Chapter 10

Slavery and Education

There you are, down at the docks.

In the slave market.

You have your slave doctor with you to check out their hearing, their sight, their teeth, and to see that they are sound of wind and limb.

But you are looking for more than physical health and fitness.

Initially, you are looking for a Greek.

An “educated” Greek. Greeks are known for their higher learning. All that study of language and literature and philosophy and mathematics. So you are probably looking for a Greek who has led a pretty soft sort of life. One with a few manners, too.

After that, you are looking for a bunch of others who are healthy, smart, but illiterate. They will need to be able to scrub up well.

To check whether they are smart, you might have developed a few simple tests. Or, if you have already found your Greek, you might ask him to check them, and see what he does.

Having made your purchases, you arrange to have them all delivered to your country estate, where you have set up a little school. Schooling for slavery. There, your Greek will teach them reading and writing and maths, and then the finer skills of secretarial work and book-keeping. He will also teach them manners and personal hygiene. Then you can take them back to the slave market, and sell them as the finer sorts of house-slaves. These are much in demand, will fetch a good price, and make you a profit. You have added value to them.

This was a known practice in Ancient Rome. Schooling for house slaves. Cato the Elder set up such a business, apparently.

This practice of the Romans provides us with a handy educational test. How does our contemporary practice of universal, compulsory, State schooling differ, in essence, from this business of schooling for slavery? What do we do today, that we would not do if our workforce consisted almost entirely of slaves?

Well, obviously, the schools and their owners don’t buy the students, and sell them off at the end, though the difference in the way we do this now isn’t as ennobling as it may seem at first sight. We have invented rather different methods of funding; a different business model, we might say. I will look at that more closely shortly. But the question is primarily about the practice of schooling itself.

There is, I think, pretense of a difference with the rhetoric we use about schooling – words and platitudes that are just demonstrably not the case. We say, for instance, that the learner comes first when that clearly isn’t at all true. All sorts of parties with a “stake” in the learner come first, most conspicuously the “employer”. They, of course stand in the same place as the future slave owner. We give lip-service, too, to critical thinking and reasoning, while doing very little about them – not even making much attempt to figure out what these things are, and what we do achieve here is not at all out of kilter with what we would want for our skilled house-slaves. We don’t want dumb secretaries or book-keepers. We want to make some use of their minds.

Some will, of course, want to point to the tradition of the “liberal education” – the education supposedly designed for “free” men and women. Quite apart from the retreat and increasing irrelevance of a liberal education even in universities, and its inadequacies as a conception of education, this idea has had little real impact on universal, compulsory State education as an educational ideal at all.

It has influenced the subjects that have been taught, particularly in high school, where some sort of gesture used to be made for the preparation of the better sorts of students for university, but only then with the educational heart ripped out of these studies – the challenge to think critically about life, the contribution that could be made to a critical understanding of society, and particularly anything that might have cultivated independent political thought. Schooling has always been too timid to allow these things to rise above content fitting for slaves.

Some people have also reacted to my comparison between slave education and contemporary schooling by complaining that they enjoyed their schooling and liked going to school. When I have suggested that we would want happy, compliant slaves, others have laughed at this proposal, as if I am reaching for an ingenious way to save my comparison.

This dismays me as a serious misunderstanding of slavery – dismays me because it makes me wonder how shallow the abhorrence of slavery might really be – if slavery might, in fact, be OK just so long as slaves are happy. Is that all that Western freedom amounts to? We want freedom, but we will trade it all in for happiness? Is that all that all that fighting and dying and sacrificing has been for? Is that all that it would mean to put the learner first?

That would explain a lot. It would explain the contemporary preoccupation with happiness, and all those happiness studies. It would also highlight our failures to appreciate the intrinsic worth of human beings – and of the nature and importance of respect for them. If that is the case then there is still a long way to go to grasp what it means to be your own person, to be fully human and take personal responsibility.

If you equate slavery with the lashing of slaves, slaves grinding away in salt mines or on galleys, then you might think the problem of slavery irrelevant to any discussion of learning processes, except those having to do with extreme violence and deprivation. Maybe in the old days, when school pupils were beaten black and blue, but not any more in our enlightened times.

As I have already indicated, there were, however, slaves who were bought for the mental work they could do, not for the menial work. Among the many house slaves were secretaries, bookkeepers, clerks and administrators – and teachers – and doctors.  Some slaves close to the emperor wielded considerable power and lived sumptuous and wealthy life-styles, even though they were, in the end, only property.

If we had chattel slavery today, we would not be buying so many of them for the work that their bodies could do. We have earth-moving machinery, combine-harvesters and diesel and gas-turbine boats now. But we would want lots of technical slaves – accountants and administrators and lots and lots of IT slaves and slave teachers. They would require training, and they would be a bigger capital investment.

Since it is their mental effort that you would want, beating them and breaking their spirit would be counter-productive and potentially reduce the value of your asset. If there were workshops on how to get the best value from your slave, the word would be that the best slave would be a contented, happy and willing slave. I am not being facetious here. This is what would make the best commercial sense. The best return on your investment. In addition, since you are going to be surrounded by them, and want them to dress well, smell nice, and have good manners, it will still spoil it for you if they are negative, depressed, miserable or sullen. These are house slaves, after all.

