85. WALKING IT OFF - Avoiding Atrophy and Learning How to Self-Govern
The anarchist thinker, Errico Malatesta, once suggested growing up with external authority imposed upon us was like learning to walk in leg braces. We don’t even realise the imposition that is dragging us down, and the limitations put upon our ability to walk, let alone run. We simply trudge as best we can in the belief that this restricted movement is the best propulsion possible because we know no better.
Malatesta is speaking about freedom, not walking. We believe ourselves to be free under the authority of the state, but it is a poor relative of true freedom. An ugly and repressed facsimile. But the metaphor goes further – one whose legs are bound from birth would not only mistake their suppressed movement as the full extent of their abilities but would find their legs to be atrophied if ever one did remove the braces. To walk without the braces would be difficult at first. There would be great pain and many falls before independent strength is restored. It might even feel like to walk without the braces would be impossible. That the braces had been helping rather than hindering all along. They might wish to put the braces back on rather than struggle to walk independently without them.
When I used to teach undergraduate philosophy seminars at Cardiff University, I noticed a strange phenomenon. Every year the students seemed to get more and more helpless when it came to writing essays. In my first year, as had been the case during my own undergraduate studies, all that was needed was to give the students an essay title and away they’d go. But by my last year students were more and more asking me for an essay plan or guidance on structure instead of figuring it out for themselves. Of course I gave the students what they needed, and we came up with some scaffolding to help them write their essays, but I remember wondering why it was that only a few years before myself and my fellow undergraduate cohort could just get on with it ourselves while these guys seemed to need to have their hands held? I got my answer as soon as I became a secondary school teacher. Whereas, again, in my day the approach to writing most essays had been to sink or swim all by ourselves, by the time I was standing at the front of the classroom the dominant wisdom I had been given through my training was that students these days couldn’t possibly be expected to write an extended piece of writing without being helped. It would be cruel to give them a title without a structure.
My undergraduate students were coming from a world where their hands had been held right up until they left school. When asked to go it alone, of course they didn’t know what to do. Like Malatesta’s bound limbs, they thought they knew how to walk but in reality their legs had atrophied.
This is not to say that having a structure shared with you doesn’t help inform the uninitiated. It would be unfair to expect someone who had never seen an essay before to write an essay. But an alternative to giving a set of rules to be inflexibly followed is to give the students a range of different essays to read. Let them figure out the way an essay is structured themselves by finding what is held in common within each of the diverse examples: a line of thought, coherently established and explained and, where relevant, evaluated and defended. But if all students are used to is being told what to do explicitly by the person in authority (their teacher), then few have the confidence to listen to their own authority and follow their instincts about essay writing based on their own observations and ideas. When encouraged to read around the subject and think for themselves the usual response is for those students to come back and ask you which essay you think is best – which structure is best for them to copy – rather than making a confident decision for themselves and finding their own voice.
Who though can expect students to develop independence and self-governance when we teachers so often equally defer to authority instead of acting with autonomy? Pedagogical fads sweep the profession every few years as magic bullet ideas of perfect lesson plans and techniques are credulously bought into and applied to the letter without critical scrutiny simply because it is the latest school policy. Whether a student’s essay or a teacher’s lesson, the guidance that it is entirely up to you to figure out what is best for the circumstances and that “best” might change depending on a billion different variables each time is little comfort when trained to wait obediently and be told how to proceed. This year’s supposedly “cancelled” exams, for example, did not give rise to liberation and innovation in assessment as they could have done. Instead, guidance from the Department for Education was followed by schools rigidly, alongside guidance from exam boards, and the exact same system of examination that was meant to be “cancelled” was instead replicated, outsourced directly to schools too afraid to figure it out for themselves.
The reason I got dismayed by my students of all ages repeatedly asking me to write a scaffold for their philosophy essays is that, unsurprisingly, the consequence was always the same: a pile of identically structured answers not seeking to really think about the issue in the title but seeking only to please me by rigidly adhering to the recommended structure given to them by their teacher. The essays read like essays, structurally speaking, but lacked the individual flare of having anything personal or interesting to say. They were cookie-cutter, bland, prefab. And the few brave souls who ignored the scaffold, thought for themselves about the issue, and put together a unique and coherent argument, stood out impressively from the rest. The same was always true in the secondary school classroom. We could give you the formula that would tick the boxes of the exam board assessment criteria, but the students who always got the highest grades were those who could work without stabilisers and construct their own ideas independently.
I have thought about this a lot in the last fifteen months. I have written before about how Covid 19 had the potential to challenge many of my anarchist instincts as free human action appeared to be the cause of massive and fatal viral spread and significant state intervention seemed required in the form of lockdowns and forced closure of certain businesses to ensure our collective safety. I have also written about how this apparent need for the external authority of government to impose such constraints on our freedom was actually an illusion. It was required only because that same state system had interfered with rational choice on a daily basis and economically incentivised the very behaviours which caused the coronavirus to spread while disincentivising the sort of behaviours which would ensure our collective safety. But the thing that has stuck with me throughout this pandemic is all the ways in which we are seeing how externally imposed authority has made us so used to waiting to be told what we can and can’t do that when that authority goes away, or circumstances require us to govern ourselves, we appear unable to successfully do so.
