DOCUMENT RESUME

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AUTHOR Fellenz, Robert A., Ed.; Conti, Gary J., Ed.TITLE Social Environment and Adult Learning.INSTITUTION Montana State Univ., Bozeman. Center for Adult

Learning Research.SPONS AGENCY Kellogg Foundation, Battle Creek, Mich.PUB DATE May 90NOTE 56p.; Papers from an Institute sponsored by the

Center for Adult Learning Research (Big Sky, MT, Lilly31, 1989). For related documents, see CE 056416-418.

PUB TYPE Collected Works Conference Proceedings (021)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PC03 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Adult Education; *Adult Learning; *American Indian

Education; American Indians; Biculturalism; *CriticalTheory; Cultural Context; *Social Environment;*Social Influences

IDENTIFIERS *Crow (Tribe); Highlander Folk School TN; *Horton(Myles)

ABSTRACTThis monograph contains papers from an institute on

the theme of adult learning in the social environment. "Bill Moyers'Journal: An Interview with Myles Horton" provides excerpts from atelevised interview :hat discusses Myles Horton's life, work, andassociation with the Highlander Folk School. "Myles Horton's Views onLearning ih the Social Environment" contains Horton's comments on hisview of learning and respormes to questions from a group that viewedthe edited tape of the Moyers intervies "Radical Pedagogy:Constructing an Arch of Social Dreaming and a Doorway to Hope" (PeterMcLaren) is theoretical in nature and shares some perspectives onsocial context from the viewpoint of an educator working within thecritical educational tradition. "Learning in the Social Environment:A Crow Perspective" (Janine Pease-Windy Boy) reflects on the processthrough which the Crow Indians integrated their culture into a moderneducational institution, the Little Big Horn Community Collegelocated on the Crow resernation in Montana. "From an Adult Educator'sPerspective" (Lloyd Korhonen, Chere Coggins Gibson) containsimmediate reactions to the two preceding presentations. "The Arch ofSocial Dreaming: Teaching Radical Pedagogy Under the Sign ofPostmodernity" (Peter McLaren) expands on McLaren's earlier paper.(YLB)

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Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be madefrom the original document.

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Myles HortonBig Sky, Montana

July 31, 1989

In my life, I set for myself a goal that I knew I would never be able to achieve....`ity goal wasto work for world democracy--real democracy, not just make believe democracy- -economicdemocracy, cultural democracy, as well as political democracy. There is still no place in theworld where I have seen the kind of democracy I would like to see....Anything worth doing takesa lifetime to do....One of the jobs I enjoy most is to create lizfie islands of decency, places forpeople to be human. You get enough of them, you know, and somehow they spread....I wouldlike to judge myself not by what I have done but by what I have ht!ped other people to learn todo. That would be my criteria of a successful life.

Social Environment and Adult Learning

Papers from an Institute Sponsored byThe Center for Adult Learning Research

Montana State UniversityBozeman, Montana

Funded byThe W. K. Kellogg Foundation

EditorsRobert A. Fellenz

Gary J. Conti

May--1990Center For Adult Learning Research

Montana State UniversityBozeman, Montana

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@ Kellogg Center for Adult Learning ResearchMontana State University

All Rights Reserved1990

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Table of Contents

ForewordRobert A. Fellenz and Gary J. Conti v

Bill Moyers' Journal: An Interview with Myles Horton1Bill Moyers

Myles Horton's Views on Learning in the Social Environiaent9Myles Horton

Radic:11 Pedagogy: Constructing an Arch of Social Dreaming anda Doorway to HopePeter McLaren 19

Learning in the Social Environment: A Crow PerspectiveJanine Pease-Windy Boy 37

From an Adult Educator's PerspectiveLloyd Korhonen and Chere Coggins Gibson 41

The Arch of Social Dreaming: Teaching Radical Pedagogy Underthe Sign of PostmodernityPeter McLaren

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Foreword

A short time before he died Myles Hortonspent a week in Montana with a group ofadult education professors. He reminiscedabout his life and about what he had learnedfrom people. Fifty-seven years of dedicatedwork at the Highlander Center constantlystruggling to bi ing democracy to the worldwas a life that had brought him satisfaction,even though his great goal of democracy forall remained 2 hope for the future. It is bet-ter, he said, to build toward a future ideal forhuman living than to be side-tracked by moreattainable but less meaningful goals. It wasthis enthusiasm, this trust in people thatmarked so many aspects his life as a greatadult educator.

Horton confessed that when he firststarted the Highlander Center he had to "goback to school with the people and learn fromthem." Schooling had given him many answersto problems that people didn't have but noanswers to problems they did have. "So westarted learning how people react; we learnedfrom them, how they learned." This lesson oflearning from the people was a lesson welllearned for it remained one of the dominantcharacteristics of the Highlander Center.People gathered there not to be given answersto their problems but to share their insightsand to learn together how to bring freedomand justice to the people of their com-munities. This "circle of learners' apprc .ch, asMyles liked to call it, also necessitated a re-examination of the role of the teacher. "I al-ways titought my role was to pose questionsand help people examine what they alreadyknew. By questions, you help people to knowwhat they already know but don't know theyknow."

The occasion of Myles Horton's visit toMontana was the third annual summer in-stitute for adult educators sponsored by theKellogg Center for Adult Learning Research.The Center, the summer institute, and thispublication were all funded through a grantfrom the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, an or-

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ganization gratefully acknowledge for its long-term support of continuing education. Thetheme of the 1989 Institute was "Adult Learn-ing in the Social Environment " A growingrealization of the major emphasis given to theeffect of cognitive psychology on adult learn-ing and the concomitant neglect of the impactof the social environment on learning led in-stitute organizers to invite Myles Horton,Peter McLaren, and Janine Pease-Windy Boyto address the assembled adult educators. Thepurpose of this monograph is to present thethoughts and suggestions of these individualsto the field of adult education with the hopethat they will inspire greater attention to theimpact of the social environment on adultlearning.

Peter McLaren describes himself as acritical pedagogist whose message "representsan approach to schooling that is committed tothe imperatives of empowering students andtransforming the larger social order in the in-terests of justice and equality" (McLaren,1989, Life in Schools, Preface). He is As-sociate Professor of Educational Leadershipat the School of Education for Allied Profes-sions, Miami University of Ohio. Peter is alsoAssociate Director, with Henty Giroux, of theCenter for Education and Cultural Studies atMiami University. His two papers aretheoretical in nature and share some perspec-tives on social context from the viewpoint ofan educator working within the critical educa-tional tradition.

Janine Pease-Windy Boy is President ofLittle Big Horn Community College locatedon the reservation of the Crow Indians ofMontana. Such tribally controlled collegeshave the two-fold mission of preserving theirNative American cultures and of providingmodern educational opportunities for mem-bers of their tribes. Janine's reflections on theprocess the Crow Indians went through to in-tegrate their culture into a modern education-al institution provide exceptional insight intothis process of integrating culture into educa-

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tion. Her paper also causes one to re-examinehow accepted standards of a dominant societycan interfere with the learning of thosebelonging to minority groups.

The reactions of two participants in theinstitute are also included. Lloyd Korhonenand Chere Coggins Gibson, professors ofadult education at the University of Ok-lahoma and the University of Wisconsinrespectively, shared their immediate reactionsto the McLaren and Windy Boy presentationsand thus initiated several days of in-depth dis-cussions among participants regarding variousaspects of learning and the social environ-ment.

While this brief publication presents someinsights into adult learning in the social en-vironment, our hope is, as Myles Hortonwould say, that it will raise more questionsthan it provides answers. How does the socialenvironment affect the way adults perceivethe world, solve problems, remember the past,interpret their experiences, or hope in the fu-ture? How do interpersonal relationshipschange learning processes? What aspects ofour culture most dominate our visions of

truth, of goodness, or of reality? How do weintegrate critical theory with the issues andproblems of real-life learning? How do we, aseducators, compete with today's "imagemakers"? How is adult education a socialreform movement? Or the Myles Hortonchallenge: How do we bring real democracy--cultural democracy, economic democracy, aswell as political democracy to all people?

