Articles by Michelle Ford - FAQ

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Some thoughts on social activism & lifelong learning by a teacher-activist in the public system

Many people believe that learning is about someone saying something and someone listening and then repeating it, but this is a kind of learning that is imposed in destructive societies, with anti-human values, that educate people into conforming to what is expected from them in that particular society or culture. Patriarchal cultures, any Culture of Violence, does this: reduce the most amazing human potential to manipulate bodies for their exploitation.

Learning is not teaching when teaching excludes interaction, communication, support for the learner to explore what she discovers as she engages in learning. If the reaction to this part of the process is offense and condemnation, then we are not facilitating meaningful transformative learning, which has this name though obviously learning is about that, because in our prevailing world learning is not about that. Learning is about learning to behave in a particular kind of society, one that stagnates the development of our minds, our worlds, our potential, and makes us disconnect and unhappy.

In the same way political parties concerned with social justice need to learn to relate to social activists, and respect them, collaborate with them and respect them as equals, as the source of what they can actually develop in the world of institutions, social activists need to learn to relate to learning, and support meaningful transformative learning processes, and this does not happen replicating fear of mistakes, obstaculizan communication. One can pose one's limits to assist others, that's human, understandable, but that doesn't need to be accompanied by what I call the Judgments of Offense.

As a social activist who has worked for over two decades in public education I feel this is one of the precious things I have learned, and that is why I am sharing it. Learners need to be respected, too. It's not that they are ignorant and the person teaching knowledgable. Most teachers tend to judge that most learners cannot learn instead of asking themselves why they are not managing. Asking that would involve revising what the teacher and the system is doing and not doing, of course.

In my view, in social activism this anti-human teaching methodology is often reproduced--we have been brought up with it. Having a good idea, more realistic information, a more inclusive, juster, a more empathetically-intelligent and informed vision, what social activists work hard to have, should not be understood in that horrendous way whereby the person that needs to learn this has to do nothing but listen and believe/repeat/repost. Where the "teacher" is placed in a position where people need to listen and learn whichever content as transmitted. The reason: because learning in the human mind, if we want learning to develop it fully, in non-destructive manners, along the lines of that intelligence hated so much in patriarchy, empathy, the talented problem-solver in my experience!, learning doesn't work like that. Shakespeare said, "People get soiled in the working", meaning, in my view, or as applied here, "People need to interact with the new information if we want that information to help them evolve, to transform them".

Repeating the "good words" in this authoritarian context of Being Right, that does not tolerate the transitions of wording the old as we discover the new, as if we could simply replace the old with new in an instant, like machines and their limited "intelligence"... That does not tolerate "mistakes", questions, connections, the very process of learning (which is unlike the "enlightening" happening in faith, it's wholly different because it activates countless skills in our human minds, not just emotion, and obedience to the dogma if there is one)... Thát perpetuates the system it fights, creates that kind of fear and violence it intended to fight, that kind of learning that validates that aggressive world. As when we learn to be afraid and ashamed of making a mistake (Mistakes! Those OPPORTUNITIES in meaningful learning processes!), saying something "mistaken" (which oftentimes is not a mistake, but a connection for exploring more), because we will offend (?!), show how unintelligent we are, and consequently automatically rejected, or punished. All that horror in mainstream education systems still today--though now teachers don't beat you, but "just" force your learning potential into the non-meaningful learning of the Exam Culture.

Meaningful learning for the construction of a different world, juster, nonviolent, cannot be done without interacting with the new, parting from who we are just then, someone with conditionings we may want to change as we realize, as we engage in the learning process. Learning the new needs re-using it in various ways to explore it, this includes placing it next to your old, the world as it existed before the new arrived. This brings about questions, mistakes, processes that need to be communicated and expressed; exploring and testing. It's not about offending, disrespecting and harming! Our knowing we have something valuable to share as social activists and transformative teachers in our society is not about replicating mainstream culture and becoming judges and executors. We, activists, teachers, are just facilitators of learning, we cannot decide what the person will belief, we can simply guide there is a less destructive world we can all create together. Faith requires followers, learning requires freedom to think, to express, to explore.

