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Frei Betto: Reclamar menos, atuar mais

Quando me perguntam sobre o Brasil, respondo que não vejo luz no fim do túnel porque nem mesmo enxergo o túnel…

Por Frei Betto

Não lembro de ter vivido conjuntura tão incerta. Na ditadura os atores, de um lado e outro, eram definidos. Agora não. Há um assombroso retrocesso no país, e é praticamente insignificante a reação de quem se lhe opõe.

A reforma trabalhista jogou por terra mais de 70 anos de conquistas laborais. A terceirização passou ao primeiro lugar. A reforma da Previdência condena os brasileiros mais pobres a uma vida toda de trabalho forçado, pois dificilmente terão sobrevida após 49 anos de aluguel de sua força de trabalho aos patrões, a preço salarial irrisório.

O Brasil está atolado no retrocesso econômico, no esgarçamento das políticas sociais, na precarização da saúde e da educação, e na corrupção. Os dados são alarmantes: 13 milhões de desempregados; surtos de febre amarela, dengue, zika e chikungunya, violência urbana crescente.

Para se contrapor a essa conjuntura, não basta abastecer as redes sociais de ofensas, ironias, ressentimentos e piadas. É preciso organizar a esperança. Ter clareza de como proceder nas eleições de 2018 e qual o projeto de Brasil dos nossos sonhos.

O voto em 2018 deverá estar pautado pelo Brasil que queremos. Essa visão estratégica deve nortear a escolha de partidos e candidatos.

Eleições, contudo, não mudam um país. O que muda é o fortalecimento dos movimentos sociais, o aprofundamento ideológico à luz do marxismo, o resgate da utopia e a militância junto aos segmentos empobrecidos da população. Buscar a alternativa socialista brasileira com visão crítica das experiências socialistas historicamente existentes.

Há que resistir a essa avassaladora cooptação feita pelo neoliberalismo. A direita avança no mundo todo. A desigualdade se acentua: oito indivíduos, segundo a Oxfam, possuem a mesma renda de 3,6 bilhões de pessoas, metade da humanidade.

Temos apenas duas escolhas: cuidar de nossa vida biológica, como estudar para obter emprego e, graças ao salário, sustentar a família, esperando que a sorte não nos empurre para a pobreza; ou imprimir à vida um sentido biográfico, histórico, ao assumir a militância da luta por justiça, liberdade e defesa intransigente dos direitos humanos.

Não nos basta informação. É preciso investir em formação, de modo a construir uma alternativa de sociedade que, a meu ver, deve consistir no ecossocialismo.+

Fora Temer? E o que colocar dentro?

http://port.pravda.ru/news/cplp/04-11-2017/44335-frei_betto-0/

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Boaventura: o risco da desimaginação social

Por: Boaventura De Sousa Santos

Em tempos de crise, capital flerta com hiper individualismo. Segundo sua lógica, competição é o máximo; cabe à cultura, e à religião, aceitar a guerra de todos contra todos

Por Boaventura de Sousa Santos

O social é o conjunto de dimensões da vida coletiva que não podem ser reduzidas à existência e experiência particular dos indivíduos que compõem uma dada sociedade. Esta definição não é neutra. Define o social pela negativa, o que permite atribuir-lhe uma infinidade de atributos que variam de época para época. É, por outro lado, uma definição eurocêntrica porque pressupõe uma distinção categorial entre o social e o indivíduo, uma distinção que, longe de ser universal ou imemorial, é específica da filosofia e da cultura ocidentais, e nestas só se tornou dominante com o racionalismo, o individualismo e o antropocentrismo renascentista do século XV, os quais viriam a ter em Descartes o seu mais brilhante teorizador. Tanto é assim que a máxima expressão desta filosofia–cogito ergo sum, “penso logo existo”– não tem tradução adequada em muitas línguas e culturas não eurocêntricas. Para muitas destas culturas, a existência de um ser individual é não só problemática como absurda. É o caso das filosofias da África austral e do seu conceito fundamental de Ubuntu, que se pode traduzir por “eu sou porque tu és”, ou seja, eu não existo senão na minha relação com outros. Os africanos não precisaram esperar por Heidegger para conceber o ser como ser-com (Mitsein).

Muito esquematicamente, podemos distinguir na cultura eurocêntrica que serviu de base ao capitalismo moderno dois entendimentos extremos do social. De um lado, o entendimento reacionário, que confere total primazia ao indivíduo e o concebe como um ser ameaçado pelo social. Segundo tal lógica, os indivíduos, longe de serem iguais, são naturalmente diferentes e essas diferenças determinam hierarquias que o social deve respeitar e ratificar. Entre essas diferenças, duas são fundamentais: as diferenças de raça e as diferenças de sexo. No outro extremo está o entendimento solidarista, que confere primazia ao social e que o concebe como o conjunto de regras de sociabilidade que neutralizam as desigualdades entre os indivíduos. Entre estes dois extremos foram muitos os entendimentos intermédios, nomeadamente os entendimentos liberais (no plural), que viram no social o garante da igualdade dos indivíduos como ponto de partida, e os entendimentos socialistas (também no plural), que viram no social o garante da igualdade dos indivíduos como ponto de chegada.

Entre estes dois entendimentos, por sua vez, foram possíveis várias combinações. Com as revoluções francesa e americana os dois últimos entendimentos passaram a ser os únicos legítimos no plano ideológico. Foi com base neles que se iniciou a luta contra a escravatura e a discriminação contra as mulheres. No entanto, ao contrário do que se supõe, o entendimento reacionário da desigualdade natural-social entre os indivíduos sempre se manteve como corrente subterrânea. Até hoje. E é intrigante que assim seja depois de dois séculos de lutas contra a desigualdade e a discriminação. Houve progressos? E, se houve, por que é que os retrocessos ocorrem recorrentemente e aparentemente com tanta facilidade? Estaremos hoje numa fase de retrocesso histórico em que o entendimento socialista se desfaz no ar e o liberal parece perigosamente ameaçado pelo entendimento reacionário?

As respostas a estas perguntas dependem da consideração de vários fatores. Vou limitar-me a um deles e, por isso, assumo à partida que a minha resposta é incompleta. O que o pensamento liberal designou por sociedade moderna democrática e o pensamento marxista por sociedade moderna capitalista foi de fato uma sociedade cujo modelo de desenvolvimento econômico exigia dois tipos de exploração da força de trabalho: a exploração de seres humanos teoricamente iguais aos seus exploradores e a exploração de seres humanos inferiores ou sub-humanos. Daqui decorreram dois tipos de desvalorização do trabalho: uma desvalorização controlada, porque regulada pelo princípio da igualdade, e por isso assente em direitos supostamente universais; e uma desvalorização mais intensa porque “natural”, exercida sobre seres ontologicamente degradados, seres racializados e seres sexualizados — basicamente, negros e mulheres. O capitalismo não inventou nem o colonialismo (racismo, escravatura, trabalho forçado) nem o patriarcado (discriminação sexual) mas ressignificou-os como formas de trabalho super-desvalorizado, ou mesmo não pago ou sistematicamente roubado. Sem essa super-desvalorização do trabalho de populações tidas por inferiores não seria possível a exploração rentável da força de trabalho assalariado em que tanto liberais como marxistas se concentraram, ou seja, o capitalismo não se poderia manter e expandir de forma sustentada.

Mas, se assim foi, não terá sido apenas nos alvores do capitalismo? Em meu entender, não, e só o domínio do pensamento liberal e do pensamento marxista nos impediu de ver que desde o século XV, pelo menos, até hoje vivemos em sociedades capitalistas, colonialistas e patriarcais. Obviamente que ao longo dos séculos houve lutas e movimentos sociais que eliminaram algumas das formas mais selvagens de desvalorização humana, mas só o domínio daquelas duas formas de pensamento moderno foi capaz de nos criar a ilusão de que a eliminação dessa desvalorização seria progressiva e até acabaria um dia, mesmo sem o capitalismo acabar.