When Aristotle identified true and natural slaves, distinguishing them from those free men who were sold into slavery after being taken prisoner in battle and their women who were captured as prizes of war, he was speaking of those who had been born to it.   They would be slaves who wanted their children to go to slave school in order to have a chance of the best slave positions. The children would expect to go to slave school. They would know it as their destiny as a significant opportunity. Everyone would confirm this for them.

What we do with our conventional practices of schooling and teaching is exactly what we would do in the preparation of slaves we wanted for their mental effort in a high-tech world – right down to the way our structures undermine intellectual independence by creating schooling factories.

Right down to the subjects you wouldn’t dare to teach them – the subjects and studies that we don’t teach now. Go through the various things that you can think of that we currently teach – do this in a serious way – and ask if you would also do this for skilled, in-house slaves. Keep in mind that some of these areas do require some initiative and critical thinking.

Then survey those areas you definitely wouldn’t teach them. You wouldn’t teach them politics, for instance – and I don’t just mean conventional party politics. You would keep their thinking about that at a pretty naive level, and probably cultivate a lack of interest. I mean that you wouldn’t teach them how to think critically about the relationship between political institutions and practices and the problems of the good society.

You would teach them moral rules and codes, but you wouldn’t teach them any serious ethics. You wouldn’t expose them to serious social criticism. You wouldn’t teach them critical history – particularly social, political and intellectual history, though you might teach them the conventional criticisms of the way things were done in the past.

You wouldn’t teach them philosophy generally – particularly how to think philosophically. You wouldn’t teach them about the nature of education, or how to take charge of their own. Quite certainly, you wouldn’t problematize good living, or open up the difficulties and possibilities of creating a fulfilling and satisfying life.

You might teach them bland, ideological histories – the latest versions that serve to show how enlightened their owners are, how necessary their slavery is, how valuable their contribution is, and how lucky they are to live in this time and place. You would teach them how to take care of their health, because you want to keep the vet bills down – and you might introduce them to some simple ideas to encourage happiness – the sorts of things that women’s magazines currently supply. Ten tips from the latest “happiness studies”. You would, of course, teach them the value of excellence, and to be the best that they can be.

But our schools don’t buy learners and sell them at profit. No. Universal, compulsory State schooling doesn’t need this because it is State funded and because it is compulsory. This wouldn’t matter, and would be legitimate if this conventional schooling could be made educational and was educational – because it would then – genuinely – be putting the interests of the learner first. It would have a sound ethical basis. But it can’t be, and it isn’t. If it isn’t educational, and if it isn’t in the best interests of the learners, then where does compulsion stand?

But these days, schooling doesn’t end with compulsion. A huge tertiary, credentialling system has emerged. Entry to this is supposed to be a matter of choice, but State policy development has meant that it is almost impossible to get a job without the appropriate credential and getting a job is obligatory . . . and this is instilled in the young from an early age.

In New Zealand, young people are tracked by the State from the moment they leave school until they enter the workforce. The student, of course, pays a considerable portion of the costs of tertiary credentialling in fees, and the taxpayer (who is, of course, the person in the student’s future) pays for the rest. We will return to that achievement later.

Chattel slavery was never the larger part of slavery, however. That was indentured slavery. You got into debt, or were forced into it, and then your creditors had you in bondage until you paid it off – the possibility of ever doing so was a rarity. Systems like this were engineered quite commonly in the West until quite recently.

Desperation would drive people to seek work in the company town. The company store sold them the necessities of life, but the prices were deliberately high and the costs of getting to another store prohibitive. The pay, on the other hand, was so low that it was difficult to make ends meet from pay-day to pay-day, so the store kindly ran up a tab for you. Your debt locked you in to your labour. A form of indentured servitude.

Few students can afford the fees for their necessary tertiary credentialling, so they are assisted in meeting them with student loans. The size of the loans are related to the level of the certificate or degree. The risk of not being able to cash in that credential because the job-market in that area collapses is, of course, born by the student – so if you are ambitious, but end up only with a lowly and unrelated career – well, that was your choice, and the debt will haunt you. In a world where we are expected to change careers multiple times in a life-time, we can expect serial loans, or declining expectations as we age.

Of course the fees don’t cover all of the cost. Indeed, in some universities, the fees of some students, such as those in science, are subsidised by the fees of others, such as those in . . . well . . . education. But the bulk is still picked up by the taxpayer.

Well, that’s all right then!

All of this classroom credentialling is only a recent phenomenon. Prior to the Twentieth Century it only existed for the higher, traditional professions of law and medicine and the like which drew students from the already privileged classes. Prior to that, the schools dealt with basic literacy and numeracy. Religious indoctrination also figured prominently, of course. Other things, such as geography and history were little more than political indoctrination. This domestication and infantilization did prepare people for the world of work, but not much in the way of the specialized skills of the workplace. That was, quite rightly, the province of employment itself.

