D. The form of the school: The collective organization of school life and its social prerequisites
The problem of school life was and still remains a major one, since school is authoritarian and holds the demand for blind discipline and limitation of syndicalist and political action. Thus, it is of primary importance for school life to be collectively organized, and go along in accordance with the wide streams within the society they represent and thus do not fear collective activity. Qualitatively, this means a new social form in the organization and management of school life, which we see in the context of the School Community and its self-administration. School should at some point come to be an actual Community in terms of its collective organization and administration. Participation institutions and administrative assignment of duties are not going to be enough to meet these needs. First of all, the development of common goals is necessary. The School Community demands a dynamic restructuring of the role of all those factors that combine to form the direct operation of school: students, teachers, and parents. Its main duty is to activate the young person’s determination, as being a member of the society, to teach that person to organize and have control over his/her life, starting from the School Community, and develop social activity within and beyond school.
School Life and its Self-administration, though, have a particular content each time, determined by general social factors, and especially by the correlations in social struggle and the role of the popular movement in educational affairs. If some people today call decentralization and self-administration the central direction of all state mechanisms aiming at the privatization of all state schools (through the interference of major publishing houses in the curricula and books, business people – sponsors etc.), we in turn support the interference with school affairs of those who are first and foremost involved in the educational process, that is teachers, students and parents and, more generally, labour unions and popular forces that have the power to fight back dominant forces.
Viewing the work of the teacher from this angle, we more clearly perceive its significance, the connection of what (s)he tries to achieve in class with whatever social and political activity (s)he develops. According to Glinos, a competent teacher “sees in the souls of young people the possibility of a better humanity and sets himself servant to its creation, finding in this activity of his the most fulfilling contentment of his existence”. We would like to note that, especially nowadays, it is essential that the teacher should not resign from his/her mission in the face of difficulties, the general low cultural lever and living conditions, the hollow foundation of schools, the attempts of those governing to “assess” the him/her and to force them to “comply with their rules”. The teacher should not be “assessed” in isolation, because (s)he exercises a vocation within the social process of education in which, practically, all students participate together with the parents and the schools social surroundings. A joint engagement in determining school courses and curriculum, a mutual exchange of opinions concerning school problems and school activity, the joint struggle for a school that will serve the needs of the people and will therefore need the people’s support, will turn the – up to now - only occasional assemblage of these entities into a permanent and creative one. It will create those conditions that will allow democratic control and essential improvement of the educational activities.
Certainly, it is not only teachers that should be working at school. The personnel of social service and general support should also be existent to cover permanent constitutional positions, at either a school or municipal level (paediatricians, psychologists, speech therapists, social workers, dieticians, librarians, gardeners, electricians, plumbers, cleaners, cooks etc). Without all these recruits, a teacher cannot function unhindered, and schoolwork cannot include necessary elements for students’ edification. A striking example, to be avoided, is unhealthy food in school canteens, whereby they pass laws, which are never put into effect, or the chaos that takes place at ‘all-day’ schools where teachers are forced to food preparation or to various other activities. In accordance with their vital role in school life, these working personnel ought to participate in school administration as well.
The socialization of the student is not a matter to be resolved in the distant future. On the contrary, it is inseparably related to the everyday struggles, it is connected to the persistent endeavour to acquire knowledge and self- education, and affects the development of the student’s conscience and personality. Those who are in power nowadays are afraid of the students’ conscious collective activity and this is the reason why they disapprove of the students’ movement, the assemblies, the students’ boards, the action coordinating units. They have been trying for years, to marginalize the established students’ boards and substitute them with various controlled institutions and activities (adolescent parliament, student symposium, various E. U. programs concerning the youth…). When the students’ movement managed through boards and assemblies to express their will, and ventured to defend the shared concerns of the vast majority of the students going against dominant anti-educational policies; when it formed action coordinating units in schools of every grand municipality and achieved coordination throughout Greece; it was then that the government felt uncomfortable, remembered to talk about institutions, took measures undermining the direct participation and collective expression of student’s will.
