From
A Pedagogy for Liberation
to
Liberation from Pedagogy
Gustavo
Esteva
Madhu S.
Prakash
Dana L.
Stuchul
Paulo
Freire was a prominent member of a group of brilliant
intellectuals and activists, who revealed --- particularly to privileged
audiences --- the horrors of modern oppression.
In the steps of Franz Fanon, they fostered a new awareness of the
condition of the world's social majorities after World War II.
In
Freire gained fame and fortune for his ideas on
literacy and education. Banking
education --- the dominant curriculum and pedagogy of classrooms and campuses
for credentials, careers, social caste or pedigree --- came under Freire's critical scrutiny.
He denounced its flaws with great effectiveness. Thousands, perhaps
millions, of young people found in his writings a source of inspiration for
their activism on behalf of peoples' liberation. His many followers applied his method with
courage and ingenuity all over the world.
In
the years following publication of his pedagogy, Freire
remained highly fashionable, particularly within certain professional
educational circles of industrial countries.
Following the Cold War, serious reconsideration of schools of thinking
and action, previously marginalized by ideological disputes, occurred. The anxious search for new avenues of reform
targeting the crises of educational systems created new opportunities for Freire's thinking.
There also emerged at this time a new wave of criticism, putting every
aspect of his theory and method under close examination. We add our names to those whose scrutiny
recognized in Freire's praxis unintended corruption.
Given
the well-established image of Freire as a progressive,
radical or even revolutionary educator, it may seem preposterous, outrageous or
even ridiculous to present him --- as we do in this essay --- as a conservative
thinker and practitioner. Even more, on
both theoretical and political grounds, we present him as a colonizer.
We
strongly believe that Freire was a man of integrity,
faithful to his beliefs and possessing profound social commitments. He was particularly committed to deep social
transformation for liberating the "oppressed," as he called them. Yet, in spite of his intentions, we observe
that he adopted assumptions or presuppositions which served the system he
wanted to change. Instead of its
transformation, his ideas nourished its conservation and reproduction. In making this claim, we hope that our
observations may help to explain the frustration we have sensed in many of his
followers and practitioners of his ideas --- frustration arising from their
accommodation within the very system against which they were courageously
rebelling after being educated by Freire.
I. The Corruption of
Awareness
During
the 1960s, a new awareness emerged among sections of the educated elite across
the world. Surveying their social,
political, and environmental landscapes, they recognized serious wrongs in it:
growing social injustice; wars like the one being waged in
Some,
attempting to escape from the established world and its set of institutions and
rules, marginalized themselves from this world.
Soon they discovered that this path was an illusion, a delusion, a bad
dream. After some time, they looked for
an accommodation to the world from which they were escaping or even for ways to
thrive within it.
Some
others attempted to make with their lives and livelihood the changes they
wanted for the world. They changed
themselves, their own behavior, translating their awareness into new attitudes
in order to live their own lives, in their own way, after identifying their own
personal limits and the prevailing social constraints.
Others
bore on their shoulders the responsibility to change the world. Freire was one of
them.
Yet,
if you want to change the world, you need to be aware of the direction of the
global change you think is needed. You
need a catholic (universally human) vision of both the desirable outcome for
everyone and the way to achieve it. And
if you do not suffer the illusion of being god, such consciousness should
include the identification of the actors, subjects, agents who would produce
the global change of which you are "aware."
Freire's pedagogy was born out of this kind of
universal conscience[i]. Freire had it. He imagined the direction and nature of
change. He identified the agents for
that change. And, he dedicated his life
to promoting the change he conceived.
The way which would enable that change was education. Freire's catholic
mission: secular salvation via education.
The
unsatisfactory conditions of the world had already a universal name, even a
global identity by the 1960s: underdevelopment.
The Peace Corps, the Point Four Program, the War on Poverty and the
Alliance for Progress contributed to root into both popular and enlightened
perception the notion of underdevelopment, coined by Truman on January 20,
1949. These programs also deepened the
disability created by such a perception.
None of those campaigns, however, were comparable to what was achieved
by Latin American dependency theorists and other leftist intellectuals
dedicated to criticizing all and every one of the development strategies that
the North Americans successively put into fashion to counter underdevelopment
everywhere. (Esteva, 1992).
For them, as for many others, Truman had simply substituted a new word
for what had already been there: backwardness or poverty. They attributed such conditions to past
looting (a.k.a. colonization) as well as to the continued raping caused by
capitalist exploitation. The neologism
coined by Frank aptly summarized the prevailing political perception, becoming
a political slogan: development (capitalism) develops underdevelopment. (Frank, 1969)
Trapped
within an ideological dispute, very virulent at the time, many activists took
sides: to get cured of underdevelopment, their countries needed to get cured of
capitalism. From this awareness, a
revolutionary ethos ensued. Latin
American revolutionaries reformulated the European tradition of the
"enlightened vanguard" as the agent of change. Instead of a party, to develop the conscience
or an organization necessary for leading the people to their emancipation, they
created the guerrilla, in the words of Che Guevara
(after Mao), "a fish that swims in the sea of the people." Guerrilleros will conscienticize
the people --- through word and praxis --- in the nature of their oppression:
leading them in the struggle to dismantle the dominant system; bringing them
the right and appropriate kind of development; offering them the promise of
their emancipation.
Within
that intellectual climate, Freire shared with the guerrilleros a
radical critic of capitalism and underdevelopment. He insisted that "
Freire also assumed, with the guerrilleros and
with Marx, that by liberating themselves the oppressed
would also liberate their oppressors.
For Marx, capital was not a stock of means of production but a social
relation. Accordingly, he affirmed that
destruction of the bourgeoisie does not consist in exterminating the bourgeois,
who are mere personifications of capital, but in dismantling the social
relations of domination. In this way,
all would be liberated. Freire sought a path of liberation which did not imply
extermination of the oppressor, but his concomitant liberation with the
oppressed.
While
sharing the critique and purposes of the guerrilleros, Freire
drew a line separating his thinking and action from theirs. He explicitly rejected the use of violence
for seizing political power in the name of revolution and liberation, and its
usual outcome: an authoritarian state.
Freire wanted the change to start with the
people themselves, with their conscientization, their
awareness. Convinced that both
oppressors and oppressed were dehumanized by oppression, he assumed that a new
consciousness would enable both to be fully human again. This consciousness, by itself, would give
them the capacity to dissolve the oppression.
According
to Freire, "the oppressors, who oppress, exploit
and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to
liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the
weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both." (Freire, 1996,
p.26) The oppressed, however, cannot
liberate themselves by themselves. They
are submerged within oppression, in the world of the oppressor; they are
dehumanized, divided, inauthentic beings.
They need an outside critical intervention. Freire writes,
The duty which Lukacs ascribes to the revolutionary party of explaining to
the masses their own action coincides with our affirmation of the need for the
critical intervention of the people in reality through the praxis. (Freire, 1996,
p.35)
In
theorizing this critical intervention, Freire's
pedagogy grew. According to Freire, a pedagogy was needed to
conceive and implement such intervention --- a pedagogy of the oppressed. Such pedagogy could not be developed by the
oppressors. "It would be a
contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually
implemented a liberating education."
(Freire, 1996, p.36) It can neither be implemented through
"systematic education which can only be changed by political
power." (Freire,
1996, p.36) The oppressed neither have
that political power nor should they seize it.
What is thus needed is a group of liberated pedagogues, fully conscienticized themselves in the pedagogy of the
oppressed. The liberated would conceive
educational projects, which should be carried out with the oppressed in the
process of organizing them. At first a
pedagogy of the oppressed, this pedagogy would then become a
pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation, a
pedagogy of humankind. (p.36)
Freire used many titles for his mediators, his
agents of change, in different moments of his life and work, describing them in
different ways. Yet, he always wrote for
them. He did not address himself to the
oppressed, who had lost their humanity. Instead, he addressed the mediators. Freire's pedagogy
is, therefore, best understood as a pedagogy for
mediators qua liberators. Freire wrote for
critical educators, revolutionary leaders, social workers, organic
intellectuals, a motley crowd of characters who in his
view could and would dedicate themselves to the liberation of the
oppressed. He attempted to teach them
the moral and political virtues, as well as the technical tools, that would
enable them, through their own liberation, to perform the function he ascribed
to them. They become a substitute for a
revolutionary party or for guerrilla activities. Once liberated, they become, for Freire, the new enlightened vanguard that would make
possible the desirable change.
