Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for the Central Brooklyn DSA Night School!

The Central Brooklyn DSA Night School is excited to announce our tenth session on education. Please come join us to discuss the place of education in capitalist societies and to explore the meaning of socialist education — not only as an object of our struggles, but also as the approach to learning we adopt as socialists.

We also have a special guest for the session. Jia Lee, a 17-year special education teacher in the NYC public education system and a union activist with UFT’s MORE (Movement of Rank and File Educators) Caucus, will open the meeting with a presentation on how neo-liberal reforms are affecting the structure of education today. She will also draw on the recent teachers’ strikes to point to avenues of resistance and educational change.

We will meet at:

Verso Books

20 Jay Street, Suite 1010

Brooklyn, NY 11201

June 28, 2018

7:00-9:00PM

As always, the bulk of the meeting will be dedicated to small group discussion.

For the tenth session of the Night School, we will be looking at four texts: excerpts from the “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” by Louis Althusser from 1970, an except by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis from Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life” entitled “The Origins of Mass Public Education” published in 1976, an article by Eric Blanc entitled “Arizona Versus the Privatizers” published in Jacobin in 2018, and excerpts from chapter 2 and 3 from Pablo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed from 1970.

You’ll find some questions below to consider as you go through the readings.

You may download a PDF of the excerpt from “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” here, the excerpt from Schooling in Capitalist America here, the article “Arizona Versus the Privatizers” here, and the excerpts from Pedagogy of the Oppressed here.

Please arrive on time, and come ready to share your thoughts. We look forward to continuing the series with lots of lively discussion!

Pizza will also be provided!

Discussion Questions:

1. Citing Marx, Althusser argues that societies cannot sustain production without simultaneously reproducing the conditions of production. What role does the educational system play in reproducing the conditions of production in capitalist societies? How does it aid the reproduction of productive forces (means of production & labor-power)? Of relations of production?

2. Bowles & Gintis provide an account of how mass public education co-evolved alongside the expansion of factory production in 19th century America. How did the new schooling structure turn out workers with both the skills and the disposition required by the burgeoning industrial economy and its class structure?

3. Please reflect on your own experience in today’s educational system. How is the current economy reflected in it? Discuss the ramifications of neoliberal attempts to commodify education — to administer and regulate it by market means — in terms of issues like school privatization, inter-school competition, high stakes testing, etc. How have these structural changes affected students and teachers alike?

4. With a plethora of actors, interests and ideas at play, the dynamics of educational reform and change are complex and conflict-ridden. And as Horace Mann’s reforms demonstrate, the outcome can be at once progressive and conservative. Do you find this mixed result to be a necessary consequence of education’s function in reproducing the conditions of production? What would socialist changes/struggles in education look like?

5. Freire presents the banking method and problem-posing method as two opposing approaches to education. How are they different? Why does he argue that the banking approach cannot be used in the practice of liberation? Do you agree? What implications might this have for the DSA and our work? What kind of campaigns, learning and leadership structures would enable us to build radical democracy rather than to replicate structures of domination characteristic of capitalist societies?