Naming the
intolerable is itself the hope.
John
Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Radical hope is the
essence of popular movements.
Douglas Lummis. Radical Democracy
This book takes the
all-too-familiar tale of education and stands it on its head.
We do not tell the history
of education from the perspective of the educated. We write about what we have
learned to learn from those who have no access to education; who cannot get the
developed person’s prescribed quota or recipe for education; or those who,
having trustfully and diligently undergone the education planned for them, have
by now come to know too well, the bitter taste of false expectations, dubious
benefits, or failed promises.
This book does not attempt
to package and sell one more reform initiative or proposal about improving or
expanding the educational system. It has no new literacy project for the
illiterate. It has no “infor-mat education” remedy for those left sick or
incapacitated by “formal education.” It does not create multicultural medicines
for the diseases of mono culturalism,
Instead, it celebrates well-being: still enjoyed in the commons and
cultures of peoples living and learning at the grassroots. It celebrates the
cultural richness, the prolific abundance that still exists in the many and
diverse worlds of the social majorities. For they need no classrooms, no
computer workshops, no laboratories nor libraries, nor even Walmarts to teach
and learn from each other. They have not forgotten their diverse arts of
survival and flourishing “in lieu of education.”
We write for our friends
within the social majorities, courageously taking the initiatives we describe
in our book. In telling their stories here, we hope that they will find further
inspiration and arguments for their initiatives; for strengthening and carrying
further their endeavors to protect their cultural spaces; to prevent the
cultural meltdown of the global classroom.
We also write for our
colleagues and friends in the educational system who share our concerns, our
perplexities, our disenchantment, our frustrations with educational outcomes,
our anguish with the horror of what the educated do to each other as well as to
the uneducated and the illiterate.
We hope that we can be of some use in building strong walls to contain
and limit the ambitions of the educational enterprise—today, as in the past,
aspiring to save the world.
The social majorities need
no saviors, no conscientization, no empowerment. They are impressively skillful
in saving their worlds. They have been able to do so for five hundred years.
The newly minted expert as well as the established scholar have much to learn
about living well from the uneducated and the illiterate—if they can give up
the arrogance of their expertise.
We suspect that many educators will find it difficult to follow our
argument to the end, and that many others will resist or reject it from the
very beginning—perceiving it as a
threat to their expertise. We hope that those
dismissing us will at least dare to give serious consideration to our insights
and experiences—however counterfactual or counterintuitive these appear.
Educators who cannot bear to impose their universe of the academy upon
the untamed pluriverse that still stretches beyond its boundaries will resonate
with the ideas explored here. For those within the academy who sense its
counterproductivity, the line of ideas followed here will not appear like paths
to Nowhere: impractical, irrelevant, or Utopian. Educators who cherish cultural
diversity will find in these pages more reasons to curtail the spread of their
own dis-ease, their plague. Our encounters with the Other are no longer
burdened by the Mission of saving their Minds, as our predecessors braved the
world of savages and primitives to save their Souls. Freed from any and ail
salvational projects—of educators, developers, and others of their ilk— our journeys
into the lands of the illiterate and the uneducated are filled with delightful
surprises of discovering the riches of the Other, with the “joy of the unknown
and the unexpected that invariably con-stitute these adventures beyond
education.
» As pilgrims, we journey to places where notions of the good life have
not been contaminated or destroyed by the plague of Homo educandus or Homo
oeconormcus. We journey to gaze, to learn, to come to understand how
magnificently they flourish in the absence of our needs, necessities, or
certainties—jobs, daycare classrooms, offices, eateries, restaurants,
hospitals, and other constitutive elements of the global economy.
We would like to offer for consideration John Berger’s (1991)
observation: naming the intolerable is itself the hope. Naming the horror
impels people to do something about it. All those who read these pages may not
share the specific hope we have discovered among the social majorities. All the
same, we hope that they will be less prone to impose their own salvational
urges on the Other. We know that our arguments are unavoidably controversial.
But nothing in these pages can be called a closed game. From this collection of
seeds, many diverse fruits can be grown, eaten, and enjoyed.
Part 1
Education as a Human
Right: The Trojan Horse of Recolonization
By old habit or new force,
carrot or stick, educators and education are rapidly changing ... to stay
unchanged.
Blind political and economic forces are pushing the educational system
out of the global market. To protect it in this turbulent time, educators,
parents, governments, corporations, its guardians and consumers, continue to
commit their will to the latest brands of educative potions and ever-new
trinkets or teaching technologies.
The uneducated, the miseducated, and the undereducated are neither blind
to, nor non-conscientized about, those efforts and processes. They are capable
of seeing through the latest educational formulae being concocted for their
secular salvation. They have their own ways, their own rich and ancient
traditions for expressing their disenchantment, skepticism, or discontentment
with the education they got or failed to get. They are teaching each other how
to become refuseniks.
The counterproductivity of
education and the educational system is evidenced in almost two centuries of
history. The time has come to abandon this modern myth; not to give it a new
lease on life with its post modernization.
Enough is enough! /Vb
basta!
What is good for the goose is good for the gander. In fact, education is
a good for the goose precisely because it is good for the gander, according to
assumptions and conclusions of the educated. It is a universal genderless good;
so good, indeed, as to be declared a basic human need; so needed as to be
claimed a universal human right.
One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Refuseniks are learning to
resist any and all universal formulae of salvation; to recognize the cultural
roots of each promoted globalism or universalism; to realize that all of them—
including the different brands or breeds of education—are nothing but arrogant
particularisms. What for some people is the proverbial dream come true, for
other people is a waking nightmare: a plague, a disease destructive of their
traditions, their cultural and natural spaces.
In the epic now evolving at the grassroots, the social majorities are
taking steps to liberate themselves from the social minorities. Those
classified and categorized as uneducated, underdeveloped, poor or undeveloped
are struggling for their freedom from those who consider themselves to be educated
or developed. Step by step, the former are dismantling all the institutions and
projects of the latter which discriminate against them— including the
educational enterprise.
In articulating these initiatives as “Grassroots Postmodernism,” we seek
lucidity, courage, and imagination. These are necessary for creating
solidarities with communities and groups suffering the most marked and vicious
discrimination of our times— imposed by the educated as professional
assistance, aid, or help .upon the three contemporary [lower] castes: the
miseducated, the undereducated or the noneducated, who constitute the majority
of people on earth, the Two-Thirds World.
The Different Faces
and Facets of Education
Education is celebrated as a cherished gift by the educated. Singing
songs in praise of it, they describe how it offers different freedoms: to
realize personal dreams, visions, and careers; to open the mind; to live the
good life; to bring about social justice and equality; to realize
democracy—conventional, progressive, or radical; to celebrate one’s own
cultural inheritance; to enjoy and promote cultural diversity. . . .
What does this gift of
education mean for the women and the men, the young and the old who constitute
the social majorities of the world? those belonging to what are currently
called “the cultures of silence”?
Freedom and Mobility
for the Individual
Radical, liberal, and
conservative educators promise social mobility for escaping marginalization—
economic, political, or cultural. People are educated to aspire for and
approach the centers of power and control by their teachers, their liberators,
their emancipators, their empowerers.
Mobility overcomes
marginalization—goes the familiar global chant of education. Mobile
individuals, like their cultures, escape the marginalization of people going
Nowhere; of cultures stuck in their past; dwelling rather than pursuing
progress by “moving and shaking.”
Through their education, however, children learn to leave home, not to
stay home. The psychological and cultural price of this impact cannot be
measured (Berry 1990, 164). The new social norm implies that the child’s
destiny is not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them; succession is
substituted for supercession. Neither school nor university looks toward
passing on an unimpaired cultural inheritance. Instead, they push and promote
the professional career. This orientation is “necessarily theoretical,
speculative, and mercenary.” The emphasis is on earning money in a provisional
future that has nothing to do with place, commons, or community. Parents and
children are separated from each other; made useless to one another (Berry
1990, 163).
In the worlds of the
uneducated, in the cultures of dwelling, elders, parents, and neighbors teach
and learn traditions which emphasize staying well rooted; strengthening the
knowledge and skills needed to nourish and be nourished by their own places. Their
ways of knowing, of living and learning, contain little or, better yet, no
thing of the knowledge the educated need for their social mobility (Berry 1972.
1977, 1983, 1987, 1991a, 1991b; Prakash 1994).
The Indian peoples of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, to take one example,
have flourished, as have their places, because of their traditions of teaching
and learning. Their diverse cultures have continued to be enriched despite the
abuses and interventions they have suffered from all kinds of Outsiders—ranging
from the Aztecs in the pre-His-panic world to national elites or transnational
corporations in contemporary times.
Centuries upon centuries,
they have been exposed to every variety of foreign imposition upon their lives
and beliefs. Unlike indigenous peoples across the globe who have disappeared,
died off, or been melted into the oblivion of the so-called national “melting
pot,” the sixteen Indian peoples of Oaxaca have successfully kept regenerating
their language and culture, while coexisting with, as well as resisting, their
colonizers’ universalizable truths. Their evolving modes of cultural
co-existence protect their pluriverse, adapting to each new condition of
oppression and domination without losing their historical continuity. In recent
years, they seem to be transforming their resistance into a struggle of
liberation.
In four out of every five
municipalities in the pluriverse of Oaxaca, differentiated moral and political
traditions prevail, enriched through the intense interactions which these peoples
have maintained over centuries with other cultures, whether dominant or
dominated. They express neither the need nor desire for formal codes to give
official definition to their traditions—well known and embraced by every member
of the community. Their system of justice seeks neither the abstract
impersonality nor the neutrality that supposedly defines the modern judicial
system, being exported worldwide from the West.1
“Westerners,” observed Marcos Sandoval of the Triqui people of Oaxaca,
“represent justice with a blindfolded woman. We want her with her eyes well
open, to fully appreciate what is happening. Instead of neutrality or
impartiality, we want compassion.
The person committing a crime needs to be understood,
rather than submitted to a trial” (in conversation).
These open eyes of their justice do not, for example, look for
punishment when a person violates a shared custom. He or she is perceived as
someone in trouble who needs understanding and help, including the opportunity
to offer compensations to the victim of his or her fault. If inadvertently,
unintentionally, or because of a lack of prudence, someone burns a part of the
forest, he or she must reforest it. If a man kills another, he must assume full
responsibility for the welfare of the dead person’s family for the rest of
their lives. Rather than confine wrongdoers in jail, they seek to create
experiences that encourage the doers of damage to calm down, to reflect on the
violence of their crime, for a safe return from their delirious conditions.
These practices are not conceived as forms of punishment. Instead, they offer
communal support: according opportunities for the soul to heed the wisdom and advice
of elders when they come to converse and reflect with those who have wronged
others. Among peoples where these regimes of communal justice fully prevail,
the incidence of all sorts of “crimes” or wrong doings is far lower than among
the abstract citizens upon whom the State inflicts its legal regime,
proclaiming the equality and impartiality of fair trials—one type of human
right prized among many as a part of human “progress.”
The Indian peoples of Oaxaca have been able to protect their indigenous
regimes of justice against the threats of the Spanish Inquisition; later, from
the ferocity of the dictatorship in Mexico at the end of the nineteenth
century; from the impulses of revolutionary governments in the first part of
this century; and then again, from the modernizing fever of public developers
who fell upon them during the last fifty years. In all these centuries of
cultural resistance to “the Other,” the Oaxaca Indians relied upon their own
traditions; including the tradition for changing their tradition. This has
helped them to adjust and enrich their regimes of justice, adapting them to
every new condition. At the same time, it has helped them to hold on to the
unique cultural leitmotivs of their traditions: themes that have kept them as
peoples within their own original and unique cultural pluriverse.
Currently, however, all
these differentiated cultural groups and small communities are confronting a
new threat. Governmental as well as nongovernmental agencies and institutions
are proselytizing another global morality implicit in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. They persist in invading all communities with their “secular”
religion of human rights.
“I can no longer do what
is fair,” reflects Romulo Santiago, municipal president of Huayapam, near
Oaxaca City; “every time I try to bring justice to our community, applying our
traditional practices to amend wrongdoings, a human rights activist comes to
stop me” (in conversation).
This contemporary threat
has many faces. One face is that of establishing national and international
juridical procedures that supersede communal customs for establishing fairness
and justice. The other face is that of the gamut of “social rights” associated
with economic development and progress.
To those struggling hard to maintain the autonomy of their cultures,
human rights activists or agents of the government explain that all human
beings must claim the universal human right to health, employment, modern
medicine, sewage, roads, and other
social services.
They are urged to present their claims before the pertinent State au-thorities
for obtaining whatever they “need.” They are educated by the educated to
conclude that education is undoubtedly among the most “basic” of human “needs”—
the wrench of reason needed to open parochial, nonmodern minds to change and
progress.
Give a man a fish; you feed him for one day. Teach a man to fish, you
feed him for life. Better yet, educate a man for life, and you give him the
wherewithal not only to similarly educate others for life, but to be able to
discover all that he “needs,” and must consequently claim as his Human
Rights—Welfare as well as Liberty Rights.
Education is both a welfare and a liberty right. It promises security:
of jobs, pensions, health care . . . These are the familiar strains of, by, and
for education. They are sung to seduce peasants and other marginals into
parting from their children; to gladly hand them over to the elementary
doorkeepers of the Neoliberal Global Economy.
The carrots and sticks of seduction or fear distract the upward or
outward bound from studying the underbelly of education. When studied from up
close, we discover with others that those who become addicted to classroom
instruction end up losing real opportunities for gaining the knowledge and
skills with which communities endure and flourish; that the more their commons
and communities are destroyed, the more dependent they become on diplomas; that
the more diplomas are distributed, the more difficult it is to procure them;
that while their procurement becomes a more difficult uphill enterprise, the
economic value of credentials and diplomas slumps downhill—with rapidly
reducing guarantees of access to salaried jobs; that the “lucky” few who wangle
their way into acquiring job-guaranteed credentials form crippling dependencies
upon salaries which come and go with the vagaries of international currency
markets; that the masses must settle for minimum wages or unemployment minus
welfare in the growing global economy.
Professional Careers
for Growth, Security and Satisfaction
Pride in the professions is justified by promises fulfilled: of personal
growth, security, and satisfaction. Entrance to the professions must be
deserved; won by the worthy; by dint of hard work; by honestly earned merit;
with geese and gander alike lifting themselves up by their unisex
bootstraps—free of the privileges of birth, caste, color, creed, or age. To
feed and foster the economy of the “disabling professions” (Illich & Kenneth
1977), education destroys the economy of home and community. These are left
weak and vulnerable when people are no longer useful to one another. As this
vulnerability grows, people fall into dependence on exterior economies and
organizations. The local schools have no use for the local community; “they
serve the government’s economy and the economy’s government” (Berry 1990, 164).
Education for “community busting” establishes itself through “the hegemony of
professionals and professionalism” (Berry 1990, 164).
Professionals are educated to “erect local failure.” For educators and
educated alike, “the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods and
as a source of ‘raw material,’ human and natural” (Berry 1990, 164). They learn
to lose “pride in [their] surroundings”; to feel no poetry about the home life.
The village scenes become “a sealed book.” The local culture “is presented ...
as imbecile, barbarous, superstitious and useless
for all practical
purposes” (Gandhi 1953, 33}. Saved from the parochial cultures of the
hillbilly, the ganuiaar (villager), the red neck, or the local yokel, education
for the economy of professional’s leaves “young people . . . contemptuous of
the calling of their fathers.” “Almost from the commencement, the text-books .
. . never [teach the student] any pride in his surroundings . . . His education
is calculated to wean him from his traditional . . . ancient culture . . .”
(Gandhi 1946, 32-33).
Gandhi’s truth (Gandhi
1946. 1970) refers not only to the education that the colonialists imposed upon
their Third World colonies. Documenting how “the country becomes the colony of
the city” in democracies like America today. Berry describes how “a vast amnesia
invades the countryside”; how “local knowledge and local memory move away to
the cities or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized sales talk,
entertainment, and education” (Berry 1990, 156-157).
While a few benefit from
the economy of professional careers, the many suffer the loss of “local
knowledge and local memory.” The professions ignore or write this off as “one
of the cheaper prices of progress.” Other careerists use this local failure to
transform it into “the business of folklorists” (Berry 1990, 157).
Only those marginal to the
educational enterprise or the economy of professional careers still sense that
when community falls, so must fall all the things that only community life can
engender and protect: the care of the old, the care ... of children, family
life, neighborly work, the handing down of memory . . . respect for nature and
the lives of wild creatures (Berry 1990, 157).
Cultural Survival,
Enrichment, and Diversity
Entrance into or
advancement within the economy—national, international or global— is among the
“lesser” (though necessary) functions served by education. Its higher function
is cultural continuity, enrichment, and diversity.
Yet, wherever education advances, homogenization establishes itself.
With every advancement of education or the educated, a “global monoculture
spreads like an oil slick over the entire planet.” The five thousand languages
that currently survive can be seen as threatened species—in danger of
extinction. Within a generation or two, not many of these languages will
survive, if current trends continue. Of the languages that are alive today,
only one percent survive in Europe and educated North America. It is scarcely
an accident that ‘“the home of literacy as well as the nation-state” has only
one percent of the languages that survive (Sachs 1992, 102).
While languages are dying and disappearing, the academic industry for
the mummification and preservation of “endangered tongues” continues to boom.
Between 1950 and 1970, “about fifty languages have died each year; half of
those still spoken in 1950 survive only as subjects for doctoral theses”
(Illich 1977, 7).
The case of Mocho offers a
glimpse of the typical pattern induced by the economy of education. Only
seventy-five elderly speakers of Mocho remain in Chiapas, Mexico. With their
death, Mocho will die. A few thousand miles north in Ohio, the academic
industry for “preserving” this language is promoting multicultural education.
Fifty years from now, the only records of Mocho will be found in an American
university or some other haven of multicultural education.
The story of Mocho is the
story of what happens when the children of a community, pursuing the promises
of education, systematically learn to forget the languages of their commons and
their communities. All it often takes are two generations of school-going
offspring to send the language of their Elders up north to a corporate, State,
or federally funded linguistic zoo.
While some members of the academy preserve Mocho in their archives and
libraries (locked in the prison of space and time within dead leaves—the pages
of the text or the book), other members are opening the doors of equal
educational opportunity for the children of Mocho speakers. Education in the
national language promises them access to the economy—unlike Mocho, which keeps
them attached to their immobile culture and place. But, promises multicultural
education, they can have their cake and eat it too. They can learn about Mocho history,
language, and culture, while at the same time shaping up for being shipped out
into the international economy; learning to clamber higher on the career ladder
designed for the educationally able and competent; for those who want to do
well in the One World, the Global Village.
The story of Mocho repeats itself wherever the educational system
successfully enters, persists, and expands. In every corner of the world,
cultural destruction and decimation follow as communities learn to take-off on
the education runway. In Mexico, among the Triqui peoples of San Andres
Chicahuaxtla, Benjamin Maldonado discovers that the school is the road to
ignorance of the local culture. On the education road, he observes that among
the children and youngsters who currently attend school, 30 percent totally
ignore their elders’ indigenous knowledge of soil culture (agriculture), 60
percent acquire a dispersed and fragmented knowledge of it, while only 10
percent may be considered as capable of sustaining, regenerating and passing it
on (Maldonado 1988).
Those who do not send their children down this road, however, keep alive
and regenerate their cultures. Among the children and youngsters who do not
attend school, 95 percent acquire the indigenous knowledge that defines and
distinguishes their culture, while only 5 percent ignore it—those being
children living outside the community for a long time. Sucking up the time,
energy, and imaginative capacities of children with compulsory classroom
attendance as well as homework, schools pose a terrible threat to the agrarian
wisdom of the Triqui peoples. They impede the young from accompanying the
adults of the community in their cultural practices, including those of working
the soil, the milpa. To appreciate the ignorance imparted by the Western school
within the soil cultures of the world, it is important to note that soil (agri)
culture in Mexico, India, Guatemala, Peru, as well as in the other parts of the
world, is not mere technical knowledge. There is a rich and complex set of
rites and myths that give life to traditional agriculture; to make it a part of
the living memory and imagination of the young of their communities; learning
to sow by propitiating the land, the rain; learning to harvest by giving thanks
to the forces of nature; learning how to avoid the impunities of scientific
intervention; learning to respect the cycles of the moon or the wind; learning
the relationships and places of people in the community; acquiring all the
nuances and subtleties of their native languages .” . . School promises “liberatior”
from these bonds of community and tradition: from what the professional
educator has come to classify all over the world as “family exploitation” and
“traditional superstition’’— opposed to “true science.”
Schools transform the children of the Triquis into cultural parasites.
Educated children, Maldonado carefully documents, no longer know how to care
for or contribute to the economy of the household and the community. Instead,
they require money for learning to grow up; thus becoming cultural aliens in
their own worlds. For the schooled Triqui, as for the schooled or educated
Indians of other places and climes, “real life” lies outside the family and
community. To help their children live this “real life,” farming families must
engage in the “sacrifice” needed to acquire the “superior” truths of science;
and for making “advancements” in the economy.
The real price for education exacted and painfully extracted from the
cultures of dwelling, Maldonado reveals, is the loss of language and culture.
Falquet’s (1995) studies describe in detail how Indian cultures are endangered
or processed out of existence by the great acculturating educational machinery.
Schools create a deep division, ripping apart the community, dividing it up into
“the illiterates,” who do not know the Latin alphabet because their knowledge
is only oral, and the literates, who minimally acquire the national
language—enough to feel superior to the elders of their own communities; and
only enough to join the ghetto masses—too ignorant of the national tongue for
climbing over the higher and higher walls being erected by the preparatories
and universities.
Schools and universities,
monocultural or multicultural, do not eliminate ignorance, but make it
functional, while suppressing difference and cultural diversity. They cannot
but promote the “superstitious efficacy” of Indian cultures. This consequence
is inevitable even when indigenous knowledge becomes the academic aim, while
the classroom becomes the site for its transmission through
education—postmodern, multicultural, or other.
Reform, Revamping,
Radicalization
A common faith connects
the radical Left and the conservative Right. It undergirds and overcomes the
divide of deep differences that they A
focus upon in their battles with each other within the academy.
One key element of this common faith, professed assiduously by educators
as well as all other professionals, is their capacity for solving problems.
Problems are part of the human condition and every self-respecting professional
solves some of them. Progress brings new problems and the professions progress
by solving the problems that progress deposits at the door of humanity. No
self-respecting professional abandons the faith of the faithful: the profession
improves the human condition, preventing stagnation or deterioration. The first
A profession’s Hippocratic
oath becomes both the touchstone and the promise of its modern descendants—all
of them problem solvers. But even before the era of litigation proliferated by
the legal profession, professionals have remained leery of promising their
clients a rose garden—especially not one that would render redundant the
professions.
The common faith shared by
professional educators contains many other elements, including a certain
certainty: education is essential for the survival and flourishing of every
culture, past, present, and future. There is no exception or qualification to
this universal rule. There would and could be no cultural continuity or
advancement without education.
Whatever their political
or philosophical orientation, another element which brings all educators under
the roof of the same professional faith is the certainty that more education is
always better than less. The more the better is the inexorable law of the
professions.
More of what kind of
education? This question, without threatening the common faith, cracks open the
impossibility of consensus, either about the aims of education or the means
that deserve to be called “educative” {Dewey 1963).
What social, personal, and
other diseases must be cured by education? What types of well-being are sought?
And how? Battles between the camps proliferate, with escalating violence and
its victims. Professionals remain unperturbed; assuring themselves and their
clients that competition among them is as natural, normal, and healthy as it is
in the classroom; or, for that matter, in the world for which the classroom
must be the best training ground—sorting out the strong from the weak; the
lions of the jungle from the sacrificial lambs.
The Crassly
Competitive
Vigor and vitality require competition; profess the promoters of bell
curves, standardized tests, and other marvelous measures that separate the
supermen from the mental midgets. They urge pragmatism and practicality; the
stuff of the “real world”: the modern or the postmodern jungle, concrete or
virtual, where “the survival of the fit-test”—the ancient, even primordial
law—still separates the grain from the chaff; the real men from the boys; the
strong and able from the weak and disabled; the winners from the losers; the
first from the last; the successes from the failures who deserve their fate of
working for McDonald’s for minimum wage.
The As deserve the American dream. The Ds and Fs demonstrate their
incapability of dreaming it. Someone has to wash the dishes in every society;
fill gasoline; collect garbage; line landfills; clean out toxic dumps; spray
chemicals; fill up cancer wards . . .
Dropouts and Ds have earned for such jobs themselves.
And the As do deserve to design worlds in which the rejects, the second rate,
the bottom of the barrel do time at a job rather than filling the jails paid
for by the As, the Bs and the Cs. The latter work for an honest living, rather
than living off the dole; or receiving free food, health care, and the other
benefits that comes from serving time in jail.
In the era of
globalization those who cannot compete and win deserve to be left behind at the
receiving end of nuclear waste; of other winners’ waste; slaving on plantations
for winners’ fruits that leave workers dead or infertile; moquihdoras where
workers’ children are born with brains hanging out of malformed skulls.
That is the real world.
Get a real job with education. Or expect to be shipped out—like the other waste
made by the successfully educated.
Slayers of Savage
Inequalities
Tracing the trajectory of the lives lost in factories, factory farms,
and jails—being built faster today than classrooms—professional slayers of
savage inequalities bring us to the beginning; elementary schools with neither
heat nor drip-free, dry classrooms; neither
computers nor toilet paper . . . But wait. Yes, they
do have the money to invest in metal detectors needed to find the knives, guns,
and other weapons that ‘“dangerous” ten- or eleven-year-olds bring to beat out
each others’ brains.
While the victors eat cake . . . swim
in heated pools through the cold months of winter
... lap up laptops
with CD-ROMS . . . play Bach; all this complemented with individualized tending
all the way to the very top of the World Trade Center where the best educators
gently—oh, so gently—deliver them that they may finally start living “the
dream”; charging up the future of the world with wallets full of magic plastic:
it opens any shut door when the right number and expiration date are punched.
True, the law of the
jungle creates victors. But, they remind us, it also creates unfortunate
victims. Those victimized by inhumanely competitive races lose their humanity.
So, too, do their victimizers. The dehumanization of schooling is contrary-to
all the highest ideals in the Western tradition of a liberal education.
A genuinely liberal education dispenses with cutthroat, crass
competition: or softens the competitive edge so no one bleeds. It teaches
respect for the laws, of social justice; replaces the law of the jungle with
the laws of democratic governance: creates win-win situations in which every
man, woman, and child enjoys their human rights—including the right to
educational equality and excellence.
Cultural Literacy
Promoters
Equal opportunity or
access to what? The “minimal competencies” needed for the marketplace? Or to
the fragrant flowers of culture . . . the Great Books of the Western canon . .
. with which one can climb to the Everests of a liberal education . . . the
highest heights of ‘’high culture”?
The reigning Czars of
“high culture” remind the rest that what makes the West supreme is not merely
its economic and technological superiority or prowess in the Global Economy.
Equally worthy of global emulation is its great humanistic tradition, traced
back to the paideia of Socrates and the other Ancient Greeks.
The Ancient Greeks were fine . . . but for the fact that they were
pagans and had too many imperfect gods . . . lotus-eaters, womanizers, and the
like. Secular cultural literacy leaves the Religious Right uneasy. Believers of
the One Best Religion and the One True God agree that cultural literacy is
important for promoting the One Best System of education, it must, however, be
underscored that the “high culture” taught by this system does not start with
the Iliad and the Odyssey. It begins with the Bible.
Multicultural Literacy
Raging from within the bastion of professional education, multicultural
educators focus on the classroom site for suppressing the savage inequalities
that leave some individuals more equal than others; and. some cultures more
excellent than others.
The classroom offers the diminutive handheld mirror for studying the
sickness of the larger society; the global malady. It is the immediate site for
transformation; for healing social ills: the age-old saga of human oppression .
. . five hundred years of colonialism as well as all the earlier modes of
oppression (particularly of women and slaves) that
precede as well as follow it as contemporary
neocolonialism. Their long sad history of human oppression tells how White
Man’s pedagogy maintains his supremacy. But White Man has not been the only
villain in the Play of Human Evil. Feminists, Gays and Lesbians, and the People
of Color reveal Brown, Yellow, or Pink villains and victims; each group voicing
their own narratives of victimization—spanning class, caste, color, age, or
sexual orientation/preference.
Radicalized and reunited under the universal banner of “the pedagogy of
the oppressed,” they denounce all the reform efforts that give new life to “the
pedagogies of the Oppressor.” Instead, they call for liberation from all the
diverse modes of oppression; for pedagogies and curricula that will break the
long, tragic, painful history of the “Culture of Silence.” Radical democracy,
social justice and liberation, recognizes lines of gender, race, color, and
sexual orientation, require radical education. Authentic multicultural
education consciences learners to the language used to justify oppressing the
oppressed, rendering transparent the categories of the oppressor; “failures,”
“Ds and Duds,” ‘“uncivilized,” ‘“pagans,” “underachievers,” “underdeveloped” .
. .
Multicultural educators take on
today’s burdens of racism, sexism, ageism, classism . .
. struggling to see a million flowers bloom. Emerging
from under the weight of the White Man’s burden, the Rainbow Coalition points
the way towards radical democracy; fully conscious that the United Colors of
the Rainbow may not be possible. For there is always the brute reality of
racism and monoculturalism, summing up multiculturalism as: “the label for all
those groups who have failed to make it in America1' (Gordon and
Newfield 1994, 33}.
The supremacists’ arrogance and intolerance must not be succumbed to.
Multicultural education must continue to wage the battle for difference and
diversity in the classroom. Furthermore, education is a basic need, necessity,
and right.
These four reformation camps are but rough, broad categories for
contemporary professional fix-its. They reveal the mere tip of the proverbial
iceberg.-There are at least as many cures as there are identified educational
ills. As with the medical establishment, there is prestige for every new
disease discovered and treated: community destruction can be cured by
communitarian education; low self-esteem can be raised by empowering education;
racism can be cured by antiracist pedagogies; fragmentation can be fixed by
interdisciplinary or holistic education; regimentation can be reversed by
pedagogies for play; environmental damage can be healed by environmental
education. . . .
The required or recommended course readings for these fixes not only
nourish the publication industry; they fatten the curriculum vitae of every new
educational reformer who first identifies the mysterious ill that prohibits the
desired learning; and then finds a pedagogical and curricular cure for it.
Among the vast and growing educational reformers, the most respectable are
certainly the great masters of alchemy who promise better schools. The most
seductive are the popular magicians who promise to make every kitchen into an
alchemical laboratory. The most sinister are the new masons of the universe who
want to transform the entire world into one large temple of learning (Illich
1977, 72-73 emphasis added).
To reform
or to abandon education?
That is the question that
no respectable professional dares to ask without facing the threat of
disrepute.
Committed professionals cannot confess, even in the privacy of their
bedrooms, let alone in the public arena, that all the cures concocted by their
profession are far, far more terrible than all the different diseases they
profess to heal.
Heretics who dare to deprofessionalize themselves must be put to death;
or, best yet, either not be studied at alt or be studied just enough to merit
dismissal with a sound kick in the pants so that students learn proper
obedience and respect for the professions.
It is a valuable lesson for learners to see that in the Open Society,
serious critics of the professions are given enough room to jest, like the
professional jesters of the court, in order to be soundly jeered out of the
critical professional consciousness.
Multicultural
Education: An Oxymoron
American pluralism has a
beautiful but limited tradition. Its enormous variety of educational, medical
and ecclesial systems witness to it. ... Only in the domain of religion is the
constitutional protection of the non-churched atheist taken seriously. This
society is gravely threatened unless we recognize, without envy sublimated into
grudge, that dropouts of any description might be closer to Huck Finn than are
the churchgoers or school goers (Illich 1996, 258).
Corruptio Optima Quae
Est Pessima. The corruption of the best is the worst.
Multicultural education aspires for the richest aims yet to be conceived
in the history of the educational system. Who but the Hitlers, the Pol Pots,
the Pinochets, the white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, the Ananda Margis, the
Shining Path, and other fundamentalists can resist or deny its allure and
enchantment; of aims that seek to human-ize through multiculturalizing a system
in which more than half the children become human waste: dropouts or human
droppings?
