In the plainest language possible, let me ask: if "the establishment" isn't good enough, why not just improve it? Whether we're talking about the justice system, the health care system, or the education system, there will usually be some number of intransigent people within the institution who will make it impossible to improve if we do not destroy it first --or, temptingly, if we do not destroy them first.
This is a temptation most revolutionaries indulge in, sooner or later, as you may have noticed: a massacre is more easily carried out than systematic reform. And the results may seem more immediately gratifying to the supporters of the revolution even if (in the long term) the violence accomplishes nothing positive at all.
The promise of revolution is reciprocal with the reality of institutional intransigence: in our ignorance, we choose to believe in one as a desperate attempt to deal with the other. If you complain that the system of divorce courts (or tax paperwork, or parking tickets, etc.) is needlessly complex (needlessly costly, corrupt, unfair, etc.) every expert in the field will tell you that a revolution would be required to compel anything (or anyone) to change. And they say this knowing that they represent one and the same intransigent establishment that the revolution would massacre. I wonder if I have ever met a single university professor who did not --in this way-- advocate for their own extinction. They are dinosaurs demanding asteroids do the hard work for them: it would be so much easier to disappear than adapt and evolve. Institutions cannot change because the people within them do not want to change: the intransigence of individuals creates the need for a revolution where nothing revolutionary is necessary at all. These same dinosaurs demanded that we defund the police, not evolve with them, entailing two extinctions --a disappearance with a difference.
And institutional resistance to change can come "from below" just as much as "from above": in some cases, wealthy bureaucrats may support fundamental reform while lower echelons of the staff resist it, whereas, in other cases, the elite controlling an institution refuse to change while all the other employees demand it.
If you were to answer the question of why a particular prison can't be improved, your research is unlikely to reveal a cabal of millionaires who have been benefitting from its mismanagement, intentionally sabotaging every attempt at improvement --although, I admit, such a thing would not be entirely unprecedented, if that turned out to be the case for the particular prison you were investigating. When I was in Cambodia, I knew a few researchers who insisted, dogmatically, that they'd seen instances of corruption in medical programs that really were at this level of cartoonish supervillainy.
If you were to interview the teachers at a school that's commonly admitted to be the worst in the city of New Orleans, each one may offer several different explanations for what exactly has gone wrong with the institution, or they may stand mute, dumbfounded, and offer no explanation at all. Some of the teachers may be activists demanding change, some may fight against efforts to improve the school (as contrary to their own interests) but --generally-- they will never suspect that they themselves are the problem that must be fixed. Their analysis will always indicate that the source of the problem is upward, outward, elsewhere, beyond. Some will feel that the students cannot be blamed, others will feel that blaming the students is essential to their dignity as educational professionals.
The teachers themselves, the policemen themselves, the judges themselves… it is certainly very easy to blame particular people without any understanding of what's wrong with the institution, without any detailed diagram of how it should be improved. Perhaps we do not even have metrics to measure improvement. Perhaps we can neither quantify the incompetence of the people we're firing, nor the competence of whoever we're hiring as their replacements.
It couldn't possibly be that we're unsystematically hiring people who agree with our own political biases, just like that other regime did before. It couldn't possibly be that our notion of "reform" is nothing more than one generation of nepotists replacing another. In this way, when revolutionaries use themselves as the standards of excellence, their revolutions fizzle out after merely eliminating particular people who fail to live up to that endlessly flexible, utterly subjective standard, without any substantive innovation ensuing to create better institutions with better measurable outcomes. The only outcome they care about is replacing one elite with another that (in some sense) resembles themselves.
Understanding education and credentialization as the engine of social inequality, both creating our elites and creating our consent to be ruled by them, the challenge of appointing better-qualified people who will be responsible for the creation of the next generation of better-qualified people seems incredibly daunting to aspiring revolutionaries and reformers alike. The problem cannot be reduced to a schematic assessment of what any given institution "is".
Our residential school system in Canada (that is only now being denounced as genocidal in the popular press, after several generations of noncommittal eyebrow-raising) would seem eminently respectable if examined only as a blueprint --as a mere schematic. The quality of education provided to our indigenous people (be it "residential" or not) was deplorable if measured by its outcomes; but who indeed was measuring the outcomes? To whom was it obvious that the blueprint was misleading? The schematic view of a social system tells you only what it "is", not how it works: a blueprint of some oceanside hotel-and-casino might look like paradise --or, if detailed enough, could be an anthropological study of the perfect society. Paradise for some. Genocide for others.