Quoting
Marx, Freire stressed that no reality transforms
itself:
The materialist doctrine
that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore,
changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets
that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs
educating. (Marx, in Freire,
1996, p.35)
Yet,
Marx's rhetorical question remains valid: who educates the educators? To this question, Freire
responds with his pedagogy. He does not
explain, however, why the only men who can change circumstances --- and thus
change other men and the world --- are privileged agents: principally, educated
educators. And this is the point.
There
is no need to assume, like Peter Berger, that Freire's
consciousness raising implies the arrogance of higher-class individuals with
respect to the lower-class population.
(Berger, 1974) However, there is
no doubt that Freire located himself in an old
tradition, assuming in the oppressed a variety of disabilities and deficiencies
embedded in their context. Neither does
he attribute to them an ontological or existential sickness. He is most certainly not a racist. Freire merely
assumes that the oppression suffered by the oppressed has radically disabled
them. The oppressed can neither liberate
themselves from oppression, nor can they even perceive
fully this oppression. Thus, the mediator
must endow the oppressed with both awareness and conscience: the perception of
the oppression itself and the characterization of the oppressive system so that
its dismantling becomes possible. In both cases, what is supposedly needed is a
specific abstract, rational perception, with a specific theory about the
oppression and its causes. Such theory
takes for granted: 1) that such awareness defines "true" reality, 2)
that the oppressed lack such awareness and conscience, and 3) that such
awareness and conscience are preconditions for the required liberation and
transformation to occur.
Freire's position belongs to a distinctly modern
(and, therefore, Western) tradition. At
the beginning of modernity, the old Hegel stated it in very clear terms a
generalized conviction in his time: people
cannot govern themselves; someone needs to govern them. This apothegm has been the premise, the point
of departure, for all the dominant political theories and practices of the last
two centuries. It implies that if people
cannot govern themselves, they cannot change by themselves. They cannot, therefore, liberate themselves
from any form of oppression. The
underpinnings of this tradition and conviction are well known. They are embedded in the unilinear,
evolutionist vision of the world, which presupposes the equally Western
conception of the autonomous individual and of Western
rationality/science. An enlightened
elite should guide the masses of individuals along their evolutionary path,
sometimes to control them, sometimes subordinating them to the dominant system,
and at other times leading them in the process of substituting one system for
another. That
elite is constituted of autonomous individuals who have evolved to the point in
which they have acquired the rational (scientific) conscience capable of
defining the necessary path for everyone, and particularly for those who are in
a previous stage of development.
This
perspective, however, implicitly or explicitly dismisses, suppresses, or
disqualifies the abundant historical evidence of how people have governed
themselves or have rebelled by themselves against all sorts of oppressors,
through what Teodor Shanin
calls "vernacular revolutions."
(Shanin, 1983)
The
term "vernacular" means native, indigenous, not of foreign origin or
of learned formation. (OED) The antonyms of vernacular are: cosmopolitan
and worldly-wise, artificial and subtle, expert, official, universal and scientific. When in the nineteenth century the idea of
progress was accepted as self-evident, the dual conceptions of vernacular and
its antonyms turned into the stages of a "necessary evolutionist scheme:
the uplifting of men from the vernacular to the universal, the scientific and
the sublime." (Shanin,
1983, p.249)
Changes
made during the twentieth century further transformed the meaning of
vernacular.
Now, vernacular was
defined as unique, hand-made, informal, autonomous, self-generated or even native .… It is
therefore a product or a situation in which the mass market, price accounting
and bureaucratic administration cannot handle to full effect. The directionality of progress becomes an
official strategy of reforms due to bulldoze, replace in plastic and
electronics or else to educate-out any vernacular substances, i.e. the
inadequate and archaic products, humans and ways. (Shanin, 1983,
p.249)
According to the dominant modern
perception, vernacular initiatives and movements, expressing the rebellion of
the oppressed against their oppressors or at least their resistance, are
unseen, irrelevant, or non-existent. Or, even worse, they
are viewed as counterproductive, traditionalist, parochial, fundamentalist, reactionary or counter-revolutionary because they do not
follow the official program. According
to the prevailing perspective, the only movements or initiatives taken into
account are those conceived and promoted by cosmopolitan, universal, educated
agents of change, agents who educate the people towards progress, pointing the
way out of the vernacular towards the universal ... the global.
Yet,
recent decades have increasingly revealed that the vision of a world integrated
under the rule of reason, welfare and the very ideal of progress has become
archaic, an intellectual and conceptual artifact fit for any museum. (Sbert, Sachs,
1992) No longer can the existence of
vernacular revolutions be denied. With
the insurrection of dominated knowledge, as Foucault calls it (Foucault, 1992), a whole corpus of
revisionist literature provides documentation of changes, initiatives and
movements born among the people themselves, in their vernacular realms. (Frank, 1987, Eyerman and Jamison, 1991, The Ecologist, 1992, Esteva and Prakash, 1998, Negri, 1999).
Those
studying the vernacular insurrections of subordinated knowledge with a new gaze
have escaped the dominant dilemma --- if your vision of the world is not
associated with the idea of progress, you are going back in history. Instead, seeking considerations of social
transformation in the full richness of peoples' cultural diversity, they are dis-covering the multiplicity, multi-directionality and
multi-quality of actual and potential social routes. (Shanin, 1983,
p.250)
What
is therefore increasingly in question is the real nature and potential for
transformation of the conscience which all sorts of revolutionaries have
attempted to instill in the people in order to promote their own projects. For some, this has been but another form of
colonization, not of liberation. As
Wendell Berry puts it:
The thinking of professional
reformers and revolutionaries usually fails to escape the machine analogy
operative in military and other coercive thinking. And a machine is by definition subservient to
the will of only one man. In the formula
Power to the People, I hear "Power to me, who am eager to run the show in
the name of the People." The
People, of course, are those designated by their benevolent servant-to-be, who
knows so well what is good for them.
Thus by diseased speech, politics, as usual, dispenses with the facts. (Berry, 1972, p.41)
Often,
when it becomes impossible to deny the very presence and the social and
political impact of peoples' initiatives or vernacular revolutions, the
dominant reaction is to associate them with prominent characters or charismatic
leaders. Such attributions of the
origins and orientations of peoples' movements to enlightened or educated
leaders legitimizes the prejudice that nothing
progressive can happen without mediators[ii].
The
construction of mediators, intrinsic to Freire's pedagogy
for liberation, expresses thus a corruption of his awareness of
oppression. It operates as a veil,
hiding from their supposedly "liberated" agents of change their own
oppression --- the fact that their conscience is still embedded in an
oppressive system and thus becomes counterproductive --- adding oppression to
the oppressed, disabling them while dismissing, denying or disqualifying the
fullness of their initiatives. This
operation does not only imply a specific, untenable arrogance: the hubris of
possessing the true, universal conscience.
It also serves the purpose of legitimizing the right of intervention in
the lives of others.
II. The Corruption of Love
At
the end of his life, Freire wrote a short book, Pedagogía de la autonomía. (Freire, 1997) In it, he offers a meditation on his life and
work, while returning to his most important themes. Freire reminds us
that his education, his pedagogy, is pointedly and purposively ideological and
interventionist. It requires
mediators. Here again, it addresses
those mediators: a final call to involve them in the crusade.
The
leitmotiv of the book, the thread woven through every page as it occurred
everyday in the life of Freire, is the affirmation of
the universal ethic of the human being --- universal love as an ontological
vocation. He recognizes its historical
character. And he reminds us that it is
not any ethic: it is the ethic of human solidarity. (Freire, 1996,
p.124) Freire
promotes a policy of human development, privileging men and humans, rather than
profit. (Freire,
1996, p.125) He proclaims solidarity as
a historical commitment of men and women, as one of the forms of struggle
capable of promoting and instilling the universal ethic of the human being. (Freire, 1997,
p.13)
Similar
to liberation theology (an option for the poor) courageously adopted by an
important sector of the Catholic Church in Latin America, Freire
finds a foundation and a destiny for his theory and practice in the ideal of
solidarity. Solidarity expresses an historical
commitment based on a universal ethics.