Such questions are complex, and theiranswers may well call for radical changes ineducational structures. But the challenge ofunderstanding the effect of the social environ-ment on learning and of helping othersbenefit from this knowledge is a challengethat has been faced by other adult educators.In reflecting on a lifetime of struggling withsuch issues, Myles Horton concluded: "I feelthat I would like to judge myself not by what Ihave done but by what I have helped otherpeople to learn to do. That would be mycriteria Gf a successful life."

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Robert A. FellenzGary J. Conti

Bill Moyers' Journal: An Interview with Myles Horton

Bill Moyers

The following are excerpts from an in-terview of Myles Horton by Bill Moyers.The entire two-part interview was ailed onPBS on June 5 and June 11, 1981, under thetitle of The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly:An Interview with Myles Horton. It is

reproduced here with the gracious permis-sion of Bill Moyers and the AppalachianJournal. The full text of the interview can befound in Volume 9, Number 4 of the 1983issue of the Appalachian Journal.

This edited version of the int3rview wasshown to the participants at the 1989 Kel-logg Summer Institute, Following this 30-minute video, Myles Horton made com-ments and responded to questions from theparticipants at the institute. Those remarksare in the following chapter.

(The broadcasted interview opens with thefollowing comirwts by Bill Moyers.) Fewpeople I know have seen as much change inthe American South, or helped to bring itabout, as Myles Horton. He's been beaten up,locked up, put upon, and railed against byracists, toughs, demagogues, and governors.But for almost 50 years now, he has gone onwith his special kind of teaching-- helpingpeople to discover within themselves thecourage and ability to confront reality andchange it. Myles Horton came to his missionfrom a childhood among the mountain peopleof Appalachia, a land rich in beazity but acolony of poverty. "Nothing will change," saidHorton to himself, "until we change-- until wethrow off our dependence and act for oursel-ves." So in 1932, in the mountains west ofChattanooga, in one of America's poorestcounties, Myles Horton founded the High-lander Folk School, dedicated to the beliefthat poor working-class people-- adults--couldlearn to take charge of their lives and cir-cumstance. At first he ran workshops to '.rainorganizers for the CIO. Jim Crow laws for-bade integration, but Horton invited blacks:ind whites alike, and Highlander become one

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of the few places in the South where the tworaces could meet under the same roof. In theearly 1950's, Horton turned the emphasis ofhis workshops from union organizing to civilrights. Highlander was now principal gather-ing place of the moving forces of the blackrevolution. Martin Luther King came; so didRosa Pai.ks, Andrew Young, Julian Bond,Stokely Carmichael, and scores of unsung footsoldiers in the long march of Southern blackstoward equality. The state tried to close itdown; the Klan harassed it; state troopersraided it. But Highlander seemed indestruc-tible, and so did Myles Horton. He's 75 now,and his school, from which he has steppedaside as leader in favor of younger colleagues,is preparing to celebrate its 50th anniversarythis year. I thought it a good t ie to pay avisit to Myles Horton at Highlander, now lo-cated on a farm near Knoxville.

Moyers: Myles, you've upset a lot ofpeople down here over the years. The MillOwner said that Highlander was about theboldest, the most insulting thing in an Anglo-Saxon South that has yet been done; oneGeorgia governor said that you were a can-cerous group spreading throughout the South;the state of Tennessee closed you down, con-fiscated your property, sold it at auction; theKu Klux Klan beat up your staff and burnedyour buildings; a United States senator hadyou ejected from his hearings. Now what's anice man like you doing upsetting all thosepeople?

Horton: Well, I don't try to upset people. Itry to help people grow and be creative, andfulfill themselves as people. And in theprocess of doing that, they upset a lot otpeople.

Moyers: What do you mean?Horton: Well, they start doing things, as-

serting their rights, for example, workingpeople asserting their rights to have a union,asserting their rights to be treated decently,people in the mountains assert their rights to

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be left alone to live their own way if they wantto without having the absentee landownersrun them out of their holdings, their neritage.And we try to help people, you know, standup against this kind of thing. We try to helppeople become empowered so they themsel-ves can do things, and that's very irritating.One of thc reasons they confiscated High-lander was because the charge was made bythe governor of Georgia that this cancerousgrowth was spreading over the South and thatthe civil rights movemert came out of High-lander. And only a, you know, only a racistwhite person could int ke that assumption thatsome white people had to be doing that kindof thing. So they assumed that since a lot ofthe black had been at Highlander long beforethe civil rights movement and during the civilrights movementblacks couldn't do anythingtemselves, so it had to be some white people.So they got four or five of the governorstogether and closed Highlander. And it wasonly after they closed it they found out thatthey, you know, didn't have anything with theCivil Riglts movement, but the blacks weredoing the civil rights movement.

Moyers: I think that's what really upset alot of people.

Horton: And they got upset, I think, whorlthey found out they couldn'tthey couldn tstop it by confiscating Highlander. When theyfirst came, they came and padlocked thebuilding, and some of the news reporters thatwere there, said "What are you laughingabout?" I was standing outside laughing, andthey took a picture of me standing therelaughing. And the sheriff padlocked the buLld-ing. I said, "My friend here, you know, hethinks he's padlocking Highlander," and, but Isaid, you know, "Highlander is an idea--youcan't padlock an idea."

Moyers: You say Highlander is an idea.What's the idea?

aorton: Well, we have a philosophy, thatwe know, that we can identify. We believethat--we believe in people. Our loyalty is topeople, not institutions, structures. And we tryto translate that belief and trust in people'sability to learn in ) facilitating peoples' learn-ing. Now you don't teach people things, since

they're adults; you help them learn. And in-sofar as you learn how people learn, you canhelp. And that's a powerful dynamic force,when you realize that people themselves inthese hollows, and these factories and thesemines, you know, can take much more controlof their lives than they themselves realize.

Moyers: How does it work, I mean, howdo you teach--how do yot., help people learnsomething like that?

Horton: Well, first thing you have toclarify is thatyou have to understand, youhave to know that people--working people,common people, the uncommon commonpeople--they're the most uncommon people inthe world, the common people-have mainly apast, they're adults. Unlike childrei . in theregular schoo1 system, who have practically nopast and are told by the schools that theirpresent isn't worth anything, are taught, youknow, they are taught about the future,they're prepared for the future. Adults are--come out of the past with their experiences.So you run a program at Highlander based ontheir experktnces, their experiences in learn-ingfrc: - which they may not have learnedvery much, because they haven't learned howto analyze it, bui it's there, and the grist forthe mill is there. And our job is to help themunderstand that they can analyze their ex-periences and build on those experiences, andmaybe transform those experiences, even.Then they have a power that they're comfort-able with. See people--first I should tell youthat not only are people adults with a past,with experiences, but they are leaders in theircommunities. I don't mean official leaders,but grass-roots leaders.

Moyers: You mean, not bankers and--Horton: No, they are the people in the

people's organizations, like labor unions orcommunity orglizations of various kinds.Well, those people come and we say, "Okay,what are your experiences that related to thistopic--not all your experiences, but your ex-periences that relate to this topic?" Now theyhadn't considered those experiences too im-portantthey hadn't thought of them beingvery important. We say, this is very importantbecause that's the curriculum, that's the build-

ing stones that we're going to use here. Andit's something you can take back with you be-cause you, you know, you brought it here. Sowe start out--

Moyers: They didn't know it, when theygot there.