Theoretically, the anarchist in me should be happy with the government’s laissez-faire or common-sense approach to keeping us safe. Unlike more overtly authoritarian regimes, such as China, where a culture of surveillance has enabled strict enforcement of protocols under threat of penalty, the UK approach has been based instead on the idea of self-regulation and “being sensible”. The rules are in place, but enforcement of them is lax and plenty of space exists in which to break or bend these rules. If I had received hundreds of visitors and taken trips all across the country, including staying overnight at friends’ houses, throughout the period of the strictest UK lockdown, I don’t think anyone “in charge” would have noticed, even if my neighbours did. Even things like contract tracing is largely self-reported, and now the majority of testing is self-reported too. Technically there is nothing stopping me from merely opening up my test kit twice a week, scanning the barcode and telling the powers that be I tested negative. No-one but me will actually know whether or not I really did poke about my tonsils and nose to get a valid result. And, of course, the testing itself is not compulsory. There is so much free choice here it’s almost like there’s no meaningful system in place at all!
Which, of course, is the point. The government doesn’t really want us thinking too much about it, and certainly doesn’t want caution to come at the expense of the economy. They want us opened up as soon as possible – whether the “bodies pile high” or not. Already with economic inequalities in place that have meant since the start that many working people simply could not afford to stay home during lockdown (if, indeed, they even had a home, as many did not) or self-isolate if sick (let alone self-isolate merely because of an asymptomatic positive test or contact tracing telling them a close contact had tested positive), the approach to keeping the population safe was one never intended to be workable. But what interests me is that the approach our government did take was met by many in the country not as the freedom to make good autonomous choices to protect themselves and their community, but as a list of possible loopholes and permissions to do exactly what they used to do instead. When told they could think for themselves the instinct has been to do whatever the rules permit simply because they are allowed. Instead of understanding, for example, the two interconnected ideas that 1) certain things are allowed, but 2) those things which are allowed still carry a level of risk which needs to be understood and the costs of doing them weighed up against the benefits, many simply stopped thinking at idea 1). The ability to socialise again became an instruction to host a barbecue, the facility to travel internationally again became a directive to take a holiday, the freedom to have overnight visits and socialise indoors became an obligation to hold a party, the reopening of non-essential shops became an order to visit the high street again, and the easing of requirements to wear a mask became permission not to wear one even where your decision to do so may put others in danger. “It’s allowed” became the refrain rather than “it’s the right thing to do”.
It is allowed for me to set up a business which intentionally exploits my workers by emotionally blackmailing them into thinking that if they don’t work overtime, they don’t show enough dedication to the job. But is it right to do so? What is allowed and what is right is not always the same thing, but a people not used to making decisions for themselves, atrophied by reliance on authority, infantilised by the paternalism of external law, have little experience of thinking things through for themselves and so they defer by training to the ruling on what is and isn’t allowed. They defer to the words of the authorities.
A few weeks ago I asked a class of students if they thought school would work without examinations. The majority of this class of 14 year olds agreed that not only would school work without examinations, it would be better. However, they worryingly also agreed that such a school would not be one they themselves would do well in. They told me that they wouldn’t know how to work now without the reward of a good exam result and the threat of failure because that is all they’ve ever known. The idea of self-motivation, learning for the intrinsic good of the knowledge being sought, was completely alien to them and felt unrealistic. A similar conversation occurred with older students that I teach regarding their plans for the half term break. They don’t know what to do with themselves with all that freedom. Without any plans enforced on them from above there’s nothing stopping them from spending the whole time sleeping or mindlessly surfing the internet, and many of them suggested that this is what they would end up doing whether they wanted to or not. When I asked why they can’t simply choose to set an alarm and determine a better activity each day of their holiday they looked at me as if I were mad. “There’s nothing to make me do it” came one person’s reply. “Why would I do it if nothing happens when I don’t?” Sadder still, the only students who did have clear plans for the week-long break were those who had decided to revise for upcoming exams. In other words: those allowing their work-life to encroach on their real life. Those still doing what they are told to do even when they are free to do anything else. Meanwhile a friend of mine, a lawyer, told me about a local campaign he was recently involved in. He was part of the volunteer legal team, but the team ultimately had to be abandoned because no one would take charge.
“Why did anyone need to take charge?” I asked him. “Couldn’t you all take charge and collectively divide all the tasks and set the agenda?”
“I suppose we could have,” he replied, “but we just sort of sat there waiting for someone to take control.”
None of this disheartens me as an anarchist. It merely reminds me how important it is to allow for as many opportunities as possible for people to take charge of their own lives. After a lifetime in shackles, breaking free will be frightening and uncertain. Our legs need to be stretched, our muscles need to be trained. And when we stumble – which we will, repeatedly – we need to remember that it’s not our fault. We need to pick ourselves up. And try, try again.
Author: DaN McKee
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