Education that Resists the Simplicities that Block our Way Forward
Nothing less than generational change will save our civilization and world.
The program was called “Teachers for East Africa.” The years were the early 1960s. We were “in the water” a few months before the Peace Corp. We were not missionaries or “problem solvers” or avatars of the American Way. We were educators in that deep, even mystical sense, that has extended from Plato to Dewey to Paulo Freire. Carries of traditional knowledge and instructors in the craft of finding and developing new perspectives and ideas.
In an interesting zoom call with many of the Teachers for East Africa cohort still alive and active, hosted by the indefatigable Brooks Goddard, I touched on the issue of how to deal with a common placeholding abstraction, “Africa.” I.e. what is really meant by this concept when people use it?
So large a continent, so astonishing a diversity of peoples and traditions and present aspirations. Grouped under one heading, this wonderful range of human experience is often reduced to racist stereotypes or pictures of large eyed starving children.
Such abstractions are often used to put what we don’t want to deal with on the outer borders or our attention, as if, in Africa’s case, it is still that blank space drawn on 19th century maps of the world.
We do this mental placement all the time, letting our partisan emotions for hot button problems and needs and causes take center stage. So, it was not a non-sequitur when our Zoom conversation turned to another broad generalization “homelessness.” And I want to take up in this blog the general problem as I see it.
Conceptual framing, that’s what such nominal categories are, can be a fatal flaw in our thinking—a word or phrase that implies in one meme both simplicity of definition and ease of solution, a shadow-show on the walls of our gated communities. Thus, we avoid seeing realty, multidimensional narratives of greed and suffering, of ignorance and failure, of triumph and vision, the human experience
It seems to me that far too many of our better impulses (angels of our nature?) are weakened by such simplistic starts to “figuring things out,” which are in fact so often dismissals of the real world in which we live.
We stand at the confluence of enormous changes that will impact the very existence of humanity in the years ahead.
Just as “our problems” are not reduceable to “code” words, neither are they separate or regional. Understanding has to cast the widest net, involve genuine experience, and the honest admission that little will be “solved” by gestures, either private charity or “Band-Aid” programs.
Social understanding and its offspring, change, are life-long projects and extend beyond individual lives. We must challenge and enlarge and inspire the minds of the next several generations to stand on our shoulders (as the old saying goes) and see further. In a word education in its deepest meaning.
At this hour, I believe we all need to become educators, at least allies of those who daily battle shallow thinking and ignorance in our schools, opposing all attempts to water down or fantasize elementary and secondary education. This is where our shoulders need to be.
I can bear with a weary smile much of the fringe junk that our political culture spills onto social media. Our electoral system is safe, at least for now. But not, I believe, our educational system. We must preserve and strengthen this civilizational life-blood. We must for that is our future.
Many of us believed this once, in the classrooms of East Africa.