Pedagogy of Freedom, page 8
Cultural Identity
It’s interesting to take a close look at the verb “to assume,” which is a transitive verb and can have as its object the person who assumes his or herself For example, I can assume the risk inherent in smoking just as much as I can assume myself (what I am) as the subject and object of that assumption. When I say that in order to stop smoking it is essential that I assume that smoking constitutes a risk to my life, what I am really saying is that I have acquired a complete and clear picture of what smoking is and what its consequences are. A more radical sense of “to assume” is when I say: One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the conditions in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicating, transformative, creative persons; dreamers of possible utopias, capable of being angry because of a capacity to love. Capable of assuming themselves as “subject” because of the capacity to recognize themselves as “object.” All this, while bearing in mind that the assumption of oneself does not signify the exclusion of others. Because it is the otherness of the “not I” or the “you” that makes me assume the radicality of the “I.” There’s another question that cannot be overlooked either, namely, the question of cultural identity in relation to both individuals and classes among the learners and for which (in the context of forward-looking educational practice) respect is absolutely fundamental. It is connected directly to the challenge of assuming who we are, which is what a purely technical, objective, and grammatical vision of education cannot do or be.
The historical, political, social, and cultural experience of men and women can never be acquired outside of the conflict between those forces that are dedicated to the prevention of self-assumption on the part of individuals and groups and those forces that work in favor of such an assumption. Teaching preparation that considers itself to be above such “intrigues” does nothing less than work in favor of the obstacles to self-assumption. The socio-political solidarity that we need today to build a less ugly and less intolerant human community where we can be really what we are cannot neglect the importance of democratic practice. Purely pragmatic training, with its implicit or openly expressed elitist authoritarianism, is incompatible with the learning and practice of becoming a “subject.”
Sometimes a simple, almost insignificant gesture on the part of a teacher can have a profound formative effect on the life of a student. I will always remember one such gesture in my life when I was an adolescent. A gesture that marks me profoundly but whose significance on my life was almost certainly not noticed or known by my teacher. At that time I experienced myself as an insecure adolescent, not at home with a body perceived as more bone than beauty, feeling myself to be less capable than the other students, insecure about my own creative possibilities, easily riled, and not very much at peace with the world. The slightest gesture by any of the better-off students in the class was capable of highlighting my insecurity and my fragility.
On this occasion our teacher had brought our homework to school after correcting it and was calling us one by one to comment on it. When my turn came, I noticed he was looking over my text with great attention, nodding his head in an attitude of respect and consideration. His respectful and appreciative attitude had a much greater effect on me than the high classification that he gave me for my work. The gesture of the teacher affirmed in me a self-confidence that obviously still had much room to grow. But it inspired in me a belief that I too had value and could work and produce results—results that clearly had their limits but that were a demonstration of my capacity, which up until that moment I would have been inclined to hide or not fully believe in. And the greatest proof of the importance of that gesture is that I can speak of it now as if it had happened only today.
The importance of the kind of knowledge transmitted by gestures such as these, which are part and parcel of daily school life, needs serious reflection. It’s a pity that the socializing character of the school, with its multiple possibilities for formation or deformation, especially in the context of the ordinary informality of the day to day, is so much neglected. What we mostly hear about is the teaching of contents, understood almost always, unfortunately, as the transference of knowledge. One of the reasons, in my view, for this negligence is a too narrow understanding of what education and learning are. Really, it has not yet dawned on us that education is something that women and men discovered experimentally, in the course of history. If it were clear to us that our capacity to teach arose from our capacity to learn, we would easily have understood the importance of informal experiences in the street, in the square, in the work place, in the classroom, in the playground, among the school staff of both teachers and administrative personnel. There is strong “witness” potential in all of these informal situations, but it is, practically speaking, unexplored territory. In “Education in the City,”9 I drew attention to this fact when I discovered the calamitous state of the education system that Luíza Erundina encountered when she took up office in 1989 as mayor of São Paulo, Brazil. On my first visits to the city schools, I saw the calamity with my own eyes and I was terrified. The whole system was a disaster, from the state of the buildings and the classrooms to the quality of the teaching. How was it possible to ask of the children the minimum of respect for their material surroundings when the authorities demonstrated such absolute neglect of and indifference to the public institutions under their care? It’s really unbelievable that we are unable to include all these elements in our “rhetoric” about education. Why does such “rhetoric” not include hygiene, cleanliness, beauty? Why does it neglect the indisputable pedagogical value of the “materiality” of the school environment?
Yet, it is such detail in the daily life both of teacher and student, to which so little attention is given, that in fact possesses significant weight in the evaluation of teaching practice. What is important in teaching is not the mechanical repetition of this or that gesture but a comprehension of the value of sentiments, emotions, and desires. Of the insecurity that can only be overcome by inspiring confidence. Of the fear that can only be abated to the degree that courage takes its place.