That question provokes us to ask whether multicultural education is an
example of Promethean expectations gone awry? Is it possible that an expensive
system— unaffordable for the Two-Thirds World— which has failed abysmally to
teach “the basics” (the three modern Rs) is being given the noble
responsibility of passing on all the other rich elements of culture by
multicultural educators? Is it possible that the system that cannot transmit
the culture of homo monolinguis with minimal competence is being asked to
transmit the 5,000 spoken cultures that constitute the richness of the lived
pluriverse at the grassroots—of the noneducated and the uneducated? Is the
school cafeteria that cannot present hot dogs and hamburgers palatably to be
the chosen political site for cultural workers serving bhojan, comlda, or the
other elaborate edible cultural delicacies fully and inextricably embedded in
the commons of the pluriverse?
Undoubtedly, many multicultural educators reflect the best sentiments
and ideals found today within the educational system of homo monolinguis:
aspiring to instruct about other landscapes of learning without deprecation;
without reducing others’ rites of passage as either touristic exotica or Stage
One in the historical evolution of the educational system. Still, the
multicultural classroom, however celebratory or respectful
of cultural
diversity, can only be a deliberately western site; transmitting only the
cultures of the West. In that limited capacity, while very useful for western
“cultural workers” taking their first steps in hosting and hospitality toward
the Otherness of the Other, it cannot do anything in terms of initiation into
the cultures of the pluriverse. The pluriverse of cultural diversity cannot be
nourished or regenerated through the project of education. For education is of
modern western origin. Multicultural education is an oxymoron. Learning and
teaching preceded education and the educational system by millennia. The paideia
of the Greeks or the gyan and gurushishya parampara of the Hindus of Hindustan
must not be equated with education. The reduction of the former to the
education of modern man and woman, or its importation into any brand of
multicultural education is tantamount to colonization.
[T]he word ‘education’ is of recent coinage, it was unknown before the
Reformation. The education of children is first mentioned in French in a
document of 1498. This was the year when Erasmus settled in Oxford, when
Savonarola was burned at the stake in Florence, and when Durer etched his
Apocalypse, which speaks to us powerfully about the sense of doom hanging over
the end of the Middle Ages. In the English language the word ‘education’ first
appeared in 1530—the year when Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon and when
the Lutheran Church separated from Rome at the Diet of Augsburg. In Spanish
lands another century passed before the word and idea of education became
known. In 1632 Lope de Vega still refers to ‘education’ as a novelty. That
year, the University of San Marcos in Lima celebrated its sixtieth anniversary.
Learning centers did exist before the term ‘education’ entered common parlance.
You ‘read’ the classics or the law; you were not educated for life (Illich
1977, 75).
“In Lieu of Education”
(Illich 1977) documents how the western (and, therefore, modern) mind co-opts
and colonizes the Other—whether of the historical past of the contemporary
present—in and through reducing their pluriverse of diverse and incommensurable
cultural patterns and styles of teaching and learning, placing them under the
universal umbrella called “education.”
While the global mission
of the Church is to save souls, the global mission of the educational system is
secular salvation. The noblest variety of secular salvation saves the mind of
the individual from remaining stunted or from rotting; while the most
“practical” or “pragmatic” is defined by the market for employment: the holy
“job market.” Education shares other elements with Religion.
Schooling and education are related to each other like Church and
religion, or in more general terms, like ritual and myth; it is mythopoetic,
and the myth generates the curriculum through which it is perpetuated.
Education, as the designation for an all embracing category of social
justification, is an idea for which we cannot find (outside Christian theology)
a specific analogue in other cultures. And the production of education through
the process of schooling sets schools apart from other institutions for
learning that existed in other epochs (Illich 1977, 76).
Illich’s historical
journeys into noneconomic cultures, western and other, help us discover that
homo educandus is necessarily homo oeconomicus—a modern mutant in the East as
in the West. Homo educandus represents the historical emergence of a new kind
of human being: who needs education in order to learn or live well. Homo
educandus radically differs from homo sapiens or homo faber.
[T]he idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so
unless he was provided with ‘education’” became a new consensus among the
elites in the West only in the early seventeenth century. With the spread of
this modern “certainty,” education came to the inverse of vital competence. It
came to mean a process rather than the plain knowledge of the facts and the
ability to use tools which shape a man’s concrete life. Education came to mean
an intangible commodity that had to be produced for the benefit of all, and
imparted to them in the manner in which the visible Church formerly imparted
invisible grace. Justification in the sight of society became the first
necessity for a man born in original stupidity, analogous to original sin
(Illich 1977, 75-76, emphases added).
For the uneducated or noneducated or miseducated social majorities,
their own ways of life are genuine alternatives to the progressive pollution,
exploitation, and opaqueness now observed in rich countries. But “the
dethroning of GNP cannot be achieved without simultaneously subverting
GNE—Gross National Education, usually conceived as manpower capitalization”
(Illich 1977, 90-91).
To resist GNE, alternatives to education are both necessary and
available in the Two-Thirds world. Realizing this in the beginning of the
twentieth century, Gandhi offered Nai Talim (often translated as “New
Education”) as an antidote to the education of the brown “intimate enemy”
(Nandy 1981) as well as the White pedagogue. Gandhi’s Nai Talim keeps alive his
peoples’ subsistence economy. It celebrates the richness and the dignity of
bread labor which weaves more strongly the fabric of the local community, emphasizing
the autonomy and self-sufficiency needed to marginalize the economy of homo
oeconomicus and homo educandus. Nai Talim teaches Yama-Niyam; the regeneration
of Varna Vyavastha; the sanskriti of dharma . . . nurturance of buddhi . . .
Jnana (Gyana) . . . atmagyana. None of these ideals
are translatable into the language of educators (Gandhi 1946, 1970: Prakash
1993; Vora 1993).
The “bread labor” central to Nai Talim keeps pyramidal hierarchies at
bay. Economic social pyramids are incompatible with the common sense of Nai
Talim. Bhaniya pan ghaniya nahin, observe Gandhi’s fellow Gujratis, when
speaking of people who possess education, while lacking sense and sensibility.
In fact our study of education reveals that wherever people abandon their own forms
of cultural initiation, they lose their common sense; their cultural sense and
sensibility developed in their commons. Since Aristotle and until the
seventeenth century, common sense was the sense bringing harmony and
correspondence to all other senses. It should not be looked for in the pineal
gland, as Descartes suggested; or in the universal reason proposed by Bacon.
Common sense is what people have in common; the sense that can be found only in
community. Gandhi’s common sense tells him, as Illich’s common sense reveals
for us today, that an “egalitarian economy cannot exist in a society in which
the right to produce is conferred by schools” (Illich 1977, 91).
Multicultural education promises all cultures a more equal share of the
educational pie constituted of the non-subsistence economy—national,
international, and global— whether liberal, socialist, or neoliberal.
Undoubtedly, multicultural education is a step forward in the educated person’s
quest for better representation; for more inclusion; for less violence; for
more respect. Unfortunately, these ideals are aspired for within the very
economic system that wipes out other economies—of household, commons, and
community; sustaining, thereby, the educators’ mythopoesis: that there are no
authentic
alternatives TO education; that education is a
universal good; that, therefore, the educa-tional system, currently broken,
must be reformed and revamped. The same system that helped smash the languages,
customs, and traditions of the commons can be reformed to teach the knowledge
and skills required to build communities; or be reformulated to nourish a
pluriverse.
Multicultural educators
run with the fox while hunting with the hound. Empowering individuals,
communities, and cultures, multicultural educators promise equal educational
opportunities—personal, communal, and cultural—for joining the global project
of education . . . defined by the mindset of homo educandus, with his moral
language of Human Rights.
Human Rights: The
Contemporary Trojan Horse
Human rights are only 200 years old. The ideology and the institutional
arrangements of human rights were born after unprecedented forms of social and
personal deprivation took root among the “developed” peoples and places of this
planet. The regime of the nation-state, fusing nationalism and statehood, was
constructed at this same time, to keep the social order in a society exposed to
the forces of the modern market, reducing the human condition to that of homo
oeconomicus.
The birth of universal human rights is inextricably bound up with the
global manufacture of the independent western nation-state. Following five
centuries of colonialism, the post-World War II universalization of this
western institution continues to deal severe blows to all other political
organizations; most particularly the commons cared for or “administered”
through village self-governance. The evils and injustices of traditional
village governance, masterfully documented by Achebe (1961, 1985) and others,
are minuscule in scale or seventy when compared with those of national
governments. Yet these as well as their contemporary descendants, the
trans-border corporate superstructures constituting the “Global Project,” are
being legitimized as those responsible to uphold and safeguard the Gospel of
human rights. In the era of the global economy, not even the Great Wall of
China poses an obstacle to the universalization of human rights. Thousands of
determined participants fly over the Wall into Beijing to attend the Fourth UN
Conference on Human/Women’s Rights, intent upon their universalization,
spreading them to every corner of the globe.5 Grander and more
global than all the other conferences now regularly held from Malaysia to
Mexico to promote human rights, its participants seek to liberate and bring
justice to all the oppressed peoples of the earth. This justice calls for
bringing one and all under the care of the global classroom for disseminating
education.
For villages or cities across the globe, the moral currency of
universalizable human rights is being newly minted, promising even to contain
the immoralities of State governments (national or local) as well as
international development agencies. This moral currency conceived and created
for the abstract “citizen,” follows Hobbes in containing their meanness,
brutality, greed, and envy; while enjoining duties, obligations, and
responsibilities toward fellow citizens and flags. It replaces the traditional
communal morality of peoples not reduced to modern individualism, either old or
new (Dewey 1962). Functioning like the British pound, the American dollar, and
other “hard” currencies, this equally “hard” moral coinage of human rights
enjoys the same
international
status of preeminence as do the other coins of the economically “developed.”
Both monetary and moral currencies of the “developed” destroy and devalue the
“soft” currencies of communities and peoples considered not only economically
but also morally underdeveloped. Following the colonial path of Christian
missionaries (who saved primitive souls from pagan gods), their descendants,
the delegates of human rights agencies, offer secular salvation: the moral or
economic development of underdeveloped cultures. “One man one vote”-style
democracy with parliaments or senates, a national economy that manufactures
classrooms, courts, patients’ wards, sewage, telephones, jobs, and flush
toilets are only some of the liberty and welfare rights promised by independent
modern States. At the nexus stand the classrooms of school, college, and
university.
This style of
“national independence” is incompatible with cultural autonomy.
[H]ow easily under the
cloak of ‘Human Rights’ a particular ‘civilization’ may penetrate into others
and disrupt the fabric of different cultures ... We can strive for success 5n
international markets, but no people can live from a borrowed myth ... No culture,
tradition, ideology, or religion can today speak for the whole of humankind,
let alone solve its problems . . . Human Rights is the fruit of a very partial
dialogue among the cultures of the world (Panikkar 1995, 112-113).
Human rights are social constructions or cultural indentions. They are
not, as some adherents claim, natural discoveries.6 Human rights are
but the formal, juridical expression of a specific mode of being and living.
They are defined by the kind of man, woman, and child who has appeared on earth
only very recently: Homo oeconomicus, the possessive individual. First born and
brought up in the West, this modern “person”—the individual self—is now
threatening the whole world with the plague of endless needs, legitimized under
the moral mask of human rights.7
We need to be aware that
the very notion of right and law is a western notion ... It is but a window
among others on the world, an instrument of communication and a language among
others. The word not only is non-existent among the indigenous traditional
cultures, but it will never come to their minds that human beings can have
rights. . . . For them, it is difficult to understand that rights or
entitlements could be homocentrically defined by a human being. That they,
furthermore, could be defined by a sovereign state, that is, by a collection of
sovereign individuals, is almost ridiculous (Vachon 1990, 165).
The processes that created Homo oeconomicus (the possessor of human
rights) disembedded the economy from commons, community, and culture, while
constituting it as an autonomous sphere. These processes “evolved” and mutated
over almost a thousand years (Polanyi 1975). After the enclosure of the
commons, there occurred a radical rupture with the traditional past. Some
describe this rupture as the transition to the capitalist mode of production
(Marx); others as the transition from the aegis of gender to the regime of sex
(Illich); and still others as the birth of the modern age. Economic man was
born after this rupture. The individual self was created before, apparently
with the invention of the text (Illich 1967a, 1993), but he was still immersed
in a religious cosmology (Cougar 1973). The economic individual, a new
genderless being, mobilized principally by self-interest, and dedicated to
optimizing his behavior (the rational use of scarce means for unlimited ends),
could only acquire his place in history when the idea of
equality had become a popular prejudice (Marx), and
when the assumption of scarcity, which the patron saints of economics
transformed into a social law {Esteva 1980, 1992), had been established as a
governing principle of society.
This “evolution” has transmogrified peoples and cultures so profoundly
that previous virtues are now reduced to vices and traditional vices have been
elevated to virtues. Hopes have been transformed into expectations; the
richness of tradition into a burden; wisdom into backwardness; awareness of
self-limitation into apathy or lack of initiative; frugality into the inability
to compete for the maximization of utility; envy into the motivation that
heralds progress and economic growth (Dumont 1977; Esteva 1992; Maclntyre 1981;
Orr 1992). Vitality, the daily expression of the condition of being alive in
and through being entwined or intertwined with others and the world, has been
transformed into mimetic desire (Girard 1978) to “catch up” and compete.
Desires have been transformed into needs, and needs into rights.
The nation-state, as a
political regime constructed to put order in the operation of the national
economy, was constituted as a social pact among individuals, to whom it
attributed, for the simple fact of being members of the State, the right or the
entitlement (Sen 1981) to the satisfaction of their needs by the Market or the
State. Looking for the1 modern definition of human nature, we
discover needy man: dependent on economic goods and services—the objects that
satisfy his needs for survival and flourishing. The tautology of the modem
definition of human beings is their subordination to the laws of scarcity.
The founding fathers of economics saw in scarcity the keystone for their
theoretical constructions. They postulated it as a universal condition of human
society, with axiomatic value. Economists have even been able to transform
their finding into a popular prejudice, a self-evident truism for everyone.
“Common sense” is now so immersed in the notions of economic “rationality” that
it is Very difficult to recognize the economists’ premise of “scarcity” or
“rationality” as mere leftovers of modern science; words which, like others,
fell into and colonized ordinary language and perception.
Wherever the law of scarcity is already enforced as the necessary
accompaniment of economic principles, a social space is created for demanding
the enforcement of some variety of human rights. But the demand for the
universalization of these rights is also advancing through contagion into
spheres where they still express the protection of freedoms. Once the scarcity
of schools and teachers is established through the redefinition of learning and
preparation for living, the right to compulsory schooling is enforced. The
recent scarcity of human organs (for transplants) or genes (for genetic
engineering) has already created the debate about the corresponding rights,
which are starting to be included in national and international codes. Freedoms
like those associated with cultural practices (in birth, marriage, or death,
for example) are increasingly formulated in terms of rights.
The final step in the global takeover by the monoculture of human rights
is now the object of an international debate. Loud voices are currently
claiming that the “community of nations,” the United Nations, should be endowed
with powers and resources to apply the global right of intervention anywhere on
earth “for humanitarian purposes”: that is, with the explicit object of
protecting human rights. The codification of that new right formally breaks one
of this century’s international rules, based on the principles of
peoples’ self-determination and protection from
foreign intervention in national affairs. Highly controversial, this “right” is
being recognized as one more way to legitimize colonial interventions.
This charge, by now well founded and documented, expresses the very
essence of human rights as colonial tools for domination. Colonialism always
implied a kind of moral and political violation, something imposed by the brute
force of the physically strong, with different kinds of ideological emblems
used to legitimize such violation. The Cross coming with the Sword took
different shapes—like development or democracy in the postwar era. What is now
under discussion would amount to the final consecration of the legal and
legitimate right of colonial intervention ... in the name of human rights.
We are aware that in packing into a few paragraphs such a complex transformation
of the human condition, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the charge of
controversial oversimplifications and interpretations. We assume that risk in
order to give the bare outlines of a sketch without which few can appreciate
our concern and our hope for the end of the global encroachment sought by the
regime of these rights in general, and the welfare and liberty right to
education, in particular.
The Nexus of
Contemporary Domination:
Education-Human
Rights-Development
Education and human rights belong to the same discourse as development,
with its web of familiar key terms and concepts: human resources the global
economy, growth, technology, progress, planning, production, science, standard
of living, One World, participation, empowerment and democracy (Sachs 1992).
Some of these key terms, like development or human resources have been around
for only a few scant decades. Others, like education, are almost five hundred
years old. Still others go back further yet—but now have transmogrified modern
and postmodern meanings. Because of these recent meanings, all the terms and
concepts of the education-development dictionary bear a certain family
resemblance, belonging to the same vast family of modern or postmodern ideas and
ideals. They reign supreme within the centers of the academy, as well as in the
economy served by it.
Rather than calling it a
family, it is more accurate to say that this conglomerate of ideas and ideals
belongs to a growing net: grand, vast, and global. The master weavers—
educators, development planners, programmers, and other professionals—sit in
classrooms, offices, and factories, weaving this great global net of education
and development; of modern and postmodern cosmovisions floated into cyberspace;
yet presented as down to earth and profoundly practical.
Keeping clear of God-given Edens, this mythopoesis reveals peoples of
all places and cultures pulling themselves up by their educated bootstraps,
joining the human quest for progress. This global net promises the whole world
a full forthcoming catch: cleansing the land and the oceans of poverty and
overpopulation, parochialism and bigotry, vio-lence and oppression. With these
ills strained out of the conditio humane, the “human family” can begin to enjoy
the gains of empowerment and emancipation in the “global village”—decidedly
democratic, multicolored, and multicultural.
In the reality separated from such myths by a grand chasm, wherever
education and development travel (hand in hand), poverty and pollution
increase; freedoms and autonomy decrease; monocultures of learning and living
destroy the rich, pluriverse of the diverse cultures of the social majorities.
In the reality beyond such mythos, this vast industrial net does not catch and
trap ills. Instead, it catches cultures; dragging out of their embedded
cultural contexts the wondrous variety found in the lived pluriverse of
teaching and learning, work and leisure, ritual and ceremony, food and dance,
healing and dying, as well as all other cultural practices. Wrenched and
uprooted from their tra-ditional spaces, indigenous knowledge, skills and the
arts of dwellers are trapped, killed, and frozen; to be micro-waved and eaten
in the fifty-minute period that lies between the bell that initiates class and
the bell that terminates it.
As the dawning millennium manufactures new educational technologies, the
scale and speed of the cultural catch gets bigger and quicker; similar to the
catches currently threatening global industrial fisheries. The Destroyer is
being destroyed by his own dance. This industry, joined by other forces of
development and progress, is con-taminating all the waters of the world with
such success that even the creatures outside the net are threatened,
endangered, or totally destroyed.
A growing minority of educators are recognizing the contamination and
damage of the net cast by global development and education. Some seek to
“green” education with interdisciplinary programs for ecological literacy.
Others proffer multicultural literacies as a way for dispensing with the net of
cultural and ecological destruction. Just as peace educators, fighting for disarmament,
propose that education teach people to transform weapons of war into plough
shares, multicultural educators propose tearing up the educational net that
traps, kills, and destroys the cultures of the marginals, the dropouts, the
silent ones. They teach themselves and their students to “think globally”
rather than parochially; to become global citizens; to broaden their
consciousness, extending their sympathies beyond the confines of national and
cultural boundaries, embracing the Other in the global village.
We take heart from the efforts of all those working within the
educational system to open up its doors, shut for centuries to the challenge of
respecting the Other, to the survival and flourishing of cultural diversity.
However, the further we walk beyond these doors being opened by critical
multicultural educators, the deeper we enter landscapes of learning not marred
by industrial civilization, the better we understand why authentic cultural
practices are necessarily taught outside the classroom; there where the notion
of the profession has no meaning. The more respectfully we explore these
cultural practices, the more clearly we discover the reasons why it is
impossible to package the cultures of the other for transmission and
consumption in the global classroom. Packaged for transportation to and
consumption within the classroom, they must be severely uprooted; severed from
the soils and waters, the ecological or natural niches where they are born and
the commons and community without which they must die out. Rendered extinct.
Multiculturalizing the classroom cannot save soil cultures from such a
fate. However passionately committed to cultural diversity, the classroom must
necessarily be the cemetery of sensibilities cultivated in commons and
communities, central to the transmission and regeneration of soil cultures.
Deities in stone and wood, stolen or bought “dirt cheap” from the peoples, who
worship them and sold to the museums of the
West, become
“priceless art.” In the course of making this journey from the familiar world
of shrines and temples into the alien world of museums, they are reduced from
being worshipped goddesses of immeasurable power into the art, artifacts, and
objects of another culture that emphasizes economic and aesthetic value, rather
than spiritual significance. True, the deities of savages are safer in the
museums that house and guard them with alarm systems and uniformed guards,
keeping them out of the hands of thieves and marauders who sold them to the
museums in the first place. But while preserving them from the processes of
natural destruction and debilitation, they are radically transmogrified.
Instead of being daily nurtured and worshipped with food and prayer, these
deities sit behind glass; objects of serious research and study, or even plain
and vulgar gawking by self-styled aficionados or “culture vultures.” The
multicultural class threatens the cultures of the Other with a similar fate:
seeking as they do to become the global site for cultural initiation.
The project of global development, only five decades old, offers an
excellent perspective for deconstructing all contemporary multicultural efforts
in educational reform. In the global race for a spot in the Global Economy,
Mauritania will take 3,223 years to “catch up” with the U.S.—we have heard
development experts pronounce. By dropping out of the global race for
development, by being themselves, Mauritanians are recovering their dignity
TODAY. They do not have to wait for 3,223 years!
To be themselves, most of the peoples on earth (the social majorities)
do not need education. Like all other modern “needs,” the need for education
has been a creation of the “disabling professions,” privileged by their
enterprise. People do not need to breathe when they are breathing; only when
they are drowning, or otherwise deprived of breathable air. Similarly, in order
to acquire modern “needs,” people must first be deprived of their conditions
for the good life of subsistence—in all of its diverse definitions. De-skilled
(Braverman 1975) or weaned from their subsistence economy, they fall into the
trap of needing a job, savings, welfare, daycare. . . . Once their dignity or
competence is no longer accepted or recognized without a diploma, they begin to
need education. The destruction of the conditions of a subsistent good life is
required to create education and the other “needs” of a very specific,
culturally determined, life style—now established as a universal goal,
transforming every man and woman into a needy subject with rights or claims for
the satisfaction of those ‘’needs.”
To be themselves, free of the needs of needy homo educandus, the social
majorities rely upon their own traditions of cultural initiation. Contrary to
the myths of (professional) educators, the traditions of the Other are neither
stagnant nor parochial. They have their predicaments, their limitations, their
demonic dimensions. Yet, they also contain within themselves the seeds for
their own reform and regeneration; revealing the fact that “genius” is not the
scarce commodity that only a few possess, but is abundantly and generously
spread across cultures. This is neither to romanticize nor to turn a blind eye
to the savage side of each cultural group. It is to recognize that just as
savagery and violence are pretty widely distributed across all cultures, so is
the genius to solve the predicaments experienced and faced differently in the
pluriverse.
Prestigious places for locking things up, museums [and classrooms] are
outside of life: in this way they resemble cemeteries (Hainard and Kaer 1986,
33}.
Among the people we deeply respect and cherish, some call themselves
multicultural educators, while others call themselves human rights activists.
Are we betraying our colleagues, friends, and others for whom we feel enormous
affection and admiration? Are we betraying ourselves and our work within the
educational system?
Among our memorable teachers of our childhood as well as our adult
years, we remember several priests with profound love and respect. They were
sent as missionaries to convert the pagans of the Third World. With hindsight,
we recognize that they did the opposite of what their bosses intended for them.
Their respect for our ways offered a welcome respite from the evangelisms of
their colleagues. Refusing to push their God on us, they celebrated our pagan
gods with us. Without embracing our pagan gods as theirs, they joined us in
nourishing our pluriverse. In their eyes, we saw we needed no salvation. Their
hospitality to our religion extended itself to the other dimensions of our
cultures. While they taught in school, they did not teach school. They did not
try to school or educate us. They did not try to conscientize or empower us.
Instead, in their gaze, we
saw our own power reflected; no one had to give us the power we already
possessed. We exercised it by tapping into our own capacities for courage,
faith, and hope. In the spaces we created together, sheltered from
institutional authority, we could be ourselves—unique, personally, or
culturally. Seeing ourselves reflected in their eyes, we learned to celebrate
the singularity and particularity of our commons, commonness, common sense.
In and through these I-Thou encounters, we learned what it means to be
hospitable to the Otherness of the Other. Because they embraced our Shiv,
Ganesh, or Ganapati, our Votan, we took their Christ as one of our huacas. Our
pluriverse was enriched by the encounter with theirs; as theirs was enriched by
the encounter with ours. Neither educated the other. These encounters with the
culture of the Other, through intercultural dialogues, took us deeper into our
own cultures—beyond education.
It is said that “the
truest eye may now belong to the migrant’s double vision” (Bhabha 1997, 30). If
there is even a tiny grain of truth in that observation, then the pain of migrations
between the different worlds we traverse may yet bear some fruit. . . . Even
the bittersweet ones may be savored and enjoyed.
Following in the footsteps of these open, cherished teachers, we seek
not to impose our rejection on anyone. We know very well that education for
jobs, like the family car and flush toilet, is felt as a basic need for many
millions. They cannot survive, or have the good life as they understand it, if
that need is not satisfied by the Market or the State. They cannot conceive
their own way of living without the consumption of goods and services now
defining their survival kits. We are not arguing that they be deprived of their
“rights” to satisfy their “needs.” AH we are emphasizing is our solidarity with
the millions saying “No, thanks” to all those “needs” and “rights”—thus
rejecting the universality of development and education. Inspired by the
diversity of the lived pluriverse, we seek limits for education and respect for
different ways of living, learning, and teaching, through political controls.
These reveal to us the importance of abandoning
oxymorons like multicultural education. We locate our
hopes for preventing cultural rneltdown in the lived pluriverse.
All those who want to bring the whole world under the umbrella of human
rights insist that that is the only way to satisfy the basic needs which define
people qua human beings. Education fulfills one of these needs. In the wake of
education, the cultures of subsistence collapse. Education is not the only
human right that does them in. Ail the human rights claimed and awarded to the
modern individual self have the same devastating impact on those whose cultures
of subsistence have allowed them to marginalize the economy. Human rights are
as much of an historical fact as are education and homo educandus. In the story
of humans on earth, the notion of education as a human right has a clearly
identified beginning. Therefore, it can have an end.
The end is being
written into the epic of the people at the grassroots.
The social majorities have next to no school. They will have neither
school nor family car, flush toilet, and other pieces of the American dream—if
the Club of Rome and other reports are telling the Truth. Structural
impossibilities prevent its universalization. That is their blessing. They do
not have to be deschooled; for they have never been schooled. The goodness, the
adequacy, the richness of all the reasons given for deschooling are daily
demonstrated to us by the social majorities, creating their footpaths beyond
the superhighways of education by walking them. They daily demonstrate for us
that their languages, their traditions, their cultures subsist without the huge
bureaucracies that trap the educated, faithfully running the educational race
to be Number One.
Hosting the Otherness
of the Other
No expert knows everything
about every place, not even everything about any place (Berry 1990, 5).
The only true and
effective ‘operator’s manual for spaceship earth’ is not a book that any human
will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures (Berry 1990,
166).
It takes a whole village to raise a Zapoteco or a Punjabi child. We have
heard that the same view is held by other peoples. Within the setting of the
classroom, how do we bring you into our cultural space, revealing what it means
to be a Punjabi or a Zapoteco?
Every time we enter the
classroom, it is akin to being in cyberspace. We know we have stepped outside
the realms of our cultural spaces.
How do we initiate you
into our cultures in classrooms, whether in or out of cyberspace?
It takes a whole village.
. . . No, we cannot go it alone—classroom style—to teach you about ourselves.
Within the classroom, we cannot be of much use to you in your quest to enter
our cultural space. Then how can we presume to initiate you in your culture—let
alone the culture of the unknown Other?
We know that we do not know how to bring you along to savor the flavors
of our vernacular worlds. We know that the lived pluriverse—of spoken
vernacular tongues, of feasts and flavors, of suffering and celebrating—cannot
be reduced to information. It is
too rich, alive, and vibrant to be keyed into the
memory bits and bytes that run the educa-tional industry today.
This reveals to us our inability to be genuine guides in the rich worlds
of others’ cultures. To enter those worlds, only the communities themselves and
their elders can be good guides: those who know how to raise the young to
maturity without classrooms and textbook experts; how to sing the river sutras;
how to remember the tongues with which they speak with the deer, the otter, and
the bear; how to grow the corn so that the soils never depart; how to harvest a
whole year’s food with three inches of rainfall; how to make a gift of soil
while we only know how to make human waste; who feel no need for lawns, yoghurt
makers, or even air conditioners when temperatures soar to 140 degrees in the
shade; who know how to speak to the trees and plants; who have a hundred
different words for snow; who can grow four hundred species of potatoes in one
small village; who know ... all the things that we cannot imagine . . . not
even in our dreams. ... To Thou and thine we express our shared hopes of
finding the strength and courage to walk away from the mirages of global
prosperity created by education.
If you do not want to be
reduced into the individual self stitching together his own individual
designer-made or sewed-up cultural identity (Bhabha 1994), you are not alone;
you are a part of quests being embarked upon by millions.
The social majorities are not fools even if they are not “learned.”
Without being learned, they are learning to be wary of the mirage of equal
educational opportunity that earlier on seduced them from their places. They
are learning to stay home, regenerating the ways of their cultures, by walking
on the footpaths of their dead, their elders. They have not forgotten their
cultures, their landscapes of teaching and learning that lie outside the
classroom. They know that the latter cannot be encased within the limits and
confines of books, libraries, museums, computers, and the other tools of their
oppressors. Standing on their own soils, they need no experts to teach them how
to nurture and be nurtured by their worlds.
We humbly acknowledge our ignorance before you. We cannot bear to keep
you in our expert educators’ clutches. Go forth with our good will to what you
already have . . .
with eyes wide open to the cultural traps created by
the human rights-education-development-progress global net.
We hope you and your descendants will enjoy the dignity of your tribe,
your culture, your places, your ways of living and learning to regenerate your
spaces. We hope we will not seek to smother your cultural spaces with our
certainties; nor you, ours.
We hope you will be
hospitable to our ways, And we, to yours,
Notes
1. For an account of alternatives to modern law and
punishment among the North American Indians, see Lauderdale 1991.
2. For a detailed analytic study of the
counterproductivity of the educational system, see Green 1980.
3.
The word “problem” was used in geometry to define a puzzle
of logic with only one solution, ft is now a plastic word (Pb’rksen 1995),
without specific denotation. Among its
connotations, it alludes to real life predicaments,
difficulties, situations, that a professional can formulate as a ‘“problem”
whose ‘’solution’’ necessarily includes professional advice.
4. For an extended discussion of the cultures of
community embedded comida, see Esteva and Prakash. 1997.
5. See the “Platform for Action” that emerged out of the
UN Fourth World Con-ference. Each statement of the 12-Point Platform is either
an expression of concern regarding the violence against women, or a demand for
universalizing the rights enjoyed by the economically privileged in the
“developed” world.
6.
“Natural rights” were claimed as the foundation for the
creation of the modern nation-state. They are no longer legitimate. In this
century, it is accepted that universal human rights are the product of reason
and agreement, a covenant. How, then, can they be universal if the majority of
people on earth do not share that culturally specific reason and did not take
part in the covenant? The United Nations Charter is claimed to be signed by
“We, the Peoples . . . “ It was convened only by governments, which can speak
in the name of their peoples only in formal, legal terms. For the current
discussion on human rights, see International Conference on Rethinking Human
Rights 1994.
7. On the history of individualism and Homo oeconomicus,
see Louis Dumont 1977. For a penetrating critique of the monoculturalism
inherent in the notion of human rights, and a defense of radical pluralism, see
Raimundo Panikkar, especially 1995 and Vachon 1990, 1991, and 1995.
