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120: A Pedagogy of Love w/ Dr. Antonia Darder
34 Plays2 years ago
On today’s podcast we are joined by Dr. Antonia Darder. Antonia is an internationally recognized activist-scholar and Professor Emerita at Loyola Marymount University, where for more than a decade she held the Levey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership. Spanning over 4 decades, she has worked to counter social and material inequities in schools and society, including through critical scholarship, activism, and authoring books such as Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, A Dissident Voice: Essays on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power, and Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States. Further, she wrote and produced a student-community driven, award-winning documentary, The Pervasiveness of Oppression.
In this episode, we talk about combating inequitable and inhospitable notions of the school system: from radical individualism which co-opts how students view themselves, each other, and society at-large, to corporate forces that shape policy and curriculum which damage learning outcomes. Instead, we can create a "pedagogy of love" which focuses on care, well-being, meaning-making, and democracy.
GUESTS
Dr. Antonia Darder is an activist, scholar, and professor at Loyola Marymount University, and author of various works and critical scholarship including Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, A Dissident Voice: Essays on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power, and Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States.
RESOURCES
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 120 of our podcast.
00:00:10
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm part of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
00:00:15
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Connie Fletcher, Savannah Lay and Ryan Boren.
00:00:23
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:24
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org or find us on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
Meet Dr. Antonia Darter
00:00:46
Speaker
On today's podcast, we are joined by Dr. Antonia Darter.
00:00:50
Speaker
Antonia is an internationally recognized activist scholar and professor emerita at Loyola Marymount University, where for more than a decade, she held the Levy Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership.
00:01:01
Speaker
Spanning over four decades, she has worked to counter social and material inequities in schools and society, including through critical scholarship, activism, and authoring books such as Reinventing Paulo Ferreira, A Pedagogy of Love, A Dissonant Voice, Essays on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power,
00:01:16
Speaker
and Culture and Difference, Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States.
00:01:21
Speaker
Further, she wrote and produced a student community-driven, award-winning documentary, The Pervasiveness of Oppression.
00:01:27
Speaker
It's a true honor to have you on the podcast, Antonia.
00:01:29
Speaker
Thank you for being here.
Personal Journey and Inspiration
00:01:31
Speaker
Thank you, Chris.
00:01:31
Speaker
I'm happy to be here.
00:01:32
Speaker
I'm always, when we can get a chance to
00:01:35
Speaker
talk about, you know, issues that are important and have a little bit of, you know, dialogue that often we don't, you know, we get so busy in other places, but this is a great moment to just, you know, stop for a bit and have a chat.
00:01:50
Speaker
So I like that.
00:01:52
Speaker
I figure we just open up a broad question to frame what we're talking about.
00:01:55
Speaker
What makes you do this work?
00:01:57
Speaker
What's the purpose of education?
00:01:58
Speaker
What's really driving you forward to keep pushing for this work when it's so difficult yet so needed?
00:02:04
Speaker
I think, you know, for me, it's so related to my lived experience.
00:02:09
Speaker
I mean, I grew up very, very poor.
00:02:11
Speaker
I grew up in very, very difficult conditions.
00:02:15
Speaker
I sometimes talk about my childhood being kind of growing up in a war zone, but in the urban war zone.
00:02:22
Speaker
And that...
00:02:25
Speaker
what I always felt was that there was something different, you know, there's a different way for us to be able to live.
00:02:31
Speaker
And there was different opportunities that we were not having.
00:02:34
Speaker
You know, you would, even if you saw the television, even back in the sixties, there was, you know, our families did not look like, you know, Donna Reed, that kind of stuff.
00:02:44
Speaker
Right.
00:02:45
Speaker
I was like, what?
00:02:48
Speaker
But there was a sense that there was something in between all of that, that,
00:02:52
Speaker
had to do within our communities and outside of our communities, but not a real clear sense of that until little by little becoming more politicized and becoming more aware of the way that the larger societal issues impact on our communities.
00:03:10
Speaker
And they impact on us as individuals in a whole lot of different ways, particularly for me as a Puerto Rican.
00:03:20
Speaker
You know, I was born colonized.
00:03:23
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I still consider myself a colonized subject as long as Puerto Rico is not independent and continues to be treated as a stepchild.
00:03:31
Speaker
It's a colony of the United States.
00:03:32
Speaker
You can use commonwealth language, but it's a colony.
00:03:35
Speaker
The way it's treated is absolutely in colonial terms.
00:03:41
Speaker
And so for me, understanding myself from that context and but then, you know, coming to the States and and growing up here and.
Education and Social Change
00:03:52
Speaker
dealing with what it means to live in poverty, to go to schools where, you know, there were some good teachers always, there's some good teachers, but there were a lot of teachers who treated us, many of us, and I know I felt that personally, that somehow we were dumb.
00:04:10
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We were, you know, not intelligent, not capable.
00:04:13
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Somehow we were deficient.
00:04:15
Speaker
And there was no sense of ever engaging what was really going on in our lives, whether, you know, what was going on in our families.
00:04:22
Speaker
in terms of poverty and what was going on in our communities and the lack of resources and access that we had.
00:04:28
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So for me, all of that became very fertile material, you know, for me to learn and to grow.
00:04:38
Speaker
And it also inspired me.
00:04:42
Speaker
I believed it could be different.
00:04:44
Speaker
I believed that we had to be willing to struggle to change the world.
00:04:48
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And as I grew and as I developed, I came across people and books and conversations and social movement work that very much reinforced
00:05:03
Speaker
that that was the truth, that we were capable of creating a different kind of world.
00:05:08
Speaker
This world that we were living in, you know, was not a fait accompli, as they say, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't a finished, or a lady would say it wasn't finished, it was an unfinished world.
00:05:19
Speaker
And so in dealing with the unfinishedness, it also meant a kind of personal responsibility.
00:05:25
Speaker
What was my responsibility in my work, in my life, in my relationships?
00:05:30
Speaker
to be able to contribute to making the kind of world that I felt that we needed.
00:05:37
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that I want it for my children, that that's a better way of putting my children and, you know, later my grandchildren, I have five granddaughters.
00:05:44
Speaker
So I see how, you know, how things continue and believe that in fact, we have a role to play, you know, as historical, you know, subjects of history, as Fadi would put it, and that we do that by understanding that our responsibility as subjects of history is not only in relation to our own lives, that all the lives we touch
00:06:05
Speaker
And that, you know, we live in an interdependent world, despite whatever is said.
00:06:11
Speaker
And so learning to work with others and to struggle with others became a really powerful impetus for me and my work.
