Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?
Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.
Implicit in the banking concept [of education] is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others…In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside.
https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf
I know a handful of teachers, and they almost universally acknowledge that the problem with education is the insane bureaucracy. Standardized tests do nothing but ramp up anxiety for everyone involved. Administrators are constantly in CYA mode, as they off-load the actual labor of administration onto the lowest paid workers. VPs just run cover for the admins and exist to gaslight teachers and parents alike. Teachers are horrifically overworked and underpaid. Parents are constantly kept in the dark, except to hear how awful their children are and how every new draconian punishment is a singular remedy to keep their wretched spawn from becoming morality tales for the next line of parents.
The absolute last people at fault for all this shit are the kids. They’ve been commoditized and they are doing all that they can to struggle against that commoditization.
I grew up in a wealthy Houston suburb. Had a science teacher in 6th grade - back in the 90s - who was the gold standard for middle-school educators. He had us doing real chemistry in a lab setting. He kept a menagerie of small animals in the class (mostly lizards and rodents) for us to inspect (and periodically play with). He was generous with extra credit, took deep dives into every subject, and made that class the highlight of my day.
He was also a loosely closeted gay man.
When one of the kids in a class started getting bad grades, he decided the solution was to blackmail the teacher by threatening to claim sexual harassment if his grades didn’t improve. The teacher refused, and so the kid’s parents filed a complaint. Guy was out of that school before the semester was over.
He got replaced with a woman straight out of college who had no teaching experience and mostly just played old 80s science videos for the class. The exams were a joke and everyone got easy As in a grade where As don’t functionally matter. We didn’t do anything fun or exciting or learn anything particularly useful in that second semester. Shit sucked.
you hit the nail on the head. the job of a teacher is largely predicated on enforcing the behavioral norms of capitalism. my spouse just wants to teach kids math, not have to cop the ones who’s material conditions make sitting in school for 8 hours a day a psychologically intractable reality.
That story is wack af. Real fucking shame that happened. It sucks when you lose a good teacher, especially if they get replaced by one who’s not very good. Would be lying tho if I said I hadn’t also seen a lot of similar situations.
You’re completely correct that the administration is a major, central issue, and for all the reasons you mentioned. This isn’t only the case at lower, middle or high school but also at universities obviously, in which the size of the admin has ballooned and yet so has the the administrative work that academics now need to do. And which fucking sucks. This was implicit in my mind when writing but I didn’t make that clear by only mentioning resources.
The resources issue is also a matter of the economic situations of the students, the school and the teachers. If the kid is in a broken home where they have a single parent working 4 jobs who can barely make ends meet (like me) and doesn’t get to see their kid for much time each day, then this has an impact on the kids behavior, motivation and education, especially when they are, say, an adolescent boy surrounded by other equally angry, alienated, and frustrated adolescent boys struggling with a lot of mental health issues. Given the pressure of on them when their teachers put a lot of homework on them, the household environment they are doing this in matters. Also the resources put into public schools is just not the same, and this has an impact of the quality of the education, the pay, the number you can attract, the size of the classes, and the fact that certain students have been so failed by the system up to that point that it really can be extremely difficult to motivate them. Working class students also don’t have access to extra tuition and external guidance in the same way, and if they do it’s generally of lower quality.
And I can confirm that as a teacher everyone despises that pile of papers to be graded. So imagine you are in a public school and you have a class of 40 kids and you have to grade their standardized tests, and you may have more than one class you have to do that for regularly. On top you have to prepare classes. All of this is essentially unpaid labor-time.
There’s also an issue you have, especially if, like your old chemistry professor, you are LGBT, or if you are a woman, let alone both, where when you’re teaching a bunch of young angry adolescent teenagers, you’re going to hear a lot of crazy misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic shit. And you are often going to feel extremely uncomfortable when having to deal with a lot of that, and some people are going to feel very unsafe, for obviously justified reasons. This is a thing in both working-class and bougie settings, thought it’s expressed in different ways. I manage okay because I’m a more intimidating man and the combination of being disciplinary when necessary and otherwise very friendly and easygoing with the students, as well as trying to make it interesting for them, does somewhat pay off. Being a man also helps because women quickly realize that most teenage boys treat them with little-to-no respect. Heart goes out to my teaching comrades, especially the women and LGBT peeps.
The thing with bougie kids is that you can really see that they are often coming from households that raise them to believe the world belongs to them, that they are literally God’s gift to mankind, and that if a teacher just making ends meet calls out some unacceptable shit they do or say, as part of their education, then they must be at fault. And that’s not even getting to debates about ensuring that students know about topics that the chuds would rather pretend don’t exist or shouldn’t be spoken about as if they should.
When I’m Commissar of Education I will personally sign the death-warrant (in minecraft) for every bougie parent who’s ever said that teachers should get low pay because they are compensated because they ‘love their job’ or because their job is easy.