Meeting
Ivan
To begin our
conversation, I feel that I cannot avoid introducing myself...sharing something
of the context and conditions in which I met Ivan. First of all, if we are
going to talk about schooling and education, I feel the need to speak about
development, because for us, in our context, education cannot be de-linked from
development. It was part of the package. To be developed, to come out of
underdevelopment, meant always, first, to get an education.
Serendipitously, Ivan arrived in my
life
when in more ways than one I found myself at a dead-end: What could I attempt
next in my long journey to recover from the global malady of development? Like
millions of others, I got infected by it. I was very, very young -- only 13 years old – when I caught it, the way
you catch a cold or malaria.
I was then navigating the delta of the divergent traditions of my
parents. Even as a little child, I knew
that my Zapotec grandmother could not come into our house in
On
Very soon
thereafter, my father died. At 15, I was
forced to support an extended family of siblings, aunts and cousins, becoming
first an office-boy in a bank; and, then, thanks to Truman’s Development, the
youngest executive ever for IBM. Thanks to the Development experts and their
Education projects for underdeveloped Mexicans, I had arrived!!! With my newly
minted education credit hours, I could be at the very center of the Development
Epic: providing good services to the community, good conditions for the workers
and good profits to the stakeholders; while of course, gaining a solid income,
prestige and a sports car.
My education produced a typical global
success story. With increasing discomfort. How long could I hide from myself
that in generating profits for my corporation, I was cheating my community and
exploiting our workers? I finally could not go on. I refused to follow the
corporate order. Immediately, I was fired from two corporations. I was only 22
years old; with seven people to support, burdened by the discovery that my
education had hidden from me – that I could not live a decent life as a
professional.
So I quit the
corporate world.
Once I realized the horrors of private
corporations, my commitment to Truman’s global goal of eradicating
underdevelopment from Planet Earth took me to the other extreme of the
pendulum. First, as a leftist; then, a Marxist; next, a guerrillero. It was the
time of Che Guevara, the first glorious years of the Cuban revolution… In
I opted for
nonviolence. For Gandhi. Yet, my days of quitting were not over. Not yet.
Inevitably, I tried good government;
imagining the orchestration of the revolution from inside: development through peaceful means. The new
president, in 1970, gave a populist orientation to his government. Suddenly,
soaring to high level positions in “good government”, I and a few others began
organizing very progressive programs, involving millions of people all over my
country. In 1976, due to our success, I almost became a Minister in the new
administration.
But by now I was aware of the traps of
“good government”. To be at the top is a path of no return. I did not want to
be part of the national enterprise; looking down upon the population from high
above. Being “up there”, in a good balcony, gave me the view I needed to fully
appreciate that the logic of the government and the logic of peoples’ power – demo-kratia -- never coincide. Even the
best development programs, like those I was conceiving and implementing, were
totally counterproductive: damaging to their supposed beneficiaries.
I quit one more
time.
Next, my National Development journey took
me to various autonomous niches at the grassroots. Through a series of NGOs, a
group of friends and I attempted to work directly with the people; with
peasants in the countryside; with marginals in the cities; with all the usual
“untouchables” Dan Grego writes about eloquently.
We learned far more with the
“untouchables” than with the experts and the rulers. With them, we began
enjoying a different kind of freedom and autonomy. Increasingly, however, I
found myself confused and puzzled. With all the formal categories of my
education, I could not make any sense of my daily experience at the grassroots.
For some time, I assumed I needed to study more, to do more extensive academic research.
At a furious pace, I studied the latest theories of economics, sociology,
anthropology, political science… And my confusion grew. There were times, I
must confess, when I even assumed that the problem was not with the theoretical
models that fascinated me. The theoretical categories were OK. Reality was what
needed to change in order to fit into all the beautiful, neat, academic,
theoretical categories of the brilliant experts of Development and Education!
Then one day, my lenses of development
just fell off, despite myself and my education. Dazzled, blind, mute, I groped
for words; for different doors of perception, of thought. The lenses of
development, no matter whether tainted Left or Right, Republican or Democrat,
Marxist or Fascist, capitalist or socialist—none of these could help me see –
understand – the complex worlds of real people living real lives at the
grassroots.
Then two things happened. First, I started
to remember. When I was a child I had asked to be sent to
Second, I met Ivan Illich.
Strange, isn’t it,
that CIDOC was just
One
day without Mexicans
Before sharing with you the consequences
of meeting Ivan 20 years ago, allow me to return for a moment to the present
day.
They are showing in
It is fun, real fun. Similarly, would a
day without teachers also be fun?
Not in
Not for a weekend or for the holidays,
when the children enjoy the days without school, but permanently. How would a
world without teachers be?
John McKnight was one of the most
cherished friends of Ivan. He inspired and guided me in many different ways.
Years ago, he was invited by the American association of dentists to conduct a
workshop in one of its national conferences. He suggested to them that they
imagine a tragic situation: because of a very peculiar condition, all the
dentists in the world were to die in a week. He asked them to reflect on what
they would want to bequeath to humankind. If they had only a week to document
their knowledge, skills and dispositions, what would they like to share with
others for the future? What were the main secrets of their trade, how would
future generations benefit from their scientific and technological advances?