8. The American Indians and the “community of the
Museums” clashed when the latter was trying to establish its code of ethics for
their collections on Indian culture. They argued, using the language of rights.
For the museums, a) a people has the right to learn about the history of
mankind, not only about its own ethnic group; b) the Indians do not give much
importance to the body, but to the spirit; and c) the museums work in the name
of science.
For the Indians, a)
collecting “cultural elements” represents profanation and racism; b) life is a
cycle, starting with birth and ending with death, a cycle that cannot be
broken; and c) culture is more important than science.
Discussing the return of Indian artifacts to their original places, the
museums argued against that idea: a) if that were to happen, in a century no
one will be able to learn about religious objects (which the museums have the
responsibility to protect); b} these objects are not pertinent only to their
producers; c) the Indians do not know how to conserve these objects—calling all
of them “sacred”; d) all the objects taken by the community of museums are
studied in a respectful way.
The Indians counter argued: a) the sacred objects have a key importance
for the survival of Indian cultures, and they are a lot more important to
perpetuate them than for the education of new generations of Whites; b) they
were the original producers of the objects; c) the museums cannot be against
the sacred values, according to which the objects “devour themselves”: d) they
should only be studied and interpreted by the tribal peoples whose objects they
are. The Indians also pointed out that their cultures do not have a word for
“religion:” “spiritual thinking, values, and duties are entirely integrated
to social, cultural, and artistic aspects in daily life. That unity of
thinking is the Indian ‘religion’.”
The whole discussion
was documented and examined in Cardoso 1990.
9.
While not describing his project of ecological literacy as
“‘multicultural,” David Orr offers an interesting explanation for why education
and ecological regeneration are incompatible; why “environmental education is
an oxymoron” (Orr 1992, 149}.
10. Some human rights activists are joining in solidarity
with others to struggle against human rights violations without educating them
in their catechism. The national or international laws are but a power abuse,
imposed on all people, who ignore them or actively oppose them. Violations of
human rights amount to an abuse of the abuse; it seems legitimate to struggle
against them, if and when such struggle does not convey cultural destruction.
For an extended analysis of the limits of this struggle as well as an
elaboration of the ways in which human rights are a contemporary Trojan horse,
see Esteva and Prakash, 1997.
11 For a rigorous
examination of the present conditions important or necessary for an
intercultural dialogue, see Panikkar 1978, 1990, 1993, and 1995, as well as
Vachon 1990, 1991/1992, and 1995a.
Part II
Grassroots
Postmodernism: Refusenik Cultures
The First
Intercultural Dialogue?
Para dialogar For a dialogue
escuchar primero. let’s listen first.
Despues And then,
escuchar. listen.
Antonio
Machado
In the year of Our Lord
1524, twelve priests belonging to the order of Saint Francis arrived in New
Spain (which later became Mexico}. They were sent by Pope Adrian VI and by
Emperor Charles V to convert the Indians.
The priests were convinced
that the conversion should only be attempted through dialogue, conversation, a
peaceful confrontation, inviting and attracting “like the rain and the snow
failing from heaven, without violence, not suddenly, but with gentleness and
softness.”
As soon as they arrived, the renowned priests started conversations with
the Indian principals. A written record of those conversations was kept. Forty
years later, Friar Bernardino de Sahagun, who had been trying for a long time
to understand Indian thinking and culture, found those notes. He decided to
give some order to the old papers and to put the text “in polished Mexican
language” with the help of the best “Mexican
scholars.” There is not much left of what Friar
Bernardino did, but there is enough to imagine what the encounter may have
been.
It is the first written testimony of an attempt at dialogue among
Europeans and Indians; one of the first in the world between peoples of vastly
different languages and cultures. With infinite courtesy, prominent persons on
opposed sides talked. Both parties knew of the other’s regime of domination.
The rank of the Franciscans clearly established itself when Cortes, the
Conqueror, the supreme authority of the Spaniards, fell on his knees in front
of them. The Indians showed their lucid acknowledgment of the objective limits
of the dialogue—even as the Franciscans repeated their tranquilizing phrases,
designed to delink the dialogue from its political context.
We have only a few pages, magnificent and fascinating, of what was said
by the Indians. They come from only one of the many “conversations.” We have no
more.
Learned, carefully conceived for the Indian principals (noblemen as well
as high priests}, the revelations of the Franciscans clarify that they do not
seek conversion out of their own initiative or for any mundane purpose. They
are sent by God himself, through his Vicar, and with no other motive but the
salvation of the Indians’ souls. Gently, ever so gently, they expose that the
doctrine they bring is the Divine Word, deposited and kept in the sacred book
they have with them. In wonderful colors, they describe all the virtues and
powers of God, as well as the miseries of the devils. To the latter, they
attribute the perverse illusion: the Indian gods, nothing more and nothing less
than despised devils, punished by God. For adoring the devil as their gods, the
Indians cannot be held guilty, not having had previous access to the Divine
Word. Now, finally, they have the opportunity to listen to the Word of God. The
time has come for them to abandon their false beliefs—for their own good, for
the salvation of their souls. The answer of the Indian principals is brief; or
at least what has been kept of it. With the fullest courtesy, the Indians
acknowledge that the priests are divine messengers; possibly even God
incarnated; or the voice and the word of Him who gives life. And God asks them
to negate their own gods, their ancient rules of life. What can they say? How
do they react to such an atrocious demand?
They have assumed
themselves to be learned in the divine mysteries; the ones charged with
interpreting them for “the queue and the wing,” for the people. At the same
time, they recognize themselves as only human, little things, limited beings,
belonging to the earth:
macehualuchos (the poorest
of the poor), earthy, muddy, frayed, miserable, sick, afflicted. The Lord, Our
Lord, only lent us a corner of his mat of his slice, where he placed us ...
(Sahagiin 1524, 149).
They know the risk they
are taking. They know they can perish, they are mortals. They have no option
but to die, because their gods are dead. But even so, they will open a little
the box of secrets of their gods.
In their finiteness, yet
with infinite courtesy, offering the choicest phrases of their language, they
reply with all firmness that they cannot accept everything being told by the
Christians as Truth—even if it is the word of incarnated divinity!
The gods gave command, dominion, prestige. To them is owed life, birth,
growth. A rule of life has been established and transmitted from one generation
to the next.
There is a call for
good sense, for prudence, for wisdom:
Our lords, don’t do
something to your queue, your wing (your people) that bring them disgrace, that
will make them perish . . . (153],
A warning:
. . . that with this,
before us, the queue and the wing (the people} may rebel . . . We may . . . act
foolishly, if we so tell them: There is no longer a need to invoke, there is no
longer a need to implore the gods’ (153).
And a conclusion;
In peace and tranquility, consider, our lords, what is needed. We cannot
be calm and certainly we don’t follow you. We hold that as truth, even if we
offend you . . .
It is enough that we have
left, that we have lost, that we have been deprived, that we have been deposed
off the mat, the seat of honor (the command).
Make with us whatever
you want. That is all we answer (155).
If the command and the power have been lost, let us preserve at least
the ancient rule of life, the road needed to reach nearer the gods! The priests
answered:
Don’t be afraid . . . You
should not take our word, what we have said, for a bad omen, how, in which way,
none of your gods is a true god (155).
Immediately afterwards,
the priests explained the Christian doctrine to the Indians, copiously and full
of love (Sahagun 1524}.
Educating the Indians
Indian peoples have been
an obsession for the elites governing Mexico since its invention. Had it not
been for the burden the Indian peoples represented, it was assumed, Mexico
might have been as great as France or the United States.
In 1820, one of Mexico’s
most brilliant intellectuals, Dr. Jose Ma. Luis Mora, dedicated to forging the
new State, asked for legislation establishing a ban on the very use of the word
“Indian”—to legally suppress both the discrimination against the Indians and
the very cultural condition of being an Indian. Some voices even claimed that
the Mexicans should follow the example of the U.S.—not only its general
political and social design, but also its handling of the Indian problem: to
exterminate the majority while isolating those remaining in reservations. But
there were too many Indians in Mexico—a lot more than the “Mexicans.” And the
elites, mainly enlightened liberals, could not even conceive of genocide
U.S.-style. They imagined something better: educating the Indians—a radical,
brutal culturicide.
The colonial period in Mexico ended at a time in which the creation of
the nation-state, after the French and American revolutions, implied a “need”
for education. The Cadiz Constitution of 1812 established the requisite of
literacy to be a citizen of Spain. Many provinces in Mexico adopted the same
requisite, but obstacles to the literacy campaigns soon forced their
governments to grant citizenship to illiterate adults. During the first years
of independent Mexico, literacy and education were assumed as
fundamental
conditions for the construction of the new country. For many years, however,
the weakness of the unstable governments, often trapped in civil war, did not
do much to fulfill their educational ideals. Their efforts were concentrated on
some Lancasterian schools and centers for training workers. The great historian
Lucas Alaman expressed his perplexity with the social contradictions he was
observing:
Some families send their
sons to Jesuit schools in England and the United States, which presents the
rare situation that the Mexican youth, in order to be brought up in entirely
religious principles, go to learn to be Catholics in Protestant countries
(Alaman 1852, 56).
With the restoration of the Republic by the middle of the century, after
the French and American interventions, the government gave education the first
priority. While the “Indian question” was still defined as the main challenge
of the country, and education was identified as the only means of overcoming
it, educational efforts were concentrated only on those sectors of society
instructed to produce workers. The Indians were virtually forgotten or subsumed
within those lowest categories that lack education. There were voices, like
those of pedagogue Abraham Castellanos, who insisted on the need of providing
them with education, both for their personal good and to benefit the nation.
For him, as for all Indian defenders, their education included the three Rs and
some technical training. Most importantly, education was to make them into
‘’normal” citizens: fully-fledged, non-Indian members of the Mexican society.
The twentieth century dawned with celebrating the progress achieved.
Mexican elites, educated in Europe or the U.S., imported their fashions,
inventions, and capital .to promote production and build the economic
infrastructure (railroads, etc.). At the end of the first decade, the dictator
Porfirio Diaz considered that the society had advanced sufficiently in economic
terms, and was now ready for democracy. His resistance to it, however,
detonated a liberal revolution in 1910, which soon became the first social
revolution of the century. The peasant and Indian armies occupied the center of
the struggle, not so much to get the suffrage asked for by the liberals, but
against the oppression they were suffering and to reclaim their commons.
The revolution imposed a
million deaths, in a nation numbering twelve million. It dissolved the old
political regime, but failed to produce a substantial change in the economic
and social structure, while leaving the country in ruins, fully disarticulated.
It also produced a hybrid: the Constitution of 1917 had a liberal design but
strong social commitments. The first governments emanating from the revolution
sought to unite and integrate the country, creating the main institutions of
modern Mexico. A new ministry was established to create a truly national system
of education. Its “cultural missions,” inspired by the work of the priests of
the sixteenth century, brought a lay message to the last corner of the country.
Its popular editions of the Western classics, published for the millions, are
still remembered in the country as a long-range educational initiative without
equal. It would have pleased many contemporary reformers of the educational
system.
In spite of the magnitude of the effort, education barely reached the
Indian peoples. The presidency of Lazaro Cardenas, starting in 1934,
implemented agrarian reforms, nationalized oil, retook the main flags of the
social revolution, and modified the Constitution to give education a socialist
orientation. It found the Indians in conditions of
extreme misery, marginalization, and isolation.
President Cardenas decided to give them special attention.
The First
Multicultural Educator of the Americas
President Cardenas was
convinced that the full and effective integration of the Indians into the life
of the country was necessary and beneficial for everyone.
Mexico is not interested in the disappearance of the Indian races and
should not look for it. The government and the Revolution consider that the
Indian peoples are capable, in a degree not only as high as that of the
mestizo, but the same as any other racial type in the world. The only thing
that the Indian has lacked is the possibility of instruction and nourishing
like the one other peoples have had (Cardenas 1978. 244).
What was needed was:
Respect for all their
values and cultural patterns, stimulating the full development of the
potentialities of their race, and implying the mutual enrichment of two
cultures, the Indian and the western (Loyo 1985, 451).
The backbone of his
multicultural effort was education—although the term “multicultural education”
had not entered the elite or the popular imagination.
“Cultural missions” were substituted for centers of Indian education.
The Institute Linguistico de Verano, with American support, emphasized the
study of Indian languages to provide multilingual education. The Department of
Indian- Affairs (later the National Indigenous Institute) was created to study
the problems of Indian peoples emphasis on solutions and their concerted
implementation. The President insisted that the new “educational agencies”
should work with the whole community, not just the young.
The peoples’ rejection of educational agencies was a continual source of
concern. The teachers were often forced to call the civil and military
authorities to capture the students who escaped from the educational centers of
their community. But the effort was sustained; even intensified. “Penetration
brigades” aspired to cover every aspect of communal life. The “agents” often
felt perplexed: how to respect and revalue all aspects of Indian culture while
imposing the alien values of education upon them, under the assumption that
their real life was inferior in every aspect? Equally puzzling was the fact
that Whites and mestizos had to teach the benefits of living in community to
peoples who for centuries have had a community life and whose social
organization was in many cases a model (Loyo 1985, 451}!
The reciprocal enrichment
of Indian and western culture, continually emphasized by President Cardenas,
was synthesized into a slogan orienting the whole effort: “Our Indian problem
is not to conserve the Indian as ‘Indian,’ neither indigenize Mexico, but to
Mexicanize the Indian” (quoted in Loyo 1985, 451), There were efforts of
castelianization (teaching Spanish), as in the-old times. But bilingual
education was explicitly promoted. And the model for dealing with “small
nationalities” in the Soviet Union was adopted, although with original methods
(Heath 1972, 110), assuming respect for the values, language, and customs of
the Indians. Pluralism was not seen as a threat to national unity.
The Indian policy established by President Cardenas saw many ups and
downs, many changes in quality, intensity, and orientation during the next half
century. Its main purpose, however, continued: to educate the Indian peoples
for nationhood. There was intense and continual controversy about both the
policy itself and the institutional practices associated with it. Repeated
failures were attributed to a variety of causes or factors. The Institute
Linguistico de Verano, for example, which made a decisive contribution to
research on Indian languages and their use for literacy campaigns and bilingual
education, was denounced as an American agency of cultural penetration and a
factor in the dissolution of the communities and the Indian cultures. Bilingual
education was the object of both celebration and critique; sometimes it was
assumed to be an expression of a radical project of liberation, or even as a
revolutionary tool; at other times it was seen as a political and cultural tool
of domination. But the basic thrust of the Indian policy and its educational
purpose was retained. Its whole history was defined by its original
orientation: extending the liberal ideal of the nineteenth century. There was
never any intention of “indigenizing” Mexico—a project that perhaps could be
dreamed of at the time of Mexico’s founding when eighty percent of the
population were Indians, But the fact is that the dominant ideology prevented
anyone among the minorities from conceiving such a project; and no one among
the majorities was thinking about a project of domination.
Neither were the policymakers able to conceive a pluralistic project
with the Indian peoples themselves. Education that did not “Mexicanize” the
Indians, incorporating them into the Mexican culture, was inconceivable. No one
dared to define with any precision the content of that “Mexican culture,” but
its specific connotation was not confusing to anyone. To “Mexicanize” the
Indians implied that the Indians should cease to be Indians; to be assimilated
to the abstract categories of modern Mexico: citizen, voter, recipient, and
claimant of rights . . . and all else involved in the formal and full
incorporation into the western civilizational matrix.
It is not irrelevant that the initial impulse of the Indian policy
adopted as a model the Soviet policy regarding “small nationalities,” whose
meaning and consequences can now be better appreciated. The respect assumed for
the values and customs of the “other” [like the respect associated with
multiculturalism) is only a formal cover-up—not always hypocritical or
cynical—for culturicide.
From the first priests of the sixteenth century until today’s
initiatives to computerize the Indian languages for facilitating bilingualism
and multiculturalism, education represents a threat of cultural extinction for
the Indians. The threat became a reality for many: millions of Indians ceased
to be what they were; they had no’longer the supportive hammock (Esteva 1987)
of their cultures; the promises of education were fulfilled for very few of
them. Many Indians saw in education a path to liberation under the assumption
of a mestizaje: the only way to escape from the discrimination, exclusion, and
oppression associated with the condition of being an Indian. Even today, the
term is pejorative. “Don’t be an Indian” means, in ordinary conversation, “Do
not be stupid, obtuse.” Be it a threat or a promise, for the Indians the
meaning of education was clear: to stop being what they were, to renounce their
belonging, their place in the world.
The
Failure of Education
We are not attempting here
to talk about the cultures that died. Nine out of every ten of the Indians
living in what the Spaniards called New Spain died during the first century of
the colonial period. They died of hunger, smallpox, or through astonishing
collective suicides. If their gods had died, how could they still continue
living? What was the meaning of life then?
If nine out of every ten
died, the survivors could not survive them. Over survivors fell a double
stigma: the ignominious mark of being who they were, in a society denying them
the freedom to be themselves; and the mark of still being who they were, of not
having had the dignity of dying.
We resist talking here about what died, as we resist nostalgia and
sentimentality. We resort to tradition. But we would like to escape from the
shadows of the past. And we will not allow the shadows of the future to prevent
us from enjoying the aliveness of the present. We want to speak about what is
fully alive; of the present cultural creations of the denied civilizations—all
those succeeding in crossing with dignity through colonizations and
development, reacting with imagination in recent times to the crises of
development. We want to speak about how “the people” at the margins and the
grassroots are now steadfastly advancing in the challenge of regenerating their
dreams, their arts of living and dying; how they dedicate themselves, with
unusual vigor, to the creation of their new commons. We want to speak about the
myths they are generating and the challenges they are confronting.
We must start with rememberings to fully grasp what is happening. The
“survivors” of the first century of colonization started their long struggle to
reclaim and regenerate their commons. During the next two centuries they were
unable to liberate themselves from the colonial oppression. Yet, in a very real
sense, they put it at their margins: many of them were able to maintain, in
their own spaces, their own forms of government, their own art of living and dying.
Those spaces were called “Indian Republics” by the Spanish Crown, to allude to
the degree of autonomy they had in the handling of their own affairs, in spite
of the rigid rules imposed on them by the Crown—exploiting them “from the
outside.”
“Education” was central to the colonizing enterprise, although it was
not called by this name. Scattered efforts to impose the official State
language and literacy upon the Indians were clearly marginal to the main
element of “education”: to “civilize” the Indians out of their “barbarian”
state. This goal was never reached. In spite of the formal domination of the
religion and culture of the Spaniards, all over the country, it did not produce
a rea / transformation of the majority of the Indians, who were still thinking,
living, and dying within their own culture, which they were capable of
preserving, always accommodating it to the conditions of foreign domination.
At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the political and ideological movement to get independence
from Spain was fully alive and vigorous … among the small minority of crioilos
(people born in Nueva Espana from Spanish parents) and the “legitimate”
mestizos (people of mixed blood: Spaniards and Indians). For Jose Maria Morelos
y Pavon, one of the heroes of the Independence, the ‘’feeling of the nation”’
was to be governed by the crioilos, who at that time represented no more than 3
percent of the population!
The Indian peoples were not included in the new political project that
has now completed almost two centuries. Mexico, the fruit of an unfortunate
invention, became an
independent State before having constituted itself as
a nation (Wolf 1958). The small, predominantly crioilo group that conceived
this State sought to use the Spanish system of domination for their own
advantage and to bring to the new country they dreamed of, even by force, the
institutions that were then fashionable in the countries that were a model for
them.
All the ideas of a nation nourishing intellectual and political
independence from Spain were themselves foreign; “Almost no one was thinking
thoughts based on the Mexican realities of the moment” (Gonzalez y Gonzalez
1974, 92). They ignored the cultures, hopes, and aspirations of the majority of
the people converted into Mexican citizens. Formally crystallized into the
Constitutional Act of the Federation, approved on January 31, 1824 these ideas
were reduced to fit the foreign molds of States being imitated. The
Constitution alluded to the Indian peoples only once, authorizing the Congress
to celebrate trade treaties with foreign countries and “Indian tribes.” Its
authors affirmed that they were following the path and the model of “the happy
Republic of the United States of America “(CNCSRFCRS 1974, 1).
That straitjacket of imported ideas, alien to the real condition of the
country, came to be considered “the root and legal foundation of the Nation,
the concrete manifestation of the democratic ideals of the Mexican people, a
form of government that remains valid today1' (CNCSRFCRS 1974, 1).
None of the later Constitutions or national projects have been able to go
beyond this unfortunate invention of Mexico; recognizing at long last the basic
pluralism of the country— the actual condition of the majority of its
inhabitants. They continued to dedicate themselves to “forge a nation,” to use
Gamio’s celebrated phrase, forcing reality into the imported design inscribed
in the founding act, and the source of an interminable dispute.
Guillermo Bonfil identified the nature of this permanent dispute,
locating it in the differences between “imaginary Mexico” and “Mexico profundo”
(deep Mexico): two essentially distinct and irreconcilable forms of thinking
and behaving.2 The imaginary Mexico of the elites (educational,
political, or other) embodies, promotes, and constructs the nation in the mold
of Western civilization. Mexico profundo is formed by those rooted in their
living Meso-Middle-American lineage: those who either do not share the Western
project or assume it from a different cultural perspective (Bonfil 1996.
xv-xvi).
The counter positions between Mexicans are not only of an economic
nature: between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. Neither are
they confined to ideological, party, or religious affiliations or to positions
regarding the political or economic “model” with which to face the peoples’
predicaments. All these contradictions do exist. But it would not be possible
to understand them and even less so to resolve them unless framed, as Bonfil
points out in the challenge represented by the presence of two civilizations,
two different horizons of intelligibility within the same society:
Two civilizations mean two civilizational programs, two ideal models for
the society sought after, two different possible futures. Whatever decision is
made about reorienting the country, whatever path is chosen to escape from the
current crisis, implies a choice for one of those civilizational projects and against
the other (Bonfil 1996, xv).
Prior to Bonfil, this counter position had barely been perceived. After
his death, the general adoption of his terms is frequently accompanied by a
forgetting of their meanings. Such negations of the country’s general and
obvious reality have a variety of
motives and
reasons. Some are strictly ideological: the conviction of the elites that all
Mexicans are irremediably inscribed in the western matrix. The inexactitude of
the term (with its implicit opposition to the eastern matrix that nobody in
Mexico argues for) has contributed to denying the civilizational matrix of the
majority of the Mexicans. Also contributing to this is the affirmation of the
mestizaje as a sign of national identity. The interminable mixing of blood,
which makes almost al! Mexicans into mestizos, has saved the country from
dangerous obsessions about racial purity. But the generalized assumption that
it deposits everyone into the same civilizing matrix and the same mythical
system has no empirical foundation.
Furthermore, the
counterpositions of these two civilizations are not commonly sensed because
Mexico profundo has not had a project.
Continually occupied with resistance, generally dispersed, Mexico
profundo has not explicitly articulated its own project to oppose the dominant
project. Because of this, among other factors; it has always remained
subordinated under the shadow of the national project emerging from imaginary
Mexico’s dominant vision.
This situation is about to
end. For the first time, Mexico profundo is articulating alternatives. This
comes with the growing awareness of the social majorities that the dominant
project offers them no dignified place. Its unification with the global economy
cannot accommodate itself to the diversity of Mexico profundo; and remaining
silent is a sure formula for their own permanent destruction.
Mexico profundo is made up of more than Indian peoples. Although born
from them, it includes the wide majority of “the people” that constitute the
nation. The minority that constitutes imaginary Mexico - grows more aggressive
every day. Still, Mexico profundo is giving its project an inclusive
character—the bases for harmonious coexistence with a general consensus never
attempted by the dominant project.
Escaping Education:
Learning to Listen, Then Listening
“We were looking,” said
the now famous subcomandante Marcos, “for an answer to an incoherent, absurd,
anachronistic situation. How was it possible that so much was in the hands of
so few and so little in the hands of so many?”
With a doctorate in
education and years of university teaching in hand, Marcos, a mestizo, came to
Chiapas in 1984 with the hope of starting a revolution. He joined a small group
of Indians with a lot of political experience.
At the beginning, he
teaches the Indians Mexican history. Instead of educating them, however, Marcos
learns from them how to become a “part of the mountain” part of “this world of
ghosts, of gods that resurrect, that take the shape of animals or things.” He
learns to listen.
They have a very curious way of handling time. You don’t know which time
they are talking about. They can be telling you a story that could have
happened a week ago, 500 years ago or when the world started. If you want to
know more about those stories, they say: ‘No, that is the way . . . the elders
say.’ The elders are their source of legitimacy for everything. In fact they
are in the mountain because of their elders’ commands.
The group of six—three
Indians, three “mestizos”—worked and learned together in the jungle. They
learned of the time of the monterias, when big companies took off wood from
Selva Lacandona, well before the Porfiriato (by the end of nineteenth century).
The Indians spoke as though present for the cutting. Young people of
twenty-five or thirty years old talk and give facts perfectly coherent with the
profound scholarly studies of that time in Chiapas.
How to explain this? I told myself that it was too much of a
coincidence. Later I knew that in reality that is the way in which history
proceeds, the other history not written. The stories are inherited and he who
inherits them makes ‘them as his own . . . Because they do not read and write
they choose a person in the community to memorize the history of the community.
If there is any problem, you consult . . . this walking book.
They did not know
what was happening outside their mountains.
But the mountain teaches you to wait. That is the virtue of the warrior,
to know to wait. It is the most difficult thing to learn. It is more difficult
than learning to walk, hunt or load ... To learn to wait is the most difficult,
for everyone, for Indians and mestizos. That is what the mountain teaches you,
from the small details of waiting for an animal, the time to do something or
the other . . . the mountain imposes its timetable on you. You come from the
city used to administering time . . . You extend the day with a light until
very late in the night, to read, to study, to make things when night falls. But
not in the mountain. The mountain tells you ‘until here’ . . . you really enter
into another world . . .
another form of being
. . .
Two years later, the
group grew.
We were already twelve; we
could then conquer the world. We could eat the world as if it was an apple. We
were twelve.
Eleven of them were Indians. They came then to the villages to talk. The
fact that they were living in the mountains won them the villagers’ respect,
facilitated the talk.
And we started to talk . . . about politics. We were telling them about
. . . imperialism, the social crisis, the balance of forces . . . things that
nobody understood. Neither did they. They were honest. ‘Did you understand?’
They replied: ‘No,’ You were forced to adapt yourself. They were not captives .
. . They told you that they had not understood a thing . . . that you should
look for another word. ‘Your word is too hard, we don’t understand it . . . And
then you needed to look for other words ... to learn to speak with the people.
. . about the Mexican history that coincided . . with their stories of
exploitation, humiliation, racism. And thus started an Indian history of
Mexico, They were appropriating their history and politics . . . They explained
what is democracy and what is authoritananism, what is exploitation, wealth,
repression. They were the ones translating their history ... we were only
spectators . . . The villagers translated their stories in another way. It is a
new word that is old, that comes from the new mountain but that coincides with
what has been said by their elders. And so it starts to run through the
mountains and the people’s support starts to be stronger. When the families of
the villagers enter the Zapatista army, they start the process of cultural
contagion, forcing us to reformulate politics, our way of seeing our own
historical process, and the historical process of the nation ... We learned to
listen. Before we had learned to speak, too much, as all the Left do ... at
least in Latin America; its specialty is talking, no? We learned to
listen,
forced to do that, because it was a language that was not your language. It was
not
. . . castilla
[Spanish] [you needed to learn their dialect); it has its own references, its
cultural frame; they were Others, When they alluded to something, they did not
want to say the same thing you are saying. You learned to listen with great
attention ... We had a very square notion of reality. When we collide with
reality, that square gets very dented. Like that wheel there. And it starts to
roll and to be polished by the contact with the people. It has no relation with
the beginning. Then, when they ask: Who are you? Marxists, Leninists,
Castroists, Maoists, or what? I don’t know. Really I don’t know, We are ... a
hybrid, of a confrontation, of a shock, in which, I believe fortunately, we
lost…
That happens in parallel to this process of conspiration, clandestine,
collective, which already involved thousands, entire families, men, women,
children, old people. They also decided to structure themselves in autonomous
governments, in reality. Diverse communities organized themselves in a kind of
parallel government….. collective works .
. . used before for
the feasts, for drinking {there was much, much alcoholism). . . start to be
used to buy guns. We thus came to the last period . . . 1989, 1990, 1991, part
of 1992 .
. . when the
Zapatista army is massified, Indianized, and becomes absolutely contaminated by
the community forms . . . the Indian cultural forms . . . The armed forces have
the work of ... protection, but the communities do the political direction . .
. [And - .
. communities] start
to tell us: The people want to fight.
We tell them “You are foolish, the Soviet Union fell, there is no longer
a socialist side, the Sandinistas lost the elections in Nicaragua, El Salvador
signed the peace, they are talking in Guatemala, Cuba is cornered, nobody wants
armed struggle, nobody talks about socialism, or it is a sin. Everything is now
against a revolution, even if it is not socialist.’ . . . They say: ‘We don’t
want to know what is happening in the rest of the world. We are dying and we
need to ask the people don’t you say that we must do what the people say?’
‘Pues . . . yes.’ ‘Pues . , . then, lets go to ask.’
And they asked- And the
people said yes, they wanted to fight. And they started the preparation. All
during 1993. Postponing the dates: November 20, December 12, December 25.
December 31.
And then starts the last
phase of our story. Well, I hope that it is not the last: the one in which we
now are, pues, the one born in January 1994 (Gilly, Marcos, and Ginzburg 1995,
131-142).
From Resistance to
Liberation
On January 1, 1994, a few
thousand poorly armed Indians started a rebellion in the south of Mexico. Their
initiative precipitated the end of the old authoritarian regime. It continues
to articulate the struggles of many local groups.
No other call of the Zapatista movement was more successful than Basta!,
Enough! Millions of Mexicans were activated by it, shaping their generalized
discontent and their multiple affirmations into a common, dignified rejection.
The movement was able to encapsulate new aspirations in a way hard to
categorize. Like other guerrillas of this century, the Zapatistas exposed the
nature of the political regime against which they were in rebellion and
revealed how they were forced to prepare themselves for dying and
killing in an armed uprising. In contrast with all of
them, however, they showed no interest in seizing power in order to impose
their own regime on everyone.
“Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves,” was not a mere slogan.
It continues to be an essential part of their political conception. Like other
peasant and Indian rebellions in Mexican history, the Zapatistas are clearly
interested in reclaiming their commons and liberating themselves from the,
specific oppression they are suffering at the local level. At the same time, in
contrast with most peasant and Indian rebellions in Mexico, they are clearly
interested in the political regime that will emerge in the country as a
consequence of their uprising,
Their struggle for a radically democratic regime attempts to take some
of the juridical and political procedures of formal democracies (an aspiration
of many Mexicans) and to combine these with their own communal political
traditions: where, rather than abstract codes or laws, personal behavior and
social order follow very richly specified and elaborated principles,
transmitted from generation to generation; where authority commands through
obedience. In their commons, the Zapatistas and other Mexicans seek to govern
themselves autonomously, well-rooted in the space to which they belong and that
belongs to them. While affirming their dignity, their hopes of flourishing,
enduring according to their own cultural patterns and their own practices of
the arts of living and dying, they are joining in solidarity with other
Mexicans to establish radically democratic regimes where all voices are heard
and respected.
Perhaps the Zapatista
movement will soon be used to describe the postmodern nature of power (Foucault
1977). It will help to understand why a country of 90 million changed in a few
months, following the initiatives of a few thousand “powerless” people who
dared to declare, with all dignity in their local spaces, that the emperor had
no clothes. He was naked.
Despite the global emergence of solidarity for their cause, and despite
the global relevance of their message to oppressed and abused groups in every
nation-state, it would be a mistake to present the Zapatistas as engaged in
global thought. Their sense of solidarity with the marginalized, oppressed, and
abused across the globe does not come with the vast baggage of some universal
conception of justice. By proposing forms of self-governance following their
own indigenous traditions, they are simply opening the door for others to
escape the monoculture and homogeneity of the model of governance imposed by
nation-states worldwide. The doors they are opening lead to the lived
pluriverse, being destroyed by even the best-intentioned “global thinking” or
multicultural education.