There is no true teaching preparation possible separated from a critical attitude that spurs ingenuous curiosity to become epistemological curiosity, together with a recognition of the value of emotions, sensibility, affectivity, and intuition. To know is not simply to intuit or to have a hunch, though there is an intimate connection between them. We must build on our intuitions and submit them to methodical and rigorous analysis so that our curiosity becomes epistemological. 10
THREE
TEACHING IS NOT JUST TRANSFERRING KNOWLEDGE
The considerations and reflections I have been making up to now are developments of an initial insight that is fundamental to progressive teaching principles. Namely, that to know how to teach is to create possibilities for the construction and production of knowledge rather than to be engaged simply in a game of transferring knowledge. When I enter a classroom I should be someone who is open to new ideas, open to questions, and open to the curiosities of the students as well as their inhibitions. In other words, I ought to be aware of being a critical and inquiring subject in regard to the task entrusted to me, the task of teaching and not that of transferring knowledge.
It is important to insist on this point, to insist on this kind of teaching as necessary to being a teacher and as necessary to everyone in education. And to understand its ontological, political, ethical, epistemological, and pedagogical basis. It is also important that it be something witnessed, lived.
As a teacher in an education program, I cannot be satisfied simply with nice, theoretical elaborations regarding the ontological, political, and epistemological bases of educational practice. My theoretical explanation of such practice ought to be also a concrete and practical demonstration of what I am saying. A kind of incarnation joining theory and practice. In speaking of the construction of knowledge, I ought to be involved practically, incarnationally, in such construction and be involving the student in it also.
Otherwise I fall into a net of contradictions that loses any power to convince. I become as inauthentic as someone who talks about creating a climate of equality in the school while behaving like an autocrat. Or, as inauthentic as someone who talks about combating racism but who, when asked if she/he knows Madalena, a black female student, replies: “Yes, I know her. She is black, but she’s a decent soul.” I’ve never heard anyone say: “I know Célia, she is blond with blue eyes, but she’s decent all the same.” In the phrase regarding Madalena, the black person, we find the adversative conjunction “but.” In the phrase about fair-haired and blue-eyed Célia, the adversative conjunction sounds redundant. The use of conjunctions in a sentence establishes a relationship of causality, for example: “I speak because I refuse to be silent.” Or a relationship of adversity, for example: “They tried to dominate him but they could not.” Or a relationship of finality, for example: “Peter struggled so that he might make his position clear.” Or a relationship of integration, for example: “Pedro knew that he would return.” So, really, there are many different uses of the adversative conjunction, and it is clear that the use of the adversative but in relation to Madalena is ideologically based because of her color. In other words, a black person in general could hardly be expected to be decent or competent. Whenever a black person is found to be decent and competent our innate racism draws on the adversative conjunction but to acknowledge what is clearly an exception to the rule. In the case of Célia, blue eyed and fair haired, there is no innate suspicion of her being lacking in decency or competence, hence the use of the adversarial conjunction but is tautological. The wide question here, then, is ideological, not grammatical.
To think correctly and to know that to teach is not merely to transfer knowledge is a demanding and difficult discipline, at times a burden that we have to carry with others, for others, and for ourselves. It is difficult, not because right thinking is the property of angels and saints and something to which we aspire only if we are arrogant. It is difficult because it demands constant vigilance over ourselves so as to avoid being simplistic, facile, and incoherent. It is difficult because we are not always sufficiently balanced to prevent legitimate anger from degenerating into the kind of rage that breeds false and erroneous thinking. No matter how much someone may irritate me, I have no right to puff myself up with my own self-importance so as to declare that person to be absolutely incompetent, assuming a posture of disdain from my own position of false superiority. I, for example, do not feel anger but pity when angry people, full of their own genius, minimize me and make little of me.
For example, it’s tiring to live the kind of humility that is the sine qua non of right thinking and the very basis from which we can admit our own mistakes and allow ourselves to diminish so that others may increase.
The climate of right thinking has nothing to do with preestablished formulae, yet it would be a negation of right thinking to imagine that it could flourish in an atmosphere of indiscipline or mere “spontaneity.” Without methodological rigor, there can be no right thinking.
Awareness of Our Unfinishedness
As a teacher with critical acumen, I do not cease to be a responsible “adventurer” disposed to accept change and difference. Nothing of what I experienced as a teacher needs to be repeated. However, I hold that my own unity and identity, in regard to others and to the world, constitutes my essential and irrepeatable way of experiencing myself as a cultural, historical, and unfinished being in the world, simultaneously conscious of my unfinishedness.