What exactly is right with the best school in Japan and what is wrong with the worst school in Louisiana is difficult to depict in a flowchart (and may be completely concealed when looking at a primary source document in detail: comparing the actual textbooks used, comparing the actual exams written, for example).
What is wrong with Communist education, Christian education, etc., may not be visible in a flowchart at all. And, despite my cautioning against the tendency as too often entailing massacres, the thorough analysis of any given institution may conclude by thoroughly blaming the particular people who happen to be teachers after all.
The incompetence (or evil) of particular authority figures may be a more meaningful target of critique than anything that we can truly say "is" the institution, existing as something separable from those all-too-human forces. In politics, we often say reform when we mean replace: if the Communists replace all the Christian teachers, have they reformed the system of education?
The most inefficient way to improve a prison, a school system, etc., is to demolish it first, planning a new one with nothing but a blank sheet of paper soon thereafter. If you don't have a definite idea of what went wrong with the system you've just demolished, it's entirely possible you'll make all the same mistakes over again, or create an institution that's even worse for unrelated reasons. The aesthetics of an emergency can serve as a substitute for a plan, or even a new idea; and in the absence of an actual revolution, these demolitions can create a convenient emergency. Inefficient and inevitable, in equal measure.
The French demolished the Bastille without any plan for a better prison system: we may demolish innumerable institutions to overcome the intransigence that has made them immutable without any expectation that we can do better than our ancestors did before. And the French still celebrate the anniversary of that demolition, in 1789, without celebrating any supposed improvement in prison conditions thereafter. The revolution liberated political prisoners, yes, but then made new prisoners out of new political enemies: the Marquis de Condorcet died in a prison cell (and a prison system) no less medieval than the one that existed before 1789. The darkness of the dark ages does not end with demolition, but only with light: the darkness that defined the Bastille was not yet destroyed --not yet made obsolete by any better idea. The new regime was not ashamed of the barbarism of the old prison conditions, they merely replaced the people in the prisons: we had not yet started to regard ourselves as barbarians, burning down one Bastille to build another.
The intransigence of our elites, the intransigence of our bureaucrats, the intransigence of employees at even the humblest level, can make it so difficult to bring about improvements (or even to experiment with new solutions for longstanding problems) that some kind of demolition starts to seem necessary from the very first phase --in the absence of any understanding of what exactly the institution's problems might be. Whether we're talking about decentralizing schools or collectivizing agriculutre, this revolutionary inefficiency is always (always!) justified with promises of future efficiency --short-term brutality justified with promises of future liberty.
When you increase the scale of the problem and speak of many different institutions being demolished all at once, you find yourself talking about a revolution, even if you have no idealized notion of what "better thing" should be built upon the rubble after the demolition is done.
The particular kind of revolution I'm discussing is the destruction of the system of education that entitles the rulers to rule, while training others to resign themselves to be ruled. It is the unquestioned "ordering" of society (putting some people in the position of making decisions and others in the position of following commands) that is challenged, questioned and then redefined in a revolution, as I'm using the word. I would emphasize that word "unquestioned" before "ordering": almost nobody researches the education that creates police officers. It is incredibly rare for students to read the PhD theses of their professors, questioning how they became qualified. And politicians research neither one.
Disassembling the gears of a working clock is quite an easy, relaxing activity, if you undertake the task with the assumption that you'll never need to reassemble it again. It is much more stressful for someone who is aware that each element they remove will need to be replaced with another part that works equally well, if not better. To repair clockwork, if purely destructive, is child's play --not unlike political reform.
If we now demolish all of the fossil-fuel-burning power plants, we might optimistically imagine that they'd be replaced with something better, but optimism isn't nearly so powerful as obsolescence. When we have something new that really is better, the significance of abandoning and demolishing the obsolete model does not resemble this "revolutionary inefficiency" I've been warning you about: if decentralized education or collectivized agriculture actually had been more productive (while also being less oppressive, or liberating in some sense of the term) there would have been nothing revolutionary about either one. Improvements to efficiency can be integrated into every level of society as innocuously as the invention and improvement of the wristwatch. Instead, like Galileo's theory of the tides, it was their inefficiency that made them revolutionary: these ideas were a challenge to the elite (as Galileo challenged the Vatican) on the basis of a theory that didn't work --or didn't even exist.