Ledo engano. O que aconteceu foi a substituição, real ou apenas jurídica, de alguns instrumentos de desvalorização por outros ou a deslocação do exercício da desvalorização de um campo social para outro ou de uma região do mundo para outra. Não ter isto em conta fez com que confundíssemos o fim do colonialismo histórico (de ocupação territorial por país estrangeiro) com o fim total do colonialismo, quando de facto o colonialismo continuou sob outras formas: neocolonialismo, colonialismo interno, imperialismo, racismo, xenofobia, ódio anti-imigrante e anti-refugiado, e, para espanto de muitos, a própria escravatura, como a ONU hoje reconhece. Da mesma forma que a discriminação contra as mulheres deixou de se manifestar no sufrágio eleitoral e nos direitos sociais, mas continuou sob as formas de pagamento desigual para trabalho igual, assédio sexual e violência, da doméstica ao gang rape e feminicídio. Esta cegueira analítica impediu-nos de dar relevo à composição etno-cultural da força de trabalho desde o início — por exemplo, às diferenças entre trabalhadores ingleses e irlandeses, ou [na Espanha] entre trabalhadores de Castela e da Andaluzia.

Por que razão é este argumento mais facilmente aceito hoje do que há vinte anos? Em meu entender, isso deve-se ao facto de a atual fase do capitalismo exigir hoje, talvez mais do que nunca, a super-desvalorização da força de trabalho e a submissão de vastas populações à condição de populações descartáveis, populações a quem se pode roubar o trabalho e sujeitar a trabalho forçado ou “análogo” a trabalho escravo; populações eliminadas por guerras onde só morrem civis inocentes, abandonadas à sua “sorte” em caso de acontecimentos climáticos extremos ou encarceradas, como acontece a boa parte da população jovem negra dos EUA. Estes fatos devem-se à conjugação de dois fatores epocais e, portanto, de larga duração: as revoluções eletrônicas e digitais e o domínio global do capital financeiro, o setor do capitalismo mais anti-social por criar riqueza artificial com escassíssimo recurso à força de trabalho.

A super-desvalorização da força de trabalho e o caráter descartável de vastas populações estão hoje a ser ideologicamente respaldados pela reemergência do pensamento reacionário da desigualdade natural-social entre os indivíduos, o qual sempre se manteve como corrente subterrânea da modernidade ocidental. Ele reemerge sob formas tão diferentes que facilmente se disfarçam de desvios conjunturais ou idiossincrasias sem significado. Aflora no crescimento da extrema-direita europeia e brasileira e do supremacismo branco nos EUA. Aflora na chocante virulência classista, racista, sexista e homofóbica  de organizações brasileiras de extrema-direita, algumas delas financiadas por  agências públicas e privadas norte-americanas. Aflora na generalização da precariedade do trabalho assalariado e da transformação dos direitos dos trabalhadores em privilégios ilegítimos. Aflora em sentenças judiciais que invocam a Bíblia para justificar a inferioridade das mulheres. Aflora no aumento do trabalho escravo. E aflora, pasme-se, na relegitimação do colonialismo histórico, um fenômeno que pela sua aparente novidade merece uma referência especial.

Não me refiro a políticos como o presidente Nicolas Sarkozy, que em 2007 dissertou em Dakar sobre as vantagens do colonialismo para os povos africanos, cuja tragédia seria não terem até hoje entrado plenamente na história. Refiro-me à justificação científica do colonialismo histórico e à sua invocação como solução para os “Estados falidos” do nosso tempo. Refiro-me ao artigo de Bruce Gilley, professor do Departamento de Ciência Política da Universidade Estadual de Portland, publicado em 2017 na respeitada revista Third World Quarterly dedicada aos problemas pós-coloniais. O artigo, intitulado “The Case for Colonialism”, defende o papel histórico do colonialismo e advoga que se volte a recorrer a ele para resolver problemas que os “estados falidos” do nosso tempo não podem resolver. Mais especificamente, propõe três soluções: “recomendar modos de governação colonial; recolonizar algumas áreas; criar novas colônias de raiz.” A polêmica que o artigo suscitou foi tão grande que o autor acabou por retirar o artigo (foi retirado da versão eletrônica da revista, mas pode ser lido na versão em papel). A minha suspeita é, no entanto, que o artigo, longe de ser apenas uma prova das deficiências do sistema de avaliação “anônima” de artigos científicos, é um sintoma da época, e a polêmica que ele levantou não ficará por aqui.

O que designo por desimaginação do social é a imaginação anti-social do social. Segundo ela, numa sociedade de desigualdade natural-social entre os indivíduos, a responsabilidade coletiva pelos males da sociedade não existe. O que existe é a culpa individual daqueles que não querem ou não podem competir por aquilo que a sociedade nunca oferece e apenas concede a quem merece. Os que fracassam, em vez de apoiar-se na sociedade, devem apoiar-se nas religiões que por aí pregam a teologia da prosperidade e consolo para quem não prospera. A educação, em vez de criar a miragem da responsabilidade cidadã e da solidariedade social, deve ensinar os jovens a ser competitivos e saber que estão numa guerra de todos contra todos.

Se não é isto que queremos, é bom termos bem a noção do inimigo contra o qual temos de lutar com todas as forças democráticas, e sem complacência.

http://outraspalavras.net/autores/boaventura-o-risco-da-desimaginacao-social/

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Trascender criterios economicistas: De la vocación social de los Institutos de Capacitación para el trabajo y su aporte a jóvenes vulnerables

Por: Víctor Gabriel García

En el marco de la Reunión Nacional de los Institutos de Capacitación para el Trabajo,  Enrique Pieck Gochicoa y Roxana Vicente Díaz,  coordinador y asistente, respectivamente, de la línea de investigación “Educación, Trabajo y Pobreza” del Instituto de Investigaciones para el Desarrollo de la Educación de la Universidad Iberoamericana  Ciudad de México, realizaron un taller para presentar los resultados de dos proyectos de investigación que giraron en torno a la sistematización de experiencias significativas de formación para el trabajo de los ICAT. El encuentro se realizó en el municipio de San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León y acudieron 40 personas entre directores tanto generales como de vinculación y personal de la Dirección General de Centros de Formación para el Trabajo, organismo encargado de coordinar el trabajo de los institutos a nivel nacional.

En un primer momento se presentaron algunas reflexiones y lecciones sobre diversas experiencias que se constituyeron en relatos que los propios actores elaboraron, se sistematizaron y quedaron plasmados en los libros En el camino… formación para el trabajo e inclusión: ¿hacia dónde vamos? y  Abriendo Horizontes. Estrategias de formación para el trabajo de jóvenes vulnerables. Posteriormente, los directores de los institutos compartieron sus reflexiones, a la luz de la presentación y de su propia práctica.  De ese ejercicio reflexivo, la directora del ICAT Yucatán, María Elena Andrade Uitzil, expresó lo siguiente:

“Lo que hicimos el día de hoy retoma mucho desde la perspectiva de los Derechos Humanos para poder llegar a todos en diferentes contextos. A lo que me remite a mí este ejercicio es conocer nuestra realidad en la entidad. En el estado de Yucatán tenemos un empoderamiento económico, pero al mismo tiempo tenemos una fuerte población indígena, que requiere de espacios educativos más allá de las aulas. Conociendo nuestra necesidad y la demanda que tenemos, se abren dos ámbitos muy importantes: la atención social y la empresarial.”

Por su parte, Lesvia del Carmen León De la O, directora del instituto en Tabasco, enfatizó el carácter social del trabajo de los ICAT:

“Los ICAT somos institutos integrados que vemos por la capacitación, por la integración del emprendurismo, por los valores sociales. Creo que eso nos hace más ricos, porque un capacitador de los ICAT no solamente es un transmisor de conocimiento, se hace amigo de las personas, se hace familia.”

Efrén Parada Arias, director general de la DGCFT, señaló la importancia de los ICAT dentro de las labores de la Subsecretaría de Educación Media Superior de la SEP para la formación de trabajadores desde su dimensión social y empresarial y dijo:

“Este servicio educativo tiene dos grandes núcleos de expresión: uno es social y otro es el de la producción. Estos institutos están dedicados a la formación del personal que se requiere para atender a esos grandes objetivos [el social y el económico]”.

Al término del taller Enrique Pieck y Roxana Vicente recogieron las reflexiones de los participantes y destacaron la responsabilidad social que tienen los ICAT en el país para atender a población vulnerable, y la importancia de su vinculación con el sector productivo de cada estado, pero siempre desde un enfoque hacia la persona.

