a persistent and troubling tendency¶

There is a persistent and troubling tendency among the broad and vaguely-defined "left," that decries education and intellectualism as "bourgeois" and "elitist."

At its core, this error stems from a valid critique of the role of education as a tool of hegemony. (1/18) The conflation of bourgeois intellectualism -- which serves to reify the hegemonic social order -- with the act of study itself is, paradoxically, a consequence of insufficient study. In fact, revolutionary study is the ONLY way to break the hold of bourgeois hegemony. (2/18) There is a qualitative difference between the intelligentsia of the bourgeoisie and that of the proletariat. This difference is as profound as the one between the intelligentsia of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie when the latter was coalescing into a political class. (3/18) Every class builds its particular self-education framework and the features of its ideology in the context of political economy. The education is both cause and effect, the product of rising consciousness and its motive force. (4/18) The class character of an emergent school of thought is rooted in material relations -- which drive the political priorities of that field of study-- and in its practical application in class society; the political organizing that it builds and the accompanying reaction. (5/18) The most salient feature of education is that, like all aspects of social life, the dominant form of education is always established as a tool of hegemony, and carries the character of the ruling class. In feudal societies, the dominant education serves the aristocracy. (6/18) "Proper" schools in feudal Europe were not open to the public, and attendance was a matter of aristocratic privilege. Basic education for the lower classes was sporadic, and was a function of the church, serving to further reproduce aristocratic norms. (7/18) But it was in these schools that a nascent bourgeois intelligentsia emerged. Their acculturation in aristocratic pedagogy gave them the tools to directly combat both feudal economy and aristocratic philosophy as they constructed their own schools. (8/18) The “universal rights” and “self-evident truths” of liberal philosophy – and the ideological movements of which they were a foundational part – were not formulated from thin air. They were developed over centuries of study, emerging as critique of the dominant ideology. (9/18) As bourgeois dominance came to be cemented, the ideology they had developed was transmitted down the generations through bourgeois schools – same as the aristocratic schools had done, centuries earlier. (10/18) It is in this context that the proletarian ideology began to take shape. In many cases, it was driven by those at the nebulous class boundary – the lawyers, bureaucrats, small bourgeois, etc., who were acculturated in bourgeois thought and best positioned to expose it. (11/18) Since its quasi-proletarian beginnings, proletarian ideology and the educational mode that synthesizes it have come to be deeply characterized by the classes that uphold and advance it: the oppressed peoples of the world. (12/18) In every social context, the local conditions dictate the particular form of the emergent and evolving proletarian study; education is, as mentioned, a dialectic between theory and its practice, each feeding the other. (13/18) But despite the different iterations, adapted to disparate iterations of political economy, the overall content and form of proletarian education remains incontrovertible: it is the theory of liberation of the oppressed classes. (14/18) To assert that we cannot have an expectation of education – that it is secondary to the purity of action and the epistemology of merely existing under oppression – is to fall prey to the explicit aim of the bourgeois educational framework. (15/18) The single greatest feat of all aspects of hegemony is the naturalization of the dominant regime. In the field of education, this is accomplished by smothering all countervailing tendencies, and subsuming them into passivity and impotence. (16/18) Revolutionary pedagogy reclaims education from the ruling class. It tears down the ideological fences that enclose the fields of science, history, literacy, economy, and so on, keeping the masses from using that space to cultivate our movement. (17/18) Education is the glue that binds past to present movements, the microscope that magnifies the contradictions, the scalpel that excises regressive tendencies, the piston that turns the wheel of revolution. It is utterly indispensable. (18/18) [This thread is an adapted excerpt from a book-length theoretical treatise/practical guide I am writing, tentatively named Pedagogy of the Liberated.]