An Interchange on Critical Analytical Curiosity, Class Consciousness, Organization, and Strategy
12:42 PM 2/21/2007
Gloria Ladson-Billings, in a recent presentation to the North Dakota
Study Group, cited several myths that go along with teaching low-income
minority children. One of these myths she labeled "Oh, you poor dear."
Here's how it goes:
A low-income minority student doesn't want to do something the teacher
asks her to do. "Oh, you poor dear," says the teacher. "Maybe you'll
feel like doing it tomorrow."
Ladson-Billings points out that this response, ostensibly a caring,
empathetic gesture on the part of the teacher, serves only to create a
self-fulfilling prophecy for the student. She argued that an affluent
white student in the same position would be challenged by her teacher
and encouraged -- maybe even pushed -- to do as she was told.
Or maybe not.
I'm a middle-class white male. I know that with my middle-class, white
4-year-old daughter, I allow space in my parenting. I don't make her do
everything I want her to do because I believe it's important to allow
her voice to develop.
In some democratic, progressive classrooms, students are often allowed
to develop their voices, too. In such an environment, saying "Maybe
you'll feel like doing it tomorrow" is not such a bad thing. In fact,
saying "Maybe you'll feel like doing it tomorrow" is quite a radical
thing to say, especially compared to classrooms where students are
thoroughly disempowered and silenced into passive submission.
So when does "Maybe you'll feel like doing it tomorrow" make sense? And
when does it serve, as Ladson-Billings noted, as a way to reproduce the
status quo? Does it suggest that "tough love" or "cruel to be kind"
pedagogy is effective, maybe even necessary, with low-income minority
students? I hope not. But it may help to contextualize why such
pedagogical approaches seem to be so popular these days, from Edison to
KIPP and their ilk, and why so many "liberals" endorse such approaches.
The implicit message seems to be, "We have to push these kids." And
while there might be truth in this, I worry what pushing them looks
like --- and what happens when a push becomes a shove. Of course, a
good teacher would be able to tell the difference between the two. But
if the teacher's judgment is taken away and replaced with the kind of
institutionalized forms of "pushing" we see at KIPP and Edison, perhaps
we see a different kind of reproduction of the status quo, one that
punishes "miscreants,"* rewards the compliant, and encourages those
that do not make it to blame themselves for their shortcomings.
* - KIPP demands that students who break the rules wear a sign around
their necks that says "bench" (taking a page from the world of sports
where players are benched for poor performance). Harold Berlak visited
a KIPP school in the Bay Area where the sign read "miscreant."
--
Posted By Peter
On Feb 21, 2007, at 4:26 PM, Rich Gibson wrote:
Gloria Ladson Billings has made profound contributions to the educator world, and Peter does here as well.
However, it seems we have to remind ourselves of, "toward what end?"
The desire to disconnect the particular from the general, and theory from practice, is very powerful within a social system that relies on the division of mental and manual labor.
I have been traveling to campuses all over the west and midwest lately, and I find that people insist on wanting to know pedagogical or organizational tactics, and at the same time shy away, almost physically, from an examination of the general social context, and the real goals of education. Absent this examination, there is no strategy.
For my part, I want to transcend the system of capital. Anything less is unacceptable. Anything less just rebuilds its revolving door of alienation and exploitation, and its very true promise of perpetual war. It is not enough to think that teaching a child to read, or giving a kid a chance in the system, is a good thing. Reading is good, having skills is good, but it is not enough. To be skilled, and not aware of the way capital works, just will not do today. So, what to do?
To do that, I think we need to patiently, yet urgently, create a mass base of truly class conscious people.
Given all the problems of defining what truly class conscious means, it is good enough to assist in seeing that capitalist schools are not our schools, but their schools, despite the fact that inside those schools there is resistance, as there is on any job, but school resistance in a de-industrialized society, is especially important.
As some professors pointed out to me the other day, the vast majority of teachers are doing nearly nothing to resist with any wisdom, and this is true. It is unlikely, at least in my crystal ball, that most teachers are going to play leadership roles, in fashioning resistance that tries to get beyond capital. However, some teachers will, and they could make all the difference. Youth are going to be central in leading resistance and fundamental change, or such is my best guess. Teachers can help youth see the way.