Why can't so many activists and teachers not see that they may be not facilitating learning? As a teacher, I know I'm no different to the learners, for as learning is interaction, within and with other people, I am continually learning about what I know and not know, and how to communicate, what communication means to different people, a whole lot of relevant things! But in mainstream cultures introspection is just allowed for issues related to faith, and for learning this means we block a fundamental activity in the learning process: noticing, being able to look a the old with new eyes, not only being able to listen to the new. Noticing is something hard to learn because we are so afraid of so many things, so polarized into being always right and prevailing. It is hard to do because 1) we are unaware of all the everyday learning we take part in which is mostly stuff that consolidates a terrible approach to life and living, an approach that harms our potential for "happiness" and coexistence and which relates to what the prevailing culture does, 2) we are not aware that we learn things we would choose not to learn, and 3) we are not aware that we are not learning things we would choose to learn.

So who would want to work like that if one's vision is we want to contribute to evolving towards nonviolent societies and cultures which respect everybody, which protect life and coexistence, nature. This vision requires an equalitarian respect for the learning process and their protagonists, not the negative feedback that says, Shut up and repeat, You are offending, etc, that equates the ills brought about by the structures prevailing in the world (which, yes, we contribute to build unconsciously) as a result of a most violent kind of Culture, enforcing numerous oppression systems, with who each person engaged in learning is and the telling fact that she is engaging in a learning, transformative, process, whose outcome we don't know what will be but which probably will empower the person and make her less cruel or unfair to other. That traditional teacher, dogmatic activist kind of attitude that blocks transformative and meaningful learning, and contributes to perpetuating the key notion in Cultures of Violence that says identity, individual or collective, is a threat to those who believe or wish to impose their identity. As if human beings were not like nature, like the universe, endlessly diverse.

Cultures of Violence and their destructive systems are certainly powerful, and whether we like it or not, we all are their children and sustain them also unknowingly with assumptions we have and allow to operate, with the very language we use to word things. But these brutal systems have failed to reduce our amazing human minds to being machines. In spite of all the violences they have exerted through millennia! Untouched, our potential and the precious talent for empathy: with some work added to not turning our backs to our empathetic intelligence, we can easily realize what is destructive and choose not to reproduce it, realize what truly helps to solve problems and stop making them worse, we can actually realize what we do everyday that helps live and coexist in non-destructive ways, we can learn to respect ourselves too, and stop repeating all those sentences a violent society thinks of us or wants us to become. Of course, if the material reality of our prevailing societies and cultures of violence is that limitless appropriation of resources (money, nature) is allowed and protected, that brutal minority will have material resources to destroy us but then, they need us anyway, and we can make them respect our terms if we are masses guided by the non-confused value of respect to life on the planet, and the natural diversity in living. We know from humanstory that they accumulate to impoverish us, make us dependent, and unable to fight them through violence. But our power to transform the situations does not lie in being able to be more violent than them. I always miss people knew more about nonviolent struggle in humanstory, and people decided to pay attention how we do that everyday, in spite of the sociocultural mandates.

Our strength to change, to evolve is not in replicating the prevailing culture, its systems, its values, its how-to's. They are inside of us, conditioning us, in how we see the world and ourselves, what we feel and do, how we relate and name. But we do replicate mainstream culture in spite of wanting to transmit more truthful information, more nonviolent ideas, if we are not aware of this. For me, learning to respect people and coexisting in diversity was something I learned and practiced in adult public education, where all kinds of different people gathered. This is privileged information, in some way, for most people tend to relate just to like-minded people, and see other people as threats or dangers, which results in this simple and damaging event: when we don't know about someone, how can we connect for respect in coexistence or to love that person? ARen't we more vulnerable to being manipulated into seeing others as "enemies"?

In the 21st century, thanks to the amazing tool for information and communication that has been the internet, with zillions of people sharing, we have learned about massive peoples' revolutions internationally, in many places: marches everywhere against a war somewhere, masses everywhere for democracies that abandon the priority of money for some and prioritize human rights and the protection of nature, the Arab spring, the 15M, the Occupy Movement, mass women's demonstrations against patriarchal violence... We have never had this precious chance of learning about our humanstory and of being able to communicate and keep each other company, not only so that we know each other, but also to generate an understanding that can produce a different human world, one that doesn't belief in violence and injustice as necessary. The odds of the extinction of this species are high, but something else could happen, this is the power of life, of being alive. Mostly, life is surprising in how it manages to keep on. It's all around us. Evolution can give us chances of something else happening.

We need to understand that evolution to something less horrible is not done without lifelong learning, and that learning is a process full of all kinds of things because it is alive and connecting, and not a something that requires the learner believes and is silent. Avoiding perpetuating what destroys us is something we can all do with each of our individual lives to favor a more positive evolution. Not only can we resist and persist--we can actually exist as a non-destructive species in this planet which is capable of generating different ways to do thing and understand things because of its imagination, but which is not alienated from understanding what the shared priorities are.