00:06:21
Speaker
That point you make about building a better world is such an interesting statement when you juxtapose it next to the mission statements of schools that often say something like preparing students for the future, which translates to jobs in STEM, preparing good listeners, those that could easily listen on the job.
00:06:40
Speaker
And to be more radical for a second, those who could easily be exploited, right?
00:06:44
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And that fit within that system.
00:06:46
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So therefore, it shouldn't be surprising, given the world that we see today, what happens when you explicitly focus on STEM, job-based, career readiness, etc.
00:06:56
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Well, I think the first place we start is the purpose.
Redefining Educational Goals
00:07:01
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What is our purpose for education?
00:07:03
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Why the hell are we doing this?
00:07:06
Speaker
Why do we have schools and all of this?
00:07:09
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And why do we fight for schools?
00:07:11
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Because I think that's an important thing.
00:07:13
Speaker
question, what are we fighting for in those schools?
00:07:16
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I mean, Paulo was very adamant, people like Juru and others are very adamant that schools are sites for struggle, there are terrains of struggle, and that we need to
00:07:29
Speaker
continue to struggle for the public because that's part of the reality of our lives.
00:07:35
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And it is a means by which we can work and that we can transform society.
00:07:42
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So the purpose of why we do education or what education is for, for me, has always been
00:07:49
Speaker
And to support, you know, the evolution of our humanity, to support students in developing their capacities to contribute to the world in ways that affirm relationships of love and compassion, solidarity, you know, across all relationships and across all communities that we have.
00:08:06
Speaker
We have to be prepared for that, that it doesn't just happen.
00:08:09
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We don't just learn how to do relationships, relationships.
00:08:12
Speaker
are powerful means by which we transform and recreate the world.
00:08:17
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So for people who don't want anything to do with the relationships, which is part of the problem, we have a kind of schooling that is very autocratic, a kind of schooling that's very instrumental, particularly for oppressed communities.
00:08:31
Speaker
And
00:08:32
Speaker
what we begin to see is that there is a purpose for that approach because if you don't really want people to participate in transforming or having any real participation in changing the world, you're going to want to keep them in a very fragmented sense of understanding the world.
00:08:49
Speaker
So much of this work is about how do we recognize that the labor for ourselves and each other
00:08:56
Speaker
is powerful and effective and compelling ways for us to be able to see that we are fully interdependent human beings, that cultivating solidarity and compassion and kindness is an important step, you know, in transforming the inequalities and injustice in the world.
00:09:13
Speaker
And that begins in our relationship with children.
00:09:17
Speaker
You know, so our relationship with students, it doesn't begin when they're in high school or when they get to college.
00:09:22
Speaker
It has to begin from the very get go of education.
00:09:26
Speaker
And so the purpose then becomes important because it's going to shape how we teach.
00:09:31
Speaker
It's going to shape what we think is important.
00:09:33
Speaker
Right.
00:09:34
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And I think one of the things
00:09:36
Speaker
the pieces that is always interesting to me.
00:09:38
Speaker
So much of education has been, you know, about reading and writing, reading and writing.
00:09:42
Speaker
And I think that we can't accomplish a kind of humanizing education unless we become literate in the ways of mind, of the heart,
Classroom as an Ecological System
00:09:53
Speaker
of the body and spirit.
00:09:54
Speaker
I mean, I see those as human faculties.
00:09:56
Speaker
I see those as, they're just part of who we are as human beings.
00:10:01
Speaker
They're resources for us to be able to, to,
00:10:05
Speaker
evolve and develop and that they work in integral ways to help us in creating a good life and creating what a good life is for me is where there are relationships where we are nurtured and we can cultivate opportunities to work and do labor that makes us happy, that makes us feel connected to each other and to the world itself.
00:10:30
Speaker
So I think that
00:10:32
Speaker
When we think of literacy, we need to change how we think of literacy.
00:10:35
Speaker
We need to do this literacy that goes beyond simply reading and writing.
00:10:40
Speaker
And we have to be willing to embrace what many of us call a decolonizing and a multidimensional approach in how we express, for example, an ethics of humanity.
00:10:51
Speaker
How do we understand an ethics of humanity in this very multidimensional way?
00:10:56
Speaker
So we're not
00:10:57
Speaker
thinking, oh, there's one way to be a human being, or there's one way to make the world better.
00:11:03
Speaker
That's not what I'm talking about.
00:11:04
Speaker
What I'm talking about is creating a kind of dynamic context and dynamic reality that is anchored
00:11:13
Speaker
in relationships of love and understanding and compassion and true sense of caring for one another.
00:11:21
Speaker
We need to care about each other.
00:11:23
Speaker
And the very moment that there are people that we don't care about, we need to ask ourselves in what way we are participating in perpetuating oppression out in the world.
00:11:33
Speaker
So there's this kind of dialectical relationship between understanding ourselves as individuals and understanding the world.
00:11:41
Speaker
I think that the other element that often is lost here and is really important to our work is that there is this kind of delicate ecological existence that we are a part of.
00:11:51
Speaker
And often that element is not even really brought forth in education or in the preparation of teachers, that we understand the classroom as an ecology, that everyone involved in one way or another is being touched and moved.
00:12:06
Speaker
It's not just
00:12:07
Speaker
It's not a hierarchical relationship.
00:12:09
Speaker
It's just a teacher doing, you know, you know, having an impact on the students.
00:12:15
Speaker
And in fact, it is an ecological process.
00:12:18
Speaker
And that if it is a hierarchical, hierarchical relationship, the teacher themselves is being affected as well, you know, in a sense, you know, hardening their heart, hardening, you know, their sense of
00:12:30
Speaker
being the expert and the one who should have the power.
00:12:34
Speaker
They're being affected whether they wanna see it that way or not.
00:12:38
Speaker
And of course, students are being affected in terms of how that particular system within a classroom is allowing them to have voice or is giving them an opportunity to participate or an opportunity to have, to really feel that they have some ability to move around the classroom and to be part of creating
00:12:58
Speaker
the life of the classroom rather than the life of the classroom being created upon them.
00:13:04
Speaker
So many of these elements to me then is about deeply understanding how culture and power work.
00:13:11
Speaker
So you can see why that's such an important aspect of my work.
00:13:14
Speaker
and how it's enacted then within the context of education in very often very dehumanizing and traumatic ways, particularly for students who reside within racialized and economically oppressed communities.
00:13:28
Speaker
And I think that's one of the hardest things for teachers to come to terms with, that many of the things they think are good for them, they're doing it for their good, are actually very autocratic and actually re-traumatize students.
00:13:42
Speaker
or traumatize them within the context of
Parental and Community Involvement
00:13:45
Speaker
education.
