TFG #3, “anarchist child-raising” Dec.1990. Part 2: Indoctrination (2 out of 3)
Frantz Fanon, Jean Wheeler, Alice Walker
I broke down The Future Generation “anarchist child-raising” issue #3, into three parts to fully cover it. In Part 2, we will go to school with some authors, civil rights activists, radicals, and psychologists.
Wikipedia says: “Indoctrination is the process of inculcating (teaching by repeated instruction) a person with ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or professional methodologies (see doctrine).[1] Broadly speaking, indoctrination can refer to a general process of socialization.[2] In common discourse, the term often has a pejorative valence to refer to forms of brainwashing or for disagreeable forms of socialization.[2] However, it can refer to both positive and negative forms of cultural transmission, and is evidently an integral element of educatory practice.[3]”
School
When I was a young 20s something radical, school used to really bug me a lot. I had had good grades in elementary school, and found many of my school years a semi-positive experience. I went to a different school almost every year as we were always moving, kinda like an army brat, for my class hopper dad’s upward mobility in jobs, starting with leaving Maryland for Texas, for a program that would pay for night school, and eventually ending up in Germany, where he worked as a safety engineer for the Government. I became dissatisfied in middle school and dropped out of high school, in the first month or two, at age 15. Everyone I knew hated school. I think my school was kind of like a school-to-prison or school-to-job-conformity pipeline. There were lots of kids bussed in, from closer to DC, and also many children of government workers where we lived outside the Washington DC beltway. There was a lot of tension in the hallways. School had seemed a kind of punishment ever since I moved to P.G. County, but everyone feared what would happen if you dropped out. I got my GED and went to University Of Maryland, turning 16 as a college student. Then I dropped out of U. of MD too, disappointed in what it was offering. It felt like a jock school where I couldn’t have my intellect seriously challenged or supported.
In the end, making my way as a self taught writer, in or out of the school system, has been difficult. That too is why I feel angry at the school system. I think all of life should be better than it is. School seems like the sorting religion (and profitable conveyor belt) of why some have more than others.
I’m not as fired up against school anymore. I believe you can learn anywhere, in or out of school. And school can be a supportive communal place. The sound of it, though, always bothered my ears.
Anarchism
As an anarchist, I’ve always felt an inclination to a third way, over any binary. Like if democrats are one side of a coin; and republicans are the other: what if instead we throw out that whole coin?! Try a different way. To me social anarchism was always about the philosophical understanding that there are always more choices than two—a better world possible. There are many options in this world, many hybrid ways of being, as well as multiple identities. Nothing is as simple as one or the other.
Even two polar opposites may still contain the same kind of principles within them. For example, Alice Miller below, critiques two contrasting parenting styles, as more similar than you would think:
“…indoctrination, which underlies both the ‘anti-authoritarian’ and the ‘strict’ upbringing. Neither form of rearing takes account of the child’s needs at his particular stage of development. As soon as the child is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his vital growth will be violently interrupted.
It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child’s curiosity, for example (there are questions one should not ask), and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.” - A.Miller
This was a reminder to me, to care for my child’s developmental needs, to not become a new version of the same things I had found so appalling. Also it spoke to me of a certain kind of processing, the educational system, and honestly the capitalist system. Taking things away from you. Then selling them back to you.
Indoctrination is not just about a parenting style or choice. It means something much larger in society and in our interactions with each other. Beyond the personal into the systematic.
Frantz Fanon put the Educational System on the top of his list when he named things that “established order serve to create around the exploited persona an atmosphere of submission and of inhibitions which lightens the task of policing considerably” within capitalist societies.
“In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their frequent and direct action maintains contact with the means of a rifle butt and napalm. Obvious here the agent of government speak the language of pure force.” (Wretched of the Earth, 1963)
I think what I was trying to get to by including this quote from Wretched of the Earth, is to understand that behind the gentle force or “bamboozlement” there is a heavier threat. If you don’t go along nicely, the next step is more coercive. (The “have nots” are a reminder to the “haves” to stay in line. It could be worse.) The colonial world is divided in two- said Frantz Canon. This also makes me think about the city I live in, Baltimore, which is often said to be divided into two: two different Baltimores, one Black and one White. (And even within this, these worlds are divided again, Baltimore is certainly many cities, not just two different ones; and not just black and white even if predominately so). I do not find this comforting, like oh great, I like being in White Baltimore with my gentle bamboozlement and all the privileged treats of getting to not be as overtly violently oppressed or murdered while my unearned privilege is gained by others pain. NO. I HATE IT. I HATE THIS UNJUST SYSTEM. I want it overthrown. (How do we change the world? Is at heart, the premise of my zine: the Future Generation.)