Those educators need organization to make their work powerful. Organization means, to some degree, sacrificing individual goals, perhaps not writing that great paper for the prestigious journal and helping build a test boycott, or throwing a military recruiter off campus, instead. Organization needs to be rooted in both theory and action, and action means risks. People are going to have to make sacrifices.
Even beyond that, I think we need to find ways to foster, cultivate, critical analytical curiosity within kids, and ourselves, so we can learn as we go, and redefine what class consciousness is. Many kids arrive in school curious from the outset, and the NCLB is designed to pound that out of them, and also to eradicate what would need to be added to curiosity: analysis and criticism, theory and history.
To close, I toss in a quote from my old friend, now dead, Fredy Perlman. In his "The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism," he takes up the question that was also raised to me again and again, which can be summed up in many ways , but I will leave it to the reader to decide what Fredy was getting at twenty years ago.
Quote:
The idea that an understanding of the genocide, that a memory of the holocausts, can only lead people
to want to dismantle the system, is erroneous. The continuing appeal of nationalism suggests that the opposite is truer, namely that an understanding of genocide has led people to mobilize genocidal armies, that the memory of holocausts has led people to perpetrate holocausts. The sensitive poets who remembered the loss, the researchers who documented it, have been like the pure scientists who discovered the structure of the atom. Applied scientists used the discovery to split the atom's nucleus, to produce weapons which can split every atom's nucleus; nationalists used the poetry to split and fuse human populations, to mobilize genocidal armies, to perpetrate new holocausts.
The pure scientists, poets and researchers consider themselves innocent of the devastated country-sides and charred bodies.
Are they innocent?
It seems to me that at least one of Marx's observations is true: every minute devoted to the capitalist production process, every thought contributed to the industrial system, further enlarges a power that is inimical to nature, to culture, to life. Applied science is not something alien; it is an integral part of the capitalist production process. Nationalism is not flown in from abroad. It is a product of the capitalist production process, like the chemical agents poisoning the lakes, air, animals and people, like the nuclear plants radioactivating micro~nvironments in preparation for the radioactivation of the macro-environment.
As a postscript I'd like to answer a question before it is asked. The question is: "Don't you think a descendant of oppressed people is better off as a supermarket manager or police chief?" My answer is another question: What concentration camp manager, national executioner or torturer is not a descendant of oppressed people?
Close quote
Here is the full text http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/PerlmanNationalism.htm
And here is an indicator of what the rouge forum is trying to do in lovely downtown Detroit next week
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/rouge_forum/RFSchedule.htm
best r
7:25 PM 2/21/2007:
Rich - I have a very practical, strategic question: how, as educators and activists, do we develop class consciousness in the way that you suggest?
As much as I'd welcome this activity, it's hard to get people to take you seriously if you frame the discussion in this way at the outset. You immediately get dismissed as a radical pinko commie.
Do you have any ideas about how to get the conversational door open and how to keep it open?
Peter
Wed, 21 Feb 2007 21:38:44
Hi Peter
A good conversation starter in a classroom, even in elementary school, is, "why are things as they are?" I put that up on the board before every class.
Or, "is it true that we are responsible for our own histories, but not our birthrights?"
In organizing, it might be "what are the best, and worst, things about this job---and why?"
In community organizing, "what would you envision as the best way to live, what is it like here, and what are the barriers between here and there?"
As you seem to note, there is a powerful tendency in the US to deal with parts, absent the whole, and in schools of education and on k12 campuses, that is particularly powerful as colleges of ed, which train teachers, typically split methods and substance, just as the union "movement" today wants to "organize" around anything but class struggle.
Organizing and teaching are very similar. All of it begins with a very good analysis of always-idiosyncratic conditions. Though the world is pretty similar, everywhere, the differences in terrain are key, as in organizing teachers as distinct from bus drivers, or teachers in Fla vs California, etc. Absent an understanding of concrete conditions, nothing. Same is true of teaching. Absent a concrete grasp of a particular community, a particular school, a specific child, etc, not much happens.