00:13:45
Speaker
Yeah, as opposed to preparing students for a better world and then diving into what exactly does that mean.
00:13:52
Speaker
Obviously, a lot of your work is inspired by Paulo Freire, as well as other folks in the critical pedagogy space.
00:13:59
Speaker
In Reinventing Paulo Freire, one of the books that you wrote, it really resonated with me because I read it after we had already founded our nonprofit, which is called Human Restoration Project.
00:14:08
Speaker
And the language of that book is just
00:14:10
Speaker
I wish I would have read the book first because our name could be based off scholarship and is not a fun, cool name.
00:14:16
Speaker
One of the chapters in the book is called Restoring Our Humanity and talking about what that means.
00:14:21
Speaker
And it seems evident that restoring our humanity is linked to creating a better world.
00:14:27
Speaker
In the chapter, you use a terminology like revolutionary praxis or a pedagogy of love or a pedagogy of hope.
00:14:34
Speaker
What does that mean or how do we build a better future through the classroom?
00:14:38
Speaker
Where do we start with that?
00:14:39
Speaker
Right.
00:14:41
Speaker
I think it's easier for me, you know, if I can, if we can have a conversation so I can kind of respond to what you're saying, because I think the point you're making is super important.
00:14:50
Speaker
And then I'll try to get back to it if I remember.
00:14:52
Speaker
You remind me if I don't.
00:14:54
Speaker
But, you know, I think that the point that you're making is an essential one and one that often gets completely missed.
00:15:02
Speaker
There's still this attitude.
00:15:04
Speaker
I mean, the colonizing attitude of schools is that they are doing for people.
00:15:08
Speaker
they are doing for the community, they are doing for the student.
00:15:13
Speaker
There's not a sense that there's a relationship here and that the school can be as much nourished and nurtured by what the students and the family and the community bring to the school.
00:15:27
Speaker
It always tends to be the going out, which is part of the problem.
00:15:33
Speaker
So then you have parents, working class parents,
00:15:37
Speaker
We have to understand that often what they're talking about is how they were educated.
00:15:42
Speaker
They were educated in that way.
00:15:44
Speaker
And they were told that this is doing your homework and this and following the rules and all of that.
00:15:51
Speaker
That's how you're going to get a job and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:15:54
Speaker
So I think that the first thing that we have to understand is their lived history and where they're coming from.
00:16:02
Speaker
You know, the other thing we have to deal with is that we often want to make these changes in the curriculum or want to bring these different ideas to the students.
00:16:11
Speaker
And the parents are completely left out of the equation.
00:16:14
Speaker
So they're never invited.
00:16:16
Speaker
There's never an in tandem kind of dialogue going on with the parents.
00:16:22
Speaker
So the parents feel, you know, the parents are kind of put on the outside and
00:16:27
Speaker
And their only way to kind of reassert themselves into the conversation is to say, well, wait a minute, I don't know what you're doing here.
00:16:36
Speaker
And there's no engaging the parents in a way that helps them to see and also experience, not just by telling them, but actually experiencing how the kind of education that you're trying to do with their children is
00:16:54
Speaker
is actually going to not only allow students to know how to deal with whatever the boundaries are in a work situation, but allow them to actually have critical abilities, critical capacities to engage what is happening in their workplace and to actually be able to transform it or even to begin to believe that they may be able to do other things that are more in line with who they are, who that child is.
00:17:21
Speaker
Every parent
00:17:23
Speaker
I've never known a parent, for example, who said they didn't want their kid to go to college.
00:17:29
Speaker
But there seldom are conversations with working class parents early on in terms of preparing children to become critical so that when they go into university, they're able to really have an empowered sense of themselves that they can understand that they have the right to participate in their own learning.
00:17:51
Speaker
And it starts early on.
00:17:52
Speaker
So I think one of the pieces that your comment brings up for me is that we cannot ignore our responsibility to have communication, schools and community, you know, teachers with parents, and that parents should not be seen as a stumbling block to children's education.
00:18:15
Speaker
Parents should be seen as absolutely needing and wanting to be a part of their children's education.
00:18:23
Speaker
And we have to create the avenues for that.
00:18:27
Speaker
Unfortunately, we're dealing with structures that don't often allow, they don't allow dialogue between parents and teachers.
00:18:36
Speaker
They don't allow dialogue between teachers and teachers themselves.
00:18:40
Speaker
Right.
00:18:41
Speaker
And I and I feel that in that often that structure, which is very hierarchical, very autocratic, it is done on purpose because if people start engaging each other around common concerns and common, you know, concerns.
00:18:55
Speaker
desires and dreams and visions, you know, they become dangerous because they realize, oh, you know, this doesn't have to be this way.
00:19:04
Speaker
They begin to say they begin to question it and say, well, why is this this way?
00:19:09
Speaker
You know, why can't we change it?
00:19:11
Speaker
And as soon as you get to that place,
00:19:14
Speaker
Often what you have is a lot of pushback.
00:19:16
Speaker
So people will say, well, we want, I'll give you an example.
Structural Reforms in Education
00:19:20
Speaker
In Chicago, a number of years ago, back in the 80s, they had, you know, they had the local school councils, which was supposed to give, you know, more power,
00:19:34
Speaker
to the community, right?
00:19:36
Speaker
So the community was going to be able to get involved.
00:19:38
Speaker
So for example, the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, who's had an incredible, I mean, it's just incredible work in Chicago.
00:19:45
Speaker
But they saw that as, okay, as a community, we're gonna get involved in those local school councils.
00:19:53
Speaker
And they had the local school councils could hire and fire, they could engage questions of curriculum.
00:20:00
Speaker
I mean, just all sorts of things, right?
00:20:03
Speaker
Well, of course, what happened as they began to get very involved and begin to ask for more culturally appropriate kinds of curriculum and other opportunities for their children, et cetera, that they got strong and pretty soon
00:20:25
Speaker
you know, there was backlash.
00:20:27
Speaker
There was definitely backlash, you know, and now, you know, essentially those councils, I mean, they had to restructure everything because there was so much strength that was being built.
00:20:39
Speaker
I mean, what people have done, of course, that they, you know, they're just like, okay, we'll work another way.
00:20:45
Speaker
And we'll, you know, they keep kind of moving.
00:20:47
Speaker
But what I'm trying to say is that the structure of schools inherently as they exist is
00:20:54
Speaker
are not democratic.
00:20:56
Speaker
So we can talk about democratic schooling all we want, but if we don't deal with the fact that we have structures that are fundamentally undemocratic, then what we have to understand is the structures are part of what produce what happens.