A student is neither a biologically self-existent nor a socially autonomous unit. Therefore, an inevitable and compulsory relation exists between school and the parent/guardian. The problem of the relations between parents and school runs deeper than the mere exchange of information on a student’s progress. Parents constitute a powerful volition, the activation of which could help the development of educational procedures in various ways. What is of particular importance, though, is the mutual exchange of opinions and ideas to deal with the major problem of children’s education. The real relation between parent/guardian and school is not the superficial rivalry, which is not natural but cultivated for specific reasons, having to do with marks, children’s treatment, and the success or not of schoolwork etc. The real relation is everything that unites the guardians and the teachers, the common goal they share: the education of the children. Now that, with the notion of privatization of all that is public, it is attempted to label school fees “return taxes”, parental/guardian associations are asked to actually pay for purely functional expenses. This relation, though often presented as realistic, (paying for heating, children transportation etc, can easily bend parental demand for free education), it is by no means what parents or the school need. There is an altogether different kind of relationship that will help school develop. There must be found ways to help both sides realize their rights and duties; there is a need for them to become conscious of the real problems of school and education. They should understand which problems derive from school, which echo the surrounding social reality, which are created within school life, and use whatever potential for creative intervention available.
D.1. The decisive influence of the social environment
The shared by the community and its members, the harmonious relations between them and their sense of responsibility, are the features characterizing the integrated School Community. A School Community like this cannot be integrated within the limits of the bourgeois Society. Bourgeois society educates people individually and tries to infuse the students’ souls with those characteristics necessary for the struggle for their own personal “interest”: slyness, fortune-hunting, and subsequently, self-interest. In the bourgeois society, each individual aspires to defeat and get rid of the others. Live and let die! Therefore, in order for the collective operation of the School Community to be accomplished, certain general prerequisites must be guaranteed. Society should adopt the idea: “one for all, all for one”. We must adopt as our basis a policy that really aims at educating the people and which will need the active support of the popular movement, to fight against any obstacle it will definitely encounter. Participation itself is of utmost importance. This participation has nothing to do with the “popular participation” of the law 1655/85, which did not change the authoritarian school structures; it was neither broad nor substantial. Mainly, it allowed such and as many authorities as were enough to subjugate the popular movement within the system. It was a form of management of the misery in the educational system, in order to gain social acceptance in the course the privatization of state education and of the radical downgrading of the school. This is why we insist on the content of the intervention of the popular factor and do not analyze the various institutional forms on the level of each school, municipality or district or even centrally, the School Self-Administration can assume depending on the development of the social struggle.
We should like to emphasis that the School Community does not cancel state responsibility for the education of our people.Therefore, in order for the school to be able to function in the framework of the educational policy, the central directions concerning school, its principles, the axes of its function and its content (i.e. central school curricula) should correspond to our people’s needs; popular participation will be able to aid in their specialization and application to schools and districts while being centrally assessed. The currently planned assessment of the decentralized school unit, in the framework of capitalist restructuring and the authoritarian bourgeois state, is the exact opposite of the social control and the social dimension of school that the working people wish to have. Who is that performs the assessment, on what basis, and for what purpose? The overpowering control of private enterprise over public education, having devastating consequences on the financial suffocation of the popular families, the cultural level of the working class children and the ideological terrorism against teachers and students, constitute the most aggressive form of privatization. We should like to repeat, for one more time, the previously mentioned view that school – as well as education in general – is determined by society and therefore in the educational process apart from the crucial intervention of the State (laws, ideology, planning) and the participation of Regional Self-administration Organizations, we also demand the active participation of parents, teachers, and broadly the intervention of trade unions and several working people’s organizations. The working class movement shall play a vital role. The broad action coordinating units of the front of struggle for education, created in municipalities and boroughs show the direction towards which popular participation can be guaranteed and realization of common goals can be built. Present day struggles lead the way to the school of tomorrow, id est. the struggles of our people against the demands of the monopolies. The socialist society is the prospect, a society where social control can take place from the bottom to the top, the state, through the direct engagement of the working people in school operation, the direct social and political responsibility of the working class itself.