The participants organized themselves in
small groups, according to their specialties. In the afternoon of the plenary
session with John, they were very confused and puzzled. They had discovered
that there were very few things worth documenting. They did not know as much
about teeth and gums as they believed. Perhaps a week would be enough to train
some people in the fundamental secrets of their trade… In addition to humbling
them a little, the workshop helped them clarify what were the most important
aspects of their profession. And the story helped us to reclaim our gums and teeth
and the thousand practices that every culture has treasured to take care of
them. It can be very healthy to avoid dependency on dentists…
Can we apply this idea to education? Can
we imagine what would happen if all the teachers in the world suddenly disappeared?
We must not give them a week to reflect on
their wisdom or skills, as John gave to his dentists. Let’s imagine that the
peculiar virus that kills them all will also kill any person trying to teach
anything to anyone in any place. The very idea of teaching should vanish from
the planet. And with it, of course, all the diplomas, all institutional
certification of knowledge transferred in school, through the Internet or
through any other means. The very idea of transferring knowledge from one person
to another should disappear. Any person attempting to bring back the school,
education, or diplomas would die immediately, as would any person trying to
teach anything to anyone for whatever purpose. Even a mother trying to teach
her children to brush their teeth… Can we imagine such a world? Would it be the
end of civilization, as educators affirm? Is teaching really required for a new
generation to learn both the wisdom and know-how of the previous generation?
We did such an exercise a few months ago,
in my university. For a few minutes, I must tell you, many images of chaos were
poured onto our table. It became amazingly evident –and terrifying- the extent
to which the whole of society is organized around the school. The life of most
people is currently affected by this institution. In fact, the whole of society
has become a school and we all are forced to be continually taught by someone,
on legitimate or illegitimate grounds: the government, corporations,
scientists, pundits, advertisers, anyone else, usually for their own interests.
Big Brother is now educating us all, as Ivan Illich warned us 35 years ago.
If schools, every school, all kinds of
schools and all forms of teaching were suddenly and permanently eliminated, the
social turbulence would be more dramatic that the physical turbulence created
recently by another Ivan, the hurricane which crossed Cuba and entered the United States…
No storm leaves only destruction. All of
them also create conditions for regeneration. What kind of blessings would we
enjoy in a world without teachers or teaching, once the turmoil of the
transition was over?
Ivan
at the grassroots
Let me now return to my story with Ivan.
In 1983 I was invited to a Seminar in
My fascination with Ivan was born out of
the fact that his ideas, his words, his writings, were a brilliant intellectual
presentation of ordinary people’s common discourse. He was describing ways of
living and being that I encountered all the time at the grassroots, in my
grandmother’s world; the world of other indigenous peoples; the world of campesinos or marginales. “Vernacular” and “convivial”, two words that are
central to Ivan’s work, were magnificent symbols for my people’s worlds. I
heard them there first, not in reading Ivan. All those pre-Illich years, I felt
and sensed and smelled and touched and experienced those words and what they
symbolized, in the villages, at the grassroots.
Illich’s work held up for me a brilliantly
lit torch in the middle of all the intellectual darkness defining the experts’
reality. Illich stood out from the majority of published voices, illuminating
for me what I could not make clear sense of before at the grassroots. His was neither a new theory nor an ideology.
In my conversation with peasants or marginals, each time I shared Ivan’s ideas,
they showed no surprise. I began to call their comfortable familiarity with
Illich’s ideas the “aha effect”. “Aha”, they said, every time I quoted Ivan.
Yes, they knew, better yet, understood by the seat of the pants, what he was
publishing. No surprise there. But hearing their own experiences and ideas so
well articulated in Ivan’s words held up for them a magnificent mirror
affirming what they already knew from common sense.
Ivan once said that “people can see what
scientists and administrators can’t”. And he said something more: that the
people in our countries, rather than the dissident elite in the advanced ones,
were the ones implementing the political inversion he conceived in Tools for Conviviality (1973).
In the last words
of that book –Ivan commented to David Cayley- I said that I knew in which
direction things would happen but not what would bring them to that point. At
that time I believed in some big, symbolic event, in something similar to the
Wall Street crash. Instead of that, it is hundreds of millions of people just
using their brains and trusting their senses. We now live in a world in which
most of those things that industry and government do are misused by people for
their own purposes. (Cayley 1992, p.117).
People are “just using their brains and trusting their senses”. That was
exactly my experience. Using Ivan’s terminology and concepts – “convivial”,
“vernacular”, “common sense” -- I was able to see very clearly what ordinary,
common people were doing.
Before telling you another story about how
we began milking the bureaucratic or corporate cows for our own purposes, let
me add a few additional elements of my story as it relates to education – one
personal experiment with my daughter and the children of my friends.
In the 60’s, when my first daughter became
of school age, I looked around me for a good public or private school, an
institution to which I could entrust my beloved daughter. I could not find any
in
Twenty years ago, joining up with several
friends, I launched a public campaign asking for a legislation that would
punish, with ten years of prison, any person producing any diploma or asking
another person for any kind of
certification of studies, to apply for a job or for whatever. I had no hope of
getting my legislation passed, but I wanted public debate and I got it. Most
people said: If we pass your stupid legislation 99% of the children will
abandon the school, whatever grade they are in. That revealed what I wanted to
make evident. In
Years later I attempted the other extreme:
to give diplomas to everyone.
At one point, on our local TV station in
I don’t understand
this world… I am an architect. I have been unable to find a job since I
graduated, three years ago, after 20 of studies. And now, after only five days
of enjoying myself in this fascinating workshop, I have three very good job
proposals, in a very dignified position, and my family is telling me: “You
finally learned something really useful!”