Solidarity legitimizes intervention in the lives of others in order to conscienticize them.
Derived from charity, caritas,
the Greek and Latin word for love, and motivated by care, by benevolence, by
love for the other, conscientization becomes a
universal, ethical imperative.
Certainly,
Freire was fully aware of the nature of modern aid;
of what he called false generosity. He
identified clearly the disabling and damaging impact of all kinds of such aid. Yet, for all of his clarity and awareness, he
is unable to focus his critique on service: particularly that service provided
by service professionals. Freire's specific blindness is an inability to identify the
false premises and dubious interventions --- in the name of care --- of one
specific class of service professionals: educators.
In
its modern institutional form, qua
service, care is the mask of love. This
mask is not a false face. The modernized
service-provider believes in his care and love, perhaps more than even the
serviced. The mask is the face.
(McKnight, 1977, p.73) Yet, the
mask of care and love obscure the economic nature of service, the economic
interests behind it. Even worse, this
mask hides the disabling nature of service professions, like education.
All
of the caring, disabling professions are based on the assumption or
presupposition of a lack, a deficiency, a need, that the professional service
can best satisfy. The very modern
creation of the needy man, a product of economic society, of capitalism, and
the very mechanism through which needs are systematically produced in the
economic society, are hidden behind the idea of service. Once the need is
identified, the necessity of service becomes evident. It is a mechanism analogous to the one used
by an expert to transmogrify a situation into a "problem" whose
solution --- usually including his own services --- he proposes.
In
this way, Freire constructed the human need for the
conscience he conceived. In attributing
such need to his oppressed, he also constructed the process to satisfy it: conscientization.
Thus, the process reifies the need and the outcome: only conscientization can address the need for an improved
conscience and consciousness and only education can deliver conscientization. This educational servicing of the oppressed,
however, is masked: as care, love, vocation, historical commitment, as an
expression of Freire's universal ethic of
solidarity. Freire's
blindness is his inability to perceive the disabling effect of his various
activities or strategies of conscientization. He seems unaware that the business of modern
society is service and that social service in modern society is business. (McKnight, 1997, p.69) Today, economic powers like the
Freire was also unaware that solidarity, both
the word and the idea, are today the new mask of aid and development, of care
and love. For example, in the 1990s, the
neoliberal government of Mexican president Carlos Salinas used a good portion
of the funds obtained through privatization to implement the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad. The
program was celebrated by the World Bank as the best social program in the
world. It is now well documented that,
like all other wars against poverty, it was basically a war waged against the
poor, widening and deepening the condition it was supposed to cure, a condition
that, in the first place, was aggravated by the policies associated with the
neoliberal credo.
Freire could not perceive the corruption of
love through caring, through service.
Furthermore, he was unable to perceive that the very foundation of his
own notion of universal, globalized love, God's love
for his children through Christ, is also a corruption of Christianity. (Cayley, 2000)
Freire was particularly unable to perceive the
impact of the corruption which occurs when the oppressed are transformed into
the objects of service: as clients, beneficiaries, and customers. Having created a radical separation between
his oppressed and their educators, Freire was
unsuccessful in bringing them together, despite all his attempts to do so
through his dialogue, his deep literacy --- key words for empowerment and
participation. All these pedagogical and
curricular tools of education prove themselves repeatedly to be
counterproductive: they produce the opposite of what they pretend to
create. Instead of liberation, they add
to the lives of oppressed clients, more chains and more dependency on the
pedagogy and curricula of the mediator.[iii].
During
the last several centuries, all kinds of agents have pretended to
"liberate" pagans, savages, natives, the oppressed, the
under-developed, the uneducated, under-educated, and the illiterate in the name
of the Cross, civilization (i.e. Westernization), capitalism or socialism,
human rights, democracy, a universal ethic, progress or any other banner of
development. Every time the mediator
conceptualizes the category or class of the oppressed in his/her own terms,
with his/her own ideology, he is morally obligated to evangelize: to promote
among them, for their own good, the kind of transformation he or she defines as
liberation. Yet, a specific blindness
seems to be the common denominator among these mediators: an awareness of their
own oppression. In assuming that they
have succeeded in reaching an advanced level or stage of awareness, conscience,
or even liberation (at least in theory, in imagination, in dreams), and in
assuming, even more, that what their oppressed lack is this specific notion or
stage, they assume and legitimate their own role as liberators. Herein, they betray their intentions.
In
response to colonization, Yvonne Dion-Buffalo and
John Mohawk recently suggested that colonized peoples have three choices: 1) to
become good subjects, accepting the premises of the modern West without much
question, 2) to become bad subjects, always resisting the parameters of the
colonizing world, or 3) to become non-subjects, acting and thinking in ways far
removed from those of the modern West.
(Quoted in Esteva and Prakash,
1998, p.45)
The
assumption of Freire is that his oppressed are
trapped within the dominant ideology, that they have been de-humanized by the
system, that they are its subjects. But
his rebellion, as much as his solidarity, succeeds at best in creating the
condition of a bad subject, a rebel subject.
In this way, neither Freire nor his conscienticizers can perceive their own oppression. As the old Arab saying wisely warns:
"Choose your enemy well; you will be like him." Freire's
presuppositions trap him with the ideology of his oppressor. He becomes a bad subject --- though not
embracing his oppression, not loving his chains, or even loving power. Yet, although bad, he remains a subject. By reducing his definition of himself, of his
own being, to the terms of the oppressor, even to resist or to oppose him, he
can not even conceive the possibility of becoming a non-subject.
In
rejecting the need of mediators and the dominant paradigm which holds that the
people cannot govern themselves or change and rebel by themselves autonomously,
we are of course affirming the opposite: that the people can govern
themselves. Even more, it is our
contention that people liberate themselves from oppressors only when both the
initiative and the struggle come from them; from within themselves rather than
from external agents of change. Instead
of pro-motion (which operates under the assumption that the people are
paralyzed or are moving in the wrong direction), those taking initiatives at
the grassroots to govern themselves autonomously or democratically speak of
co-motion --- moving with the people, rather than moving the people. In Spanish, the word conmover, conmoción, is instructive and strong in
its denotation. Conmoción means not only to dance
with the other the common tune (which does not necessarily define a common
conscience). It also denotes moving together with the heart and the stomach,
not only with the brain, with rationality.
The real plurality of the world is thus manifest in a pluralist
attitude, fully respecting both the radical otherness of the other and their own visions and initiatives. Co-motion may thus operate as a vaccine
against the corruption of love.
III. Resisting Awareness:
The Case of Literacy
Like
Marx, Freire professed a profound fascination for
modern technology. Like Marx, he
recognized that technology is not neutral; that it can be used as a vehicle of
oppression. But like Marx, he seemed
unable to discover the nature of technological society and to find in la technologie
itself, as defined by Ellul (Ellul,
1964), a source of oppression and alienation.
Admittedly,
Marx was a man of his time. It was for
him impossible to anticipate technological evolution and how completely tools
would enslave rather than liberate tool-users.
Freire, in contrast, separated himself from
his times. While he conceived his work
within the intellectual climate in which Jacques Ellul
and Erich Fromm were revealing the nature of the
technological society; when Illich published Tools
For Conviviality (1973); when the
Greens were emerging as a radical movement against the dominant paradigms of
industrial society, Freire was incapable of radically
rejectioning the progress flaunted by technological
society. Critiques of Freire's pre-ecological mindset legitimately focus on this
incapacity.
In
no other aspect is his silence or denial more evident than in the case of the
alphabet: the tool of literacy. It is to
the alphabet and to literacy that Freire dedicated
his life. Literacy was his chosen field
and until his end, he dedicated himself to promoting it and its tools. Courageously, he denounced the deficiencies
and perversions of the literacy promoted and imposed by banking education. From these critiques followed Freire's proposed paths to liberation: the appropriation of
the tool, its pedagogy and curricula, as well as the skills engendered by the
oppressed themselves. He insisted on the importance of a "critical
appropriation" of literacy so that oppressors can no longer oppress the
oppressed.
