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<h1 class="post-title"><font color="B40431">Education as the
Domestication of Inner Space</font></h1>
<h4>by <a
href="https://www.fifthestate.org/fe_author/layla-abdelrahim/"
rel="tag">Layla AbdelRahim</a></h4>
<h4>Fifth Estate # <a
href="https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/391-springsummer-2014/">391,
Spring/Summer 2014 - Anarchy!</a></h4>
<p><span style="color: #ff0000;">Note: A shorter version of this
article appears in the print edition.</span></p>
<p>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.<span
id="more-2712"></span> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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]</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>raison d’etre</em> 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.</p>
<p>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. <u>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.</u></p>
<p><br>
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<p>[...]</p>
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<address><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://layla.miltsov.org/nonfiction/">http://layla.miltsov.org/nonfiction/</a><br>
</address>
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