Another example. We had many traditional
healers in
We still have political campaigns, for
example against compulsory education. But we are not using too much time or
resources in such campaigns. We are, rather, dedicated to implementing our own
initiatives. Let me tell you the story of one of them, the Universidad de
Reclaiming
our freedom to learn
They came from villages and barrios, mostly Indigenous. They were
naive refuseniks, fed up with the classroom.
They came with curiosity, rather than conviction. They’d heard about
Universidad de
They knew that we had no teachers or
curricula and didn’t provide educational services. They loved the idea that
they would be in full control of their own learning paths – the content, the
rhythm, the conditions. But it was not easy for them to take such control into
their own hands. Even those who’d suffered school for only a few years were already
conditioned to be passive receptacles of instructions.
They soon discovered, nonetheless, that
what we were doing was just reclaiming practices of apprenticeship as old as
the hills, and complementing them with some contemporary practices for shared
learning and study. We weren’t trying flashy novelties or reinventing the
wheel. Well rooted in fleshed-out traditions and our own places, sometimes
tiptoeing through abandoned pathways, at
other times enjoying the company of many others used to visiting these places
of encounter, we were simply, humbly and very
practically rejecting modern amnesia.
On the Day of the Dead, November the
Second, we Mexicans sit with them, with our beloved, those who have passed away
some time ago. In a few days, I will be there, in San Pablo Etla, the Zapotec
village in which I live, eight
kilometers from the place in which my grandmother was born, and all the
villagers will come to my house. I will offer them food and drink, and we will
all celebrate my mother, my grandmother, all our beloved dead. At our home
altars, we will leave for them some of the food and drink they loved the most.
They will come during the night. We know. In Unitierra we are only re-membering
them, humbly bringing back to life their old path.
As soon as the
young people arrive at Unitierra, they start to work with a person doing what
they want to learn, who is willing to accept them as apprentices. In doing
their work, in observing these mentors, our ‘students’ usually discover that
they may have good use for some books. As apprentices with an agrarian lawyer,
for example, they observe how he alludes in his work to some articles of the
Agrarian Law and seek out with curiosity that little book full of strange
sentences. At their request, a reading circle starts, where several ‘students’
study the Agrarian Law together.
They also discover that they need specific
skills to do what they want to do. Most of the time, they get those skills by
practicing the trade, with or without their mentors. At their request, they may
attend specific workshops, to shorten the time needed to get those skills.
Our ‘students’ have been learning faster
than we expected. After a few months they are usually called to return to the
living present of their communities to do there what they have learned. They
seem to be very useful there. Some of them are combining different lines of
learning in a creative way. One of them, for example, combined organic
agriculture and soil regeneration (his original interest), with vernacular
architecture. He is thus enriching, though a variety of experiences and
mentors, what a good peasant usually does. Instead of producing professional
services for moving up towards the middle class standard of living by selling
services and commodities, he is learning how to share, like peasants, what it
means to be a cherished member of his community and commons. As has been done
through time immemorial—before the modern rupture.
We are very proud of our first graduate.
She is a woman. When she asked to be registered in Unitierra, she had dropped
out in two countries and had been practicing some medical skills with friends, such
as healing massage. After some conversations with her and after putting her in
contact with a traditional healer, it became clear that she had a kind of gift
for healing. She is now practicing what she learned with us from a diversity of
medical traditions – the Indigenous ones of
There is a student who has been coming
back to Unitierra time and again. In his first year he learned how to produce
radio programs, videos, journals and other skills in the field of popular
communication. He won a National Award for one of his videos. In discovering
what he already knew, his community called him back and he now has a very
dignified position in his area. From time to time, he discovers that there is
something in Unitierra that he also wants to learn. He comes for a week, to
learn how to build dry toilets, or for a month, to enrich his skills in organic
agriculture. Whenever he is around, he shares with other ‘students’ what he
already knows, mentoring them as he does with the people in the communities.
In order to define areas of
apprenticeship, we explored with the communities both the kind of knowledge or
skills not available to them and the kind of learning they want for their young
people. Following the request of the communities and our own conviction, our
‘students’ are learning how to stay in their own regions in a dignified
position. Whenever someone asks to be trained to leave their places or even our
province, we refer him or her to other institutions. Unitierra is for those who
wish to stay put and flourish, not those who want to become transient vandals,
as our beloved Wendell Berry would put it…
Why
Unitierra?
We don’t need Unitierra to do what we are
doing. In fact, we were doing it for a long time before we created it. We gave
to our activities that specific mask, packaging them in the metaphor of a
University which has no teachers, no classrooms, no curriculum and no campus,
only after careful reflection…and in a very playful spirit.
Years ago, we started to observe in villages
and barrios, particularly among
Indigenous peoples, a radical reaction against education and schools. A few of
them closed their schools and expelled their teachers. Most of them avoided
this type of political conflict and started instead to just by-pass the school,
while reclaiming and regenerating the conditions in which people traditionally
learned in their own ways.
