Are school teachers bourgeois?
Are school teachers bourgeois?
Consider:
-holders of advanced degrees and credentials (gatekeeping)
-assigns labour (literally called worksheets!) to pupils (proles)
-gives out sanctions, extra work, and bad reviews to punish bad work behaviour
-literally trained in discipline
-sharing of knowledge is forbidden, calls it cheating
-insists that you not work directly with your best friend, assigns you pairwork with a gender you're not yet comfortable with
-according to most media, teachers are the most liberal profession
-creates quarterly performance reports for workers, stressing constant need to improvement (report cards)
-have direct access to whiteboard markers and notebooks, the means of instruction!
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No, but as Engels first noticed in "Conditions..." about fledgling British education system for proletarians, they are part of inteligentsia specifically tasked to instill burgeois sentiments in proletarians.
Historically situation was improved under socialism, but you can't just replace entire teacher cadre after revolution, that could easily cripple your education system and in consequence economy and state. And thus in new socialist states in Europe (for example) teachers were the same and education system still instilled bourgeois sentiments and nationalism (not to mention other issues like in Poland after 1945 teachers came from mainly Kraków, Wilno and Lwów school of thouoghts because only those cities had Polish education centers after partitions, so it was carried over interwar period, spreading obscurantism, blind nationalism, russophobia and ending up polonising several minorities like Kaszubs or Silesians).
Historically situation was improved under socialism, but you can't just replace entire teacher cadre after revolution, that could easily cripple your education system and in consequence economy and state. And thus in new socialist states in Europe (for example) teachers were the same and education system still instilled bourgeois sentiments and nationalism (not to mention other issues like in Poland after 1945 teachers came from mainly Kraków, Wilno and Lwów school of thouoghts because only those cities had Polish education centers after partitions, so it was carried over interwar period, spreading obscurantism, blind nationalism, russophobia and ending up polonising several minorities like Kaszubs or Silesians).
The solution to this in my opinion would be to create a new school. Call them "Academies" or something. These new schools would be constructed with the specific purpose of recruiting and teaching in a socialist way. Providing specific teacher training for these Academies is easier to have teachers accept because they know damn well they're applying to a new and different type of institution when they apply for the job.
You construct more and more of these over time alongside the old schools and slowly phase them out. You can also gather data demonstrating that the Academies provide better results which reinforces acceptance in phasing out the old ones.
Yes this was actually attempted, but didn't work, because the academia and broader inteligentsia resisted the attempt to replace them, and furthermore, the new socialist cadre was necessarily educaded by the old burgeoisie one.
Non European socialist countries succeeded more with this, since they started with lower level and they had actual revolutions unlike euro socialists, but the thawing after 68 got them too.
Interesting. The Labour Party here in the UK started the academy system that slowly phased out old schools and it worked quite well. Obviously not to create socialism or anything ideological but to change from a prior education method to a newer better approach providing better pupil outcomes.
I think the main place to initiate real changes is probably less in the schools where teachers teach pupils though and moreso in the universities where the teachers learn to teach.
Still though you're guaranteed for this to be a 50 year or more project because what are you supposed to do with the teachers otherwise? Have them not work?
We also like, need their skills because we need educated workers for pretty much everything so we can't exactly do terror with them to conform as it'll cause too many to leave the country.
Yes, you're right, in Poland it failed because high concentration of reactionary thought in inteligentsia (not just apathetic or apolitical but reactionary, and this was even more true in universities) and the fact that after 1956 coup power was taken by the nationalist faction, and for them the nationalist education was a given, ignoring rest of the baggage attached.
Huh that's interesting. It's the complete and total opposite here in the UK. I would say that our school teachers are particularly left, with about half being significantly left of liberal even. We have very good teachers unions which might play a role as we have socialist leadership and organisers in important positions among them, the teachers themselves are very amenable to socialists. In my opinion they'd be our allies here.
I'd even say that they actually get considerably more left the higher up in education you go.
Elaborating on the part i mention before about polish education:
Poland and Polish nationality basically entire existence was formatted by the partitions. Not only country was occupied and divided, but also opressed. In Prussia/Germany the oppression was strongest, polish culture and language was systemically eradicated. In Austria, it was mildly tolerated, or at least as much as Austrian regime tolerated any not compliant ethnicity. In Russia it's the middle, oppresion was lesser as in Prussia and not consistently enacted. Partitions explain the insanely high Polish nationalism too, also the romanticism literature hit Poles very hard and is flattening the brains here ever since.
So fast forward to 1918 and the only places where Polish inteligentsia was present in sufficient numbers to actually try to assmble the university cadres and education system were the locations of current (Kraków i Cieszyn in former Austrian part.) and former (Wilno and Lwów in former Russian part.) universities, and those are lava-hot beds of nationalism, full of Mickiewicz-maniacs* very much influenced by backward ideas like romanticism and catholicism. And those cadres taught the future ones - which is also one of the main reasons of the Polish culture high uniformity noticed by many foreigners even now.
*Also note that in 1968, when the banana youth and other liberal students rioted against the socialism, the direct spark for that was also the withdrawing of the Mickiewicz play from the theatre - people organising that protest were later the core of worst polish liberalism - Michnik, Kuroń et cons.