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- IS: For our last talk, let's just get into how you would start class on the first day. But I also wanted to talk about ethics. What gives us the right to shape minds?
- PF: The liberating educator can't manipulate students, neither can she leave them alone. She has a *directive *role. we direct serious study, we don't implant beliefs.
- This directive role is necessarily unequal, yes, but it can be directed *towards comradery* rather than away from it. The inequality is not an antagonism, but a productive tension.
- We are doing *with *them, not *for *them, with rationality and passion. "I don't understand how to be alive without passion."
- As teachers, *we have something to offer, but nothing to give.*
- Maybe Americans get so sensitive about the issue of manipulation precisely because it's absolutely everywhere in their daily life.
- Erich Fromm studied the "fear of freedom". Students might feel manipulated by the mere invitation to think critically, to be free, to recognize that they are responsible.
- IS: Totally agree. We're so sensitive to "indoctrination", but we're so scared of real freedom. "Freedom" and "liberty" are heard constantly, but its meaning is carefully distorted.
- Part of liberating education is realizing that *we cooperate in denying our own freedom*, which can be hard to swallow. It can also show us the limits of domination, the spaces in which we can still act. People don't like that. They think being challenged is the same as being manipulated.
- Let's talk specifically about sexism and racism though.
- PF: Of course. What right do we have to challenge racist/sexist positions? I'll be clear: we have the right to disagree with students. Disagreeing with them is challenging them. I'm not obliged to pretend I agree in order to be "neutral". That's not neutrality at all!
- IS: "Neutrality" is really support for the status quo. Not acknowledging, not challenging inequality is a political decision *in favor of* inequality. It's another name for an "opaque" curriculum.
- PF: Exactly. We have the right *and the duty *to challenge the status quo. We don't have the right to "impose our position", but we can't stay silent on social issues.
- But let's clarify what we mean here a little. When we challenge students, we offer them a means of changing their views. But we know that consciousness won't transform inside the seminar. That only happens "to the extent we are illuminated in real conflicts in history."
- IS: Is it fair to say that while we can't transform the structure in the classroom, we can interrupt the transmission of ideology?
- Social conflict is present inside the schools. Taking it as an object of study "contradicts the reproduction of dominated consciousness."
- PF: Yes, authoritarian relations of production are inside the schools.
- *Conflict is the midwife of consciousness.*
- IS: Agreed. You've said that we can and must transform student consciousness, but not as in a "professorial conspiracy." The teacher, too, changes. The teacher is never thinking "What should I do to them next?"
- PF: yea lol good
- IS: The charge of indoctrination is so weak, anyway. The students themselves set limits for how much they are willing to change or be challenged. I am usually changed more than they are! It's actually elitist, this idea that kids are gullible, passive, and vulnerable, vulnerable to devious plots of intellectuals. My students are "shrewd and feisty".
- With this in mind, let's go back to my question. How do we start a class?
- PF: Liberatory teaching is risky business, so we need some dispositions. Not from god or from books (but books can help), but from doing. We assess risks through experimentation. We find the medium between too cautious and too reckless. Finding the "necessary fear".
- /// I like how he went to bat for books but not God lol
- Let's keep in mind that we are taught to have much more fear than we actually need. This is "unnecessary fear". We have to find the place where that illusory fear becomes real, find our *real *limits, because right now we *could be *taking up a lot of space that we aren't. We're just ceding it to them.
- I went to Frankfurt once to talk with some Christian Left and Marxist people. The two groups didn't get along, but my presence was to be a sort of pretext for cooperation.
- We had a single Spanish worker present who translated the German for me. I spoke to him on our coffee break. Here's what he said:
- "I tried to set up a course for exiled spanish workers. We decided on our own syllabus. But when we invited colleagues they'd say that they didn't want anything to do with politics, they wanted to earn money and go home."
- "So we reflected on our failures. We didn't give up and decided to do some research. We started asking colleagues what they like to do besides work and earn money. #1 was drinking."
- That was interesting, Ira, because you know how important bars are to Germans. Let's get psychoanalytical. The spanish workers thought they could integrate by meeting Germans in this sacred space. It didn't work, but that didn't deter them from pursuing this dream time after time. My worker friend didn't see a way in through here, though.
- "#2 was playing cards, though. Us teachers learned so many card games. We studied. Then we went to the card tables and every few hands we'd say something like "Did you hear about what happened in Madrid? Big strike. Workers got arrested." And they'd just be silent, but a heavy, important silence that we didn't interrupt. A few hands later, same thing. By the end of the night they were interested in talking about it. We had to wait till they were ready."