“Realmente la vocación que tienen los institutos tiene que ver una incidencia en el ámbito social como fin último, lo cuál es el trasfondo, es lo transversal. Por ejemplo, las estrategias en el ámbito productivo, son medios que se tienen para tener una incidencia en lo social. Esta perspectiva en torno al papel social de los ICAT nos ayuda a pensar más creativamente, sobre qué medios utilizar, qué recursos se tienen para brindar más estrategias mucho más integrales. Esto también tiene que ver con el enfoque hacia la persona, porque es cierto que está la rentabilidad y los ingresos, pero ante todo son las personas y las capacidades los que deben ser priorizados”, aseveró Roxana Vicente

Finalmente, Enrique Pieck subrayó la importancia de realizar encuentros donde los directores de los ICAT reflexionen sobre su propia práctica y la visualicen de manera integral: “Este fue un evento para reflexionar y nos da mucha riqueza haber recogido sus reflexiones. En términos del quehacer de la investigación este espacio es un privilegio, porque nos permite compartir y devolver los resultados de investigación con ustedes que dirigen los institutos en cada entidad. Es importante este espacio porque permite enriquecer el trabajo con los sectores vulnerables de nuestro país.

Los institutos de capacitación siempre se han caracterizado por atender a poblaciones marginales, por ello los dos proyectos dan cuenta de la importancia de responsabilizarnos con esa población y responder no sólo al aspecto económico, sino también al social; mirar más allá de la productividad y de atender a criterios meramente economicistas”.

[1] Asistente de investigación de la línea Educación, trabajo y pobreza del Instituto de Investigaciones para el Desarrollo de la Educación de la Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México.

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Trascender criterios economicistas: De la vocación social de los Institutos de Capacitación para el trabajo y su aporte a jóvenes vulnerables

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Important lessons for antiwar movement makers…

By: Bill Ayer

The Antiwar Movement Then and Now

Howard Machtinger
Vietnam Full Disclosure

A broad-based antiwar movement which challenges white and male supremacy and stands in support of oppressed people around the globe, from the Rohingya to the Palestinians, is an important part of a larger movement for social change; one that can navigate racial, class, gender, generational, ideological, spiritual and strategic and tactical differences is required.

 

It is offered—not in expectation of agreement—but to provoke a serious discussion about the current state of antiwar politics.

Burns and Novick in their PBS documentary: The Vietnam War could not ignore the antiwar movement, but exhibit little interest in its dynamics, except in its supposed hostility to American GIs. Since my interest still lies in how to build a more effective antiwar movement, I want to focus on the lessons learned and not learned by the Vietnam antiwar movement as a prelude to exploring how we might move forward to confront the multiple wars and threats of war that beset our world.

Of course, there was not one unified antiwar movement, but a conglomeration of tendencies featuring contending critiques, strategies and tactics. What follows is an attempt at a succinct, dispassionate description of those tendencies, which no doubt risks over-simplification. I will look at three general perspectives. I will begin with a critique of tendencies with which I was associated.

The first set of tendencies included the anti-imperialists, militants, and Marxist-Leninists. Members of these overlapping, but distinct groupings, all grasped the depth of the problem that the war in Vietnam exposed. The war was not a mistake or an aberration from the general direction of US global policy. Its goal was to dominate the world and, in this particular case, to gain a strategic foothold in mainland Asia. These movement tendencies recognized the need to do more and to widen the scope of protest. They also placed great importance in connecting to and humanizing the Vietnamese enemy, not merely viewing them as victims, but recognizing and honoring their capacity to resist.

Too often, however, the connection remained abstract or turned romantic. Che’s invocation of “2, 3 many Vietnams” not only decontextualized Vietnamese resistance, but led people to ignore or downplay the incredible price paid for this resistance. In the 1980’s an uncritical anti-imperialism led to support for leaders who proved to be problematic such as Cayetano Carpio in El Salvador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. One version of anti-imperialism meant support for any leader hostile to the US; including people like Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad. For them, the enemy of our enemy by definition became a friend. Anti-imperialists did not always acknowledge other negative forces operating in the world aside from US imperialism.

The romanticization of the Vietnamese resistance also led militants to overstate the revolutionary possibilities in 1960s and 70s America. Some resorted to violent methods that proved ineffective, isolating, and divisive for the movement as a whole. Though violence as a strategy, not as spontaneous outbursts, constituted a small part of the antiwar movement, it too often became the ‘issue’ and functioned to divert attention from the monumentally greater violence of imperial war.

The parts of this tendency that identified with global Communism–a relatively small, but influential sector–had little understanding of that movement, weak grasp of the Sino-Soviet split, and were often ignorant of differences within Vietnamese Communism. Sometimes the result was a dumbed-down and sanitized Maoism. Their version of democratic centralism was rarely democratic. And they were often drawn into obscure sectarian struggles.

The pacifist left tendency brought a solid grasp of the profound penetration of militarism in the US economy, its politics and culture. It offered a valuable overall critique of war and militarism. A. J. Muste and Dave Dellinger played unifying roles in an often-fractious movement. And militant pacifists like Dellinger forged a creative model of militant nonviolence that effectively expressed the depth of opposition to the war.

But other pacifists enjoyed the role of the ‘good’ protestor as opposed to other less acceptable protestors, thereby dividing the movement and enabling an establishment critique, providing fodder for false equivalences between imperial violence and resistance to it. Pacifists could and did adopt a purer than thou attitude. It should have been possible to legitimize one’s own form of protest without delegitimizing other forms. Most significantly, the pacifist tendency was overwhelmingly white and middle class with insufficient connection to the powerful movements of people of color that had staked out clear and resonant positions against the war. This was not simply a question of coalition building, but of creating consistent, enduring relationships of trust.

Another tendency consisting largely of dissident and liberal Democrats saw the war as a losing proposition damaging US credibility, draining treasure, destroying morale and national unity, not to mention increasing battlefield casualties. This is in part the perspective of the Burns/Novick effort. This tendency brought to light the war’s corrosive effect on democratic institutions: the expanding imperial Presidency, the impotence and irrelevance of Congress, and the repression of protest. Innovative forms of working ‘the system’ were created, that while often frustrating, pointed the way to a possible political revitalization. These movements led to some Congressional scrutiny of the war, LBJ’s abdication, McGovern’s nomination as the Democratic candidate in 1972 and Nixon’s impeachment; generally forcing politicians to openly deal with the war.

But it proved unable to prevent Nixon’s election–allowing him to pose as a strange sort of stealth peace candidate—and didn’t achieve majority support in the Congress until very late in the war. It did not develop adequate means of holding politicians accountable. It both expanded the scope of mainstream politics and was simultaneously hemmed in by the establishment.

Parts of this tendency also posed as a preferred, less radical alternative to the politics of the street. Finally its overly pragmatic strategy implied that the war was a correctible mistake, not requiring a fundamental overhaul of the national security state and its imperial goals.

There are important parts of the movement that I have obviously so far ignored. The antiwar movement was a boost to the development of new creative and feisty women’s and queer liberation movements both by providing spaces for activism and then circumscribing these spaces because of the limits of iantiwar leaders’ consciousness of gender issues. So women and LGBTQ people were energized and then marginalized which simultaneously divided the movement and resulted in new organizational forms, including significant antiwar organization and action as well as a critique of military and movement macho.

The level and sophistication of GI and veteran resistance was unprecedented. Dewey Canyon III in Washington DC in 1971, when veterans threw away their medals, brought the issue of the war’s immorality and pointlessness home and helped transform the public face of the antiwar movement from that of cowardly, spaced out hippies and unrealistic pacifists. Often left buried in the dustbin of history are efforts like the coffee house movement where civilians and soldiers collaborated in spreading the antiwar message. It would certainly be worthwhile to further explore what was learned about civilian/soldier relationships from this experience.

After the war, the antiwar movement lost steam and direction in a sense succumbing to the fantasy that the end of the war allowed a return to normalcy without further consequence. We did not succeed in helping Americans come to terms with military defeat—to understand it as something positive for the American spirit.

