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- IS: Teachers fear reprisal for becoming militant. They fear embarassment of re-learning their profession in front of students. But they too can be made to feel the predicament they're in.
- The precarious and unenviable position of teachers is precisely an opportunity to dream of alternatives
- But also a source of risk, since they cannot count on support from mass movements
- Since the neocon resurgence, students are taught to think in terms of careerism and test scores. It's only natural that they resist experimental pedagogy, and many teachers shrink from the challenge anticipating this.
- So what do we do here?
- PF: First off, fear is not an abstraction. People have much to lose. Second, fear is normal.
- The more you believe in the work's importance, the more you understand the risk of reprisal.
- We all feel fear. We don't need to hide it. But we can't let it hold us back.
- Our task is to "cultivate" fear; to accept it and keep it bounded, not to deny it.
- We fear because we dream. If we rationalize away our fear, we deny our dream. This is crucial.
- /// Makes me think about how the conservative media apparatus is so focused on creating fear for people who do not have it organically; conservative students don't *have to *fear reprisal, and their punishment for conservatism as such would be unthinkable. But they have to *feel *persecuted. That fear is real even though it is spurious. To an extent, we have to meet it with open hearts. I suppose this is why Friere clarifies that we're talking about "concrete" fear, though that's a concept that's hard to convey and agree upon when our concepts of risk and reward and what is truly acceptable and what is truly punished is so ideologically fraught, not merely observed in reality.
- IS: The dream never enters reality if we do not accept its risks. Let's talk as well about "heroism". Teachers who want change may hide their fears because they want to act tough, like unshakeable revolutionaries. For them, fear is a sign of weakness. But for you, fear is a good sign.
- /// Fear is half of courage.
- PF: When you recognize fear as a consequence of commendable risk-taking, you stop letting it hold you back. Castro, Cabral and Che all felt fear, although I never asked them about it.
- My fear does not diminish me, it testifies to my humanity. We work with it, we give it limits.
- IS: Almost negociating with it. I'm ready to overcome this fear, but not that one yet.
- PF: Yes. You understand fear critically, not just rationalizing it. When you recognize how fear limits you and begin to work with it, you enter more effectively into the dialectical relationship between tactics and strategy.
- If strategy is your dream, tactics are your means and instruments. You can't have authoritarian tactics for liberating strategies, etc. You bring strategy and tactics into agreement by recognizing your limits.
- Let's say you learn that walking one kilometer will get you killed in this particular historical moment. Your fear is "domesticated by your clarity".
- So you walk 800 meters. And you wait to do the extra 200 until the risk is acceptable.
- How do you learn the limits? You don't find it in books. In a sense, you have to learn what is punishable by getting punished.
- /// big mood
- IS: We learn our limits by testing them, in politics and in the classroom. When we gain concrete feedback, fantastical fears lose their grip on us. If you bring up racism and class war and students give you blank stares, you use that data to rewrite your tactics.
- There are also "correct" militant actions which wind up disasterous. Some profs and students wanted to disrupt a racist geneticist's lecture. I advised against it, since I thought the college would be overwhelmingly against us.
- Failing to convince, the action went ahead, and what resulted was a break between liberal and left on campus, and some left profs were fired. Because we shouted down the speaker, the issue was allowed to shift to "free speech" instead of what we were trying to point out (racism).
- Because the group had not assessed their limits correctly, there were consequences visited upon us which hindered our ability to continue acting. Profs once punished tend to quiet down in their next job. "The example of their disappearance is not lost on the faculty who remain".
- During the Open Admissions fights of 1972, I raised my hand in a meeting and my older colleagued pulled it back down. He said "if you want to keep your job, shut up and publish." "He was a liberal and he had a wonderful New York sense of humor. But the lesson he shared with me was to shut up. I felt sorry for him."
- I too felt fear. It took me a long time to get the job, I needed the money, and I liked the work. I was "observed in my class five times in five months" and it almost gave me an ulcer.
- /// Tell me about it.
- "Each year was a research for me in new political conditions"
- PF: Politics is a research also.
- IS: It's risky research. You have to "reveal yourself" to do it.
- PF: Without risking, we don't have the possibility to exist.
- When we enter an institution, we're best served by vibe-checking our colleagues and superiors in a semi-systematic way. Make an "ideological map".
- Through this, we know who we can count on. Acting alone can be suicidal, and numbers assuage fear.
- I used to think (like in Pedagogy of the Oppressed) that education was *political*. Now I think that education *is politics*. Politics has *educability. *
- Knowing this I treat my fear "not as a ghost that commands me. *I *am the subject of my fear."
- It took me a long time to overcome fear. In 64, when the coup was brewing, many did not "cultivate" fears of reaction, instead pushing them away. I wasn't much better.