They came to this point after a long
experience and for many years they resisted the school. As Ivan mentioned to
David Cayley,
In 1954,
the UNESCO, at its regional meeting in
The UNESCO campaign was very successful:
the parents were educated in the need to send the children to the school, only
to find that there were not enough schools and teachers. No Latin American
country has been able since then to satisfy the demand for education. More and
more the people suffered the damages of schooling their children and
participated in all kind of efforts to reform, widen or improve the system:
better equipment or staff, alternative curricula, bilingual education, parents’
participation, more and more schools, etc.
And finally they said ¡Basta, Enough! like the Zapatistas. They
know very well what is happening. Benjamín Maldonado, a young anthropologist,
verified it. Using a variety of tests, he compared children going to school
with those out of school. The latter knew more about everything, except the
national anthem... And those going to school looked down on their communities
and cultures, and had subordinated their minds and hearts to the authority of
the teacher. “The Indigenous school as a path towards ignorance” is the title
of Maldonado’s report (1988).
Ivan also said to Cayley:
Today I know from
my own experience that there is widespread cynicism, not only among old people
–grand parents or great grandparents- but among people who went through school,
and who don’t see any reason why their children should go through the same
experience. People can see what scientists and administrators can’t. (Cayley
1992, p.117).
In fact, the people in the villages know
very well that school prevents their children from learning what is needed to
continue living in their communities, contributing to their common flourishing,
and that of their soils, their places. And it does not offer them an
appropriate preparation for life or work out of the community. They are no
longer delegating their children’s learning to the school.
True, many of them don’t dare as yet to
take their children out of primary school. They don’t want to deprive them of
the school diploma, a required passport in the modern society, whose lack is a
continual source of discrimination and humiliation –the condition that moved
Dan to do what he is doing, in spite of his awareness of what school does. But even
those still sending their children to school, in our communities, have now many
ways of damage control, both supporting their children in active resistance at
school and creating for them alternative opportunities to learn whatever they
have a passion or talent for.
Some parents observed with satisfaction
that their children were learning out of school everything they needed and
wanted in the community. But they started to nourish another concern. What if
their children want to learn something more, out of the community, but had no
diploma to continue their studies?
They knew by experience what usually
happens with those abandoning their communities to get “higher education”. They
do not come back to the community and usually get lost in the cities, in degraded
jobs. A recent official study found that only 8% of all graduates of Mexican
universities will be able to work in the field they graduated in. Certified lawyers
or engineers are driving taxis or tending stalls. In spite of such awareness,
people still hold the illusion that higher education may offer something to
their children. They don’t feel comfortable in depriving their children of such
an “opportunity”.
Even those fully aware that such an
“opportunity” is a dead end, recognize that their young people need to learn
many things that they cannot learn in the community in order to be able to deal
with current predicaments. The Global Project is clearly encroaching into their
lives. In Etla, the little town where my grandmother was born, there is a group
of women who after milking their own cows produce magnificent cheese and
butter. In recent years, they can no longer sell what they used to sell. They
are being forced to sell some of their cows. The market of the city of
In any case, no community is isolated any
more. We all are increasingly intertwined, interdependent. Half of Oaxacan men
have worked out of their communities, often in
So we created our university. Young men
and women without any diploma, and better yet no schooling, can come to us.
They will be able to learn whatever they want to learn –practical trades, like
topography or law, or fields of study, like history, philosophy, astronomy,
whatever. They will learn the skills of the trade or field of study as
apprentices of someone practicing those activities. They will also learn how to
learn with modern tools and practices not available in their communities.
We call it a university to laugh at the
official system. We are playing with its symbols. After one or two years of
learning, once their peers think they have enough competence in a specific
trade, we give to the ‘students’ a magnificent university diploma. We are thus
offering them a ‘social recognition’ denied to them by the educational system.
Instead of certifying the number of ass-hours, as conventional diplomas do, we
certify a specific competence, immediately appreciated by the communities, and
protect our ‘students’ against the usual discrimination.
We are also celebrating our wise and our
Elders with modern symbols. We thus offer diplomas of Unitierra to people who
perhaps never attended a school or our university. Their competence is
certified by their peers and the community. The idea, again, is to use in our
own way, with much merriment and humor, all the symbols of domination. Or rather, as Ivan says, to misuse for our
own purposes what the state or the market produce.
Our diplomas are not rituals, as those of
the educational system are. According to Gluckman, in Ivan’s interpretation,
those participating in a ritual cannot see the discrepancy which exists between
the purpose of the ritual and its consequences. If it doesn’t rain after a rain
dance, you may blame yourself but not the ritual. Ivan was the first in seeing
schooling as a myth-making ritual, “a ritual creating a myth on which
contemporary society then builds itself” (Cayley 1992, p.67). Thanks to Ivan or
their own common sense, more and more people have been discovering the
discrepancy between the stated or articulated purpose of the school and its
outcome. Schooling can no longer generate the myth. Our diplomas represent an
additional challenge to the myth, instead of reinforcing it. Any of our
graduates in topography can do better in the real world, after three months of
learning, than certified engineers can after 20 years. Our diplomas have no use
for those who wish to show off or to ask for a job or any privilege. They are
an expression of people’s autonomy. As a symbol, they represent the commitment
of our ‘students’ to their own community, not a right to demand anything.
Cultural
regeneration
In recent years, Indigenous peoples have
been repeating an old saying: “They wrenched off our fruits... They ripped off
our branches... They burned our trunk... But they could not kill our
roots.” The foliage represents the
visible aspect of a culture, its morphology. The trunk, part visible and part
invisible, represents the structural aspect. And the roots represent their
myths, their view of the world, their notion of the self, space, time,
spirituality...