00:21:12
Speaker
Because the structures also produce the relationships that we're allowed to have, whether it's between students, between teachers and teachers, teachers and administration, teachers and community.
00:21:25
Speaker
And I think that so much of our capacity to think more multidimensionally about how schools work,
00:21:34
Speaker
exist in communities.
00:21:35
Speaker
In addition to that, part of what happens with parents is that there's all this talk about the children and trying these new things with their children and stuff, but there's never a lot of conversation about asking the parents, what's going on in your lives?
00:21:53
Speaker
What are things that... What are you needing?
00:21:55
Speaker
How can we...
00:21:56
Speaker
You know, as a school community, parent school community, you know, address some of the other issues.
00:22:02
Speaker
And part of what happens with that is just the way it happens in the classroom that happens out in the world.
00:22:07
Speaker
You know, there's a fragmentation of how we deal with the needs of human beings.
00:22:11
Speaker
So, you know, you either you're looking at health and you're looking at health here in a very isolated way.
00:22:16
Speaker
You're looking, you know, at health.
00:22:18
Speaker
At economic development, it's over here in a very isolated way.
00:22:22
Speaker
Seldom is there this truly multidimensional lens that helps us to position schools within a larger liberatory structure that would be necessary in order for us to create truly just environments, just and loving worlds in which we could exist and where we could begin to
00:22:47
Speaker
that sense of empowerment and participation and find the ways in which then, you know, young people come to recognize the world as theirs.
00:22:59
Speaker
You know, this life, this world that we exist, it's ours.
00:23:04
Speaker
You know, people who run around, you know, because they're wealthy and rich and that they somehow own it.
00:23:11
Speaker
Part of our struggle is how do we begin to feel, no, we own the world, all of us together, you know, and begin to push back against those very hierarchical and privileged and very unjust things.
00:23:28
Speaker
you know, forms of life that have become just kind of second nature in this society.
00:23:33
Speaker
The point you're making about the flourishing notions of the classroom when you remove a lot of those barriers to learning, I think, are very self-evident.
00:23:42
Speaker
I used to teach ninth grade, and of course, that was part of a new building for them.
00:23:46
Speaker
That's the high school section of the building.
00:23:47
Speaker
Our class was fairly progressive.
00:23:50
Speaker
Students had a lot of selection over what they were doing.
00:23:52
Speaker
They voted on curriculum.
00:23:53
Speaker
A lot of it was ungraded and project-based, and a lot of it was social justice-driven.
00:23:58
Speaker
Folks were learning about queer artists, black artists, indigenous artists, et cetera.
00:24:01
Speaker
And it's amazing what kids would do when they're exposed to situations that are open-ended like this.
00:24:08
Speaker
The quality of what they do
00:24:11
Speaker
when they're working, the interest of them in their community is astonishing.
00:24:14
Speaker
It makes you want to come in every single day.
00:24:16
Speaker
However, there were also circumstances where the student or maybe their family didn't buy into those ideas about shifting those systems within school.
00:24:24
Speaker
There were many circumstances where parents would question our grading policy or discipline policy.
00:24:28
Speaker
They would say that it wasn't robust or harsh enough.
00:24:32
Speaker
It wasn't harsh like a typical school would be.
00:24:34
Speaker
And it was worth noting that a lot of these concerns came from working class families.
00:24:39
Speaker
The argument being that the workplace, which of course is super dehumanizing, the workplace would need kids to learn this because that's just how things are.
00:24:49
Speaker
And we know that our work is rooted in helping students learn how to channel their energy toward changing that system.
00:24:54
Speaker
But that's a difficult narrative to someone who's working multiple jobs, who's struggling financially day after day, who wants a better future for their kids.
00:25:03
Speaker
It's a risk for them to invest in a school which may not be seen as like, quote unquote, college and career ready.
00:25:10
Speaker
How do you then shift that purpose of school and have a discussion that
00:25:15
Speaker
with families beyond just changing teachers minds, you have to also help families and students be onboarded to this practice.
00:25:24
Speaker
Yeah, when you fail to see things in systems, it leads to a lot of banal platitudes about school in general.
00:25:30
Speaker
Things like you're talking about screen time, phone use, reading test scores, the ACT scores, things that could lead to probably better testing.
00:25:37
Speaker
Sure.
00:25:38
Speaker
But it's not going to lead to meaningful change, especially for students at the boundaries where those things were often intentionally designed to keep people out.
00:25:46
Speaker
So, of course, they're not working.
00:25:47
Speaker
The case in point example would be poverty as a concept, right?
00:25:51
Speaker
So many educational policies are taken with a sole reason of helping students escape poverty, not recognizing that poverty is a political, it's a policy decision.
00:26:02
Speaker
It's not an individual decision that teachers will somehow solve.
00:26:07
Speaker
manufactured, I think using, you know, Tom's piece term, right?
00:26:10
Speaker
People don't want to leave it because even in their churches, you know, it's like, Oh, the poor will always be with us.
00:26:15
Speaker
Well, shit.
00:26:16
Speaker
Like why?
00:26:16
Speaker
Why shall the poor will always be with us?
00:26:20
Speaker
You know, we, we have the capacity to transform the way, you know, money is distributed.
00:26:27
Speaker
I, you know, the way wealth is distributed.
00:26:30
Speaker
I mean, we have the capacity to do that.
00:26:32
Speaker
It is just that,
00:26:34
Speaker
how we're educated and the ways in which we're in many ways channeled in life because education becomes a kind of interesting, you talk about tracking within school, but it's more about tracking beyond schools that we need to look at.
00:26:50
Speaker
Like I remember,
00:26:52
Speaker
I was at some event and it was, oh, what was it?
00:26:56
Speaker
The Princess Bride.
00:26:57
Speaker
My kids love The Princess Bride, that film, right?
00:27:01
Speaker
So it was the director.
00:27:04
Speaker
I mean, this is one thing as you start getting old at 70s, sometimes I forget the names, but...
00:27:09
Speaker
The director, oh gosh, anyway, the director and I can't remember if it was a writer of the script.
00:27:17
Speaker
Rob Reiner.
00:27:19
Speaker
Yeah, Rob Reiner.
00:27:19
Speaker
Thank you.
00:27:20
Speaker
Rob Reiner was the director and some of us, right?
00:27:23
Speaker
And so what was interesting is that both of these guys are having a conversation up in the stage and different things about the...
00:27:30
Speaker
But what starts to come out is that they both come from families, wealthy families and who were in the business.
00:27:38
Speaker
And then that just clicked with me.
00:27:40
Speaker
And then I started to think about this and I started to look how, you know, different people get positioned.
