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<p>In any school around the world, with the exception of caged or
farmed animals kept for the purpose of training children in
domestication, children are kept away from other species and even
from different age groups and generations of humans. Moreover, the
socio-economic structure of public space and the inequality in the
distribution of wealth segregate schoolchildren by class even in
those schools where attempts are made at mixing genders, ethnic
groups and socio-economic classes. In tangible ways, schools
ensure that children are denied the possibility of experiencing
life outside the walls or beyond the limited family network,
because even family relationships are secondary to the time
children spend in schools and to the importance placed on
schooling. Therefore they acquire no real knowledge of how the
world thrives or suffers or how their civilized subsistence
paradigm causes others to suffer and die.</p>
<p>Years of such isolation impairs children’s ability to empathize
with other human and nonhuman people and renders them prone to
accepting ethical stances rooted in alienation, hostility to the
wild, and ignorance. In fact, immorality, cruelty, and ignorance
constitute the most prominent features of civilization. If the aim
of education is to proliferate civilization, then it stands to
reason that, whether this agenda is articulated or not, schools
work to instill these qualities in future “human resources” and
therefore the competitiveness, bullying, and other forms of
violence that are rampant in today’s schools reflect this
foundation. [4]</p>
<p>Conversely, in wild ontologies, beings get born for their own
purpose and pleasure of being. Their very existence is thus their
<em>raison d’etre</em> in itself. The fact that wild beings
continue to exist without anyone teaching them how to do it
demonstrates that human and nonhuman children are hardwired to
learn how to live; and since they cannot thrive in a dying
environment, they also learn that the best for living beings is to
maintain a balance of diversity in the community of life. This
epistemology, or way of knowing ourselves and the world, is rooted
in the fundamental premise of wildness: namely, if life happened
on earth it is because the conditions were favorable to life and
if the world is good for life, then living beings, by virtue of
living, know what is best for them. The best for living beings is
health, diversity, and happiness.</p>
<p>Acquisition of such knowledge requires presence and the capacity
to understand the emotional and experiential state of those who
share one’s space, one’s world. As Erica-Irene Daes writes on
behalf of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations established
in 1982 regarding the peoples whose subsistence cultures are based
on sustainable wild socio-environmental relationships:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">“Indigenous peoples regard all
products of the human mind and heart as interrelated, and as
flowing from the same source: the relationship between the people
and their land, their kinship with the other living creatures that
share the land, and with the spirit world. Since the ultimate
source of knowledge and creativity is the land itself, all of the
art and science of a specific people are manifestations of the
same underlying relationships…” [5]</p>
<p>Therefore, in wild societies children are expected to learn
through experience and interaction with empathetic and protective
family and community where a child is encouraged to try, test, and
experience herself and her surroundings. Nondomesticated nonhuman
and human animals allow the child to develop her instincts and to
forge biodiverse relationships through experience, empathy, and
self-realization, no matter how obscure that self-realization may
appear to others. There are endless examples that span human and
other animal societies. The Semai people of Malaya offer us a
contemporary illustration of such parenting and childhood
cultures.</p>
<p>Like many other indigenous societies around the world, the Semai
do not impose restrictions other than on violent or competitive
games or when responding to immediate life-threatening danger. [6]
They do not coerce children to serve nor do they practice any form
of psychological, moral, or physical punishment on children,
because they see the child as desiring and capable of learning
simply by living and enjoying the safety of the unconditional love
that the community provides. [7] In such societies, as soon as
they begin to crawl, children assimilate the culture of hygiene
and social interactions, for instance, they quickly learn where to
go to the toilet without books, narratives, or the threat of
ostracism. They also learn that any expression of cruelty,
including the consumption of animals they raise, is not part of a
“natural food chain”, but constitutes cannibalism and is part of
the larger context of violence that marks civilized relationships.
