DEFINING the ENEMY Adult Education in Social Action
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
DEFINING THE ENEMY Adult education in social action by MICHAEL NEWMAN First published by Stewart Victor Publishing, Sydney in 1994 (ISBN 0 646 21052 1). Republished by Centre for Popular Education, University of Technology, Sydney in 2002. Republished on this website (www.michaelnewman.info) by Michael Newman in 2007. © Michael Newman, 1994, 2002, 2007 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The words of the song ‘Joe Hill’ by Alfred Hayes (words) and Earl Robinson (music) are reproduced by permission of MCA Music Australia Pty Ltd. Unauthorised copying is illegal. The words of the song ‘Silver Dagger’ as arranged and sung by Joan Baez copyright © Chandos Music, ASCAP, Santa Monica, are used by permission. The eleven lines from the poem ‘September 1, 1939’ by W. H. Auden from The English Auden are used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd, London. The lines from the play Death and the Maiden are translated from the Spanish original La Muerte y la Doncella. Copyright © 1990 by Ariel Dorfman. They are reproduced by permission of Nick Hern Books, London. 2 Contents Foreword Section One: Learning and opposition 1.People under pressure 2.Two quotes 3.Courses for unionists 4. Joe Hill 5. Courses for Aboriginal adult educators Section Two: Ideals that disempower 6. Decency 7. Detachmment 8. Civic responsibility 9.Turning a blind eye 10.Recognising the enemy Section Three: Ideas and unsatisfactory answers 11.Utopian compromise 12.Learning societies 13.Collaborative enterprise 14.Critical thinking Section Four: Really critical thinking 15. Redefining ‘critical’ 16. Enemies within 17. Research at the edge 18. Violence and learning on the line 19. Silver dagger 20. Women on the line 21. Discriminating discontentment Section Five: Political contexts 22. Learning through struggle 23. Knowledge, ideology and hegemony Section Six: Traps, tricks and hegemonic sidetracks 24. Industrial collusion 25. Diverting consciousness 26. Assertion, and the danger of domestication 3 27. Introspective activism 28. Reflection disempowered 29. Competent forms of control Section Seven: Finding focus 30. Human beings 31.The person 32. The location of power 33. Self-concept in struggle 34. From oppressed to oppressor Section Eight: Thinking, planning, learning and taking action 35. Theory and practice 36. Identifying the enemy 37. Consultation, negotiation and conflict 38. Exploring strategies 39. Self-appraisal 40. Learning in action 41. Separatist adult education Section Nine: Challenges and safeguards 42. Death and the maiden 43.Safeguards 44.Values and resolutions Afterword Bibliography 4 Foreword Lalita Panicker, writing in the journal UNESCO Sources in December, 1993, describes the ‘tiny malnourished’ six-year-old Doraiswami stitching buttons on T-shirts in ‘a filthy dark factory’ in the south Indian district of Tripur for Rs 20 ($0.62) a day. Officially there are seventeen million children in India in bonded or other forms of illegal labour, but unofficial estimates put the figure at forty-five million. This book, Defining the Enemy, is based on the assertion that life can be grim, confused, ambiguous and dangerous. While our own neighbourhood, town, city and even country (if we are lucky) may be untroubled, a quick scan of the papers will tell us that this is not the case in a number of other locations, where wars rage, human rights are denied, people are poor, and oppression of the kind experienced by Doraiswami is commonplace. And even if we do live in an apparently fair society, a little reflection will often lead us to conclude that all is not well at home either. Exploitation, potential violence, and the willingness of some to intrude on the space and liberty of others are there. I am writing this in Sydney, Australia, where we pride ourselves on being an equitable and peaceable society. About a kilometre away is an area full of pubs, clubs and restaurants. A few months ago a young woman and three friends went to a Thai restaurant there. They were allocated a table in an upstairs room. There were several other tables occupied by couples or groups of four, and a large table occupied by a group of ten men. As their jokes and raucous laughter made clear, the ten men were already well into a stag night. Just after the young woman had been served, she noticed that several waiters had come into the room from other parts of the restaurant and were lining the walls. Unobtrusive music had been playing quietly over the restaurant speaker system, but this was abruptly replaced by very loud, very raunchy strip music. A woman ran up the stairs into the room, led the groom away from the stag party to a chair placed in the middle of the dining area, and began stripping in front of him. One of the other diners remonstrated, but the men in the stag party noisily egged the stripper on. Gyrating in front of the groom, the stripper stripped to a G-string, the removal of her last piece of clothing coinciding with the end of the record. For a moment the event appeared to be over, but the music started up again and, with the men in the stag party egging her on again, the stripper began stripping the groom. She unbuttoned and pulled off his shirt and then, dancing over his outstretched legs, began leaning backwards. Someone from the other tables shouted: ‘That’s enough!’ but the 5 stripper continued. The men in the stag party clapped in rhythm, barracked, and someone began shouting: ‘Fuck , fuck , fuck!’ In this perfectly normal restaurant, there was now an ugly intensity, din, potential violence, incitement to rape. Telling the story afterwards, the young woman said she looked around her and that every other woman in the room except the stripper was staring down at the table in front of her. A little as if in a dream, but in control, the young woman stood, picked up her plate of food (with lots of sauce), walked over to the groom and poured it over his head. Food spilled over him, the sauce running through his hair, down the front of his naked torso and soaking into his pants. The music stopped and the men in the stag party shouted in outrage. The stripper was lying on the floor and the young woman bent down, touched her on the arm and said quietly: ‘It’s not you. It’s them’. The stripper’s eyes, she said later, were sad. By now, others were on their feet, speaking loudly, arguing. People at the other tables applauded the young woman’s actions. The men justified their behaviour as ‘harmless fun’ and accused others in the room of being wowsers. The young woman stood her ground, had her say, and then walked out. People at one table left without finishing their meal, and without paying. The management barred the door to prevent others doing the same. There was more arguing, some of it between customers and the members of the stag party, some between customers and the restaurant management. Gradually the uproar subsided. There are issues galore in the incident: sexism, the demeaning of women, the grotesque and incipiently violent behaviour of the men in the stag party, the gratuitous imposition of their standards and behaviour on others, the connivance of the restaurant. There are questions to be asked. Why did only one person take direct action? How could the men feel free to behave in the way they did? Why did the restaurant’s management go along with the event? Had they as a minority culture acceded to what they saw as a norm in the majority culture? And where are the stripper’s rights in all this? What is legitimate sex work and what is sexploitation, oppression and insult? Adult educators can make extravagant claims for their craft, or set themselves extravagant agendas. Various practitioners and theorists have argued that adult education has a role to play in helping transform individuals, in helping bring about social change, and even in combatting hegemonies and ‘conscientizing’ whole populations. But despite such claims I am hard pressed to find much in the literature that helps me understand how I as an adult educator might address the incident in that restaurant. Where are the tools to help people deal with inimical forces like those that were released in this normally orderly 6 context? Where are practical proposals for helping people learn how to curb real or potential violence, and resist unsolicited impositions on people’s space and freedom by others? And if I find little to help me deal with the challenges thrown up by an oppressive incident in a restaurant in an affluent city in an affluent country, I find even less to indicate how I might help people learn to combat the kinds of monstrous exploitation of child labour depicted by Panicker. In this book I want to understand a little better how to help people learn to address these kinds of challenge. To do this I go trawling for ideas through the writing of a number of adult educators who have tried in various ways to confront violence, exploitation, imposition, and injustice. I look at some currently fashionable adult education theories, concluding that a number mislead or are simply too nice, too unfocussed, too inward- looking or too mechanical to help us help others learn in contexts of opposition and hostility. And I look for some principles and processes that might help us help others learn how to identify, define, and then deal with their enemies. The text is discursive and at times disjointed, but this form is intentional, and owes something to the style and ideas of some of the writers on post modernity.