Sovereignty

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Andreu Navarra

In her lecture Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship (1964), Hannah Arendt advanced a disturbing idea: ‘Bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of government.’ We live in a deeply bureaucratised society, and our educational system cannot be immune to this condition — at once adverse and, paradoxically, enabling. As Max Weber taught us, a certain rule of nobody is necessary for the birth and preservation of democracy, because where there is no meritocratic hierarchy within a bureaucratic structure, what we find instead is the rule of someone in particular: a strong prince, a dictator, an absolute monarch, or an oligarchy of the privileged.

But what happens when we live under a bureaucratic regime in which nobody appears to rule — only in appearance? Who governs us beyond this rule of nobody? I ask because, for reasons that need not concern us here, I have recently had to attend a number of administrative and governmental meetings at the modest scale permitted by our autonomous regions — the modern-day patchwork of our semi-feudal regions — where civil and public responsibility seems to have thinned almost to the point of disappearance. The harmful side of bureaucratic regimes is that there is no one to appeal to when things go wrong or when the funding of public services collapses spectacularly.

No one is responsible; no one resigns. The blame is always passed on — to the office next door, to the party on the other side. And all the while, everyone behaves in much the same way: mafia-style capitalism, identity tribalism, the siphoning off of public funds, banal nationalism, and a kind of barnyard patriotism.

In the educational meetings I am obliged to attend for professional reasons, I do not encounter petty tyrants or despots. The problem is quite different. In a sense, one almost wishes it were so: we would at least know whom to oppose, from whom to demand accountability. What is unsettling is that, with few exceptions, what predominates is the figure of a competent, even well-meaning manager who has virtually no control over what he or she is supposed to regulate or govern. The administration under which I happen to live functions like the late Soviet Union: it depends on an economic secretariat or commissariat that simply refuses to fund anything with minimal solvency.

My greatest surprise came when, in one such institutional meeting, a senior political official confessed to us — a trade union committee — that his department had no proper office, no adequate facilities, no suitable staff, not even a functional website. They were, quite simply, attempting to keep things afloat on a shoestring budget. No public service desk, no technical tools of any kind, software worthy of The Flintstones, all against the backdrop of a steady brain drain caused by uncompetitive salaries.

The result is an explosive combination. People are forced to use trains that do not run — or, worse, kill; to send their children to schools that do not teach; to attend clinics that do not cure. Yet nobody is to blame and, therefore, there is nobody to whom one can appeal when things go wrong. The question, then, remains: who has decreed this graded descent into misery? Why has neoliberal globalism become the official creed? And how is it that, in the West, the only alternative with any prospect of broad popular growth now appears to be fascism?

Since publishing Devaluación continua. Informe urgente sobre alumnos y profesores de secundaria  (2019), where I already warned of the relationship between competence-driven orthodoxy and far-right resentment, I have been convinced that the educational problem in our country is essentially political rather than pedagogical or methodological. Pedagogist reforms are, above all, a vast public deception. This is why I have learned to avoid pedagogical quarrels and Byzantine, polarised debates. My question is of a different order: ‘Who is in charge here?’ In other words: who is deciding that teaching and education should quietly cease in our country? Who pays the salaries of the emo-deconstructive gurus? Where do competence-based designs come from, and what are they for?

For we already know that what is being imposed is a smokescreen — a cascade of distracting measures designed to conceal the central issue: where does our educational sovereignty actually reside? In Europe? In Madrid? In our increasingly provincial regional capitals? In school leadership teams that are depleted, exhausted, and internally hollowed out? This is no minor matter, because the answer may yet serve as a shield against demagogy and salvationist solutionism.

If regional ministers and deputy directors have little idea why they are required to draft absurd decrees; if ministries of every political stripe devise identical policies of austerity and employability; if senior officials privately admit that they do not believe in what they publicly defend; if economic reasoning has displaced what ought to be a humanistic — or at the very least informative — rationale, it is because they no longer feel responsible for what they administer. They experience the same anxious precariousness that reduces citizens to degraded users, stripped of agency. They, too, do not know who subjugates them — yet the consequences of non-compliance are severe.

There is no one to appeal to, no one to vote out. As a society, we find ourselves at the point described by Alexis de Tocqueville. We resign ourselves to the sorry spectacle of generalised corruption and the circus of rent-seeking post-politics, popcorn on our laps, while we wait for the millenarian rupture: an American-style bloody catharsis, or the tribal hammer blow of the new Huns, who are already close at hand.

The bureaucracy that was meant to sustain our democracy has taken refuge in cynicism. Culture has been reduced to little more than emotion-soothing entertainment; the academies join the carnival of idiocracy; and educational policy continues its cheerful slide into neo-Thatcherite sludge. Everyone appears to be doing whatever they can simply to get by. Collective vectors seem to have been dismantled — though they may yet surprise us.

Yet for a minority still trying to think clearly, the central question remains: who is in charge here? Who decides that something should be taught, what should be taught, and to what end? What is the purpose of a public education system? Why do those who threw the stone now hide their hand?

The answer can only come from the thousands of teachers who do not know how to break out of their daily cycle of bewilderment. The sovereignty of the public classroom, in the face of the irrational sabotage of an irresponsible administration, must belong to public school teachers. There is no other path.

Subversive, anti-civic bureaucratic discipline has repeatedly demonstrated its demoralising failure. The competence reform was merely a late wave of bureaucratic disciplining, profoundly demobilising in its effects. Its ultimate purpose was the creation of a lumpenised majority, stripped of civic rights and deprived of the conceptual tools required for analysis. The latest innovation consists in teaching through pictograms, as though a twelfth-century device designed to alienate serfs were being presented as an educational breakthrough.

The competence reform has undoubtedly prevailed, but it has not convinced. What we still do not fully know is who unleashed this vast wave of symbolic violence against teachers and pupils. Its demobilising and anxiety-inducing effects are now plain to see; it convinces only a fanatical minority of paid propagandists.

The time for change has come. And that change requires the direct establishment of a form of academic sovereignty capable of replacing a hollowed-out legal order produced by deregulating and deconstructive politics — the smiling face of economic rationalism. We must move away from a regime of stress towards the political construction of democratic education.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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