“Global Power” has no other foundation than the thinking constituted of
“global statements.” Global forces, in their local incarnation, were challenged
by the Zapatistas. Local initiatives spread that challenge around the globe to
address other local incarnations of those global forces, forcing the latter to
recede. The “Zapatista journal,” started by a librarian in California and
disseminated through E-mail, has a local profile, used by many local people,
actively putting local pressures upon the local incarnations of global chains.
The group Accion Zapatista, of Austin, Texas, has begun regenerating the old
art, of pamphleteering, while at the same time giving highly sophisticated use
to state-of-the-art techniques and technologies of interneting. They are now
far ahead of corporations and governments, who are investing millions of
dollars in research and
development to mimic what grassroots groups of this
kind are doing, attempting to find ways of stopping them. There is not one
single “global tool” for a “global confrontation” associated with the
Zapatistas—although thousands of pages are being written and circulated about
them, while lengths of video are now being transmitted or shared around the
globe.
A few months after the
uprising, Marcos confessed that the “civil society” surprised both the
Zapatistas and Presidente Salinas. “What happened in the last ten years in
Mexico, at the grassroots, while we were in the mountains?” he asked himself,
he asked everyone.
The transition from resistance to the liberation of “the people,” which
started at the grassroots, is revealing Mexico profundo’s postmodernity— in
spite of globalization, development, and education. Refuseniks of development,
human rights, and education seek to live. The window of Mexico profundo opens
onto a very wide and complex landscape of initiatives all over the world. In
the lived pluriverse, diverse peoples with a sense of place share a common
challenge, confronting their extinction by the forces of displacement. They are
the refusenik cultures— they say “No”; they refuse to die out; to be beaten; to
disappear . . . They know that to survive they must drop out of the global
race. If they run the race, they will drop out by dying. Why, then, not drop
out in order to live and flourish? This is not necrophilia. The cultures
dropping out of the education/development race are biophiliacs. They are not alone
in their quest for liberation from global development and education. They have
each other; their solidarities with many others similarly suffering and hoping.
Radical hope is the very essence of popular movements (Lummis 1996).
The Diversity of Liberation
in the Lived Pluriverse
At the grassroots, the
people do not need to be educated or conscientized to pose their own questions:
How to protect themselves—
their places, their customs, their traditions for teaching and learning— from
the Outsiders’ culture? the culture of schooling and education, teaching how to
forget the traditional sense of place?
How
to marginalize the educational system and its economy that marginalizes them?
How to drop out of the culture
of dropouts? How to prevent the death of their own cultural patterns of caring
for their young and their old?
How to drop out of a global race in which they are doomed to be the ones
trying to “catch up” in perpetuity? 3,223 years for Mauritania, developers
announce . . .
Writing of her peoples’
resistance to the national alliance of education, politics, economics, and
other dictators, Rigoberta Menchu notes:
We don’t celebrate Guatemalan Independence Day . . . because, in fact,
it isn’t a celebration for us. We consider it a Ladino celebration because,
well, Independence as they call it means nothing to us. It only means more
grief, and greater efforts not to lose our culture. Other than that it has no
meaning for us at all. It is only celebrated in the schools and the people with
access to schools are above all people with money. The majority of Indians have
no access to primary or secondary schools. The bourgeoisie,
middle-class people, celebrate it but lower down
there’s none of that (Menchu 1994, 205).
I, Rigoberta
Menchu—An Indian Woman in Guatemala continues:
When teachers come into the villages, they bring with them the ideas of
capitalism and getting on in life. They try and impose these ideas on us. I
remember that in my village there were two teachers for a while and they began
teaching the people, but the children told their parents everything they were
being taught at school and the parents said; ‘We don’t want our children to
become like ladinos.’ And they made the teachers leave. What the teacher wanted
was for them to celebrate the 15th of September. They had to wear school
uniforms and buy shoes. We never buy those things for children. They told them
to put on a uniform, to disguise themselves by taking off their own clothes,
their costumes, and putting on clothes of all one color. Well, the parents
didn’t want their children to be turned into ladinos and chased the teachers
out. For the Indian, it is better not to study than to become like ladinos
(Menchu 1994, 205). (emphasis added)
The questions of
resistance and liberation raised vary from place to place. The challenge of
going beyond the culture of schooling and education is confronted differently
from place to place. For the challenge is, in fact, conceived differently from
one place to another.
The Quiche of Rigoberta
Menchu’s place in the highlands of Guatemala physically throw the teachers out
of their communities to protect themselves from the external economy that the
teachers bring with them: of uniforms, shoes, and other purchased items,
destructive of the local traditions. They have their own distinct cultural
patterns for making and using their own clothes. The same is true of all the
other ‘’goods” that they nourish and cherish. Made within the local economy of
household and commons, these are not bought or sold. To buy them is to abandon
the autonomy of the “economy of gifts.”
Similarly, in Ireland, to
enjoy the freedom and autonomy of their own economy, to marginalize the economy
of the educators, “Alternatives to Education Campaign” challenges the Minister
of Education:
Dear Minister: School has encouraged me to study hard and get my points.
But when I get my points, what can I do with them? Only try to get into a
college somewhere. So 1 leave home and head for the city. Then when I qualify,
what can I do with my qualification? Only look for a job. But where I come
from, nobody needs points for the work being done there, and nobody needs
college qualifications either. So I end up forcibly removed from my own
locality and my own people . . . May I make a suggestion then ... for a
meaningful and productive life within their own community, and in their own
locality. In rural areas in particular, this policy would tackle the twin
problems of rural depopulation and rural unemployment . . . What is the point
in educating people for emigration or even migration? . . . Yours sincerely,
Migrant (Molloy 1991, 21). (emphasis added)
In the ayllu and the chacra of the Quechua in the Peruvian Andes, they
ingest and digest the alien culture of schooling, in order to immunize
themselves against the plague. Their own methods of soil culture have taught
them that the arrival of every plague, every disease, reveals to them their own
weaknesses; their vulnerabilities; of their physical and
cultural spaces. Rather than engage in a war to throw
out the pestilence attacking their physical and cultural soils, they learn to
observe the pestilence. It teaches them how to overcome their own weakness and
vulnerabilities:
The official system of education . . . tries to subject the Andean
peoples to the order that the West wants to impose . . . Once the installation
is achieved, [there are those who .
. . are enraptured
by the precepts that education has taught them. They are the devoted admirers
of the West. But . . . the immense majority . . . know very well what it is all
about and . . . use it only when, due to life circumstances, they need to
relate with the official apparatus. They maintain alive their Andean culture
and their spontaneity . . .
Here in the Andes
we have never been conquered by European invaders, nor are we poor or
malnourished or underdeveloped: nor are we victims, nor have we been subjected,
nor do we demand anything . . . For us what happens is that—just like the
frost, the hail or insects sometimes visit our chacras—five centuries ago there
appeared here suddenly a very virulent plague that has gravely damaged the life
and happiness of our Andean world . . . Because in that moment our world has
not known how to be sufficiently harmonized, because we were careless in the
daily nurturance of harmony. Since we Andeans love the world as it is, with
humility and with vigor, without fear nor laments nor resentments nor anger, we
have little by little found the manner in which to re-harmonize ourselves, the
manner in which to cure ourselves of this terrible plague. Each day we are
recovering something of the lost harmony. Each day we are closer to our
plenitude. We will be fully healthy when we will have harmonized ourselves
again with all those who configure the Andean world: the Huacas (deities), the
Sallqas (those of the wild) and the runes (people). We nurture harmony when all
and each of us adjust with joy and good will to the circumstances of each
moment and harmony in its turn nurtures us, making us feel at ease and cared
for in each moment, full of the joy of living in community (Grille in Apffel
Marglin, forthcoming).
The Zapotecs, the Mixes,
or the Chatinos accept the presence of the educational system. They go through
it only to come out on the other side in order to make their own cultural path;
beyond the system’s pyramidal vertically in order to reclaim the horizontally
of their commons.
Their own parents invested
too much in creating these institutions. -Eliminating them is very difficult.
It is easier to work around them. Within indigenous communities in Chiapas,
Indian parents send their daughters—the preservers of culture—to school as
little as is essential; knowing that both “normal” or bilingual education means
cultural violence, acculturation destructive of personal and collective
self-esteem as Indians (Falquet 1995, 6-8).
Marcos learns from the Indians of Chiapas . . . their mountains . .
their elders who know how to use the tools of-oppressors for going beyond them;
to come out on the other side walking the walk of their elders; to drop out,
becoming refuseniks of the global machinery manufacturing the educated,
imposing their economy on the uneducated.
Dropping Out
Knowledge and Judgment—attitudes peculiar to the culture of the modern
West but which nonetheless claim universal ^applicability—constitute the
contents of cultural
imperialism and of
official education on a worldwide scale. The school, the college, and the
university are institutions which . . . fulfill . . . the function of
fashioning our youth with imperialist interests {Grille in Apffel Marglin,
forthcoming).
A great achievement of world scholarship has been the creation of a
universal middle class that makes an intellectual from Puno think in a manner
similar to the one from Brussels, with the difference that the one from Puno
will always be a disciple of the one from Brussels, but with difficulty will he
become his teacher ... If education is the method invented to prepare the
individual for systematic access to the secrets of nature, what is in crisis is
not only the school, that long ago showed its irrelevance to the ideals that
support its gestation and development, but also the very principles that are
behind the concept of education (Rengifo in Apffel Marglin, forthcoming).
At the grassroots, people live in commons. If lost or damaged during
colonization and development, the people are reclaiming, regenerating or
re-creating new commons according to contemporary conditions. Their postmodern
vein reveals that the people are not trying the impossible or the undesirable:
going back in history.
Having experienced the
modern anguish, having resisted it, struggled against it, lost countless
battles, they have not lost the war. They are still themselves, rooted in their
own worlds. These teach them how to learn to make new paths that go beyond
modernity: continually healing the ruptures from their past, their elders
imposed upon by education and other modern technologies.
Resisting or bypassing all
the institutions and practices conceived to educate them into cultural
extinction, learning in freedom, they struggle against all the institutions
that privatize knowledge; reduce wisdom into knowledge stock, a commodity sold
and bought by those capable of paying for it. Their wisdom is a commons;
neither bought nor sold. To cherish the wisdom of their elders, the people must
remain dropouts or refuseniks of the educational system.
Their freedom comes from
belonging; from a sense of place—to which they belong and nurture; and which
belongs to them, nurtures them. No damage of the educational system is more
evident and threatening for the people at the grassroots than its effectiveness
for uprooting: the successful students and the dropouts become either
“itinerant professional vandals’ or unprofessional vandals and transients.
Their common sense, their sense of place, explains how the people reroot
themselves when removed from the places of their elders.
‘’Education?” asks Jairne Martinez Luna, a Zapotec, a singer, an
anthropologist who renounced his professional career to re-root himself in his
ancestral village, his culture. He is creating some spaces here where children
and young people are living as learning. In our workshops, they learn person to
person, without the vertically of the educational system, where the teacher has
the knowledge and the child should receive it. Here the young learn from each
other . . . the basketball patio, the forest, the work of daily life, the
village in general, their mother, the work of their father, everything.
Learning horizontally, very soon they see what the community does: to work in
common, to have a shared tradition. They strengthen their own ‘education’ of
real things, not of abstractions.
“This ‘education’ does not
deny formal education for the time being. Can it put the system aside?”
Our own parents invested
too much work in creating these institutions. Eliminating them is too
difficult. However, our workshops change the parents. They see that their
children really learn what is important for the community - .
“How can the
communities organize by themselves such activities?”
First, we are involving
those who organize the communal feasts, the music band, the rituals. They have
been displaced by the cultural policies of the State ... In every community, we
invite those people. When we leave, they simply continue with their experiences.
“How did you conceive
this?”
We did not have a project, a plan. People who like to sing came together
and started to sing everywhere. The songs themselves, and the people listening
to those songs, involved us in new conversations and activities. Our “theory”
is only a reflection and formalization of our practice, generated by the
communities themselves.
“How to nourish
awareness of the things that matter?”
We challenged academic reasoning imposed on us from the outside with one
rooted in our own place . . . We do not have any order or sequence, any
specific program …. . Schools absorb-the children, make them receptacles. They
lose the possibility of reflecting on what it means to go for the wood ... to
know the work of their parents . . .
what kind of plants
must be collected and harvested every season . . . This is a knowledge that the
children are losing by spending time in school. For some time, the parents did
not dare to say anything. “If my child is in the school, he must learn there.
My own knowledge has less value every day. There is no need for me to share it
with him.” But times are changing. The parents are observing that what they
know themselves is useful for a living; and that what the children learn in the
school is useless. Their children are relearning to learn what really matters.
The most important thing is to recognize our capacity to be ourselves .
. . Zapotec or Mixe or Chatino. To measure our difference not as a comparison
with others, but as an awareness of our own dignity . . . our freedom, a space
to have our own initiatives, What is done by the destituted, the marginalized,
the exploited? To look for a space of decision, and to look for it
collectively. Sometimes we fail, because of the systems of control. But
sometimes we succeed (Martinez, 1992).
In San Andres Chicahuaxtla, all the women wear beautiful huipiles of red
and white stripes. From a distance, they may appear to the stranger to be
wearing a uniform. Up close, every huipi! reveals itself as a profoundly
personal creation. Each red row is woven in its own unique pattern. Every
Triqui girl becomes a woman when she weaves her first huipil in her own
personal style. Even the common symbols are combined in ways that are exquisitely
singular, and particular. Whoever discovers a new design or a special way of
weaving is admired by everyone in the community. Weaving together, the new
skill is soon shared with all the others, preventing the festering of envy or
jealousy. Their wisdom is a commons. Every skill, every creative impulse, is
simultaneously personal and a part of their commons.
The huipiles of San Andres offer many symbols of communal life: where
the personal and the common are indivisibly constituted; the unique, peculiar,
and exceptional conjugated into singular wholes. San Andres has a mode of
existence typical of thousands
of communities,
millions of people, everywhere. At the same time, it is the exception to any
norm or rule. Far from existing in the past, as reminiscence as many want to
see them, it is a contemporary reality that seems to have in it the embryo of
an ancient future.
The Triquis came from very
far away, carrying their difficult story here, to San Andres Chicahuaxtla. As
the outcome of a peculiar chain of events, Fausto and Marcos Sandoval created
“the house that collects our path”? a communal initiative that generates
surprises every day.
Education? Well our
initiative reflects our own communal ways of learning . . . Fully aware of what
our culture is we know how to take what we need from the outside to follow our
own path (Sandoval 1992).
Art, for us, is not an
object for an exhibition or a sale, that only some can have; for us, what is
created is shared and belongs to the community . . . In their arguments of
superiority, western culture has called our history “legend”; has converted our
art into folklore; has called “custom” any juridical system practiced without
physical coercion; has marginalized our language (Sandoval 1992).
Our initiative was a great dream. We have not been able to do everything
we wanted. But we continue. The inhabitants of Chicahuaxtla live with dignity.
. . . Each person has land and access to everything that exists in the
community. In my case, after being out of the community for many years, to
study in Oaxaca and Mexico City, took the decision of coming back, because this
is my home, here is my family, here are my roots, here I have everything
(Sandoval 1992, 8-10).
They tried everything. One brother became a teacher and struggled to be
assigned to a nearby community. Its isolation, the virtual absence of
bureaucratic control, allowed him to introduce radical changes. The children
learned the practical skills needed in the community, instead of accumulating
“knowledge”: a collection of alien names, “facts,” and figures. By the time the
authorities discovered the situation and closed the school, all the children
knew enough to thrive in the community.
Fausto and Marcos started their initiative with a simple experiment.
They observed that the most important feast of San Andres, the carnaval was
declining: children or young people were no longer interested in participating
in the traditional dances and masquerades. They organized a contest, with a few
small, symbolic prizes for those best representing their traditional dances.
Their success took them by surprise. More groups participated in the contest
than they could have imagined. The carnaval was transformed. The elders and the
adults now enjoy the variety offered by the young. Another unexpected
consequence of these initiatives is the regeneration of the rezanderos— a
species in the process of extinction. Usually very old, they had started to
become very sad people: nobody was interested in learning with them. Today they
select the best: those who really want to learn with them. Other initiatives
followed these successes: a documentation center with a singular collection of
books, pamphlets, and documents; a small workshop producing cassettes and
videos to catalyze debates on common predicaments for the local radio station;
small agricultural experiments; their list of local initiatives proceeds with
variety and daily surprises...
For years, the Sandovals and other families selected the teachers of the
school of San Andres as the main cargos (communal positions of service,
culminating in the position of
presidents
municipal) of the community—assuming that they “knew” more despite their lack
of experience in handling local responsibilities. Following on the heels of
many disasters, communal consensus concludes today that anyone but the teachers
are appropriate for the cargos, due to their arrogance and disregard for
customs and the disposition to impose their own individual authority. One
teacher, for example, forced the children to wear ties to the school, in spite
of the fact that no one in San Andres and very few in Oaxaca use a tie. Others
imposed national norms, deriding local customs as non-progressive. Every time
they threw a teacher out of San Andres, the substitute turned out to be worse.
Fausto used an opportunity to translate the official curriculum into Triqui,
forcing the teachers to use their own language in the classroom. Fausto
observed that every time the children asked their parents something about the
height of the Himalayas or about the geography of Africa for their homework,
the puzzled and humiliated parents failed to be of any help. He changed the
content of the curriculum, focusing on the local area. At first, the parents
were really happy; for they knew every river, every hill, every place in the
region, better than any book or teacher. They supported their homework with a more
dignified attitude. Soon, however, a new question emerged: why send their
chil-dren to the school, if the parents and community members know more about
the curriculum? They did not stop appreciating the fact that the teachers were
now recognizing and appreciating what was locally important in the kitchen or
the mi/pa, in the feasts or the communal assemblies. Their appreciation
notwithstanding, they realized that there now seemed even less reason for
‘“institutionalizing” their children, thereby preventing them from full
participation in community life.
“My education?” answers Fausto smiling; “do you mean my horas nalga
(arse hours)? the number of hours, months, years, I put my arse on a classroom
chair?”
Luis Arevalo lives in
Tepito, the vast barrio of downtown Mexico City. He is a shoemaker, a very good
one. He worked as a foreman for a big factory came back to Tepito and after
some time, as a personal and communal initiative, he founded the Free Workshop
of the Art of Shoemaking.
Education? I think that education is really bad information. Since we
were children, we were made to believe that there were coudillos idols, heroes.
. . . That is not true . . .
Instead of learning about something called
Independence and Revolution in the books and the school; we must look for our
independence and make our own personal revolution, for the things we can
change.
“How do people learn
in your workshop?”
We don’t have technicians
or teachers. There are some maestros who really know how to make shoes. And we
have young people that really want to learn. We focus on shoes: an art, not an
impossible science. The chows (affectionate Spanish slang for “boy”) can learn
that art here, if they really want to...
Some people come to learn even though they have another income . . .
even another profession. Some of them are unemployed; others are old people.
They learn how to make a living, how to keep their dignity, not to own more and
more, but to enjoy their time as their own and not as their bosses’ time . . .
and to really live.
Here, they learn
something more than making shoes . .
“And the school?”
I think it must disappear. If the parents and all the people can live
together more time, and thus become really independent, we will be able to
better resist the power of money.
To start, we need to use
our own hands and make with them what we want. Here, to talk about the family
is to talk about the community: in a sense, they are the same thing. It is
easier to rescue those that do not have a professional diploma. But in our real
world, we send diplomas to the garbage (Arevalo 3992).
Fernando Diaz Enciso is a brown man, short and robust. On the street of
Any Town he is indistinguishable. On the streets of Santo Domingo de los Reyes,
a vast barrio in the South of Mexico City, it is impossible not to notice him.
Here he has an invisible presence. He was a key element in its construction. He
came with the first group of settlers twenty-five years ago, in what was one
the biggest invasions of urban land in Latin America: in one night, 25,000 well
organized people “illegally” occupied this arid, hostile land at the back of
the University City, the pride of public and private developers who
“modernized” Mexico City: creating specialized spaces for everything (to study,
buy, sleep, work, socialize, commute . . .) interconnected by speedways-While
Mexico City was suffering this reformulation and transmogrification, the people
of Santo Domingo de los Reyes focused on putting down roots in a place they
could call their own. They transformed a hostile piece of potentially
commercial land into a home for 400,000 people. Fernando Diaz accompanied his
people in their epic of creating new commons. No one will call him a leader;
yet he dared to resist the authorities, sticking his neck out in their complex
struggles to build their homes, to illegally bring in electricity, and other
adventures needed to reclaim, nourish, and regenerate the autonomy of their
commons from the authorities.
Each group has its own way; its definitions come from daily life, not
from a theory. In Mexico, we are many cultures and we must respect each other,
exchange experiences, and learn from each other to defend ourselves from
modernity, which crushes us in ways increasingly irrational. There must be the
freedom of the communities to govern themselves, without sacrificing liberties.
I think that ‘community rights’ does not sacrifice personal liberties: the
communitarian includes the personal (Diaz 1992}.
After twenty years as a postman in Mexico City, Domingo Martinez was
invited by his village to the cargo of presidents municipal. Accepting this
traditional honor meant that he would lose the security of his job in the
institutional world. Despite two decades spent in the bureaucracy, it did not
take him long to opt for the security of raising his children in his
traditional commons. He became a conscious refusenik of the institutional world
in order to re-member with his small village commons near Oaxaca.
Javier Solis, a young member of the Solis family has returned to his
plot of land in San Pablo Etla, after three years in Mexico City and one in
California. Like Domingo, the postman, returning to San Pedro El Alto, Javier
is a dropout of both school and development ... a conscious refusenik saying
“No, thanks” at the right moment. Javier bought a yoke, reestablished his milpa
(the sacred center of crops grown in his commons), is topil—the lowest cargo in
the village—in San Pablo, plays in a rock band with four friends and is the
encabezado (the head of the procession) at the comparsa (masquerade) for the
celebration of the Day of the Dead, leading the preparatory activities for
several months. Milpa is not a technical activity of producing corn for him. He
is fully aware that it is, in more sense than one, anti-economic: economically
speaking, it could
be better to work for a salary (than be absorbed for days cultivating the
milpa) and buy state-subsidized corn. Re-embedding himself in agri [soil]
culture is not. for him, the attitude of a smart consumer or a smart producer.
He is re-embedding by remembering within a whole set of social relationships—
which keep the economy under communal control, subordinating it to cultural
patterns.
Solis, Diaz Enciso,
Martinez, like the Tepitans and countless others at the grassroots, are not
placing their hopes in NAFTA, the cultural identity of Mexico—if that
expression has any meaning—or national political projects; they are equally not
dwelling on the “problems” of Mexico City—an urban settlement that can not even
be conceived as a real entity, except for authoritarian purposes (Esteva 1991).
Unlike professionals, they are putting all their prodigious ingenuity and
talent into the regeneration of their physical and cultural soils; those living
matrias where they find freedom and rediscover their communal virtues.
People at the grassroots live in commons. Millions live in isolated
villages, far away in the mountains, where they have learned to resist
colonization and development in a thousand different ways. Millions of people
also live in the heart of the big cities, or at their outskirts; in the
downtowns of urban monsters like Mexico City or its periphery, in Tepito or
Santo Domingo de los Reyes, where they are reclaiming and regenerating their
new commons. The more creatively they regenerate their commons, the more easily
they go beyond education; transforming themselves: from dropouts to refuseniks.
Waking Up: Diplomas
in the Survival Kit?
Half of all the children
who enter Chicago’s public school system drop out before they can graduate from
high school. Worldwide, three quarters of all children who register in first
grade never reach the grade that the law of their country defines as a minimum
(Illich 1996, 257).
The worldwide bankruptcy of the educational system offers all the
evidence needed to wake up from the modern “dream of reason”; a non-virtual
nightmare for most of the people of the world. Travels to the Third World are
not necessary to study this bankruptcy. Schools located a few minutes driving
distance from the White House render naked the folly of following the First
World’s educational superhighway. From that epicenter of First World education,
“savage inequalities” spread with the virulence of AIDS to any and all cultures
which open themselves up to educational conversion.
Chicago’s catastrophic bankruptcy mirrors the educational system’s
reality, replicated all over the world. South of the border, in NAFTA’s Mexico,
for every 100 children entering primary school, only 62 conclude it and only 53
continue their studies. Only 40 conclude secondary school (three years) and
only 32 continue: 25 in college and 7 in some kind of professional training
(concluded only by 2.7). Only 15 of every 100 entering college conclude it and
only 11 continue. And only 2.5 complete higher education (which includes certification
for the professions—legal, medical, and engineering, among others]. While nine
years is the constitutional level of compulsory schooling, the national average
is frozen at less than six years. The upper and middle classes, however,
consume twelve to twenty years of schooling. It is an offense to
mention national averages among peoples left
destitute in the province of Chiapas by national or global development.
Yet, replicating the
educational leadership of the North, the system south of the border also offers
increasing employment to the “fixers’1 of the system that
manufactures mass graves for those whose souls it shreds. Instead of generating
shame among professionals, the problems-to-be-fixed are lucratively used for
generating more business than usual. Professionals prefer not to publicly point
out that the educational project is catastrophic, unjust, even apocalyptic.
Hope comes from humor. At the grassroots, we find people laugh more than
those at the Center or the Top. Perhaps it-is time to draw on their humor to
leaven the pathos, tempering the misery and injustice perpetrated globally by
education. “Education for all” is the hilarious global catechism of the World
Bank, the government, the political parties, and all the disabling professions
wearing the mask of care. The mask does not take long to peel off as one
closely studies the recent research of experts, widely diffused by the Mexican
Ministry of Education. This research establishes that three people (such as
teachers, writers, janitors, secretaries, builders of schools, counselors,
etc.) are needed for every seven students of any grade. Given that 70 percent
of Mexicans “lack” school, 30 percent of the people must give up their useful
lives to “educate” the other 70 percent— the majority of whom are doomed to
drop out!!!
Common women, men, and even children—their common sense and cultural
imagination not dulled by education—need no statistician to know that the
“caring” slogans of international institutions or of governments seeking
re-election are laughable empty promises. “Education for all?” In the 1950s,
the UNESCO experts, full of the development fervor fostered by Truman in 1949,
considered that the main obstacle to education in Latin America was the lack of
interest in it because of the mis educated priorities of the poor and the
illiterate. Ten years later, the experts were profiting from a different
conclusion: the obstacle, declared the latest diagnosis, is that no Latin
American state could ever meet the educational demand. Their educational
budgets cannot comply with the social claims and demands for this basic human
need and right that they helped to promote.
Despite the increased awareness of the damage done to people and places
by schools, the demand for schooling has not declined. Nine out of every ten
Mexicans between six and fourteen years of age attend school. With a success
like that of the Coke and Pepsi promotions, schools have created a national
demand for their product. Mexico passed from the fourth to the fifth grade in
the average schooling of Mexicans, while the government raised compulsory
schooling to nine years. There are no dog catchers in Mexico. Compulsory
national education, here as in other “underdeveloped” countries, is not an
enforced constitutional right. The social and psychological pressures;
effective when associated with the universality of the American dream,
are now mere leftover customs: one of several modern inertia of daily life.
Schooling remains, for millions of young people at the grassroots, a
ritual passage, the modern “rain dance.” Increasing millions are, however,
aware that the passage is blocked. Schools are a road to Nowhere; diplomas
guarantee nothing, neither learning nor jobs; neither status nor prestige;
rather than correct inequalities, they perpetrate them. At the same time, they
are discovering other rituals or practices that may take them more
effectively toward
useful work that they can share with their parents and other members of the
extended family; toward creative and productive lives in their own contexts and
communities. These contexts are creating countless uses for their talents and
skills.
Diplomas may still be in demand all over Mexico. They offer, however,
little if any employment insurance. Earlier on, employers raised school
requirements for the jobs they were offering, under the illusion of getting
better workers. Having discovered, however, the low productivity of a
frustrated college graduate working as a janitor, clerk, cook, technician, or
mailman, they are now reducing these requirements. The social role of diplomas
to sort and shift is rapidly changing.
Years ago, some of us campaigned for legislation imposing ten years of
jail upon anyone demanding a diploma to qualify for work. In the debates
generated by these campaigns, the central conclusion was that most students
will abandon education once diplomas become an illegal currency. These debates
revealed the extended awareness of the people that schools and universities are
not really places for learning useful skills or for “socialization”—as it is
called. They are principally places for procuring diplomas, which guarantee
nothing in terms of skillfulness or hard work and responsible character yet
still carry the illusion of avoiding grim disaster.
After our failures at making diplomas illegal, we have sought to escape
them by following other routes in the exact opposite direction: we now give
diplomas to anyone learning any useful skill—especially those mastered
autonomously in a matter of a few hours of study with a non-expert. After three
days in our workshops on dry latrines, for example, young people now receive a
big, beautiful diploma certifying them as “Experts in Alternative Sanitation.”
If you cannot beat them, join them, they say. One possible route for escaping
the diploma game is through its multiplication—thus widening access to those
who do not want to or cannot attend school. Our three-day diplomas and other
certificates offer immediate access to creative and profitable occupations. We
have even received support for our endeavors from the system of “open
education,” created by the government for “adult learners.” Students can
receive certification equivalent to three or six years in a few months of study
in community workshops we have participated in at the grassroots.
“What is this business of the university?”—rhetorically asked don
Ricardo, a prosperous peasant of San Jose de Gracia, in Michacan, a few years
ago. His son, a lawyer in Mexico City, had come to visit him at the same time
that we were there. Explaining his failure to get a job as a lawyer, his son
was mentioning examples of friends with credentials who were driving taxis or
tending stalls in Mexico City. His experiences revealed his own situation to be
the rule, rather than the exception. ‘For twenty years,” argued don Ricardo,
the whole family sacrificed itself to give you a profession. We were proud of
your success in the school. The community celebrated your prize as the best
student of your generation. We were deeply satisfied with our success in offering
you an opportunity for escaping from the miserable destiny of a poor peasant;
for leaving our poor community. And now twenty years after all this effort, I
am receiving in just one growing season more than you can get in a year. Look
at your brother. I am sure he is eating better than you. What is this business
of the university?
He smiled. It was obvious to all that he was neither blaming his son,
nor expressing frustration or impotence. We perceived, in fact, a certain
dignity in his face, reflecting a
reconsideration of
his own life, of the conditions offered in his place. Lacking a diploma was no
longer for him a source of shame, a deficiency. His own childhood patterns for
social recognition were being reestablished; beginning to make a return and be
revalued.
Don Ricardo’s family story is repeated in peasant households across the
country. In the early 1970s, the populist government of Luis Echeverria proudly
announced a new educational system for peasants’ sons. Decentralized technical
schools were to train them for bringing industrial agriculture to their
communities; contributing to the technical and economic revolution that the
country needed.
Ten years later, more than 90 percent of the graduates of this system
abandoned their communities and were working for a public agency—usually in the
lowest ranks of the bureaucracy—in different parts of the country. Their
peasant origin qualified them to better disseminate the practices of the Green
Revolution, promoted by the Mexican government with the support of the World
Bank.
But then came the Third World debt crisis. Mexico’s mounting debts to
the First World put petty bureaucrats off the payroll; in the middle of
nowhere; abandoned by the institutions that manufactured them with brilliant
promises. They were taken by surprise. More than anger or frustration, they
suffered disbelief. What happened to all the promises they heard in school
about their brilliant modern destiny . . . careers . . . permanent job security
…. escaping the seasonal security of peasant life?
Following a period of confusion, they woke up to the brute fact that
they were not in some temporary down slope, soon to be reversed by the
development economists. This was no short-run economic cloudburst after which
the professional experts would put them back on the road to the promised land
of development. Long before the economists recognized that the golden years of
the Mexican miracle were gone forever, the people came down to earth to rely
again on their common sense.