Vietnam was more isolated in the 1980s than during the American war as it invaded Cambodia to overthrow the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime and then fought off a Chinese invasion. The Cold War framing of Southeast Asian conflict as part of a Soviet plot was reasserted by the US with little opposition from the remnants of the antiwar movement; the Maoist fringe, in line with Chinese policy, even supported the Khmer Rouge. There were brief upsurges of activity in response to Reagan’s Central America wars and before both Gulf wars, especially W’s 2003 war. Today there exists a barely perceptible antiwar movement. Its impotence allowed Donald Trump to play a bogus antiwar card during the 2016 campaign.

As antiwar activists we have allowed the myth—of which Burns/Novick partake—of the deep antagonism between the civilian antiwar movement and soldiers to penetrate American consciousness, including that of younger antiwar activists. I have met numerous young activists who take for granted that the antiwar movement typically spat at returning soldiers. We can credit Jerry Lembcke for Burns and Novick not further propounding that particular myth. They favor ’baby killers’. In any large, sprawling social movement almost any perspective can be found. Though I knew a few people who felt like targeting soldiers was legitimate; this was a quite marginal perspective in the antiwar movement. The same mythology led many of those opposed to the Gulf wars to so reassure the public that the movement was pro-soldier that they lost sight of the central task of any effective antiwar movement: projecting and humanizing the direct victims of the war in Iraq. It was a form of surrender to the prevailing Islamaphobia.

As a movement, we have failed to adequately challenge the deleterious effects of imperial war on democratic institutions. ‘Forever war’ means permanent limitations on freedom and the right to protest and continuing intrusions on privacy. We haven’t been able to convincingly demonstrate to Americans the connection between successive wars; how the Iraq war increased sectarianism and chaos in the entire region, catalyzing the growth of groups like ISIS; how we are imprisoned by the terrible logic of war in which the next war is seen as a justifiable and necessary response to the failure of the previous one.

Given this history, how might a more effective antiwar movement be constituted? First of all, we must acknowledge, embrace even, that maybe none of us in this room will be in leadership of this reconstitution. If we are together, we can offer perspective, some cautions, a necessary connection to past efforts. Multiracial forces already in motion will lead the new activist peace/antiwar movement. For instance, the M4BL highlights the militarization and racism of our criminal ‘justice’ system while connecting to global struggles of people of color. The immigration and refugee movements—with important experience in navigating cultural difference—has drawn attention to the connections between war, state violence, and population movement and alerted us to the role of racism and Islamaphobia in mobilizing and justifying aggressive wars. Environmental activists lead us to revalue the leadership of indigenous people as in Standing Rock; organizations like 350.org explicate the relationship between environmental degradation and wars and potential wars over natural resources, as well as leading to increased global migration. The new women’s and LGBTQ movements have led the way in expanding our consciousness of sexual violence in war and in the military. And even as the nature of war has changed, the voices of GIs and veterans remain vital. A new antiwar movement must be constituted and led by those forces which will both broaden and deepen the movement making evident the intersectionality of movements against oppression, white supremacy and militarism.

We are living in a treacherous moment for our and other species. The impact of climate change imposes a fateful due date. The prevalence of nuclear weapons along with authoritarian leaders eager to demonstrate their macho add to the immediate peril.

So a broad-based antiwar movement which challenges white and male supremacy and stands in support of oppressed people around the globe, from the Rohingya to the Palestinians, is an important part of a larger movement for social change; one that can navigate racial, class, gender, generational, ideological, spiritual and strategic and tactical differences is required. Absolute agreement is not required; rather a Zen-like mastery of the art of coordination, mutuality and solidarity is the order of the day. We don’t need one big organization but we do need accountable organizations with accountable leadership. Our movement must not be so ‘correct’ that it does not allow for experimentation and a diversity of tactics. The movement must strive for power as it creates an open and welcoming environment where, rather than being stigmatized or shamed for inevitable mistakes, activists can learn from them and grow with the movement. And we must make our case to ordinary people while still engaging in anti-racist and anti-sexist initiatives. The other side is driven by a mean-spirited white male nationalism that we must directly take on.

There is a lot we have to do. We must work in establishment politics and reinvigorate democratic forms, fighting for meaningful reform; and at the same time (not necessarily the same people) be on the streets, loud and passionate. We must be militant, but smart and strategic about our militancy; keep the engine rev-ed but prevent it from veering off the tracks. Be moral and not moralistic, nor purer or more radical than thou. Connections are local and global, virtual and personal. Be forthright and sure-footed, but humble about our importance and correctness. Nothing less is required.

My comments leave many questions unexplained and unanswered. My simple goal is not completeness or agreement but to both initiate and add to a discussion that will lead to more effective action. We sorely need some.

The Full Disclosure campaign is a Veterans for Peace effort to speak truth to power and keep alive the antiwar perspective on the American war in Viet Nam — which is now approaching a series of 50th anniversary events. It represents a clear alternative to the Pentagon’s current efforts to sanitize and mythologize the Vietnam war and to thereby legitimize further unnecessary and destructive wars.

Source:

https://billayers.org/2017/10/

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Beyond Pedagogies of Repression

Dr. Henry Giroux

Introduction

At a time when the public good is under attack and there seems to be a growing apathy toward the social contract or any other civic-minded investment in public values and the larger common good, education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job, and pedagogy as more than teaching to the test. Against pedagogies of repression such as high-stakes testing, which largely serve as neoliberal forms of discipline to promote conformity and limit the imagination, critical pedagogy must be viewed as crucial to understanding and overcoming the current crises of agency, politics, and historical memory faced by many young people today. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. Education must mobilize students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to important social issues and alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy.

At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy. What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people with the capacities to think, question, and doubt, to imagine the unimaginable, and to defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for a robust democracy? In a world that has largely abandoned egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people to challenge authority, resist the notion that education is only training, and redefine public and higher education as democratic public spheres?

What role might education and critical pedagogy have in a society in which the social has been individualized, emotional life has been collapsed into the therapeutic, and education has been relegated to either a private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation in which everything is reduced to a desired measurable economic outcome? Feedback loops and testing regimes now replace politics, and the concept of progress is defined through a narrow culture of metrics, measurement, and efficiency.1 In a culture drowning in a new love affair with empiricism and data, that which is not measurable withers. Lost here are the registers of compassion, care for others, the radical imagination, a democratic vision, and a passion for justice. In its place emerges what Goya, in one of his etchings, termed: “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” Goya’s title is richly suggestive, particularly about the role of education and pedagogy in compelling students to recognize, as my colleague David Clark points out, “that an inattentiveness to the never-ending task of critique breeds horrors: the failures of conscience, the wars against thought, and the flirtations with irrationality that lie at the heart of the triumph of every-day aggression, the withering of political life, and the withdrawal into private obsessions.”2

Given the multiple crises that haunt the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which an unprecedented convergence of resources—financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological—is increasingly used to concentrate powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language must be political without being dogmatic, and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political, because it is connected to the struggle over agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means being vigilant about those very “moments in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created.”3

The testing regimes now promoted by the anti-reformers such as Bill Gates, the Walton family, and others from the “billionaires’ club” function as dis-imagination regimes, undercutting the autonomy of teachers, unions, and the intellectual and political capacities of students to be informed and critically engaged citizens. The educational establishment’s obsession with testing and teaching to the test is part of a pedagogy of repression that attempts to camouflage the role that education plays in distorting history, silencing the voices of marginalized groups, and undercutting the relationship between learning and social change. Too many teachers suffer under regimes of testing, which trap them in a labor process that not only produces political and ethical servility, transforming them into deskilled technicians, but also obscures the role that schools might play in creating the formative cultures that make a democracy possible, and in addressing pedagogy as a moral and political practice.

Testing regimes make power invisible by defining education as a form of training, and pedagogy as strictly a method designed to teach pre-defined, standardized skills. Purposely missing from this discourse is education’s role in shaping identities, desires, values, and notions of agency. Lost from the prison house of testing regimes is any consideration for educators to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied. For example, the Tucson Unified School District Board not only eliminated its famed Mexican American Studies Program, but also banned Chicano and Native American books it deemed dangerous. The ban also included Shakespeare’s play The Tempestand Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the famed Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. This act of censorship provides a particularly disturbing case of the war being waged in the United States against not only young people marginalized by race and class, but also against the very spaces and pedagogical practices that make critical thinking possible.

