TO COMRADES

I am again,  a candidate on the November ballot for the Berkeley school board. My intention is to use this office to let come before us, the contradiction that U.S. institutions, like those throughout the world, are retaining and advancing efforts to continue subjugation of populations, de facto enslavement.

 The U.S. imperium takes control, too of what’s on Earth that nations of people are living on. These products gleaned and produced by people, have unfortunately been termed resources, meant to serve hu/man’s profiteering, as well as adding to advancement of societies.

 School is one of those controlling institutions. 

 I began my studies to qualify to do school teaching in 1959.  I became licensed, having completed 4 years of college study, in 1963.  Until 20 years ago I held various positions teaching and conducting student activities.   At one, the War on Poverty Community Action Program/Total Action Against Poverty, in Roanoke, Va., where I was the Education Director of a program to direct the local students and their families to use public school better, I kept having to promote the traditional tactic that people are to utilize school in order to achieve goals that were supposed to be satisfactory to themselves and their communities.

 People – students and parents and teachers were never able to attain structures that felt good; thus the constant insistence on ‘reform’.  Reform has not yet, in 150 years of it, provided satisfactory schooling.

 Various understandings including intensive and constant research and experience suddenly enlightened me; I was overcome with the recognition that it is school itself that is the problem.  The institution requires the overall eradication of the person who attends and of their family.  Both are obligated to become an ‘other’ in order to fit the requirements school has in order to meet the design, the demands of this social system, to provide submission to a de facto slavery system that provides profit, wealth, and power to the few people who own it.  (see Casey Gerald, on having to leave pieces of oneself)  ( see George Carlin)

 That’s what the wars and school tests have always been for.

 NO WAY can a teacher teach to each child – to each child’s willingness nor to their ability nor to their interest – all of which change – or stay the same – over time; from day to day, hour to hour, or not at all – depending…  Not if they have 20 children or 5, or even just the one or two. 

            Children are not asked.  They are put through “free, compulsory education”, a 13yr old explained.

This ‘education’ needs also deny that students’ other learning, customs, experiences – are not education.  It insists that school is the source of learning, of education. Education is made into a package we’re forced to buy into.

Commodification is the rule in capitalism.  Form people into workers which will then go robotically to make money for our Owners.  They will even go to kill people ostensibly for our Owners, ostensibly for OUR COUNTRY - which it no way is. Teachers unintentionally guide students to give up their humanity in order to conduct our Owners’ wars, and jobs.

 School is a bad place to force anyone to go regardless the moments of pleasure and learning there.

Y’tell people we all hate school – they ‘go’ oh no! I love/d school. 

 That’s selective amnesia.

We all do that constantly. 

 But life’s difficulties are magnified by the burdens we’re required to shoulder in this oppressive system – yes, like school – that we don’t want to ‘go’ to but have to in order to ‘get a job’, etc.etc.

 Isn’t that involuntary servitude? - oh, no, there are laws overriding that disagreement, laws laid by our Owners’ legislators/legislatures - that They have bought.

 Let people live integrated, instead,  among people of all ages, doing various skills and interests together – including showing people who can’t how to read and write and calculate ON THE JOB, whatever that activity is.

 The many efforts called reform are not.  They’re just continuation by one jerk’n around or other of the status quo, which begins with students needing to line up to enter the building when a bell rings.  For that it is usual that the student had to be awakened in order to get there ‘on time’, at great discomfort to themself at having had to wake up then.  And their folk who had to do that didn’t feel good about it either.

 The martialing continues throughout the days, again, at great discomfort.  Humbling continues for the lesser student not only in the classroom, the hallways, the washrooms, the lunchroom, but on the playground.  Bullying is usual.

 Failure is feared.

 How horrible – that failure is allowed! 

That’s because school is church-derived and continued. 

Children especially must not be forced to be judged failed. 

These contradictions confuse even those children who are able to appear successful.  Watching other students behave incorrectly encourages their submission, acceptance of the standards.  They don’t want to fail. They’ve been enabled not to.

 They suffer through the early grades, having cried at being left by their dear people; they get a Kindergarten diploma and later an elementary school diploma, and a high school diploma, and a college or university degree of one or several levels, and fit into some 8hr a day stifle because they have that scroll; and then they spend short or long periods doing those jobs. My brother got a Master’s degree in parasitology, a Master’s in World Health, a doctoral in World Health and ended up his last couple of work decades selling AAA insurance and GRATEFUL TO HAVE THAT. A child was his boss and frightened my brother throughout my brother’s time there.

 And no way my brother is different from MANY employees.

 PEOPLE DON’T GET A CHANCE SOCIALLY – OR ALONE - TO TAKE AN HONEST LOOK AT THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE, to determine among each other how it’s done, or what it is that has happened to them. My intention is to give people the chance to say they don’t like what happened to them, what’s happening to their children, to their brothers; what could happen if the structure were inclined to let us form lives for ourselves among each other that are under our own control INSTEAD OF CONTROL BY THIS TERRIBLY BRUTAL SOCIAL SYSTEM – that we’re all told FROM THE CRADLE! that we love. 

  I think there are people here who are able to form together these understandings and the altogether other social formation in which we can live meaningful lives – from the time we’re 2 through 102 or more.  Age segregation is antithetical to worthy or enjoyable living.  It is essential to the profit system, capitalism.

 We need to set up alternative living that FEELS good for ALL of us to do. 

