All modern civilisation is a tension between the school classroom and school playground. The classroom is…

All modern civilisation is a tension between the school classroom and school playground. The classroom is where a society grafts its knowledge onto its present-day culture. The playground is where kids bring their outside social lives to bear upon each other. /1 https://t.co/ksqoa22yAJ

The two will always be in collision. Social life is dominated by imitative rivalry, the formation and maintenance of status hierarchies. You see that every day in a playground, with shifting allegiances between groups. The classroom stands in direct opposition to it. /2

Education is dying in the same way public life is dying, mostly through the belief that it’s about information, or ‘content’. The role of the teacher is a social, cultural role. Not a provider of information. We wouldn’t need pedagogy if education was about information. /3

Education is about transforming a child embedded in social status hierarchies, into an adult connected to generations of institutionalised learning. It’s a social process. A ‘raising’, not a transmission. /4

The kidult society we now live in that I tweet about often is marked by the total marginalisation of teachers. In the pandemic fake debates about Covid in schools, nobody even asked them. Instead show-pony health pros promoting their own social status opined regularly. /5

Opinion has replaced knowledge. Opinions aren’t knowledge, they’re banners the different teams in the team sport battles for status march under. They’re the playground decoupled from the classroom. From the guidance of teachers. /6

The social role of the teacher is best understood by life now in adult society, where teaching is completely ignored and abused. The army of opinionated kidults that now dominate freedumb life are societies pulverised by the absence of teaching. /7

Teaching and teachers are the way we civilise humans. They shape people, fundamentally, into functioning, civilised adults. The insolent, proud ignorance of the social media kidult is the school kid who hasn’t had a pedagogical clip around the ear from a good teacher. /8

Most of the despair you see at the collapse of basic civic life is the destruction of the role of teachers. Teachers know knowledge and civilisation itself can’t tolerate ‘each to their own’ horseshit freedumb ideas. It matters what’s wrong and right. /9

And much more than that, it’s a FIGHT, to make the right the done thing, not the wrong. Every instinct of kids coming off the playground for more lessons will be to resist. Teachers used to lead that fight. It’s far more brutal than cage fighting. /10

Without supporting them in that fight, our civilisation is over, quite seriously. And we don’t support them, despite all the weasel words about the work they do. They’re childcare for working parents, at best. In a Covid soup right now, because we don’t give a shit. /11

The transformation of adult life into giant high schools I also tweet about has meant the playground won. There was no way playground culture was going to have anything but utter contempt for classroom culture. Playground culture is social media society. /12

Next time you look around at the great masses of ignorant violence, remember the playground. That’s what you’re seeing. Absent the teachers to discipline, punish (up yours Foucault), and transform children into adults. /end