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When I google I can’t find who coined “School to Prison Pipeline.” When did that discussion start? Only that the school to prison pipeline originated with Reagan’s zero tolerance policies and Nixons war on drugs. I think what I was trying to get at in this section was the racial inequality in the U.S. school system. And that schooling isn’t always the way forward it is presented to be. I think the story Frankie Mae illustrates that that.
Frankie Mae
In a story called FRANKIE MAE, 1968 by Jean Wheeler, a young Black girl is excited about her school and does well In it - even though she starts two years late because of watching the little ones, and misses half a season for the plantation boss insists on having her pick cotton, and she misses days because she has no shoes to wear in the snow. But she still does well because she is so persistent and doesn’t give up. She gets so good at math that she keeps the record books for the church at age thirteen. Then she decides she will keep an accounting book for her daddy who is a share cropper. Well when its time for him to get paid, she comes and see’s the boss is going to give her dad half as much as he deserves so she says it. But the boss says she is wrong. She asks her dad to stand up for the truth but he doesn’t. The boss said to her “Look, Black Bitch, I will always be right and you will always be wrong as long as you live.” School is no longer important to her after that.
What is the point of truth when someone in power will deny you at every turn? This to me is the blunt force of the rifle underlining the bamboozlement of capitalist society.
Jean Wheeler worked with SNCC into 1967 and then went on to become a child and adolescent psychiatrist working with community-oriented mental health programs. I couldn’t find a lot about her but she is my mom’s age, 82 and living. I read this story was based on a real interview she did with a woman who grew up with her father being a share cropper. I’m disappointed to be unable to find a listing of her writing.
An African student sent off to study in Paris- from “The Temple of My Familiar” by Alice Walker
“It seemed impossible for the professors to acknowledge that ancient Cyrene was Libya, or that the ancient Egyptians were black. … When they did discuss Africa, they did so in terms of it’s problems, it’s “backwardness,” never in terms of its contributions or its centuries of oppression under whites, including the smug, self-righteous French themselves, who, even as we studied African history without a word about French colonialism, were tying to finish off the Algerian resistance by the foulest possible means.
The Art history when the professor was discussing the Greek foundations of Western art and civilization, he presented a slide, at the front of the classroom, that depicted Perseus slaying Medusa. … if you are from Africa you recognize Medusa wings as the wings of Egypt, and you recognize the head of Medusa as the head of Africa, and what you realize is you are seeing is the Western world’s memorialization of the period in prehistory when the white male world of Greece decapitated and destroyed the black female Goddess/Mother tradition and culture of Africa. - - - to understand that being educated by people who despise you is also a conquest -‘
This is not a Dream (I know you know)
The full paragraph of the quote I used in my zine by Franz Fanon:
“The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior--all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilderers" separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.”
And here are some interesting things written more recently in this article:
Because he traced mental illness back to external power imbalances, Fanon became skeptical of psychoanalysis’s emphasis on the self. If Freud saw the oedipal struggle as the foundational trauma, Fanon located that rupture more politically: in the moment when someone realizes they are not a person but a racialized or colonized subject. He rejected Freud and, interestingly for a theorist who wrote like a poet, he also stripped the unconscious of its metaphors.
. . .
For Fanon, healing the patient likewise required something concrete: decolonizing the society in which they lived.
. . .
When The Wretched of the Earth came out in 1961, Fanon lay dying from leukemia in a Bethesda hospital in what he called the “country of lynchers.” He was only 36.
…
To achieve decolonization, Fanon wrote, we who live in the center of empire must realize how we’ve “often joined the ranks of our common masters” and then “wake up.”
In the end, I wonder (similarly to how I wondered in part 1, What is the difference between Caste and Class?) What is the difference between anarchism and decolonization? Obviously they are not the same thing. But I think there can be an important tie between the two. On that note, I’m glad to end with Fanon. Although I can’t find the perfect quote I was looking for, just trying to quote him at all feels apt.
I’ve struggled the whole way through revisiting The Future Generation #3. I’ve been focusing wasn’t excerpted in the zine book (such as Xeroxed excerpts from books and theories) since the focus of the book was more on personal writing for the compilation. I hope to end next week on a more polished reflection of it all!
NEXT THURSDAY: We will finish with more anthropologists, sociologist, and historians.
P.S.
More authors and books excerpted in the “Indoctrination” section of TFG #3:
Compulsory Miseducation, Paul Goodman (I xeroxed the whole first chapter, 1. The Universal Trap, in my zine)
The Lives of Children, George Dennison
How Children Learn, John Holt
For new readers that made it this far down- hooray! Every Thursday I do a Throw back Thursday into my zine archives; every Sunday I do a bit of a serialized fiction with “Tangled: a Baltimore Fairytale”; and every Tuesday is the “Quilts and Writing.” You can look back under these headings to dig into the archive. Thank you for coming along <3
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