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It’s impossible to lie and manipulate when you have no power.
26. School as a contract of adhesion
Friedrich Kessler, writing in 1943 in the Columbia Law Review, articulated a new kind of
contract, one for the industrial age. Rather than being individually negotiated with each party, a
contract of adhesion is a take-it-or-leave-it mass deal.
The industrialist says, use this car or this software or this telephone, and merely by using it, you
are agreeing to our terms and conditions. With a hat tip to Doc Searls, here’s what Kessler
wrote:
The development of large scale enterprise with its mass production and
mass distribution made a new type of contract inevitable—the standardized
mass contract. A standardized contract, once its contents have been
formulated by a business firm, is used in every bargain dealing with the
same product or service. The individuality of the parties which so
frequently gave color to the old type of contract has disappeared. The
stereotyped contract of today reflects the impersonality of the market....
Once the usefulness of these contracts was discovered and perfected in
the transportation, insurance, and banking business, their use spread
into all other fields of large scale enterprise, into international as well as
national trade, and into labor relations.
School offers the same contract. Every student walking through the doors of the public school
is by default entering into a contract of adhesion (and so are her guardians or parents). In Texas,
the contract even includes tickets and fines for students as young as ten years old (and if they
aren’t paid by the time the student is eighteen, he goes to jail).
Beyond the draconian, barbaric frontier schooling techniques in Texas, though, we see a
consistent thread running through most of what goes on in school. The subtext is clear: “Hey,
there are a lot of kids in this building. Too many kids, too many things on the agenda. My way
or the highway, son.”
Precisely what a foreman would say to a troublesome employee on the assembly line. Not what
a patron would say to a talented artist, though.
27. The decision
We don’t ask students to decide to participate. We assume the contract of adhesion, and
relentlessly put information in front of them, with homework to do and tests to take.
Entirely skipped: commitment. Do you want to learn this? Will you decide to become good at
this?
Stop Stealing Dreams Free Printable Edition 22