John M. Elmore - Out of the Ruins

Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces

Edited by Robert H. Haworth & John M. Elmore

2017 PM Press

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781629632391

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948145

Cover: John Yates /www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

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PM Press

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Robert H. Haworth

F or most of my life, I have gravitated toward reading, writing, listening, and acting outside of traditional lines. Although I have been educated to operate within the confines of our current structures and cultural norms, I look at how and what I have learned from quite a different perspective. In other words, my learning and my education are in stark contrast.

By the time I was ten, I knew I was in deep conflict between my learning, outside of school, and my education, within public schools. At that time, the Cold War was still a dominant debate within the United States. Although I was still in elementary school, I remember some of the drills and the films we saw that were supposed to scare us into submitting to particular U.S. policies and to demonize the Soviet Union and other places around the world that were not like us. On the other hand, I was beginning to explore and learn about contemporary political issues through a different lens, punk rock.

I had been introduced to punk early on. My older brothers bedroom always intrigued me. It was filled from floor to ceiling with the artwork (flyers, album inserts, etc.) of local and international bands that were attempting to construct a very different narrative of what was going on in the world. It was in my social studies classes where I was being educated to believe that Ronald Reagan was a heroic figure and Margaret Thatcher was the important sidekick. They were our leaders in protecting the population against communism and democratic socialism, all while opening up the world to freedom and democracy and the global marketplace.

On the flip side, punk provided me with a counter narrative to my formal education. For example, my brother had a foldout poster that was included in Crasss album The Feeding of the 5000. The poster was a collage that included Reagans face placed on a bodybuilder flexing his muscles, while Thatcher was shitting hotdogs and human skulls. As someone who was young and being introduced to the music, culture, and politics of punk, I didnt understand the nuances of what the artist, Gee Vaucher, was conveying. However, it produced a much larger shift in my learningmoving me to question how, and what, we were being taught in school and ultimately, who benefits, and who does not, from traditional and formal educational processes.

Another example of learning through punk was through reading zines. Zines were a way to disseminate information about different scenes, political movements and ideas, punk ethics, interviews with bands, and music reviews. As I mentioned in another essay (Haworth, 2010), some of these political interactions became intense and, at times, divisive, but they enabled us to see the complexities of punk and the diverse ways we interpreted our experiences. From a learning standpoint, punk has its problems and contradictions, but what I feel is important are the tensions that emerged within my own learning, particularly between how I was formally educated and how punk embraced a different way of knowing and interacting with the world. It is not that I believe everyone should go out and join a punk band, shout revolutionary slogans, or create a zine (although that would be cool), but it is important to point out that there are various learning spaces that resonate more with individuals and to question whether the statist educational institutions to which many are exposed have the capacity to create a more sustainable and critically conscious future.

In a recent keynote address at the University of Colorado, Boulder, David Stovall (2011) noted, There are really three paths young people are being forced to take in order to survive our current economic systemservice sector employment, the military and prison. It is no doubt that this is what Giroux (2013) and others have referred to as the zero generationzero jobs, zero hope, zero possibilities, zero employment.

From an educational standpoint, the move to privatize, vocationalize, and credentialize (Brown, 2003; 2013) k12 and higher education is not surprising. The massive commercial campaigns of for-profit universities bombard cable networks and local billboards to entice young adults to return to higher education. University of Phoenix is a perfect example, as they promise that a degree from them will lead to a choice of corporate jobs. There is quite a different story that is beginning to permeate the larger social narrative, particularly through the economic realities of students accumulating enormous amounts of debt, fraudulent for-profits extracting federal dollars from the public till, and the shrinkage of jobs within the corporate sector.

This is not a new phenomenon. The development of public education, particularly in the United States, has worked primarily in conjunction with the dominant social, political, economic, and cultural institutions to create a specific type of citizen/individual. Historically, Adam Smith believed that workers would need a particular education under the state in order to protect the economic system that exploited them. Spring (2006) argues: Smith proposed educating workers to defend a state whose role is to protect an economic system that exploits those same workers. In other words, Smiths argument is that workers should be educated to defend their own exploitation. (p. 10)

Additionally, mainstream educators in the United States continue to champion Horace Manns fight in the early nineteenth century for compulsory, tax-based, common schools for all citizens. What we dont discuss or even recognize is the behind the scenes concessions Mann and other preindustrial capitalists had made during the early part of the nineteenth century to make sure that public education created a particular type of citizenry and coincided with a particular economic order. Katzs (1971) research critiques Manns intentions and the outcomes of the development of the common schools during that time:

The crusade for educational reform led by Horace Mann was not the simple, unambiguous good it had long been taken to be; the central aim of the movement was to establish more efficient mechanisms of social control, and its chief legacy was the principle that education was something the better part of the community did to the others to make them orderly, moral, and tractable. (p. ixx)