Testing regimes have nothing to say about the oppressive ideologies that function as part of a hidden curriculum that produces and legitimates tracking, social sorting, segregated schools, the defunding of public schools, and the power exercised over the production and control of knowledge. For instance, the testing movement seriously undermines the critical capacities of students, and gives them no tools to recognize how right-wing religious and political fundamentalists are shaping textbooks. What tools does teaching to the test offer students that might enable them to recognize that in a recently published McGraw-Hill world geography textbook, a speech bubble in a section on Patterns of Immigration pointed to the continent of Africa and read: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations”?4 Calling slaves “workers,” and the forced migration of Africans to the United States an act of “immigration,” is something that could have been written by the Ku Klux Klan or other white supremacist groups. And it is precisely this kind of historical and political erasure that is central to the testing regimes pushed by dominant financial and class interests.

Such actions are not innocent or free from the working of dominant power and ideology. The damaging ideology underlying the testing mania and its pedagogical forms of oppression suggests the need for faculty to develop forms of critical pedagogy that not only challenge testing regimes but also inspire and energize students. That is, they should be able to challenge a growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies while also resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in inequality, environmental degradation, and the elevation of war and militarization to national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes, an audit culture, market values, and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed market-driven society. It becomes part of a formative culture in which thoughtlessness prevails, providing the foundation for what Hannah Arendt called “the curse of totalitarianism.”

At a time of increased repression, it is all the more crucial for educators to reject the notion that public and higher education are simply sites for training students for the workforce, and that the culture of education is synonymous with the culture of business. At issue here is the need for educators to recognize the power of education in creating the formative cultures necessary to challenge the various threats being mobilized against the ideas of justice and democracy, while also fighting for those public spheres, ideals, values, and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, thinking, social relations, and politics.

In both conservative and progressive discourses, pedagogy is often treated simply as a set of strategies and skills used to teach and test for pre-specified subject matter. In this context, pedagogy becomes synonymous with teaching as a technique or the practice of a craft-like skill. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must grasp the limitations of this definition and its endless slavish imitations, even when they are claimed as part of a radical discourse or project. In opposition to the instrumental reduction of pedagogy to a method—which has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility, or the demands of citizenship—critical pedagogy illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority, and power.5

Central to any viable notion of what makes pedagogy critical is, in part, the recognition that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. This approach to critical pedagogy does not reduce educational practice to the mastery of methodologies. It stresses instead the importance of understanding what actually happens in classrooms and other educational settings by raising questions: What is the relationship between learning and social change? What knowledge is of most worth? What does it mean to know something, and in what direction should one desire? Pedagogy is always about power, because it cannot be separated from how subjectivities are formed or desires mobilized, how some experiences are legitimated and others are not, or how some knowledge is considered acceptable while other forms are excluded from the curriculum.

Pedagogy is a moral and political practice because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. But it does more; it also, as Roger Simon has written, “represents a version of our own dreams for ourselves, our children, and our communities. But such dreams are never neutral; they are always someone’s dreams and to the degree that they are implicated in organizing the future for others they always have a moral and political dimension.”6

It is in this respect that any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth, and above all value is informed by practices that organize knowledge and meaning.7 Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not only about the exercise of economic and political power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, “has to do with political judgements and value choices,” indicating that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy—learning how to become a skilled citizen—are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy.8

In this instance, critical pedagogy emphasizes critical reflection, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and difficult knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history and theory. However, many educators and social theorists refuse to recognize that education does not only take place in schools, but also through what can be called the educative nature of the culture. That is, there are a range of cultural institutions extending from the mainstream media to new digital screen cultures that engage in what I have called forms of public pedagogy, which are central to the tasks of either expanding and enabling political and civic agency, or of shutting them down. At stake here is the crucial recognition that pedagogy is central to politics itself, because it is about changing the way people see things, recognizing that politics is educative and, as the late Pierre Bourdieu reminded us, “the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.”9

Just as I would argue that pedagogy has to be made meaningful in order to be made critical and transformative, I think it is fair to argue that there is no politics without a pedagogy of identification; that is, people must invest something of themselves in how they are addressed, or recognize that any mode of education, argument, idea, or pedagogy has to speak to their condition and provide a moment of recognition. Lacking this understanding, pedagogy all too easily becomes a form of symbolic and intellectual violence, one that assaults rather than educates. Once again, one can see this in forms of high-stakes testing and empirically driven teaching approaches that dull the critical impulse and produce what might be called dead zones of the imagination. We also see such violence in schools whose chief function is repression. Such schools often employ modes of instruction that are punitive and mean-spirited, largely driven by regimes of memorization and conformity. Pedagogies of repression are largely disciplinary and have little regard for analyzing contexts and history, making knowledge meaningful, or expanding upon what it means for students to be critically engaged agents.

Expanding critical pedagogy as a mode of public pedagogy suggests being attentive to and addressing modes of knowledge and social practices in a variety of sites that not only encourage critical thinking, thoughtfulness, and meaningful dialogue, but also offer opportunities to mobilize instances of moral outrage, social responsibility, and collective action. Such mobilization opposes glaring material inequities and the growing cynical belief that today’s culture of investment and finance makes it impossible to address social problems facing the United States, Canada, Latin America, and the larger world. Most importantly, such work points to the link between civic education, critical pedagogy, and modes of oppositional political agency that are pivotal to creating a politics that promotes democratic values, relations, autonomy, and social change.

Rather than viewing teaching as a technical practice, pedagogy in the broadest critical sense is premised on the assumption that learning is not about processing received knowledge, but actually transforming it, as part of a more expansive struggle for individual rights and social justice. The fundamental challenge facing educators in the current age of neoliberalism, militarism, and religious fundamentalism is to provide the conditions for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency. In part, this suggests providing students with the skills, ideas, values, and authority necessary for them to nourish a substantive democracy, recognize anti-democratic forms of power, and to fight deeply rooted injustices in a society and world founded on systemic economic, racial, and gendered inequalities. I want to take up these issues by addressing a number of related pedagogical concerns, including the notion of teachers as public intellectuals, pedagogy and the project of insurrectional democracy, pedagogy and the politics of responsibility, and finally, pedagogy as a form of resistance and educated hope.

The Responsibility of Teachers as Engaged Intellectuals

In the age of irresponsible privatization, unchecked individualism, celebrity culture, unfettered consumerism, and a massive flight from moral responsibility, it has become more and more difficult to acknowledge that educators and other cultural workers bear an enormous responsibility in opposing the current threat to the planet and everyday life by reviving democratic political cultures. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus or project, teachers are often reduced either to technicians or functionaries, engaged in formalistic rituals, absorbed with bureaucratic demands, and unconcerned either with disturbing and urgent social problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one’s pedagogical practices and research. In opposition to this model, with its claims to and conceit of political neutrality, I argue that teachers and academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with issues that bear on their lives and the larger society, and to provide the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. The role of a critical education is not to train students solely for jobs, but to educate them to question critically the institutions, policies, and values that shape their lives, their relationships to others, and their myriad of connections to the larger world.

Stuart Hall, one of the founders of cultural studies, was on target when he insisted that educators as public intellectuals have a responsibility to provide students with “critical knowledge that has to be ahead of traditional knowledge: it has to be better than anything that traditional knowledge can produce, because only serious ideas are going to stand up.”10 At the same time, he insisted on the need for educators to “actually engage, contest, and learn from the best that is locked up in other traditions,” especially those attached to traditional academic paradigms.11 It is also important to remember that education as a form of educated hope is not simply about fostering critical consciousness, but also about teaching students, as Zygmunt Bauman has put it, to “take responsibility for one’s responsibilities,” be they personal, political, or global. Students should be made aware of the ideological and structural forces that promote needless human suffering, while also recognizing that it takes more than awareness to resolve them.

What role might educators in both public and higher education play as public intellectuals in light of the poisonous assaults waged on public schools by the forces of neoliberalism and other fundamentalisms? In the most immediate sense, they can raise their collective voices against the influence of corporations that are flooding societies with a culture of violence, fear, anti-intellectualism, commercialism, and privatization. They can show how this culture of commodified cruelty and violence is only one part of a broader and all-embracing militarized culture of war, the arms industry, and a social Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest ethic that increasingly disconnects schools from public values, the common good, and democracy itself. They can bring all of their intellectual and collective resources together to critique and dismantle the imposition of high-stakes testing and other commercially driven modes of accountability on schools.