The Maoists persecuted innumerable teachers without ever coming up with a better idea of what exactly a teacher ought to be; they found it easy to condemn the Confucian tradition, but never came up with a new idea as to how they should organize the system of education. They ended up imitating the Americans. Look, now, at the revolution in Vietnam, that was even more expressly anti-European and anti-American while wrestling with a similar mix of Confucian and Buddhist traditions: did they, with their one hundred million minds, produce a new model for education, while the Chinese, with their one billion, have failed to? As shallow and insincere as the excuses for students interrogating and killing their teachers may have been, nevertheless, in studying even the most laughable failures in the history of revolution, we're left with the profound question of what makes a teacher a teacher, what makes a judge a judge, and so on.
Merely assigning new commanders to an army could never be revolutionary, not even if the old commanders are put on trial for crimes against humanity --not even if an insurrection in the barracks massacres a generation of generals. If, instead, you change the system of military education while redefining the criteria for advancement (i.e., how leaders are selected, how enlisted men can earn their promotions, etc.) then you may be looking at a real revolution, even if nobody fires a shot. Revolutions (big and small) question the credentials that define the elite to then create new systems and standards --rather than merely replacing particular people.
At the risk of repeating myself, I say again: in a revolution, as I'm using the term, the unquestioned order of society becomes questioned, and some attempt is made to redefine how people are prepared for their positions of power, even if it is the power of a schoolteacher, a policeman, a prison guard, or a judge. There may indeed be a meaningful question to be asked of what makes a good soldier, who is deserving of promotion, and of how this might now, in the 21st century, differ from any prior century, entailing sweeping institutional reform. Would we be willing to ask the same question of teachers, professors, doctors, police officers, prison guards or any other positions of authority, in our times? And would we be willing to deal with the intransigence of those who'd be opposed to anyone even daring to ask that question?
In the creation of Afghan democracy, if the American army had torn down the government of the Taliban in the capital and chased out their soldiers from the larger towns into the countryside while allowing the whole population to continue to be educated (only) in Taliban schools (madrasas, etc.), how much cultural and political change could have possibly ensued? How much or how little democracy could have been created, at the cost of so many billions of dollars, if the Taliban had just retained control of the schools? It is easy enough for Americans to say, "the future of democracy in Afghanistan relies on education", implicitly meaning that it relies on worldly, scientific, atheistic education intended to undermine the legitimacy of the Taliban, and yet it remains very difficult for Americans to say the same thing about themselves: to admit that the future of their own democracy relies on education --and on a type of education that would disrupt the cultural assumptions and religious traditions of their own great-grandparents. We cannot yet see our own barbarity: that the American people could conquer and civilize themselves remains unthinkable.
This kind of disruption cannot happen just once: if it does, democracy disappears within a generation, as it did in France after Napoleon. The intransigence and immutability of educational institutions (and of the people in power within them) is a recurring obstacle to democracy, even if we are just considering the task of sustaining an already-existing "paper democracy" without any great ambitions for it to be more profoundly democratic.
Neither in Afghanistan nor in Canada will you find schoolteachers with the iconoclastic spirit necessary to challenge the next generation to do what the last one could not do for them. Instead, you'll find only dull-eyed conformists who are, within their own cultural milieu, equivalent to the Taliban.
If we're holding an academic debate about the possible future of some "exotic" country, every expert standing at the podium will readily admit the absurdity of creating "formal democracy" in the absence of "necessary" cultural and educational changes for the masses, but we're reluctant to question the extent to which we're living in a merely formal democracy ourselves, with the specific nature of that formality hinting at "necessary" changes that have yet to unfold.
