SKOOL: An Institutional Critique

School sucks, even the great school are often too limited  in their ability to give us what we need to thrive in the world. I use the word “we” here intentionally, since the rhetoric so often is focused on “them”, meaning young people, youth, the future leaders of the world. And by world, I mean the planet, not just the social norms we live by.  Schools are primary means we use to shape our society, our government and ourselves. I am using this blog post to call for art educators to become critics of the institution of schooling. I’m calling it skool, a deliberate misspelling that reflects our commonly shared societal miseducation.

The vast majority of schools are based on a 19th century  industrial model, and instead of providing an education that operates organically, based on context and the individual, it creates a social monoculture by taking a uniform imprint - otherwise known as a “curriculum” largely based on what someone once said we all should know, and applying it on all of us.

Schools provide our society a key mechanism for ensuring social conformity. A complicit relationship forms between the adults and the status students, an unofficial curriculum of bullying and  snubbing that keeps the oddballs, blabber mouths, hot heads, fags, ethnic types and the general freaks in check. Let’s be clear; the type of behavior that is unacceptable in the classroom also becomes a problem on the playground, so that by high school these marginal kids have been largely assimilated, kicked-out or silenced.

Schools are fully primed and ready for an aggressive,  bare-faced institutional critique, a full onslaught  not against teachers like the attack that’s been playing out in Wisconsin, but against society’s expectations of what schools should be, against the way society pushes schools to become day-prisons for errant youth.  Hans Haacke, a German artist whose work took aim at the connection between museums and their wealthy donors, has served as a model in the art world for how to use art to critique the institutions that govern us, especially those institutions that appear to be corrupt. Some critics call his work mere commentary because it lacks irony or academic obtuseness, the trademarks of serious contemporary art, but those characteristics make his work an excellent model for the classroom. The ability of art to show us and not merely tell us can become a tool for students to transform education and society’s future.  Let’s make “skool” happen.