Horton: They don't--they hadn't learnedto analyze those experiences so they couldlearn from them. You know, people say youlearn from experiences--you only lf rn fromexperiences that you learn from, yJu know.That's not all experiences. And we try to helpthem learn from their experiences in such away that when they go back they'll continue tolearn. But we have to also learn from our ex-periencm And one of the things we have todo in addition to what they have to do, is tolearn how to relate our experiences to theirs.And you ;lo that by analogy, you know, you doit by storytelling. You don't get up and say,"Look here are some Pads we want to dumpon you." We say, "Well, you might considerthis. Now this happened to somebody kind oflike you in a different situation." So we getthem doing the same thing with each other.You get peer teaching going, where everybodythat's in the circle is part of a peer teach:4group.

Moyers: What's radical about that? Whatwas radical about that back in 1930?

Horton: Well, it's terribly radical, becauseeducation, it goes against what education issupposed--Education is supposed to preparepeople to live in whatever system the educa-tional school system is about. Like in our sys-tem it's to prepare people to live undercapitalism and be--you know, fit into that sys-tem. In the Soviet Union, it's to preparepeople to live in that system, and fit in thatsystem. And that's what education, officialeducation is all about, to prepare people to fitinto the system, and support the system.

Moyers: And Highlander?Horton: And turn them--really, it's to turn

them into nuts and bolts to keep the systemtogether, you see, whatever kind of system itis. Highlander says, No. You can't use peoplethat way. People are, you know, creative,you've got to allow them to do a lot of thingsthat don't fit any kind of systems, and you've

got to have a lot of deviations, to have a lot ofpluralism. We believe in people keeping a lotcf their old custom:: and adding new ones.And we saki, tha s what enriches life. Sowe're going to focus on that, and there's a lotof dynamics and a lot of power in that, thatscares people. When people in the South,before the civil rights were started, began tofeel that they could do something, in spite ofthe laws, in spite of tradition, and starteddoing it, then you know, all hell broke loose.We had that experience earlier, in the '30's.We started back in the Depression, in thepre-industrial union movement in thiscountry, before the CIO was started. Andmany of our students who had been at High-lander before, you know, became leaders inthe unions in the early days when it wasrough. When we first started organizing it wasillegal to have a picket line, and a lot of ouractivities were illegal. Highlander itself was il-legal up until about four years ago. We defiedthe state law on segregation in public--inprivate schools, which stayed on the bookslong after the public schools were integrated.You know, we had to work that way to live upto our principles. So, to get off the subject alittle bit, but the people have all this power,but it's suppressed by the public school systemand by the institutions. We, having loyalty tothe people and not the institutions, you knew,always try to throw our weight on the side ofthe people, and heir them do things that areright. Now you can't get people to do some-.thing they think is wrong. You know, youcan't--you know, people say Highlander is apropaganda necI, you get all these ideas inpeople's heads and they go out and do thingsthey learned at Highlander, well, you know,that's not the way things are.

Moyers: They were in their mine's.Horton: They were in their minds, they're

seeds. What you do, you develop those seeds.They're crusted over, you know, with all kindsof things and the people don't even knowthey're there. We know they're there, we digfor them, and we cuRivate those seeds. Wehelp prepare the ground for them to grow,and we help people learn, they can learn fromeach other, that they're stronger. In-

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dividualism is enhanced by being part of agroup, you know, individuality, I guess, wouldbe a better way of saying it, is enhanced bybeing part of a group, instead of telling peoplethey should go it alone, they should be com-petitive, ttey should, you know; compete withtheir fellow man. We say, work togother, andyou'll be a better person.

Moyers: Look, Myles, if everyone made aprivate heresy out of challenging tlie system,how would society function?

Horton: I believe in laws, but I know tliatthe only way that laws can have any meaning,they have to be just laws. For just iaws tohave a meaning, and to have a society of laws,you've got to challenge unjust laws. This con-cept was provided for by an anaendment tothe Constitution, you know, our trials wereyou can appeal--this L not as kind of outsidereality as it seems to people.

Moyers: You think that's what Jeffersonmight have meant when he said that everygeneration ought to entertain the pc,ssibilityof its own revolution?

Horton: That's right, that's right. I'vequoted that many times, I've said, you know, Istarted out I thought there ought to be arevolution in this country, I mean a revolutionthat, you know, is run democratically, becauseI believe in democracy--we don't have it, andnone of the countries that I know of and Iknow practically all of them--

Moyers: We don't have it? We hear allthese salutes to democracy on Inaugural Dayand--

Horton: No, we don't have it. We havesome trimmings of democracy. We have someof--like the parliament electoral system, whichmight have worked in the early days when youhad a handful of people, but, you know,people don't have anything to say about thepeople they elext today, you know that. That'swhy only a small percentage of people vote.They know that the timing is set up-it's so--too far away from them. We have to really ex-amine all of our structures in this country, tomake them more democratic. You can't havedemocracy in the workplace, when the systemis run for the benefit or the profit of some-body instead of for the benefit of all the

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people. You know, so we can't have economicdemocracy under a profit taking system, wecan't have political eemocracy when we don'thave some kind of decentralization that bringsgovernment closer to the people. That soundslike Reagan, you know, but you do have tohave--you do have to break the system downto where people could have more say abouttheir own lives. I mean, that's efficient, that'smore creative. I believe in a kind of pluralisticsort of society. We've never--no country, nosystem has to my mind, you know, thought tooseriously about how you do this, and I thinkit's one of the things we ought to be about inthis country.

Moyers: But tell me specifically, Myles,what did you do le these workers when theycame here in the early days?

Horton: Okay. In the first place, you hadto have their confidence, because by helpingthem with their problems, like I said earlier,you had to learn from people, you had to startwInre they were and deal with their problems.And we say, "Look. Who's been telling youwhat to do--teachers, preachers: politicians--and did it work? Was it good ad-ice, did itwork for you? I don't know, but you wouldn'tbe here, if that work,RI. Because you've hadplenty of people telling you what to do. Sowe're not going to do that, we're not going tocompound that. We're going to try somethingelse--we're going to try to build on what youknow, and your experiences, and help you un-derstand that your neighbors have some ex-periences, and that ottt:r people in anotherplace, maybe in another country, have someexperiene!.s that relate tu this problem. MI ofthat are related, died in with your experien-ces. I remember one fellow that came fromover here in the mountains, ur near theNorth Carolina line. He said, "When I camehere, I had one little piece of pie that had allthe answers. Pie has all of the answers," hesaid, "I hae a little slice of that pie. And joehere, he had a little slice, somebody else hada slice, and he e.,ntributed to that slice. Sonow we got the whole pie and now I knoweverything, I got the whole pie, and I'm goingto take the whole pie back home instead ofmy little slice." Well, he was proud of the fact

that he contributed a slice, yov know, hedidn't then just learn from other people. Wellthat's what happens.

Moyers: You didn't--Horton: But in addition to getting that in-

formation, you got to get motivation. Andmotivation comes from within, not from out-side in something, you don't motivate some-body, you help them to learn to motivatethemselves. So what you do is try to getpeople to have more confidence in themselvesand their peers, and to understand it's up tothem, there's nobody else can do it.

Moyers: Was it a coincidence that thetrigger of all this, Rosa Parks on the bus, hap-pened two months after she was at High-lander? Was that just a coincidence?

Horton: No, not according to Rosa. Now Inever tried to tell what happened at High-lander, just let the people it happens to, tell.Rosa said that the connection between thosetwo things was that at Highlander it was thefirst time in her life she had met white peopleshe could trust, fully trust. And what Rosa--Rosa had known some wonderful whitepeople who were full of social equality and--but, what she was saying was she had neverbeen in a place where you could demonstrateby everything that happened that you believein full social equality. You know, that High-lander was--anywhere you went, you know, itwaseverybody was equal. There was no, youknow, that was no way--I always said we weretoo small and too poor to discriminate. Wedidn't have any facilities for discrimination.There was no way .:,,,.. could have done it if wewanted to, you know. So you know, Rosa justsaw a total way of living she'd never seenbefore, she just couldn't believe that would,you know, happen. She didn't go back withany plans or anything, she went back with adifferent spirit.

Horton: One of the ideas that we had atthe beginning of Highlander was that we hadto use cultural activities as part of theprogram, because people need not just intel-lectual discussion, or even--

Moyers: Politics--Horton: Actionlearning from action and

doing it, but they also need something to, you

know, to cultivate the spirit and soul. And it'sobvious that drama and dance and music andthings like that would contribute--and art, dif-ferent kinds. Well, we were really fortunate inthat when Zilphia, my wife, came to High-lander, she was a trained musician, fromArkansas, and, you know, had a backgroundof--a miner's background, her father was acoal miner. But she also had, you know, musi-cal training. But the musical training, but, youknow, was a classical kind you get in ayouknow, going to college and so on. So she--butshe soon, you know, started singing laborsongs and folk songs and learned to play theguitar and accordion--she played the piano--and used her music to help fit into theprogram. The same time she was doing it, shewas a good teacher. She was a very goodteacher, like in training shop stewards on howto take up grievances, and the Highlander wayof doing it, mot just technically, but in rallyingthe people behind you. And she'd use dramaas part of her way of teaching, so shedeveloped a drama program lloag with themusic program. So she 11%u two kinds ofprograms going.

Moyers: Do you rememner that song thatJohn Hancock of the tenant farmers taughtZilphia? Called "No More Mournin'?"

Horton: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's abeautiful song. I was teaching in a school forsharecroppers, tenant farmers out in LittleRock, Arkansas, in a school that Claude Wil-liams ran. And the police were, you know,harassing us, because had some whites andblacks together there. And every time thepolice would come, why, I would sit down ;nthe audience like a white person being enter-tained, and the blacks would start leadingsinging. Ind John Hancock was the--becomethe star, because he could always make upsongs if we'd run out of songs. And that's thepart--I brought that back to Zilphia, I col-lected that.

Moyers: Do you remember that song?Horton: Yeah, I can't remember the

words, now, but I remember the--Moyers: No more mourning/No more

mourning/No more mourning afterawhile/And before--

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Horton: Before I'll be a slave/I'll beburied in my gave/And go home--

Moyers: Leadbelly was here, too, wasn'the? He wrote a song that was going to beused to raise money for Highlander, that be-came a classic.

Horton: Yeah.Moyers: You remember that one?Horton: Yeah, Leadbelly was never at

Highlander. He always wanted to come toHighlander, but he did three or four benefitconcerts for Highlander.

Moyers: But he did write that song.Horton: Oh yeah, he did a :ot of songs, a

lot of music. Zilphia used .i play with him,they'd play together. He said she's the onlywhite woman could play, you know, blackmusic, that he ever saw. And he'd get her toplay with him any time she was around. She'dget on the piano and play with him.

Moyers: "Bourgeois Blues" was--Horton: And she'd--he'd sung the--We

were at a party, a fund raising party, in NewYork, and--well, that was back when we hadrespectable sort of sponsors like Mrs.Roosevelt and all the big people in--

Moyers: Eleanor Roosevelt?Horton: Eleanor Roosevek. Well, she was

at Highlander twice; she was a great sup-porter _A Highlander. But at that time shehelped us, used her influence to get a name--abunch of name people together there, andLeadbelly was the performer at that place.And when we were getting ready to put on aprogram, Zilphia and Leadbelly were backplaying backstage--playing, just having fun,and he said he wanted to try this song out onher. He'd just been working on it, but he triedto get it done for that occasion, he wanted touse it for that occasion, but he hadn't finishedit. And- -so she liked it so well, she said goahead and use it anyway. She persuaded himto sing it even though he wasn't quite satisfiedwith it. So that was the beginning of "Bour-geois Blues"--that was the first time it wasever sung.

Moyers: There is a story that a couple ofstriking tobacco workers from Charleston,South Carolina, brought your wife Zilphia asong which she and Pete Seeger then turned

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into what has become one of the most famoushjmns of the civil rights movement, "We ShallOvercome. Is that a true story?

Horton: Well, it's almost. There was astrike of tobacco workers, working in thetobacco plant in Charleston, South Carolina,and we always encouraged students to bringsongs that they had written or used on a pick-et line, and just like Guy (Carawan) doestoday, we still do the same thing here now.And that song was a kind of rough-hewn songthat they'd gotten from a black hymnal; theblacks had sung it, and the white people hadpicked it up--they had tried to make a strikesong out of it. And it was a song that Zilphiasaid it wasn't singable, it was too hard to sing.So she sat down at the piano like she alwaysdid with people like that, and they worked outthe music so it'd be simpler. She used to saythere was singable songs, and then there wassongs like 'The Star-Spangled Banner," whichnobody should sing. You know, she thoughtsongs should be eisy to sing. So that wasrevised, and that became a very popular songthat week. People liked it after they hadsimplified it a little bit.

For ten years it was just a Highlandersong, and then the labor movement startedusing it a little bit more, and then it dieddown, and just kind of stayed in the High-lander domain. And then Guy Carawan, whois in charge of music here now, taught thatsong, which is a black peoples' song, to a lotof his people in SNCC, and later on did it forthe Southern Christian Leadership Con-ference, and it kind of--the song came back tothe people where it originated from, and thenit became a popular song again in the civilrights movement, and now as you know it'ssung around the world. It's everywhere.

Moyers: How do you assess its impact onour times?

Horton: Oh Lord, it's no--there's no onesong that I know of that is still, you know, yousee the Irish scrapping, you see people inChile, they use it in Chile, it was used inCuba, it's used in, it's sung in China, all theschools sing it h. China--it's used everywhere.I don't know of any song of that kind that isso widespread.

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Moyers: Well, it symbolized, didn't it, yourown transformation from the union movementto civil rights?

Horton: Yeah. Some people tried todescribe Highlander, they said Highlanderwas just a series of different schools, youknow, it was a community school, we werepoverty, you know, a depression school, wewere an industrial union school, a CIO school,we were a farmer labor school, we were a civilrights school, we were Appalachial--that's oneway to describe it, because you have to, youknow, break things up to describe them. Butto me, it's vety inaccurate. Highlander has justbee,' one school all the way through, we werejust doing the same thing with differentgroups of people. We try to empower people.We're using these different periods of interestin the South to--as a means of educatingpeople to take more control of their ownlives. And although the subject matter differs,the approach differs, the purpose is the same.We use the same methods that I describedearlier, and the same purpose--the purpose isto help people become so empowered thatthey can begin to have something to do withtheir lives. And you can't do it with largenumbers of people.

Moyers: Is that why you've stayed smalland--

Horton: Yeah. Well, see, the reason is--Iknew that intellectually, and I said Highlanderis--I never want to be big, because I alwayswant to deal with 20 or 30 people at a time,because that seems to be the n.aximum youcan deal with effectively. And I don't want tohave a lot of branches, I just want to be small.And whatever influence you have, developingpeople with a multiplication influence. Theymultiply, that's where you get your, you know,your two cents' worth--you multiply people,you deal with leaders who multiply themsel-ves. Then you have an outreach. You don't domass education, so you don't need to dealwith a lot of people at a time, because that'snot the way you get your Brownie points builtup. It's how many people are influenced.That's done best by taking the people who canmultiply themselves.

Moyers: I'll tell you something that in

looking back over your life, has helped me.And it's what you discovered about how muchconflict is in the lives of poor people, and howoften only conflict is the way the way they canresolve their problems. You know, well-edu-cated middle--

Horton: That's a very hard thing to ex-plain to my nonviolent, pacifist friends. Theysay, you know, of course you'd always adviseagainst violence. And I say, no, I said, High-lander--the people that Highlander deals withlive a life of violence, and this violence takesa lot of forms. Not just the physical violence,but the violence of starvation, the violence ofdepriving people of education, the violence ofbeing--you know, of oppression of variouskinds. All those are forms of violence. Soyou'd have to choose a lesser violence always,never between--Our choice at Highlander wasseldom between violence and nonviolence--itwas between the lesser forms of violence. Wehad a discussion some of us, some youngpeople that came down from the East duringthe big summer in Mississippi, you know, in--when was it, '64, '65?

Moyers: '64Horton: '64. And we were down at Green-

wood, Mississippi, and they were talkingabout, maybe we'd better talk to the police,maybe--after all, they're not all bad, and we,some of us could talk to the police. And Iremember these kids were just a bunch ofthem from Yale, just had come down. Andthey w\ere going to talk to the policy. So oneof these black guys, said, no, no, no. Andfinally this white guy said to this guy, "Why isit that you don't want to talk to the police?"He says, "When they sees this black head,they hits it." Now, see that's what blacks haveknown all the time, and people don't know.They just hit them because they're black. Killthem, bc-muse they're black.

Moyers: But the point I want to get at, be-cause I think it's essential to you, is that whenmiddle-class, upper-class, well-intentioned,liberal peopie rule out conflict as a way ofpoor people solving their problems, they leavethose poor people powerless, don't they?

Horton: No, they support the status quo.What they're doing is reinforcing the situa-

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don, firming up the situation as it is, and notallowing for any change, and the condition ofthose people will get worse. It'll continue toget worse, because if you don't struggleagainst oppression, oppression moves in onyou. So what they're doing, they're accelerat-ing the rate of oppression on people by notunderstanding it has to be a struggle. A strug-gle is not only, in my point of view, the moralthing to do, but it's a great learning ex-perience. People--thb greatest educationcomes from action, and the greatest action isstruggle for justice. So if you deny people theopportunity to become empowered and edu-cated, deny people the right to be free, youknow, to be people, and they all do it in thename of law and order.

Moyers: You do know fear?Horton: Oh yes, I know fear. You didn't

survive--I wouldn't have been here today if Ididn't know fear. If you don't know fear, it'sjust like having the sense of touch, so whenyou burn your finger, you know, it hurts. Ifyou didn't have that, you'd burn your fingeroff. You know, you wouldn't--or you put yourhand in the buzz saw, you wouldn't know itbut you'd be looking off when you cut it off. If

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you don't know fear, in this kind of business,when you're playing on the cutting edge of so-cial change, and conflict situations, wherethere--you know, where the sides are lined up,and there's violence all the time, you betterlea a to know it.

Moyers: Well, given that reality, why didyou think that a bunch of teachers at aseclusive place like this could identify withmen in circumstances as painful z.,:s those?

Horton: Okay, now, I believe that it hadto be done. And I was determined to try to dort. And I was determined to identify, to be--have these people perceive that I hadsolidarity with them. I knew that had to be.

Moyers: Here you were Union Theologi-cal Seminary, Chicago University--

Horton: A year ago up in West Virginiathey got to arguing about people who hadcome down, these experts would come in fromthese universities, and somebody says, "Well,you know, your friend Myles Horton is one ofthem." "The hell he is," he says, "he's neverbeen to school. We know him." You know?

Moyers: (laughs) But why did you think--Horton: So I knew it was a handicap, but I

thought I could overcome it somehow.

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Myles Horton's Views on Learning in the Social Environment

Myles Horton

At the 1939 Kellogg Summer Instituteon Learning in the Social Environment, theparticipants watched a 30-minute excerptfrom The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly:An Interview with Myles Horton by BillMoyers. Following this viming, Myles Hor-ton commented on his vie.w of karning andrczponded to the following questions fromthe group.

Horton's Comments

The Appalachian Journal of Aging andKnowledge wanted to publish an article on mywork at Highlander. They asked for 50 pic-tures of me, and I said that was all rightproviding they put in one picture that Iselected. The picture I sensibl; put in was apicture of iii sleeping in front of the capitolin Washington during the poor people's cam-paign. I called it a portrait of Horton in ac-tion.

Some people have seen me limpingaround here. My leg turns to well-cookedspaghetti once in a while when I'm wai#.ingaround. It hasn't always been that way. In fact,I am having a hard time practicing what Iha 7e been preaching all my life in terns ofthe interdependence of people. I'm having ahard time justifying the fact that I am havingproblems. Recently while in Nicaragua, wewere going down to demonstrate in front ofthe American Embassy. Someone said "Don'tyou want to get a cab?" I said, "No, I want towalk along so I can greet the people. I can getthere all right." My friend said, "Yes, but youseem to have a problem with your knee." Itlooks like I am dying from the bottom up. If Ihad a choice, I would rather die from the bot-tom ur than the top down. I would ratherknow where I am going and not be able to getthere, than be able to get there and not knowwhere I am going.

In my life, I set for myself a goal that Iknew I would never be able to achieve. I don'tthink limited goals are really helpful. Theycan be a step toward your goals, and steps are

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wonderful to tell whether you are makingprogress or hot. But they can also make itseem that our goal is something that is alwaysgetting further and further away. My goal wasto work for world democracy--real democracy,not iust mah.e believe democracy--economicdemocracy, cultural democracy, as well aspolitical democracy. There is still no place inthe world where I have seen the kind ofdemocracy I would like to see. I suppose if Ihad the opportunity to see some of the thingsI dream of today, they wouldn't took toogood. I would want to see something beyondthat. It is like climbing a mountain. When youget to the top of the mountain, you see a big-ger mountain and go on. I think that is greatto have that kind of goals. My goal is fordemocracy. I am not disappointed that I havenot been able to see a world of democracy.

Another thought I had was that anythingworth doing takes a lifetime to do. Goalsshorter than that you should not get too in-volved in. Any kind of limited reform, itseems to me, would reinforce the system,rather than change it. That s just structuralreform, and that does not change things. I amnot unhappy about my life journey because Ibelieve that you build a future as you goalong; what you do today is a building blockfor the future. The future is not somethingthat you have later on; it is something thatyou build now. The way you do things todaydetermines the future you will have. I am arevolutionary in my philosophy. I think whenyou accomplish something now, it builds forthe future. That is a revolutionary act. I amvery content to do things that are importanttoday provided they are building in the rightdirection--in a democratic direction. At onetime I said one of the jobs I enjoy most is tocreate little islands of decency, places forpeople to be human. You get enough of them,you know, and somehow they spread. Anykind of education that doesn't multiply itselfand doesn't spread is no good because youhave to have masses of people to bring about

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changc. You have to have the majority of the.people who really know what they are into inorder to bring about fundamental change. Soyou have to have an educational programwhere one of the components is the multi-plication of what you do. Then hopefully therewill be a law of decency, and you won't haveto appeal to laws.

You can build more yourself if you getother people to help you, even though it takesmore time than doing it yourself. It may beeasier to do it yourself, but it is more impor-tant to get other people involved. I feel that Iwould like to judge myself not by what I havedone but by what I have helped other peopleto learn to do. That would be my criteria of asuccessful life.

The other thing that I would like to talkabout is what we call a circle of learners.Those of you who are intrigued withAmerican. Indians know where we go: thatidea. W e wzre aczused one time of having acommunist schoot because we didn't have adesk or pocharn fJr a speaker; we sat aroundand talked and didn't have text books. Ourtext books were the curriculum the peoplebrought with them. But some couldn't under-stand that; it didn't fit their definition of aschool. That didn't bother us, but we did careabout our status as a tax-exempt institution.So they kept bringing up the idea of this circlebeing a Red invention. I went along withthem. I said, "Yes, you are right there." I justlet them talk to build up to that point. FinallyI said, "Well we got this idea from the NativeReds in our country, not from Russia." OurNative American Indians had the idea longago that groups had to do things, not in-dividuals. They had an educational processwhere groups were involved in the learningprocess. So I want to give them credit for thatidea. (If I gave credit for all my ideas, itwould take all day.)

I don't think there are many new ideasbut only adaptations of ideas. I am hopingthat as we talk a little bit about Highlandersome of you might feel that you could adaptborne of these ideas. Others feel you wouldprobably like to but can't get by with it. Thatis all right with me. I have to make decisions

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Aft.

of what I am going to do; I share with youwhat I learned, and you make decisions ofwhether you want to do anything with it ornot. That is your choice.

Another question was raised about rolesof the educator. That is something I had to doa lot of thinking about. If I were to be a partof this circle, what is my role? Am I going tobe like everybody else, or am I going to belike everybody in some ways and different inother ways? This is how I figured out what Iwas going to do. If people don't think of meas being in solidarity with them, then I am notgoing to have any influence with them. I willbe an outsider trying to tell them what to do.If I am to identify with them, I have to con-tribute on the same basis as everybody else;that is, staying within the sphere of knowledgeof the people. This can extend rapidly in thisprocess, but you can't break that chain fromtheir experience to what you are talkingabout. If you are aware of that and stay withinthose parameters, you can talk just likeanyone else in the group. They can take whatyou say or leave what you say, just like theytake or leave what anyone else has to say.You have to participate because if you just sitthere you are saying that you are not likethem.

You also have another role that has to beexercised with care. I always thought my rolewas to pose questions and help people ex-amine what they already knew. By questions,you help people to know what they alreadyknow but don't know they know. Admittedly, Ihad a wider range of knowledge than anyother one person, though not than the totalgroup. I knew a lot of things going on in theregion, and they only knew their area. So myjob sometimes, in addition to posing questionsand getting th...m to examine contradictions,was to tell them about other people that theydidn't know and to relate things I knew butthey didn't have any way of knowing. Youhave the responsibility to share that part ofyour knowledge with them too. That is how Iresolved my role, and I found if I followed itcarefully, I never had any problems. The bigthing is to stay within the limits of their ex-panding experience. What theyrwere doing at

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Highlander was their experience too, and ithad to be examined as they went along justlike any other experience.

People got ready to leave Highlander andtried to figure out what they had learned fromeach other as part of a group. They then real-ized they had to go back to different situa-tions. There was no effort to try to get anyagreement on what to do and how to do it;everybody had to take what they could use,just as you do here. But we had everybodymake a summary of what they thought theywould do when they went back. I mean rightthe next day they were back doing things be-cause they had evolved into leaders. So theymade a statement about what they would doand had the advantage of the evaluation ofother people right there to discuss their plans.This peer evaluation became a commitment. Iwould tell them, "If you think you are safe andgo home and goof off after you said you weregoing to do this, all these people are going tofind out about it." It is a good way to makepeople remember what they said they weregoing to do and to take responsibility fordoing it. That is another part of that circle oflea rning.

That is not the only thing we do at High-lander to try helping people. For example, theminers in our region finally got strongly or-ganized to protest black lung. We had beenworking with them. We did not play a majorrole, but we knew all the leaders. After theygot pretty well established, the textile workersin the Carolina's found they had a similarproblem in the textile mills. They called itbrown lung. They wanted to organize andasked us if we would help them. When wesaid yes, they thought we would tell them howto do it. Well we did, but in a way they didn'texpect. We brought in the people from theblack lung association--some of the victims,the doctors who pioneered the treatment, andthe president of the black lung association--and they were the teachers. They shared withthe people what they had learned. They spokeof the political problems they had, problemswith the medical association, and so on. Theylearned from peers or as close to peers as youcan get. It was peer learning they learned

from those who they identified with and whohad not forgotten how they learned. Itworked. They went back and within a yearthey were organized. That is another way ofempowering the people.

The last two years we have done a lot ofwhat we call participatory research. Once wedidn't have a name for it, but now it is an in-ternational organization. People usually thinkof that as a simple situation where people re-search their own problems, but it can be usedin any situation. For example, everybody knewthat Appalachia was in absentee ownership.Nobody knew how it was done or who ownedthe region, so we didn't have the evidence toknow exactly who owned which land. Thesigns on the mines didn't mean anything. Theynamed a subsidiary of a subsidiary or theyused front people. So instead of us doing a re-search project and saying here is information,we decided to use that project as an em-powering program. We empowered people todo their own research. They asked the ques-tions and we said here is how you get toanswer the questions. We brought the peopletogether from states for some training aboutresearch. They went back and did a studywhich became the biggest land study ti..'t hasever been done in the United States. Over100 peopie were involved in the processbefore they got through. They collected infor-mation and in the process of collecting itlearned how to do other kinds of research.They started usivg the process for otherthings even before they got through the landstudy.

I remember one county in Kentuckywhere the ohool board said they had nomoney for what the people wanted. They wentin and got the records; they analyzed therecords and said, "Here is the money." Before,they would not have known how. So they usedthe process on organizations; they changedlaws. One successful group in Kentuckystudied the practice where owners of mineralrights would come in and tear up whole farmsin explorations. Well, they got a law passedout of that study.

But the land ownership project was sucb amassive thing there came a time when you

lth

had to know more than could he learned inthe short time at Highlander. In fact therewas so much material that the biggest com-puter in Knoxville could not hol i it all. But upto that point, everything was done in a par-ticipatory way by the people themselves. r.was their material being analyzed so they keptcontrol of it. It was studied and summarizedby the University of Kentucky press, but therewas no author's name on it. It belonged to the80 to 100 people that made it all their study.That is a good example of how participatoryresearch can empower people and thosepeople are still in power today. If that projecthad been done for those people, they wouldhave the information but they wouldn't havebeen empowered by someone else's informa-tion. This way it was theirs. Two countypapers published their research data in theirstate, every bit of it. So people had the oppor-tunity not only to use it, but go home with it.

But that will give you an idea of thevariety of methods used at Highlander. Iwould like to answer any questions you haveor would like to get your reactions.

Questions and Answers

It is very clear that you have a genius of visionarid a clear set of intuitions of where you wantto be and how to get there that lets you notneed to articulate what these principals andtheories are. Do you consciously use theory?

When we started, we didn't know anyother way to function except to start withtheory. But it was an abysmal failure. Wecame to the conclusion that all of our theoriesand all of our answers to problems were notrelevant. We had answers to problems peopledidn't have, and no answers to problems theydid have. What we were taught to think of aslearning in school didn't have any application.So we had to take a kind of postgraduatecourse and go back to school with the peopleand learn from them. At that point, wedecided that we would never get anywhere ifwe tried to learn how to teach but what wewould do is try to learn how to learn. Whenwe learned how to learn, then we could helppeople. So we started learning how people

react; we learned from them, how theylearned.

We never went through the formulation ofthcory. That doesn't mean I didn't profit bysome of the theoretical background I had, likesome of t1... concepts I got Li sociology. Ifound them useful, but I didn't find it usefulto talk about them and not apply them. Ifound them useful as a kind of background formy thinking. That's the reason I read a lot,and I still read a lot. I don't try to develop atheory to fit a situation, but I agree that youhave to have theory. If you can start with theexperience of the people, that is the way toget going. People start where they are, notfrom where the teacher or somebody else is.You can't start from where you ain't, youhave to start from where you are.

The trouble we found was we were tryingto make the people start from where we wereas teachers instead of us trying to start wherethey were. It was our obligation to find outwhere they were, and the only way was to askthem or observe them. It is their perceptionof where they are, not our perception ofwhere they are that is important. Our percep-tion of where people are and their perceptionof where they are may be two different things.We see them through our background and ourway of thinking. That is not a safe way to doit. You have got to fird some way to get thepeople to have a voice; then you know whataction to take. We found in the early daysthat we were one of the 11 poorest countiesin the United States according to literacy rate.So a lot of the things we had to do was innonverbal ways of communication. Wecouldn't just ask people some things; we hadto observe them. Sometimes you find outmore about people by watching their kidsthan by watching them. You had to get closeto the situation to listen to their voices too. Inthat we had no training as you can imagine,so we had to work it out ourselves.

We had great ideas about democracy andhow people get together and do things; andthey wanted food tO eat. They were toohungry to think about these things. We had tolearn that. We had to learn a lot of things wedidn't know before. We had to learn that even

though people didn't talk about these grandideas, wonderful things like brotherhood andsisterhood, they had them anyway. They didn'tsay it in words but they had it. I have heard itsaid that poor people focus just on materialthings, but people live by values. But peoplehave to eat; they have to have a job. That is aproblem today, people can't get a legal job;they create illegal jobs, like our people alwaysdid by moonshining and bootlegging. Butpeople have to find a way to eat whethersociety provides them an opportunity to workor not.

We also found people had to dream, tosay what they wanted, even if they had no wayof expressing it in their lives. I have seen amountain miner, tired, and the kids came tobother him and he gave them a slap. The kidcried, but pretty soon he climbed on hisdaddy's lap and his tired dad was loving. Thekid knew there was another side to his daddy.Somebody who doesn't know people like thatsee that slap and say "Wasn't that cruel?"Well, that w,_s a cruel act, but it wasn't a cruelperson. When you deal with people, you haveto know there is a down side and up side toall of us. People have a decent side and that'sthe side we have to cultivate. People becomewhat they do, and f we get people doingmore of that kind of thing than the other,then they become that kind of person.

Somewhere in our beginnings, we heard alot of nonverbal things about learning andabout people that got us back on the righttrack. We said we id to unlearn much of thestuff that we had learned so there would beroom to learn new things. That doesn't meanyou have to relearn everything. As I said ear-lier, many of the concepts I learned theoreti-cally, I made use of in my thinking but rot inmy talking about them.

Myles, I am curious about the use of music.What do you see as the role of music at High-lander?

My way of approaching the role of musicis culturally. We leave out culture so much ineducation. The whole field of culture, oral his-tory, dancing, singing, story telling, whittling,

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crafts, all that kind of thing that is very real,very much a part of people's lives. Singing isthe most obvious part of that because it is thekind of thing people can hear and pass on."We Shall Overcome" was used at Highlanderas part of a consortium with all kinds of ideas.Zaphia used to tell people to bring their musi-cal instruments. Well, they also told storiesand danced. She would get people together todo skits or 11ay acting or something. Theywould dance and sing and tell stories andjokeseverything was a part of the experience.Singing was integrated with the rest of theculture because it was so integral to the totalprogram. Sometimes we would be working onsome problem like labor history and the bestway to do it was to act it out. If that was theway to do it, that was the way you do it, right?Or sing it out or tell stories about it fromyour own experience. We made culture an in-tegral part of the experience because it has al-ways been a powerful thing.

Music kind of steals the show like "WeShall Overcome". Did you ever see the PBSspecial "We Shall Overcome" last year? It wason our program "We Shall Overcome." It toldof its origin, how it was started, how it wentaround the world. You couldn't do that witheverything else at Highlander; there is no wayyou could share all that with the world. Butmusic gets a bigger play than anything else.The thing is to make culture a part of learn-ing because culture is a part of people's ex-perience.

We were interested in democratizing cul-ture, in having a pluralistic culture. Just as wewouldn't try to get everyone in a workshop to(Nelop the same plans while working on dif-ferent situations, so we don't expect people tohave the same cultural background. Ourrespect for the cultural backgrounds of peopleis part of being a de-nocratic society.

I am curious about what you are curious aboutright now as a result of this week, this past year.What are you thinking about?

I keep learning, you know. I just pick upideas, like a sponge, of everything I can getand then I try to sort it out; not sort out so

much theoretically but tied a lot to action.Oh.; of the problems I have with theory that Ihave no evidence of having any kind of realityis that it is so easy for somebody to writesomething that sounds good, but who doesn'tknow what they are talking about. Then thatis used as the basics of somebody else'sdocumentation. It never had any reality. But ithas become the basis of what could haveworked in practice. There comes a basis oftheorizing about what could help in practice,so I think I would like the people to test outtheir ideas. Ivan Illich, this friend of mine,and I have had a lot of discussions, and whenmy daughter met him she thought he was justan elitist with all these ideas. She was reallyright. Illich had all these ideas, beautiful ideas,exciting ideas, very stimulating ideas. I alwaysfound it very stimulating to be around him.But once I asked him why he didn't test outsome of his theories in Cuernavaca. I said Ialways took advantage of chances to test outmy ideas to see if they worked. You areremembered more for what you do than forwhat you say. So I asked how his ideas will betested. He said, "Well, people like you testthem out." I said "PT ideas of my own I'mgoing to test out. It seems to me the only per-son who will test out your ideas is somebodywho never had ideas of their own." I thinkthere is a problem there somehow about howideas get tested.

My sense is if you are acting in a critical way,then that action is in fact informed by somekind of theory. I think that the problem is whenwe try to separate the two, as if to suggest thateverything we do we have to filter through somekind of explicit theory. In the politics of everydaylife, in fact, is where you see theory and practicecoming together. Mcybe it is important to thinkabout theory not stpaiate from practice butthink about it as praxis.

That is the right idea. Theory and practiceare always intertwined. When I was talkingabout Highlander students, they had a theoryabout what they were going to do; now theywere going back to test it. If they learned howto analyze their experience, then they didn't

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have to come back to Highlander to do it;they could do it at home. But then they had tohave another hypothesis or theory on which tomove next. That goes on all the time. Ifpeople don't know where they are going, theyare not going anywhere. They are just going ina circle chasing their tails. They don't theorizeabout what they are going to do.

Fraxis is the right idea. I think the idea ofpraxis is what we have to think about morethan any other word, that concept of theoryand practice intertwined--you don't knowwhf 2 one begins and the other starts. That iswhy I never speak in terms of overall theories.I think of theory as pointing out the directionand not as a sign the air above our head,saying here it is. It presents a not un-reasonable goal, an ever expanding goal.There needs to be some way to tell if you'reon the road. That is a kind of theorizing; ittells us if we're moving in the right dit,.-tion.For example, it tells us if we're just goingalong with the system and not basing our ac-tion on needs of people. You need some goalposts along the way, and that has to be donetheoretically.

Could yott 'a& about democracy and pluralism.A lot of people would say they are not the samething at all. I would like to hear what you haveto say about that.

Modernistic society is best done underfascism. If we want to have a really monolithicsociety, it should be done under fascism. If wewant a democratic society, we don't know howthat is done, but we do know it isn't done theway fascism is done. People here have askedme if I felt my life *as a failure because cfnever achieving all my goals. I said no, I hadto make a choice between fascism and somesort of democracy; the fascism that existedand some kind of imagined democracy. amvery happy to have spent my life not beingpart of the fascist part of society. Democraticpluralism means that you welcome differen-ces. You are not into efficiency as goal. Thatwill get you no where fast; it is not veg im-portant. I am not interested in efficiency. I aminterested in people living a full life now and

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with hope for a better life for all people lateron. They need to get a little taste of decencyor they are not going to value it. I believe webuild revolutionary change as we go along--aswe contribute toward it. I am very comfort-able with that kind of thing. Our system wasbuilt up when the whole United States had asmaller population than Tennessee. Peoplewere pretty well represented in that systemthen. But as we got larger, the systemremained the same. There was less and lessrepresentation. Look at the last electoralprocess and the choices we had to vote for ornot vote for. Most people decided not to votebecause it would not have made any dif-ference one way or another to have a voice init.