They can speak out against modes of governance that have reduced teachers and faculty to the status of part-time Walmart employees, and they can struggle collectively to take back public and higher education from a new class of hedge fund managers, corporate elites, and the rich, who want to privatize education and strip it of its civic values and its role as a democratic public good. This suggests that educators must join with parents, young people, social movements, intellectuals, and other cultural workers to resist the ongoing corporatization of public and higher education. It also means developing a comprehensive understanding of the interconnections between the ideology of financial elites, the testing industries, the criminal justice system, and other apparatuses whose purpose is to reduce teachers to the status of clerks, technicians, or “entrepreneurs,” a subaltern class of deskilled workers with little power, few benefits, and excessive teaching loads. As Noam Chomsky has observed, this neoliberal mode of austerity and precarity is part of a business model “designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility,” while at the same time making clear that “what matters is the bottom line.”12

In addition, educators, parents, workers, and others can work together to develop a broader, comprehensive vision of education and schooling that is capable of waging a war against those who would deny both their critical functions—and this applies to all forms of dogmatism and political purity, across the ideological spectrum. As my friend, the late Paulo Freire, once argued, educators have a responsibility to not only develop a critical consciousness in students, but to provide the conditions for students to be engaged individuals and social agents. As Stanley Aronowitz has argued, such a project is not a call to shape students in the manner of Pygmalion, but to encourage human agency, not mold it. Since human life is conditioned rather than determined, educators cannot escape the ethical responsibility of addressing education as an act of intervention whose purpose is to provide the conditions for students to become the subjects and makers of history. This requires dismissing a repressive system of education designed to turn students into simply passive, disconnected objects, or mere consumers and not producers of knowledge, values, and ideas.13

This calls for a pedagogy in which educators would be afraid neither of controversy nor of the willingness to make connections that are otherwise hidden. Nor would they be afraid of making clear the connection between private troubles and broader social problems. One of the most important tasks for educators engaged in critical pedagogy is to teach students how to translate private issues into public considerations. One measure of the demise of vibrant democracy and the corresponding impoverishment of political life can be found in the increasing inability of a society to make private issues public, to translate individual problems into larger social issues. As the public collapses into the personal, the personal becomes “the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotional valence.”14 This is a central feature of neoliberalism as an educative tool, and can be termed the individualization of the social. Under such circumstances, the language of the social is either devalued or ignored, as public life is often reduced to a form of pathology or deficit (as in public schools, transportation, and welfare) and all dreams of the future are modeled increasingly around the narcissistic, privatized, and self-indulgent needs of consumer culture and the dictates of the allegedly free market. Similarly, all problems, whether they are structural or caused by larger social forces, are now attributed to individual failings, matters of character, or individual ignorance. In this case, poverty is reduced to a matter of individual lifestyle, personal responsibility, bad choices, or flawed character.

Pedagogy as a Practice of Freedom

In opposition to dominant views of instrumental and test-driven modes of education and pedagogy, I want to argue for a notion of pedagogy as a practice of freedom—rooted in a broader project of a resurgent and insurrectional democracy—one that relentlessly questions the kinds of labor practices and forms of production enacted in public and higher education. While such a pedagogy does not offer guarantees, it does recognize that its own position is grounded in particular modes of authority, values, and ethical principles that must be constantly debated for the ways in which they both open and close democratic relations, values, and identities. Needless to say, such a project should be principled, relational, and contextual, as well as self-reflective and theoretically rigorous. By relational, I mean that the current crisis of schooling must be understood in relation to the broader assault being waged against all aspects of democratic public life. At the same time, any critical comprehension of those wider forces shaping public and higher education must also be supplemented by an attention to the historical and conditional nature of pedagogy itself. This suggests that pedagogy can never be treated as a fixed set of principles and practices that can be applied indiscriminately across a variety of pedagogical sites. On the contrary, it must always be attentive to the specificity of different contexts and the different conditions, formations, and problems that arise in various sites in which education takes place. Such a project suggests recasting pedagogy as a practice that is indeterminate, open to constant revision, and constantly in dialogue with its own assumptions.

The notion of a neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. Education and pedagogy do not exist outside of relations of power, values, and politics. Ethics on the pedagogical front demand an openness to the other, a willingness to engage a “politics of possibility” through a continual critical engagement with texts, images, events, and other registers of meaning as they are transformed into pedagogical practices, both within and outside the classroom.15Pedagogy is never innocent, and if it is to be understood and problematized as a form of academic labor, educators have the opportunity not only to critically question and register their own subjective involvement in how and what they teach, but also to resist all calls to depoliticize pedagogy through appeals to either scientific objectivity or ideological dogmatism. This suggests the need for educators to rethink the cultural and ideological baggage they bring to each educational encounter. It also highlights the need to make educators ethically and politically accountable and self-reflective for the stories they produce, the claims they make upon public memory, and the images of the future they deem legitimate. Hence, crucial to any viable notion of critical pedagogy is the necessity for critical educators to be attentive to the ethical dimensions of their own practice.

The Promise of a Democracy to Come

As a practice of freedom, critical pedagogy needs to be grounded in a project that not only problematizes its own location, mechanisms of transmission, and effects, but also functions as part of a wider project to help students think critically about how existing social, political, and economic arrangements might better address the promise of a democracy to come. Understood as a form of educated hope, pedagogy in this sense is not an antidote to politics, a nostalgic yearning for a better time, or for some “inconceivably alternative future.” Instead, it is an “attempt to find a bridge between the present and future in those forces within the present which are potentially able to transform it.”16

What has become clear in this current climate of casino capitalism is that the corporatization of education cancels out the teaching of democratic values, impulses, and practices of a civil society by either devaluing or absorbing them within the logic of the market. Educators need a critical language to address these challenges to public and higher education. But they also need to join with other groups outside of the spheres of public and higher education, in order to create broad national and international social movements that share a willingness to defend education as a civic value and public good and to engage in a broader struggle to deepen the imperatives of democratic public life. The quality of educational reform can, in part, be gauged by the caliber of public discourse concerning the role that education plays in furthering, not the market driven agenda of corporate interests, but the imperatives of critical agency, social justice, and an operational democracy.

If we define pedagogy as a moral and political exercise, then education can highlight the performative character of schooling and civic pedagogy as a practice that moves beyond simple matters of critique and understanding. Pedagogy is not simply about competency or teaching young people the great books, established knowledge, predefined skills, and values, it is also about the possibility of interpretation as an act of intervention in the world. Such a pedagogy should challenge common sense and take on the task as the poet Robert Hass once put it, “to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us all the time.”17 Within this perspective, critical pedagogy foregrounds the diverse conditions under which authority, knowledge, values, and subject positions are produced and interact within unequal relations of power. Pedagogy in this view also stresses the labor conditions necessary for teacher autonomy, cooperation, decent working conditions, and the relations of power necessary to give teachers and students the capacity to restage power in productive ways that point to self-development, self-determination, and social agency.

Making Pedagogy Critical and Transformative

Any analysis of critical pedagogy needs to address the importance that affect, meaning, and emotion play in the formation of individual identity and social agency. Any viable approach to critical pedagogy suggests taking seriously those maps of meaning, affective investments, and sedimented desires that enable students to connect their own lives and everyday experiences to what they learn. Pedagogy in this sense becomes more than a mere transfer of received knowledge, a disciplinary system of repression, an inscription of a unified and static identity, or a rigid methodology; it presupposes that students are moved by their passions and motivated, in part, by the identifications, range of experiences, and commitments they bring to the learning process. In part, this suggests connecting what is taught in classrooms to the cultural capital and worlds that young people inhabit.