Renouncing the careers of “zootaxistas” (for zootecnista, zootechnician)
or “peterinarians” (veterinarians for pets), many reentered the communities of
their childhood. Others settled in the regions they discovered when they had
careers. They “peasantized” themselves again, using whatever they learned in
their bureaucratic pilgrimage which had brought them in contact with peasants
of different parts of the country. Their parents’ traditions helped them to
create new niches, within communities or peasant organizations, applying their
skills to organize all sorts of initiatives: cooperatives for the production of
honey; greenhouses; set up experimental fields in communal lands to test
different local varieties of corn. In some communities they attempted
experiments for the regeneration of the soil all too quickly depleted after the
use of agro-chemicals; they also contributed to improved methods of organic
agriculture
... In the majority of cases, they began looking for and
finding new places inside their communities, opening new paths beyond the
bureaucratic dead ends their education had led them into.
The modern system of agriculture—the product of education and
development—itself started to collapse: there were no longer budgets for
agricultural experiments, for the school labs, for practices in the fields,
even for books, paper, or pencils, Teachers and researchers, as well as the
18,000 students that the system had enrolled in the early 1990s, suffered
paralysis and impotence for awhile, compelling them to associate themselves
again with their communities. Brought down to earth from their heights of
educated
arrogance, for the
first time since their careers were launched did they really begin to be of
service to their commons. Their increasing dependence on subsistence changed
the whole orientation of their endeavors. They asked the peasants how they
could be of some use, instead of telling them what they must do. They used the
school labs for the experiments or analyses suggested by the peasants, with
materials provided by the latter, rather than applying bureaucratic
instructions or waiting for budgets that never arrived. A new, promising
perspective started to dawn on their professional and economic horizons.
They made, as Schumacher once put it, a good thing out of a bad thing.
In suggesting this, we don’t want to go any further in repeating here another
modern horror story about the Green Revolution. That story, spawned by the
marriage of education and development, was fed to millions. They were taught to
prize education as the way of escaping the hard, wretched, and poor life of the
peasant. That failed and disastrous tale, with its ecological and social
devastation, is by now well documented, extensively examined and described. One
would need to be very blind or very rich, very stubborn or very immoral, to
keep one’s eyes closed to the destructive impact of that monstrous experiment
of development and education devastating soil cultures everywhere, in North and
South.
Emerging Coalitions
of Discontents
In the landscape of burgeoning initiatives at the grassroots, we are
discovering the emergence of new coalitions of discontents. Dropouts are
transforming themselves into refuseniks. The ranks of refuseniks are growing
due to the accretions of non-dropouts.
Among the refuseniks are pre-institutionalized people—those who have
never been included in any institutional coverage; those never exposed to
medical services or a school; those who ignored “the job market” because they
never asked for a job nor were ever near the possibility of being accepted for
one; those that are still without automobiles—self-moved—because they use their
feet or their bicycles to move around and do not perceive a “need for
transportation,” even if they do occasionally ride in the decrepit local bus
that takes them to the only town of their municipio- those who never did
acquire any real dependency on the Market or the State, because they knew they
could only rely upon their communities for a dignified livelihood; those that
have no access to the ‘’modern marvels” of TV or the supermarkets; those that
live without access to institutional services, because they have neither
“needs” nor “rights”; those never solicited to make consumer claims . . .
Those de-Institutionalized, on the other hand, were once incorporated
into the institutions of the modern -economy, later becoming deprived; those
who lost their jobs and see no prospect of being included ever again in any
payroll; dropouts of different grades of schooling, unable to continue their
studies, for economic reasons; those that lost, with their jobs, their social
security rights; those who can no longer use their credit cards or closed their
checking accounts after losing their source of income; those who never got the
house they applied for from their union, their company, their barrio , . . All
the peasant sons who were abandoned in the middle of nowhere in the 1980s
intimately know this experience of “de-institutionalization.” Their ranks are
increasing every day. In 1995 alone, a million Mexicans lost their jobs—thanks
to the “crisis” of globalization and development.
That “crisis” helped these two groups of discontents to start looking in
other directions, nourishing new hopes. Instead of clamoring for inclusion or
reinclusion, they have started to avoid the traps laid by institutional
promises of security. In the midst of their frustrations and disappointments,
they are finding new opportunities for freedom; new possibilities for remaining
outside institutional jails. Some have already discovered creative, joyful, and
independent activities after being sacked from a monotonous, underpaid job; to
apply again those skills disvalued in the economic boom. Peasants deprived of
their previous access to the official credit are now intercropping again, thus
enriching their lives and their soils. Former managers or employees are
candidly ques-tioning themselves on how they could previously accept a future
of permanent slavery to the office dock and institutional norms. There are even
those who keep their diplomas a secret in worlds where an interesting stigma is
attached to these. There are also those puzzling over the fact that they no
longer need the medical perks of the company doctor.
These groups of discontents listen with particular interest to the
emerging arguments about institutional counter productivity. Refuseniks of
education—bored or burned-out— share stories with victims of the other
professions: those who became infertile growing bananas for agribusiness; the
scores who lost their babies or got cancer once the new business, promising
lots of new jobs, came into town; those who got hepatitis or AIDS in a
hospital; or those who discovered, with infinite anger, that the C-section or
the appendectomy they suffered was unnecessary; those wondering if the cancer
treatment they took was really worth it; those that can stay at home, when they
are sick, and discover that fever, rather than antibiotics, is better for
healing from most infections; those who rediscover the pleasure of walking or
bicycling, in their own barrios, after resigning from the distant job to which
they were transported; those learning that they will never be able to work in
what they studied or discover the obsolescence or uselessness of what they
learned in the school, but are thriving in a creative occupation after a short
period of apprenticeship; those escaping from obesity or prescribed diets after
substituting industrial junk for real comic/a; those finding alternative
solutions within the extended family to the messy condition of their divorce
after three years in the hands of lawyers and litigation . . .
This collection of discontents constitutes a motley multitude of highly
diverse characters. Unknown and ordinary people are joined by some famous
names, Nobel Prize winners, poets, painters, deprofessionalized intellectuals
of every kind. And we are sure that you have a few friends or relatives for
inclusion in this list—those who laugh when they hear of “sustainable
development”; or who warn their neighbors about a new threatening class of
ecocratic rulers. If they share strong convictions, it is usually about what
they do not want: what they are firmly opposing. And while some may be cynical,
many more are festive discontents—even when they cannot share with their former
colleagues what they are discovering and enjoying. Some others share a silence—
a solid silence; a committed, concerned silence before events or policies that
throw a shadow on their hopes. While these shadows dampen their spirits, they
also foster new hopes: a renewed sense of urgency for further extending their
existing coalitions.
Apart from the pre- or de-institutionalized discontents, there are
refuseniks whose institutional affiliations continue in discomfort; posing for
them the painful schizophrenia of daily performing at a job while seeing
through the facade of productivity it proffers to the outside world. This group
of discontented refuseniks gets to be even more disparate
and, therefore,
difficult to classify. Often its members are accused of being hypocrites: of
continuing to do what gives them grief. We are talking about disparate groups
of people profoundly discontented with the market or the state as mechanisms
for the social control of the means of production, the allocation of resources,
or the distribution of the fruits of the collective effort. Many of them talk
about injustice, inefficiency, corruption, environmental destruction, violence,
selfishness, isolation . . . They are thus using the same words that any decent
citizen may use to describe our present world. But they constitute a special
category of people, because they do not have any hope for the reform of the
present system. Some applaud the Unabomber while others wince with the anguish
suffered by those committed to Gandhian nonviolence and satyagraha. They do not
think that any cocktail, combining specified doses of market mechanisms and
State interventions, can overcome our current predicaments. They are afraid of
both the failure or the success of the reforms being proposed or implemented,
in Cuba or Mexico, Russia or the United States, Poland or South Africa, China
or India; with any ideology or any catechism, following the inspiration of the
IMF, the World Bank or the Pope, Yeltsin or Clinton, Jacques Delors or the late
Jacques Cousteau. Greenpeace or the Rio crowd; they are afraid that everyone and
all of these reforms will be basically counterproductive— generating the
opposite of what they are looking for. Although many of them are very active,
politically speaking, most of them consciously refuse to participate in any
political party, any bureaucracy, any formalized structure of “power.” For this
reason, they are frequently classified among the “silent majority”: those who
are disillusioned with or marginalized by “the world as it is,” but have not
been able to transform their discontent into awareness and strength.
The members of this class of discontents share a firm and clear
conviction of the need to establish political controls over the characteristics
of industrial products and the intensity of professional services. They have
arrived at this conviction taking many different paths: sadness at seeing a
devastated natural environment which they earlier experienced as flourishing;
anguish before the behavior of their offspring after a few years of school and
TV; frustration in the face of political betrayals or corruption; anxiety
experiencing increased violence and injustice; fear living as they might next
to a nuclear plant similar to the one in Chernobyl or Three Mile Island;
ethical confusion, before genetic engineering; simple human horror before fetal
manipulation. In some of them, the recent collapse of dominant ideologies
helped to foster their new awareness. A few may have started to read
Schumacher, Amory Lovins, Thomas Kuhn or the Rome Club Reports; some others
were able to continue their search in Goodman; Polanyi, Ellul, Kohr (1992),
Gandhi, Ludwig Fleck, Ivan Illich . . . Some are socialists. Others are former
socialists who do not want to throw the baby out with the bath water. They love
to remind us about Marx’s warning that “the devaluation of the human world
increases in direct relation with the increase of value in the world of
things,” and that the focus on useful things will bring the overproduction of
useless people. They remain faithful to the ideals of justice, through the
social control of the means of production and the fair distribution of the
fruits of the collective effort. But they have abandoned their earlier hope in
the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, the role of revolutionary
vanguards or the belief in nationalization, collectivization, or slogans like
“power to the masses.”
Among this motley crowd, we find honest liberals—liberated from the
obsession of fighting communism after the demise of the Soviet Union—now openly
recognizing that
market forces are
no solution. They share with former socialists a reinforced commitment to
democracy, while recognizing that no democratic regime can effectively deal
with the present challenges—if government continues to be about the
centralized, grand-scale, bureaucratic allocation of resources, and
suffrage—the carpet bagging of hopes, claims, and rights; and the economy
continues to be at the center of politics and ethics. Whether socialists or
liberals, they challenge the a critical idea that whatever is technically
possible must be done; that any technological feat should be reproduced; that
science or technology is intrinsically neutral; that progress in the quantity
or the quality of social products and services can be infinite. They are thus
consciously opposing the “technological imperative.”
Whatever their ideological source or affiliation, these discontents
resist all invitations to embrace one or another variety of “global thinking.”
For their disenchantment with a long line of well-known “isms” has taught them
that all those who have ‘thought globally” (and among them the most successful
have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by
means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought.
. . Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it:
reduce it, make a bauble of it (Berry 1991a, 61).
They also smell that power is something different from what is usually
assumed. Abandoning the myth of Kings or Party Presidents, they suspect that
Power is not something that can be found in a certain place, something that
certain people have, something that may be reached, taken, conquered, seized,
grabbed. Rather than the illusory pursuit of Power, through peaceful or violent
means, to have it or to have an influence on it, they have started to believe
that power may be omnipresent, but not because it encompasses all, as
authoritarian thinking believes, but because it stems from everywhere: it is
constituted and flows in the form of webs of ever-changing forces. Assuming
that ‘:true statements” are not right or wrong statements, but
statements through which people govern themselves and others, they are focusing
their interest on the institutional regime for the production of truth— a focus
that paves the way for the autonomous production of truth (Foucault, 1977).
Escaping the educated imagination in search of ordinary common sense,
these discontents recognize that political limits to technological designs and
professional services can only be formulated, expressed, and implemented based
on free and voluntary personal initiatives and decisions, and through community
agreements. Very, very gradually, their gaze has begun to shift: instead of
taking “the whole of society” as a reference, they are recognizing in all such
political and intellectual orientations a dangerous trap. They are suspicious
of abstract thinking when it is articulated as misplaced concreteness. They
prefer to concentrate their thinking, imagination, and initiatives at the local
level; in their concrete spaces; in their soils. They are learning anew what it
is to walk on their own feet; to trust again their own noses rather than some
institutional authority. They are fully exerting the ‘’powers of the weak”
(Janeway 1980), the “power of the powerless” (Havel 1985).
They share the intuition that our generation has lost its grounding in
both soil and virtue. If virtue is that shape, order, and direction of action
informed by tradition, bounded by place, and qualified by choices made within
the habitual reach of the actor, if it is practice mutually recognized as being
good within a shared local culture which
enhances the memories of place, then virtue can only
flourish in local spaces, among communities of peoples who recognize each other
and share ideals of self-limitation (Groeneveld, Hoinacki, Illich, and friends
1991).
The different varieties of discontents are discovering paths of return
and remembrance in their matria, their motherland. Migrants who come back from
New York or Los Angeles do not come back to their patria, their fatherland;
they come back to their place, their soil, their community, their matria.
Rerooting themselves, they take creative new steps in escaping the certainties
of development, progress and education; recovering their own truths—with
growing confidence.
The Return of the
Incarnated Intellectual
Stories of recovery and regeneration are profuse and generously abundant
at the grassroots. Suffering scarcities of stories is inconceivable there. Our
focus has been limited for the most part to those whose education led them not
to prestigious professions, but toward the jobs of petty bureaucrats in the
bloating bureaucracy of the State—on its way from underdevelopment towards
development. Now we turn to stories of deprofessionalization for the return and
recovery of incarnated intellectuals.
We find incarnated intellectuals mostly at the grassroots. Among the
most articulate of our experiences, we have discovered some in the Peruvian
Andes. Proyecto Andino de Tecnologias Campesinas (PRATEC) was started by a
small group of development professionals in Peru, with brilliant careers. These
intellectuals were part of the first generation of non-elite Peruvians of
peasant origin with access to a university education.
After several decades spent as successful professionals of development
and education, they could not close their eyes to the damage and destruction
done by their professions to Peruvian peasants and other common people,
imposing profoundly alien western ideas and practices upon them.
Deprofessionalizing themselves, they began sharing their new understanding with
their colleagues and previous “clients,” revealing to them the violence and
counter productivity of the epistemologies and ontologies embedded in
economically developing the underdeveloped. They started reaffirming the
regeneration of Andean agriculture and other traditions occurring in peasant
movements throughout the country. As part of their solidarities with the
people, these intellectuals began to deprofessionalize themselves: decolonizing
themselves of their educated cosmovision, defined by development and other
western myths; abandoning the disciplinary concepts and methods they had
embraced, starting in primary school and all the way into the university.
Relearning to articulate Andean ideas and practices continues to be a
part of their deprofessionalization. For the recovery of their Andean world in
its own terms, they relied first on remembering their experiences within their
own families and communities; re-experiencing these by joining peasants, both
in their social movements and in their daily living. Clearly embedded in the
daily lives and practices of their new commons, their writings and research
carefully keep clear of producing “scientific knowledge.”
Science is founded on a clear separation and opposition between humans
and nature and between the knowing subject and the known object. For science,
culture is an exclusively human attribute and precisely the quality that makes
human and nature different . . . Here [in the Andean-world], conversation
cannot be reduced to dialogue, to
the word, as in the
modern western world but rather here conversation engages us vitally: one
converses with the whole body. To converse is to show oneself reciprocally, it
is to share, it is to commune, it is to dance to the rhythm which at every
moment corresponds to the annual cycle of life. Conversation assumes all the
complication characteristic of the living world. Nothing escapes conversation.
Here there is no privacy. Conversation is inseparable from nurturance. For
humans, to make chacra, that is to grow plants, animals, soils, waters,
climates, is to converse with nature. But in the Andean-Amazonian world, all,
not only humans, make and nurture the chacra, all nurture. The human chacra is
not only made (or nurtured) by humans, rather all, in one way or another,
participate in the creation/nurturance of the human chacra: the sun, the moon,
the stars, the mountain, the birds, the rain, the wind . . . even the frost and
the hail (Grille quoted in Appfel Marglin, forthcoming).
“Conversing with nature”
is not metaphoric or symbolic. It fully assumes the non-dualism of the Andean
world. PRATEC rejects any and every form of commodified knowledge.
We are a living world. We
live nurturing and letting ourselves be nurtured. We live the immediacy of
familiarity, of nurturance, of tenderness; we love the world as it is. Here
there is no separation between man and nature. Here we do not want to transform
the world: we are not a world of knowledge, we are not the world of technology.
Here neither subject nor object, nor ends and means, nor abstraction belong
(Appfel Marglin. forthcoming).
Like the Zapatistas in
Mexico, PRATEC members reject formal political organizations which “would
fetter the decentralized creative capacity required by the task of
decolonization.” Rerooting themselves in their own physical and cultural soils,
they affirm themselves, ‘’dispensing with having recourse to the colonial
authorities, breaking with the colonial authorities, leaving them thus without
function and obsolete” (Appfel Marglin, forthcoming}.
Frederique Apffel Marglin,
reflecting on the difference between PRATEC’s deconstruction of modern western
knowledge and academic postmodern critiques of modernity, observes:
PRATEC’s critique of modern western knowledge first of all is a critique
of the knowledge acquired by themselves and all other educated Peruvians in
schools and universities; it is therefore an autocritique or rather a process
of mental decolonization. Most pertinently, that critique is made from a point
of view rooted in Andean cultures. In fact PRATEC’s discourse on “Cultural
Affirmation” is a bifocal one since they became aware that no cultural
affirmation can take place without simultaneously engaging in a process of
mental decolonization. This is in part so because just about every so-called
descriptive category is loaded with modern western cultural baggage. This work
enables the members of PRATEC to speak of modern western knowledge from the
perspective of their own world views and ways of life ( 1995).
The firm stance of
PRATEC’s members against school and education comes from seeing in the Andes
its abject failures—not in the conventional terms about quality or,
quantity—due to the successes of Andeans in continuing to be who and what they
are: resilient, complicated, subtle, and unpredictable; of a world which
“continues to live as a living totality and a re-creation in spite of the
school”
that the colonizers do all
that they can so that the school is substituted for the Andean way. This
compulsive, fundamentalist spirit is what damages, erodes, and causes problems
for the harmonious recreation of life. But its victories . . . have been momentary;
they have not achieved the death of nurturing. Such that in spite of the
worldwide enterprise for development and education, the Andean world is one of
the most diverse on the planet . . . And in the middle of a crisis of modernity
and of the educational system, both locally and worldwide, the Andean people
recover their spaces (Rengifo in Appfel Marglin, forthcoming).
While delving deep into
the depths of their own traditions, PRATEC’s members show how they are nurtured
by the ideas of Illich in their journeys of deprofessionalization. These
journeys are also taking them far from home through new solidarities and
networks with other Centers for Mutual Learning (CML) in several parts of the
world (Apffel Marglin 1995).
To end for now our
description of incarnated intellectuals, we briefly meditate on the life and
learning of Don Fidel Palafox. His story illustrates one among many different
types of recovery occurring at the grassroots; of people healing themselves
from the damage of education and development. We tell his story not because it
offers any paradigm for cultural recovery and regeneration. Instead, precisely
because of its singularity and particularity, it offers a flavor of the
diversity of initiatives we savor and enjoy in the lived pluriverse.
Don Fidel Palafox, a peasant, lives in the State of Tlaxcala, north of
Mexico City, where he was born in 1895. He started to work on the land when he
was fourteen years old. For more than eighty years, don Fidel Palafox nurtured
the land and was nurtured by it. He spent half of his life “administering”
different haciendas, all in the same region. As a careful and patient observer
of natural processes and peasant practices, he continued to experiment with
ways of improving the relationship between people and their land. Once he felt
his experience was mature enough to be useful for others, he started to write
down what he had learned. He was then forty years old. After his work was concluded,
however, he resisted publishing it for four decades, in spite of the insistence
of his friends. Finally, in 1988, presented with new pressures, he accepted
publication. At ninety-eight, he had two more books ready to go to print.
We pause to reflect on the historical sequence creating these three
different sets of conditions: those fostering in don Fidel the impulse for
writing, those creating his resistance to publish his writings, and those
finally overcoming that resistance.
Don Fidel’s book is a
jewel of peasant wisdom, a brief encyclopedia of placed knowledge. “Told” in
simple language, through the pertinent use of local, vernacular expressions,
don Fidel organizes and systematizes his lifelong observations and experiences.
He describes carefully, with patience and rigor, sensible agricultural
practices for the region he learned to know so well. He wrote the book in the
early 1940s, just after the agrarian reform of President Cardenas, when the
people were full of hope, dreaming again their own dreams.
But then came the Green Revolution. He saw around him the invasion of
alien practices and the devaluation of peasant knowledge. Compesino, a word
symbolizing
dignity, became a
bad word. Campesino is peasant, paysan—a word that has had derogatory
connotations for a long time. It comes from the Latin, pagensis—ager, the
territory of a pagus or canton, the country. In early uses, the word peasant
was used for foreign countries and connoted the lowest rank. It was antithetical
to the noble or the prince, and also had inferential connotations of serf or
villain.
Because of the development
of his place, don Fidel, a wise peasant, learned that peasant knowledge, like
the rest of his world, was a “left-over.” He did not dare to publish his book
when the very quality of his life, the treasure of wisdom he was trying to put
in written words, was not only disqualified but doomed to extinction. It was
publicly paraded as a straitjacket for peasants like don Fidel, a chain trapping
them in their undesirable past.
But then came the Third World debt crisis, with its decade of
development lost. New peasant initiatives emerged. A new ethos, beyond
development and education, appeared everywhere. Peasants began revaluing their
world. A peasant leader, a woman, became the Governor of Tlaxcala, the province
in which don Fidel worked during his whole life.
This Governor and other
friends begged don Fidel to publish the book. He finally accepted. He has
refused to die before finishing his work. He knows many of us long to learn
from his wisdom.
But What to Do with
the Children?
Philipe Aries (1962) and others reveal that childhood is a very recent
invention. All kinds of economic and political pressures—including compulsory
schooling or the legal control of so-called “child labor”—continue to be
exerted upon the people, forcing them to accept the transmogrification of their
offspring into childish beings.
The resistance of the social majorities to this specific form of
colonization has succeeded for the most part. Their daughters and sons, nieces,
nephews, and godchildren are accepted as full members of their communities
rather than individuals whose childishness must be justified as a necessary
feature of teens, preteens, and post-teens.
At the grassroots, children are really desired, not only in emotional
terms but as responsible members of the household—sharing work, obligations,
and predicaments as well as opportunities for enjoyment. Far from being irrelevant
or an economic burden, they constitute the very center of family life. Among
peasants or marginals, the question of what to do with the children, how to
entertain them, how to get rid of them, cannot even be posed or conceived.
Radical differences distinguish the family life of the social majorities from
that of other social classes.
Wearing the spectacles of economists and other professionals, we can
objectively conclude that children are highly profitable investments for their
underdeveloped parents. After the first two or three years of life (in which
the mother provides most of the food needed, and other expenses for the child
continue to be limited), the new member of the household and commons starts to
contribute towards their sustenance, In other social classes, in contrast,
“children” and young people represent a heavy “investment”. Professionals we
know personally bemoan the fact that, given how expensive daycare and other
services have become, they have to postpone bearing a child till they can
economically afford to have one.
What this economic mind
hides, however, is that the “care” and “protection” of children in the modern
context, in fact, disables them: represents a radical discrimination against a
vast group of people, explicitly excluded for years from a robust participation
in family and community life, doomed to confinement in “caring” institutions
which additionally disable them (Illich and Kenneth 1977).
This situation is better understood if the size of the family is also
considered. The so-called nuclear family—a creation of the economy-has already
appeared in Mexico. The number of families of four or five members, like the
middle classes, constantly increased in the last decades, and now represents a
third of the population. Fortunately the extended family still prevails. Half
of Mexican families still have more than five members; 10 percent have more
than ten members. To complete this picture, it must be considered that these
figures refer to the household. In both urban and rural families, several
households belonging to the same family often live in the same neighborhood at
the grassroots. This brings the numbers of the extended family up to several
dozen. In the villages, families of 50 or 100 members, living close to each
other, are far from being the exception.
Dwellers of the land still live in a commons. After all these years of
expert analyses on emigration through development, the last census revealed
that six out of every ten Mexicans still live in the province in which they
were born. In the 1980s, the decade with the highest rate of migration between
provinces, when a fifth of the population changed their place of residence, a
number of them were coming back to their province of origin. These flows are in
clear contrast with the American pattern where every person changes his/her
place of residence seven times, on an average. If the figures in their coldness
tell anything, they establish radical differences between developed “residents”
and underdeveloped “dwellers” of the land. [Orr 1992]
Questions about what to do with the children at the grassroots cannot be
conceived as problems or challenges, or, even less, as requiring imported
caring institutions. Bypassing education and giving up childhood, peoples at
the grassroots are not renouncing the joys and pleasures of having children;
nor are they renouncing the natural human act of learning—through living and
doing. Quite the opposite. Keeping alive their own cultures, regenerating their
cultural spaces, they are recovering historical continuities damaged by
education; they are enriching and multiplying their opportunities for learning
and strengthening every form of cultural initiation.
They refuse to mimic
developed peoples’ goal of no demographic growth—a condition that they cannot
conceive. There has been a radical change in their “reproductive patterns.” The
annual rate of demographic growth in Mexico fell almost to a half in the last
twenty years. But it still was 2 percent in 1990, Mexican women still have an
average of 2.5 children, and Mexico’s population will double every thirty-five
years.
In many rural villages, the first birthday is celebrated when the child
is three years old. That very day, accepted as a full member of the community,
the child begins participating in most community activities: births, deaths,
feasts, funerals ‘and all the regular rituals of a rich cultural life, becoming
part of productive, religious, or political activities. Two out of five
Mexicans are less than fourteen years old. If they were given the usual
professional treatments applied to modern childhood, they would suffer severe
discrimination. At
the grassroots, people have successfully learned not to renounce the freedoms
and opportunities for contributing to the community enjoyed by their children.
Dissolving Needs
When I was a child,
more than fifty years ago, remembers Gustavo,
the word ‘needs’ was only
used when, for example, my mother instructed me to ask where I might ‘make’
them, while visiting a house where, not having been there before, we did not
know the location of the latrine. Nobody would have considered a school, a
health center, a book, or a telephone as a ‘need.’
Twenty years ago, when a presidential pre-candidate was organizing
Public Assemblies of Investment all over Mexico to promote his nomination, he
arrived in a remote village of central Mexico. On one side, there were the
officials of almost every agency, setting up their shop windows to display all
the goods and services they had to offer. On the other side, there were the
representatives of the communities sent to expose their “needs”: potable water,
credits, roads, schools, jobs. . . the whole repertoire of petitions. Almost at
the end, don Chuy spoke. “We are so poor,” he said, “that we don’t have any of
the needs mentioned by our companeros. We only want to continue living. But now
they are preventing us from even that.”
Almost everyone laughed at don Chuy’s expression, remembers Gustavo,
attributing it to the poverty of his language ... to typical peasant ignorance.
Later, in conversation with don Chuy, his vocabulary, rich in vernacular
textures, revealed how his people had suc-ceeded in preventing the development
discourse from invading and polluting their perceptions; how they still
possessed the words of those who have not lost their grounding in their own
soil. Don Chuy’s people did not have “needs1': they were busy enough
with living, fully aware of the restrictions imposed on the human condition.
They supported their own initiatives for the most part, allowing them to
flourish and endure on their own terms. For some new experiments, they were
requesting a small loan. But no institution responded to their request: the
loan requested was too small and failed to focus on the “needs”— basic and
other—that constitute the package of development.
“Needs,” in its modern meaning, did not appear with development. It
emerged with capitalism and modernity, when the enclosure of the commons, in
England, created the conditions for the transmogrification of humans into
“needy” beings; when scarcity was established as the organizing principle of
social life, disembedding the economy from the culture, and instituting it as
an autonomous sphere at the center of politics and ethics.9
The pursuit of education and development, in the postwar era, brought
“needs’” to the center of the western political discourse, giving new appeal to
the term. It became the educated man’s word: the most appropriate to designate
the moral relations between strangers in a world dreamt up of welfare states
(Ignatieff 1984; Illich in Sachs 1992). The concept, hopefully, will not last
much longer. It provided managers with a philanthropic rationale for the
destruction of cultures. Furthermore, it is now being replaced by the new
emblem of “basic requirements,” under which the latest global project—”survival
of the earth”—can be justified.
Since the 1970s,” all the failures of development concurrently fostered
new labels to renovate that myth, even when acknowledging its limits and
contradictions. Paul Streeten
showed that
successes in reaching the goals of economic growth were the cause of hunger and
misery. He thus proposed the Basic Needs Approach, as an effort parallel to
development, if the conditions of the social majorities were to be improved
(Streeten 1979). Given the limits to growth, identified by the Club of Rome
(Meadows [and others] 1972), new campaigns were launched for giving
underdeveloped peoples at least the fulfillment of their ‘’basic needs.”
Manfred Max-Neef shaped in “alternative” terms his design for the “other”
development (Dag Hammarsjold Foundation 1975). These orientations put aside any
critical debate about development, permeating most strategies and programs ever
since.
Today, it is not easy to
challenge the modern premise of needs, so well rooted in the educated mind.
Only a few have perceived the historicity of the present notion: the way it has
transformed the perception of human nature, in the last 50 years:
transmogrifying homo sapiens into a needy man; transforming a dimension which
is part and parcel of the human condition—its limitations, its radical
immersion in its environment—into dependence on the market economy and
addiction to specific goods and services defined as “needs” (Illich 1977).
To go beyond education and
development means learning to abandon the path of progress that creates “needs”
where previously none existed, it means escaping the mindset of “basic
needs”—including ;’the basic human need for education.” By
acknowledging the incommensurability of cultures, peoples liberated from the
obsessions of education and development are able to propose their own cultural
redefinitions of the good life. Any new universal formulation of “human needs”
threatens the lived pluriverse of the social majorities.
No new paradigm is needed
as a substitute for the needs that come with education and development.
Flourishing beyond the reign or need of education, different peoples and
cultures conceive incommensurable ideals of life and of social organizations in
the lived pluriverse.
Grassroots
Postmodernism
Postmodernism at the
grassroots describes an ethos of women and men who are liberating themselves
from the oppression of modern economic society. The reign of homo educandus and
homo oeconomicus go hand in hand. Liberation from the one cannot occur without
liberation from the other.
Learning to marginalize
the economy has nothing to do with suppressing money or stopping trade.
Similarly, learning to marginalize the educational system has nothing to do
with stopping the all-too-natural disposition of people to learn about life and
living in their contexts. It is finding cultural alternatives to the One World
(Sachs 1992} of education molded to exclude all other cosmovisions except that
of homo oeconomicus or homo educandus.
The political design establishing modern societies excised the economic
sphere from society and culture, while installing it as an autonomous domain at
the center of politics and ethics. That brutal and violent transformation,
first completed in Europe, has always been associated with colonial domination
in the rest of the world.
Grassroots postmodernism
(Esteva & Prakash 1997) opens windows to the initiatives of people for
regaining their autonomous cultural spheres from the clutches of the economy;
while reembedding it (to use the expression of Polanyi 1975) subordinating it
again to politics and ethics; marginalizing it—putting it at the margin—which
is, precisely, what the “marginals” are doing.
But what is being marginalized at the grassroots? It is the idea of
scarcity—a principle, a logic that they are marginalizing from the center of
life. It is not rarity, shortage, restriction, want, insufficiency, even
frugality. The sudden shortage of fresh air during a fire is not scarcity of
air in the economic sense. Neither is the self-imposed frugality of a monk, the
insufficiency of stamina in a boxer, the rarity of a flower, or the last
reserves of wheat mentioned by the Pharaoh in what is the first known
historical reference to hunger.
The “law of scarcity” was construed by economists to denote the
technical assumption that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas
his means are limited though improvable. The assumption implies choices about
the allocation of means (resources). This “fact” defines the “economic problem”
par excellence, whose “solution” is proposed by economists through the market,
the plan, or the state.
At the grassroots, we are learning what is involved in giving up that
assumption. Just that. An assumption. A belief, a statement through which many
people have been governing themselves and others. Marshall Sahlins (1972) and
Pierre Clastres (1987), among others, have given detailed and well documented
accounts of cultures in which noneconomic assumptions govern the lives of the people
and which reject the assumption of scarcity whenever it appears among them.
