by Lucy S.
When I was an undergraduate at my huge
public land-grant university, we would read about and discuss how people were
marginalized in various ways; how education is both doled out differently and
experienced differently based on class, ethnicity, gender, and other differences;
that people of color and poorer people (of any ethnicity) are statistically imprisoned
at higher rates for similar crimes than whites and/or the more affluent; how
levels of literacy vary and what effect that has on someone’s whole life; how
the cultures of the working-classes and poverty-classes are degraded and
devalued; how oppression plays out for girls and women; the damages done and
still being inflicted by colonization and imperialism; and how material
realities are the foundation for so much of our potentials and choices. That is
a long-winded list, and still, there was so much more connected to what I am
now going to talk about. My point is that we were intellectually confronted with
these issues, and what was strange for me was the feeling that we were always
talking ‘about’ people who were in so many ways kept out of that institution.
During my first round there, when my
niece Rose was still alive (I’ve written about her in other blog pieces here), I’d
be talking with her on my cellphone while traveling to campus, because I often
felt like that traveling time was the only time I had to get into phone
conversations. I was swamped with school work and other responsibilities. So we’d
be talking, and she’d talk, for example, about the mice running everywhere in
her dad’s mobile home (because of holes in the subfloor or a door that wouldn’t
shut all the say), how they’d run over her and Anthony (her baby) when they
tried to sleep; or how she was trying to get beyond her meth addiction but
friends in the mobile home park were knocking on the windows and doors saying
they knew she was in there and to come out and party; or how proud she felt of
finally getting a job but later how the wife in that Subway franchise owner-couple
said the husband was talking to Rose too much and started taking her off the
schedule. Then we’d hang up as I entered the building and made my way upstairs
to my – by comparison – clean, serene, organized class. The contrast was
usually jarring for me. The combination
of that contrast and our discussions of readings about people in situations
similar to those of people I love or sometimes my own life (past or present –
the many moves, the economic instability, the ways in which work so often
thought of as ‘women’s work’ is devalued, being kept out of educational
endeavors because of larger systemic issues) struck me as surreal and at times psychologically
overwhelming. It deeply pained me in ways that I struggled to articulate.
The question-combo that often came to
mind, which I later voiced, was: “Why are they out there and we’re in here talking
about them? Why aren’t they in here?” Much
more needed to be said to explain why this was problematic, but my mind felt
thick the way a tongue can feel when we physically can’t form our words well. I
knew these exclusions were wrong, but my mind felt too swollen with hurt and
worry and hazy anger to methodically try to explain.
Sometimes I think that a major reason
for continuing my education has been to build walls of words and theory and
closely-read stories around those feelings so that I could explain to others
how I felt and why these exclusions are so immoral and devastating to those who
are kept out.
After I returned, these were some of
the early questions and ideas that formed. Why did academics and college
students (or the political policymakers) get to come together and theorize
about these other people? Who were they
to try to decide what to ‘do’ about the working-classes and poor? What would happen
if this were turned upside down? What if
the working-classes, poverty-classes, and colonized came together with our readings
to discuss what to ‘do’ about those humans damaged by having too much power and
privilege? What theories would we explore and build upon as we confronted absences
in empathy, intelligence, insight, ethics, self-discipline, and sanity in the
ruling classes? What psychological and sociological knowledge bases would help
us determine how to treat their personality disorders which resulted in spoiled,
self-indulgent, greedy destructiveness? What would we do about their impoverished
value systems that were products of their class-interests – and thus of the
system’s structure? Could they be educated out of their deep ignorance and their
sense of entitlement to dominate others’ lives and exploit other people’s labor
so egregiously?
I discovered others in academia who had
long been working to turn the tables this way, to reframe the parameters of
these analyses. The radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is one of the best
known; he repeatedly contrasted education for domestication with education for
liberation. It’s easy to toss these phrases around in sloganeering fashion, but
it is much harder to grasp what they mean or to work out for ourselves what
they mean as we try to live them. What we do know is that it surely consists of
something very different than just turning the poor, working-classes, and
colonized into the upper classes and world dominators. Doing this to
individuals does not liberate them; it only changes their position in the
systemic prison. It positions them more as dominators rather than dominated,
and there is no liberation in those roles. And doing this collectively is
impossible; there would be no serving class to exploit and rule. But the
culture and value systems of the ruling classes are built on their distorted
relationships with others – their normalized exploitations and dominations.
But still, this is too abstract. What IS
education for liberation – collective liberation – the only kind of genuine
liberation there can be?
The upper classes comfort themselves by
clinging to the lie which insists that the poor, working-classes, and colonized
did and do suffer mostly because of their own deficiencies. It’s not surprising
that they tell themselves this to fend off a guilty awareness of themselves as
the ‘bad guys’ wreaking havoc on most people’s lives and on our shared planet. What
makes them successful and what hurts the rest of us so much is when we believe
them. Believing them can and does manifest as shame about ourselves and those
close to us, or a pseudo-defiance that can sometimes be self-destructive. Believing
them can make us look down on each other and compete to be more like the ruling
class (economically and culturally). My friend Kerry is hopeful that we can figure
out how to get beyond our petty divisions. When I saw her recently, she
reminded me of a basic truth: “There’s more of us than there are of them!!”
I would like to hear more about what
others think of when they think of liberation – and education for liberation.
What does this mean to you?
This morning, I was reading Aurora
Levins Morales’s blog (which is linked to on the side of my blog), and this
struck me:
I am the descendant of Taíno people whose tropical ecosystem
allowed them to put in minimal work and reap abundant crops of carbohydrates,
who could spend a modest amount of hours fishing and gathering shellfish, and
have plenty of time to develop sophisticated art forms and elaborate
rituals. Their culture honored artists and trees, created breathtaking
carvings in wood and shell, invented hammocks knotted from the fiber of maguey,
polished rings of stone, ceramic pots and figures elaborately worked with earthen
dyes, and days long festivals of poetry and song.
Europeans arrived and decimated the
Taino people on the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican
Republic). They enslaved the Tainos, forcing them to work. (Bartolome de las
Casas, a priest in Hispaniola at the time of these atrocities, wrote
extensively about the extreme violence inflicted on the indigenous people by
the colonizers. http://www.lascasas.org/
)
Would education for liberation result in lives more like the Tainos lived when they were not violently enslaved by the colonizers?
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