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- IS: Teachers wonder how much they can take from you, Paulo, since your epistemology comes from a very different political-economic context.
- Plus, they wonder if first-world students "need liberating" when we're a democracy.
- To be clear, I totally think your methods work here, but we gotta answer the questions to clear up doubt.
- There totally is a culture of silence in the US schools i've worked at. Students might not know what they want out of college, they just show up because it's better than working. They're so alienated they don't even speak.
- Students oppose our work aggressively, not just passively, which is different than what you talked about in PotO
- Students space out because the classroom is horrible. They resent the imposed tedium. Some lash out. "culture of silence" doesn't fully encapsulate our situation.
- Passivity is not natural in adolescence. Aggression is expected.
- We inflict symbolic violence upon students with control, judgment, and reinforcing inequality. It's no surprise they rebel.
- IS: Our curriculum teaches that speaking truth to power is a good thing, and then we become that power. The discipline problems at school show us that this "dominating curriculum" is not entirely successful.
- Students are subject to these systems before they're able to understand it or oppose it effectively.
- Some become passive, some see through the game and play it to their best ability, others will actively oppose school, and some will fully identify with the authority in place.
- Students in group 3 (and 2 sort of) are "defending their autonomy", albeit often in "self-destructive and confused" ways
- When teachers drone on and only emphasize the important parts, it *facilitates inattention, *and students take the opportunity to retaliate with (mostly) symbolic violence
- Talking in class, jokes, absenteeism, etc, these are ways that students sabotage the curriculum, but almost never in the goal of gaining constructive freedom.
- This is a stalemate. Being a teacher in this climate is highly demoralizing. Our response cannot be better-structured passive instruction or tougher authority, it has to be de-alienating education "on the side of student subjectivity".
- PF: The cultures of silence and sabotage are, I think, expressions of something larger.
- This is interesting to me, because I've found none of this aggression in Brazil. Students might agitate for lower tuition, but will still listen passively during class.
- i'm not sure I can speak on this. The places I've spoken in America have been privileged, and didn't have situations like this. *But since you're asking me...*
- I guess I would ask them why they're doing what they're doing. Treat the rebellion itself as an object of study. "Let's set aside the planned material, let's talk about what's really going on here."
- I think we should "invite serious attention" to the rebellion, not out of fear though! We "challenge it to know it better."
- I guess the students have two options then: to rebel harder or to co-operate with this unexpected invitation to speak. But what happens if they escalate? How would you handle it?
- IS: Like you said, set aside the plan and talk about what's really going on. "Challenge students to discuss their own challenge." If it works, classroom communication will get much stronger. If students can't go on, start a dialogue about why. These have been at least partial successes for me, but some groups just aren't receptive.
- For disruptive students, I have a slow chain of escalation which might end with me asking them to drop the class. If it's a disruptive group, I ask them to do the work outside of class. But it's easy for me now, since my students are adults who *can *just leave.
- The dialogical class experiments are not panaceae. Results are encouraging but mixed. In some schools, it's so bad that changes to society are necessary before we can even think of school intervention.
- PF: Tell me more about what American teachers deal with.
- IS: Well, it *really *depends, and the makeup or location of a school can't fully determine its culture. Some schools are almost *too *orderly. Some are beset by vandals. Violence in urban schools is notorious because of race. Mostly white teachers teaching mostly non-white students. This naturally breeds resentment.
- In some schools, students feel they are "going somewhere." In others, they see no future worth working for. Social class and racism are no secret to the students. Theodor Sizer said "Tell me about your students' families' income and I'll describe to you your school."
- If you have nothing to gain by being good, why behave? If the school is shabby, why should we believe that education matters?
- Even when students are "well-behaved", they are overwhelmingly "aliented, bored, and uncooperative."
- PF: This all just reminds me that schools will never be the lever of change. We have to change society.
- I think about teachers who come in full of ideals, despair, and fall to cynicism. This fall is a constant temptation when every day is a struggle.
- To avoid this despair and cynicism, we should be realistic about what we can do in schools. We can do important work there, but we won't change society when we're on the clock. That's just how it is. If we shed naive optimism, we don't set ourselves up for despair.