D.2. The School Community: the internal operation of school
The School Community is not part of the external operation of the school. It builds up in the course itself, starting from the very classroom. Collectivity is realized within school, first of all by transforming the very form of the school course. In attempting such a change certain principles must be followed:
- The elimination of the juxtaposition between teacher and student. Not only should teacher’s raised high desk be abolished but also a general classroom arrangement and restructuring should take place in order for it to release the potential that lies within it. The students are the subjects of education; their active participation is essential. This by no means suggests an equalization of the roles of the teacher and the student; on the contrary, the teacher’s scientific knowledge and mastery are needed for such a class to operate.
- Student’s activation for the acquisition of knowledge. The passive reception of textbook and ‘desk’ information should be replaced by the active participation in revealing knowledge through conversation and its active pursuit. Students do not forget what they themselves have discovered. The school class, in its present form, does not meet such a need. It is necessary to enhance classrooms providing them with a library and with all the equipment needed for the supervisory tuition, which being manufactured in a public factory, they will not be extremely expensive. Today’s classroom is a fossil coming from another era, and is not appropriate to encourage active acquisition of knowledge and the development of an active personality. It should, of course, remain the place of collection, planning and assessment of schoolwork, of certain lectures, the place where the personal items and the equipment are kept. However, the actual tuition should take place in a special classroom for each course, which means different classrooms for Geography, History, and in Physics, Chemistry, and Crafts’ laboratories; it means teaching in the Library, at the theatre, in sports facilities, in the schoolyard. Tuition will also take place outside school, using forms that are not limited to just one visit to a place. Human and social relations and the problems resulting from them are a great source of knowledge acquisition and creative activity, when the material collected at school is processed and applied to the laws and rules of life.
- Group activity should be the main form of schoolwork. The is no better method for the multilateral development of young people than the team operation of the class, strongly motivating and harmoniously cultivating and helping students to overcome learning difficulties. This is also the answer to the problem of ‘weak’ students which cannot be effectively dealt with when they are separated from the rest of the students, as it is attempted with “extra supporting” lessons – an alibi for class barriers and individualization of the responsibility for the low educational level of the working class children. Any problem can be dealt with in conditions of healthy competition, mutual help and cooperation, which only the class working as a team and mutual teaching in the team can bring.
Moreover, the activities of the School Community, which School Self-administration is to arrange, include the following:
School Life and its Self-administration, though, have a particular content each time, determined by general social factors, and especially by the correlations in social struggle and the role of the popular movement in educational affairs. If some people today call decentralization and self-administration the central direction of all state mechanisms aiming at the privatization of all state schools (through the interference of major publishing houses in the curricula and books, business people – sponsors etc.), we in turn support the interference with school affairs of those who are first and foremost involved in the educational process, that is teachers, students and parents and, more generally, labour unions and popular forces that have the power to fight back dominant forces.
Viewing the work of the teacher from this angle, we more clearly perceive its significance, the connection of what (s)he tries to achieve in class with whatever social and political activity (s)he develops. According to Glinos, a competent teacher “sees in the souls of young people the possibility of a better humanity and sets himself servant to its creation, finding in this activity of his the most fulfilling contentment of his existence”. We would like to note that, especially nowadays, it is essential that the teacher should not resign from his/her mission in the face of difficulties, the general low cultural lever and living conditions, the hollow foundation of schools, the attempts of those governing to “assess” the him/her and to force them to “comply with their rules”. The teacher should not be “assessed” in isolation, because (s)he exercises a vocation within the social process of education in which, practically, all students participate together with the parents and the schools social surroundings. A joint engagement in determining school courses and curriculum, a mutual exchange of opinions concerning school problems and school activity, the joint struggle for a school that will serve the needs of the people and will therefore need the people’s support, will turn the – up to now - only occasional assemblage of these entities into a permanent and creative one. It will create those conditions that will allow democratic control and essential improvement of the educational activities.