00:27:47
Speaker
And I realized, my goodness, whether you're talking about attorneys, whether you're talking about, you know, the film industry, actors, educators, you know, there's a tendency.
00:28:00
Speaker
for people to follow in familial lines at levels that we don't acknowledge.
00:28:07
Speaker
We pretend, oh, like you can be anything you want.
00:28:10
Speaker
No, no, the truth of the matter is some people actually have a head start at that, you know, because of the experiences and the opportunities that their families, you know, provided for them.
00:28:22
Speaker
And so I think I'm, I, yeah.
00:28:30
Speaker
But, you know, it works on all sorts of levels.
00:28:33
Speaker
And so knowledge, then there's an interesting way in which the knowledge gets tracked from the get go.
00:28:40
Speaker
And so if we really wanted to begin to open that up, we'd have to begin to see why is it that certain people end up more are more likely to be able to follow certain paths in terms of work.
00:28:54
Speaker
and others are not or opportunities and others are not you know those those questions become important and then of course there's always the the stuff that i've got have to deal with you know when people like oh well you grew up so poor and you know you and and look at you and i'm like you know damn you know accident of history there's a few of us that you know we just happened
00:29:14
Speaker
you know, somehow be in the right place at the right time.
00:29:17
Speaker
But, you know, rather than taking that on and feeling like, oh, yes, of course I could do it.
00:29:21
Speaker
So if I, you know, and it's just, it's like, there's, there's,
00:29:26
Speaker
relationships and realities and conditions, the best conditions that are there that have an impact on our lives.
00:29:35
Speaker
It's not just what's happening individually in our head or in our own little, you know, little life.
00:29:41
Speaker
If we are linked to all these, you know, other conditions that are at work that are having an impact on our lives.
00:29:49
Speaker
And I think that it is a way of thinking.
00:29:52
Speaker
It's a different way of thinking about the world.
00:29:54
Speaker
But I believe it's the way we need to think if, in fact, we are serious about wanting to create a better world, a more loving
Building Genuine Relationships
00:30:01
Speaker
world.
00:30:01
Speaker
We have to deal with aggression.
00:30:03
Speaker
For example, within schools, there is so much aggression.
00:30:08
Speaker
And people don't, you know, because an autocratic form of education inherent in that is aggression because it requires, in order to maintain the structure of
00:30:20
Speaker
unequal, uneven, right?
00:30:23
Speaker
There's going to be ways in which there's just an aggressive kind of pushing back anytime someone wants to get out of there, you know?
00:30:32
Speaker
So like when students try to organize so they have more to say about what's going on in their classroom,
00:30:37
Speaker
You see it immediately.
00:30:39
Speaker
You see it immediately.
00:30:40
Speaker
Or students, students, you know.
00:30:42
Speaker
It's a very interesting kind of process.
00:30:45
Speaker
But it has to do with the manner in which also aggression happens in some subtle ways, you know.
00:30:51
Speaker
And I think...
00:30:53
Speaker
it happens in the classroom by the way that kids are talked to.
00:30:58
Speaker
Or, you know, teachers trying to be funny, like they're going to be funny and then they make fun of students, you know, and it's like, oh, you know, they can take it.
00:31:06
Speaker
I mean, there's a lot of bullshit ideas.
00:31:09
Speaker
There's no other way to put it.
00:31:10
Speaker
Just ridiculous ideas about how to be with students that is just absolutely shameful and disgraceful.
00:31:19
Speaker
And yet teachers are taught
00:31:21
Speaker
you know, are somehow given the green light to persist.
00:31:25
Speaker
They're not called on them.
00:31:27
Speaker
I've heard teachers yelling, you know, yelling.
00:31:31
Speaker
I've come to the belief, and part of it is the hard work that I've done internally, which I believe teachers have to do their own internal work because we all get triggered.
00:31:39
Speaker
You know, kids, you know, a kid can trigger us.
00:31:41
Speaker
But we need to take responsibility as the adult in that classroom or as the person who is there as a teacher has a responsibility to facilitate the well-being of kids.
00:31:52
Speaker
And I don't think you do that by yelling at them to get over there.
00:31:55
Speaker
And, you know, I think we have to begin to see
00:31:59
Speaker
that we ourselves have been duped into believing that aggressive ways of talking to each other and being with each other is, you know, is the only way we can control these kids, you know, kind of thing.
00:32:10
Speaker
And it's not true.
00:32:11
Speaker
My experience has been completely different when I'm dealing with children.
00:32:17
Speaker
I mean, when children feel recognized and heard, when they're engaged in a consistent way, because then, of course, what happens is if a kid, if kids have been used to being, you know, kind of shh,
00:32:29
Speaker
yelled at or, or, you know, and a teacher all of a sudden starts to, you know, comes, it happens when a teacher, kids have been in a, in a classroom that has been pretty, pretty aggressive and pretty oppressive.
00:32:39
Speaker
And then they come, you probably know this one, and they come into a classroom and the teacher is really working to kind of democratize the process, give kids more.
00:32:49
Speaker
Well, at first it's chaos.
00:32:52
Speaker
And we should not be surprised because the kids are like, what?
00:32:55
Speaker
What the hell is going on here?
00:32:57
Speaker
And they're pushing back and they're doing all of that.
00:33:00
Speaker
But our willingness to stay with the vision and to stay with the work and the process of creating space is like we got to listen to them.
00:33:12
Speaker
We have to stay with it.
00:33:15
Speaker
And what happens is relationships are powerful.
00:33:18
Speaker
When they're genuine, then those relationships begin to evolve and they get a substance to it.
00:33:26
Speaker
And that substance between the teacher's relationship with the kids and kids' relationships with each other in the classroom, where a sense of community is being built and that kind of thing, it transforms.
00:33:38
Speaker
the experience of learning.
00:33:40
Speaker
And it's something that you said earlier that, you know, they will do like 10 times anything you expected from them.
00:33:49
Speaker
I mean, it's just, it is powerful.
00:33:52
Speaker
It is amazing.
00:33:53
Speaker
And it is like the superpower that most people refuse.
00:33:57
Speaker
Maybe they don't, I shouldn't say they refuse.
00:33:59
Speaker
Maybe they're just
00:34:02
Speaker
They've been taught that relationships are dangerous.
00:34:05
Speaker
You know, if we think about what happens in terms of teaching, this professionalization of teaching, you know, to me is another piece of bullshit.
00:34:13
Speaker
But anyway, the professionalization, any professionalization, what that's talking about, oh, is that you should somehow maintain that hierarchical place as an expert or, you know, and that you should distance people.