Our experiences at the grassroots reveal to us that this is not
something belonging to the past, something to remember, but a contemporary
practice among the social majorities. It is the very condition for their
survival. They are suffering, of course, all the damaging consequences of
economic development. They are not living out of the planet that is dominated
today by the economic assumptions of homo oeconomicus. They are fully immersed
in a world daily attacked by the economic plague. They need to struggle, day
after day, with the economic mind; with the economic invasion of their lives—
frequently supported by bulldozers and the police, always at the service of
development; with the thousand-and-one personifications of homo oeconomicus,
surrounding and frequently attacking them. But they do find support in their
own traditions, as they continue to challenge economic assumptions both in
theory and practice (Esteva 1993).
When learning and
knowledge are organized around the assumption of scarcity, the majority of
people at the grassroots are not only deprived of the proper access to the
“system” where the new commodity is kept under control by the “knowledge
capitalists,” the educated and their public or private bosses. Their own ways
of learning are also cancelled, reduced or devalued, and their wisdom, their
own relations with the world, are deprecated by the market.
Bypassing schooling and
education, the people are putting into proper perspective the professional
gateways, controlling who enters or exits from the centers of the economy. Some
might see this as either ignorance or a case of sour grapes. We have learned to
understand it as cultural autonomy.
The people are exercising the power of their cultures. These teach them
not to struggle for the security proffered by these economic centers. They also
see that education is not going to transport them to the upper echelons of
economic society’s pyramid of success.
Using their feet to walk around and beyond these, the people are keeping
alive their home economics—that nurtures, nourishes, and sustains them (Berry
1987, 1990, 1992). They are recovering and protecting their own ways of
teaching and learning—those that enrich and regenerate their commons and their
places of dwelling—where they gain their sense of place, their common sense
(Robert 1996).
Showing us how they
exercise their own powers, common women and men are also teaching us how to
dissolve for ourselves the “professional secrets” of educators: of “scarce”
knowledge capital, bought and sold to keep the economy going; to gain or
maintain institutional privilege.
The epic now evolving at
the grassroots, whose beginnings we roughly sketch, teaches us what it is to
live in commons beyond modernity. Or often against modernity, after escaping
education.
Notes
1. Many “mestizos” were not “legitimate”: they were
living and dying among the Indian peoples, accepted by them, but not by the
society of Spaniards, criollos, and “legitimate” mestizos.
2.
The expression “imaginary Mexico” is unfortunate, as Bonfil
himself recognized toward the end of his life; it would be more appropriate to
talk about the “fictitious Mexico.’’ Regarding the expression “deep Mexico”
(Mexico profundo—the expression adopted in the English edition of the book), it
has suffered a clear impoverishment in the use given to it by the media and by
daily conversation. In some sectors, it is “a vague denomination of an even
vaguer idea” (see Paz 1996). But Mexico profundo is a precise technical
category, theoretically delimited. There exist’ discrepancies as to its
pertinence and value, but it cannot be qualified as “vague,” that is, of
“indeterminate meaning or use.” As a sociological and anthropological category,
it can form part of a disciplined and rigorous analysis of reality and be the
object of empirical studies that put its usefulness to the test. Currently, it
fulfills an efficient function as the emblem of explicit political positions.
3. One of the main reasons for this lack is that a
political project, in the modern sense of the word, does not come naturally
from the vision of Mexico profundo. They cannot conceive such a system of
domination.
4.
For a long time, some sectors of these majorities
surrendered their will to the dominant projects because of the relative
“benefits” offered. They were happy enough not to be among the marginalized,
who for their part did not have sufficient strength to confront simultaneously
the dominant minorities and these strata of majorities who had allowed
themselves to be seduced by the minorities. The ranks of the marginalized, who
under the current version of the dominant project are in fact doomed to
extinction, are now being strengthened by the disposed and disposable from the
relatively prosperous majorities who have lost in these years a good part of
the “winnings” to which they had surrendered themselves. One and the other both
feel the urgency now of joining forces to
react to the ever
more fulfilled threats they are facing. An expression of the emerging political
coalitions was evidenced on July 6, 1997, when the political opposition won the
midterm elections, thus putting an end to the authoritarian regime of the last
70 years.
5. For an analysis of the postmodern Zapatista movement
signaling the end of the modern era in Mexico, see Esteva 1994a, b. Also see
Autonomedia 1994. For analyses of other important local movements, see Esteva
& Prakash 1992, 1996, 1997 and The Ecologist 1992.
6. For the most complete and current publications on the
Zapafistas, contact Zapnet collective: E-rnail:zapnet@actlab.utexas.edu; web:
www. actlab. utexas.edu/zapnet; mail: 3115 Tom Green, # 405/Austin, TX78705.
7.
As in many other traditional villages, the rezanderos play a
key role in San Andres. They conduct all prayers, in the absence of priests,
for every purpose, both personal and collective; in the families as well as in
the church, the fields, the feasts . . . The prayers themselves are usually a
rich combination of languages. They include old modified words and phrases in
the Spanish of the sixteenth century, modern constructions in Spanish, and some
elements of the local language. Oral traditions nourish the creativity of the
rezandero, who introduces changes for different motives and reasons, without
breaking the line of continuity that defines the tradition.
8.
We met Grimaldo Rengifo in April 1992, in the Colloquium
“Living with the Earth” organized by the Intercultural Institute of Montreal.
We immediately became friends and since then Gustavo has corresponded with
Grimaldo and exchanged materials with him and other members of his group. For
the description that follows, we are using our own materials and the
introduction written by Apffel Marglin, forthcoming.
9. See Dumont 1977, Esteva in Sachs 1992, Polanyi 1975,
Sahlins 1972.
Part III
After Education,
What?
This book is written
as a celebration.
We celebrate the vitality
and inventiveness of common women and men at the grassroots; the ingenuity and
courage with which they survive and flourish, despite all the forms of
exclusion and discrimination imposed upon them by the economy of the educated.
We celebrate the lived
pluriverse of cultures that still flourish outside the monocultural educated
world. They continually teach us what it means to share personal and collective
knowledge in their regenerated commons; to escape the chains of commodified knowledge
and skills, mass manufactured by schools and universities competing for bigger
hunks of the world campus.
We celebrate the different
ways common women and men practice their diverse arts of teaching and learning.
Studying with them, we sense what it means to be deprofessionalized teachers
and learners; to practice “peoples’ science” for overcoming the expanding array
of disabilities imposed by the modern professions upon their communities; for
skillfully retooling their cultures, applying their traditions for changing
their traditions.
We engage in this spirit of celebration with our eyes wide open to the
suffering, miseries, restrictions, and threats that the social majorities
endure daily. We refuse to be blind to the variety of traditional horrors that
scar human communities across the world. Some of them are also succumbing to
modern horrors: learned needs, demands, and expectations of the abstract
institutions of national and global economies that supply goods and services to
developed peoples; while controlling lives planned by planners’ futures. In the
villages and barrios of the social majorities, we also witness the horrors
found in the suburbs and cities of the social minorities: peoples physically,
mentally, and morally destroyed. Evil finds its way into human lives,
disregarding the barriers of class, creed, color, or sexual orientation.
Knowing and understanding
these horrors better, we join them in their call for solidarities of
resistance; of liberation and autonomy from the tools, technologies, and
economics of the educated. It has taken us decades to decolonize our minds; to
start seeing with our own eyes; to learn how to take off the spectacles of the
educated, which reduce the abundant, rich, and multi-textured Two-Thirds World
into the flat, bleak, space of homo miserablis.
Developing Education
Literacy prosecutes
illiteracy . . . Blessed are those who know how neither to read nor to write
because they will be called illiterate (Jose Bergamin, La Cabeza a Pajaros,
quoted by Aionso 1996, 243).
[T]he major enemy ... is ... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in
our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the
very thing that dominates and exploits us ... The individual is the product of
power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and
displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond
uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization
(Foucault 1983, xii-xiii).
At the end of World War II, the United States was formidable productive
machinery; the undisputed center of the world, the master. The United Nations
Charter could not but echo the Constitution of the United States. Having won
World War II, “most Americans just wanted to go to the movies and drink
Coca-Cola,” observed Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s special envoy to London and
Moscow during the war. Their elites, however, wanted more: their new position
in the world made more explicit and permanent.
On January 20, 1949,
President Truman took office and launched a new era for global development:
We must embark on a bold
new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial
progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.
The old
imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—has no place in our plans. What we
envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair
dealing (Truman 1949, 114-115).
By using the word underdeveloped for the first time in such a context,
Truman changed the meaning of development. He created the emblem for alluding
discretely or
inadvertently to the era of American hegemony, Since
then, most people on earth must be educated: learning to be developed; learning
the American way of life to.. become full-fledged members of modern
civilization.
Never before had a word been universally accepted on the very day of its
political coinage. A new perception of self and other was suddenly launched
globally. Two hundred years of social construction of the historical-political
meaning of the term, development, were successfully usurped and transmogrified.
A political and philosophical proposition of Marx, packaged American style as a
struggle against communism and at the service of the hegemonic design of the
United States, succeeded in permeating both the popular and intellectual mind
for the rest of the century.
On January 20, 1949, two billion people became underdeveloped. In a very
real sense, they ceased being what and who they were—in all their diversity.
They were transmogrified into an inverted mirror of the other’s reality:
belittled and sent off to stand at the end of the queue: the heterogeneous and
diverse social majorities reduced to the homogenizing and narrow terms of the
social minorities. The stage was set for global compulsory education. For the
sign of identity among the developed was education.
Redefined a thousand times
since 1949, global development still continues to mean that the peoples of the
Two-Thirds World need to be like them: the developed women and men. To learn to
be developed, the hopes and dreams of the underdeveloped must measure up to
expert norms. For the professionals of developed countries already know what it
is to be developed and can teach people lacking that knowledge. Their advice
changed continually to amend the fabulous failures of every expert strategy
imposed upon the masses during the four Development Decades. One advice never
changed: Education.
During colonization or the
first phase of their political independence, the “underdeveloped” countries
were the object of diverse educational attempts. In the postwar era of global
development, however, universal education became an international obsession for
Right and Left, for the progressive or the reactionary.
The literate started their
fullest persecution of the illiterate in all of human history. Illiterates
succumbed to the literates’ definitions of their deficiencies.
A Time of Renewal
The placid prosperity and conformism of the late 1940s which allowed
Truman to under develop two billion culturally distinct peoples with his
campaign also marked the beginning of the Cold War: U.S.-style intolerance
which Senator McCarthy finessed and took to new heights. That oppression
propitiated relevant sectors of American political and cultural life to
rediscover the American reality hidden behind the myths of affluence, equality,
scientific, and artistic splendor. Dissident intellectuals pealed off the
illusions hiding mass miseries and inequalities, economic and cultural: the
lack of civil liberties: authoritarianism and militarism; color, class, gender,
culture, and race discrimination. Resistance flourished in diverse quarters:
feminists, farmers, teachers, students, and others coalesced in common cause
against the war in Vietnam. Their critical renaissance joined daily life to
poetry, music, language, or clothing for expressing social ruptures
from mainstream misery and violence. The American
Dream is a waking nightmare—this awareness offered many a sense of renewal.
Education, one untouchable pillar under-girding the American Dream,
could not but come under critical scrutiny. The educational machinery
controlling Americans was nakedly displayed in Jules Henry’s Culture against
Man (1963). His essay, “Vulnerability in Education” (1971), revealed how
insecurity and dependence are used by authority to create the consensus and
discipline of subordination. Scholars of school tracking studied how it
solidifies the social system of castes and classes. The 1960s school critics,
like their contemporary descendants in the 1990s, sought to save the project of
education through radical reform-There were exceptions. In the 1940s, Paul
Goodman had started to draw the line. In the May Pamphlet of 1945, he came to
the conclusion that “we draw the line in their conditions; we proceed on our
conditions.” if we want to extend spheres of free action until we have a free
society {Goodman 1977). In the 1960s, he found himself rubbing elbows with
people who ran things—planners, educators, jurists, senators. He did not get
many ideas for educational reform by sitting on the local school board, but his
new tone of voice, patiently spelling out the details, was the result of that
face-to-face familiarity with his audience. He began to speak as if his program
might actually be put into practice (Stoehr in Goodman 1977, xxiv).
Goodman shared with his
readers some old-fashioned virtues—prudence, temperance, courage, justice—to
cope with the situation. (“Coping” was in fact a word he constantly used in
that period).
Young people especially were outraged at how the Established
Order—government, the military, industry, education, the media—connived in the
abuse and disregard of every traditional value: our resources were wasted, our
lovely countryside polluted, our cities a shambles; the entire network of
public communications was in the service of a venal standard of living and
soporific entertainment; the young were taught to behave themselves in
educational salt-mines; public monies were poured into wars which destroyed
other countries, or into the roads and cars which destroyed our own; young men
were conscripted and sent to die in foreign lands or, if they refused, to rot
in jail at home; citizens were systematically lied to about all of this, knew it
and had lost their faith in human nature, including themselves. Goodman changed
the lives of many of us simply by naming these outrages (Stoehr, in Goodman
1977. xxv and xxvi, emphasis added).
Rejected and ridiculed in England, Growing Up Absurd became a
best-seller at home. Goodman bought himself a suit and wrote and spoke more
than before, following the principle “make hay while the sun shines”—as he
later told Colin Ward. The perversions of contemporary society in general, and
of the project of education in particular were fully revealed in Goodman’s
Compulsory Miseducation (1962)— the first book advocating deschooling as an
alternative to the unjust, discriminatory, expensive, and inefficient
educational establishment, constructed to “park” the young outside an economy
which treats them as universally handicapped and useless.
The real breakthrough beyond remediation, repair, reform, and other
“fix-its” came with Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1970). He had already
drawn attention across the world with his critique of some of society’s most
cherished institutions that alienate people from each other and from their
traditional sources of human dignity and joy. In the late 1960s, even before
Deschooling Society, Illich’s critiques of school were already
known-. “The
Futility of Schooling in Latin America” and “School: The Sacred Cow” (included
in Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution, published in
1971, as the first collection of his essays and articles) were the object of
intense debate the very moment they appeared (1968 and 1969). Deschooling
Society, however, brought him the acclaim and notoriety needed for his
successful marginalization.
The Failure of
Deschooling
As Vice-Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico and member of
the Board governing the whole educational system of the island in 1958, Illich
came to understand how compulsory education creates structured injustice;
teaching people to blame themselves for failing to reach its mirage of equality
and success. Compulsory education combines the native poverty of half of the
children with a new interiorized sense of guilt for failing. His conversations
with Everett Reimer revealed how and why for the majority of women and men the
obligation to attend school restricts the right to learn.
During the 1960s, Illich and Reimer with Valentina Borrernans, cofounder
and director of the Intercultural Center for Documentation (CIDOC), organized
discussions and seminars attended by John Holt, Paulo Freire, Peter Berger,
Jose Ma. Bulnes, Joseph Fitzpatrick, Angel Quintero, Layman Alien, Fred
Goodman. Gerhard Ladner. Didier Piveteau, Joel Spring, Dennis Sullivan, Everett
Reimer and many others. Deschooling Society, an outcome of those seminars,
specifically rendered tribute to two participants, who died a little later:
Paul Goodman and Augusto Salazar Bondy. First published by Harper and Row in
1970, the conclusion of Deschooling Society was clearly and precisely presented
in the introduction:
Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would [NOT] be more feasible
if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of
present schools. Neither the new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor
the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or
bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility
until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The
current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for
their Institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity
for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning,
sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct
such counterfoil research on education—and also to those who seek alternatives
to other established service industries (Illich 1970, iv-v). [Please see
footnote 6 for our insertion of “not” in the second sentence of this
quotation.]
Consumption, the fundamental function of a schooled society, is
exquisitely learned through the ritual of schooling. Designing and packaging
knowledge, schools generate the certainty that it is best acquired in graded
and certificated sequences. Through its monopoly of knowledge and instruction,
the school inhibits alternatives, while fostering dependence on other monopolies
for goods and services. The monopolistic rituals of school merely replace those
of the previous alma mater of western society: the church. Furthermore, like
the church, the school also promotes faith in (unlimited) progress.
Why should the ritual of schooling be a precondition, a compulsory
ticket for other forms of social participation? Daring to raise this question,
Illich broke free of the
educators’ walls
within which critiques of the educational system remain confined—since
respectable educators, radical or other, keep clear of the danger of belling
the cat or biting the hand that feeds. Free of career ambitions, autonomous of
professional hierarchies, with inimitable candor and bluntness, Illich
described the immoralities of the educators’ economy: discriminatory in denying
the competence and skills of those who do not consume credentials; akin to the
Church’s denial of grace or salvation to those living outside its confines.
Walking with the forthright freedom of those who disestablished the hegemony of
the Church; Illich uncovered the importance of liberating learning
from the confines of the profession and its expanding empire. In the same vein,
Goodman’s reformation called for an upheaval of belief that is of religious depth,
but that does not involve destroying the common faith, but to purge and reform
it. It is evident that, at present, we are not going to give up the mass faith
in scientific technology that is the religion of modern times; and yet we
cannot continue with it, as it has been perverted. So, I look for a ‘New
Reformation.’ As a corollary, I think that important agents of change will be
found among professionals and academics dissenting from the establishment; and
this is like the Protestant Reformation (Goodman 1969, xi).
Despite its strong appeal for industrial societies in the early 1970s,
educators found it easier to misunderstand the central insight of Deschooling,
Society. Turning their backs to Illich’s evidence of the educational system’s
counter productivity, reformers launched a new barrage of improvements, equally
counterproductive.
Modern institutions, given their incumbent mythmakers’ genius, have an
embedded capacity to transform their failures into powerful motives for
expansion. The more the failures and damages of the school are revealed, the
more the funding and new resources allocated to commissions, experiments, and
reforms continued to reinforce the institution. Despite the consensus Illich
generated about the ills of the educational system, the professional reaction
was to ask for more and better education. Ian Lister suffered “the ultimate
punishment for [his] deschooling activities—being made a professor of
education” {Lister in Illich 1974a, 28). His accounts of the early 1970s reveal
dangers in two directions:
dangers of deschooling . . . [and] to deschooling. Deschooling argued
for structural changes, and there were many ways of failing to achieve them: by
being co-opted as add-on alternatives (the conservative pluralist approach) or
by being made into fringe activities, operating at the periphery of the system.
A further danger lay in encouraging the growth of alternative bureaucracies. .
. . The ideas of deschooling could also become defused and diffuse through
being accommodated . . . making School Js Dead compulsory reading on the
student’s book list and deschooling into fodder for courses, essays, and
doctoral theses . . . career development (Illich 1974a, 4).
Lister shares his
struggles to be sure that most of his energies go in the right direction: “that
is the one that will help the human majorities, with whom deschooling has
always been concerned” (Illich 1974a, 28).
Deschooling does not and cannot make any sense to the schooled
imagination—of Illich’s principal readers. This has been amply demonstrated
already in all schooled societies. For those well tarried by the rules and laws
of the educational system, Illich’s conclusions bring to the surface all the
fears ‘’civilized” peoples have of the “savage” and the “wild,” walking out of
the familiar cave into the vast, abundant, and diverse
pluriverse; where
the irrelevance of school skills cannot be hidden; where schooled individual
selves—units of definition, distinction and privilege in the educated world—
must confront the genuine poverty of their lives, their commodified pedagogies.
This challenge continues to be too threatening for most members of the
social minorities. Deschooling Society, if and when rarely read today, is taken
by professional educators as a personal attack; a source of anguish. How can
they deprofessionalize themselves, if the society itself is not turned upside
down? How do they have an income? Those reading Illich feel, as Judson Jerome
confessed, “furiously paralyzed”; not furious with Illich, “but at the social
situation he so lucidly describes”; all too quickly concluding that “not only
were (they) unlikely to attain the society he envisages . . . but even without
strong desire to get there” (Jerome in Gartner et al. 1973, 104). The idea of
deschooling was discussed mainly by professional educators: the experts of the
social minorities. Instead of biting the hand that fed them, they offered to
beautify it, taming or masking its violence.s All the “alternatives
in education” are escape routes; rationalizing the horror revealed by Illich
rather than reducing it; or easier yet, misunderstanding the main conclusions.
It is clearly preposterous to conclude that Deschooling Society calls
for closing all schools. Even as an imaginary armchair exercise in the
One-Third World, that closure reveals its impossibility. It is as crazy as
taking off the tires of a car to make it run smoother and faster. The standard
reading of Deschooling Society put the cart before the horse. His critics
assumed that Illich was proposing the closure of all schools and universities
as a tool for the institutional inversion of industrial society. This reading
was deliberately used at times to demonstrate his proposal as unfeasible,
reactionary, or plain foolishness. It also fostered counterproductive attempts
to square the circle.
Cass Canfield, Harper’s president, chose the book’s title without
recognizing its consequences for misrepresenting Illich’s thoughts. The very
week in which the book came out, Illich published an article advocating their
disestablishment—which means not paying public monies for them and not granting
any special social privileges to either church- or school-goers; taxing them “so
that schooling becomes a luxury object and be recognized as such” (Illich in
Hern 1996. viii); making illegal any social practice or ritual that creates,
establishes, and anchors “in souls the myth of education,” thus presenting what
he still considers the main criticism of his own book (Illich in Cayley 1992,
73).
The search for alternative schools, on the other side, could have been
stimulated by a critical mistake in the editions of the book. Furthermore, as
he later recognized, Illich called for the disestablishment of schools for the
sake of improving education. Here lay his mistake. More important than the
disestablishment of schools, Illich turned his attention to reversing those
trends that make education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous
leisure.’711 began to fear that the disestablishment of the
educational church would lead to a fanatical revival of many forms of degraded,
all encompassing education, making the world into a universal classroom, a
global schoolhouse. The more important question became: ‘Why do so many
people—even ardent critics of schooling—become addicted to education, as to a
drug?’ (Illich in Hern 1996, viii).
In 1977, observing the ridiculous misunderstandings of Deschooling
Society, Illich noted that his description of the undesirable latent functions
of compulsory schools (the ‘hidden curriculum’ of schooling) was being abused
not only by the promoters of so-
called free schools but even more by schoolmasters
who were anxious to transmogrify themselves into adult educators (Illich 1977,
68).
These abuses persisted, despite the fact that in mid-1971, “In Lieu of
Education” (included in 1977 in his book Toward a History of Needs), insisted
that the alternative to the dependence of a society on its schools is not the
creation of new devices to make people learn what experts have decided they
need to know; rather, it is the creation of a radically new relationship
between human beings and their environment. A society committed to high levels
of shared learning and personal intercourse, free yet critical, cannot exist
unless it sets pedagogically motivated constraints on its institutional and
industrial growth (Illich 1977. 68).
Professional growth by
this time ensured that the educational function was ‘’emigrating from the
schools and that, increasingly, other forms of compulsory learning would be
instituted in modern society” (Illich in Hern 1996, via). The profession
proffered this as progress.
A third stage followed
Illich’s queries into “the historical circumstances under which the very idea
of educational needs can arise/’ He came to understand education as learning
when it takes place under the assumption of scarcity in the means which produce
it” (Illich in Hern 1996, be).
The parting of Freire and Illich is important for grasping this third
stage in his philosophical investigations of the substance of education. They
met in the early 1960s and became close friends when Illich accepted the
tutorship of Dom Helder Camara and was sent by him to talk with Freire. A few
years later, Illich had the opportunity to rescue Freire from a Brazilian jail,
bring him to Cuernavaca, and publish his first book out of Brazil. Deschooling
Society refers to the work of Freire’s group with admiration.
Their parting of ways
occurred when Illich moved beyond the criticism of the system of schooling.
Clearly grasping what education does to foster the belief that people need help
or “empowerment” (as it is called today) to “gain insights into reality, and
have to be helped to prepare for existence or for living,” Illich warned of the
looming threat of today’s compulsory adult education.
This became for me the thing I wanted to analyze very critically.
Therefore, despite its good and solid tradition, it was I who moved away from
the approach for which Paulo has become the outstanding spokesman during the :60s
and early ’70s not only in Latin America but all over the world ... I remember
Paulo with immense affection, but also as somebody who more and more wanted to
save the credibility of educational activities at a time when my main concern
had become a questioning of the conditions which shape education in any form,
including conscientization or psychoanalysis or whatever it might be (Illich in
Cayley 1992. 206-207).
In “the pedagogy of the
oppressed” Illich saw another turn of the educational screw. Neither interested
in improving the educational system nor in shutting down schools, Illich
offered evidence that saying “NO” to education was a matter of decency and
courage. Educational alternatives or alternative schools simply cover up the
fact that the project of education is fundamentally flawed and indecent—despite
its Schindlers and Schindlers’ lists (Illich 1996, 258-259).
Then as now, projects to deschool this society are doomed. If and when
schooled societies are genuinely modified for freedom and radical democracy,
their educational institutions as well as their enterprise of education will
crumble—organically.
Beyond Deschooling:
Education Stood on Its Head
The great majority of all Chicago
children who leave school before they graduate are
... slum-bred. By the time they drop out they have been
badly mangled in soul and body .
. . But these
dropouts, in another way, are also privileged because they have learned to fake
almost anything, and to see the school system for what it really is: a
worldwide soul-shredder that junks the majority and burdens an elite to govern
it (Illich 1996, 258).
A few understood that
Illich was not pushing for the closure of schools. Among those who did, some
challenged Illich to counter the damage done by his book: the push for more
efficient modes of education. Illich pondered how home education can be more
efficient; consequently, more horrible.
Years later, Illich
recalled this for David Cayley:
John Holt very quickly understood. I could then give up talking about it
because he took it over with his newsletter and his association. This was a
beautifully monomaniacal guy, someone you occasionally went to see, just to
touch him to make certain that he did exist! And there he was with his
paperclip on his shirt, strengthening his fingers for playing the cello, which
he learned as a man of forty, while you talked with him, a guy who put on a
green helmet when he went into the subway so he would not be disturbed and
could listen to whatever recording of poetry he wanted to enjoy that day
(Illich in Cayley 1992, 209-210).
The “Holt Schools,”
despite their name, offered resistance to compulsory education. They are not
alternative schools; even less do they offer schooling at home. Rather than
schooling, they offer legal protection for autonomous initiatives that go
beyond education.
John Holt knew well what
he was doing. Asked to define education in 1982, he replied:
It is not a word I personally use . . . Different people mean different
things with it. One of its assumptions is that learning is an activity which is
separate from the rest of life and done best of all when we are not doing
anything else and best of all in places where nothing else is done—learning
places, places especially constructed for learning. Another assumption is that
education is a designed process in which some people do things to other people
or get other people to do things which will presumably be for their own good.
Education means that some A is doing something to somebody else B.
Pressured by the
interviewer, he said:
I don’t know of any definition of education that would seem to me to be
acceptable. I wrote a book called Instead of Education, and what I mean by this
title is instead of this designed process which is carried on in specially
constructed places under various kinds of bribe and threat. I do not know what
single word I would put [in its place]. I would talk about a process in which
we become more informed, intelligent, curious, competent, skillful aware by our
interaction with the world around us, because of the mainstream of
life, so to speak.
In other words, I learn a great deal, but I do it in the process of living,
working, playing, being with friends. There is no division in my life between
learning, work, play, etc. These things are alt one. I do not have a word which
I could easily put in the place of ‘education.’ unless it might be ‘living’
(Palbel 1993. 13-14).
Holt realized that the
standard perception of education implied some sort of “treatment.” Even
self-education is suggestive of a self-administered treatment. Holt and Illich
understood that educational treatments at home are a nightmare, more poisonous
and dangerous than public schooling; transmogrifying parents into
pseudo-professional teachers; contaminating the natural life of the family.
Holt took further steps to
heal the rupture between learning and doing created by professional educators
(Holt 1965, 1972, 1974).
Not many years ago I began to play the cello. I love the instrument,
spend many hours a day playing it, work hard at it and mean someday to play it
well. Most people would say that what 1 am doing is ‘learning to play the
cello.’ Our language gives us no other words to say it. But these words carry
into our minds the strange idea that there exist two different processes: (1) learning
to play the cello; and (2) playing the cello. They imply that I will do the
first until I have completed it, at which point I will stop the first process
and begin the second; in short, that I will go on ‘learning to play’ until I
‘have learned to play.’ and that then I will begin to play.’
Of course, this is nonsense. There are not two processes, but one. We
learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way. When we first do
something, we probably will not do it well. But if we keep on doing it, have
good models to follow and helpful advice if and when we feel we need it, and
always do it as well as we can we will do it better. In time, we may do it very
well. This process never ends. The finest musicians, dancers, athletes,
surgeons, pilots, or whatever they may be, must constantly practice their art
or craft. Every day the musicians do their scales, the dancers exercise at the
barre and so on. A surgeon I knew would from time to time, when not otherwise
bust’, tie knots in fine surgical gut with one hand, without looking, just to
keep in practice. In that sense, people never stop “learning to do’ what they
know how to do, no matter how well they do it. They must “learn” every day to
do it as well as they can or they will soon do it less well. The principal
flutist of the Boston Symphony under Koussevitsky used to say. ‘If I miss a
day’s practice, [ hear the difference; if I miss two days, the conductor hears
the difference; if I miss three days, the audience hears the difference’ (Holt
1976, 13-14).
Instead of Education concludes with Holt’s clear and precise statement:
‘’Education— compulsory schooling, compulsory learning—is a tyranny and a crime
against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way
they can” (Holt 1976, 222). Growing Without Schooling, the bulletin he
published until his death, still in circulation, is full of stories about those
seeking to escape education in the U.S., any way they can . . .
and succeeding in the
venture.
True, “refusing schools is a real possibility for everyone, which in no
way limits a person’s options for the future.1' More and more people
are successfully protecting their children from that specific horror. True,
“more and more voices are joining the dialogue about deschooling, as the entire
system of public schooling becomes increasingly difficult to maintain’ (Hern
1996, 36). But their stories illustrate how marginal their efforts remain; how
successfully the educational system keeps them at its periphery.
We cannot but admire those living and swimming upstream in schooled
societies. Their most difficult challenge comes probably from their experiences
with deschooled children. What to do with them? The parents who are unable to
put their children in the educational cage after becoming aware of its damage,
find a social desert for their children outside the home and classroom. They
discover themselves unable to continue with their “normal” lives, “to pay the
mortgage,” if their children are not in a regime of institutionalized learning.
And they also find that it is almost impossible for their children to have
friends and a “normal life,” surrounded as they are by schooled children. If
they do not want to raise their children as isolated anomalies, outsiders of
the society to which they belong, they cannot “deprive” them of the school.
That is not the case among the social majorities—as we have described
earlier on. Villages and barrios, all over the world, successfully resist the
modern imposition of childhood. Their children are not deprived of their
commons—which increasingly demonstrate the redundancy and counter productivity
of the educational system.
Taming the Horror:
Overcoming the Reign of Educated Literacies
There is a spiritual culture
and there is another literal culture . . . Alphabet is a false order. The
alphabetic order is the biggest spiritual disorder: the disorder you can see in
alphabetic dictionaries or literal, more or less encyclopedic, vocabularies
which reveal the universal reductionism aspired to by literal culture (Jose
Bergamin quoted by Alonso 1996, 243).
If the popular untutored culture disappears, so does the real poetic
world. . . . [W]ritten literature [depends] on a background of non-literary
experience. But the reverse is not true: genuine oral-popular ‘literature’ can
exist without literacy. If genuine oral-popular literature disappears, so too
does the spiritual life (Alonso 1996, 245).
Learning from cradle to
grave under the expert instruction of the credentialed graduate, the
“civilized,” literate, educated, and developed people continue to be fabulously
successful in destroying linguistic diversity. With the aid of hundreds of
credit hours of canned instruction, the educated of the North speak only 1
percent of the 5,000 languages that survive temporarily on earth.
Those that survive .are threatened by the depredations of progress,
development, and education; by national schemes ensuring that the masses and
the classes demand education in the mother tongue, with a smattering of
bilingualism thrown in, if the State or local school boards are amenable to
such suggestions.
Different,
decentralized, more hopeful stories thrive at the grassroots.
The illiterate peoples of India still enjoy their lived pluriverse of
1,682 languages— alive, spoken, untamed, and wildly variant from one community
to the next.
Twenty-three Mayan
languages are still spoken in the parts of Guatemala where even the State
dictatorship has failed to decimate this existing diversity through its
educational system, public or private.