- I learned a lot in prison, and in exile also.
- IS: Luckily, such punishments for teachers are still extreme in the US. Firing and blacklisting are often as bad as it gets. My doctoral committee were all fired for their politics, and entered a kind of "internal exile" by having to move states.
- /// hmm. I wonder what he'd feel about online mobs or stochastic gun violence.
- PF: One day a guard called for me without telling me the purpose, and we took off in a jeep for 30-40 minutes. I felt that if I didn't master my fear, it would destroy me.
- That time period was one of my toughest fights against fear. I tried to get it under control by putting my experience in context of the political moment. I gained some detachment by considering my problems vs. the problems of my country. I thought my position as an educator might protect me, also.
- They took me to army barracks and put me in a tiny cell. I lost my fear of the unknown, but gained the fear of survival in a cramped space that was intentionally painful to be in. "My body would have to invent survival."
- Once I accepted my situation, I could confront it. I tried to figure out how to position myself to avoid injury. A soldier suddenly spoke to me through the grate: "I know who you are, I know this is new to you. Don't stand up or sit down too long. You must walk. Every hour, ask to go to the toilet even if you don't have to." His advice did a lot to assuage my fear.
- In 1980, when I could return to Brazil, I visited a small catholic community that I had known before. A "tall, strong, and beautiful man" told me that while I had been gone, he had followed my example and taught literacy to his co-workers. He was arrested.
- He felt deep fear thinking of his 7 children.
- When they got to the station, he was let off with a warning: knock it off with the Friere stuff.
- He cooled down for three days, then resumed, unable to repress his ideals.
- Arrested again. Someone intervened to get him out, and he resumed.
- He thought: my seven kids aren't a reason I need to keep quiet, they're actually a reason I need to speak up.
- IS: His dream was hope for his kids. His fear meant that his dream was alive. Teachers in the US don't go to jail, but I've also learned to make "ideological profiles". I'm more careful than I was in the 60s. It's not enough to oppose with a defiant heart, it must be done strategically.
- Good also to learn the political history of institutions you enter into; you can discredit yourself by proposing something that was fought over just before you arrived.
- The guy in your story had a community to support him, so the police could not isolate him.
- Another thing I do is what I call "deviance credits". Take on harmless institutional tasks so you "get recognized as a legitimate part of the scenery." little committees here and there, judging contests, activities, etc. Planting your roots deeper like this will earn you more room to deviate.
- "It is not the goal of opposition to get fired..." Prolong your struggle, don't just be a flash in the pan that accomplishes nothing. Find ways of legitimating yourself, like the guy in your story's community connections and his standing in the church.
- IS: Students are often cynical and focused on the "market value" of a class.
- PF: This is real. Let's keep in mind first that society creates their ideas and not vice versa.
- For one thing, schools are very well equipped to help kids get jobs. It's a realistic demand. /// is this still true?
- Liberatory educators are just as obliged to help kids acquire these skills. The difference is that these skills are taught *critically. *Why DO we have to know this? What is the reality of the jobs this prepares you for? We raise questions about the very training we are offering.
- IS: Do students feel confusion here? Having the material be endorsed and criticized at the same time?
- PF:Â *It is not a confusion, it is a **contradiction**. /// big marxist word hours*
- IS: There's a big separation between classes that offer technical expertise and classes that encourage critical thinking. This is not an accident. Liberating educators often come in from the humanities, so we lack some contact with the technical students.
- Engineering and nursing students in my classes are skeptical of the importance of the skills I teach. I try to keep it relevant by changing the subject matter of our literacy.
- PF: "*By understanding the elite and political aspects of standard usage, the liberatory teacher avoids blaming the students for the clash of their own language with the ruling forms."*
- It is necessary to teach the standard while criticizing its political implications
- In Brazil, there is a tremendous linguistic divide between classes. What I think we have to do first is testify that we respect popular language, see its beauty, and help our students *believe *in it.
- Showing students the grammatical rules of their own speech which they use without recognition helps show students that their speech is just as complex and valuable as the speech we write textbooks about
- Next, we have to talk about power with our students. Your language is beautiful, and it is being subjugated. To survive in society as is and to fight your oppression, you should know the dominant forms of speech.
- IS: I agree, but I have some criticism for the concept of "survival". It's historically been weilded as a weapon against experimentation. "The student fear for survival has helped conservatives tilt the curriculum towards careerism and back-to-basics."
- In this mindset, job skills are "the essentials" where politics and critical thinking are distractions
- "Work-based programs have a poor historical record of connecting schoolish training with future employment"
- "The great masters of survival are the cockroaches of new york"
- For now, students want "survival" skills, but this paradigm may change, and we must be ready to encourage any outgrowth of experimentalism