The System Versus Community

Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

The magazine I published, Growing Without Schooling (GWS), often discussed the role of communities to help people learn and grow and why it is important for children to learn through informal and formal communal activities instead of just classroom instruction. Unfortunately, children are often not welcome in public during school hours. As unschoolers and homeschoolers learned early on, you can get the police called on you if your children are walking alone or playing outdoors without an adult supervising, and this situation continues today, as the group Let Grow shows.

But I’ve always been inspired by this phrase by the founder of GWS, John Holt: “A life worth living and work worth doing—that is what I want for children (and all people), not just, or not even, something called ‘a better education.’” This excerpt from GWS 65 (October, 1988) echoes John’s words and presents a good view of how community and individual initiative is diminished by institutional and corporate overreach.

From a talk that John McKnight, of the Community Life Project at Northwestern University, gave in Holyoke, Massachusetts this June:

… My mother went on to tell me that today, people learn in schools. Security is a police problem. Family troubles are social work problems. Justice is a lawyer’s problem. Health is a doctor’s problem. Play is a recreation director’s problem. Infancy belongs to child care workers. Food comes from McDonald’s. Money comes from banks and corporations. Homes come from Century 21.

She says, “I don’t like this world, because in it there is nothing to do.” She lives in a world that is now a terrible vacuum, because all its meaning, and purpose, and work, has been taken away. She says, “It’s no wonder so many people get divorced. Families have nothing to do.” Groups don’t exist for magical purposes. They exist because they have a place, and a function, and work to do. And so it may be that those workless groups called families naturally dissolve.

In my mother’s world, people who sit, rock, chat, play checkers, knit, and listen for the orioles in the lilac bush, are living life. But in the hollow world they say of those people that they are killing time, wasting time. People who are younger and have the advantage of time-saving devices, appliances, communication systems, and transportation, must find it hard to understand why my mother likes this world of wasted time, this world where time is killed. I think she’d call this world of wasted and killed time “the community,” and I think she would call the world of time-saving and leisure time “the system.”

… We have removed pleasure from our work in order to remove drudgery from our lives. Addicted to the pursuit of pleasure because we’re saving time through systems—but at least, we say, the system way gives us choice. I work in a system—a university: a system in pursuit of excellence dedicated to maximizing choice. But my mother knows better than that. In her community, she, her friends and neighbors, know things in many ways. They know through experience, they know through stories—which are often the way you use words to tell about experience. They know through dreams, they know through prayers, they know because of what their mother told them. But the system called a university rejects all those ways of knowing. You can’t put a footnote that says, “My mother told me so.” And yet the great knowing of community has always come from experience, prayers, dreams, stories and tradition—all rejected by this place that’s maximizing choice. It’s the one place that only allows one way of knowing. The community allows all ways.

And this system, called “the university,” pursues excellence to maximize our choices. That means we set up the highest possible barriers against people getting there. If you walked up to the president of my university and said, “How many students did you admit this year who have been labeled by human service professionals as retarded?” He would tell you, “None! We have an intricate system to see that that would never happen. We’re pursuing excellence!”

Choice, excellence, individualism, are the system’s justifications for eliminating diversity and creating jobs—that is, work without pleasure. Because diversity takes time, is slow, unsystematic, common and incorporative, it is like democracy. Democracy is about diversity, not choice. It’s slow, messy, conflicted—but totalitarianism is fast.

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[PF]: The Community Life Project is examining how labels such as mentally retarded, developmentally disabled, physically disabled, mentally ill, elderly, keep people out of community life and in systems organized to provide services for their needs. The project has published a report called The Gift of Hospitality: Opening the Doors of Community Life to People With Disabilities [https://mn.gov/mnddc/mcKnight/documents/88-GOH-MOC.pdf]

The report says that “social services were designed with the best of intentions: to protect and serve people who might otherwise be ignored or victimized,” and that it is an “indisputable right” of people to have resources that enable them “not only to survive but to live a full, vigorous life. The problem is clearly not that services exist to support a life like Judith’s [a quadriplegic]. The problem arises when the services take over the life they’re supposed to be supporting.” It isn’t hard to apply this concept to our school systems. Many homeschoolers would probably be more comfortable making arrangements with school systems if they believed the school’s services were to support, rather than take over, their children’s time, and their time with their children. I see schools as the place in our culture in which we become accustomed to the idea that organized service systems are preferable to what the report calls, “the free space of human relationships called community.” Perhaps if homeschoolers recognize that their community encompasses not only people teaching their children at home but also other groups that feel disenfranchised by our social service systems, we can create a wider base of support for keeping our children in our communities.