This requires working to end profit$.

 1.  FAILURE We need never to fail people, students.  Not getting something right that needs to be gotten right needs do-overs together with other people who will help fix it, is all.   ‘tests’ is the opposite of that. 

2. SEPARATE GRADES Age segregation is a serious invasion into reasonable, humane living.  We belong together over chosen alliances caused by the varied impetuses respect of our living creates – will create. Enumerating those ways I leave to our organizing to make ‘education’ other than the indoctrination school presently is. I could name ideas which cause us to gather – in all cases here I’m speaking of 2year olds as well as 100yr olds and everyone.  You too could name those ideas.

  3. EQUALITY Two year olds want to be part of production.  You’ve seen that evidenced time and time again, often causing from somewhere someone to say – don’t do that – to a child. Our nature, human nature, is we all want to participate to perpetuate society and to advance it, too, TOGETHER.

  4. SCHOOL’S PLACE None of our learning is extraneous – not from outside the classroom, not from before we’ve begun or ended schooling, not from our ancient cultures, none of it. 

  5. TEACHERS   We are all teachers all our lives. Alienation by commodification of that role, that behavior, causes a terrible rift between us and our humanity. Who are teachers, then…  Not only the people who get that small paycheck to take care of our children while we do jobs that are not satisfactory but profit our Owners. Teachers are to transmit a segregated curriculum, as though math is separate from science is separate from art is separate from history is separate from gym is separate from those few precious minutes of recess is separate from singing….

  6. STUDENTS   As well, we’re all always students. It is not the graduate scroll that makes us able or displays our limits.

 7. JOB job is the relation of labor to capital.  Full employment is just a term to keep us enthralled with the capitalist structure.  Jobs are not for us to support and maintain our society and our relations with our friends, family, neighbors, allies everywhere.  It is for us to become able to keep making our Owners rich, wealthy.  As Carlin says, we have no choice.

  8. POLITICS  We won’t come out from under our Owners thumb until we organize at the base of our thinking – this is not a nice life.  Those who think they have a nice life, again, employ selective amnesia.  People don’t like to see other people hurt/hurting. People allow it because we have no choice.  All capitalist life is an occupying force in our minds, needs our mass organizing to identify it and work to overthrow the occupation, to decolonize. 

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   Politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. 

George Carlin   https://www.azquotes.com/author/2470-George_Carlin/tag/critical-thinking

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98

School Is The Opposite Of Education, a study to release us from our confinement  https://njfhar.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/table-of-contents  

https://www.berkeleyside.com/2014/10/22/berkeley-school-board-3-seats-contested-by-5-candidates ,  https://ballotpedia.org/Norma J.F.Harrison , https://votersedge.org/ca/en/ballot/election/42-55852a/address/null/zip/94708/contests/contest/13201/candidate/135338

 As the colonized mass that we are, we the 99%, have to be indoctrinated to accept – no,  to love our de facto enslavement… so we go to school -  we go to  what a 13yr old child explained is ‘free compulsory education’. 

 I’ve described numerous details about this. One of those is that we are all students and teachers all our lives. Yet the education commodity is snatched from us. This is the greatest sorrow, the alienation we endure – as we are compelled to hand over our babies, our children to the self-same institution we suffered through, and go off to make some money to pay the rent – or mortgage – and to buy the food and everything we make, that our Owners steal from us and force us to buy back at prices we can’t afford – or can’t well afford.  We give up our lives in order to pay the rent.

   We are not allowed to interact without age segregation throughout the major content of our days. Age segregation is one element of our oppression. 

 Another restraint – children go to school in order to be sorted out – who fails, who succeeds … 

 failed! - how splendid! casting a seven or 12 or 17-year-old child as failed. 

 Adults go to school and get failed as well. 

 Testing is not a friendly loving way to go about being together. It’s judgmental, as is church. Testing , instead, needs to become our experiences together finding that if we don’t do a thing right that people among whom we’re doing whatever it is offer us the right or the better way to do it. 

 We learn – and teach – tactics for advancing a way, a skill, an idea. 

 Yes reading and writing and arithmetic and music and history and gym all can be taught by fixing the porch steps playing the piano running around and playing with friends and going and doing something else. 

 The idea of segregating us all into grade classrooms fits the idea of segregating clumps of knowledge…   you know geography history math arithmetic gym recess segregating these from each other so that they can be tested, so that they can give teachers a commodity to teach, tell how to answer questions on a test instead of live together, enjoy it, develop it as we go along. 

  But the so-called ‘subjects’ actually include each other. 

 The structure is austere – the school building – the separation so that a parent can’t just walk in and talk with their child – is  the opposite of friendly and loving. 

 … but then that’s what school teaching is for - to make us available to serve our Owners and not expect kindness. 

 School reform doesn’t work! it’s been being done for 150 years.  Trying to reform something that cannot be reformed – it makes some people who are there at the right moment, who’ve found the resource to do it, into education specialists.  So we have the Diane Ravitches, and the Johnathan Kohls and all.

  It’s like economists.  Economists try to make sense of capitalism.

  It is another of the brutal structures, unkind to us all, in the service to make profit for our Owners.  

 I am a candidate for the Berkeley, California school board.  Know and tell anyone that I identify the commodification and concomitant theft of education.  Let people know this element of our oppression. School Is The Opposite Of Education, a study to release us from our confinement 

https://njfhar.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/table-of-contents/