Here
Freire confines himself to the critical question of
who owns the tools and curricula of literacy as well as to their means and
ends. He does not venture the distance
required to see how the tool itself tames people, reducing and confining them
to the operations of the textual mind. Freire's historical perspective does not extend itself to
examine the social construction of the textual mind. Neither does he reflect upon the implications
of the textual mind for the human condition, including social organization and
its system of domination. (Illich, 1986, 1993)
In
his denunciation of the discrimination suffered by the illiterate, Freire does not see, smell, imagine or perceive the
differential reality of the oral world.
While aspiring to eliminate all these forms of discrimination from the
planet, he takes for granted, without more critical consideration, that reading
and writing are fundamental basic needs for all humans. And, he embraces the implications of such
assumptions: that the illiterate person is not a full human being.
Freire's pedagogic method requires that literacy
should be rooted in the socio-political context of the illiterate. He is convinced that in and through such a
process, they would acquire a critical judgement
about the society in which they suffer oppression. But he does not take into account any
critical consideration of the oppressive and alienating character implicit in
the tool itself, the alphabet. He can
not bring his reflection and practice to the point in which it is possible,
like with many other modern tools, to establish clear limits to the alphabet in
order to create the conditions for the oppressed to critically use the alphabet
instead of being used by it.
Though
we are writing a text, we no longer wish to describe ourselves as "text
people." With this expression, we
are alluding to a kind of man whose mind has been shaped and constructed, as if
it was a text. However the text, as an
object in itself different from the book, appeared simultaneously with the
possessive individual and is its counterpart.
It is clearly modern. Plato
foresaw the problems inherent in the division between orality
and literacy. He examined the transition
from the always new act of remembering to the literate memory --- to a
condition dividing speech and thinking.
With the emergence and dominance of text, a radically new kind of being
is born.
As
Plato suggested, the text is radically uprooted from any concrete, living
experience, no matter how much it evokes living and concrete experiences or is
written or read in a very concrete and alive situation. The textual mind is constructed according to
that model. In the same way that the
liturgy of the Catholic church generated the faith and
the reality of the community as a church, which is the object of such faith,
the learning of texts, in the school, is the privileged place to generate the
modern textual mind --- radically uprooted and homeless.
The
textual mind thinks of speech as frozen; of memories as things that can be
saved and recovered; of secrets that can be engraved within the conscience and
thus examined; and of experiences that can be described. In writing texts, the modern individual
"looks" for the proper word to say what he wants to say. He thinks that he can fix in line what has
happened --- in his life, his job, his country --- and mummify them, only to
resurrect them later. A text is in a
sense past speech, but speech which has suffered a radical transformation, so
radical that perhaps it can no longer be called speech. The alphabet allows us to register the speech
and to conceive that record as a "language" that we can use to speak
and, in particular, to transmit to others the text we have in the mind. A textual man is someone who speaks trying to
find, in his mind, the proper words, the text, to shape his speech, his
discourse. To "communicate"
with others --- a very modern urge --- he tries to find not only the
appropriate text, the one capable of capturing everything he wants to
"communicate," but also the best way to transmit that text, to
imprint that text within the mind of another.
Text
offers the material useful for constructing the present. Textual man continually constructs his
present with the materials offered to him by his memory. Here, in memory, he is storing all the
previous texts that he has learned "by memory" as well as the texts
into which he has transformed his experience.
Prior
to the ascendancy of text, persons must abide by their word. With the emergence of text, they need to rely
on it. The transformation of man and
society with the text is illustrated by its etymology. Jurisdiction is "administration of
justice; exercise of judicial authority, or of the functions of a judge or legal
tribunal; power of declaring and administering law and justice; legal authority
or power." It is also "power
or authority in general; administration, rule, control" or "a
judicial organization; a judicature; a court, or series of courts, of
justice." (OED) The word comes from the Latin: jurisdictio. Dictio is the action of dicere, to say, to declare; Jus-juris is law, rule. Used to establish the force of the
word, the condition in which the word of a man was valued, accepted, or in
which it ruled, the original meaning of the word and its modern use can only be
fully grasped in the two different worlds in which they were used.
In
the world of orality, where the oath is law, words
are the fabric of human interaction.
Modern men are men in context.
The word context still describes the weaving of words, the connection
between the parts of a discourse, the parts around a 'text' which determine its
meaning. But it also means today how men
and woman are woven together, connected.
They are connected through texts.
Their minds are constructed in the shape of texts --- uprooted, homeless
texts. And they feel unbearable
loneliness unless they find their contexts, to connect themselves to others
through pertinent texts.
Thus,
we no longer wish to describe ourselves as text people. Instead, we are bookish people: people who
love to read books. But we have learned
with the people at the grassroots, to assume a critical distance from the
alphabet. We now carefully avoid being
reduced to a text. Even more, we seek
not to reduce others to a textual frame of mind. We resist the modern faith that liberation
comes with literacy.
Modern
mentality --- whether that of Freire's oppressor or
oppressed --- is inextricably shaped by the alphabet. Liberation cannot come from literacy --- not
even critical literacy, Freirean style. Liberation comes with the autonomy of
assuming a critical distance from the alphabet; from the recovery and
regeneration of our minds, currently trapped and embedded within texts.
We
recognize and celebrate that most people on earth are either functionally or
absolutely illiterate: that is, non-alphabetized. Tragically, with each and every literacy
campaign, their way of life and cosmovision are at
risk of being disqualified. Thus, in
departing from Freirean pedagogy and liberation,
interest in the autonomy or liberation of the non-alphabetized by the literate
must also be accompanied by the sense and feeling of the association between
our texts and their oppression.
IV. Resisting Love: The
Case Against Education
Freire's central presupposition: that education
is a universal good, part and parcel of the human condition, was never
questioned, in spite of the fact that he was personally exposed, for a long
time, to an alternative view. This seems
to us at least strange, if not abhorrent.
Freire was explicitly interested in the
oppressed. His entire life and work were
presented as a vocation committed to assuming their view, their interests. Yet, he ignored the plain fact that for the
oppressed, the social majorities of the world, education has become one of the
most humiliating and disabling components of their oppression: perhaps, even
the very worst.
Education
creates two classes of people: the educated and the uneducated or undereducated. The educated, a minority, receive all kinds
of privileges from their position. The
rest get all kinds of deprivation and destitution. No literacy campaign or educational project
has or can overcome that deprivation and destitution in any society. Why did Freire
close his eyes to such facts? Like all
other educational reformers, he concentrated his efforts on polishing and cosmetizing people's chains. This further legitimized and deepened the
oppression he was supposedly struggling against.
The
uneducated are not able to read the texts of the educated. But they are not stupid.[iv] They retain their common sense. In the era of accelerated educational
reforms, the uneducated are better equipped to accept the fact denied by the
educated: the foolishness of placing faith in the possibility of secular
salvation through education. The growing
awareness among the illiterate, the uneducated, and the undereducated about
this situation, coupled with many other facts, is allowing an increasing number
of them to think that perhaps the beginning of the end of the era of education
has already begun.
For
the experts, the contemporary state of education is dire. The educational system becomes more
oppressive to those enrolled within it, even as it expands. With every step of its expansion, teaching
becomes more mechanical, monotonous and irrelevant. Students discover faster than their teachers
can hide how irrelevant their learning is; how little it prepares them to do
useful work or to live.
Despite
this, the reform proposals proliferate.
Grouped into three categories of reformers, some look to improve the
classroom: its methods, equipment or personnel.
Others attempt to liberate it from any bureaucratic imposition:
promoting teachers, parents, and communities as the principal decision-makers
for determining the content and methods of education. Still others attempt to transform the whole
society into a classroom: with new technologies substituting for the closed
space of the classroom, providing for open markets and remote teaching. Whether reformed, free or a world-wide
classroom, these reforms represent three stages in the escalation of
interventions to increase social control and to subjugate people.
Educators
continue to educate the world in the fallacy that education is as old as the
hills. However, the idea of education is
exclusively modern. Born of capitalism,
education perpetuates it. The past is
colonized every time the cultural practices or traditions for learning or study
of pre-modern or non-modern peoples are reduced to that category understood as
education.
Across
the globe, education is promoted in the name of equality and justice. Education is presented as the best remedy for
the oppressive inequalities of modern society.