Certainly, it is not only teachers that should be working at school. The personnel of social service and general support should also be existent to cover permanent constitutional positions, at either a school or municipal level (paediatricians, psychologists, speech therapists, social workers, dieticians, librarians, gardeners, electricians, plumbers, cleaners, cooks etc). Without all these recruits, a teacher cannot function unhindered, and schoolwork cannot include necessary elements for students’ edification. A striking example, to be avoided, is unhealthy food in school canteens, whereby they pass laws, which are never put into effect, or the chaos that takes place at ‘all-day’ schools where teachers are forced to food preparation or to various other activities. In accordance with their vital role in school life, these working personnel ought to participate in school administration as well.
The socialization of the student is not a matter to be resolved in the distant future. On the contrary, it is inseparably related to the everyday struggles, it is connected to the persistent endeavour to acquire knowledge and self- education, and affects the development of the student’s conscience and personality. Those who are in power nowadays are afraid of the students’ conscious collective activity and this is the reason why they disapprove of the students’ movement, the assemblies, the students’ boards, the action coordinating units. They have been trying for years, to marginalize the established students’ boards and substitute them with various controlled institutions and activities (adolescent parliament, student symposium, various E. U. programs concerning the youth…). When the students’ movement managed through boards and assemblies to express their will, and ventured to defend the shared concerns of the vast majority of the students going against dominant anti-educational policies; when it formed action coordinating units in schools of every grand municipality and achieved coordination throughout Greece; it was then that the government felt uncomfortable, remembered to talk about institutions, took measures undermining the direct participation and collective expression of student’s will.
A student is neither a biologically self-existent nor a socially autonomous unit. Therefore, an inevitable and compulsory relation exists between school and the parent/guardian. The problem of the relations between parents and school runs deeper than the mere exchange of information on a student’s progress. Parents constitute a powerful volition, the activation of which could help the development of educational procedures in various ways. What is of particular importance, though, is the mutual exchange of opinions and ideas to deal with the major problem of children’s education. The real relation between parent/guardian and school is not the superficial rivalry, which is not natural but cultivated for specific reasons, having to do with marks, children’s treatment, and the success or not of schoolwork etc. The real relation is everything that unites the guardians and the teachers, the common goal they share: the education of the children. Now that, with the notion of privatization of all that is public, it is attempted to label school fees “return taxes”, parental/guardian associations are asked to actually pay for purely functional expenses. This relation, though often presented as realistic, (paying for heating, children transportation etc, can easily bend parental demand for free education), it is by no means what parents or the school need. There is an altogether different kind of relationship that will help school develop. There must be found ways to help both sides realize their rights and duties; there is a need for them to become conscious of the real problems of school and education. They should understand which problems derive from school, which echo the surrounding social reality, which are created within school life, and use whatever potential for creative intervention available.
D.1. The decisive influence of the social environment
The shared by the community and its members, the harmonious relations between them and their sense of responsibility, are the features characterizing the integrated School Community. A School Community like this cannot be integrated within the limits of the bourgeois Society. Bourgeois society educates people individually and tries to infuse the students’ souls with those characteristics necessary for the struggle for their own personal “interest”: slyness, fortune-hunting, and subsequently, self-interest. In the bourgeois society, each individual aspires to defeat and get rid of the others. Live and let die! Therefore, in order for the collective operation of the School Community to be accomplished, certain general prerequisites must be guaranteed. Society should adopt the idea: “one for all, all for one”. We must adopt as our basis a policy that really aims at educating the people and which will need the active support of the popular movement, to fight against any obstacle it will definitely encounter. Participation itself is of utmost importance. This participation has nothing to do with the “popular participation” of the law 1655/85, which did not change the authoritarian school structures; it was neither broad nor substantial. Mainly, it allowed such and as many authorities as were enough to subjugate the popular movement within the system. It was a form of management of the misery in the educational system, in order to gain social acceptance in the course the privatization of state education and of the radical downgrading of the school. This is why we insist on the content of the intervention of the popular factor and do not analyze the various institutional forms on the level of each school, municipality or district or even centrally, the School Self-Administration can assume depending on the development of the social struggle.
