Social crisis, authoritarism & education

Social crisis, authoritarism & education

Educators for Active Nonviolence are concerned with the direction of the changes which we are now living and are proposing to work with methods of Active nonviolence in order to give human meaning to personal and social changes. Educators for Active nonviolence aspire to generate an educational alternative capable of constructing news proposals and concrete pedagogical practices. 

No one any longer disputes the fact that society is changing faster and faster and geneted crisis. But while the crisis contains the possibility of opening ourselves to new perspectives to allow people and human being to evolve voices are also being raised that propose more regressive and authoritarian alternatives. Education should give some answer to the social crisis, but it's clear to do this we need a profound change in the educational system. We also need to humanizes our personal life and humanizes the school system. Teachers must be a reference in this sense because today we are in the presence of an educational system of growing dehumanization in which grades are more important than learning and fear of the school administration has replaced respect. We believe that students can grow saying yes or no from themselves. Student can learn without fear to respect themselves and respect others.

In this way education for Active Nonviolence is seeking for coherent relations versus relations of authoritarianism, discrimination and violence. But in order for this to happen teachers and educators must be the voices and action of the best in the human being.

But we are clearly far from an education appropriate to the present moment. We are far an education which would makes possible the advancement of the human being of the 21st century. We want an education that effectively grants equal opportunities for everyone and above all recognizes the rights of all, without any exception what so ever, including for the simple fact of being alive would give the rights to a free education.

Today's educational system is marked by the brand of discrimination. It prepares a few to direct and control society, and the greater majority to work as a source of cheap and submissive worker. There is a qualitative ayss between paid and free educational institutions. Whether we like it or not, we must realize that every announcement of improvement in education, is a lie and a hypocrisy since we are not tackle the basic issues. Because the problem is not only of resources, but an existential problem caracterizes by general desorientation and social crisis.

Educational alternative : the Intentionality of the consciousness & personal & generational historicity

The school system as it is currently conceived no longer makes sense for society, it does not fulfill the objectives for which it was created. Our school are as a sort of replica of the factory, it is understood that the school must produce workers, while the university must produce professionals. In this kind of education, the intention is to 'objectify,  to make a thing out of the human being to cut off his or her intentionality or/and subordinate the intentions of the many to the designs of a few.

Certainly, others epochs when the school system was generate "experts" asked about the nature of the human being and answered accordingly, but without realizing that what defines him or her as such was precisely his or her historicity and therefore his or her world-transforming and self-transforming activity. The fact is that education currently conceives the human being as a social and rational being, attributing to the intellectual function a greader importance than that of the emotional or motor functions. In accordance with this concept, only instruction, information and data are given. In the school system temporality and personal historicity is not even a notion. 

The fact is that in most school system the notion of historicity is denial. This position has major consequences on "being in the world" by holding the believe that the aciton of consciousness is passive in the world.

... "the being of time is the now, but it no longer is and is not yet, and thus it is a non-being. The world is experienced as external to the body, but the body is part of the world, since it acts in the world, and from the world if receives action." (Silo, 28 p. Contributions to Though, 1995) 

But in reality both students and teachers are in the world and participate in the constant flux, which is an ongoing transformation of their essential constituent. So how can we go on justifying an idea of an education that only reproduces what alreadly exists or socializes people to fit the current mold .. since everything is changing ?

Education for Active Nonviolence develop a particular unprejudiced vision about the constant flux, temporality and landscapes. This education take his inspiration from the Universal humanism pedagogical current. This current define the human being as an historical and social being ; a being that carry actions that transform the world and transform himself or herself. Therefore the human being is above all a builder ; it is human intentionality that moves the world, transforms it, improves it or worsens it, promotes evolution or involution.

"Thus by starting from the temporality of being there can one comprehend how in it world time I inherent. And the temporality of being there is a structure in which past and future times - and the latter as projects, or more radically, as protentions (according to what Husserl taught) necessary to intentionality - coexist ( but not one with the other as additions.) In reality, the primacy of the future explains the pre-being-ifself-in-the-world as the ontological root of being there ..." (Silo, p.26, 1995)

For many educators it is evident that the school system is neglecting the temporality and generational historicity of and no longer offers a satisfactory answer to the needs of today's changing world. This is why more than ever educators are aware of the magnitude of the crisis in which we are living and are seeking answers that give meanings to their work and meaning to learning. 

Education for Active Noniolence propose an education that will liberate the intentionality of the consciousness of the women and men of our time. An education that will liberate the human being from various form of discrimination and violence. An education that will not condition the individual and the social masses to expect a limited future according to various believe.

Furthermore this education reject the 'repeting' acts of degradation on diverses culture and human being through wars, violence, discrimination, exclusion and corruption. The point is that education should propose a system in which relationships are subject-to-subject, not subject-to-object. By the recognition of the historicity of the human being and the activity of the consciousness this new educational system would arrive at an educational practice that would help students feel referenced to work bringing them together, enlightens them, orients them and attracts them. 

In conclusion we think Today education system must have theses quality and offers new meaning. In others words a humanizing educational proposal must place itself necessarily within the perspective of social and cultural transformation. It most place itself in the perspective which it will allowed the practiced attention to one's own look. That means to consider the possiblity that there are no absolute truths of visions, and that the landscape is a particular structuring of the student consciouness - (which is not the reality itself - but co-exist with others realities within an historical moment). As for "practiced attention to one's own look" this means that students attentively observe the construction and / or structuring of their particular way of "seeing" and structuring knowledge.

In this case we are not talking about knowledge in a strict sense, but about the contact with ones own registers of thinking. That is to say, mastery and consciousness of the processes of building knowledge, utilizing or exercising metacognition, making present or conscious ones own way of achieving understanding, and /or personal growth.

Practiced attention to one's own look also means to govern ones own body. This means students acquire the ability to observe how the mechanisms of learning work, to realize how they are learning. We are therefore taking about enabling individuals to integrate with the internal world from the body.

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Credit photo ; Anne Farrell and Humanista Collectiva