I was at a party organized at my daughter´s school today, and I had another epiphany.
When we chose the school (I’m happy to say she’ll change next year – whether that will be an improvement is of course not preordained), we noticed that there was a very big emphasis on codes of behavior. It was kind of a bit too much, but nothing objectionable that one could put one’s finger on. On the contrary, who could disagree that it was a good thing to learn to listen to others, to take their feelings into account, to be on time in the classroom, and many other laudable aims and intentions?
Plenty of parents hope that school will instil in their youngsters a sense of discipline and standard of behavior which they, as parents, feel they have failed to do at home. This takes on occasion extreme forms in response to desperate parenting failures. We rather hope that school is a place where our children would have fun and learn self-expression; in the right environment, we would expect the rest to follow without any need for compulsion. But of course we also know that not everyone brings up their children like we do, giving the teacher a more difficult job, and we wouldn’t want our daughter to be terrorized by children that are out of control, so I guess we thought we could live with the school’s approach.
As expatriates, and given that she would only spend one year in the school, we haven’t been very closely involved in the life of the school. The only thing that I have found constantly disturbing in this school is the lack of tenderness and joy on the part of the teaching staff. They don’t smile much, and treat children brusquely to say the least. But otherwise – a normal school. Nothing really to complain about.
The event was themed around tolerance of diversity, with plenty of other laudable themes thrown in for good measure – like environmental stewardship and so on. Pretty much as I would imagine American high schools – full of public displays of allegiance to the school’s moral code. Except we’re talking here kindergarten and primary.
I have lived in Brussels for 20 years, so I pretty much know the place. It has been my experience that many members of the educated population present a sycophantic public persona, which is apparently polite and very conflict-averse, but behind which the rage is barely masked – utterly unprovoked verbal aggression is not difficult to solicit from the most innocent of comments or questions. So one might wonder whether this school is typical or counter-cultural.
A casual glance at the faces of the parents present at today’s event, at their body language, or casually eavesdropping on their conversations convinces me that as far as the parent population is concerned, it is typical. And of course I cannot fast-forward 20 years, but both self-selection and the conservatism of social institutions make it highly likely that the children as adults will not be so very different from their parents.
So is the moral education not working?
Of course it is not working. Moral education does not work. We have been amply warned by Nietzsche of the social role and the effects of Morality, and we should have listened better. What is Good flows directly from Lebendigkeit, vitality. The extinction of resistance to the behavioral code you wish to impose can only beget outcomes that are, at the very best, socially convenient; the anger locked inside expresses itself exactly as I have already alluded to.
The insidiousness of this is that it is so hard to argue with and stand up against. Almost no-one will understand you. Don’t we want our children to grow up to be good citizens? To prosper through their connections to their peers?
And so the groupthink marches on, and the Gleichschaltung is assured of success.
There is one word for this: manipulation, and it is a power game whose true nature yields rapidly to analysis. Exactly as many manipulative mothers, my own included, constantly remind(ed) their children of how much their behavior disappoints them, hurts them, how “good boys and girls” don’t do things like that.
Well fuck you. Children owe no duty to their parents in a world where parents have no regard for their children. Children are easy to exploit and emotionally manipulate, but Macht macht kein Recht, power is not morality.
Just before going to that party, I was reading another article from the school promoting the doctrine of non-violence, I believe in the Marshall Rosenberg tradition. I of course agree that when our spontaneous reaction to something is a violent one, we should try to come to an understanding of why that is and maintain our emotional states in consciousness – which is not quite the same as rejecting violence, but it comes close enough in practice. Everything that is said in that article sounds right – about understanding the different perspective of the other, how one’s own psychic wounds predispose one to certain emotional reactions and so on. The problem is that this discourse will inevitably be instrumentalized, implemented in such a way as to impose anyway the will of the more powerful individual by manipulation.
The words don’t matter; only the motivation and consciousness matter, and these will not be changed by words. The realization of this was what underpinned the great post-colonial emancipation movement; and when violence is provoked, it is also legitimate and understandable, even if it is not always wise or enlightened. Even if the original provocation was very well disguised in seemingly philanthropic dress (behind closed doors, be assured the violence is as real). Then, as Sartre put it in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, “this irrepressible violence [in response to colonial exploitation] is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself”.
These days I am shaken by rediscovered violence from my childhood. I love it, I feel alive, each time I abreact it (of course I don’t hurt anyone; or myself) I come into a new space of greater consciousness and joie de vivre. As for aggression, it is positively sacred in my eyes.
My children don’t need to be brainwashed into subscribing to pretty ideologies and to the relationships of power which vehicle them and are profoundly opposed to their own sense of self.