And here we have arrived at the point from which perhaps we should have departed: the unfinishedness of our being. In fact, this unfinishedness is essential to our human condition. Whenever there is life, there is unfinishedness, though only among women and men is it possible to speak of an awareness of unfinishedness. The invention of our existence developed through our interaction with the material world at our disposal, creating a life support in which life, the life of women and men, became sustainable. Within this life support, our life, human life, takes on a specific qualitative difference in relation to animal life. Animals, for example, operate in given dimensions of space, confined in some cases, unrestricted in others, in which they develop “affective” boundaries necessary for their survival, growth, and development. It’s the space where they, trained and skilled, “learn” the skills of hunting, attacking, and self-defense, in a period of time much shorter than human learners do. The greater the gap, culturally speaking, the greater the time of learning of “infancy.” The nonhuman animals in the infrastructural support system do not have a conceptual language, that is, the capacity to “grasp” consciously the implication that belonging to an infrastructure would inevitably endow them with the capacity to communicate a certain awe in the face of life itself, in the face of its mystery. In this sense, their behavior, within the context of the spacio-temporal infrastructure, is explicable in reference to the species to which individual animals belong rather than in reference to the individual itself. That is, the individual does not have the freedom to opt. For this reason, we cannot speak of ethical questions in regard to elephants, for example.
This basic life infrastructure or life support system did not require or imply the use of language or the erect posture that would free the hands—the two things that in fact would make possible the emergence of Homo sapiens. The more the hands and the brain engaged in a sort of pact of solidarity, the more the support system become “world,” “life,” “existence.” In other words, as the human body became aware of the capacity of “capture,” “learn,” “transform,” and to create beauty, it ceased to be simply empty “space” to be filled in with contents.
The invention of “existence” necessarily involves the emergence of language, culture, and communication at levels of complexity much greater than that which obtains at the level of survival, self-defense, and self-preservation. What makes men and women ethical is their capacity to “spiritualize” the world, to make it either beautiful or ugly. Their capacity to intervene, to compare, to judge, to decide, to choose, to desist makes them capable of acts of greatness, of dignity, and, at the same time, of the unthinkable in terms of indignity. It’s not possible to break with an ethical code unless one has become an ethical being. It is unknown for lions to cowardly murder lions of the same family group, or of another group, and afterwards to visit the families to offer them their condolences. It is unknown for African tigers to throw highly destructive bombs on “cities” of Asiatic tigers.
While Homo sapiens were emerging from the basic life-support structure, intervening creatively in the world, they invented language to be able to give a name to things that resulted from its intervention, “grasping” intellectuality and being able to communicate what had been “grasped.” It was becoming simultaneously clear that human existence is, in fact, a radical and profound tension between good and evil, between dignity and indignity, between decency and indecency, between the beauty and the ugliness of the world. In other words, it was becoming clear that it is impossible to humanly exist without assuming the right and the duty to opt, to decide, to struggle, to be political. All of which brings us back again to the preeminence of education experience and to its eminently ethical character, which in its turn leads us to the radical nature of “hope.” In other words, though I know that things can get worse, I also know that I am able to intervene to improve them.
I like being human, being a person, precisely because it is not already given as certain, unequivocal, or irrevocable that I am or will be “correct,” that I will bear witness to what is authentic, that I am or will be just, that I will respect others, that I will not lie and thereby diminish the value of others because of my envy or even anger of their questioning my presence in the world. I like being human because I know that my passing through the world is not predetermined, preestablished. That my destiny is not a given but something that needs to be constructed and for which I must assume responsibility. I like being human because I am involved with others in making history out of possibility, not simply resigned to fatalistic stagnation. Consequently, the future is something to be constructed through trial and error rather than an inexorable vice that determines all our actions.
Recognition of One’s Conditioning
I like to be human because in my unfinishedness I know that I am conditioned. Yet conscious of such conditioning, I know that I can go beyond it, which is the essential difference between conditioned and determined existence. The difference between the unfinished that does not know anything of such a condition, and the unfinished who socio-historically has arrived at the point of becoming conscious of the condition and unfinishedness. I like being human because I perceive that the construction of my presence in the world, which is a construction involving others and is subject to genetic factors that I have inherited and to socio-cultural and historical factors, is nonetheless a presence whose construction has much to do with myself. It would be ironic if the awareness of my presence in the world did not at the same time imply a recognition that I could not be absent from the construction of my own presence. I cannot perceive myself as a presence in the world and at the same time explain it as the result of forces completely alien to me. If I do so, I simply renounce my historical, ethical, social, and political responsibility for my own evolution from the life-support system to the emergence of Homo sapiens. In that sense, I renounce my ontological vocation to intervene in the world. The fact that I perceive myself to be in the world, with the world, with others, brings with it a sense of “being-with” constitutive of who I am that makes my relationship to the world essential to who I am. In other words, my presence in the world is not so much of someone who is merely adapting to something “external,” but of someone who is inserted as if belonging essentially to it. It’s the position of one who struggles to become the subject and maker of history and not simply a passive, disconnected object.
