WRITING
IN OPPOSITION TO THE CAPITAL-EDUCATION COMPLEX
Contemporary learning and educational methods based in hierarchical, linear systems were designed to create a compliant modern subject. American public schools were not designed to foster creative, free thinkers but train workers for the assembly line. The goal of the educational institution is to conform new subjects to the systems of governance and capital which rule our environment.
This is a well-documented phenomenon and one which I will refrain from investigating for the sake of brevity. Instead, I would prefer to focus our attention to alternatives in education and more profoundly, what learning is.
The typical school system operates hierarchically: the teacher governs as a fountain of knowledge and the students, willing sponges. Education in this top-down manner views students as a tabula rasa, attributing little significance to what was learned in their past lived experiences and instead emphasizing the teacher as a “knowledge bank.” This very basis denotes experiential learning as less significant than rote memorization of so-called “facts.”
The purposeful devaluation of experience plagues the education system, reducing creativity by perpetuating the actual rather than the possible. The stifling of creativity is endemic, fostered by systems of capitalist oppression, thereby entropic in quality. Creativity is fundamental to humankind, but is a necessarily nurtured faculty which if not “reinforced in practical use… may wither.” Creativity is critical for the hardened divergence demanded to withstand the crushing mold of the compliant subject. A combative direction against conformity can be found in the writing of Hungarian psychologist Ferenc Mérei: “great steps forward… derive from the application of unlearned procedures.”
You may think that the question then becomes how we unlearn these procedures, but it is my belief that we have conformed for too long and our understanding of ourselves, distanced by the trundling drive of capital, has lost the fundamental understanding of what it is to learn.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri outline a specific idea in A Thousand Plateaus essential in understanding the psychological structure of learning: the rhizome. The rhizome could be described as a complex, a network of multiplicity, or in relation to its namesake, a horizontally growing plant with an interconnected matrix of root systems.
The rhizome is infinite, growing variably in all directions, even through itself (“the rhizome connects any point to any other point.”) It becomes a “map,” “that [is] produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.” It is not difficult to imagine the neural pathways inside the brain in biological spectacle “constructing,” “connecting,” and “modifying” similarly. This network relies on constant “deterritorialization” (unlearning) followed by “reterritorialization” (relearning in new ways), achievable only through experimentation with processes and experiences. The rhizome necessitates the dissolution of the individual into a node within a larger network. This inherent interconnectedness may be the greatest strength in our own creative proliferation. Through the rhizome, every action is transmitted– rippling through our worldly network at different frequencies to continuously alter the conditions of existence. Fundamentally, this is the process of learning or becoming: engaging and/or creating dynamic networks of relationships between things, concepts, and people.
The education system is a crude pruning process designed to individuate and determine growth vis-à-vis governance, curriculum, teachers, and architecture, exclusively territorializing that which capital and the state deem productive. The system maintains a particular vein of experimentation entrapped within the enclosure of the capitalist actual. We reside in a container with no ceiling, but whose walls stretch towards the heavens. Capital must progress within these walls as progress outside warrants destabilization inside. But the limitations of these boundaries have grown apparent; confined experimentation now only occurs “with enormous difficulty” as “irregularity and uniqueness are constructed from identical elements.”
This “enormous difficulty” is not to be surpassed by the continued experimentation of identical elements, but by exploration outside the actual. We have lost sight of the grandeur and scale of our world and the potential of the possible. Education based in creativity fosters explorative networks, approaches questions with questions, and emphasizes the possible rather than the actual. Communities like this exist with varying degrees of success, but their existence points towards a potential which must be nurtured.
The psychiatric clinic La Borde (founded by Jean Oury, co-directed by Guattari and observed by Deleuze) was exemplary in its capabilities of producing a rhizomatic, non-hierarchical space. La Borde differed from other “asylums” in key ways, offering a guide in potential reproducibility within other spaces.
Patients, doctors, and staff at La Borde did not wear uniforms, incurring a small but significant change to break the boundaries between groups. Chores (cleaning dishes, landscaping, etc.) were also divided among the different groups and the clinic had no physical boundaries (gates, etc.), allowing patients to roam the property as they saw fit. These methods dissolved the hierarchical differences typically observed between patients, doctors, and staff members in hospitals, creating a community-driven relationship between the people in residence and the spaces they inhabit.
These changes towards a communal, horizontal style of living surface purposefully buried anti-hierarchical systems which have no place within the boundaries of capital. Instead of individualizing, La Borde treated each person as a node within its network, allowing everyone to actively participate in its progression. These methods can be modified to serve as the basis of an educational system. My own schooling serves as an example.
My high school (Acton Academy) is a small Socratic, project-based, one-room schoolhouse grounded in the belief that all children are curious people who can take initiative in their educational journey. At this school there are no teachers. A socratically-minded Guide is the only adult in the room and they do not answer questions. We drafted and signed our own governance contracts, upheld through a democratically elected Council which implemented a similar chore system as La Borde. There were no schedules; we were provided deliverables, due at the end of each day, and were placed in groups to hold each other accountable for the completion of these deliverables.
These are but a few key systems which allowed for a style of learning rooted in curiosity and creativity. The result was a self-guided group of learners who at every opportunity were determined to constructively improve each other's ideas and push each other to pursue their potential. We abandoned notions of hierarchy in favor of a creative, explorative network with hopes of changing the world. There was no mention of the idea of a rhizome, but within a small anti-hierarchical network its presence is immediately apparent.
If what I observed through four years of schooling is even partially true, there is an inherent understanding of the rhizomatic network of which we unconsciously participate. Our present containment can only result in the consumption of all resources and the ceasement of life as we now know it. It should remain our most pressing focus to cultivate educational spaces of uncontained creativity manifested through the unlearning of the systems of capital. Old and new spaces must be converted or designed with rhizomatic creativity in mind if we hope to bury the actual and uncover the possible.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, 30th anniversary ed., Bloomsbury, 2000.
Stoschek, Marina, and Olafur Eliasson, editors. Creativity Exercises: Emancipatory Pedagogies in Art and Beyond. Sternberg Press, 2022.
Hooks, Bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.
Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” October, vol. 100, Spring 2002, pp. 175–190.
Davidson, Cathy N. The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. Basic Books, 2017.