But credentialling developed in the Twentieth Century, at first just in terms of the level of schooling that employers required. Over the years, the levels for jobs simply escalated – more in line with the hoped-for status of the job than any real need, so that when there was competition for a position, the person with the highest level tended to get the job.

Increasingly, though, credentialling has become transformed into a direct gift, a transfer, on the part of the government to the business sector and to employers generally by offering to prepare workers for all work, down to the most menial, since even quite  mundane jobs now require national certificates. The effect on the worker is that it isn’t realistic to seek a different job, because they have the wrong national certificate. There is, therefore, enormous inflexibility. Certificates, too, tend to date, so that in ten years time it may need to be replaced. This gift from the government to the employer is indeed a gift. It isn’t funded by the employer, who is, after all, the real user, but by the tax-payer trapped in the system. The taxpayer who has to pay off the loans as well.

All Western economies now depend on this approach – taxing the very people who are the employees so that the State can train them to service employers who don’t have to pay for this tailored labour-force. The real costs of production and competition are therefore masked, and this masking with huge subsidies from taxation is necessary for international competitiveness.

Politicians continually advocate lowering taxation to ease the burden on tax-payers, but never this one – one of the largest budgetary items alongside health and military expenditure, and perhaps one of the greatest exercises in social engineering ever undertaken. Governments continue to support this transfer of wealth while cutting services to the very people whose wages and salaries are being siphoned back to the employment sector.

Modernity – the so-called “Western values” – involves two value systems that are in constant tension and competition. On the one hand – the real human achievement of the Western Enlightenment, and truly enlightened – is the ethical achievement, expressed in great political ideas. These have been ideas such as toleration, freedom of thought and speech, respect for self determination, democracy, fairness in the distribution of goods, and human decency and respect in the conditions of their production. The moral underpinning of all these rests on the insight that, in the organization of our collective lives, the highest value is the sanctity of the intrinsic worth of each human being, a sanctity deserving equality of respect and decency of treatment.

In contrast to this is the enormously powerful, dynamic, creative, but ethically blind system of capitalist wealth-creation. Wealth is important, because below a certain level of life, good living can hardly be entertained. Beyond that, the prospect of more wealth always appears to open the door to more opportunity, and certainly to the proliferation of desire. For a society committed to self-determination, it offers the means that are necessary for an abundance of ends.

If capitalism were a person, however, it would be one who would hunger for unrestrained freedom, and advocate unrestrained desire so long as it led to a market, and didn’t interfere with production. The ancient worry about becoming a slave to the passions would not inhibit capitalism. If there is wealth to be achieved through stoking any desire at the expense of reason, capitalism will, without hesitation, inflame and renew those desires every time in the service of wealth for somebody.

It is vital, however, that the ethical values trump the value of wealth-creation. Capitalism knows no ethical values  beyond the value of wealth. That is why it is ethically indifferent to slavery. Its only objection to slavery is efficiency. You can’t lay chattel slaves off in a recession, and nobody will want to buy them. So in  recession, just when you need to cut costs, they will be a continuing expense. Otherwise, if any form of slavery helps wealth creation, then unfettered capitalism will embrace it.

If capitalism is to be endorsed in a society that also embraces the ideals of the intrinsic value of human beings – of equal freedom and dignity – then those values must therefore keep capitalism under strict control. It must certainly be understood only as a means, and never as an end in itself. This is why there is inevitable and continual conflict – and the humane values are all too easily compromised.

The vices of capitalism have never been properly tamed. But in the last thirty years, the reins have been slackened even more, and the destructiveness of capitalism has been allowed to be even more ascendant. The world now sees the emergence of people who would, in the past, have been described a robber barons, though now on a global scale, global robber barons, and corporations much larger than many national economies – corporations that can dictate terms to nations on an already fearful scale. This has gone on long enough now for a large proportion of the adult decision-makers active today to have known nothing else. They were born into a world dominated by neo-conservative assumptions, and for them it is normality.

Capitalism has, indeed, supplied the means of life to many millions of people. It has the capacity, though, to rob people of the powers and abilities to make much of those lives, and this is what it is doing – more and more progressively and comprehensively. As national governments put wealth-creation as the first priority, they demonstrate the poverty of purpose that educational failure creates.

They are captive of their own educational failure, acting out the failure of education at the level of each participant, each politician, each official and policy-maker. And they betray the right to a good life that each and every citizen is entitled to pursue. In doing so, they betray the very human rights that have become such an important global phenomenon, reducing them too often to mere platitudes.

Just as education desperately requires a widespread and serious discussion and reconsideration of its proper purpose, and some serious action to get it on to a proper track, so too does economics and the purposes that should underlie the single-minded collective pursuit of wealth-creation and its radically uneven distribution in which our lives, and too much of our effort, have all been enlisted.

But it may be too late.

Of course we could say that none of this really matters if this situation is all that we have ever known; if we just don’t know any better. Ignorance is bliss, after all.

Happy slaves!

© R. Graham Oliver, 2018