The student as education insurgent
"Educating for Insurgency," by Jay Gillen, makes the case that the transformation of our schools depends on recognizing the critical role of young people in high-poverty schools.
Gillen is a Baltimore math teacher who helped organize the Baltimore Algebra Project, a student-run collective that provides tutoring services and engages in political advocacy. The project was inspired by and draws on the legacy of the iconic Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leaders Bob Moses and Ella Baker.
Gillen’s book centers on a discussion of what he calls "schools of poverty" and the efforts to reform them. He compares the organization and norms of the plantation during slavery with today’s schools.
The view of slaves as lazy and resistant to authority is carried over in the attitudes toward students, which are sometimes overt but more often coded, by many of today’s educators. Today’s schools of poverty, no less than plantations in slavery times, rely on repressive discipline.
… the official policies of most schools for adolescents in poverty assume that without "consequences" (the 20th century euphemism for ‘punishment)’, students would do no work at all, probably would not even bother attending school or classes, and would, most likely, run amok. A whole panoply of physical movements are alternately prescribed and proscribed: where the students must or many not sit; where they must or may not go; which doors they are required and which doors they are forbidden to use; which books or materials they must or may not touch; which websites they may see or must not see; when they must stand and when they may not stand; when they may use the bathroom; when they may eat, when they may or must leave the building; when they may or must speak. All these modal constraints depend utterly on punishments and the threat of punishment. Well-run schools, like well-run plantations, are places where the “consequences” for violating requirements are swift and certain.
For Gillen, efforts at fixing these schools break down, because students are seen as objects, to be manipulated for the purposes of others, rather than as subjects, who are actively engaged in shaping their own learning.
The other blind spot he identifies is the tendency to take student behavior literally. Things are not always what they seem for Gillen, who draws on the work of philosopher Kenneth Burke and novelist Ralph Ellison. Young people are experimenting with different personae and acting in a cultural context that is not always apparent to adults. Schools of poverty are contested territory in which student resistance, primarily in the form of non-conformity, challenges the role of these schools as the means for reproducing the social relationships that serve those with power.
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