In the province of Oaxaca, in Southern Mexico, where three million live,
many different cultures coexist: Amuzgos, Cuicatecos, Chatinos, Chinantecos,
Chocholtecos, Chontales, Huaves, Mixes, Mixtecos, Nahuas, Triquis, Zapotecos,
and Zoques, as well as
Afromexican communities. Each of those peoples speaks their own language
and all of them have important variants. Among the Zapotecs, for example, there
are clear linguistic differences among those living in the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec. in the Sierra de Juarez or in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca. And
there are also dialectal differences -from community to community, among the
more than 7,000 communities of Oaxaca. (More than 100 variants exist alone
among the Zapotecs.)
In desecrated and abused Chiapas, the uneducated enjoy their Tzotzil,
Tzeltal, Zoque, Choi, and Tojolabal, despite educational curricula furiously
promoting Spanish.
Central America,
geographically tiny, keeps 260 languages alive.
In Nigeria, more than
400 languages have been counted.
The poor in non-industrial countries all over the world are polyglot. My
friend the goldsmith in Timbuktu sptaks Songhay at home, listens to Bambara on
the radio, devotedly and with some understanding says his prayers five times a
day in Arabic, gets along in two trade languages on the Souk, converses in
passable French that he picked up in the army—and none of these languages was
formally taught to him. He did not set out to learn these tongues: each is one
style in which he remembers a peculiar set of experiences that fits into the
frame of that language (Illich in Cayley 1992, 28-29).
Similarly recounting the
linguistic riches of the unlettered. Wolfgang Sachs muses over the fact that a
“great number of these languages cling to remote places. They hide out in
isolated mountain valleys, far-off islands; and inaccessible
deserts. Others govern entire continents and connect different peoples into a
larger universe” (Sachs 1992: 102); the opaque “One World” of
centralized, gigantic technologies-including those of Education.
In the pluriverse of
Quechua, Aymara, and other peoples in the Peruvian Andes, voices singing of
resistance to the linguistic and cultural erosion of education, write of the
State’s Spanish culture imposed upon them through the schools and other
institutions of the national economy:
Five centuries ago there arose among us a terrible plague from whose
havoc we have not totally recovered, although we are very near a complete cure
. . . The plague has not taken our world away from us nor our convictions, it
has not changed our way of being. Even though we often speak in Spanish . . .
(Grillo in Apffel Marglin. forthcoming).
But they speak Spanish only with the outsider. Grillo, Rengifo, and
other members of PRATEC tell us. With their own people, in the comfort of
shared communities, among Insiders, the varying, hybrid tongues of the commons
flourish, protected from the rules of expert educated grammarians and their
schools, brought in all the way from Spain, where a luxurious pluriverse once flourished.
In the Iberian Peninsula,
observes Andoni Alonso, a “huge variety” existed in the Spanish language during
the late fifteenth century.
At that time Spanish took
different forms in Navarra, Aragon, Extrernadura, Andalucia, and elsewhere,
while other languages such as Basque, Galician, and Catalonian co-existed
within the country. The Kingdom of Navarra, for instance, was officially bilingual,
recognizing both Basque and Spanish as established languages (Alonso 1996,
244).
This linguistic pluralism
was considered “natural” at the time, even by Queen Isabela, despite the
Gramatica CasteUana (Spanish grammar) dedicated to her by the grammarian
Antonio de Nebrija (1444-1522).
Out of this natural
“vibrant matrix,” Illich’s historical voyages uncover, “there gradually
precipitated official languages . . . guarded in the national academies of old
nations and manufactured in the language institutes of new ones” (Cayley 1992,
29). Nebrija played a critical role in one of the epochs of this history,
proposing to Queen Isabela the necessity of unifying “the speech of the country
to reinforce the unification of religion and political power that constituted
the emergence of the modern European state” (Alonso 1996, 244).
In the same year that Columbus sailed west to his “discoveries,” Nebrija
proposed to Queen Isabela the importance of engineering “popular edification
and administrative control” of the “loose and unruly” speech of her people. The
Queen, however, “demurred on the ground that her sovereignty did not extend to
the speech of her subjects who were already perfectly in command of their own
tongues” (Cayley 1992, 29).
But “it was Nebrija . . . who had the future in his bones” (Cayley 1992,
29). The next logical step in this process of the modern centralization of
power created education as a “need” for learning the mother tongue. Perhaps
even more important than the discovery of the “New World,” this emergent
reality of education grounded a new political-economic order. The rest is
educational history, promoting the certainty that children should be taught the
proper forms of everyday speech, and teachers should be paid to deliver this
commodity. Elements of home-grown speech recur, like weeds growing through the
cracks in pavement, in the mouths of poets and dropouts, but speech that is
designed, packaged, and administered predominates (Cayley 1992, 29-30).
The history of education, like the history of the modern state, tells
the tale of languages and customs submerged; of communities and traditions
smashed when unacceptable to the State’s educators, grammarians, judiciary, and
other arms of control and management. Key to progress or modernization,
educators and other incumbents of the state continue to be fully implicated in
the “colonization and domestication of vernacular speech by standard forms”
(Cayley 1992, 28).
Yet other incumbents of
these institutions—multicultural educators-are currently promising to unmask
and undo the damage done to subjugate the oppressed, the colonized; to make
them disappear; to reduce them to the impotence of “cultures of silence.”
Despite several centuries
of educational management, the uneducated social majorities are not silenced,
enjoying their rich “Babel (Panikkar 1995) of tongues in their commons. To
speak with educators and other functionaries of national bureaucracies,
however, they are forced to enter the world of homo monolingus.
Paul Goodman reminded us
(long before Chomsky and other linguists) about the organic and natural ways of
learning to speak—minus education:
Kant showed that our intellectual structures come into play
spontaneously, by the ‘synthetic unity of apperception,’ if we are attentive in
real situations. They certainly seem to do so when infants learn to speak. The
problem of knowing is to have attentive experience, to get people to pay
attention, without cramping the unifying play of free
intellectual powers. Schools are bad at this.
Interesting is really good. On the other hand, according to Kant, to exercise
the cognitive faculties abstractly, ante rem, in themselves, is precisely
superstition, presumptuous theology. He wrote all this in The Critique of Pure
Reason, which I would strongly recommend to the Harvard School of Education
(Goodman 1969. 80-81).
At the grassroots, the
common people live, teach, and learn their tongues, intuitively swimming with
such insights. The educated continue to call their knowledge “the superstitions
of the illiterate and the uneducated.”
Inverting Pandora’s
Box
Pandora, the All-Giver ... an Earth
goddess in prehistoric matriarchal Greece ... let all
ills
escape from her amphora (pythos). But she closed the lid before Hope could
escape ...
[The] history of modern man begins with the degradation of Pandora’s
myth ... It is the history of the Promethean endeavor to forge institutions in
order to corral each of the rampant ills. It is the history of fading hope and
rising expectations (Illich 1971a, 151).
Emil Molt, the owner of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory of
Stuttgart, who sponsored Rudolf Steiner for founding the first Waldorf School
in 1919, wrote that the original purpose of the school was clearly social: to
provide the children of the workers and employees the same teaching and
education enjoyed by the children of rich families.
There are now about 500 Waldorf or Steiner schools all over the world.
Some may receive State support, but most are financially self-sufficient,
receiving private support. Highly privileged children attend these schools.
Their parents clearly appreciate the privilege—even though not all of them
belong to the highest economic strata. Some of them still dream of a society in
which all children can attend such schools. But even they recognize that their
dream is as unfeasible today as Molt’s was in his time.
Despite the prevalence of this realization among the educated, few
support Illich’s twenty-five-year-old suggestion that education be heavily
taxed, along with all luxury objects that discriminate against the
underprivileged. Educators continue espousing radical democracy, justice,
equality, and excellence as the goal of their project, while enjoying the
privileges of the global educational system, designed to spew and vomit out
millions of Ds; dropouts, and failures while providing to a few a
socially recognized certificate—a patente de corso. This legitimizes the As and
other “successes” in their disposition to impose, control and oppress, for
consuming at the expense of the majorities they doom to the life of failures.
If education still has a concrete meaning, it is a conscious attempt to
turn one into ‘’something”—Tolstoy observed. That “something” is increasingly a
specific ability to produce the “useful things” of industrial society. What is
frequently forgotten, as Marx warned, is that they want production to be
limited to “useful things,” but they forget that the production of too many
useful things results in too many useless people.
We are already living in the era marking the overproduction of useless
people. The Director-General of the World Labor Organization recently declared
that feeding faith in future full employment—in rich and poor countries
alike—is a most objectionable creation of false expectations. There was a time
when schools operated as training centers
for industry, qualifying people for the labor market.
Today, on the contrary, they are institutional means for preventing people, as
long as possible, from entering that market. The university’s programmed
obsolescence becomes shorter every year; and only a mi-nority of graduates will
ever find work in their field of study.
Recognizing the current predicament of the educational system, some
educators feel the need to save the school by redefining its purpose (Postman
1996). Others see in The End of School (Leonard 1992) fresh opportunities for
finding innovative teaching and learning, leading out of the contemporary
institutional morass. For those weary in body and soul with “narration
sickness,” with the “necrophilia” of “banking education” (Freire 1993), finally
there is light at the end of the dismal, dark education tunnel:
School as we know it is doomed. And every attempt to improve—but
fundamentally preserve—the present system will only prolong its death throes
and add immeasurably to its costs, both financial and social. By the year 2020,
if we are to survive as a democratic society, our children will have to learn
in a variety of new ways, some of them already on the drawing board, some
unforeseen. None of them will involve a teacher in the front of a classroom
presenting information to twenty or thirty children seated in desks (Leonard
1992, 24).
Given that the “time has come to recognize that school is not the
solution . . . (but) the problem,” Leonard builds boldly on ideals articulated
by Dewey or Freire: “The effectiveness of any learning experience,” he says,
“depends on the frequency, variety, quality, and intensity of the interaction
of the learner.” Given that fundamental fact of learning, “we must empower our
educators to create interactive learning environments, rather than merely
presenting information to passive students” (Leonard 1992, 26).
Leonard suggests: “Recent developments in computerized interactive
multimedia can take us considerably further.” He mentions George Lucas and
others who show that “contemporary electronic technology, used not as an
adjunct to the conventional classroom but as something entirely new, inspires
cooperation, encourages learning teams, and builds student confidence . . .
Moreover, this technology can join students with a whole universe of
information, allowing them to reach out to other learners and teachers all
across the United States and overseas and to link up with data bases that
eventually will contain a goodly chunk of all human knowledge.” Describing some
“advanced experiences,” he concludes: “The end of school could mean the
beginning of an education that would tap the potential of all our children, and
immeasurably increase individual fulfillment and national success as we enter a
new millennium” (Leonard 1992, 28).
Five years after its publication, Leonard’s article is obsolete; his
technological dream a fact: multiplying millions already “communicate” and
interact on the Web without the obstruction of instruction from a single
schoolmaster. In fact so redundant is the familiar instructor, pedagogue, or
information dispenser that there are specific instructions available for that
increasingly rare moment: “when you need to contact a human.” The adept surfer
on the Web could learn without ever “contacting a human.” [Those desperately
seeking Susan and others, however, are equally free to spend most hours of
their daily life “contacting humans” through the Web.] The president of IBM
proudly re-vealed that 45 millions learned the complex skills of handling their
PCs on their own or
with the help of friends (on or off the Web). Neither
school nor formal training was necessary.
The specter looming menacingly behind the facade of these supposedly
democratizing teaching and learning technologies extends once more the iron
grip of the Establishment: the “intellectual property rights regime” (one of
the main battles fought in GATT-WTO); “in essence a policy by which
pharmaceutical, agricultural, biogenetic. and computer software transnational
companies are allowed to privatize, enclose, monopolize the cultural wealth of
the planet—so that no shred of information and knowledge can ‘ideally1
be acquired without passing through monetary exchange, and without a toll being
paid by the purchasers to these companies” (Caffentzis 1997, 15). The
conglomer-ates of corporations and governments are trying to ensure “property
rights” on each and every kind of “knowledge”—including the diverse uses of the
indigenous neem tree, haldi, or amla used for centuries by the peoples of India
to heal, enjoy well-being, or deal with termites and other “pests.” “Knowledge
consumers” on the Web are vying to become “knowledge capitalists,” spreading
information so liberally among all races, classes, and genders that they elude
ATT and its 1,500,000 stakeholders.
Two contradictory analyses of the boldest, sharpest, and the best of the
technological system are summarized here. On the one side, we are offered
promises of perfect democracy: with access for everyone, to everything, for
almost nothing. On the other side, the Orwellian concentration of money and
power—totalitarian and antidemocratic. The new education/communication/teaching/learning
technologies reveal the nature of economic society and its technological
system-including its educational technologies (Ellul 1964, 1980). The illusion
of democratic access to “knowledge,” hides the reality of its undemocratic
privatization; just as the illusion of equality hides brutal injustice; or the
illusion of suffrage hides the concentration of political power by
self-appointed elite; while the illusion of the “sovereignty of the consumer”
hides the corporate control of peoples’ lives.
State-of-the-art educational technologies of professionals driven by the
prospect of new monopolies over “knowledge stock” provokes remembrance of
Illich’s classic metaphor for contemporary knowledge as the excrement of our
mind which can be put together in a heap, or into place? called scientific
research institutions, where scientists are responsible for making it grow at a
certain percentage every year. It is then marketed, channeled through the
education system and consumed, incorporated, interiorized by so-called students
who are really knowledge consumers or knowledge capitalists. They get knowledge
stock-holding certificates (Illich in Kumar 1980, 86-87).
In the new era of information consumption, the dreaded certification
analyzed by Illich may soon be redundant; its place occupied by the
intellectual property rights regime in which people “are forced to pay in order
to use their own knowledge. For the products now patented by transnational
companies are often nothing more than ‘high tech versions of a seed, plant,
organism, chemical, or drug only found naturally in the same ‘low tech, low
wage’ country that now has to pay for it.” Payments to knowledge capitalists
must be made—even if the product’s use “was discovered by the indigenous people
of that very same country.” Thus, “the unequal exchange, first defined for
non-intellectual products by Arghiri Emmanuel in the ’60s, could not be more
complete and perverse than it is in this new form” (Caffentzis 1997, 18).
These latest modes of oppression are sparking off movements,
particularly in the Third World, to halt this “conspiracy.” Those movements are
doomed to counter productivity by asking, as some groups already do, for the
extension of intellectual property protection to the peoples or countries whose
“knowledge” is now being patented. There is no decent alternative, it seems to
us, but the total and complete abrogation of all such “rights”-including the
latest western obscenity of developed and educated peoples called the
“protection” of life-forms.
The notion of “knowledge” implicit in the current trends increasingly
involves stealing from the pluriverse of learning and knowing—incarnated,
specific, rooted, necessarily vernacular (consequently unique and diverse}
forms of relationship between women and men, and between them and their living
cosmos. “It is fortunate,” argue the Peruvian incarnated intellectuals, “that
knowledge is not pan-cultural” (Grille in Apffel Marglin, forthcoming). And
they add:
[I]n the individualistic and highly competitive environment in which
people of the modern West live, ... the acquisition of knowledge is seen as the
achievement of a highly profitable investment, as a way to build a career.
[P]eople are suddenly caught involuntarily in a runaway zeal ... in the
addiction to competition for competition’s sake .
. . and that once in
it ‘one forgets to live’ (Grille in Apffel Marglin. forthcoming}.
In such contexts, “love
and friendship could be limitations or obstacles that hurt one’s chances for
career promotion” (Grille in Apffel Marglin, forthcoming).
Reduced to a specific kind of “excrement of our minds,” the knowledge of
the educated continues to be a commodity, bought and sold on the market. The
school was, of course, the institution that operated that reduction in a
massive scale; it “educated” people to first accept and now globally market
this contemporary horror.
Resistance to the
universal classroom has emerged everywhere. Neo-Luddites protecting the text
from its massacre by the screen are now being joined by those protecting the
conventional classroom against this assault. Conventional educators argue for
the old, personal relation between the teachers and the students; presenting
strong and good arguments against the risks of losing “human connections” in
the new scheme of things.
They are naming something
that seems to them intolerable. They abhor this new twist to the economic
relations that are already pervasive among and between homo educandus- while
still idealizing education and the ideals of the educated person, failing to
see that the universal classroom, now technically implemented, has inverted
Pandora’s myth. This inversion abandons all hope, while attempting to keep,
control, or corral all human ills (Illich 1970).
Living Without
Schools or Education
Though there are machines
that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man, they are not needed. The
people take death seriously and do not travel far. Though they have boats and
carriages, no one uses them. Though they have armor and weapons, no one
displays them. [The people) return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes
secure; they are happy in their ways (Lao Tzu, Too Te Ching).
[W]e can set the
conditions for a new era in which technology would be used to make society more
simple and transparent, so that all men could once again know the facts and use
the tools that shape their lives. In short, we can disestablish schools or we
can deschool culture (Illich 1977, 70).
Its enchantment and
mystique for transforming frogs into princes and princesses now thoroughly
deconstructed, the educational system continues postponing its disestablishment
in the societies of the schooled and the developed; replacing expectations and needs
of Promethean Man for the hopefulness and sufficiency of Pandora and her
husband Epimetheus.
Illich’s call for
institutional inversion is echoed at the grassroots, among the illiterate
social majorities, sick and tired of suffering policies promising development
and progress, masterminded by educators, economists, manpower planners, and
other professionals.
Meditating on the perspective of the dropouts—persons and cultures—who
fail to function with the modern Rs (the Bill Gates, Apple and IBM’s [un]Holy
Trinity insist that these be learned on the screen), preferring their spoken
words to those written by the educated, we see whole worlds opening up to
Illich’s authentic alternatives TO education; TO schooled knowledge; TO the
classroom; TO the institutionalized modes of learning and teaching destructive
of the lived pluriverse.
Rendering transparent the
illusions and damage perpetrated by all modern institutions—including
education—Illich calls for “institutional inversion.” His Celebration of
Awareness offers an invitation to all those “unwilling to be constrained by the
apparently all-determining forces and structures of the industrial age ... of
privilege and license” (Illich 1971a, 17).
Three decades ago, Illich was fully aware that his call would create
major confrontations with contemporary systems. “Let us join together
joyfully,” he said, at the time of the March to the Pentagon, “to celebrate our
awareness that we can make our life today the shape of tomorrow’s future”
(Illich 1971a, 18). Illich’s “institutional revolution” continues to be
misunderstood: associated with the seizure of power.
Seeking to understand and
undertake the “institutional inversion” he calls for, we are reminded of
Foucault’s warning: “Do not become enamored of power”; preceded by his call:
Withdraw allegiance from
the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna),
which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access
to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity,
flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is
productive is not sedentary but nomadic (Foucault 1983, xiii).
“Institutional inversions”
are being borne by extended political coalitions of those already
de-institutionalized or damaged by the institutions of industrial societies:
the dropouts, the unemployed, and many others either excluded or no longer
clamoring for their re-institutionalization. The conditio sine qua non of their
struggle is not sour grapes but the critical distance needed to see beyond them
to better alternatives for living as learning. While still employed by such
institutions, some people are joining such coalitions for institutional
inversion.
Our hope for a world beyond education rests with all the cultures that
have remained outside the school and other jails of the technological system
(Ellul 1964, 1980); cultures that are still alive and flourishing in spite of
the pressures, restrictions, and burdens imposed on them by it. They protect
themselves with their inbuilt barriers against educators’ assumptions of scarce
means for the production and consumption of knowledge. They enjoy the affluence
of living in ways which are not disconnected from learning by doing. The
cultures of resistance and liberation do not disconnect people from the things
with which learning occurs; and neither do they dismember their communities
through educators’ myths of mobility.
Solidarities with the dropout cultures call for establishing limits to
the educational system. Their commons are protected through marginalizing the
mainstream institutions: all of which create scarcity in every aspect of daily
life. This marginalization has nothing to do with depriving people of school;
especially not those who lack the interest or motivation to learn to survive
without educational institutions. We hope, by placing limits on schooling and
all the other institutions of the modern era, that those fully immersed in the
institutions of the Center will in time be able td see with their own eyes the
alternatives at the margins. Those who see may then create their own paths of
liberation.
The challenge of living the good life without education is intuitively
grasped and understood by those whose common sense has not been drowned or
buried under the barrage of information prized by the proud owners of
information technologies; by those who still have unschooled cultures. From
them we have learned to learn without bells and bell curves, without
credentials, textbooks, chalkboards, and the “overwhelming perverse
institutional logic that “dumbs down” all those who come under its sway. With
them we have learned to free our imaginations from the clutches of classroom
information; to recover our common sense before it was extinguished by under
use or denigration. For they know in their hands, their eyes, and in all their
other senses what it is to learn without packaged instruction. The people at
the grassroots have not forgotten the skills required to live and flourish
outside the academic “cave”—with its shadows, its dark doubts that are mistaken
to be liberatory or emancipatory certainties.
We celebrate in this book not only the courageous attempts of the
homeschoolers and the deschoolers—going upstream in schooled societies; but,
even more so the extended, massive reactions among the social majorities- True,
they are ignorant of Holt’s or Illich’s writings and initiatives. However,
their children are growing without education and have been able to translate
that condition, suffered for a long time as a lack, into opportunities for the
dignified and joyful regeneration of commons. It is from the unlettered and the
untutored beyond the margins of mainstream institutions that we have learned to
recover, remember, and reread the books that professional educators prefer to
forget; that do not serve well any professional career today. Obviously, the
social majorities do not read these books. They have little reason to do so.
These books were not written for them. For common men and women today, as in
the past, continue to enjoy the common sense, the ordinary arts of living and
dying (without technological dependencies) celebrated in these books, lying in
the forgotten corners of the academy.
Coalitions of refuseniks are emerging in ways that the mainstream finds
more difficult to put down or to ignore as the ways of the ignorant. Illich’s
insights are being sensed by those who have never belonged to the Centers
falling apart. Perhaps it is not incidental
that Illich’s reflections started in Puerto Rico:
“How do you make human beings—these Puerto Rican jibaritos with whom 1 was
dealing—human resources?” (Cayley 1992, 61) His work increasingly challenged
what was being done to “develop” these so-called ‘’underdeveloped’’ peoples.
Long before his readers could comprehend him, Illich began insisting that
“underdeveloped” peoples are in a better place to tame the horror—a task
experienced as either impossible or an immense sacrifice by the people of the
“developed” world.
The Third World has a crucial responsibility in the liberation of the
world from their idols of progress, efficiency, the GNR its masses are still
not trapped in the habit of consuming, and specially the consumption of
services. Most of the people still heal and settle and teach each other . . .
The Third World could open the way in the search of a style to learn for
living, a style which will be the preparation of men for satisfying authentic
needs in a genuinely human context. No doubt, those nations could illuminate
the way for a world as developed as it is decadent (Illich 1974b, 45).
Next to the frustrating experiences of deschoolers in the North are the
different ventures of the social majorities, revealing to themselves and to
others their growing new awareness of the road to nowhere built by the
schooled. Before being “fully developed”—that is, before becoming fully
“institutionalized,” educated, empowered, or conscientized—they are seeing
through the myths of development that their own Third World political and
intellectual elites are imposing upon them through forging multinational and
international alliances, increasingly obsessed with catching up (as Illich
predicted) rather than trying alternatives to Truman’s project of global
development.
The initiatives now being taken by the people at the grassroots are
opposing, first and foremost, those elites. They are turning a bad thing into a
good thing: using their marginalization as the context for creating new
opportunities; transforming their conditions as the desperate, the passive
left-overs, the dropouts, into becoming active and creative refuseniks;
transforming their unfulfillable demand for education and other economic goods
and services into a new awareness of the false promises of development or
progress. They are recognizing and celebrating the reliability of their own
traditions to achieve their cultural ideals of a good life.
We would not describe what
is happening at the grassroots as the deschooling of society. Of course,
sharing the hopes of the people in their struggles to protect their new commons
through extended coalitions, we also nourish the hope of reaching that point
where there will occur the inversion of all the oppressive institutions. We
join those who also hope that in the new era, schools will become a relic of
times past; monuments of a dark age examined with an archeological gaze by
scholars studying the rise and fall of modernity.
Marginalized by the
educational establishment and the industrial world as the ravings of a crank,
Illich’s wisdom already has immediate practical uses in the “marginal” world:
the Two-Thirds World seeking to protect itself from its continued exploitation
by the One-Third world. For Illich observes that
[a] deschooled society . . . would rely on the autonomous and
self-adjusting use of components and tools. It would encourage trust in
personal experience and the rise of transitory and dispersed associations in
which decisions are made by those directly affected, and in which common
purpose frequently emerges only in the very instance of
its achievement. Access to information and tools must
be random, if new connections are to be discovered.
If a society uses
technology to increase the autonomy of each person, it follows that only
procedural rules can be planned. These rules will set limits, but they leave
substantive goals unpredictable. Only certain tools can be made generally
available, but how they can be used cannot be predetermined.
Illich adds:
To plan for unpredictable results is a scandal to the educator, a threat
to the economist, a danger to the politician, and folly to the civil servant.
The educator derives his income from the commercialization of knowledge; the
economist rests his case on the possibility of measuring all values; the
politician wants his power backed up by welfare institutions; the employee of
national and international development agencies cannot bear to admit that he
has been leading the poor down the garden path. Yet the planners are finding it
increasingly difficult to live with their own predictions, which often point to
disaster.
The alternative to the
present educational system and the societies it engenders is a return of
responsibility for each man’s present to him and to the member of the informal
group emerging around him. This is an admittedly surprising proposition, but
without surprise there is no hope (Illich 197 Ib, 10-11).
These words, written in 1971, are useful for understanding what is
actuary happening at the grassroots today. In 1992, reacting to the Earth
Summit, the editors of The Ecologist described what the people were doing at
the grassroots. All over the world, they found successful initiatives for
reclaiming their commons. Their book, Whose Common Future? (1993), is a
hope-filled, rigorous, and detailed account of grassroots initiatives
undertaken by deschooled cultures. Their undertakings reflect many of the
elements Illich celebrates: and, not surprisingly, they are producing in
educators, economists, politicians, and civil servants the kind of reactions he
predicted.
Since the 1970s, the ideas
and texts of Illich have a way of reappearing—particularly at those times when
the continual crisis of the educational system goes through explosions
demanding urgent attention. His main conclusions about the situation and
functions of the school system, a source of scandal in the late 1960s and the
1970s, then considered too radical, are now part of conventional wisdom. Even
the fashionable, non-marginal Alvin Toffler declared:
In the economy of the third wave, education becomes something permanent,
compulsive, and is integrated in the costs for the operation of business. There
is no way to escape it. But I must say that we should try to blow up our entire
educational system (I don’t like hyperbolic expressions, but I cannot avoid one
for this case). In fact, the educational system is but a subsystem immersed in
another system that integrates the family, TV, the school, sport training . . .
and the most important part, that part for which nobody has found the name
(Toffler 1992, emphasis added).
The expanding educational industry of the 1990s, selling every variety
of medicine or cure—radical, alternative, ecological, conventional, “back to
the basics,” or on the technological forefront of the cyberspace World
Campus—proves that in the increasingly developed North, the immediate “inversion”
of institutions that Illich hoped for in the
1970s will be postponed to usher in more educational
expansion . . . mass information or nuclear technologies . . .
the epoch of a global schoolhouse that would be distinguishable only in
name from a global madhouse or a global prison, in which education, correction,
and adjustment became synonymous . . . [with] new and fearsome educational
devices that teach about a world which progressively becomes more opaque and
forbidding (Illich 1977, 70).
Margins and Centers:
Escaping the Mythopoesis of Education
Students are not the only ones graded and ranked for their good or bad
behavior, their obedience or failure to obey the norms of the Open Society’s
educational system. Scholars and scholarship are similarly ranked: following
the same exact criteria. Underlying the creation of Centers and Margins, these
criteria separate those who are certified as able or exemplary from those who
are failed and ousted. All those who pose a genuine threat to the reigning
“certainties,” the academy’s Tower of Truths, must be sent off to the
doghouse—denied jobs, tenure, or promotion; or tolerated enough to be
misunderstood and misclassified: as interesting and even original thinkers
whose ideas belong to “utopia” and not to the practical realities of the real
world.
Despite this treatment,
several survive. Against all institutional odds, their books are republished:
like those of Gandhi, Ivan Illich. Paul Goodman, John Holt ... to name a
smattering. Irrelevant or outdated at the centers of the academy, they offer
much to the marginal; to people at the grassroots looking both for precedents
and inspiration for their current endeavors; seeking articulation or solid
intellectual foundations for their hopes and initiatives.
Those marginalized by
Centers of academic scholarship and institutionalized knowledge are proving to
be particularly pertinent for those experiencing puzzlement and perplexities in
their struggle for dignity and liberation. To understand contemporary methods
of marginalization, we cannot find a better case than that of Gandhi— whose
myth of being much celebrated and revered hides the reality of being little
read, little heard, martyred, and misunderstood.
Only a while ago, a kind and gentle editor of America’s leading journal
of professional education told us that our article on Gandhi’s Nai Talim (often
translated as New Education) could not be published since there was no
possibility for applying his philosophy of teaching and learning in
contemporary America. This recent rejection of Gandhi reminded us of
not-so-recent rejections of Illich. As early as 1973 prominent educational
reformers like B. Frank Brown, the Chairman of the US National Commission on
the Reform of Secondary Education, declared: “Deschooling may be a useful
exercise in scholarly discourse, but it cannot be taken seriously” (Brown
quoted by Lister in Illich 1974a, 2).
Those committed to progress and development cannot take Gandhi or Illich
seriously. Gandhi’s treatment by modern India is even more instructive than his
treatment in the American academy. It offers a fascinating archetype for
fathoming how Centers (especially in the democratic, Open Societies of our day)
systematically push all serious debunkers or challengers to their margins . . .
oftentimes by placing them in seats of real importance. Modern India elevates
Gandhi to the stature of saint as well as the “Father of
the Nation.”
Standing erect on this pedestal, he is exquisitely castrated: saintliness takes
him out of the running in matters practical; while fatherhood—particularly the
father who is aged or elderly—reduces him down to size, to one who is not
sufficiently ‘’fast,” “smart,” or “with-it” to merit serious consideration in
the context of modernization. Ashis Nandy reveals the intimate enemies (Nandy
1981) of Gandhi:
Indian statists of both
the right and the left have never acknowledged their enormous debt to Mr.
Nathuram Godse for imposing on the Father of the Nation a premature martyrdom
that straightaway gave him a saintly status and effectively finished him off as
a live political presence (Nandy 1996, 2).
Crafty Gandhi, however, even half a century after his death, resists
being neutered-‘’Their brain children still hold it against Gandhi that he has
refused to oblige them and has defied the saintliness imposed on him as a
strategic means of neutralizing him.” No matter how weak remains the Gandhi of
the Indian State and Indian nationalism, or the Gandhi of the Gandhians, the
mythic Gandhi rises from the ashes; “derived from the principles of Gandhism as
they have spread throughout the world as a new legend or epic.” Half a century
after his assassination, he remains potent. Neither spreading a specific
catechism nor a learned discourse, he remains a continual source of
inspiration; constantly regenerated as “a symbol of defiance of hollow tyrants
and bureaucratic authoritarianism backed by the power of the State and modern
technology” (Nandy 1996, 2. 6).
Gandhism at the grassroots is not always associated with the initiatives
that follow his footsteps. More often than not, the people actively practicing
satyagraha have neither heard that word nor read Gandhi. Nonviolently, in small
Gandhian ways, Gandhi’s thought and praxis affects peoples’ initiatives at the
grassroots. Despite the educational system with which India continues aping its
supposedly ousted colonizers, Gandhi’s Nai Talim remains a presence; a celebration
of the indigenous cultures of India; of agri[soil]-culture and homespun with
which, despite their violent hanging-on, Gandhi spun out the last Global
Empire,
Gandhi’s Nai Talim refuses to be confined to any classroom—not even
those created in Gandhian schools. It is found anywhere and everywhere,
resisting the new temples of modern India: World Bank funded dams for progress
and development, nuclear reactors, Miss World pageants, the State’s endless
schemes for deforestation, for patenting the indigenous haldi, amla, and neem .