[8]</p>
<p><u>Pedagogy can thus have no place in wilderness. </u>It can
only exist in civilized societies where the intention is to
integrate children as future “resources” into an established
hierarchy of consumption (of effort, labour, and lives). Such
“integration” requires a system of education that modifies
children’s behavior, needs, and desires. This is domestication per
se and it entails standardization of purpose: the food chain for
which everything and everyone supposedly exists. Unlike in
wilderness, where it is vital for children to learn to respond to
change and difference innovatively yet in a symbiotic manner, in
civilization, control of what, when, and how children learn
constitutes an indispensable part of a fixed and abstract
curriculum intended to prepare them to work in controlled and
predictable environments producing and catering for the needs of
owners. Education is therefore a system of domestication that
relies on confinement, isolation, formulaic thinking, and
representational language, rather than on presence and personal
experience, whose goal is to eradicate idiosyncrasies and instead
inculcate, by means of pain and the withdrawal of food, the
“knowledge”, or the notion that one exists not for one’s own
pleasure, but as a resource of labor or nourishment for someone
else.</p>
<p>Such modification of one’s purpose and being becomes the focus of
inter-generational relations and constitutes the most
characteristic experience of childhood, lasting, at least, until
early adult years, if not later through university and graduate
school. This practice stems from the assumption that children will
not learn how to live (in civilization) and serve others as
resources unless they are forced to learn by means of threats and
a systematic infliction of emotional and/or physical pain. And of
course, this is an accurate contention, for children know that
they exist to enjoy life, not to torture it, not to suffer from
it, and not to extinguish it. Resistance to domestication has
always been strong. Hence, it takes decades to eradicate wild will
and hardly any time at all for human and nonhuman animals to go
feral.</p>
<p>I<u>n this respect, food lies at the nexus of domestication,
colonization, civilization, and education, for it constitutes
the resource, the method, and the underlying reason of civilized
violence. Specifically, the retraction of food and the induction
of hunger is the method of training nonhuman people to serve the
interests of human domesticators. Human animals are domesticated
in the same way by means of the threat of poverty or starvation
which, at its core, is about the retraction of food and which
constitutes the main pedagogical method in training human
resources: schools use grades and other psychological and
physical punishment to coerce future resources (workers) to
comply with the hierarchical order. Namely, good grades promise
a higher place in the food chain; lower grades and bad reports
threaten with hunger, homelessness, social isolation, and
suffering either from unemployment or performing menial tasks in
underpaid jobs in often horrendous conditions. School
evaluations serve to justify the apathy on the part of those who
exploit the suffering and labour of those whom this hierarchical
socio-economic system forces to the bottom of the food-chain. In
other words, cruelty, apathy, and alienation are artificially
inculcated in institutions of “learning” in order to civilize
and colonize human and nonhuman resources in the name of food
and simultaneously by means of food. These qualities are not the
side effect or the result of an undesirable accident of “human
nature”; they lie at the heart of a civilized agenda. In fact,
they are an intrinsic part of the mechanism that ensures its
proliferation.</u></p>
<p>It therefore comes as no surprise that like never before, the
last century has seen an unprecedented globalization of obligatory
schooling where the formation of civilized children’s <em>habitus</em>
has become largely confined to the classroom whose hierarchical
structure demands obedience to higher ranking persons of authority
(e.g. teacher and appointed class leaders) and where children
learn through listening to the teacher and through reading and
writing. Classes are arranged by age, outsiders are not allowed,
and this confinement of children in spaces with age peers
eliminates the possibilities of children experiencing the chaos of
everyday life in the real world. In the last century, literacy and
colonial languages have been imposed on children around the world
regardless of their cultural background or whether the work that
they would end up doing requires reading or writing skills,
particularly in a foreign, colonial language.</p>
<p>My own childhood is a perfect illustration of this colonization
and its complexities. When living in Russia, my options of school
curricula were limited to Russian, which was the official language
of the Soviet Union and the satellite “friendly” nations and, when
we moved to Sudan, I was schooled in English and Arabic, both of
which were colonizer languages in Africa. Furthermore, all of my
education was anthropocentric and mostly Eurocentric and alienated
from the real life of the north eastern African landscape in which
I lived and which was devastated in order to serve “Western/Middle
Eastern” and colonial needs–first for human slave labour, then for
ivory stolen from murdered elephants, then cotton, copper,
uranium, and finally petroleum, among endless other violations of
life. After independence from Britain in 1956, Sudan inherited
colonial borders and remained a colonial entity by virtue of its
inscription in the hierarchy of the “post” colonial economic order
and thus continued the legacy of mining, slavery, exploitation,
war, and desertification, thereby re-enacting the exploitation
paradigm of the predatory food chain. This is true for all the
nation states of the contemporary world, for there can be no
sovereignty in civilization, which is colonialism per se,
encroaching upon and conquering our inner and outer landscape.</p>
<p>As the most effective method of domestication, education has
always played a critical role in all of this. Historically, when
Arabs and later Europeans would colonize a new place, the first
thing they did was to open schools, or <em>madrasah</em> and <em>kottab</em>
in Arabic. Yet, in spite of the causal relationship between
civilization, suffering, and environmental devastation, the more
desperate the ecological situation grows, the more excruciatingly
“enhanced” civilized schooling becomes and the more parents demand
it for their children, accepting the state’s propaganda that