Teaching and organizing can be pictured as a triangle: a specific teacher meets a unique student in a singular school community that is, even so, one the planet. Good teaching or organizing surrounds that triangle with a spiral, a teacher organizer's world view that is tested by having both known goals and stated ethics, all underpinned by the guiding notion of equality. Equality is the one thing the system of capital cannot stand.
Getting the conversation open, in organizing and teaching, is in part by showing up, by being there with people, and to get people to listen and trust, listen and be trustworthy. Friendship with principles might sum that up.
Anyone can listen and probably figure out what people's particular problems are. It takes a class analysis to grasp that most people's problems are social problems, that require social action, mass action, and that in that process, a lot of problems of depression, for example, vanish. It takes a class analysis to realize that people have a right to direct and control what they create, and that they can do that by utilizing the organizations that already exist in nearly any work place (as in, who organizes the bowling league, who would you see if you had a legal problem, who here has a following, etc?) and, at the end of the day, they can express the creativity within that struggle that they cannot exhibit at work, and they can learn that they do not need a boss, who really is a parasite.
Of course, that concrete friendship, understanding or relationship is set up, molded, by one's world view. Flatly, if one does not understand that class struggle is at least a key, if not the key, motive force of history, one won't be much of an organizer, nor much of a teacher. Ollman does a nice job summing up class struggle, in school and out http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/Ollman.html
And that, then means one must connect one's tactics with one's strategy, at every step of the way. Lots of teachers have good teaching strategies at hand. Very few of them understand the nature of class struggle, and many of them will reject it as they believe they are on the wrong side of that battle, and they may well be. Teachers will vacillate between the working class and the owning class, rather like they want to promote a fairly vapid idea of democracy which, today, is really a mask for what once was religion, an excuse for conversion, exploitation, and today, extermination.
So, the big picture is always the small picture, and vice versa. They work together.
People take the notion of class struggle very seriously today. They have for decades, but it became much easier to talk about after the social-fascist USSR fell apart, a collapse that I celebrated but most on the 'left' are still mourning.
Now, I have yet to meet a prof or a teacher (granted, people who come to stuff I do are interested at the outset, and may have some sense of disagreement, or not) who can seriously make a case that what is going on is not:
*an international war of the rich on the poor,
*within which, a series of imperialist wars breaking out more and more
*requiring nationalism, racism, sexism, irrationalism, nihilism, as motive factors for citizens and troops,
*meaning a pounding down on every nation's working class while, at the same time,
*the local bosses pretend that what is up is an attack from without, requiring a united, national, response,
*meaning inequality deepens, wars break out more and
*more and more people are positioned so they MUST fight back to live like California grocery strikers and Detroit teachers
*but they do not know how to make sense of their resistance so they typically trust people they should not trust
like their union bosses, etc
*so at the end of the day we need to teach that nobody is going to save us but us
and organize in the same way,
*particularly using methods of direct action, distinct from alienating voting or vigils for example.
*Organizing must be rooted in personal ties and, not coalitions which are easily atomized, but real organizations
addressing the system of capital itself, and
*there is no time to lose, but we must be patient.
How that is taken up in a given locale may be different from place to place. In San Diego we are just beginning on the route to strategic planning, and that has taken a long long time http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~rgibson/strategicplanningSD.htm
People in other communities will come up with different things. In San Diego, we have a lot of military people. One part of our group has focused on throwing the military off campuses, and in high schools we have been very, very successful, but not in the universities, interestingly. While I do not agree that everyone should stay out of the military, as for some kids it is an only way out, just as for some kids school is the only safe place with food, and because we will need at some point to get the military to desert, mutiny, and that can be best organized from the inside, like anywhere else, I have worked hard with the dedicated people who lead the project.
We are also seeking to build boycotts of the high stakes tests. That part is led by the Rouge Forum. In CA we have not been nearly as successful as in Michigan and other states, though we did help trigger the mass antiwar school walkouts here in the last few years.
http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/%7Ergibson/High-StakesGibsonRossCounterpunch.htm
In the classroom, it is not so hard to teach about class struggle and to take the side of the working class. Class struggle sets up everything else, so it can be taught in the liberal arts, in science, in math, in anything. Bill Bigelow's "Organic Goodie Machine" is a nice example and can be done across age ranges. Farmer Duck is a great book to use with adults and kids not only pointing out the possibilities for revolution, but the rot of socialism which was, really, nothing but capitalism with a "benevolent "party riding it.
One way to deal with class struggle is to make it slightly more abstract, and then more concrete. The battle of Masters and Slaves sweeps across history and is clearly recorded back to Rome. Plato wrote about it, as did others. Hegel pressed that forward in Phenomenology of the Mind, and Marx picked it up in his early essays. Because the Master/Slave relationship has such a long history, it is nearly impossible for bosses to attack when it is used in the classroom. (as an aside, as egalitarian as much of early Christianity was, it hardly took the side of the slaves). Here is my take on the Master/Slave issue, for the classroom: http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/masterslave.htm
We should surely teach that in any country that is promising to go to war, the nation's leaders are going to start lying to the population, as they must, logically, and as they do. The only thing Bush and Hillary et al are not lying about is their mutual promise for perpetual war. That is real. The rest is lies. How to spot lies? http://www.pipeline.com/%7Ergibson/liespotter.htm
We can be consistent antiracists as racism has been the achilles heel of the working class for centuries, and sexism has for millenia
http://www.pipeline.com/%7Ergibson/approach.htm
There is, as you say, plenty of anticommunism around. That takes a lot of forms and, for my part, I just deal with it directly. I am not invulnerable, but I don't need to be as circumspect as, say, an untenured classroom teacher. That does not mean that one cannot address the many issues above. Discretion needs to be based on one's analysis of the power relations at hand, so as not to be dismissed, as in fired, or as in ignored.
I suggested, in the earlier piece that we need to fashion three things: Organization, class consciousness, and critical analytical curiosity.
The Rouge Forum is trying to deal with the organizational issue, mostly in schools, with some modest success. Organization does not create class consciousness, necessarily, as the Communist Party USA surely showed, but it is both an expression of class consciousness and can build it. Without organization, nothing.
As to class consciousness and how it grows, as well as critical analytical curiosity--that to me is a very serious problem. I am sure it is created and/or cultivated at the outset by loving guardians who do not fear, for example, sexual pleasure and who are themselves critical, analytical and curious, or even just readers who talk about events at the dinner table.
This is what I think about class consciousness. Unlike the other links, it is not short:
http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/%7Ergibson/rich.pdf
I believe cultivating class consciousness, or analytical critical curiosity, is a matter of being sure that freedom, not license, is offered in early youth, and on. That would include the freedom to roam, to artistic expression, to disputation with parents, educators, etc. It is also a matter of grasping the necessary discipline and sacrifice of purposeful hard work. It is a curiosity that is nurtured by caring, love, but not uncritically. But it is also just telling. "All of history is the history of class struggle, " for example. Whole Language takes up a lot of that, but leaves out the real Whole, the system of capital, but there is a lot to learn from whole language.
It is also fair game to simply tell people that we are in a unique position in history, and have been for perhaps fifty years, in which it is possible for everyone on the planet to live well, if we just shared. What would it take to get from here to there? Or, why is it that we are poised on the corner of World War III, united through systems of production, technology, communications, exchange, etc., yet divided to the death by nation, race, creed, sex gender. Which should outweigh which in that contradiction?
Without class consciousness, in any case, we cannot begin to grasp the world as it works, nor will we be able to make reasonable estimates about people who really are our enemies, and what they will do next. Absent critical analytical curiosity, it may be impossible to discover the mistakes that honest people are making as we go along. That too requires all the factors I noted above. But we need to have an idea of where we are going, or we will never be able to correct our course, and we will be engaged in meaningless bickering about organizational, or pedagogical, tactics.
I hope I have addressed the question you asked and, again, thanks for your good and fair challenge. I hope I addressed it.