For instance, schools often have little to say about the new media, digital culture, and social media that dominate the lives of young people. Hence, questions concerning both the emancipatory and oppressive aspects of these media are often ignored, and students find themselves bored in classrooms in which print culture and its older modes of transmission operate. Or they find themselves using new technologies with no understanding of how they might be understood as more than retrieval machines—that is, as technologies deeply connected to matters of power, ideology, and politics. The issue here is not a call for teachers to simply become familiar with the new digital technologies, however crucial, but to address how they are being used as a form of cultural politics and pedagogical practice to produce certain kinds of citizens, desires, values, and social relations. At stake here is the larger question of how these technologies enhance or shut down the meaning and deepening of democracy. Understanding the new media is a political issue and not merely a technological one. Sherry Turkle is right in arguing that the place of technology can only be addressed if one has a set of values from which to work. This is particularly important given the growth of the surveillance state in the United States and the growing retreat from privacy on the part of a generation that is now hooked on the corporate-controlled social media such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

The experiences that shape young people’s lives are often mediated modes of experiences in which some are viewed as more valued than others, especially around matters of race, sexuality, and class. Low-income white students and poor minorities are often defined through experiences that are viewed as deficits. In this instance, different styles of speech, clothing, and body language can be used as weapons to punish certain students. How else to explain the high rate of black students in the United States who are punished, suspended, and expelled from their schools because they violate dress codes or engage in what can be considered minor rule violations.

Experiences also tie many students to modes of behavior that are regressive, punishing, self-defeating, and in some cases violent. We see too many students dominated by the values of malls, shopping centers, and fashion meccas. They not only fill their worlds with commodities but have become working commodities. Clearly, such experiences must be critically engaged and understood within a range of broader forces that subject students to a narrow range of values, identities, and social relations. Such experiences should be both questioned and unlearned, where possible. This suggests a pedagogical approach in which such experiences are interrogated through what Roger Simon and Deborah Britzman call troubling or difficult knowledge. For instance, it is sometimes difficult for students to take a critical look at Disney culture not just as a form of entertainment, but also as an expression of corporate power that produces a range of demeaning stereotypes for young people, while it endlessly carpet bombs them with commercial products. Crucial here is developing pedagogical practices that not only interrogate how knowledge, identifications, and subject positions are produced, unfolded, and remembered but also how such knowledges can be unlearned, particularly as they become complicit with existing relations of power.

Conclusion

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the notion of the social and the public are not being erased as much as they are being reconstructed under circumstances in which public forums for serious debate, including public education, are being eroded. Reduced either to a crude instrumentalism, business culture, or defined as a purely private right rather than a public good, teaching and learning are removed from the discourse of democracy and civic culture. Pedagogies of repression wedded to diverse regimes of testing now shamelessly parade under the manner of a new reform movement. In actuality, they constitute not only a hijacking of public and higher education so as to serve the interests of the financial and corporate elite, they also constitute an attack on the best elements of the enlightenment and further undermine any viable notion of democratic socialism.

Under the influence of powerful financial interests, we have witnessed the takeover of public and increasingly higher education by a corporate logic and pedagogy that both numbs the mind and the soul, emphasizing repressive modes of learning that promote winning at all costs, learning how not to question authority, and undermining the hard work of becoming thoughtful, critical, and attentive to the power relations that shape everyday life and the larger world. As learning is privatized, treated as a form of entertainment, depoliticized, and reduced to teaching students how to be good consumers, any viable notions of the social, public values, citizenship, and democracy wither and die. I am not suggesting that we must defend an abstract and empty notion of the public sphere, but those public spheres capable of producing thoughtful citizens, critically engaged agents, and an ethically and socially responsible society.

The greatest threat to young people does not come from lowered standards, the absence of privatized choice schemes, or the lack of rigid testing measures. On the contrary, it comes from societies that refuse to view children as a social investment, consign millions of youth to poverty, reduce critical learning to massive mind-deadening testing programs, promote policies that eliminate the most crucial health and public services, and define masculinity through the degrading celebration of a gun culture, extreme sports, and the spectacles of violence that permeate corporate controlled media industries. Students are not at risk because of the absence of market incentives in the schools, they are at risk because education is being stripped of public funding, public values, handed over to corporate interests, and devalued as a public good. Students are at risk because schools have become dis-imagination machines killing any vestige of creativity, passion, and critical thinking that students might learn and exhibit as part of their schooling. Children and young adults are under siege in both public and higher education because far too many of these institutions have become breeding grounds for commercialism, segregation by class and race, social intolerance, sexism, homophobia, consumerism, surveillance, and the increased presence of the police, all of which are spurred on by the right-wing discourse of pundits, politicians, educators, and a supine mainstream media.

As a central element of a broad-based cultural politics, critical pedagogy, in its various forms, when linked to the ongoing project of democratization can provide opportunities for educators and other cultural workers to redefine and transform the connections among language, desire, meaning, everyday life, and material relations of power as part of a broader social movement to reclaim the promise and possibilities of a democratic public life. Critical pedagogy is dangerous to many educators and others because it provides the conditions for students to develop their intellectual capacities, hold power accountable, and embrace a sense of social responsibility.

One of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, and other cultural workers is the task of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means developing languages and pedagogical practices that connect reading the word with reading the world, and doing so in ways that enhance the capacities of young people as critical agents and engaged citizens. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to become autonomous actors who have the knowledge and courage to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order. On the contrary, it is the precondition for providing those languages and values that point the way to a more democratic and just world. As Judith Butler has argued, there is more hope in the world when we can question common sense assumptions and believe that what we know is directly related to our ability to help change the world around us, though it is far from the only condition necessary for such change.18 There is more hope in the world when educators and others take seriously John Dewey’s insistence that “a democracy needs to be reborn in each generation, and education is its midwife.”19 Today, Dewey’s once vaunted claim is more important than ever, and reminds us that democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public and higher education in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good.20 We may live in dark times, but the future is still open. The time has come to develop a pedagogical language in which civic values, social responsibility, and the institutions that support them become central to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic imagination, a renewed sense of social agency, and an impassioned international social movement with a vision, organization, and set of strategies to challenge the anti-democratic forces engulfing the planet. My friend the late Howard Zinn got it right in his insistence that hope is the willingness “to hold out, even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise.”21 Or, to add to this eloquent plea, I would say, resistance is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

Notes

  1. See for instance Evgeny Morozov, “The Rise of Data and the Death of Politics,”The Guardian, July 20, 2014.
  2. Author’s correspondence with David Clark.
  3. Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy,”Journal of Advanced Composition 18 (1998): 361–91.
  4. Yanan Wang, “Changes due for ‘revisionist’ textbook,”The Hamilton Spectator, October 6, 2015.
  5. For examples of this tradition, see Maria Nikolakaki, ed.,Critical Pedagogy in the Dark Ages: Challenges and Possibilities (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Henry A. Giroux,On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Continuum, 2011).
  6. Roger Simon, “Empowerment as a Pedagogy of Possibility,”Language Arts64, no. 4 (1987): 372.
  7. Henry A. Giroux,Education and the Crisis of Public Values, 2nd ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).
  8. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Institutions and Autonomy,” in Peter Osborne, ed.,A Critical Sense (New York: Routledge, 1996), 8.
  9. Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass, “The ‘Progressive’ Restoration: A Franco-German Dialogue,”New Left Review 14 (2002): 66.
  10. Greig de Peuter, “Universities, Intellectuals and Multitudes: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” in Mark Cote, Richard J. F. Day, and Greig de Peuter, eds.,Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 113–14.
  11. Ibid., 117.
  12. Noam Chomsky, “The Death of American Universities,”Reader Supported News, March 30, 2015, http://readersupportednews.org.
  13. This idea is central to the work of Paulo Freire, especially hisPedagogy of the Oppressed andPedagogy of Freedom.
  14. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,”Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 305–06.
  15. For an informative discussion of the ethics and politics of deconstruction, see Thomas Keenan,Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2.
  16. Terry Eagleton,The Idea of Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 22.
  17. Robert Hass, cited in Sarah Pollock, “Robert Hass,”Mother Jones (March/April 1992), 22.
  18. Cited in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignification,”Journal of Advanced Composition 20, no. 4 (200), 765.
  19. John Dewey, cited in E. L. Hollander, “The Engaged University,”Academe 86, no. 4 (2000): 29–32.
  20. Andrew Delbanco,College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
  21. Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 634.

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Beyond Pedagogies of Repression

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La cultura caraqueña de la pobreza (I)

Por: Mario Sanoja Obediente

Los estilos de vida expresan la dinámica histórica de la subjetividad, en este caso referidos a los colectivos que poseen determinados modos de vida en una sociedad dada, pasados o actuales.