education is the answer. However, the ten thousand years of
civilization have demonstrated that it was civilization itself
that brought about organized violence, spread poverty among the
dispossessed classes of nonhuman and human animals whose
malnourishment, stress, and exploitation weakened the immune
system, while cramped living conditions facilitated the spread of
contagious diseases and epidemics. For instance, Armelagos and
colleagues discuss in their 1991 paleontological research how
sedentism and agriculture increased early mortality rates,
particularly negatively affecting women, children, and the oldest
adults. [9] According to them, the sudden growth in Neolithic
population occurred in spite of the increased mortality by
reducing the intervals between births and increasing the number of
births per woman.</p>
<p>In other words, civilization demanded disposable human resources
for military, policing, and hard labour and this demand was met by
the adoption of a patriarchal paradigm that increased monocultural
populations, deteriorating the immune system of individuals,
groups, and the whole environment. But I have not learned this in
school. I looked for this research on my own. For, the more
educated we become, the further away we stray from remembering the
happiness of simply being in the world, of treading lightly upon
the earth lest we hurt it. Still, parents entrenched in the
civilizing project, regardless of their place in it, continue to
believe that if people are educated even further, domesticated
even deeper, and punished even more, then happiness–in whatever
shallow understanding of it that the civilized may entertain–shall
come.</p>
<p>I do not know if at this point the ecological crisis is
preventable. However, we still must do everything in our power to
tackle its root cause and stop it. This requires a thorough
re-examination of the epistemology that drives civilization and
hence the abolition of all forms of coercion and incarceration
including, or perhaps rather starting with, schools.</p>
<p><span style="color: #ff0000;">Layla AbdelRahim is an
interdisciplinary author who uses a variety of research methods
and disciplines to understand civilization, wilderness, and our
place in the world. Her recent book, <em>Wild
Children–Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of
Education</em> (Fernwood, 2013), examines the connections
between civilization, domestication, and education relying on
her journal entries as well as on anthropological and
ethological research.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #ff0000;">For more on her critique of
education, civilization, literature, and culture visit her
website: <a href="http://layla.miltsov.org/">www.layla.miltsov.org</a></span></p>
<h4>Endnotes</h4>
<p>1. Ellen in Ingold, Tim (ed.) (1997) <em>Companion Encyclopedia
of Anthropology</em>: Humanity, Culture, and Social Life,
London: Routledge.</p>
<p>2. For an in-depth analysis, see AbdelRahim, Layla (2013) <em>Wild
Children–Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of
Education</em>, Winnipeg: Fernwood.<br>
And my dissertation:<br>
_____ (2011) <em>Order and the Literary Rendering of Chaos:
Children’s Literature as Knowledge, Culture, and Social
Foundation</em>. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Montreal.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/5965">https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/5965</a></p>
<p>3. From AbdelRahim, Layla (2013) <em>Wild Children–Domesticated
Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education</em>, Winnipeg:
Fernwood.</p>
<p>4. I discuss the statistics and the roots of violence in-depth in
AbdelRahim, Layla (2013) <em>Wild Children–Domesticated Dreams:
Civilization and the Birth of Education</em>, Winnipeg:
Fernwood. As well as in:<br>
_____ (2011) <em>Order and the Literary Rendering of Chaos:
Children’s Literature as Knowledge, Culture, and Social
Foundation</em>. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Montreal.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/5965">https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/5965</a></p>
<p>5. Quoted in Ingold, Tim (2007) <em>The Perception of the
Environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill</em>,
London and New York: Routledge, page 150.</p>
<p>6. Dentan, Robert Knox (1968) <em>The Semai: A Nonviolent People
of Malaya</em>, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.</p>
<p>7. Ibid.</p>
<p>8. Ibid.</p>
<p>9. Armelagos, George J., Alan H. Goodman, and Kenneth H. Jacobs
(Fall 1991). “The Origins of Agriculture: Population Growth During
a Period of Declining Health.” <em>Population and Environment: A
Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies</em> 13, 1: 9–22.</p>
<h4>References:</h4>
<p>AbdelRahim, Layla (2013) <em>Wild Children–Domesticated Dreams:
Civilization and the Birth of Education</em>, Winnipeg:
Fernwood.</p>
<p>_____ (2011) <em>Order and the Literary Rendering of Chaos:
Children’s Literature as Knowledge, Culture, and Social
Foundation</em>. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Montreal.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/5965">https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/1866/5965</a></p>
<p>Armelagos, George J., Alan H. Goodman, and Kenneth H. Jacobs
(Fall 1991). “The Origins of Agriculture: Population Growth During
a Period of Declining Health.” <em>Population and Environment: A
Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies</em> 13, 1: 9–22.</p>
<p>Dentan, Robert Knox (1968) <em>The Semai: A Nonviolent People of
Malaya</em>, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.</p>
<p>Ingold, Tim (ed.) (1997) <em>Companion Encyclopedia of
Anthropology: Humanity, Culture, and Social Life</em>, London:
Routledge.</p>
<p>_____. (2007) <em>The Perception of the Environment: Essays in
livelihood, dwelling and skill</em>, London and New York:
Routledge.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 16-08-2020 12:23, R.O. wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:584dea6b-9fa9-5e4d-9608-b32f73bd0fa2@ziggo.nl">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<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" moz-do-not-send="true">Layla AbdelRahim</a></h4>
<h4>Fifth Estate # <a
href="https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/391-springsummer-2014/"
moz-do-not-send="true">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>
</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<address><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://layla.miltsov.org/nonfiction/"
moz-do-not-send="true">http://layla.miltsov.org/nonfiction/</a><br>
</address>
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