A culture may accept, as does a tree, some
grafts –something brought by another culture that becomes fully incorporated.
The Spaniards, for example, brought the plough, which is now an intimate part
of our peasant cultures. But to prosper, a graft should be of the same species,
and it should be grafted in the appropriate way. In the communities there are also
many alien elements, which cannot be grafted into their cultures. They may
decide to keep them and use them in their own way, with a critical distance, or
they may decide to reject them, as something damaging or dissolving their own
culture. The school is often the first example mentioned by the participants
when we discuss such alien elements. They remember that eight years ago, in a
public forum of the Indigenous peoples of
Inspired by what the communities are
doing, we started recently in Unitierra another adventure. People of 300
communities from three provinces are participating with us in an exercise in
cultural regeneration. We have two-or three-day workshops, in groups of 20 to
40, every six months, in towns near the communities. Every month we have one-or-two-day
workshops, in groups of 3 to
For six months, with the full
participation of the communities, we cooked up both fascinating and painful
reflections on our cultures and how they have been affected and damaged. After
such reflections, the participants conceive initiatives to strengthen their own
ways. During the following years we will accompany them in the implementation
of their initiatives; more than 200 are now being implemented. Those so willing
may continue in Unitierra their learning process.
We are learning together, with these young
and old people designated by communities’ assemblies of ten different
Indigenous peoples, to participate in this adventure of ‘reflection in action’.
We are learning how to regenerate our own cultures. We are hospitably opening
our arms and hearts to others, but fully aware that we need to protect our own
cultural trees from inhospitable people, tools and practices that corrupt or
kill them. We are thus healing ourselves from the damages done to us by
colonization and development. Together, we are all joyfully walking again along
our own path, trusting again our own noses, dreaming again our own dreams...
Radical
research
We also reclaimed for Unitierra an old
tradition of the medieval university: the opportunity for a group of friends to
learn and study together, around a table –not to get any diploma or to advance
in the educational ladder, but for the joy of it. We were doing this before
Unitierra. Again, we can do it without any formal institution. But Unitierra
has become a very lively and joyful and playful place, and we love to have
these conversations in its facilities.
We thus have in Unitierra regular seminars,
to freely discuss what we want to discuss. We usually start with the definition
of a common interest. Someone suggests a specific text, pertinent to the theme.
In the next session we organize our conversation around what we read. The
number of participants in every session varies from six to 25. Some ‘students’
and other friends come regularly to them.
We also organize special seminars, when
one of us or an interesting visitor has something to share. The speaker speaks
for 30 or 40 minutes and all the participants discuss with him or her for one
or two hours more.
A regular, weekly seminar is focused on
the ideas of Ivan Illich. We are exploring whether he articulated appropriately
our experience at the grassroots. We use a selection of his texts as a
reference or a framework to examine our own experience. The seminar has been
very fruitful. Most of the participants are now conscious refuseniks. And it has produced a group of sub seminars, in which
we are discussing a specific text or field of Illich. A sub-seminar, for
example, is focused on Gender (1982),
to examine what we are calling the feminization of politics in our communities.
We are also attending to the call of Ivan in the 80s, expressed in his amazing
essay “A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy” (1992), to do some radical
research. We are applying in education what is already known about the literate
mind. One of our regular sub seminars is dedicated to sharing the advances of
four different research groups, created after Ivan’s call.
During the last part of his life Ivan was
clearly interested in stimulating
a certain number
of people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we
can do with them, to look at how tools shape our mind, how their use shapes our
perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using
them.
In other words, he said,
I’m interested in
the symbolic fallout of tools, and how this fallout is reflected in the
sacramental tool structure of the world… I would like to attempt two or three
alternative approaches to the exploration of this fundamental question…I have
had to select a few specific questions in which I have just enough competence
to suggest a model approach. And one of them is this. I ask myself, What is the…most interesting technology that
shapes the space one usually calls Western culture, as distinct, say, from
Chinese culture? The obvious answer…is the alphabet. (Cayley 1992, pp. 224-5).
He did his part, through the book he wrote
with Barry Sanders (1988) and particularly through the research that produced
what he considered his best book, In the
Vineyard of the Text (1993). He
thus cleared the way to the path he suggested in Lay Literacy (1992). We
are just following his call.
We don’t have any funding for this
research. We don’t have a time horizon or any prescribed outcome. None of the
participants have any expectation about the results. We are only enjoying
ourselves by sharing every week, around a table, our insights or perplexities
after some readings or experiences.
Through this research, day after day, we
dis-cover the resilience of our oral culture in the communities, still
resisting the restrictions and corruption of their beings and their way of life
imposed by the alphabet – for example in fostering individualism or violent
conflicts. We can inspire through such struggle our own resistance to the
cybernetic mind and world which are now being imposed to everyone. And we can
maintain a critical distance to the alphabet, knowing that yes, most of us are bookish
people, but we are liberating ourselves from the symbolic fallout that the
alphabet has had on all of us. Sharing this experience with our ‘students’ or
in the communities has also been very stimulating.
A
world without teachers
In the seminar about Ivan’s thinking in
which we applied the idea of John McKnight to education, we learned a lot.
