"International Student Movement"

After reading the site's definition of "emancipation" and the reasoning behind "the movement", I feel it is necessary to explore the basic concepts of this movement a bit further because some things seem to be missing. Although Foucault was mentioned in the "Resources" section, most of the writing seems to ignore the broader aspects of how power functions in "educational" environments: knowledge gleamed not only from Foucault, but also from Pablo Farrar, A.S. Neill, John Dewey, and many many others.

Systems of State education have a very long history of ulterior motives for their institutions. Any struggle for emancipation ought to take into consideration that the developing commercialization of Universities, Public School Systems, etc. is better understood as a shift in "masters" and not as a sudden change in power dynamics, aims, freedom, etc. Corporations may be gaining more and more control over school systems, but they are following in the footsteps of bureaucrats before them, State-governments before them, and the Church even before them! Public Schools and Universities have a history almost entirely composed of techniques for social control, whether those in control are Corporations, States, or Churches. The panoptical style of the architecture, the power dynamics of teacher-student relationships, the rules and regulations (including all the bells and whistles to keep track of students), the pledge to whatever State's flags, and plenty of other things about Public Schools and Universities have been designed with the conscious intention of social control. And by "social control" I do not mean "law and order", I mean reducing critical thinking, obedience conditioning, reproducing authoritarian power dynamics, manipulating the flow of communication to create oppressive relationships, implementing surveillance systems and other control mechanisms (such as the hallway structure of schools, the administrative hierarchy, etc.), and overall generally aiming to produce NOT well informed, critical, civic-minded, and independent persons (especially when you get into gender stereotyping and other such identity issues) - rather, to produce ill-informed, passive and accepting, obedient, and dependant persons who have not the slightest capacity for acting politically, analyzing the messages that not only corporations will feed them in life (on billboards, television, bias newspapers, etc.) but also the military, religious groups, and others in positions of power.

If anyone needed proof of the ideological opinions that have shaped education in most industrial countries, proof of the fact that such opinions are the ones that lead to almost all of the designs and changes educational institutions have gone through, and proof that many of the negative affects we see from such institutions were consciously planned... I would be happy to provide them. All of the facts are out there whether you want to look into the Jesuit idea of education and how that influenced the development of Public Schools in the US, the slow bureaucratization of education later, the consistent parallels between institutions of education and prisons, military institutions, and corporate structures themselves, or the psychological/sociological effects of typical administrator-teacher-student dynamics (or the group dynamics of most classrooms). Also, there have been innumerable alternatives created through-out the history of Western education that have been much more successful in emancipating human beings and providing the experience/knowledge they need to challenge power, avoid the manipulation of corporations/media/etc., take political action or make civic decisions, see others as equals instead of seeing them stereotypically or in hierarchical taxonomy, and having a deep understanding (not just a bunch of facts) of existence/etc.

Emancipation requires a look into these things, it demands broadening your understanding beyond this tiny moment when institutions of education are simply switching controls - it demands the knowledge of history and power-dynamics necessary to not only eliminate the corporate privation of school systems, but to eliminate the conditioning and mis-education that has run rampant through such institutions since they were founded!

I hope this is taken with utter seriousness because there is no reason why a movement for the emancipation of education should only focus on one of the many forces behind the institutional oppression it seeks to abolish.