The problem with school is not a new one. If one studies the early educational literature that are many decades old, they will find observations that are uncannily similar to the modern classroom. Schools in lower socio-economic areas suffered from a severe lack of resources, resulting in worse outcomes for the poor students. In the suburban middle-class areas, the problem was different one. The students had been driven to apathy. A stale classroom failed to develop creativity or critical thinking, and students were graduating completely disempowered of the ability to learn on their own. Despite these terrible outcomes for students, in both cases, the designers of the education system achieved their objective. That purpose is to create a society that is most amenable to the capitalists in the upper class, one that is filled with compliant workers. The poor enter the workforce without technical skills and desperately need money to survive. Hence the elite are provided with an abundance of cheap labour that cannot rebel without inflicting great self-harm. The ‘middle-class* are also subservient. Rather than gaining any real skills and knowledge from their education, many will graduate school with the only difference being institutional credentials. These degrees are not a universal key to freedom, but a mark of dependency. These people will then go to beg (apply) to various institutions to grant them the privilege of becoming another cog in a work machine. If they are ejected from the machine, they will have no ability to be self-sufficient or create their own machine. Their only path to survival is to go to one of the other institutions, ruled by a different overlord, and resume begging.
I have written plenty about the issues with the education system in other pieces. For further reading, I also direct you to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971). This introduction simply seeks to make clear some points that only exist in a very cloudy manner in mainstream discourse.
The education system has not been broken in recent years by some superficial cultural issue such as teachers having an ‘agenda’ or students being addicted to their phones.
It was intentionally designed from the beginning to cause suffering and fail to educate students, because both of those outcomes create the best conditions for a capitalist system
We need to see the current system as not one that ‘intends to do good, but has failed, and now does harm,’ but one that ‘intends to cause harm, works successfully, and so does harm.’
This is important because there is a mainstream perception that ‘school inevitably is bad.’ This doesn’t make sense, because society has not actually tried to make a ‘good’ schooling system.
What does it fundamentally mean to be a ‘progressive?’ I would say that a progressive should see two potential results in the question to reform education.
One option is that a new system is created that ‘intends to do good, works successfully, and the world is a better place.’ The other option is that the system ‘intends to do good, but fails, and now does harm.’ Critically, a progressive looks at these two possibilities and chooses to act because either option is rationally better than the existing one.
So how does the education revolution come about? People can make the mistake of seeing a superficial view of protest/resistance/revolution that has passed through the many disfiguring lenses of mainstream media (see Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward S Herman), and conclude that it is just random shouting and futile. That would be a very Dunning-Kruger-esqe response. With everything, there is theory that can inform practice (and with any science, the theory itself evolves through practice). The science of societal change is called prefigurative politics. And now we can start to talk about the role of Atlas Academia as a prefigurative project towards a better education system.
The interesting thing about prefiguration is that it is an approach to social change that feels akin to the scientific method. One may be able to imagine, at least partly, what the features of a utopian society may look like, but they cannot write out a step-by-step on how to create something that they have not experienced or does not exist yet. At the same time, while we do not have absolute certainty on the steps to take to improve society, prefigurative politics acknowledges that a better world does not spontaneously appear by simply attacking what one perceives as the current issues. Thus, prefiguration is about enacting ‘projects’ (or one can think about them as experiments), in which aspects of this future utopian society are attempted to be brought into existence at a smaller scale, in which lessons can be learnt and people through their experience with it, are emboldened of the potential for progress and work to reach others through other projects. The fundamental principles of prefiguration emerged from the synthesis of many progressive movements in the 60s and 70s. Each movement focused on a particular marginalised group, but the actions taken were able to be generalised under the idea of prefiguration. Femininists coined the concept of ‘the public is politics’ which encouraged women to recognise how their everyday life experiences (public) were not independent of broader societal issues (politics), and therefore making changes to the ‘public’ (choosing not to conform to gender norms) constitutes meaningful change in politics too. In another example, anti-racist group, Black Panthers, created their own community programs to create small pockets where people could experience the society that they were fighting for. Volunteers provided free breakfast for school students from low-income families which were predominantly Black, which also acted as a space for both volunteers and students experience what tomorrow could look like with enough political action.
How is Atlas a prefigurative project?
Prefigurative politics is sympathetic to the difficulty of building alternative systems, which is constantly opposed by the existing ones. It is why I think it is in the spirit of this concept to begin first with pointing out the places where Atlas fails to meet the literature recommendations on how to enact a prefigurative project. Prefiguration is strongly non-hierarchical. It believes that all people need to have ownership and a voice in society, and that the elevation of a minority ‘elite’ or ‘vanguard’ to authority will only entrench a different system of oppression. An alternative organisational structure of Atlas (or technically lack of structure) would be the mutual ownership and decision-making shared with all employees of the business. Atlas is not currently structured this way. It exists as a business entity and has registered shares that are only owned by two people. A concept within prefiguration is the ‘means-ends equivalence,’ which is where the actions you take (means) ultimately affect the possible outcomes (ends). It acts as a deterrent against ‘means justify the ends’ mentality, warning that you cannot fight oppression by creating another system of oppression**.