As I told you before, for a few minutes
many apocalyptic descriptions circulated around our table where we imagined a
world without teachers or teaching. But then something radically different
started to come into our conversation. We imagined a myriad of ways in which
the people themselves would create a different kind of life. Yes, for some time
both the children and the young people would use their sudden freedom for pure
leisure. For a few days or weeks, Internet would be at a near collapse, because
all of them would be chatting… After some time, however, they would discover
how boring such a life could be and would start doing something else. The most
impressive element in our conversation was to discover how easy the transition
would be, and how much the life of everyone would be improved in every possible
aspect. Radically de-schooling the world, and not just disestablishing the
school, as Ivan suggested, can be today the most important change than anyone
can conceive for a new society. It implies a complete reorganization of our
lives.
One of the most important conclusions of
our conversation was the explicit recognition that we learn better when nobody is
teaching us. We learn better from a master when he or she is not teaching us.
We can observe this in every baby and in our own experience. Our vital
competence comes from learning by doing, without any kind of teaching…
After the game, a very practical proposal
came to the table. We knew that no virus killing both teachers and teaching was
possible or even desirable. And we assumed that perhaps for a long time the
school or its technological substitutes – increasingly dissolving it – would
endure, entrenched in the dominant system. But we have learned, with the
Zapatistas, that while changing the world is very difficult, perhaps
impossible, it is possible to create a whole new world. That is exactly what
the Zapatistas are doing in the south of
There could be, we imagined, a kind of
intellectual virus infecting a certain number of parents. Perhaps our small
group could start that kind of contagion. How many of them would be needed to
create a real alternative? What is the critical mass required for that purpose?
Would we need, every one of those involved in the idea, to radically change our
own way of life? Would we need a specific approach? A promotion or a co-motion?
How could we make such an initiative?
Let me be very clear. We were not talking
about our rural communities and even less about the Indigenous communities or
the Zapatista communities. They are doing
what we were just imagining. Yes, they still need to remove many obstacles, in
their minds and in the real world, but they are clearly advancing in that
direction. They are literally deschooling their lives. They have now a lot of
experience in that endeavor. Our university is only one of the many visible
tips of the magnificent iceberg of experiences that goes beyond both school and
education. Sometimes, they still use the E word, a word that we are trying to
exclude from our vocabulary. The Zapatistas, for example, have a General
Coordination for their Rebel Autonomous Zapatista Educational System. In 1994
they closed the public schools and for ten years they’ve rejected all services
from the government. They’ve reclaimed their own learning tradition, now
applied in 500 “schools” they constructed in the area under their control.
Their children are learning there and everywhere in their communities how to
reclaim their old traditions and use contemporary tools. In the countryside,
many people are deschooling their communities, both in
No, we were not talking about those
communities. We were talking about urban people, mostly middle class, many of
them former professionals, individuals that no longer have anything that can be
called a real community. They are urban individuals, with nuclear families in
which both parents work. Some of them took their children out of the school,
some time ago, to protect them from the experience they suffered in it when
they were children. A little later, however, they relapsed into the school
system. They came back to public, private or home schooling out of despair:
What could they do with their children? All the other children were in the
school. And where could they find the people and places for their children to
learn what they want to learn and to learn something useful for their lives if
they were out of school?
The most dramatic lesson we derived from
the exercise was to discover what we were really missing in the urban setting:
conditions for apprenticeship. When we all request education and institutions
where our children and young people can stay and learn, we close our eyes to
the tragic social desert in which we live. They have no access to real
opportunities to learn in freedom. There are no conditions for apprenticeships.
In many cases, they can no longer learn with parents, uncles, grandparents –
just talking to them, listening to their stories or observing them in their
daily trade… Everybody is busy, going from one place to the other. No one seems
to have the patience any more to share with the new generation the wisdom
accumulated in a culture… Instead of education, what we really need is
conditions for decent living, a community…
Our challenge thus became to find ways to
regenerate community in the city, to create a social fabric in which we all, at
any age, would be able to learn and in which every kind of apprenticeship might
flourish. In doing this radical research, we surprise ourselves, every day,
when we discover how easy it can be to create alternatives and how many people
are interested in the adventure.
Hope
as a social force
Five or six years ago, when I was talking
with friends about Unitierra, I wrote a letter about my intention to Ivan, who
was in
His letter took me by surprise. I read and
reread my own letter. And I decided to wait until he returned to
When he returned, we sat calmly at the
long table of his house in Ocotepec. He was as affectionate as ever, ready to
listen. I cannot remember any occasion in which he gave any kind of advice, to
me or to any other person. He refused to be treated as an expert. He was
available for consultation, whenever someone had a specific question about his
work or about a specific theme, in which he could make a suggestion, recommend
some readings or whatever. But he never gave advice.
Two points came out of that conversation
which clearly contributed to the final shape of Unitierra. The first was not
something that we had forgotten, but it was not clear enough in my letter to
him. Our initiative was not another educational tool. We had no intention of
transforming the ‘students’ into something. We would not be an institution
providing educational services. In fact, we had no educational goals.
In 1970, Ivan selected the word tools to present his ideas, because he
was convinced that such a word clearly expressed what he wanted to express: tools as a means to an end which people
plan and engineer. A tool, he said once, “is not just a stick picked up in the
street. I call a revolver, a gun or a sword a tool for aggression. I don’t call
every stone which lies around such a tool.” (Cayley, p.109). Was not Unitierra
just another tool, in which we were planning and engineering redesigned
educational means and ends? Like all modern tools, it could turn from a means
to an end and frustrate the possibility of the achievement of an end.