It produces, however, exactly the opposite. Education creates the most oppressive of the
class divisions now in existence, separating people into two groups: the
"knowledge capitalists" and the "destitute." In this new class structure, more value is
attributed to those consuming more knowledge.
And because society invests in them in the creation of "human
capital," the means of production are reserved for them. The few receive
all kinds of privileges; the many suffer all kinds of discriminations and
disqualification.
Beyond
any consideration of the quality of the services provided by educational
institutions, the fact remains that everywhere the outcome is the same: to
disqualify the social majorities.
According to the educational experts of UNESCO, 60% of the children now
entering into the first grade will never be able to reach the level considered
obligatory in their countries. They will
live forever with the handicap of a distinctly modern social category: the "drop-out." Meanwhile, a small minority will get 20 or 30
years of schooling.
The
compulsion, now achieving epidemic proportions across the world, is to expand
and to reform the educational system.
This compulsion is derived from two well established facts: 1) that most
people in the world are uneducated or undereducated, and 2) that an increasing
number of the educated can no longer find the type of job for which their
education supposedly prepared them.
Reformers continually debate the content or method of the reform while
sharing the same purpose: the reaffirmation of the social prejudice which holds
that schooling and its equivalents are the only legitimate way to prepare
people to live; and that whatever is learned outside of them has no value. New generations are thus educated to consume
knowledge under the assumption that their success will depend of the quantity
and quality of their consumption of that commodity, and that learning about the
world is better than learning from the world.
The
most dangerous reformers are today those who promote the substitution of the
classroom for the massive distribution of knowledge packages via global
communication technologies. These
reformers go further in establishing knowledge consumption as a basic need for
survival. While traditional reformers are
still promising more and better schools, these current reformers are at this
moment winning the race. They present
themselves as the only ones who will be able to acheive
the goal, accepted by everyone: equality of access.[v] Rather than diminishing the need for
classrooms, these reformers extend its function. Theirs is an attempt to transform the global
village into an environmental womb in which pedagogic therapists will control,
under the appearance of a free market, the complex placenta necessary for
nourishing every human being.
Furthermore, the regulation of intellectual rights, now being negotiated
in international institutions, will serve to protect the corporations which
produce and distribute the knowledge packages that from now on will define
education in the global campus.
Education,
like capital, was initially promoted through force. Today, police and armies are still used to
extend and deepen educational control.
However, education has now been established as a personal and collective
need. Like other needs, it has been
transformed into a right. More than
bureaucratic imposition, education has become a legitimate and universally
accepted social addiction --- it stimulating knowledge consumers to freely,
passionately, and compulsively acquire their chains and thus contribute to the
construction of the global Big Brother.
In
attempting to define "education," Tolstoi
observed that education is a conscious effort to transform someone into
something. More and more that
'something' is a subsystem, a creature who functions
within an oppressive system. As a
central tool for reproducing this system, modern technologies, particularly
those linking TV and internet, will lead the oppression farther than ever
before.
Marx
observed that the blind compulsion to produce too many useful things will end
producing useless people. The current
global escalation of educational need only accelerates the process. And, although capital has more appetite than
ever, it has not enough stomach to digest everyone. The promise of employment for
"educated" people is viewed as the illusion that it is. Globalized markets
simply cannot absorb the masses.
Increasingly, people become disposable human beings --- unavailable for
capital to exploit them. However, by giving
them, with public funds, access to knowledge packages, capital educates them as
consumers and prepares them for the moment in which it can subsume them again
in the system of exploitation.
These
"disposable" people have started to react everywhere. There is a proliferation of initiatives
escaping the logic of capital. Everywhere, disposable people are transforming
the drama of exclusion into an opportunity to follow their own path and to
create by themselves their own life. One
of their first steps is to escape education.
In
1953, when education was included in the promotion of development launched by
Truman in 1949, UNESCO experts concluded that the main obstacle to education in
The
illusion that education delivers employment, prestige and social mobility,
which proved real for a minority, lead many people to
accept its high price: severe cultural destruction and dismembering of family
and community life. Step by step, the
social majorities received proof that diplomas did not certify competence or
skills but the number of hours and years during which the ass of a student has
sat in a school chair. Far from
guaranteeing employment, they doom many of those advancing up the educational
ladder to permanent frustration. The
humiliation of engineers or lawyers, forced to work as taxi drivers or hotel
porters, has become an opportunity for liberation for those without diplomas or
those having one of low value. In time,
people, the "disposables," are revaluing their own wisdom, skills,
and competencies for living.
While
the Internet accelerates the irrelevance of most schooling, the social
majorities are bypassing schooling altogether as they do, whenever they can,
all bureaucratic impositions and the addictions of the rich. They no longer surrender themselves to the
illusions of education. People are
saying: Enough! --- recovering, little by little, their old art of
learning.
Given
the fact that education is the economization of learning, transforming it into
the consumption of a commodity called knowledge, people are recovering their
own notions of learning and living free of educational mediation. Since the noun "education" imposes
a completely passive dependence on the system which provides education, people
are substituting this noun with the verbs "to learn" and "to
study." Unlike the noun, these
verbs reestablish the autonomous capacity for building creative relationships
with others and with nature --- relationships which generate knowing,
wisdom. People are again acknowledging
that to know is a personal experience, and that the only way to know, to widen
the competencies for living, is to learn from the world, not about the world.
Everywhere,
dissident groups are enjoying the sufficiency of their initiatives, the opening
of new spaces for freedom. (Prakash & Esteva, 1998) Here and there, some people close the schools
or put them under community control.
Instead of allocating public funds for education, they start public
campaigns to impose heavy taxes on schooling, like those on alcohol and
tobacco. Other campaigns seek to
abrogate all laws making education obligatory.
However, the main impulse of these initiatives follows another direction.
While
the educated persist in their competitive struggle to consume more knowledge,
the uneducated or undereducated are increasingly acknowledging that to know is
a personal experience and relation, controlled by the person learning. Confronted by the propaganda of knowledge
peddling, they adopt the same attitude that they take before junk food: they
know that the latter does not nourish, although sometimes it may curb
hunger. They realize that education, akin
to junk food is unable to generate wisdom or to guide experience.
While
Bill Gates and his colleagues prolong the agony of education, many people are
anticipating its death with creative, convivial initiatives which widen their
capacity for learning, studying and for doing (instead of the capacity to buy
and to consume). Such initiatives are
proving useful in their living and working within their old or new
commons. While undermining the dominant
institutions, they prepare their inversion.
Their hope: that the extinction of the ritual of schooling and of the
myth of education is appearing on the horizon --- the beginning of an era
ending privilege and license. (Illich, 1971)
Freire was entirely unable to anticipate such
evolution or even to perceive the nature of the problem. In his very famous essay, "Education:
Domestication or Liberation?", written two years
after Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he presented the essence of his thesis:
Education cannot be neutral.
If we claim to go beyond
the naive, formal interpretations of the human task of education, this must be
the starting point of a critical dialectical reflection. Lacking this critical spirit, either because
we are alienated to thinking statistically and not dynamically, or because we
already have ideological interests, we are incapable of perceiving the true
role of education, or if we perceive it, we disguise it. We tend to ignore or to obscure the role of
education, which, in that it is a social ‘praxis,’ will always be at the
service of the 'domestication' of men or of their liberation. (Freire, 1972,
p.18)
From
there on, Freire concentrated all his efforts, in
that essay and in his life, on the idea of designing an “education for
liberation.” He was thus unable to
perceive the victimization created by schooling and education and to derive the
pertinent conclusions. He was unable to
bring his brilliant critique of "banking education" to education
itself.
“Birds
fly, fish swim, people learn.” (Holt,
1976) With these words, Holt reminds us
of the treasure of learning and study.
Learning is a human invariant, but not a cultural universal. (Panikkar, 1993)
People learn from the day they are born until they die. At all times, in all cultures, people
learned. Most peoples created institutions
to facilitate the group study and many of them also created institutions to
train specific persons or groups for a programmed destiny: to become a king, a
priest, a warrior or a tailor. The
modern university was born out of the sensible idea that a group of peers can
better deal with the intricacies of a text if they are together, discussing it,
rather than alone in their rooms.
