In the 19th century, formal schools that otherwise stemmed from the disciplinary endeavours of religious communities and colonialism (i.e missionary schools), were beginning to find roots in liberal capitalism. Besides the support from working class families (mostly white and well-off in the US), stricter labour laws began promoting an increased number of schools where children could go, instead of working in factories or labouring elsewhere. By constructing exclusive spaces for children to ‘grow,’ and especially those that maintained a certain distance from the adult labour force, was society opening up possibilities of an anti-capitalist future? Or, were these spaces meant to ‘grow’ children into the future labourers, in particular those who own and control the means of production and their separation from those who become the means of production? In this paper, I map out how children’s lives are implicated in liberal capitalism (and its possible antithesis) through schools and the philosophy with children movement. I will begin by elucidating Susan Ferguson’s argument regarding children and capitalism and then further her analysis by drawing on John Taylor Gatto’s observations about schooling and the pedagogies of the philosophy with children movement. In the end, I ponder about what it takes for children to indeed embody anti-capitalist futures.
In children, childhood and capitalism: a social reproduction perspective, Ferguson addresses the complex relationship between children and capitalism by arguing for the conclusion that there is a “deeply contradictory relationship between the social reproduction of children and childhoods, on the one hand, and the continued thriving and expansion of capital, on the other” (Ferguson 113). Before elucidating the reasons behind her claim, let me propose an understanding of capitalism and social reproduction. Capitalism is a system of producing surplus value whereby individual labourers sell their labour power to produce goods, commodities and services and receive wages in return. Inherent to this system of surplus value is exploitation and expropriation because to obtain “more from less,” the owners of capital must confiscate land, lower wages and take advantage of the natural world. Crucial to this system is habituating workers to the alienation from what they produce, how they produce, the other individual workers and ultimately, themselves. In the effort to divulge the processes that prepare the worker for alienation and the relationships that sustain their everyday functioning (besides receiving wages), social reproduction theory aims to acknowledge the familial and communitarian work that reproduces the worker’s labour power (Battacharya 2). This includes an understanding of the complex social relationship between ‘productive’ labourers, i.e those who produce commodities and provide services, and the ‘unproductive’ labourers or those who are unpaid, paid poorly (usually marginalised, of certain gender and race). An example of the work of SRT is the insightful ways in which it reveals the unpaid work done by women in homes and their role in sustaining the labour power of working men.
Ferguson sheds light on how the institution of schooling contributes towards “the thriving and expansion of capital” (Ferguson 113). She draws parallels between rules in schools such as those against running in the halls and detentions for incomplete homework and the disciplinary practices of workplaces such as scheduled breaks and productivity quotas (Ferguson 121). In both these cases, there is emphasis on an individual’s ability to contribute to value production even if it represses physical, intellectual and emotional fulfilment. In establishing corporal punishment as a solution to “misbehaving” children and through the policing of truants, schools find ways to deal with the slippages that came about from their disciplinary efforts (Ferguson 127). But Ferguson also highlights the potential of schools to foster anti-capitalist tendencies because of how they are not “directly under the thumb of capitalist control” (Ferguson 124). Schools might do this by indeed attending to the psychological and physiological impulses of children. Encouraging children to tell stories, draw pictures, sing, play sports, and work together to solve problems, orient them towards pleasure, affect, physicality, and sociality (Ferguson 124). In this manner, play, music, visual arts, sports and “inquiry-based” learning, keep the sensuous and imaginative life of a child alive (Ferguson 124), giving way for a more “playful, transformative relationship to the world” (Ferguson 114). It is in these ways, then, that children, in and through the socially reproductive system of schooling, “bend with and against capital” (Ferguson 114). In other words, by repressing children’s emotional, physical and intellectual fulfilment, schools socially reproduce the alienated workers required under capitalism and hence bend with capitalism and by encouraging creative play, schools also resist the very same social reproduction and bend against capital.
I will now draw from the work of John Taylor Gatto and from the philosophy with children movement to add to Ferguson’s analysis of how children “bend with and against capital.” I end on a slightly skeptical note by challenging the argument that children “bend against capital” and look for the missing aspects of this conversation.