00:34:25
Speaker
You know, so the relationship that you have, you have to create a distance with the kids because that's how they're going to respect you and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:34:31
Speaker
All this.
00:34:32
Speaker
It's all this nonsense that people believe that it's not been interrogated.
00:34:37
Speaker
And it just isn't true.
00:34:40
Speaker
You know, it isn't true.
00:34:41
Speaker
I mean, that fearing a teacher is not the same thing like respecting and loving that teacher and being, you know, happy to be in school.
00:34:49
Speaker
It's a very, very different relationship.
00:34:51
Speaker
And so I'm, I'm,
00:34:53
Speaker
talking about a placing a focus on these relationships where a sense of intimacy and presence and honesty and, you know, and faith in the student's capacity is like at the center.
00:35:05
Speaker
And then we, we trust that there's an organic human process.
00:35:08
Speaker
That's always at work that we're all going to learn together as a, you know, and that's what the, that's, what's been taken away from us.
00:35:16
Speaker
That's when life happens.
00:35:17
Speaker
Life happens in relationship.
00:35:20
Speaker
All of these rules, all the stuff that's created, it is to try to control life, to try to, you know, structure it and control it in ways that actually don't work.
00:35:30
Speaker
I'm not, and I'm not, you know, I don't want to be someone to think that I'm saying, you know, we don't need structures.
00:35:36
Speaker
We need structures.
00:35:38
Speaker
You know, the structures are going to be there anyway.
00:35:39
Speaker
Nature has structures, but we need structures that are life affirming.
00:35:43
Speaker
You know, structures that really allow people to open up, to grow, to evolve, and to participate as true genuine human beings with each other and the world.
00:35:55
Speaker
And this means then that through that intimacy, those relationships get established.
00:36:00
Speaker
We have to be willing to see everything.
00:36:03
Speaker
The good, I always say the good, the bad, and the ugly.
00:36:05
Speaker
And that's why we have so many problems because we're not, you know, these damn TV shows and all this bullshit media.
00:36:12
Speaker
I mean, it has such a corrupting impact on people's understanding what human relationships are about.
00:36:18
Speaker
They don't happen.
00:36:19
Speaker
Love does not happen in 45 minutes or an hour, an hour and a half in a
00:36:23
Speaker
That's not the way it happens.
00:36:24
Speaker
Or, you know, friendship doesn't happen that way.
00:36:26
Speaker
You know, there's this like, you know, craggy paths we have to go through together.
00:36:31
Speaker
And it's because we go through together, we labor in, you know, whether in the classroom or in the community, we labor together for common, you know, for common goals and common desires and needs.
Empowerment and Community Building
00:36:43
Speaker
that we come to understand each other and we begin then to relate to each other in ways that transforms us.
00:36:52
Speaker
So it's not just about transforming something out there.
00:36:54
Speaker
It is we ourselves.
00:36:56
Speaker
have to struggle for our own transformation.
00:36:58
Speaker
And it's hard.
00:36:59
Speaker
I mean, it's hard to do because often people want to keep us in our little box.
00:37:04
Speaker
I mean, that's the other thing that happens.
00:37:06
Speaker
You know, as soon as you start to shine, they want to keep you in your damn little box.
00:37:10
Speaker
And to fight yourself out of your box is an inside job, in a sense.
00:37:14
Speaker
I mean, because, and the reason I say that is that it starts in here.
00:37:19
Speaker
I have to like really face why am I believing, you know, all of these limitations that are being put on me.
00:37:26
Speaker
Why, why, you know, why, why am I, you know, where, where is this fear coming from?
00:37:30
Speaker
And as a woman, as a working class woman working in the academy for almost 40 years, I mean, I cannot tell you the brutality and the cruelty of,
00:37:41
Speaker
that I had to contend with because my political project was outside of the mainstream.
00:37:49
Speaker
And you'll hear that.
00:37:50
Speaker
But then the worst part about it is when people who are in the margins are fighting each other because they never learned how to have real relationships, genuine relationships.
00:38:02
Speaker
So then we want to talk about schooling and we leave that piece completely out of it.
00:38:08
Speaker
The political life is a particular relationship.
00:38:12
Speaker
You know, it has to do with power and how power gets distributed and how it moves in communities.
00:38:19
Speaker
So I think that for us to not look seriously at questions of relationships and the ways that people are traumatized and the ways in which people can be supported and
00:38:32
Speaker
in which, you know, we talk about, oh, empowering kids.
00:38:35
Speaker
I don't want to empower kids.
00:38:36
Speaker
I want to create conditions.
00:38:39
Speaker
You know, the kids will empower themselves.
00:38:41
Speaker
I mean, they will.
00:38:42
Speaker
You know, people want to feel good.
00:38:45
Speaker
They want, they will.
00:38:47
Speaker
I don't know.
00:38:48
Speaker
It's like why I've never been able to let go of this faith that I have, that we have a tremendous capacity in us to, you know,
00:39:02
Speaker
I'm sorry.
00:39:04
Speaker
But it's just, there's always this sense, like we have to be, you know, they have to lead us like with a ring or something.
00:39:11
Speaker
They have to, you know, unleash or they have to whip us into submission.
00:39:16
Speaker
And, you know, and what we're doing is we're fighting.
00:39:19
Speaker
We have to fight.
00:39:20
Speaker
We have to fight that it's all lies.
00:39:22
Speaker
And we will not be able to move away from the kind of society that we have until we realize that those particular attitudes are,
00:39:31
Speaker
do not serve the majority of human beings.
00:39:34
Speaker
They serve the few who want to maintain power and control over resources, over including humanity.
00:39:43
Speaker
And the only way that we will be able to move forward in a different way is by refusing to remain in those limited ways
00:39:53
Speaker
definitions that have been created for us and be willing to really step into the fact that we as human beings have enormous potential, enormous superpower that is tied to our capacity to build solidarity and relationships and community with one another.
00:40:11
Speaker
And that's, you know, that I would want every student to come out of my classroom, you know, being revived in the sense of understanding that communities are
00:40:22
Speaker
that we can build different kinds of communities and that communities begin with ourselves and our, you know, how we show up, how we are present, you know, and our willingness to love, not to be afraid of loving and yeah, you're going to get hurt.
00:40:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:38
Speaker
But if we have real community, you know, we, we support each other through, through those pains and through those struggles.
00:40:45
Speaker
That's, that's what the kind of solidarity that we need.
00:40:48
Speaker
And so in the classroom with kids, for example, you know,
00:40:52
Speaker
creating the kind of environment
00:40:55
Speaker
where they begin to support each other.
00:40:56
Speaker
And you know that it's possible.