The very modern idea of teaching
everything to everyone, of providing the same knowledge to every member of a
society, of educating all of them to give to them vital competence, transformed
learning and knowledge into a commodity. It applied to
learning the premise of scarcity: the economic principle that man's wants are
very great, not to say infinite, but his means are limited, although
improvable. The logic of this assumption
defines the economic problem par
excellence: to allocate resources (limited means to alternative, unlimited
ends). Once defined as education, the
conditions for learning, always sufficient in every culture for its own
requirements, became scarce. Once the
premise of scarcity became the main principle of organization for society, with
modernity and capitalism, the allocation of means for learning and for the
distribution of the new commodity called knowledge, always limited, started to
follow the pattern of injustice: some had access to them; others did not. Furthermore, the ways and means of learning
still available for the destitute were restricted, eliminated, or radically
devalued. The very experience of knowing
was transmogrified into the mechanical consumption of abstract, unfleshed, disembodied, genderless texts, now called
“knowledge.”
The
new awareness of the 1960s, looking for alternatives to that condition, was
corrupted in the remaining decades of the last century. Like the global emblem of development, the
1960s winds of change left ruins which are now being explored with an
archeological gaze. Freire’s
pedagogy of liberation, viewed with archeological eyes, is yet another modern
tool and technology used against vernacular probity and honor. The universal conscience and the
institutional rules guarding it are doomed to colonize, standardize, and tame
the wilderness of what still remains vernacular.
At
the grassroots, people still rooted in their own cultures, in their ancient
traditions, are reclaiming and revaluing their own ways of learning and
studying. They are saying Enough! to the reformulation of
learning as a commodity (scarce by definition) and the concomitant
transmogrification of knowledge into an additional tool of oppression. They thus can enjoy the blessing of their own
capacity to learn and study, in freedom, and their art of teaching for the
cultural initiation of new generations.
V. Liberation From Pedagogy
There
are teachers --- past and present --- whom we admire. We admire them for different reasons and in
different ways. They come from
completely different worlds. We admire
the kind of impact each of them has had or is having in their worlds; an impact
so profound and powerful on their people that it spills over into other worlds;
of the Other who does not belong to the world of each
of these.
The
teachers we admire have not prided themselves in being professional
teachers. In fact, even those who were
professionals chose to abandon their profession: to become, so to speak,
professional dropouts. Here, for matters
of variety and spice, we will limit ourselves to identifying only three. Three de-professionalized teachers,
belonging to three worlds so different ... they might as well be three distinct
planets.
For
clarifying the issues of this essay, we chose to reflect on the life, the work,
and the teachings of Gandhi, Subcommandante Marcos
and Wendell Berry. Purposely, we
juxtapose them to exacerbate their radical and dramatic differences. Is it absurd to even place them under the
umbrella of public and private virtues we dwell on as we reflect on the kind of
impact they have had upon others ... even as they have said a firm No! to all the symbols of modern power? Particularly the power of the modern agent of
secular salvation: education?
We
cannot call them educators. Even less
can we call them Freirean educators. Emancipators. Conscienticizers. Empowerers. Liberators. Humanizers. Undeniably, each of them has put up the good
fight for freedom from colonizers, from corporations, from the oppressive
system of the State. Undeniably, their
courage has infected others with the contagion needed to swim upstream against
the global current. Each lives a life so compelling that it becomes their message ---
let me be the change I wish for the world.
Each is literally an enfleshment of these
words. Words made flesh. Each reveals in
his own fashion what it means to buck the modern madness called Progress. Each
has been cured of modern man’s mad love for The Machine. Each goes against the grain of modernity not
to be novel, not as a fashion, but because his wisdom suggests the significance
of breaking free from the radical rupture imposed by modern man on
tradition. And, each reveals the art of
enriching, enlivening tradition; possessing the traditional knowledge for
changing the tradition from within the tradition, thus ensuring its historical
continuity.
Each
of them suffered a radical transformation, once they became aware of their
condition as subjects. First, they
became good subjects. Next, they became
bad subjects of an oppressive system. In
so doing, each of them was able to perceive and to conceive a way out of such
oppression. And each of them fell into
the temptation to transform their awareness into the agency of change, leading
others towards that way. But each of
them recovered after that fall and transformed their culturally rooted
awareness into the decision to incarnate, in their own lives, the way out of
oppression, while embracing their own personal limits under pervading social
constraints.
Finally,
each of them became non-subjects and attributed the agency of change to the
people themselves, rather than to any kind of mediator. They do not see others’ awareness as something
created or constructed by them: their intermediation, their leadership. They are only articulating peoples’
experiences and traditions, through which people recognize the foundation for
their own thinking and action. Instead
of using such awareness to preach ideals of life, they transform it into living
ideals which they attempt to incarnate and regenerate, in an ashram, in the
jungle of
Gandhi
changed himself. From good subject to
bad subject: from being another Hindu educated in Oxford, to being a
lawyer-activist in South Africa, providing legal services to his people. After he re-rooted himself in his traditional
soil, the soil of his people, he became a non-subject. Others experienced a similar transformation. They joined him. His experiments spread through contagion: any
ordinary man or woman could do as much as Gandhi in his eating or shitting
practices, his regeneration of khadi or his production of the salt controlled by the
British. To suit their career ambitions,
even the good subjects of colonialism allied themselves with Gandhi, next to
some bad subjects. After the British
were thrown out using Gandhi’s non-violence (“as old as the hills” to him), the
good and bad subjects threw out Gandhi.
In Independent India, there was no place for a non-subject leader. Gandhi was the wrong man for being at the
helm in the race to catch up with the West, even if catching up meant that a
few Indians would annihilate the many.
The educated Indians early decided there were too many of the wrong
kinds of Indians: the uneducated; those who did not consume education; did not
consume, period --- those who proliferated like rabbits, like their
grandparents.
For
the
Gandhi
trusted his people still living in their vernacular worlds. They trusted him. Together they worked to throw out the
British. Together they suffered in the
hands of the Brown Sahibs who grabbed the power vacated by the British,
starting a new phase of colonialism. For
these reasons and others, Gandhi’s legacy is even more pertinent to those in
the XXI century resisting the neo-colonialism in which the Brown Sahibs have
opened wide the doors of the Global Economy and Global Education so that their
private lives can quicker approach The American Dream.
Like
Gandhi, Marcos changed himself. From
good subject to bad subject: from a student and a teacher in
Some
of the main principles of Zapatismo, like “commanding
by obeying,” “to walk at the pace of the slowest one,” and “to listen as you
walk,” are not theoretical statements or abstract values of a new utopia. They are concrete shapes and styles of the
movement as it is formed and reformed. All of them allude to a condition in
which the people themselves, including of course the weaker and the slower,
inspire and realize the action and control over all decisions. Like other grassroots groups, the Zapatistas
are revealing what it means to be non-subjects, affirming their own forms of
local thinking and action in their particular cultural places. They refuse to buy or sell global ideologies,
political platforms, revolutionary plans or the appropriate way to participate
in conventional politics and to struggle for power. They refuse to transform themselves into any
form of enlightened vanguard or to reduce their action to a force game or to
mere numbers in a “statistical democracy,” trapped by the ballot box.
In
a recent caravan to
Brothers and sisters: We
have invited you to this meeting to seek and to find yourselves and us. You have all touched our heart, and you can
see we are not special. You can see we
are simple and ordinary men and women.
You can see we are the rebellious mirror that wants to be a pane of
glass and break. You can see we are who
we are so we can stop being who we are to become the you
we are.
Without
being empowered by
These
non-teachers, non-conscienticizer teachers give us a
glimpse of what it means to be non-subjects; what is involved in the recovery
and the regeneration of vernacular worlds.
They do not do it in any nostalgic, sentimental way. Their living, rather than a going back, are
worthy of emulation precisely because they live full of hope, in the
present. Their lives are attempts to
heal the brutal rupture caused by modernity while they break free from it in
order to re-connect themselves to real people in their soil cultures.