But Unitierra was not a tool, not even a
tool for conviviality.
It was easy to explain to him that
Unitierra is not a means to an end. What we learned from the communities
brought us back from the future. There, you don’t have expectations. You have
hopes. In Spanish, we have a beautiful expression to say that you have hopes: Abrigo esperanzas, that is, I wrap my
hopes up well, for them not to freeze. You nourish your hopes, you care for
them. As Ivan once said, “Hope…means trusting faith in the goodness of nature,
while expectation…means reliance on results which are planned and controlled by
man. Hope centers desire on a person from whom we await a gift. Expectation
looks forward to satisfaction from a predictable process which will produce
what we have the right to claim”. And he also warned us: “The Promethean ethos
has now eclipsed hope. Survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as
a social force.” (1970b, 105-6).
A few years ago I was visiting
-
How can you bear all this suffering? I asked her. She
smiled.
-
We are not suffering more than before. We are not
hungrier. They are not killing more people. But now we have hope. And that
changes everything.
You can very well imagine what it means to
be in such a situation and assume that it will continue for ever and ever, for
your children and grandchildren. That would be absolutely unbearable, the
source of all kinds of despair. But if you see the light at the end of the
tunnel, as the Zapatistas are doing, if you have fully reclaimed your dignity
and you are no longer plugged into the system, everything changes for you. You
can deal with any predicament or restriction with a light spirit.
At the end of the Intercontinental
Encounter against Neoliberalism, the Zapatistas, giving a new use to old
leftist jargon, suggested the creation of the International of Hope. Using
words as their main weapon, the Zapatistas rediscovered hope as a social force
and opened a whole new avenue of transformation for all of us.
Radical hope, the very essence of popular
movements, is not the
conviction that something will go well, but, as Vaclav Havel has said, the
conviction that something makes sense, no matter what happens. This is the kind
of hope we share in Unitierra – not the expectation of transforming any of our
‘students’ into something. Both the ‘students’ and the staff are doing
something that makes sense. No one knows what will happen.
Discipline
and freedom
In Unitierra we are not producing
professionals. We have created a convivial place, where we all are enjoying
ourselves while learning together. At the same time, both the ‘students’ and
their communities soon discover that a stay at Unitierra is not a vacation.
True, the students have no classes or projects. In fact, they don’t have any
kind of formal obligation. There are no compulsory activities. But they have
discipline, and rigor, and commitment –first with their group (other
‘students’), with us (participating in all kinds of activities for Unitierra)
and with their communities. And they have hope.
How come? How is this possible? Is this
not a kind of Summerhill…and will we not have the same outcome? There is an
important contextual difference. We noticed it recently. A young urbanite
individual came to Unitierra from
Our ‘students’ have the internal and
social structure that is a fundamental condition for real freedom. If you don’t
have them, if you are an individual atom within a mass of a collective, you
need someone in charge of the organization. We all know how fragile a castle of
cards can be. A group of billiard balls cannot stay together by themselves. The
workers of a union, the members of a political party or church, the citizens of
a country…all of them need organizers and external forces to keep them
together. In the name of security and order, they sacrifice freedom. Real
people, persons, knots in nets of relationships, can remain together by
themselves, in freedom. They may use political and juridical procedures to
generate and express their consensus, creating autonomously the rules for their
harmonious coexistence. That is also what our ‘students’ are learning in
Unitierra, sharing their knack for it with others, because many of them are
experts in that trade.
And
friendship?
The second point is more difficult to share.
After listening carefully to my stories, Ivan asked: “What about friendship?
Does it have any place in Unitierra?” My immediate reaction was stupid. I
answered: “Yes, of course, we all are friends. The very idea came from
friendship. All of us, working there, are friends. Whenever we start a seminar,
it is a group of friends, enjoying a free conversation, gathered around a text,
a common interest, whatever.” That was not his question.
At the end of Deschooling Society, where he elaborates on his not very smart
proposals, Ivan wrote:
What characterizes
the true master-disciple relationship is its priceless character. Aristotle
speaks of it as a “moral type of friendship, which is not in fixed terms: it
makes a gift, or does whatever it does, as to a friend”. Thomas Aquinas says of
this kind of teaching that inevitably it is an act of love and mercy. This kind
of teaching is always a luxury for the teacher and a form of leisure (in Greek,
“schole”) for him and his pupil: an
activity meaningful for both, having no ulterior purpose. (1970b, 101).
That is the main point in friendship.
Gratis. Not only because there is no economic exchange involved, but because
you are doing what you are doing for the joy of it, having no ulterior purpose.
Gratis. Learning together is not a means towards an end, but an end in itself,
for the joy of it. It is a pleasure to do it with friends, as an expression of
friendship.
After learning with his friend Hugh of St.
Victor, Ivan writes:
Friendship is the
word in Hugh for that love of wisdom which is sapientia, or tasteful knowledge. (“If I am not so excited about
knowing, yet I am strongly moved to love”, wrote Hugh). The friend is paradisus homo, “his very first presence
is beatifying; friendship is a garden, a tree of life, wings for the flight to
God… Sweetness, light, fire, wound…paradise regained”. When Hugh in the Didascalicon explains the appeal of
wisdom, he cannot but use the metaphor of friendship which ultimately motivates
studium.