I want to make it clear that Wayne and I are open-minded, and more accurately, actively in search of more cooperative models of business. Our current obstacle is the fact that while the current employees of Atlas mostly support of an education revolution, they have other commitments. A cooperatively run organisation needs a substantial buy-in from all participating members. This means that in a funny sort of way, while the hierarchy and traditional business structure of Atlas fail some criteria of prefiguration, I like to think that it embodies a much more important trait of a ‘project.’ That is, it is an ‘as best as possible in the current circumstances’ attempt by some people, that can hopefully be a stepping stone to an even better future project***.
If we analyse Atlas as a school alternative, there are two main functions it seeks to achieve as a prefigurative project. The first is experimentation. Atlas cannot simply proclaim that the education system is flawed, it needs to actively enact alternative methods of teaching and learning and iterate based on the experiences of the teachers and students. For example, what does it mean to have better explanations? Teachers need to be experts on their subject matter, which is only reinforced in a supportive environment that is open to discussion and collaboration. There are both cultural and structural elements in the traditional school which obstruct this. A large enough group of teachers discourage discussion and respond unfavourably to constructive criticism, and teachers are also not afforded the time to dedicate to meaningful professional development. So how does one foster a simultaneously high performance yet supportive environment? The point is that there is no playbook to follow, only ongoing experiments that inform future steps. This ranges from formal discussion meetings between teachers, to the freedom for all teachers to make modifications to teaching resources. The experiment extends to students as well. The students of Atlas range across a spectrum in terms of their consciousness about why they are not satisfied with the education system, and well as their progress to self-actualisation as a lifelong learner. In their exposure to the Atlas classroom, they will encounter meaningful challenge and have to reflect on how they responded to them. In what areas did they flourish when offered support? In what areas did they have to take accountability and realise that their greatest obstacle was themselves? Experimentation builds genuine expertise so that over time, the next steps to take to better the conditions for students become clear.
A prefigurative project also plays a subjective and discursive function. This refers to the idea that the challenge of convincing others about the value of change is that one cannot truly articulate this argument in the realm of theory. For example, the notion of an improved education system can be met by apathy by a general public. Even for students, their immediate motivation may be simply to ‘get better marks at school,’ without the deeper understanding of why their marks were poor in the first place. There is a wealth of theory that one can consult to better understand the importance of education, but prefigurative politics, and I would argue most people in general also agree with this sentiment, that these things only really connect with people once they experience it. Or as Paulo Freire and others have claimed, the objective of dialogue with the oppressed who are not yet conscious of their state, is to help them make their own connections about how their everyday life experience is affected by the minority elite. In this sense, I agree with the following Ludwig Wittgenstein quote, “Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain.” Theory should be read by the already converted. Its role is not to change our minds, but to make clear what our opened minds were already in the process of realising.
We have already seen in the few years of Atlas’ existence, this function in effect. Many students feel refreshed and encouraged in their experience, and though they may struggle to verbalise in what way Atlas does good (much to our own chagrin when trying to collect student testimonials), the vague compliments such as “I look forward to going to class/the staff there seem to care about me/it just feels different to other tutoring places” are the tip of the iceberg in the deeper changes to the students’ psyche which may not make itself apparent for a long time. It is more than a superficial sloganeering when the teachers of Atlas say that highest priority of their work is not to graduate students with the highest marks, but students that will go on to be good people.
To end, I will give a slightly modified quote on prefiguration:
The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make ourselves, and could just as easily make differently. Engaging in alternative ways of learning can reveal how changeable the education system really is, which can be deeply transformative for all those involved.
*I am at odds with the use of this label, given how it accomplishes a key capitalist objective of creating division where there really are only two groups: the vast, yet underrepresented ‘oppressed,’ and the astoundingly few ‘oppressors’
**I feel it is important to clarify so I am not misconstrued that ‘oppression’ is not interchangeable with ‘violence’ or ‘resistance’ in this case. While we should not further oppression on our mission to better society, many academics and philosophers have thoroughly criticised the ideals of passivism or non-violence, which are often propagandised by the upper-class. Paulo Freire has some good writing on how defiance of the ruling class cannot be labelled as ‘oppression’ because there is no-one who is being ‘oppressed’ by an act of defiance (you will need to read him to get the full idea).
***If you want to quit your job and start a co-op, hit us up.