We
refuse to reduce their life and work to the enterprise called education. We refuse to have their life and work
corrupted and co-opted by an institution and by a word that we have been well
warned not to use for what occurs in vernacular worlds. We can no longer call education these many
other forms of traditional, cultural initiations, bookish or not. We have been guided away from having the word
“education” co-opt and corrupt the life and work of such teachers. Such guide was not offered to us by Gandhi,
Marcos, or
The
critique of a de-schooling Illich died a quick death
once he recognized the ridiculous impact of his most famous book on nourishing
the very institutions he identified as oppressive, unjust, and violent. The Illich who rose
out of the ashes of the dead de-schooler knew well
the folly of fame; knew well the danger of writing for abstract audiences. Forsaking the temptation of fame and fortune,
following in his Christian tradition, he chose the path of friendship, of
seeing himself in the eyes of his friends.
He thus wrote only for his friends, rather than for abstract
audiences. “In Lieu of Education” (1977) was written
by the Illich who celebrates the worlds, the
traditions of the uneducated, the undereducated, the illiterate, and the drop
out. It is the Illich
who showed us the wealth of worlds, the richness of those Two-Thirds worlds of
people whose being forsakes the curricula and the pedagogies of the pedagogues
in the global classroom. It is this Illich who forsakes the desire to convert people into
de-schooling their lives. It is this Illich who so fully celebrates the vernacular gender of his
vernacular worlds, of his 12th century ancestors, uneducated and uneducable.
From
this Illich, we have learned to use the word
“education” with extreme caution because of the toxicity of the enterprise with
which it has come to be inextricably connected.
It
is the post-Deschooling Illich
who recognized that ALL education is consumer training, transmogrifying people
into individuals, who can fit into and function within a society of consumers
as either prisoners of addiction or prisoners of envy.
It
is Illich who, having recognized that socialism must
come on a bicycle, used the best of this insight to
ride his way out of socialism and all modern “isms.”
It
is this Illich whose archeological gaze not only
guided us to clearly see the ruins of all modern institutions, including the
one that most insidiously trains all ages to become completely dependent on
economic society, without roots which are necessary for flourishing in soil
cultures, in vernacular worlds.
And,
it is this Illich whose gaze reveals to us the
profound richness of the worlds of Gandhi, Marcos, and
The
Illich who walked away from his own ideology of
de-schooling society is also the Illich who parted
company from Freire.
Illich clearly recognized the way beyond any
and all varieties of conscientization: “all
professionally planned and administered rituals that have as their purpose the
internalization of a religious or secular ideology.” (Illich, 1982,
p.158) Illich
reflects,
Well, one of the men I
had to meet (in
and became good
friends. Then, a year and a half later,
he was in the military police jail.... I then brought him to
Therefore, despite its
good and solid tradition, it was I who moved away from the approach for which
Paulo had become the outstanding spokesman during the 1960s and early 1970s not
only in
Now, I hope that nobody
interprets such a split in our fields of interest, which at a certain moment began to diverge, in that silly
political way in which people are always considered as opposing each
other. In the analysis of ritualized and
graded school education, Paulo was for me a very solid point of
passage and remains a dear friend. (Illich in Cayley, 1992,
pp.206-207)
VI. Reclaiming Awareness
and Love
As
victims, we have been seduced into believing that schooling and education are
prerequisites for living a good life. We
have been deceived by the cult of experts to accept that living, learning, and
growing require expert expertise. We
have been schooled into accepting one kind of institutional arrangement (for
example the school) --- hierarchical, centralized, compartmentalized, and
normalized --- which provides programmed choice behind the guise (and using the
language) of freedom. Through curricularized learning, we know how to measure, assess,
and rank knowledge (as well as ourselves and others), increasingly devoid of
real-life experience. And, we have
resolved that schooling yields learning, that school-learning yields wisdom, and that school-wisdom ought to yield quantitatively
improved living. Yet, most fail to
consider the ill-effect that an over-emphasis on “quantity” or “quality”
(education, not to mention career, income, “toys” and the like) must have on
spirit, body, culture, and nature.
Wendell
Berry summarizes the “victimization,”
The purpose of education
with us, like the purpose of society with us, has been, and is, to get away
from the small farm --- indeed, from the small everything. The purpose of education has been to prepare
people to ‘take their places’ in an industrial society, the assumption being
that all small economic units are obsolete.
And the superstition of education assumes that this ‘place in society’
is ‘up.’ ‘Up’ is the direction from
small to big. Education is the way up.
The popular aim of education is to
put everybody ‘on top.’ Well, I think I hardly need to document the consequent
pushing and trampling and kicking in the face ....(U)p may be the wrong
direction. (Berry, 1990, pp. 25-26)
As
Schooling,
analogous to both a social and societal crutch, functions as mass employer,
day-care provider, social strata legitimator, and as
“education” deliverer. Schooling enables
society’s advancement in the direction of Progress. As a consequence of the desire for society’s
smooth operation, people must increasingly submit themselves to bureaucratic
and technocratic control, the product of Progress’ institutions. Believing in the power which such control
allegedly offers, people hypnotically seek more power.
This
power, however, is only tendered in exchange for greater and greater submission
to the bureaucracies and technocracies of Progress. With such submission, tragic and despairing
distortions occur. Institutional
insurance displaces both the traditional as well as the radical abandonment of
grace. Technical proficiency within the
technological hardware replaces both humane or divine
vocation. And, an ethic of power (which
supports systems of war, systems of neo-colonial and global cultural hegemony,
systems of mass economies, and systems of education) militates against all
forms of powerlessness: those supportive of small-scale, localized, communal,
and convivial forms of living. As a
result, people’s self image and self-capacities are altered.
Three
types of alteration (separation) occur.
First, people become separated from themselves. No longer possessing the capacities to
provide for their own necessities and desires, they become dependent upon
technological “fixes” to do what they could provide for themselves amidst
family, friends and neighbors. Rearing
the young, caring for the elderly, food cultivation and preparation, treatment
for illness, enjoyment and entertainment, and learning (understood as being)
all demand some gadget, some system, some
enterprise. Doing for oneself is now
understood as making the money which will buy access to the goods and services
that a person or group can no longer do without. Thus, making, doing and being are transmogrified
into buying, hiring, and becoming. And in this transmutation, people believe
themselves more powerful when, in truth, they are made debilitated and
dependent to the degree that they must consume industrial and technological
goods and services.
Second,
people become separated from each other.
Education addiction almost inevitably sends people scrambling for more
and better knowledge. Requiring
specialized treatment which only specialized teachers can dispense, the person
needing education looks to the artificial, the imposed, and the authoritatively
verifiable for the abstract, practical, technological, scientific, humanistic,
and empirical “knowledge” uncritically viewed as distinct from the home, the
field, the craft, the story, or the tradition.
Always needing to be “taught,” people are led away
from the very sources capable of nurturing courage, character, and conviction. These virtues are cultivated amidst local
family and friends still bound together within local cultures. In contrast, the educated become consumers,
viewing all affairs as sales transactions, always searching for the best “buy”
and prepared to go wherever the “purchase” may lead.
Third,
people become separated from a place, somewhere to which they are intimately, nutritively, psychically, and generationally
connected. The “enlightenment” peddled
within educational “systems” is not attuned to a wisdom which suggests that one
stay put. Rather, educationally
enlightened people purposively pursue the career pathways which their education
and schooling make available. Such an
“awakening” requires that people view the traditional simplicity which sustains
the life of small and local places as mundane and anachronistic. Earthiness is viewed as backward and crude,
commonness as repressive and unfulfilling.
Individuality, newness, sophistication, specialization --- all
characteristics of educational “niches” --- are
suggestive of the fast and furiously paced race to keep abreast and to get
ahead. All imply dislocation and
evolution at a speed where one is constantly, intellectually and physically,
“on the move.” Thus, there is little
remaining time for knowing a place well.
In fact, one may consider himself to be doing well if he has time for
eating and sleeping. Smelling, not to mention
growing the flowers, is supreme luxury, most
especially for the educated and professional “careerist.”
Having
despaired over the deceit perpetrated by schooling and education, we are, we
believe, ready to hope. The gods of
schooling and education no longer hold possession of us. They no longer bind us to expectations of a
world or society made better as a result of their functioning --- whether
reformed, revolutionized, humanized, conscienticized,
multi-culturalized, democratized, or greened.
We
prevent our hope from being transmogrified into a program or an expectation ---
the hubris of pretending to control the future.
