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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol. 34, No. 18. October 6 1971

The Student as a Nigger

page 7

The Student as a Nigger

"... the classroom offers an artificial and protected environment in which teachers can exercise their will to power ... students do what you say — or else ..."

Past the Bullshit

Students are niggers. When you get that straight, our schools begin to make sense. It's more important though, to understand why they're niggers. If we follow that question seriously enough, it will lead up past the Zone of academic bullshit, where dedicated teachers pass their knowledge on to a new generation, and to the nitty-gritty of human needs and hang-ups. And from there we can go on to consider whether it might even be possible for students to come up from slavery. First let's see what's happening now. Let's look at the role students play in what we like to call education.

Into the Cafeteria

Here at Vic the students have separate dining facilities. I am not allowed to take them into the staff club, and if I eat at the student cafeteria, I become known as the educational equivalent of a nigger-lover. In at least one building there are even rest rooms which students may not use.

Academic Mississippi

Students are politically disenfranchised. They are in an academic Mississippi. Many of them can vote in the national elections -their average age is about 21 - but they have no voice in the decisions which affect their academic lives. The students are, it is true, allowed to have toy government run for the most part by bureaucrats and concerned principally with trivia. The faculty and administration decide what course will be offered, the students get to choose their own toy parliaments. Occasionally when studetns get uppity and rebellious, they're either ignored, put off with trivial concessions, or get manouvered expertly out of position.

He'll Fail Your Ass

A student is expected to know his place. He calls a faculty member "Sir" or "Doctor" or "Professor" - and he smiles and shuffles some as he stands outside the professor's office waiting for permission to enter. The faculty tell him what courses to take; they tell him what to read, what to write, and frequently, where to set the margins on his typewriter. They tell him what's true and what isn't. Some teachers insist that they encourage dissent but they're almost always jiving and every student knows it. Tell the man what he wants to hear or he'll fail you out of the course.

Lobotomised

Even more discouraging than this Auschwitz approach to education is the fact that the students take it. They haven't gone through twelve years of seconary school for nothing They've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing during those twelve years. They've forgotten their algebra. They write like they've been lobotomised. But, Jesus, can they follow orders. Freshers come up to me with an essay and ask if I want it folded, and whether their name should be in the upper right-hand conrner. And I want to cry and kiss them and caress their poor tortured heads.

Two Truths

Students don't ask that orders make sense. They give up expecting things to make sense long before they leave primary school. Things are true because the teacher says they're true. At a very early stage we all learn to accept "two truths", as did certain medieval churchmen. Outside of class, things are true to your tongue, your fingers, your stomach, your heart. Inside class things are true by reason of authority. And that's just fine because you don't care anyway. Miss Widemeyer tells you a noun is a person, place or thing. So let it be. The important thing is to please here Back in kindergarten, you found out that teachers love children that stand in nice straight lines. And that's where it's been ever since. Nothing changes except to get worse. School becomes more and more obviously a prison. Last year I spoke to a student assembly and then couldn't get out of the school. I mean there was No Way Out Locked doors. High fences. One of the inmates was trying to make it over the fence when he saw me and froze in panic. For a moment I expected sirens, a rattle of bullets, and him clawing the fence.

No Spades in Pointy Shoes

Then there's the infamouse "code of dress" In some high schools, if your skirt looks too short, you have to kneel before the principal, in a brief allegory of fellatio. If the hem doesn't reach the floor, you go home to change while he, presumably jacks off. Boys in high school can't be too sloppy and they can't even be too sharp. You'd think the P.T.A. would be delighted to see all the spades trooping to school in pointy shoes suits, ties and stingy brims. Uh-uh. They're too visible. What school amounts to, then is a 12-year course in how to be slaves. What else could explain what I see in a first year class? They've got that slave mentality; obliging and ingratiating on the surface and hostile and resistant underneath.

As do black slaves, students vary in their awareness of what's going on. Some recognise their own put-on for what it is and even let their rebellion break through to the surface now and then. Others - including most of the "good students" - have been more deeply brainwashed. They swallow the bullshit with greedy mouths. They honest-to-God believe in grades, in busy work, in General Education requirements. They're pathetically eager to be pushed round. They're like those old grey-haired house niggers you can still find in the South who don't see what all the fuss is about because Mr Chairlie "treats us real good".

Some students are expert con artists who know perfectly well what's happening. They want a degree and spend their years on the old plantations alternatively laughing and cursing as they play the game. If their egos are strong enough they cheat a lot. And, of course, even the Toms are angry down deep somewhere. But it comes out in passive rather than active aggression. They're unexplainably thick-witted and subject to frequent spells of laziness. They misread simple questions. They spend their nights mechanically outlining history chapters while meticulously failing to comprehend a word of what's in front of them.

Fresh Pimples

The saddest case among both black slaves and student slaves are the ones who have so thoroughly introjected their masters' values that their anger is all turned inward. These are the students for whom every low grade is torture, who stammer and shake when they speak to the professor, who go through an emotional crisis every time they're called upon in class. You can recognise them easily at finals time. Their faces are festooned with fresh pimples; their bowels boil audibly across the room. If there really is a last Judgement, then the parents and teachers who created these wrecks are going to burn in hell. So students are niggers. It's time to find out why.

A Cattle Stampede

Professors were no different when I was an undergraduate during the McCarthy era: it was like a cattle stampede as they rushed to cop out. And in more recent years, I found that my being arrested at demonstrations brought from my colleagues not so much approval or condemnation as open-mouthed astonishment "You could lose your job!"

Now of course, there's the Vietnamese war. It gets some op posit ion from a few teachers. Some support it. But a vast number of professors who know perfectly well what's happening, are copping out again. And in the high schools you can forget it. Stillness reigns. I'm not sure why teachers are so chikenshit. It could be that academic training itself forces a split between thought and action. It might also be that the tenured security of a teaching job attracts timid persons and, furthermore that teaching, like police work, pulls in persons who are unsure of themselves and need weapons and other external trappings of authority.

As Judy Eisenstein has eloquently pointed out, the classroom offers an artificial and protected environment in which teachers can exercise their will to power. You neighbours might drive a better car; gas staion attendants may intimidate you; your wife may dominate your, the State Legislature may shit on you; but in the classroom, by God, students do what you say - or else. The grade is a hell of a weapon. It may not rest on your hip, potent and rigid like a cop's gun, but in the long run it's more powerful. At your personal whim - anytime you choose - you can keep 35 students up for nights and have the pleasure of seeing them walk into the classroom pasty-faced and red-eyed carrying a sheaf of typewritten pages, with title page, footnotes and margins set at 15 and 91,

Irrational Authority

The general timidity which cuases teachers to make niggers of their students usually includes a more specific fear - fear of the students themselves After all, students are different, just like black people. You stand exposed in front of them, knowing that their interests, their values and their languages, are different from yours. To make matters worse, you may suspect that you yourself are not the most engaging of persons. What can protect you from their ridicule and scorn?

Respect for authority. That's what. It's the policeman's gun again. The white bwana's pith helmet. So you flaunt that authority. You wither whispers with a murderous glance. You crush objectors with erudition and heavy irony. And, worse of all, you make your own attainments seem most accessible but awesomely remote. You conceal your massive ignorance - and parade a slender learning. The teacher's fear is mixed with an understandable desire to be admired and to feel superior - a need which also makes him sling to his "white supremacy". Ideally, a teacher should minimise the distance between himself and his students. He should encourage them not to need him - eventually or even immediately. But this is rarely the case. Teachers make themselves high priests of arcane mysteries. They become masters of mumbo-jumbo. Even a more or less conscientious teacher may be torn between the need to give and the need to hold back, between the desire to free his students and the desire to hold them in bondage to him.

Another result of student slavery is equally serious. Students don't get emancipated when they graduate. As a matter of fact, we don't let them graduate until they've demonstrated then willingness - over 15 years - to remain slaves. And for important lobs like teaching, we nuke them go through more years just to make sure. What I'm getting at is that we are all more or less niggers and slaves, teachers and students alike. This is the fact you want to start with in trying to understand wider school phenomena, say, politics, in our country and in our countries.

Raise Hell

Educational oppression is trickier to fight than racial oppression. If you're a black rebel, they can't exile you, they either have to intimidate you or kill you. But in high school or Varsity they can just bounce you out of the fold. And they do. Rebel students, renegade faculty members, get smothered or shot down with devastating accuracy. Others get tired of fighting and voluntarily leave the system. This may be a mistake though. Dropping out of Varsity for a rebel is like going north for a Negro. You can't really get away from it so you might as well stay and raise hell.

How do you raise hell? Thai's a whole other article. But, just for a start, why not stay with the anology? What have black people done? They have, first of all, faced the fact of their slavery. They've stopped kidding themselves about an eventual in the Great Watermelon Patch in the sky They've organised; they've decided to get freedom now, and they've started taking it. Students, like black people have immense unused power. They could, theoretically, insist on participating in their own education. They could make academic freedom bilaterial. They could teach their teachers to thrive on love and admiration rather than fear and respect, and, lay down their weapons. Students could discover community. They could learn to dance by dancing on IBM cards. They could make colouring books out of calendars and they could put the grading system in a museum. They could raze one set of walls and let life come blowing into the classroom. They could turn the classroom into where it's at - a "field of action" as Peter Mann describes it. And believe it or not they could study eagerly and learn prodigiously for the best of all possible reasons - their own reasons.

They could. Theoretically. They have the power. But only in very few places, like Berkeley, have they even begun to think about using it. For students, as for black people, the hardest battle isn't with the system. It's with what the system has done to your mind.