- Knowing education's limits actually increased my political goals in schools, but more than that it made me realize I had to work outside schools.
- When I end a seminar, I'm not deluding myself into thinking I've just created 25 revolutionaries (lol). But we may have planted seeds. Curiosity, contradictions, clarifying their own agendas.
- Outside of school hours, I'm in the workers movements. Sometimes as myself, sometimes in educator groups. I don't have enough time for this as I'd like, mind you.
- That said, we gotta respect liberating teachers who limit their work to the classroom. What they do matters. Some only work outside the schools, too. For me though, I wouldn't be satisfied with one or the other. It's sort of a matter of temperment.
- The important thing is that inside and outside never stop learning from each other.
- IS: Schooling was politically neutered as a reaction to the 60s, and teachers can despair in feeling like they're not making a difference.
- PF: Say more, this is important.
- IS: College campus protests used to be huge, and it even spilled into some high schools. Movements which existed off-campus too, like anti-war and civil rights.
- Nowadays, we have to find those connections ourselves. Sometimes the work feels continuous, sometimes it feels parallel.
- Admin and standards constrict these connections, but the students do too. It's a random group of kids who didn't choose to be there. So of course there are limits.
- I'm curious though, when I was talking about silence and sabotage, why did it make you think about limits?
- PF: Good question. Let me retrace my steps.
- PF: Sabotage, alienation, silence, etc have concrete material reasons. These conditions must be changed. We can develop minds, but that's only one step in developing the world.
- IS: I might say that we are doing something *concrete *in school though. We can change behavior. We interfere with the reproduction of domination. This is a clear contribution to transformation, isn't it?
- PF: Yes, but let's turn it around a moment. Education isn't the lever for transformation, *but transformation is educational*. "Liberating education", for that reason, *must extend past school hours*. Disruption in society is educational.
- PF: In American schools, I think that the distance is growing between what is talked about in school and the real world students live in. We teach school-words, not reality-words.
- This is another kind of "culture of silence." We are silent about the real world.
- IS: Hopefully, dialogic education bridges the gap and puts "school" and "world" in conversation.
- PF: Yes. School-language describes but does not understand. Discourse remains conceptual. Intellectual study is totally isolated from action in the world.
- In this mode, you can study *good theory *and still have it mean nothing. "How many marxists have never drunk coffee in the house of a worker!" These scholars are *marx experts*, but not really *marxists.*
- We even get to a point where people hate marxism because they think it's so *conceptual *lol
- Let's imagine a teacher who comes in with all these new ideas about liberatory pedagogy. Their hardest task isn't replacing old ideas with new ones, it's actually connecting new ideas to practice.
- In the US, this separation is enormous, it seems to me. In Brazil, it's still there, but I don't think as much.
- IS: I think so, yes. Our curriculum is either conceptual/bookish or rote/vocational. Both are presented as value neutral. The material is empty, repetitive. It's no surprise students rebel.
- Maybe American kids rebel more than Euro/LatAm kids because of "traditions."
- PF: I think some Sao Paolo kids are getting rowdy like Americans too. Sociogenic for sure. They're angry at conditions of living. They break stuff and attack teachers.
- IS: Social reasons, yes. So how do we get dialogic in this situation? We invite them to study critically the stuff that they either submit to or hate uncritically.
- We can set the stage, but it's never guarantee that we'll stop disorder/passivity. The root causes are outisde the classroom.
- We can "aim for a detente in the class war in the classroom." A truce.
- PF: That's sensible. The hard work is transforming "rebellious consciousness" to "revolutionary consciousness". There's a huge difference.
- Mere rebellion is impotent. Tactics and strategy aren't considered. With revolution, you enter the real limits/possibilities of history.
- IS: Last thoughts on USA vs Brazil?
- PF: We both live under capitalist rule where the wealthy disguise their own interests as National Interest. The difference is you live in the HQ and we live on the periphery. The contradictions are easy to disguise when you have the illusion of affluence. This difficulty / confusion is what makes illumination harder & more necessary.