As Vaclav Havel affirms, “Hope is not the
conviction that something will turn out well, but the conviction that something
makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
(
We
find inspiration in the words of Paul Goodman, another of our teachers:
Suppose you had had the
revolution you are talking or dreaming about.
Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you
wanted. How would you live, you
personally, in that society? Start
living that way now! Whatever you would
do then, do it now. When you run up
against obstacles, people, or things that won’t let you live that way, then
begin to think about how to get over or around or under that obstacle, or how
to push it out of the way, and your politics will be concrete and
practical. (Quoted in Holt, 1970, p.302)
Every
day we find affirmation and nourishment for our hope. We find it, first of all, in the epic now
evolving at the grassroots. Pioneering
social movements are groping for their liberation from the “Global Project”
being imposed upon them. Seeking to go
beyond the premises and promises of modernity, people at the grassroots are
reinventing or creating afresh intellectual and institutional frameworks
without necessarily getting locked into power disputes. Ordinary men and women are learning from each
other how to challenge the very nature and foundations of modern power, both
its intellectual underpinnings and its apparatuses. Explicitly liberating themselves from the
dominant ideologies, fully immersed in their local struggles, these movements
and initiatives --- which need no mediators --- reveal the diverse content and
scope of grassroots endeavors, resisting or escaping the clutches of the
“Global Project.” (Esteva
and Prakash, 1998)
We
recognize Gandhi's path in that epic. At
the grassroots, we find him alive and flourishing everywhere, not in the hands
of the self-appointed guardians of his teachings, but among people who perhaps
ignore his name. The contagion of the
living ideals he so well incarnated have continually spread, from mouth to
mouth, among ordinary men and women.
Perhaps, as Illich once said, Gandhi will
become the philosopher as opposed to the conscienticizer
of the XXI century.
Our
hope is also continually nourished by the Zapatistas, who have inspired
thousands, millions of globaphobics all over the
planet. The Zapatistas continue to offer
a radical refutation to all modern fanatics, self-styled cosmopolitan
individuals, still dismissing all vernacular initiatives and movements as
parochial, fundamentalist, and as going-back-in-time.
We
find parochialism in all globaphilics, like
international institutions or transnational corporations, and in their reductionist science.
All of them are constrained by their lenses which reduce the richness of
the world, in all its diversity and complexity, to the homogeneous, abstract
quantities of their statistics, always associated with a very parochial,
self-serving interest.
As
defined by the deeds of the Zapatistas as well as by the words of Marcos,
localization is the opposite to both localism and
globalization. True, traditional
resistance to all kinds of colonizers often implied forms of localism in which
people were forced to entrench themselves in their own places. Such entrenchment implied the danger of
short-sighted and even fundamentalist localism. In the epoch of economic and technological
globalization, people realize that all isolated localisms will be razed to the
ground. But instead of abandoning their
roots and places, as global forces push them to do --- in order to better gut
them in the shapeless space of the market and the State --- they affirm
themselves in them while at the same time opening their hearts and hands to
others like themselves.
What
we observe at the grassroots, as the Zapatistas clearly illustrate, is the
multiplication and strengthening of wide coalitions of discontents with the
“Global Project.” Far from being
parochial, their localized views and perspectives are affirming cosmovisions of a cosmic nature. They are no longer trapped in the western
universalism, but neither do they fall into the trap of relativism which so
easily transforms itself into fundamentalism.
They are not pluralists either: no one can be. Still, they affirm themselves in their own
set of beliefs, opinions, philosophy, and religions. They affirm themselves in their truths, but
at the same time adopt a humble, open attitude, a pluralist attitude having
recognized their own limits, the radical incapacity of any human being of
knowing it all, of owning the
universal truth, the only version of the truth, a catholic truth. (Panikkar,
1996) They can say, with Gandhi:
(S)eeing that the human mind works through innumerable
media and that the evolution of the human mind is not the same for all, it
follows that what may be truth for one may be untruth for another .... All that I can in true humility present to
you is that truth is not to be found by anybody who has not got an abundant
sense of humility. (Gandhi,
1970, p.433).
We
also find our hope nourished by the life and work of Wendell Berry, a western
man seeking to recover the best of the western tradition, while abandoning what
does not work; what does profound damage; what creates enormous suffering for
all. He sees himself very much
implicated in the suffering. He suffers
from the hidden wound of racism. And, he
is a man of conscience while avoiding the arrogance of transforming himself
into a conscienticizer. His humility is all the more touching, in
light of the profound impact he has had at the grassroots in the western world.
Yet,
the truth is that each time we read about his life, we feel inspired by him,
desiring to emulate him. As we embrace
Berry, Gandhi, and Marcos, our hope focuses on the awareness and love, the rootedness and the humility, that knowing which is neither
born of conscience, conscienticization, or mediation,
but rather of a procession --- “a living procession through time in a
place.”
Modern humans tend to
believe that whatever is known can be recorded in books or on tapes or on
computer discs and then again learned by those artificial means. But it is increasingly plain to me that the
meaning, the cultural significance, even the practical value, of this sort of
family procession across a landscape can be known but not told. These things, though they have a public
value, do not have a public meaning; they are too specific to a particular
small place and its history. This is
exactly the tragedy in the modern displacement of people and cultures.
That such things can be
known but not told can be shown by answering a simple question: Who knows the
meaning, the cultural significance, and the practical value of this rural
family's generational procession across its native landscape? The answer is not so
simple as the question: No one person ever will know all the answer. My grandson certainly does not know it. And my son does not, though he has positioned
himself to learn some of it, should he be so blessed.
I am the one who (to some
extent) knows, though I know also that I cannot tell it to anyone living. I am in the middle now between my grandfather
and my father, who are alive in my memory, and my son and my grandson, who are
alive in my sight.
If my son, after thirty
more years have passed, has the good pleasure of seeing his own child and
grandchild in that procession, then he will know something like what I now
know. This living procession through time in a place is the record by which
such knowledge survives and is conveyed.
When the procession ends, so does the knowledge. (
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[i] In using
"conscience," we are guided by Illich who in a footnote in Gender
(Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1982, pp.158-9), provides a
lengthy elaboration on the history of the term as well as a critique of its
contemporary derivative. We include an
excerpt from the text.
"Conscience here means the human guide and
umpire internalized. As an ideal type,
it is opposed to the gendered sense of vernacular probity (FN 82). What has been called the 'process of
civilization' builds on a process that could be called 'conscientization.'
The term has been coined in
[ii] A case in point is the
Zapatista movement. For the government,
the political parties, many analysts and even many of its followers or
sympathizers, the Zapatistas are in fact reduced to the now famous subcomandante Marcos.
They thus express their racist prejudice: the only educated white man of
the movement, who has performed a brilliant role as speaker (a kind of cultural
bridge between the indigenous peoples and the educated world), should be the
one conceiving and leading the movement.
Time and again, the Zapatistas have declared, or demonstrated with
facts, that their uprising came from people's own initiative, from their
communities, not from an enlightened leader.
They affirm that they are not guerrillas: they are the sea, not the
fish, having no interest in seizing power while their army is subordinated to a
civil command. Zapatismo
was born from the communities themselves, that have since then been in control
of it. Marcos himself has explained how
he was "converted" by the communities, which cured him of the
ideological burden he brought to the jungle.
But no fact seems to be able to dissolve the prejudice: the Zapatistas
are still seen, by the elite, as a group of manipulated Indians, under the
control of a mestizo.
[iii] Krishna Kumar (1998)
accurately writes that "it is hardly unfair to say that Freire belongs to that short historical period which lasted
from the late 1960s to the middle of the 1980s ... Activism aimed at social
change had become a fully magnetized service industry, copiously funded by
international donors with a clear view that it would help contain within limits
the feelings of the poor and the marginalized majority. This portrait of the past decade or so,
though sketchy, should help us appreciate the incorporation of Freirean ideas and terminology into the industry of
voluntarism."
[iv] In fact, the very idea
of modern education emerged with the conviction, generalized in the XVII
century, that men are born stupid.
Stupidity became equivalent to original sin. Education became its cure, defined as the
inverse of vital competence. (Illich, 1977).
[v] The promise is of course
another illusion, legitimizing the current campaign. Less than one percent of the people in