00:40:59
Speaker
I mean, many of us know it's possible because we've done it, you know, and we've done it with students at different ages.
00:41:05
Speaker
So it's not, oh, they're too little.
00:41:07
Speaker
No, no, little kids, you know, university students.
00:41:12
Speaker
We all, there's something about our capacity as human beings to respond to love.
00:41:16
Speaker
I mean, it is a political force that Freddy understood.
00:41:20
Speaker
And when the greatest, you know, moments of, of,
00:41:24
Speaker
social movement happened is that somehow in those moments there is this kind of arrows, you know, this kind of love that that is felt and that unites us.
00:41:35
Speaker
What is very hard is to sustain it because the structures all around us are doing everything they can to annihilate that level of connection and community between people.
00:41:48
Speaker
I mean, to me, that's the power in having conversations like this.
00:41:51
Speaker
So I reread
00:41:52
Speaker
rethinking Paulo Freire yesterday and preparation for this podcast.
00:41:56
Speaker
And there's moments I'm going through that and it's illuminating.
00:41:59
Speaker
It's reaffirming that I'm not a crazy person.
00:42:02
Speaker
There are real ideas and other people out there that think the same way.
00:42:06
Speaker
Sometimes when we're talking about systems, it can almost feel conspiratorial or outlandish.
00:42:12
Speaker
A lot of that's because we were programmed in school to think that the system's working right.
00:42:16
Speaker
The hidden curriculum of school establishes that because I got good grades,
00:42:20
Speaker
that other people deserve to be worse off because I worked hard and they didn't, that kind of stuff.
00:42:25
Speaker
And as you were saying too, the media, the canonical nature of what's taught in schools is backed up by almost modern day Horatio Alger stories.
00:42:33
Speaker
Like you go on LinkedIn and every post is about how someone picked themselves up by their bootstraps.
00:42:37
Speaker
They became successful.
00:42:38
Speaker
So therefore you can too.
00:42:40
Speaker
Or even the literature that's fed to us in schools that feeds us a popular narrative.
00:42:44
Speaker
The book,
00:42:46
Speaker
about the kids stuck on the island and they're trapped.
00:42:49
Speaker
Lord of the Flies?
00:42:50
Speaker
Lord of the Flies, yeah.
00:42:52
Speaker
where they found the actual thing the book was based on, and the kids were getting along just fine.
00:42:58
Speaker
They helped each other push through to escape.
00:43:01
Speaker
And it seems like ultimately, when you find people outside of these assumed structures and systems, that people tend to be naturally good.
00:43:09
Speaker
They tend to help and assist each other.
00:43:11
Speaker
It's the systems that get in the way that cause greed, individualism, the myth of meritocracy, which you know is just as problematic as our education system is in general.
00:43:22
Speaker
I guess the last question would be, uh, something I was thinking about when you were talking about escaping these systems as a teacher, parent, student, you wrote this in one of your books, uh, the, the concept of educating our fears, which I think is a really cool phrase or terminology for understanding.
00:43:37
Speaker
Like, how do I even do this?
00:43:39
Speaker
Because it's really hard to go against the grain.
00:43:41
Speaker
It's really scary.
00:43:42
Speaker
You get fired.
00:43:43
Speaker
The news could come after you.
00:43:45
Speaker
Um, in today's political climate, you could be doxxed.
00:43:47
Speaker
People could be outside, you know, my house and place me in actual physical danger.
00:43:51
Speaker
And I get that we've gotten phone calls from deranged people who want to take down the org, that kind of stuff.
00:43:57
Speaker
What does that mean to educate our fears in 2022?
00:44:04
Speaker
Taking that full circle to what the purpose is of education, you could certainly make the argument that individualism is an existential threat.
00:44:12
Speaker
It's all about you.
00:44:13
Speaker
You're a self-motivator.
00:44:15
Speaker
And if you get into a position of power, you're winning and successful.
00:44:18
Speaker
It's no wonder that the bulletin of atomic scientists say that we're 100 seconds to midnight.
00:44:24
Speaker
We're closer than ever to nuclear war, rampant cyber war, an ever-growing climate crisis.
00:44:29
Speaker
All of those things have the same thing in common.
00:44:31
Speaker
They're all STEM related.
00:44:32
Speaker
You make the most amount of money really in those kind of careers, but the problems aren't being solved.
00:44:37
Speaker
They're getting worse because at the end of the day, if that's all that I care about, why would I care about what's going on in another part of the world?
00:44:44
Speaker
Or why would I care that these problems aren't going to matter to me first?
00:44:47
Speaker
They're going to matter the most to poor people.
00:44:50
Speaker
It's not my lived experience.
00:44:51
Speaker
If I simply just focus on STEM, making money in college and career prep, that grand re-imagining of the education system,
00:44:59
Speaker
is very much in line to be grandiose, saving the human race, which is an obvious, you know, it's a huge thing, but it's empowering as a teacher to consider that when I go into the classroom, it's not about just helping kids learn, but ensuring that we build a better world together.
00:45:15
Speaker
That's purposeful.
00:45:16
Speaker
It gives me a reason to push forward and do this work.
00:45:19
Speaker
So, you know, we're in a time right now and so many folks are burning out faster than ever before.
00:45:24
Speaker
That's partially due to that.
00:45:29
Speaker
That makes me think of one more thing, which is that point you just brought up, meeting up.
00:45:36
Speaker
Part of the theory of change of our project is that we're in a time of connection like never before.
00:45:40
Speaker
Because of social media and other virtual spaces, it's only a click away to stay together in this movement and connect with like-minded people for support.
00:45:48
Speaker
The growth of online virtual spaces can be used for evil, but also for good.
00:45:53
Speaker
It's a resounding reverberated space for a reverberating space for impact.
00:45:58
Speaker
I think about the free schools movement in the 60s and 70s.
00:46:01
Speaker
They were doing a lot of awesome work, but ultimately it was so localized there wasn't enough attention to call to it at large and a lot of people were working against
The Role of Technology and Fear
00:46:08
Speaker
it.
00:46:08
Speaker
So it phased out over time.
00:46:10
Speaker
I think establishing that idea today is easier.
00:46:12
Speaker
It's not easy, but it's easier because you can meet with other folks online.
00:46:18
Speaker
other like-minded people, you can access information quickly and realize you're not the only person thinking this way.
00:46:23
Speaker
That's what gives me hope is leveraging that technology to reimagine education and come together and make change.
00:46:30
Speaker
I think, I mean, it's interesting because we always want to kind of historicize and, you know, what does it take now?
00:46:37
Speaker
I mean, I think it takes what it's always taken, you know, which is, you know, to come to a place where
00:46:47
Speaker
where we understand our fears are linked to our experiences that caused us to believe in that fear.
