Bureaucracy

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Andreu Navarra

Moshe Lewin (1921–2010), the Sovietologist and University of Pennsylvania academic, left us a striking account of the evolution of the Stalinist regime during the 1930s: “We know that bureaucracies, whether efficient or sloppy, are not that pliable a tool. Stalinism hoped to solve its problems by ‘mastering the masters’ – i.e. the summits of the bureaucracy. Yet this endeavour was to be complicated by an unanticipated trap, which the top leadership fell into. They had concentrated enormous power in their hands, which they justified on the basis of their tasks. Strong pressure from above was their strategy and it had its logic. The fact that so many crucial decisions depended on the capacities and psychological make-up of a small ruling group, and each of its members”.

But events did not go as expected, and stagnation set in. Lewin continues: “Butamid the turmoil of the 1930s, the more the leadership reinforced its control and grip onpower, the deeper was its sense that things were escaping its control. As they read reports or visited factories, villages and towns, they realized how many people were not carrying out their orders, were concealing the reality as best they could, or were quite simply unable to maintain the stipulated pace. They noted that thousands of their directives and decrees were not even properly applied. All this helped to spread a perception among the top ranks that their power was actually more fragile than it seemed. They shared a sense of insecurity and disorientation, leading some to doubt the validity of the whole line”.

They began to lose faith, and leaders increasingly surrendered to purely autocratic tics: only the strongest could continue to pull this monstrous Leviathan, now paralysed and abulic. They failed to realise that this behaviour worsened the problem; appearances of efficacy do nothing to dispel inertia or terminal sclerosis. Lewin terms this state “systemic paranoia”.

His account illuminates the trajectory of contemporary Western, European, Spanish, and Catalan public education systems. Setting impossible objectives spreads discouragement among teachers. Hundreds of directives and prescriptive guides fall by the wayside—Byzantine evaluation schemes, inclusive decrees dead before birth, academic reinforcements everyone knows will never arrive, personalised learning support that remains a chimera. Political teams pressure middle managers, who in turn pressure school leaders, who then transmit this paranoia to teaching staff. Efforts focus on simulacra rather than realities. Staff meetings have been reduced to empty rituals, while honest teaching is treated as heresy—a challenge to authority. The student-centred myth becomes purely propagandistic. Many headteachers and academic coordinators live daily on the verge of tears or personal crisis. They could face a purge (or even a revolt) at any moment: They scan emails and rumours in search of the rot within academia.

Divergent perspectives within schools escalate into genuine schisms. Entire staff teams fall into exasperation and rebellion. Power becomes a bundle of impotent spasms: attention is no longer paid to the latest delusion of an administration unable to guarantee sufficient staff, clear procedures, or even a minimal internal reconstruction plan. The only individual valued is the fanatic—the civil servant who has silenced their own conscience.

Yet, of course, the leadership must go on pretending that it feels strong, that it knows where it is heading, to the historical New Man on the horizon, to the great School of Being so often invoked by propagandists. In reality, reports are ignored: reality itself is their principal irritation, their core problem of legitimacy. Everyone has to keep pretending that everything’s fine, that the Great Leap Forward is steaming ahead and no one has the slightest doubt about its “glorious success”. You can spot a mile off that these leaders are terrified of their own doubts. Cynicism has seeped into every corner of the system: it’s hard to imagine any sane adult actually buying into all that waffle and nonsense in their shiny newspeak.

This is why our education system has acquired the unmistakable aroma of stagnant administrations: unable to manoeuvre, trapped in their own labyrinthine mental frameworks, capable only of digging further into dogma while coercing the bunker of pedagogical nullity. Against all odds, against the world, against the errors of an outraged citizenry, against the minimal convictions a teacher must hold, our public education system is itself falling into “systemic paranoia”, leaving fee-paying options as the only escape for those who can afford them. The pedagogical apparatchiks are, in truth, working for the very people intent on privatising the whole system.

Perhaps shame will return, perhaps honesty will return. The solution lies in internal democratization, methodological plurality, and trust between institutions; cleaning up of the accounts; ending the blatant misappropriation of funds; and dismantling the empire of mediocrities who cover up their hidden windfalls. But to do that, we’d actually have to put our thinking caps on and stand up to the bribes and siren calls of a handful of multinational corporations. We’d need to shut the revolving doors, hold people to account, and throw all the windows open. Brush away all the cobwebs that have been gathering in there since around 1985. And in doing so, instead of an educational Chernobyl, we might, perhaps for the first time, have a school system built on students’ right to learn and to be treated with dignity—without patronising hand-holding—so they can shape their own future, not the one that suits us.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons