Though I had planned from the beginning not to send my daughter to school, over the last months of chaos and pain, I had determined that Ramona would do just fine there. I would have more time/freedom to research and create in solitary peace. Ramona’s education and socialization needs will be handed to us on a silver platter. And, well, what makes us so special, that school isn’t good enough…but…every time I would meet someone who was ditching school permanently, my throat would tighten and my heart sink. Jealousy. Compromising my ideals, yuck! I want the freedom they have and the guts to go through with it…I have that, don’t I?
In the beginning I liked school sort of, but not particularly. I complained about school starting so early from the first day. I hated how people were so uptight and mean because I wasn’t like they were (actually was really painful). I felt like I was wasting my time at school. By the time I was a teen and I realized that the person the designed the school I went to also designed the local prison I REALLY despised school. I hated that when I didn’t go to school, they would send the police over to escort me and threaten to send my mom to jail. Whoa, fascists! Compulsory public schooling to me looks like a lot of compulsory conditioning…first invented in Prussia in order to create good soldiers and citizens. While some parents want their children conditioned to support and carry on the current social structure that happens to be coming unraveled at the seams, I see friends of mine spending a lot of time undoing the damage that the experiences of school creates for their children.
I dropped out before the age of legality, to live my rebellious life. Five years later, I took my GED and went to college . That’s when I got even angrier at school. I realized how much of what I learned was superficial as well as completely wrong. In college I reconnected with my innate drive to learn, the one that nearly everyone is born with, the one that school had wrung out of me. In college I was treated with respect rather than a subject to be “taught” (conditioned) to some weird standard that was created by some shmucks who think they know what my child needs to live her future adult life.
I know that school has changed some in some places since I was a child. I guess I just haven’t seen good results with reform, so I’m not a reformist. Some people like school…and it isn’t so much that there aren’t alternatives to the lame status quo mainstream classroom, especially here in Liberal Northern California. My objections to school run much deeper than that. They spring from the center of my being, which is where my activism, creative energy and way of life also spring. Where once my activism emerged from resentment and rebellion…now it emerges from rebellion, hope and dedication to a better future. Some magical experiences I have had involving Mexico, research and alternative schools; a collage of Zapatismo, Oaxacan rebellions and Gustavo Esteva’s writing and work brought me to this place. “Imagine the future you are dreaming of and fighting for in vivid detail. Now, build that future, in everyway that you can, miniscule and humongous, in the here and now. Let every action be an action towards realizing your utopia. Live the future now.” The ideas snuggled in these words have salvaged me. They have given direction to my creative and political energy and a voice and contentment to my innate self.
If you crush it, smash it, tear this “white racist, homophobic, patriarchal bullshit paradigm” down, what have you but a power vacuum followed by more power grabbing and the “join me, join me” propaganda war? How can we change if we aren’t creating something to change into. How can we fight “power over” without cultivating personal power? After spending years fighting and dying and screaming and crying I realized I had been ignoring the other side or more likely I didn’t feel the power to think outside the paradigm…but the Zapatistas have been trying it (they were a bit farther from our western controled paradigm already). Gustvo Esteva has been working on it as well. Two years ago I had the opportunity to study for a month at the so-called university that Esteva co-founded called Universidad de la Tierra. It’s about building. Building connections, building alternatives, building whole lives…defragmenting and decentralizing EVERYTHING.
So as my life fell apart this winter and my inspiration stagnated, so did my desire and ability to build the new paradigm that is being built in a million tiny pieces and places all over the world and growing and growing (seriously, but much of what is going on ISN’T in the USA). I want to struggle against fragmentation and centralization and for self-empowered people and communities. Power from above centralizes as people power and self-sufficiency dwindles. The power that we give to the government is the power that we give to the government. Our relationship with our work, our food, our educations, our children, our health, out water, our environment, our lives are fragmented and we become helpless and dependent on centralized power to give us everything. We know that this isn’t sustainable. The struggle for sustainability should be the struggle for self-sufficiency.
Schooling is synonymous with conditioning. I want my daughter to learn in freedom. I want her to learn from the real world, not about it. I want her to know that (outside of math) there is always more than one answer, that are always more than two sides of a story and the truth isn’t always somewhere in the middle. To know that what is impossible to solve in one paradigm may be simple in another. I want her ability to follow her bliss to stay intact.
Funny thing is that while I often hear parents worried that their children aren’t being stimulated enough, I see children being over-stimulated. So-called “stimulation” actually looks a lot like distraction to me. Distraction from listening to the self and learning to deal withit. When my daughter is in preschool, she expects adults to always give her something to do; to keep her busy. When summer comes, she goes crazy for a couple weeks (driving me crazy), and then when she realizes I am not going to give her everything to do, she will start being creative. Finding her own things to do. She becomes amazingly focused and creates her best work. Following her own passion, or at least discovering it. If this is already obvious to me in preschool, I am afraid what happens in the higher grades.
It isn’t that I don’t believe in the public good, or public education, it has more to do with schooling and conditioning of children. Ordering 25 seven-year-olds to a room for most of the day, day after day, accompanied by one adult and pressuring the teacher to teach to some Government standards based on making our country competitive in the global factory is not a good way to learn; it isn’t even safe (this is why so much of Teacher Training programs are focused on “classroom management.”) The structure of school requires hierarchical power structures and carrot/stick punishment and reward tactics to keep the peace and encourage students to fulfill government mandates. What our children learn as children will profoundly affect the way they exist as adults. I know there are better, less costly ways to learn. Ivan Illich had some good ideas about this. His book “Deschooling Society,” touches on a lot of the problems with schooling, that I haven’t even began to go into in this blog, as well as a few ideas and solutions. I also know that present day school is the better option for many children whose parents don’t have the capacity to put them anywhere better or even make educational decisions for them. But I hope for everyone to one day have better options. The more people say “no” and take a step out, the easier it is for others to do the same. And as people find popular-based and local-based solutions, the humongo, centralized, misguided federal government solution becomes less desirable. Maybe I am a pioneer. I hope I am a pioneer. I can’t do this alone. I see more parent cooperative, community schools and free skools on the horizon. At least for my daughter’s and my sake.
I recently started a homeschool/unschool Park Day in my town. I think it was a hit. I find more and more families are turning towards, “No More School” by the week. And they mostly aren’t rich or religious. Look at me. The Crazy Anarchist.
If you have actually made it through that long post, and your still interested, well, I would like to share a couple links. Here is a link to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society online with notes and commentary…it is posted as a reading group on Wikiversity. http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich:_Deschooling_Society
And here is the text of a speech Gustavo Esteva gave to some college students around commencement, that talks about some of his amazing life, thinking, meeting of Ivan and most importantly the thinking and actions that gave birth to the bad ass learning space in Oaxaca, Universidad de la Tierra. http://www.gustavoesteva.com/english_site/back_from_the_future.htm
Also, this is an awesome awesome awesome movement in India, I really dig the “Walk-Out” campaign. http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/
No comments:
Post a Comment