00:46:59
Speaker
You know, there are experiences that say, you should be afraid.
00:47:02
Speaker
Don't go through that door because, you know, if you go through that door, you know, the boogeyman is going to eat you or whatever, you know.
00:47:10
Speaker
I'm playing with that as a metaphor, but we get a lot of those kinds of messages.
00:47:18
Speaker
we give them in education.
00:47:20
Speaker
Well, you know, if a student is not doing well at such a place, that means that they'll never go to college.
00:47:25
Speaker
Yes, that's just ridiculous.
00:47:27
Speaker
Oh, if they didn't learn to read by the time they were, you know, 13, they're never, you know, they're going to be illiterate.
00:47:34
Speaker
I mean, these are lies, or lies, and certain people, you know,
00:47:39
Speaker
make a lot of money by perpetuating those lies, the rewards and punishment stuff that goes on that, you know, that is actually feeds into fear.
00:47:49
Speaker
Rewards and punishment, don't do that because you're going to be punished.
00:47:53
Speaker
And so we have to understand that the punishing, that a punishing culture is an aggressive culture.
00:48:00
Speaker
It is a culture of conquest.
00:48:03
Speaker
And it is the manner in which a historical culture of conquest exists.
00:48:07
Speaker
which is what schools are part of, that colonizing culture, it's perpetuated.
00:48:14
Speaker
And so we begin, as we understand then those relationships that they have to do with the manner in which we are placed in these subordinate contexts, then we begin to see that the only way we can transform those, and in fact, the only way that we can deal with our fear truly, is both
00:48:35
Speaker
to understand where it originates within us and how it gets triggered, and to understand that in order to engage with that fear in the world, we need other people.
00:48:49
Speaker
I think one of the frustrations for me is that
00:48:54
Speaker
Sometimes I say something that people just go like, ah, you know, and I'm like, I don't believe in individuals.
00:49:01
Speaker
I don't believe.
00:49:02
Speaker
I believe that that's one of the biggest ruse that, you know, they duped us with this notion of individualism and individuals, you know, that, I mean, think about it.
00:49:11
Speaker
None of us could exist if it weren't for all of, I mean, all sorts of relationships and all sorts of connections in the world.
00:49:20
Speaker
I mean, we can't survive.
00:49:21
Speaker
We survived.
00:49:22
Speaker
through those relationships and those connections and all of that.
00:49:26
Speaker
So to teach people that, oh, you're an individual, like, you know, and it's back to your comment about the Horatio Alger story, you know, it's like, oh, to see yourself that way, then what it does in many ways, it reduces your capacity for compassion of others.
00:49:42
Speaker
Because if someone falls in your same situation, it fuels a kind of egoic drive and an arrogance about who you are.
00:49:52
Speaker
And I believe that that has so much to do with so many of the problems.
00:49:55
Speaker
Why relationships are so damn difficult, you know?
00:49:58
Speaker
Because in order to have a relationship, you have to be willing to want to.
00:50:04
Speaker
To want to relate and allow yourself to be close.
00:50:07
Speaker
It's the same thing like a teacher.
00:50:08
Speaker
The best teachers are the teachers who are close to themselves.
00:50:12
Speaker
They're not afraid to be close to themselves and are afraid to be vulnerable.
00:50:15
Speaker
And the consequences they create.
00:50:18
Speaker
relationships where the students feel close to their teacher.
00:50:21
Speaker
Like even long after, you know, they're not even in the classroom anymore.
00:50:26
Speaker
They still feel a sense of love for that teacher.
00:50:29
Speaker
And that's because that teacher allowed them to come close.
00:50:32
Speaker
When we come close to each other, we can deal with our fears together.
00:50:36
Speaker
Not as individuals, because we understand that the fears that are out there are the fears that are generated.
00:50:43
Speaker
They have been generated deliberately.
00:50:47
Speaker
as forms of suppression.
00:50:49
Speaker
You know, and often, you know, we have to look at parenting, for example.
00:50:54
Speaker
I mean, there's issues around parenting that in the same ways that teachers perpetuate aggressive ways of being and perpetuate ways that perpetuate children's fears, parents do as well, thinking that you're doing, you know, doing it for their own good.
00:51:11
Speaker
We have so much work to, excuse me, to do.
00:51:15
Speaker
But I know that for myself,
00:51:18
Speaker
If there weren't other people in my life that I trusted, that I felt I could have intimate relationships with, that when I do feel afraid or I'm struggling, that I can really open up myself to them.
00:51:30
Speaker
And I know they're not going to judge me.
00:51:31
Speaker
I know they're always going to see me as me.
00:51:34
Speaker
And I know that they love me and they have my back because they know that I love them and I have their back.
00:51:40
Speaker
That when we build those kind of relationships, then the issue of fear just becomes, oh, okay, it's just fear.
00:51:46
Speaker
We're afraid.
00:51:47
Speaker
Okay, right now, I'm really afraid about this or that.
00:51:50
Speaker
We can engage it because we know that love and relationships of love
00:51:55
Speaker
and caring and solidarity are far bigger than any fear than any of us could have.
00:52:00
Speaker
I mean, there's so, you know, our relationships of community and solidarity are so much greater.
00:52:06
Speaker
And I think it's one of the lessons that students can learn when we create a real community in our classrooms, where they begin to see that by helping each other, you know, we are all, we're all moved, you know,
00:52:22
Speaker
in different ways and ways that make us happy when we're working together, in ways that actually open up, it makes us learn more.
00:52:32
Speaker
We learn more.
00:52:33
Speaker
We are more open to learning, right?
00:52:35
Speaker
Because the construction of learning happens more organically and, you know, and more with more fluidity.
00:52:45
Speaker
And that's when we really see learning happen.
00:52:47
Speaker
You know, part of the reason why little kids learn, you know, so they can learn things that adults have a hard time learning, it's because we've lost that capacity.
00:52:57
Speaker
We've lost that capacity for fluidity, that organic capacity to enter into our learning, you know, in a more free way.
00:53:07
Speaker
We have, you know, all these complexes that get created by, often created by parents and teachers who didn't, you know,
00:53:15
Speaker
They thought they were helping us, but they really were not.
00:53:18
Speaker
And then you spend a lifetime trying to overcome, overcome the fears or overcome the trauma.
00:53:24
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:53:28
Speaker
Podcast.
00:53:28
Speaker
I hope this conversation leads you to inspire and be ready to push the progressive possible education.
00:53:34
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education.
00:53:37
Speaker
To support our cause, stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationprojects.org.