Escaping Education: Living As Learning Within Grassroots Cultures Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva
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Escaping Education: Living as learning within grassroots cultures Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva. Table of Contents Prologue I. Education as a Human Right: The Trojan Horse of Recolonization The Different Faces arid Facets of Education Freedom and Mobility for the Individual Professional Careers for Growth, Security and Satisfaction Cultural Survival, Enrichment, and Diversity Reform, Revamping, Radicalization The Crassly Competitive Slayers of Savage Inequalities Cultural Literacy Promoters Multicultural Literacies Multicultural Education: An Oxymoron Human Rights: The Contemporary Trojan Horse The Nexus of Contemporary Domination: Education-Human Rights-Development Apologies and Celebration Hosting the Otherness of the Other II. Grassroots Postmodernism: Refusenik Cultures The First Intercultural Dialogue? Educating the Indians The First Multicultural Educator of the Americas The Failure of Education Escaping Education: Learning to Listen, then Listening From Resistance to Liberation Table of Contents The Diversity of Liberation in the Lived Pluriverse Dropping Out Waking Up: Diplomas in the Survival Kit? Emerging Coalitions of Discontents The Return of the Incarnated Intellectual But What to Do with the Children? Dissolving Needs Grassroots Postmodernism II After Education, What? Developing Education Time of Renewal The Failure of Deschooling Beyond Deschooling: Education Stood on Its Head Inverting Pandora’s Box Living Without Schools or Education Margins and Centers: Escaping the /m Mythopoesis of Education Incarnated Intellectuals Contemporary Prophets 3 Epilogue Rooting, Rerooting Ruralization Reclaiming the Commons David and Goliath I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions ... I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance Prologue O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible. Pindar, Pythian Hi 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 monoculturalism, 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