no diploma, you sift by what? By recommendation? Whose? And the poor children with no one to speak for them, what of them? The very sieve Illich would tear down is the one road up a poor child has. Four questions, and Illich answered none of them. He saw the sickness clearly, and did not catch the four layers of work. His line is satisfying. But after the satisfaction, people have to go home and eat. This is the cost of passing a verdict. You have sentenced the thing to death, and you cannot carry its work away.
The second is Foucault, who in 1975 wrote Discipline and Punish. He did a thing that startled the whole world. He set the modern school, the prison, the hospital, the barracks, and the factory down on one table, and said, look, they are built alike. Alike how? A wall enclosing people. A timetable slicing the day into blocks. Someone watching from above. A discipline. And one uniform ruler, measuring every person into pass or fail. Foucault gave this apparatus a name. Discipline. Modern society, he said, uses it to turn people, one by one, into the obedient shape. And now a voice must be sounding in you. Is this not the very line the teacher spoke in the first section of the fourteenth chapter, when those children said the days inside were much like boarding school? It is. What Foucault saw in 1975 is the same layer this book saw in that chapter. So is this book saying what he says? It is not. The difference is a single word. But to show that word, first look at the tower he drew.
Foucault's book describes a tower. An Englishman named Bentham designed it, a prison, more than a hundred years before. Draw it. A ring of cells around a circle, and the inward face of each cell open. At the center of the circle, a tower. The tower has windows, but they are dark, fitted with blinds. The prisoner looks up and cannot see whether anyone is in the tower. Cannot see. And so a thing happens. He does not know whether he is being watched at this moment, and therefore he must assume he is always watched. And therefore he manages himself. Think this all the way through. The cruelest thing about the tower is not that it watches you. It is that the tower can have no one in it at all. Not one guard need be hired, and the prisoners stay orderly, day after day, managing themselves. The one who manages has vanished, and the managing has not stopped for a single day. That is what Foucault meant. Now take your eyes off the tower and look elsewhere. The small black dot on the back wall of the classroom. The ranking board posted in the hallway. The homework book a parent must sign every night. The dean who might push the door open at any moment. Does the child know whether anyone is watching him just now? He does not. And so he assumes he is always watched. And so he sits up straight. The same tower. Foucault's stroke is fierce, because he carried that tower out of the prison and set it on the back wall of the classroom, and made you look at it.
So where does this book part from him? From where did Foucault go in? From exposure. Under his pen the tower is a yoke, a shackle laid on people, a thing to be recognized and thrown off. He wrote the book to jolt the reader awake. You are bound, and you do not know it. And so the whole of Foucault has a stance, and the stance is this. This apparatus is bad, and must go. And this book? After it laid out the five layers of work in the first section of the fourteenth chapter, what did it say? It said, to see these five clearly is not to curse them. It said, without this yard, who takes up those twelve years of daytime, and whose parents go to work? It said, to see clearly is to take back the share that was yours to carry all along. See it. The same tower, seen by both. Foucault says, this is a shackle, throw it off. This book says, this is five layers of work, and someone must carry them, and once you see clearly, you know which share is the school's and which is your own. One is a verdict, the other a position. The verdict is satisfying, and after it the days still have to be lived. The position is not satisfying, and it puts you back in the place where you should stand. Confucius spoke four words. Transmit, and do not invent. Only tell the thing as it is, and add none of your own sentence to it. And the sixth chapter brought in Laozi, teach without words. Real teaching does not hand down a verdict line by line. Lay the thing out, and people will see for themselves. Twenty five centuries ago the ancestors set that posture down, and this book, from its first chapter to this page, has held to those four words.
So here is where this section leaves us. Two who saw more fiercely. Illich in 1971 saw that the school equated attending with being educated, and made of a person a permanent half-product, a thirty-year carpenter with no diploma taking orders from one who never held a chisel, and he saw it with accuracy, but his line was abolish it, and after the school is gone, who takes the five layers of work, four questions he answered none of, for a verdict is easy to pass and its work hard to carry. Foucault in 1975 saw that school and prison and barracks and factory are built alike, and drew the tower that can have no one in it while the prisoners still manage themselves, the tower that stands today on the back wall of the classroom and the ranking board in the hall, the same layer this book saw, but he went in from exposure and called it a shackle to be thrown off, while this book, having laid the five layers out, said that to see clearly is not to curse but to take back your own share. The same tower, and two landings. One a verdict, one a position. Confucius, transmit and do not invent, Laozi, teach without words, set down twenty five centuries ago. That is the second part of the sixteenth stake. Seeing the very same layer, the one who passes a verdict and the one who lays out a position walk to two wholly different places. Five have now been called out. From five directions, each saw one branch of this tree. Set together, what do they show? The next section gathers the five, and nails the chapter. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.