Gatto focuses on how schools, through their structure, instil in children the attributes that the future alienated labourer must possess. He talks about the curriculum, age-determined classes, the bell, rewards and punishments, teacher dependency, the lack of self-evaluation and constant surveillance. The curriculum conceals and suppresses the human search for meaning by being out of context, disconnected in its parts and too much (Gatto 2-3). By separating children into fixed classes based on age, they come to know their place within a hierarchy and also that there is no way out of one’s class besides “number magic” (Gatto 5). Here, I believe that Gatto is referring to the arbitrary connections between age and privileges of what is learnt/taught in the classroom which parallels the necromany in action when wages are awarded differently to people based on their class background. In responding to a bell, children learn to not care too much about anything that they may be learning or thinking about (Gatto 5). Through rewards and punishments, children are made emotionally dependent on an external authority (Gatto 6). Moreover, by depending on the teacher as the expert knowledge provider, children are encouraged to be conformists (consumerist) (Gatto 8). In denying self-evaluation and relying on an external individual to tell me what I am worth, schools perpetuate dissatisfaction (Gatto 9). And finally, children are always watched and under constant surveillance to disallow any private spaces (Gatto 10). In this manner, schools prepare children to become disembodied, alienated labour and contribute towards social reproduction. Denying meaning-making and private space, assigning a place within hierarchy, normalising an attitude of indifference towards labour, fostering emotional and intellectual dependency on external authority, and normalising dissatisfaction, fear and confusion, are the elements of this reproduction.
The philosophy with children movement, on the other hand, is one that attempts to acknowledge and nurture young people’s philosophical selves by engaging with their open inquiries. The movement motivates children to “bend against capitalism” and does not contribute towards socially reproducing the alienated labour precisely because of how “Philosophy is a waste of productive time and a saving of free or aionic time, affirming another kind of life than a producer-consumer life” (Kohan 206). By this, I understand Kohan to mean that philosophy, which by nature is a time for exploratory play with ideas, involves the creation of new meanings and possibilities, and hence, stands against the goal-oriented way in which time under capitalism functions. Similar to how Ferguson conceives of the transformative potential of play, philosophy with children centres on the open-endedness of thinking through hypotheticals and counterfactuals. Moreover, pedagogically, philosophy with children begins with the questions that young people view as meaningful explorations, the teachers are not considered the experts and do not provide answers. Rather, teachers contribute towards the understanding of different perspectives, developing reasonableness, engaging with disagreements and challenging assumptions. As philosophy with children is against rewards, punishments, external evaluations, and is not bound by an age criteria, it resists the mechanisms that schools follow.
Having explicated the ways in which children’s lives are implicated in the mechanisms of schooling as well as in movements that resist the same, I conclude this essay by questioning the possibilities of “bending against capitalism” through play, philosophy, art and music. Aren’t these spaces merely brief escapes from the impending future? We know how the aforementioned opportunities are more available to children of certain class/caste/racial backgrounds, and hence how they further the gap between children who can creatively and critically control the means of production and those who are forced to fall back on becoming the means of production. Given that there is labour necessary for society to sustain and that this labouring repeatedly falls in the hands of the most marginalised communities, is it not necessary for everyone to partake in essential labour for there to in fact exist the possibility of “bending against capital?”
Works Referenced
(1). Bhattacharya, Tithi, and Lise Vogel. Social Reproduction Theory : Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya, 1st ed., Pluto Press, 2017.
(2). Ferguson, Susan. “Children, Childhood and Capitalism: A Social Reproduction Perspective.” Social Reproduction Theory, Pluto Press, 2017, p. 112.
(3). Gatto, John Taylor., and Zachary. Slayback. 2017. Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition : The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. 4th ed. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers.
(4). Kohan, Walter Omar, and David Knowles Kennedy. “School and the Future of Schole: A Preliminary Dialogue.” Childhood & Philosophy, no. 19, 2014, pp. 199–216.
