Common People

by Lucy S.

The other day, I wrote to a friend that I’m just a common person. I felt over my head in these academic efforts. Who did I think I was to be doing these things, anyway? I have no soaring, amazing talent, nor do I have a background in formal leadership. Once I became a leader in a homeschool group because the person who’d organized it decided to leave and said she only trusted me to take it over. But the first thing I did was to tell them that we didn’t need a leader, that me running an email group did not make me or anyone else any kind of boss over the rest. I kept trying to move us toward a more consensual approach. I’ve been in a few groups over the years, but by and large, my role has been to just be a common member, and sometimes not a very active one. I’ve been much better at informal efforts.

I talked with a close friend today and she asked if I’m proud that I’m going to be graduating with a master’s degree (if all goes well…). She said she’d be thrilled if she was graduating with one. I said I’m glad about it, and that I love what I learn even if I do seem to be having a nervous breakdown over it at times, and that I believe so strongly that these efforts matter. I well know the work it’s taken me. But I tend to think more in terms of being thankful than being proud. And beyond that, I know that what I’ve been able to do in the past few years is something that many people have no chance to do. I myself could not have managed it for many years. I’m touched when people have said they’re proud of me, but to say it about myself doesn’t feel right. I can feel proud to stand with others in a worthy effort, but what always troubles me about the pride connected to my own academic successes is that it seems to celebrate the exceptional individual.

This often obscures the entrenched injustice of a system that prevents the majority of people from gaining the knowledge and abilities to more thoroughly understand their society and their own place in that society. Too often, the tragedy is supposed to be that this special individual was stuck down low with the common masses. It’s easy to fall into that feeling with ourselves, too. There were many times over the years when my self-pity would get the best of me and I would think about how much I’d LOVED reading, writing, and my semesters in community college, and what was so tragic was that “I” of all people could not seem to get back to those efforts. It was, to be sure, a painful stunting. The isolation sometimes deeply depressed me, and then I would desperately try to plan out some way to set up our lives so that I could go back to school. It was an injustice. But it was not a special one. It was bound up with the injustice of a society which continues to perpetuate the myth of ‘intellectual types’ of people, despite the abundant evidence that we all engage intellectually, and can further develop our intellectual capacities if we have the means and discover a reason to do so.

To be kept out of this kind of ongoing growth and to be blocked from participation in these conversations is a kind of segregation, often connected to race in our still too racist society, but at any rate, bound to exploitation and a theft of people’s lives. Moreover, as Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

 Any situation in which some individuals prevent other individuals from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence.  The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects. (85)

Denying that common people can and do grow intellectually is one of the ways in which this violence is continually perpetrated upon us. How are we to fully engage in that process of inquiry if we are kept out in so many formal and informal ways from conversations with those who have had the time and support to deeply develop their own intellects? To say through their actions that common people are good enough to watch their children, harvest their food, build and maintain the structures they live in, and wait on them in stores and restaurants, but are not good enough to seriously talk with about history, political events or theory, literature, philosophy, or science is to refuse to recognize the equal humanity of common people.   

At the same time, I have to say that one of the most crucial gifts my parents gave us was intellectual inquiry on our own terms. Most importantly, it was disconnected from grades or material rewards. We were working-class people; my parents had not even graduated from high school. But we read and we had rousing discussions about what we read. This was vital because I learned to love these endeavors for their own sake rather than as a means to some other end. The reason to study is to understand our lives better and to be able to participate more fully in decisions in our society – and to demand genuine rather than minimal participation.

The great educator Myles Horton says in We Make the Road By Walking:

I think if I had to put my finger on what I consider a good education, a good radical education, it wouldn't be anything about methods or techniques.  It would be loving people first.  If you don't do that, Che Guevara says, there's no point in being a revolutionary.  I agree with that.  And that means all people everywhere, not just your own family or your own countrymen or your own color.  And wanting for them what you want for yourself.  And then next is respect for people's abilities to learn and to act and to shape their own lives.  (177)

I guess the more I think about this, I am proud of my efforts, and it is in this sense: I’m proud to be one of the common people who have been lucky enough to do what I’ve done and have worked with what was available. I’m proud because this helps to show what common people can do if we just have enough of a chance and some people help bolster our often battered psyches by reminding us over and over that our efforts matter and that we need to keep trying. And I’m proud to have people in my life like that close friend who said she’d be thrilled if she was getting a master’s degree and the many other common people, in or out of academia, with whom I learn and grow.

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Postscript: I woke up thinking about problems with this post.  One is the question of who I mean by common people. For me, it means just about everyone I know, laboring in or out of the academy, and that is part of my point. But I leave it to readers to let the phrase evoke whoever it may.  The bigger problems are bound up with the implication that not going to college is a "stunting" (a word I used to describe my experience in being unable to return for a long time) and that everyone should be able to go. 

I am always torn over these issues. On the one hand, Paulo Freire has written extensively about class-knowledge - the grounded, intelligent awareness that workers gain by virtue of their lived realities. And there is certainly enough other theory to argue that revolutionary change will come about by means of workers and not primarily by means of people studying ideas. But these can become the same when workers with class-knowledge also have the means to study ideas which contribute to a further understanding of their society and those individuals' place in that society. They can become in various ways what Antonio Gramsci calls "organic intellectuals." It is also possible for someone from what Gramsci calls "traditional intellectuals"  to merge themselves with the organic intellectuals by becoming part of workers' active efforts to forge a more just society. Furthermore, many argue that those who labor in academia, including professors whose positions are shaky and often not well-paid, are a kind of organic intellectual. (Let me add, as I have stated so many times, that by workers, I do not mean only paid workers; I include those of us who are in so many ways care-laborers.)

But this may be too theoretical. I do not think that everyone needs to go to college for the sake of credits and degrees. And I have met plenty of people there who were far less deeply intelligent about their world and the majority of people in it than many I know who haven't been to college or have no degrees.  Yet I also know that what I have experienced in the best classes there has been profoundly transformative. It isn't just a matter of me being transformed, though. I believe that by being there, I too have acted upon those around me by bringing in my perspective. And there is something special about a group of people coming together who have done the same readings, having a serious discussion about those readings, and writing what amounts to a dialogue between themselves and some of those readings - and doing all of this faithfully, week in and week out. Furthermore, having someone there who has studied these things for a long time and can act as a guide can be a tremendous benefit, just as it makes a huge difference for someone with any kind of long-accumulated knowledge to share that with others.  If I didn't believe these endeavors were worthy and crucial for a majority of people, I would do something else. 

Yet just as I believe that we all need these kinds of experiences, I believe that we all need the kinds of knowledge and wisdom that come from helping to grow food, care for children, and participate in a variety of ways in the work needed to sustain humanity. Eduardo Galeano says that lies and domination are a result of "the social division of labor." He continues:

In reality, both the intellectuals, an expression that reduces people to heads, and the manuals, people reduced to hands, are the result of the same fracturing of the human condition.  Capitalist development generates mutilated people. (We Say No 159)

We common people need to heal our mutilations.