- This is an amazing example to me. This worker, he did his research, he read reality, and he did his teaching there. A theorist and a practitioner. He learned how the dominated copy the dominant.
- IS: Just like the Italian worker in *Bread and Chocolate.* He even dyes his hair blonde to fit in with the Swiss-germans.
- PF: Beautiful film. We saw it in Geneva, where it happened.
- IS: Your story is about racism, but also about how a teacher began dialogue by situating themselves in students' lives. They did their research to learn how to approach them.
- Besides research, how do we begin? Let's maybe return to the "ideological map" you mentioned, research into the political atmosphere. How do you begin?
- PF: First things first, remember you won't change the world in the classroom. This really is the first thing for me. Next we recognize that we can still do important work. We shouldn't go too far if students aren't ready for it, nor should we hold back from what students are capable of working with.
- Second, I need to get humble and work *with *them. This isn't a tactic, it's a necessity. I'm not the only one here who Knows Things. I want to focus on how we can bring out their knowing.
- Third, remember that I need to *re-know what I think I know. *The starting point for students can't be my own understanding of the object of study. We must meet them were they are and re-learn from there.
- What do students want out of this class? What are their dreams? What will they struggle with?
- Fourth, I need to have a critical understanding of how society works. We can't separate our education from the "global dynamics of social change."
- Bisseret talks about this in *Ideology, Class Language, and Education. *The aristocratic justification of inequality by breeding gave way to the bourgeois justification of "aptitude". Science was right there to design "aptitude tests" which conveniently showed that working class people were not apt. If my school is doing tests like this, I have to know where I stand on them.
- Fifth, reinvent my idiom. Descend from abstraction without losing rigor. Break with academese and form a new language with your students.
- Sixth, we gotta engineer good reading experiences. Reading both books and the world. Reality is changing, we must follow it and continue studying it.
- Example: I talked with this young guy called Lula.
- /// !!!
- Great guy. Awesome leader, very intelligent, president of the worker's party. He understands Brazil so well, even though he never went to school for more than a few years as a child. He holds his own against more conventionally intellectual folks.
- So he recently said on TV that he doesn't really read books. I said to him afterwards that he was wrong, he *did *read, just not in *books*. He was *reading *history, partly through helping to make it.
- Let's not diminish reading books as an experience. What I want to do is bring word and world closer together.
- We must avoid dogmatism. Keep questions genuine (no one correct answer).
- IS: We need to take student utterances completely seriously, even as we are under pressure from large classes, syllabi, and students at low levels of development who express ignorance or anti-intellectualism. We have to *let them speak their mind *in order that we can know how to talk back to them to help them along.
- /// Agree
- PF: All questions are permitted, but we can't permit "aggression." There are limits. But not limits used to silence dissenting opinions.
- IS: In my college, students will try and guess your politics and only tell you what they think you want to hear. I try and demonstrate that there's no penalty for disagreeing with me and no reward for parroting me.
- I don't praise mimicry.
- Opposing views are things I can use for class study.
- This is another reason to keep quiet in the early days. I struggle with this, I'll get excited and talk too much and then students just copy my beliefs.
- IS: You talk a lot about "dreams", which doesn't on the surface have much to do with critical thinking, historical knowledge, inquiry, etc. The bridge, I think, is imagination.
- Dominant parties control our imaginations through media. The ability to imagine a different society is drowned out. Despair is useful to the elite.
- Our education must stimulate "alternative thinking." I often ask students to imagine how problems they study might look different in a different world. As an impetus to thinking of solutions, you know.
- PF: Yeah, but imagination and critical thinking are not separate. Intuition is "almost guessing. It's something where my feelings challenge me in order to foresee. It's something that tells me that there is something over there. Or, there is something coming." This is an aid in "knowing rigorously."
- Obviously it's not enough, though. We treat the object of intuition with rigor. Intuition is a bus that we take to the train station of reason.
- To me, being a prophet "does not mean to be a crazy man with a dirty beard." It means to be so firmly planted in the present that to foresee the future "becomes a normal thing. You know the present so well, you can imagine transformation."
- In Guinea-Bissau in Africa, I met with some people who'd worked with Amilcar Cabral. A woman there told me this story:
- After an hour of discussion at a meeting to evaluate our progress, Comrade Cabral closed his eyes and said "now let me dream." He talked about what should happen after independence, some details of organization, the education system. After maybe 40 minutes of this he opened his eyes. One of the militants asked him: "Is this not a dream?" Cabral said "It is. A possible dream. How poor is the revolution that doesn't dream."
- "This is utopianism as a dialectical relationship between denouncing the present and announcing the future. To anticipate tomorrow by dreaming today. The question is: Is it possible or not? If it is less possible, how do we make it more possible?"