Un conocido antropólogo norteamericano, Oscar Lewis, escribió hacia mediados del siglo pasado dos monografías extraordinarias sobre la vida de los pobres en un barrio mexicano: Los Hijos de Sánchez y La Cultura de la Pobreza. Ambos analizan el estilo de vida, el modo de vida de la sociedad pobre que constituye el sector cuantitativamente más importante de una sociedad urbana opulenta como la de Ciudad de México. Igualmente, la antropóloga venezolana Iraida Vargas-Arenas analiza los estilos caraqueños de vida pobre en su obra Resistencia y Participación. Los estilos de vida expresan la dinámica histórica de la subjetividad, en este caso referidos a los colectivos que poseen determinados modos de vida en una sociedad dada, pasados o actuales. Un estilo de vida está constituido por los hábitos culturales y sociales que se expresan en la vida cotidiana, por la ideología que define a un sector específico de una sociedad, el cual puede llegar a conformar una subcultura que se manifiesta a su vez en formas culturales de comportamientos laborales, la alimentación, el vestido, la vivienda, la concepción del urbanismo. En el caso venezolano, los estilos de vida que definen a la sociedad burguesa actual confrontados con los de las clases populares, constituyen un ejemplo aleccionador. Por razones históricas, las migraciones campesinas que se produjeron en Venezuela a inicios del siglo pasado como secuela del impacto de la cultura y la economía petrolera, llegaron a un espacio geográfico donde las tierras planas del valle caraqueño y buena parte de la zona montañosa del Este de Caracas eran propiedad de una burguesía latifundista urbana, los llamados amos del valle. Hasta bien entrado el siglo XX persistieron en el Este y en el Sureste caraqueño extensos tablones de caña de azúcar como el caso de la hacienda Ibarra, donde se construyó posteriormente la Ciudad Universitaria, o la zona de Montalbán, donde sobrevivieron hasta tiempos muy recientes trapiches donde se molía la caña, se fabricaba el azúcar, el papelón, el ron y el aguardiente blanco. La expansión de la clase media y el enriquecimiento ostentoso de los burgueses caraqueños, determinó la expansión territorial de la ciudad hacia el Este y el Sureste del valle. Los migrantes campesinos fueron impedidos de ocupar las tierras planas que estaban dedicadas por sus dueños a servir de asiento a urbanizaciones para la clase media o media-alta en ascenso. Los pobres tuvieron que asentarse en las laderas de las serranías del Sur, para lo cual desarrollaron nuevas tecnologías constructivas, una nueva cultura y modos de organización social.

Fuente: http://www.ultimasnoticias.com.ve/noticias/opinion/mario-sanoja-obediente-la-cultura-caraquena-de-la-pobreza/

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El herbario de los 600.000 tesoros

Por: Ignacio Mantilla

La semana pasada tuve la oportunidad de asistir a una sobria ceremonia que, además de conmemorar los 81 años de creación del Instituto de Ciencias Naturales de la Universidad Nacional, tenía como propósito central presentar dos nuevas especies de plantas de la familia Araliaceae, del género Schefflera, que fueron encontradas en Santander, más específicamente en el municipio de Onzaga, por el profesor Orlando Rivera, investigador del instituto, las cuales, como sus estudios señalaron, son visibles en zonas de transición entre subpáramos y bosques altoandinos de roble. Aún no conocemos todas las propiedades de estas plantas, pero tal tarea es parte de la investigación y seguramente escucharemos de estos ejemplares en los próximos días.

Uno de estos nuevos ejemplares de nuestra rica flora colombiana fue entregado al Herbario Nacional Colombiano, a cargo del Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, como su ejemplar número 600.000.

En el ambiente del evento se hizo más visible la petición que connotados científicos han hecho a la sociedad para dejar de ver la naturaleza como un vehículo o como una vía mediante la cual nos abastecemos de algunas necesidades básicas o creadas. Nos han insistido en la urgencia de comprender la importancia de dejar de depredar a los demás seres vivos, pues de no hacerlo, advierten, no nos quedará mucho tiempo de existencia como especie.

A los científicos no los mueven intereses mezquinos y materialistas; la curiosidad es principalmente el verdadero motor de su actuar. En Colombia tenemos el excelente ejemplo de científicos y naturalistas como Francisco José de Caldas y Julio Garavito, pero no podría dejar de hacer mención del sacerdote jesuita Enrique Pérez Arbeláez, a quien los biólogos colombianos conocen muy bien. Luego de una rigurosa formación en Europa, Pérez Arbeláez regresó interesado en estudiar la flora de nuestro país.

En la década del 30 del siglo pasado fundó y fue el primer director del Herbario Nacional Colombiano y en 1935 impulsó el Instituto de Ciencias Naturales de la Universidad Nacional. A lo largo de su vida, este científico continuó tejiendo una red de conocimiento y trató de recuperar los esfuerzos de sus pares en el pasado, y con ese fin viajó constantemente al Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid.

Pérez Arbeláez fue, además, uno de los miembros fundadores de la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. En realidad, hasta su muerte fue un extraordinario divulgador científico y dejó un gran legado para los estudiosos de hoy.

La labor de Pérez Arbeláez es heredera a su vez de la Real Expedición Botánica de José Celestino Mutis y de los esfuerzos investigativos que en el campo de la botánica y el estudio de la naturaleza realizó la Comisión Corográfica encabezada por el primer rector de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Manuel Ancízar.

Hoy más que nunca son conocidas las diversas aplicaciones, no sólo médicas e industriales, sino también culturales y populares, que se les da a las plantas en el país. Desde aliviar los dolores en los casos más contingentes, hasta connotaciones mágicas para “conocer el amor de la vida”.

Probablemente, la Araliaceae, de la familia de las mano de oso, no pueda “ligar” al ser querido, pero su verdadero potencial aún está por comprenderse a plenitud a través de pruebas científicas que nos permitan entender su complejidad y su función social, porque un importante papel de la ciencia es buscar la solución a los problemas prácticos y dar a conocer al público sus resultados para que sean puestos a beneficio de la sociedad en general, y las directivas del Herbario Nacional Colombiano lo han entendido muy bien, permitiendo que cientos de investigadores puedan acceder de forma controlada y responsable a las muestras que allí se albergan.

Aliento a quienes trabajan en esta importante apuesta científica para seguir trabajando activamente por el bienestar ambiental del país, que es al mismo tiempo el bienestar social. Sin el conocimiento de nuestra riqueza natural y ambiental, nuestra nación está condenada a la dependencia y a un lugar rezagado entre las economías del mundo. Pero este conocimiento, esta relación con la naturaleza y con las plantas, no pueden ser depredadores ni utilitaristas, sino que deben velar por la prolongación de los recursos de forma sostenida.

Conservar y fortalecer la labor del Herbario Nacional Colombiano es una tarea apremiante, no sólo por su legado cultural, sino porque además contiene un saber crucial para el conocimiento de nuestra riqueza ambiental, el aprovechamiento médico de las propiedades de las plantas y su relación con el resto del mundo físico. Pensemos que el fin del conflicto armado con las Farc ha traído la posibilidad de explorar diversas zonas del país que antes estaban vedadas para la ciencia. Seguramente encontraremos nuevas especies que contribuirán al bienestar de los colombianos. La paz es la hora de la ciencia; esperemos que el Gobierno Nacional lo pueda comprender.

Hoy, el legado del padre Pérez Arbeláez es cuidado con esmero en el Instituto de Ciencias Naturales de la Facultad de Ciencias de Bogotá. El Herbario Nacional Colombiano, preservado durante ocho décadas en el instituto, alberga, sin lugar a dudas, una de las colecciones más valiosas que tiene nuestra sesquicentenaria institución. Este herbario es el más grande e importante del país. Lo sigue en número de ejemplares el herbario de la Universidad de Antioquia, que cuenta con cerca de 200.000 muestras.

Poner el sello 600.000 al más reciente ejemplar incorporado, que indica el número de plantas perfectamente clasificadas en este emblemático lugar, fue una de esas experiencias que harán parte de mis más valiosos y gratos recuerdos de la celebración de los 150 años de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, patrimonio de todos los colombianos.

Fuente: https://www.elespectador.com/opinion/el-herbario-de-los-600000-tesoros-columna-722586

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