For a few decades,
Hugh’s contemporaries recovered and Christianized the Platonic doctrine in
which knowledge without friendship that delights in the friend’s knowledge is
deficient. He himself could not avoid interpreting the ultimate aim of studium in terms of this experience. The
light of wisdom which envelops the mind of the student calls and draws him back
to himself in such a way that he affects the other always as a friend. (1993,
27-8).
We all know that in a room with 10, 20, 40
or 400 students you cannot befriend them. You are performing. They are
listening. Yes, as Ivan suggested, you can be a Schindler for them, saving some
of them from the horrors of the system. But they are not your friends. You are
not their friend. You have a professional relation with them and certain obligations.
They also have certain obligations with you. It is not gratis.
Furthermore, in a modern educational
setting friendship may become a very serious problem. Hugh of St. Víctor could
speak openly of the tender friendship he found among other monks and nuns. Ivan
observes that it is an experience which may appear shameful to Twentieth
century readers and “diametrically opposed to even the noblest ‘interpersonal,
relationship’ found anywhere since ‘the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first
LP’” (1993, 27). Such tender friendship may be easily interpreted as sexual
harassment in a modern university and bring to the staff legal conflicts and
many other complications.
How different is Unitierra? The ‘students’
coming to Unitierra are not our friends. When we put them in contact with a
person doing what they want to learn, they are not friends. We know very well
that you cannot create friendship. You cannot force it. Furthermore, you cannot
befriend everybody. There is always a personal element of mutual attraction for
friendship to be possible.
Austerity has been a key element in the
creation of a social environment in which friendship emerges and flourishes.
Austerity, as Aquinas clarified, is a virtue that does not exclude our delight.
It does not exclude wine and women. It only excludes those delights degrading
personal relationship. Austerity often includes techno fasting, renouncing
anything that can be an obstacle for friendship, excluding any tool or
technology that can create a distance between friends. Austerity, as a virtue,
wrote Ivan 30 years ago, “is part of another virtue which is more fragile and
embraces and overcomes it; joy, eutrapelia, friendship”. (1973, México: Posada, 1978, p.16).
We are not, in Unitierra, a community of
friends. Notwithstanding, friendship is always at the very center of our
activities. Friendship flourishes in every corner. If one of our friends does
not feel he is comfortable with an apprentice or he thinks he cannot befriend
him or her, he may call us and ask us for a change. Any ‘student’ can do the
same. We need such flexibility and openness to walk our own path – creating a
situation in which no condition for learning is scarce and our challenge
becomes to deal with the affluence of joy and friendship which may overwhelm
us. And there, more and more, we discover ourselves, who we are, in the eyes of
our friends.
Escaping
education?
Are we escaping education?
Without the certainty of knowing exactly
what we are doing, we nourish the hope that we are creating and dis-covering
alternatives to education. Yes, we are coming back from the future, living in
the present, living in our own places, not in search of any kind of mobility
which will take us to the centers of power of the global economy…
Like John Holt, I don’t like the word
education. I am convinced that we can abandon it. Escaping education has
become, for many of us, a very profound path of liberation.
At the same time, I can fully appreciate
the need for a compromise. We are not living on Mars. We are living in a
society organized around education. I think I can fully understand Dan, when he
felt conflicted about the idea that while the project of education is
fundamentally flawed and indecent, it will continue junking the majority. He
has
looked into the
eyes of hundreds of young men and women…who are stuck in this society and who have been designated ‘untouchables’. And as
long as children are still compelled by law to attend school and can be
harassed by the police (and their parents fined) if they fail to do so; as long
as economic opportunities are divvied up according to school credentials…; as
long as people are taxed to pay for a system that many of them cannot use
because it continues ‘to spew and vomit out millions’ of children, places like
Shalom can be justified (Grego 2002, 49).
I think that I can fully understand him.
And I don’t think that any of your students, after their experience here, will
resign themselves to the status of “untouchables”. I know that some of them
here will learn “to play the game” of schooling and make their way into the
exploiter class. As Dan observes, the authorities monitoring your activities
will consider them “positive outcomes”. And I can see very well why he takes
greater personal satisfaction when the students decide “to redefine themselves
from ‘untouchables’ to conscientious objectors whether they graduate or not”
(Grego 2002, 50).
I can fully understand the need for
compromise and accommodation. One of the secrets of the survival of Indigenous
cultures, after 500 years of continual aggression, is their flexibility and
resilience in adapting themselves to changing circumstances. It is the same
kind of attitude you observe among the Mexicans, many of them from Indigenous
communities, coming to work to the
I hope it is evident, at this point, how
much I love your adventure. I am sure Ivan would have also loved it, as would
many of his friends and respected teachers, like Leopold Kohr. You are doing
all the right things. You are bringing this enormous establishment to a human
scale, where you can gain again a sense of proportion, common sense –the sense
you have in community-, and the opportunity to exercise your art of living and
dying.
The best critiques of schooling are
implicit and explicit in the materials prepared for this conference, the best
quotes of
We Mexicans, as Dan points out so well, are used to doing the shitwork for Americans. Should I do the shitwork of the conference, looking for flaws and difficulties in this magnificent endeavor? We Mexicans know how to enjoy our shitwork; it is part of our art of living. I would have been willing to assume that role. However, I know that such an idea is repugnant to Dan. He is convinced that we all should do our own shitwork. As far as I can s