We should like to emphasis that the School Community does not cancel state responsibility for the education of our people.Therefore, in order for the school to be able to function in the framework of the educational policy, the central directions concerning school, its principles, the axes of its function and its content (i.e. central school curricula) should correspond to our people’s needs; popular participation will be able to aid in their specialization and application to schools and districts while being centrally assessed. The currently planned assessment of the decentralized school unit, in the framework of capitalist restructuring and the authoritarian bourgeois state, is the exact opposite of the social control and the social dimension of school that the working people wish to have. Who is that performs the assessment, on what basis, and for what purpose? The overpowering control of private enterprise over public education, having devastating consequences on the financial suffocation of the popular families, the cultural level of the working class children and the ideological terrorism against teachers and students, constitute the most aggressive form of privatization. We should like to repeat, for one more time, the previously mentioned view that school – as well as education in general – is determined by society and therefore in the educational process apart from the crucial intervention of the State (laws, ideology, planning) and the participation of Regional Self-administration Organizations, we also demand the active participation of parents, teachers, and broadly the intervention of trade unions and several working people’s organizations. The working class movement shall play a vital role. The broad action coordinating units of the front of struggle for education, created in municipalities and boroughs show the direction towards which popular participation can be guaranteed and realization of common goals can be built. Present day struggles lead the way to the school of tomorrow, id est. the struggles of our people against the demands of the monopolies. The socialist society is the prospect, a society where social control can take place from the bottom to the top, the state, through the direct engagement of the working people in school operation, the direct social and political responsibility of the working class itself.
D.2. The School Community: the internal operation of school
The School Community is not part of the external operation of the school. It builds up in the course itself, starting from the very classroom. Collectivity is realized within school, first of all by transforming the very form of the school course. In attempting such a change certain principles must be followed:
- The elimination of the juxtaposition between teacher and student. Not only should teacher’s raised high desk be abolished but also a general classroom arrangement and restructuring should take place in order for it to release the potential that lies within it. The students are the subjects of education; their active participation is essential. This by no means suggests an equalization of the roles of the teacher and the student; on the contrary, the teacher’s scientific knowledge and mastery are needed for such a class to operate.
- Student’s activation for the acquisition of knowledge. The passive reception of textbook and ‘desk’ information should be replaced by the active participation in revealing knowledge through conversation and its active pursuit. Students do not forget what they themselves have discovered. The school class, in its present form, does not meet such a need. It is necessary to enhance classrooms providing them with a library and with all the equipment needed for the supervisory tuition, which being manufactured in a public factory, they will not be extremely expensive. Today’s classroom is a fossil coming from another era, and is not appropriate to encourage active acquisition of knowledge and the development of an active personality. It should, of course, remain the place of collection, planning and assessment of schoolwork, of certain lectures, the place where the personal items and the equipment are kept. However, the actual tuition should take place in a special classroom for each course, which means different classrooms for Geography, History, and in Physics, Chemistry, and Crafts’ laboratories; it means teaching in the Library, at the theatre, in sports facilities, in the schoolyard. Tuition will also take place outside school, using forms that are not limited to just one visit to a place. Human and social relations and the problems resulting from them are a great source of knowledge acquisition and creative activity, when the material collected at school is processed and applied to the laws and rules of life.
- Group activity should be the main form of schoolwork. The is no better method for the multilateral development of young people than the team operation of the class, strongly motivating and harmoniously cultivating and helping students to overcome learning difficulties. This is also the answer to the problem of ‘weak’ students which cannot be effectively dealt with when they are separated from the rest of the students, as it is attempted with “extra supporting” lessons – an alibi for class barriers and individualization of the responsibility for the low educational level of the working class children. Any problem can be dealt with in conditions of healthy competition, mutual help and cooperation, which only the class working as a team and mutual teaching in the team can bring.
Moreover, the activities of the School Community, which School Self-administration is to arrange, include the following:
- Planning, applying and controlling educational and learning activity
- Matters of discipline, social life and behaviour
- Controlling and utilizing school finances
- Problems in connecting schoolwork to the environment, social activity and the school social functions
e-mail:cpg@int.kke.gr