. . the list is as long as the horrors perpetrated by the best educated
Indians: whose international credentials give them the legitimacy to
transmogrify Truman’s “underdeveloped” nation into what the developed and the
developing call one of four Asian Tigers.
Incarnated
Intellectuals
Like Pandora and her
husband Epimetheus, the people at the grassroots are teachers of hope, humility,
and sufficiency; of abandoning the arrogance of controlling the future; of
practicing the arts of teaching and learning which occur organically in the
context of living on soil: well rooted in soil-cultures.
We are learning from them what it means to offer our offspring as many
opportunities as we can to learn with us; drawing from our ancient, rich
traditions in taking our first
steps toward
creating our own new commons. They teach us how to commit ourselves to our
immediate world; in our relations with each other and our natural spaces; in
the dignity of our modest lives. Our teachers are generous in sharing with us
their predicaments, the constant struggle for protection from the economic
invasion of our lives. They are also generous in sharing with us the thousand
and one opportunities for enjoyment—free of scarcity, indeed abundantly
available in our well rooted present.
Who will educate the educators? Marx’s question has no other answer but
the dominant ideology, the system. Liberation cannot come from translating the
“something” of education into a “political conscience” obtained through
“conscientization.” Who will educate the educator, the teacher-student and
student-teacher?
Political awareness for escaping the tyranny of homo educancfus and homo
oeconomicus comes, we are learning, from the uneducated, by radically
liberating ourselves from addiction to any form of education ... to start
living free of the traps of the educated conscience. We hope others may enjoy
this liberation. We hope others can extend the political coalitions by which
peoples’ new commons are protected from the daily encroachments of the economy
of education and development; and the privilege and license that inevitably
arrive with them.
Bypassing the school system, people at the grassroots are applying to
that modern ritual the same treatment they are creating for all the meddlesome
bureaucratic procedures imposed upon them. In the new commons, people do not
subordinate living to education. We are learning from them the types of damage
done by separating learning from living. We now know that institutional
certification produces nothing other than facilitating our relations with the
institutional world.
Some of us hope that the school system will collapse, taking with it its
inherent contradictions and counter productivity. Some of us think that our
societies can no longer afford to dedicate a vast proportion of their peoples
to an enterprise generating inequalities, discrimination, and the loss of
dignity. But we are also increasingly aware of the magnitude of professional
interests and prejudices constantly reinforcing the educational system. Is
there any possibility of finding attentive listeners among the million members
of the gargantuan Teacher’s Union in Mexico, marching year after year to demand
salary increments? True, some of them are already finding their way out of the
morass of the school. But how do we dissolve the social belief that education
is a basic human good, a right?
Less and less do we desire to expend our energy persuading others of the
moral conclusions entailed by the worldwide damage done by the educational
enterprise? Instead, we are increasingly drawn to share with the dropouts—who
represent the majority among us—our admiration, our new discovery of the
blessings they enjoy; affirming their stance of being refuseniks. Liberating
learning from education and schooling, healing from Health Care, re-embedding
food in agriculture, repossessing the damaged arts of dwelling, finding useful
and creative work that offers cures from the addiction to jobs through creative
occupation—all of these offer a perennial source of enjoyment and autonomy,
radically regenerating the ancient arts of suffering and dying.
The “new social movements” and the new incarnations of the “civil
society,” now the object of increasing academic and political interest, are
nourishing hopes at the .margins and alarms at the centers. To understand
these, we have found it important to study the
generation of
educated refuseniks who have, in the course of the last fifteen years, become
members of grassroots communities. They must not be confused with the small,
enlightened, dissident vanguards who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike the
tatter, the former exemplify a new kind of rooted, regenerated awareness.
This new awareness, explored in the entire course of this book, is not a
spontaneous product of people’s Resistance. It comes with the transformation of
discontents into refuseniks: those engaged in the radical re-conceptualization
of certainties promoted by the dominant ideologies- For their incarnation, they
have had to do more than take a critical academic distance from the modern,
western concepts and tools, imposed through colonization ‘and development. More
importantly, it has been necessary for them to put their feet again on real
soil; to escape the mental magma now dominating the public discourse-in the
think tanks, the centers for higher education and research, as well as in the
popular media.
This magma is the symbolic fallout of modern technology, shaping the
perception of the middle and upper classes of the One-Thirds world. Their
reality, personal and collective, is increasingly shaped by an empty collection
of words and statements. The invasion of plastic words (Porksen 1995) is now
superseded by “conversation” and “talk”’ which no longer alludes to anything
real; a subsystem of the system of virtual reality. This non-reality shapes the
selves immersed in the dominant discourse. Media, professionals, and
politicians incessantly repeat hollow catchwords and empty statements about
social and personal goals. Presented as processes of democratization, these
perpetuate the opposite: technical “problems” and “solutions” which create the
illusion of participation in the important decisions of personal and social
life, when the nation-state itself also becomes a kind of symbolic magma
(Guehenno 1995).
Incarnated intellectuals are learning how to emerge out of this
standardized magma of virtual reality in and through their connections with the
common men and women who have never been immersed in it. Dissatisfied with the
packaged knowledge manufactured by oppressive professional institutions, a few
educated peoples have been searching for alternative paths. Some of them have
found in their deprofessionalization unexpected opportunities for creative
living among uneducated peoples—especially those successful in protecting their
commons from institutionalization and its magma of virtual reality.
Drawing upon our earlier examples of incarnated intellectuals, here we
take further steps in clarifying the nature of their deprofessionalization at
the grassroots. It involves, first and foremost, sharing professional knowledge
with the “clients” or “consumers” supposedly being served by the services of
the experts. This attitude has a long tradition: of lawyers sharing legal
“secrets” to avoid litigation, making themselves redundant; or of doctors explaining
medical “secrets” that liberate their “clients” from expensive and unnecessary
calls. Practices that lessen the control over their clientele by the
professions should not be confused with deprofessionalization. Most
particularly it is to be distinguished from the now standard practice of
professionals, corporations, or governments which delegate to their “consumers”
the functions previously performed by them, imposing “shadow work” (Illich
1981) upon their “clients”: patients trained to examine their bodies or minds
to facilitate the work of the medical doctors; taxpayers trained by the IRS to
facilitate its control; consumer-students trained to be “enlightened
consumers” of goods and services, knowing their
“rights” and legal responsibilities for making lucrative claims, etc.
Departing from the gamut of practices that insert professional goods and
services even deeper into the lives of people, creating stronger addictions,
deprofessionalization transforms “expert-client” relationships in ways which
enhance social capacities, rendering redundant the reign of “professional
expertise.’ This behavior clearly militates against the interest of the
professions for increased economic and other power. Instead,
deprofessionalization puts the profession aside for the good of commons and
communities; celebrating the personal autonomy and social capacities that
thrive through the marginalization of the economy and its professional
hierarchies,
Other facets of deprofessionalization, usually overlapping with the
first, include taking distance from the language and categories which define
each profession. Used to befuddle rather than profess to the public, the
‘’technical” languages of the profession erode the public life that constitutes
radical democracy (Prakash 1994). Deprofessionalizing themselves, distancing
themselves from their coded practices, we know gynecologists who refuse to
“deliver” babies. They render redundant^ the medicalization of birth by
rejecting their profession’s control of the natural activity of giving birth.
Celebrating centuries old wisdom, gathered by women, these gynecologists
“collude” with midwives in sharing the rituals of labor as natural processes
rather than medical functions. Abandoning their addiction to exorbitant
professional medical fees for delivery (best yet, C-sections), they stand ready
to support common women—if and when called; and, they report to us, they are
almost never called.
Similarly,
deprofessionalized lawyers share with the people their experiences for avoiding
debilitating debacles with the law. This is the clear opposite of the expertise
that, for a fee, finds loopholes for avoiding taxes—a new profession in modern
businesses; or transforms justice into a technical game and a soap opera—as the
dream team of lawyers for O. J. Simpson has shown.
Deprofessionalized lawyers
share their technical knowledge of the juridical system for finding escapes
from it—ways by which the people themselves can find just ways to resolve their
conflicts without recourse to the exorbitant legal system of courts, lawyers,
and judges.
When deprofessionalized women and men become fully incorporated in the
life of their commons—whether in rural villages or urban neighborhoods, ghettos
and barrios— they are all too often and understandably accepted by their own
people as the traditional wise women and men or the elders. Their moral and
spiritual leadership lacks pro-fessional authority or power. Their specific
competence articulates in new ways a shared communal wisdom. They live well by
combining literate and empirical knowledge, bookish insights, and traditional
wisdom—producing the empirical knowledge of the struggle (Foucault 1977). They
perform the critical functions of facilitating processes that generate the shared
communal wisdom of their common struggle. They have the “disinterestedness” in
not reducing this wisdom to an individual endowment, a “knowledge capital”
which promotes the benefits of the career. They understand that their own
articulations are the outcomes of many shared conversations and experiences—
the living interaction of different systems of knowledge, of diverse
cosmovisions.
Incarnated intellectuals are differentiated from both armchair
intellectuals or organic intellectuals (in the tradition of Gramsci), whose
thinking and practices clearly belong to the world of abstraction and ideology.
Subcomandante Marcos reveals how his own ideology—an ideology that brought him
to Chiapas as an armchair intellectual in the process of becoming an organic
intellectual—was dissolved in the course of his lived interactions with the
Indian peoples. He is no longer what he was. He can no longer think the way he
thought. He clearly contributed to a collective process that we now know as
zapatismo. The outcome does not belong to him. But neither is he irrelevant. It
was, and continues to be, a shared daily creation, profoundly and deeply rooted
in the traditional soils and toils of the people.
Contemporary Prophets
For the modern mind, prophets are people who, allegedly inspired by God,
can predict the future. Moderns have lost the original meaning of the word
“prophet,” with its allusions to women and men who gaze at the present with the
lucidity needed to render opaque predicaments into fully transparent ones. With
the light they shed on the present, it is possible to see clearly.
Traditionally, prophets neither predict nor anticipate the future. They do not
conduct cheap tours to some promised land.
At the grassroots, among
deprofessionalized men and women and incarnated intellectuals, contemporary
prophets profess only the possible or probable outcomes evidenced and emerging
in the present.
They unveil what is hidden and rendered opaque by economic,
technological, and other systems. These prophets include Gandhi, Ellul, Illich,
Orwell, Berry, and others prescient of the damage contemporary institutions and
technologies are doing to people and cultures, to the environment, to the human
condition. Theirs clearly is the case of the road not taken; for it offers
radical divergences from the superhighway’s high-speed dramas and horrors.
Unheeded by those racing at high speed to the top, these prophets write and
speak for those ready to slow down and live (Sachs 1997, Illich 1997).
At the Centers, their hopes are scoffed as the fantasies of those
impractical or deluded. Their awareness has done little or nothing to wake up
the Centers. Spurning Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, the highly educated elite of India
opted for a nation state. Instead of nonviolence and bread labor, India got
management, corruption, centralization, pollution the bomb, and other forms of
unlimited violence—cultural and environmental. Yet, at the grassroots,
reincarnated Gandhi nourishes the awareness we are celebrating in this book.
We would not describe Ivan
Illich as a role model for anyone. His own condition, as a pilgrim, with no
place on Earth that he can call a home, is an inverted mirror of the convivial,
rooted life about which he writes. But his personal story clearly reveals how
his destiny transformed him into a prophet.
As a half-Jew in the’1930s in Central Europe, he was radically uprooted.
He knew at the early age of twelve that he would not bring a son to his
ancestral home—breaking the tradition of centuries that was no longer present.
Thus started his pilgrimage. He chose not to react to this loss with modern
denial—forgetting his roots, escaping to the future, as too many contemporary
men and women do, willingly collaborating with their own uprooting. Neither did
he fall into nostalgia—transforming his memories into
sentimentalism.
Instead, he kept fully alive, in his heart, the treasure of his roots. He
became consciously traditional; well anchored in his tradition, continually
enriching that tradition through his historical explorations, refusing to be an
accomplice to the forces uprooting him. The more he nourished his roots in
tradition, the more his writings appeared to his modern readers as a fantastic
novelty. The more deeply he entered his tradition, the more he distilled his
traditional knowledge to become a flame in the darkness of modern perceptions,
the more he appeared as a radical innovator.
Rooted in his tradition
while rigorously avoiding any form of nostalgia, Illich’s radical innovations
systematically explode any illusory bridge that takes us back in history.
Instead, they open to those who gaze with him, to the surprise with which the
present presents itself. Illich exemplifies the courage needed to gaze into the
darkness of the present, revealing its horrors to be even worse than what he
witnessed in the occupation of his place by the Nazis.
In 1971, when I began to
write Tools for Conviviality, on the multidimensional thresholds beyond which
human endeavor becomes destructive of a human mode of existence, I broke down.
It was the only time in my life that something which is probably called a
‘depression’ has hit me very deeply, I don’t think I would have gone on writing
if I had a son of my own flesh in my arms. I would have had to join the rain
dance (Illich in Cayley 1992. 281-282).
Without Illich’s guts and
strength to face loneliness, he could not have avoided the rain dance, gazing
into the darkness far enough to discover that we have no future about which we
can say anything, or about which we have any power:’’ that is “a necessary
condition for thinking and reflecting, both with meaningful and sensual words
and clear and distinct ideas” (Cayley 1992, 281-282). It is easier to escape,
to engage in the rain dance.
Rituals are forms of behavior that make those who participate in them
blind to the discrepancy which exists between the purpose for which you perform
the rain dance, and the actual social consequences the rain dance has. If the
rain dance doesn’t work, you can blame yourself for having danced it wrongly.
Schooling, i increasingly came to see, is the ritual of a society committed to
progress and development. It creates certain myths which are a requirement for
a consumer society. For instance, it makes you believe that learning can be
sliced up into pieces and quantified, or that learning is something for which
you need a process within which you acquire it. And in this process you are the
consumer and somebody else the organizer and you collaborate in producing the
thing which you consume and interiorize (Cayley 1992, 66-67).
The darkness into which Illich has been able to gaze continues producing
human and environmental horrors. More horrifying, perhaps, is the sight of
people engaged in every kind of rain dance with frantic breathlessness: packing
children off at early dawn into day-care or school confinement; preparing for
institutional life—from birth to death hooked to machines; to international
institutions, political parties, and all governments fanatically looking for a
good rate of economic growth to eliminate poverty and injustice; billions of
dollars spent on “democratic” elections promoting candidates who will “fix it”;
marches and sit-ins for achieving more satisfaction of every possible need . .
.
At the grassroots, some people may still be involved in real rain
dances: rituals which are part of their tradition. But they know that they are
not buying insurance . . . that they
cannot manage or control the future . . . Without
becoming trapped with needs and expectations, they nourish their hopes (abrigan
esperanzas); keeping them warm; preventing them from freezing. They know human
pain and suffering cannot be managed (away); they are part of the conditio
humana.
The rain dances at the grassroots do not transform the lively present
into an ever-postponed future, a substitute for real hopes and initiatives. The
arts of living and dying of common women and men allow them to deal with the
darkness; to dare to see the evil, the horror, whose shadow emerges as prophets
light themselves up as flames in the darkness. The light that allows us to see
is neither the eye nor the thing it illuminates.
Still, Illich is no role model. For Teodor Shanin and others he is “the
central thinker of our generation.” In a review of Tools for Conviviality, John
Holt stated that
from now on no analysis that does not include his, extend it, grow out
from it, can be considered as anything but trivial and misleading (Holt in
Hoinacki 1996, 4).
Without being anyone’s role model, deliberately refusing to be a media
guru, throwing cold water on all brands of Illichisms, Ivan Illich continues to
provide incarnated intellectuals the concepts and insights necessary for taking
a critical distance from the dominant modes of perception; to gaze respectfully
at their own differentiated traditions flourishing in lieu of education (Illich
1973, 1982, 1985, 1987b, 1988, 1989, 1992, 1994c). His radical critique of
technological society, and particularly of the way it shapes our view of
reality and generates in us a set of certainties, is never devoid of hope:
I have no expectation from
technology, but I believe in the beauty, in the creativity, in the surprising
inventiveness of people, and I continue to hope in them (Illich in Cayley 1992,
111).
He believes in “the
extraordinary creativity of people and their ability to live in the midst of
what frustrates bureaucrats, planners, and observers” (Cayley 1992, 116). He
anticipated an inversion in the structure of tools after a “big, symbolic
event.” It never happened.
Instead of that, it is
hundreds of millions of people just using their brains and trusting their
senses. We now live in a world in which most of those things that industry and
government do are misused by people for their own purposes (Illich in Cayley
1992, 117).
Those millions intuitively
doing what is needed are increasingly arriving at Illich’s insights through
common sense; their own as well as that of their own incarnated intellectuals,
giving articulation to their resistance transformed into liberation. They have
things, models, peers, and elders, as well as reticular structures whose legal,
organizational, and technical aspects they try to improve through their daily
endeavors (Illich 1970, 109-110).
New technologies and gigantic economic forces are now dismantling the
school system, plagued since its creation by every kind of committed reform to
establish itself in the stead of peoples’ commons. The emerging technological
and economic forces conspire to bring to the world more and better education,
the universal, multicultural classroom. That they are doomed to fail is
irrelevant to the mythmakers, transporting their education rain dance to all
corners of the globe.
“Deprived” of their privileges, the peoples of the Two-Thirds World are
better able to sense these limits. Bypassing the school, genetic patenting, the
Web, biocratic controls, and other horrors of the educated, they are learning
from and teaching each other how to mock the economic credo and its disabling
goods, services, and professions. Their grassroots epic is evolving with each
step they take to return from the future—promised by parties, governments,
churches, and all the ideologies of the educated. They are now increasingly
aware that the educational system—starting with the school—was the first
industrial enterprise that recognized no frontiers; the first “global”
corporation, pioneering the reorganization of society to concentrate more and
more “labor power” in the creation of consumption “needs” that only highly
capitalized corporations can satisfy. Awareness and understanding of this paves
the way for alternatives to education, simultaneously attending to the other
economic and political structures of society (Illich in tuning 1974, 21-22).
Conviviality is not a futuristic Utopia, but part of our present:
Convivial actualization of
the present has taken the place of a future alienated by ideologies . . . Paul
Goodman’s “reconquest of the present” is brought about by conviviality. Ivan
Illich’s ideas have introduced a new quality of our human life together into
the present (Steger 1984, 300).
Courageously walking their
simple, modest, joyful paths, common men and women at the grassroots offer hope
to those who desire to escape the traps of colonization, progress, development,
and education.
This book is but a
fleeting glimpse into their ventures and adventures.
Notes
1. The brilliance of a Chinua Achebe (1961, 1985)
reveals these horrors in ways that put them in their proper perspective—particularly
in comparison with the scale and virulence of the large-scale horrors that
corns with colonialism or the neocolonialism of the technological system (Ellul
1964, 1980).
2. For a detailed account of the trapping web of
concepts constituting the development discourse, see Sachs 1992.
3.
The word has not yet been contaminated or made toxic. For a
radical critique of its contemporary use, see “The Mask of Love” in Cayley
1992, 199-218.
4.
Reporting on Ivan Illich’s Spanish reputation, Andoni Alonso
takes us back to the 1970s in Spain: “What was at stake was a new way of
dealing with education, completely opposed to the patronizing and repressive
educational system created by the regime of Generalisimo Francisco Franco.”
Illich was a crucial influence for that purpose: translating and publishing his
works defined an attempt “to develop an entire cultural project opposed to the
conservative mediocrity of official thinkers.” But in the 1980s, “general
interest in Illich temporarily waned ... In many ways, socialist technocracy
was no more than an extension of Franco’s program of techno-economic
development, but with a democratic facade . . . Most intellectuals now remember
Illich’s work as exclusively related to pedagogical reform ... at the exclusion
of any real appreciation of his broader and deeper concerns” (Alonso 1996.
243-44). For Alonso, the Spanish image of Ivan Illich can be seen by his
English readers as in “a distant mirror” (Alonso 1996,
245). In the mirror offered by Alonso’s Spanish Ivan Illich, we discern
his successes as well as failures in all other schooled, developed societies.
5. See, particularly, Gartner et al. 1973. The book
includes articles written as a reaction to Illich’s essay, “After Deschooling,
What?”, published in Soda! Policy, September-October 1971, as well as articles
from Saturday Review and Harvard Educational Review. The book illustrates the
academic reaction to Illich’s work. For a rigorous account of the reactions to
the book, see also Ohliger and McCarthy 1971, and Ohliger 1974.
6.
We eliminated this mistake in our quote offered earlier on
in Part II of this book, taken from Illich’s Deschooling Society (1970, iv-v)
which starts with the line: “Universal education through schooling is not
feasible.” In the edition of Deschooling Society we used, the first sentences
of this fundamental statement read as follows: “Universal education through
schooling is not feasible. It would be more feasible if it were attempted by
means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools.” We
found it necessary to add a “NOT” in the second sentence. [P.S. After the
proofs of our own book were ready, we discovered that other editions of
Deschooling Society do have a “No” in this very sentence.] Without it, there is
a contradiction in the whole paragraph and with the book; but a contradiction
that the readers may refuse to perceive in their search for “alternative
institutions built on the style of present schools” as many of them did and
still continue to do.
7. “Schotle,” the word from which school is derived,
originally meant leisure.
8. There still abound many Illich critics who argue for
the education of the poor, the destitute, or the jobless—claiming schools on
their behalf in the name of social justice. The models for such criticism can
be found in the many articles written by Herbert Gintis and Vincente Navarro
against Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis. For Illich’s reaction to this pair,
see Cayley 1992, 74.
9. For our extended discussion of how the written
word—in text, screen, or cyberspace—breaks up commons and communities, creating
the atom, the private reader, the individual self with his personal collection
of books bought and owned, see Esteva and Prakash. 1997.
10.
The argument is now in the media. See the dossier
“Reclaiming real life,” Utne Reader, July-August 1997. Jon Spayde’s article, “A
way out of wonderland: is a real life possible any more?”, starts by stating:
“These days I’m hearing the word real a lot, mostly from people who have
noticed that the demonstrable difference between Bill Clinton and the computer
animated spaceman in the movie Toy Story is narrowing every day” (49). Ten
years ago, finding that Reagan and Mickey Mouse were equally real for children
was puzzling for many. Spayde’s statement is now conventional wisdom.
Epilogue
“Utopia,” we
understand, refers to “no place” in this world.
What people have been doing in recent years, particularly in the South,
we dare to describe as ambiguously Utopian: their new eras are already here,
offering a pluriverse of alternatives to industrial society. These eras,
however, do not yet have their marked
place. Their grassroots epic of many different tales
continues in its marvelous unfolding .
. . toward horizons
unmanageable, unpredictable.
Rather than globalization, we sense emerging forms of localization;
rather than urbanization, realization; rather than modernization and
individualization, recovery of the present and the commons. If that is what is
happening among the social majorities, as we believe, it suggests that ordinary
people are using the turbulence of a dying era to go in a thousand different
directions; away from the dominant discourse of “a good life,” managed and
molded by the experts of the establishment.
Following their own sense, they are pioneering some of the most
interesting cultural initiatives of our time: those that dare the imagination
to go beyond education.
Rooting, Rerooting
The world ceased to be a dream, a prophecy, a project. It has become
real. Cultural isolation belongs to the past. There are no peoples, cultures,
or societies without “contact” with the “external world”: there is interweaving
among them. The Web, on a world scale, makes inevitable interactions, inter
penetration, interdependence. In such a context, the propensity to unify and
homogenize the world has intensified, no longer through ideology but through
production: the global farm, the global factory, the global market, the global
audience. The new systems of transportation and communication have created a
novel sensation of belonging to the world—a form of common existence-captured
in the emblem of the global village. Corporative transnationalization, what the
experts called internationalization of capital a few decades ago, creates the
illusion of full integration, of a deep and complete subsumption of one’s being
in a globalized reality, confirmed by empirical experience: people across the
world using the same brands of jeans or smoking the same brands of cigarettes
(or being persuaded by the same campaigns to abandon them). A Mexican soap
opera captures record audiences in Russia; an unknown Indian author’s story of
Kerala gets translated into ten languages and published in seven editions
within twelve weeks; gossip about the English royal family reaches Timbuktu and
San Francisco in the same second . . .
These descriptors, however, fail to reflect what happens outside the
boundaries of the social minorities’ world: among those who will never drive a
family car; eat in McDonald’s; own a mobile or immobile phone; check into a
Sheraton ... It is no longer a secret that the social minorities will have
depleted the world’s resources well before the contagion of their daily needs
overtakes the worlds of the Other. Peoples at the margins have no need to go to
school to learn of their increasing marginalization from what the minorities
are celebrating as the globalized mode of living. They are experiencing what
the experts call structural impossibilities.
Faced with the fact of their exclusion from a way of life proposed as an
ideal for everyone, in whose name developers continue sacrificing their
environments and commons, the people in barrios and villages have started to
react. Faced with the globalization of their marginality, they are rooting
themselves in spaces which belong to them and to which they belong. To entrench
themselves against the forces of up-rootedness, they are localizing their
initiatives and giving them a new meaning: instead of trying to be incorporated
into the global promised land, they now claim respect for what
they already have; who they are; dedicated to
enriching and reclaiming their commons; wrenching them out of the grasp of
developers In order to regenerate them, or to try creating new ones.
These trends are overtly manifested among those who have successfully
resisted developers’ subjugation and avoided being transmogrified into homines
oeconomici (the possessive individuals born in the West) in their barrios and
villages. However, they can also be observed among those who were successfully
incorporated into the middle classes. The new operation of the
transnationalized economy expelled many of them from what they considered their
privileges, throwing them into the informal sector. Some of them, like the mass
in panic, do crowd themselves at the narrow doors of access to the privileges
they lost, joined by aspirants who never knew the condition of
institutionalization. Those seeing the reality of the narrow door are walking
away, strengthening their joint efforts to cope with their common political and
sociological challenges.
Localization or
relocalization, taking root again, is being pioneered by those already awake to
their marginalization by the global economy.
Ruralization
Urbanization, as a privileged expression of industrial society, imposed
a two-pronged dependency: of goods and services necessary for survival and of
the mechanisms of access to them. These two prongs—of dependency on the market
and the institutions of the welfare state-reshaped the city. The modern city
was fragmented into homogeneous and specialized spaces, to accommodate the
economic functions defined for the people. To get subsistence out of that logic
became virtually impossible.
The process of urbanization has apparently concluded in the industrial
societies. Seventy-five percent of its population is urban, while most
non-urbanites are assimilated into the same pattern. The invention of the
commuter and the search for a better quality of life stopped the growth of
cities; while its logic of operation defines more than ever before the daily
life of homo transportandus.
Urbanization continues in the southern hemisphere, where the urban
population is still increasing at a rate of 4 percent a year. Nine out of the
ten most populated cities of the world are now in the South. In regions like
Latin America, the urban population will soon catch up with and surpass the
percentages of industrial countries. The experts predict that the urban
population of the world will rise to 60 percent of the total in the year 2000.
Alternative trends are
suggested by the visible deceleration of urbanization, already observed in many
countries. There are also signs of its changing nature. For, till recently, the
growth of the city always occurred at the expense of the barrio. The diversity
and multi-functionality of the latter, tending to self-sufficiency, entered
into continual contradiction with the economic logic of urbanization. Whole
barrios were devastated in order to impose the logic of specialized sectors—for
sleeping, working, or buying goods and services, all of them interconnected by
speedways needed by urbanites to fulfill their functions.
Those suffering the consequences of this devastation have started to
react. Since urbanization in the South has effectively fulfilled its dissolving
and destructive function,
without providing
employment opportunities or urban goods and services, the people have been
forced to rely upon themselves for their subsistence. Their rural traditions,
still recent, have helped them in “illegal” land takeovers and the organization
of their settlements. With ingenuity, they endow themselves, legally or
illegally, with the “basic services” that the government will not; building
their houses, using their subsistence skills to occupy the interstices of
economic society, and thriving within them in their own ways. These include
maintaining their organic relationships with the rural communities from which
they carne, facilitating flows of people and products in both directions.
The economic turbulence of
recent years, including the debt crisis, has strengthened and nourished their
social fabrics, further stimulating such double trends: to enrich rural
settlements through the reformulation of urban techniques, while ruralizing the
city, reclaiming and regenerating the multifunctional barrio, in all its
diversity. In the big urban settlements of the South, modern enclaves, widened
to accommodate the middle classes, are literally under siege by the complex
social fabric of those they call “street people.”
Of necessity, this fabric
is inextricably linked to the market of the middle classes; but these street people
would be wiped out if they submitted to its abstract logic. They live, eat,
find shelter, sing, dance, and celebrate through their millions of informal
initiatives for the “ruralization” of the cities.
Reclaiming the
Commons
The enclosure of the
commons not only tore women and men from their land and their household
economy, but also ripped them from the social fabric through which they derived
support and comfort. Those who were not absorbed by the factories nor operated
as parts of the industrial reserve army were treated as castoffs. Many of them
were forced to emigrate.
In the countries of the southern hemisphere, the enclosure followed a
different pattern. When it did not enslave the people, it subordinated them to
the requirements of colonialism, exploiting them without expelling them from
their commons. When the expulsion was pushed forward through methods like the
Green Revolution, the capacity to employ the people was always very limited and
great numbers of people were left behind. There were constant resettlements of
people, but many of them had no place to emigrate. Since they could no longer
function as functionaries of the industrial reserve army, they became
disposable human beings.
They naturally reacted—often staying alive by the skin of their teeth.
Those who could, resisted colonialists and developers, concentrating their
efforts on the regeneration of their traditional places and commons. Many
others, who lost their traditional commons, struggled to reclaim them in the
countryside; or they created new ones in the city. They did not attempt to come
back to the condition they had before colonization or development: an obvious
impossibility. They rooted their efforts to improve their differentiated ways
of life in their traditions; without any longer being able to assume or to
understand them as a destiny. Their traditions prevented them from falling
under the industrial ethos, with its arrogant presence of controlling the
future. They avoided the expectations which come with the assumption of
scarcity or of the individual self.
Individualization, one element in the modern logic, reduces people to
the minimal unit of several abstract categories. The individual is a
passenger—in a flight, a client or professional, a student or professor—in the
economic society; a housewife or a family head, in its sexist regime; a citizen
or a foreigner in the nation-state. Those individualized in the abstract
category of castoffs, the unemployable, cannot but find their condition to be
unbearable. In contrast, however, from those educated from birth to be
individuals, those robbed of their communal polity (comunalidad) have it in
their flesh. They have within them the capacities and skills for regenerating
and enriching their spaces—not as some futurist Utopia but as a part of the
present being actualized; free of the baggage of alienated and alienating
ideologies about the individual self. They know that, instead of being
individuals, they are persona/ knots in nets of relationships: the nets have
given them a place to which they belong and which belongs to them.
David and Goliath
Global forces, operating
today under the banners of free trade and other neoliberalisms, are mortal
swells weakening nation-states. Their privileged incumbents search for security
and control within ever bigger macrostructures, expecting to soften and moderate
the blind forces of the market.
Rather than following such
impulses, increasingly incapable of holding back the oceanic force of the new
economic storms, peoples rooted in their commons search for the autonomy that
comes with the human scale of their political bodies. To protect them from
being drowned or swallowed up, their grassroots initiatives build dikes to
contain these global forces to their margins.
Every struggle of autonomy
demonstrates that these global forces can only have concrete existence in their
local incarnations. In that territory of their commons, David always has the
possibility of winning over Goliath. And the emerging coalitions of well-rooted
women and men. at the grassroots, are articulating their local advances,
for-mulating and enacting the political controls required to protect and
strengthen their ventures.
Every day offers new documentation about the successes of the people in
such endeavors, obtained after hard and long struggles. Their failures or new
threats are also documented. They confront severe restrictions and it would be
criminal to idealize the misery in which many of them live. They harbor no
illusions of an ideal life.
They live their ideals
every day. Their epic unfolds outside the brutal, vicious grasp of global
forces. They continue to share the humble hope that Pandora did not let escape
from her amphora. In their shifting horizon, their institutional inversions
reveal the brilliant and diffuse colors of the rainbow.
End
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