Throughout the decadent west, the praxis of democracy relies on new phases of "disruptive" education withinin each generation, just as much as it does in poverty-stricken countries trying to make their first transition from dictatorship to "paper democracy". In our private lives, also, taking responsibility for our actions is not a lesson we learn just once; in our public lives, what it means to take responsibility (for the fate of the republic, shall we say, to be a bit outré) is something we must learn again and again, within each generation, and in the transition between generations even more. We are too close to the problem to see it clearly when situated comfortably within our own culture, in the same way that parents refuse to see the problem with putting their own children into football and ice hockey leagues, no matter how many life-altering injuries ensue: familiar evils ensconced in tradition are asserted as morally good, and are demanded of the school system (how could they possibly neglect the teaching of these sports, that meant so much to our parents and grandparents!) while absolutely nobody is concerned with how education might be failing to prepare their children to present a complaint at city hall --or even to deal with a routine police interrogation. It is much more comforting to preach the virtues of democracy to Myanmar than to preach it to ourselves. It certainly gives Americans a sense of pride to reproach the Russians and the Iranians for the tenuousness of their claim to being a democracy (merely because they have elections, "on paper") and it might be humiliating, instead, to reflect on what we have in common with our enemies.
The shallowness of democracy in Afghanistan indicates the depth of educational and cultural change that would be "necessary" for democracy to function there. The shallowness of our own democracy has similar implications for our own immediate future --implications that are neither discussed nor dreamed of.
We would rather not think through the cultural and educational requirements that would make our own claims to democracy more than mere fiction; we are reluctant to recognize that we might lack the very accoutrements that separate the civilized world from savagery --by which I mean the self-serving justifications that grant us our unflappable sense of moral superiority when we compare ourselves to the Chinese, for example. When our thoughts turn to the hypothetical future of Myanmar or Afghanistan, no civilized person would propose that they merely change the procedures and processes within government (in "the civil service", etc.) while ignoring the procedures and processes of education and cultural change outside the government's walls. The ways in which we ourselves must still change if we are even to have democracy at the local level remain unthinkable to us.
If the police murder a man in cold blood, the ensuing debate never touches on direct democracy; generally, it never touches on what "we" must do, in governing our own deme, but only on what "they" must do on our behalf (i.e., the nameless, well-paid professionals of our unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy). We are fascinated by the nebulous abstractions of international politics and "human rights" because we presume we've accomplished something great just in choosing between two candidates for Prime Minister, leaving the whole praxis of democracy aside for the bureaucrats to carry out on our behalf thereafter. Unlike the Chinese or the Saudi Arabians, we imagine, we are not ruled over by mere men (not by aristocrats, not by apparatchiks) but instead by such fine abstractions as "human rights" --by the ideology of our unelected bureaucracy. Any research into how direct democracy operates at the local scale of the nearest 100,000 people (i.e., a population greater than all of Periclean Athens and the Piraeus combined) will reveal the extent to which our democracy is a kind of fiction --and the fault in authoring this fiction, nightmarish in its implications, is not "theirs" but "ours", here and now. And it takes nothing less than the police committing and covering up a murder to force us to even notice the unreality of this democracy: we pretend to be amazed at former generations who thought so little about the suffering of household slaves, dismissing them as nothing more than "talking tools" (instumenta vocalia) and yet we are so comfortable with being "silent tools" ourselves (instumenta muta).
All relationships outside of the family are learned through education, all responsibilities, all roles, and, with the passage of just a few decades, formal education transforms family relationships, religious relationships, etc., just as palpably as it transforms the economy, public health, and so on. "Teacher" and "student" are roles created by the government, along with "doctor" and "patient", just as deliberately as every military rank and honor: what it is "to be a good soldier" is ultimately the effect of government policy --and what it is "to be a good man", "to be a good father", etc., emerges in much the same way, although it is worrying for us to admit this to ourselves. Inevitably, a revolution changes all of these things in the same way that revolutions change the notion of what is "a good policeman", "a good judge", or "a good jailer", even if there is not a single word iterating what the new standard ought to be in any constitution or manifesto.
If the education system does not change, there is no revolution to speak of: Afghanistan remains Taliban so long as the schools are Taliban, even if "a paper democracy" is created "on top", and China remains Communist so long as the schools are Communist, even if the whole country were to adopt the kind of "paper democracy" that Hong Kong now has "on top". If we change our notion of "what it means to be a man", we must also adjust our preconception of "what it means to be a policeman" --with implications for what it means to be a good teacher in the training (and credentialing) of policemen and innumerable other authority figures.
