[D66] Education as the Domestication of Inner Space

[R.O.]

  Education as the Domestication of Inner Space


        by Layla AbdelRahim
        <https://www.fifthestate.org/fe_author/layla-abdelrahim/>


        Fifth Estate # 391, Spring/Summer 2014 - Anarchy!
        <https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/391-springsummer-2014/>

Note: A shorter version of this article appears in the print edition.

We are taught since early childhood that everything in the world exists 
in a food chain as a “resource” to be consumed by those higher up the 
chain and concurrently as the consumer of “resources” that are lower in 
this predatory hierarchy.We are also told that life in the wild is 
hungry, fraught with mortal danger and that civilization has spared us a 
short and brutish existence. As children, we thus come to believe that 
life in civilization is good for us, in fact even indispensable for our 
very survival.

Today’s civilization, namely the European/Western, owes its existence to 
the Agricultural Revolution, which was born in the Fertile Crescent with 
the domestication of emmer wheat in the Middle East around 17,000 
B.P.–an event followed by the domestication of dogs in Southeast Asia 
around 12,000 B.P. and independent parallel civilizations in North 
America around 11,000 B.P. [1] Accordingly, a new conception of food 
fueled this socio-environmental praxis as it drove some humans to shift 
their subsistence strategies from those based on a conception of the 
environment as wild or existing for its own purpose supporting diversity 
of life to seeing the world as existing for human purposes, to be 
managed, owned, and consumed.

Thus, civilization began not simply as an agricultural revolution; 
rather, the revolution occurred in the ontological and monocultural 
conception of the world as existing for human use and consumption, 
thereby creating the need for such concepts as resource, hierarchy, and 
labour. Since civilization is rooted in the appropriation of food and 
“natural resources” as well as of slave labour (dogs, horses, cows, 
women, miners, farmers, et al), all of our institutions today 
inadvertently cater to these constructs and the needs that have been 
generated by this monocultural perspective. That is why every 
contemporary institution or company has a department of “human 
resources” and is thereby linked to managing, killing, and protecting 
the ownership of “natural” and other resources. [2]

Hence, everything, including humans, became “professionalized” and thus 
divided into gendered, ethnic, racial, and other categories specializing 
in specific spheres of labour thereby falling into defined niches of the 
“food chain”. Language reflects these categories and naturalizes 
oppression. For instance, in European languages, humanity is conflated 
with maleness. The word “woman” allows us to unconsciously accept that 
womanhood entails an aspect of humanness which erases our (female) 
animality thereby excluding the depersonified nonhuman animals from the 
privileges accorded to some animals (a small group of primates) by 
belonging to “humanity”. Moreover, by separating these categories of 
humanity, animality, femaleness, maleness, race, ethnicity, et al., 
language veils the racist, speciesist, and patriarchal essence of 
civilization where human and nonhuman women have been relegated to a 
class specializing in the production of human and nonhuman resources.

As children, we are thus programmed through language to accept our 
“specialized” places and roles in the cycle of oppression. Consequently, 
Africans were forced to work on plantations or in mines. The lower or 
dispossessed classes in Europe were turned into serfs and then into 
factory workers. Cows became “food”, horses–labour and/or entertainment, 
wild animals exterminated or hunted for fun, just to name some examples. 
Such outbursts of socio-environmental cultures had occurred sporadically 
in human and nonhuman societies throughout the history of life. However, 
until the Middle Eastern and Egyptian civilizations conquered Europe, 
this paradigm for subsistence based on exploitation and consumption had 
never achieved the global scale that we are experiencing today.

Growing up in Sudan, I learned, as early as the fifth grade, about 
civilization through a British curriculum and, ever since, the banks of 
the Tigris and Euphrates and the Indus Valley have captured my 
imagination. However, I remained puzzled by the dissonance between the 
deep sense of happiness and serenity that I had experienced in my 
childhood in the presence of wildness and the underlying assumption in 
civilized epistemology that portrayed the world as inhospitable to us, 
where life meant struggle and suffering. Even while accepting this 
suffering and struggle until my early twenties, I knew deep inside that 
being in the world and in my body was an incredible source of joy when 
not submitting to the religious, capitalist, or civilized decrees to 
obey those higher up the “food chain” hierarchy and to work, exploit 
others, kill, and consume.

This connection between food, colonization, and civilization has always 
been articulated in schoolbooks as something positive, intelligent, and 
important. Starting with our earliest curriculum, obligatory schooling 
indoctrinates us to believe in the necessity of colonizing the 
environment by monocultural perspective and coerces us into 
participating in this colonizing project.

Successful colonization hinges on the extent to which the domesticated 
resources are capable of generating surplus value of products, services, 
or flesh for their owners/consumers at minimum expenditure. To 
accomplish this, the one who domesticates must modify the purpose of 
being of the victim from wild existence for an uncontained reason to 
someone who exists to work most efficiently and produce the maximum in 
the shortest amount of time, in the smallest possible space, and with 
the least possible energy (food and other energy expenditures). The 
domesticator must also “educate” or convince the “resources” that they 
are resources. Civilization thus begins with the modification of the 
inner landscape of the domesticated being. The earlier this process 
begins, the better, preferably at birth and even before conception when 
the very concept of child is built on the understanding that her /raison 
d’etre/ is to serve the “higher”, outside, abstract social order called 
the “social good”. Civilization thus needed and thereby created a system 
of modification of children’s behaviour by means of a systematic 
imposition of civilized information, logic, and schema, namely: schooling.

A Soviet anarchist physiologist and director of the Moscow laboratory 
for developmental physiology between 1935 and 1978, Ilya Arshavsky, saw 
wilderness as a place of morality because the wild are guided by empathy 
and the knowledge that life must flourish in diversity in order for us 
to thrive. The wild have no choice but to collaborate with diversity and 
life, he says. Civilization, in contrast, says Arshavsky, is immoral, 
because the civilized have accorded themselves the right to choose 
whether to punish or not, to torture or not, to kill or not. _Most 
important, he explains how civilized parenting and schooling are 
responsible for the ecological devastation, war, and other forms of 
brutality against animals and wilderness. [3] It is not an accident, 
therefore, that civilized education takes place in the sterility of the 
school, where children are locked up for most of their lives between 
four walls and are taught through print and other media how to succeed 
by working in civilization to reinforce hierarchy._


[...]


http://layla.miltsov.org/nonfiction/

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