When you get smaller units then peoplecan't know everything that is going on. Thenwe're less efficient, less fascist, sort ofpluralistic. I think that enriches us. Whatwould an orchestra be if you only had a harp?You would hear an awful lot of harp but noth-ing else. You need all of the instruments toplay together. So we need to do thingstogether; not all things but some things. Ithink that is the mistake we make when wethink everybody has to work together oneverything. We have to work together onsome things but on other things we don't haveto work together. That is the kind of world Iwould like to see--sort of inefficient smallnesswhere people really express themselves andsee what they are.

Given the global economy that we are allfacing, it appears to me that one of the majorproblems when it conies to oppressed peopleand a capitalist system is that capitalism seemsto now be a worldwide entity. When it conies todemocratic pluralism where different culturesare indeed toleratg where efficiency is no!ono- the goal, it seems that sort of movementflies in the face of very strong capitalism, andthat if you are not smart or a student in thecapitalist arena, you will be impoverished fromthe economic perspective. Black and hispaniccommunities want the part of capitalist pie butin order to get it, they have to trride off somecultural advantages.

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Two things are important. One is that weno longer have national capitalism; we haveinternational capitalism because capitalism byits very nature necessitates growth. If a com-pany does not grow, it is taken over byanother company that does grow. They haveto grow to make the capitalist system work.Now the United States has outgrown theeconomy here; they have exploited that togive them maximum profit. Now they have tomove into the world economy. There is noquestion that we have world capitalism. Youcan't change a system unless you understandit and know it; so we can't understand it asnational capitalism; that way it doesn't existanymore. We need to see it as worldcapitalism. So, if you are going to bemonolithic, not in the old fascist idea of a na-tional capitalism but a world capitalism, youwill have to have everybody at the same potall over the world, not just in any one nation.So it is even more important to decidewhether we want to play that game and bepart of the world melting pot and to loose ouridentities, to ban the right to express oursel-ves culturally in our own ways.

Your other point is weii tzken bccause ifyou want to make it in the system then youhave to support the system. People have todecide whether they want to wait for the longhaul and change the system, in other words tohave something more than capitalism, or tobuy into it. That :s a tough problem if you aregoing to survive. You might have one foot outof the system, but you have to have at leastone foot in for that is where the jobs are, thatis where your livelihood is. I think there hasto be some sort of compromise there betweenselling your soul and survival.

I personally am against the capitalistic sy-tem and have been all my life. I don't thinkcapitalism can ever be democratic. Socialismmay not be democratic either. We never hadreal socialism. Stalinism wasn't socialism;what they are doing in China is not socialism.So we don't know what socialism could tie.We do know what capitalism is, what it has tobe. Capitalism has to continue to get biggerand has to exploit more people and resources;

it will die if it doesn't. There is nothing per-sonal about that. Charles Wilson, the presi-dent of General Motors, was criticized formoving General Motors plants out of Detroit.They said, "Don't you have any concern forthe people in Detroit?" He said, "I might havea personal feeling, but as chairman of theboard, I don't have any. If I didn't maximizeprofits, I could be sued by the stockholdersfor not doing my job. My job is to maximizeproirts, not to have consideration for others."That is capitalism; it has to be that way. It isthe nature of the system. It seems to me weare going to have to have another kind of sys-tem. I don't know what it is, . ut money can-not be the top and bottom line and the onlypriority to be considered. To change a system,you have to understand it. Last year a groupof teachers from the South came to High-lander to try some workshop discussions. Theywere new at this; they had never gottentogether before. It soon became obvious theydidn't understand the school system. Theythought the school system started with theprincipal of the school they worked for. Theydidn't know that me-t decisions had beenmade before they got to the pr:acipal, and fewof them ever got to be made with theteachers. Because they didn't understaid thesystem, they thought the principal was mean.Like Charles Wilson, he would lose his job ifhe didn't do what he is supposed to do ac-cording to the state. The state would lose themoney if they didn't do what the nationalgovernment wanted them to do. If you don'tunderstand those things, you can't talk aboutchanging these things.

So you have to understand this world sys-tem. I remember doing a paper with HelenLewis about 10 years ago on the role of thirdworld countries. We agreed that what hap-pened to third world countries is going to ef-fect this country more than things here. Rightnow the wheat farmers here in Montana can'tsell their wheat because the banks want tocollect their money from the third worldcountries which don't have the money to buytheir wheat. One guy said, "Twenty years agoyou said we had to understand this system ofnationalist capitalism, and now you say it is

world capitalism. What are you going to talkabout next?" I szid, "I don't run the show. I tryto study and learn about it." Contradictionsare part of the dichotomy of life. We willnever have a situation where there are nocontractienr You can talk about violence and

difgrent forms of violence, but you canchoose a lesser form of violence. We know asagitators, you can't shoot ideas in peoples'heads, you have to have nonviolent activity.Education per se is nonviolent, and anyonetalking about social change has to work non-violently. Right now the miners, who have ahistory of militancy, are in a nonviolent cam-paign; they quote Martin Luther King andtalk about High la,. ''..r. Those ideas are goodto learn and un .stand, but there is stillviolence against them even though they arenonviolent. So you always have contradictions.Contradictions are nothing to avoid; they aresomething to analyze just like a crisis. I al layswelcomed crises because people learn fasterunder strife when they are emotionally in-volved. They thi± of things they neverthought of bsiore. Most people try to resolvea crisis by taking people into the system. Iresolve them by making people mad at thesystem so they can have a smoldering anger atthe system. You could use things like that tohelp people understand. Learning is best in asocia l. movement when there is a struggle forinjustice. When sparks fly, the fire spreads tohelp a lot of people.

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If it is true that caphalism is all pervasive, is itpossible to change the system without causingthe collapse of capitalism? If capitalism collap-ses, what will replace it?

Capitalism, as I understand it and ascapitalists say and do, is a system that has toget bigger and bigger. That has to be changed.We can never have a democratic society aslong as that is the dominant course. There area lot of good things in this country, and a lotof good things elsewhere. We were talkingabout how people analyze those good thingsin their own country and in other countries.For example, since I believe the future isgoing to be built on the present, our freedom

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of speech has to be carried on. Once you havefreedom of speech and the rights of protest,you can never change that. That's one of thecontributions that we have to make to theworld because that is further advanced in thiscountry. People buod on what they know andthey don't know anything about freedom ofspeech. They don't know what you are talkingabout. People in this country do know aboutfreedom of speech even if we only give lipservice to it. And that is a contribution whichwe can make to the world.

My contributkons have been different. Tome, building islands of decency was terriblyimportant from the beginning. I am anupholder of absolute freedom of speech. Thatis why I am upset by President Bush's obses-sion with pushing change in laws aboutdesecrating the flag. I believe in concern forwhat the flag should stand for, but not the flagitself. That is something serious because we'vegot to keep thosl rights, not only keep themhere but share them with qle world. I thinkthere are a lot of good values in America.Most people don't realize that Karl Marx sawcapitalism as the greatest thing that happenedto this country. He thought we had to gothrough that stage of industrial developmentbefc. ~e we could have socialism. You learn towork together in industry. He saw ahead,without know:ng a lot about the third worldpower, that the time would come whencapitalism wouid get so big it would squeezeout everything else. That is what happened.

So I don't care what it is called. That kindof economics never allows for people. Money,as they say, is the bottom line but then thepeople have to come under the bottom line.

Is it possible we have to go to capitalism toreach some kind of socialism? What do you seehappening? Is it possible to think that systemswill go so far and the people will rise up forchange?

I think the people will awaken to thesituation when it gets oppressive enough sothere is no way they can avoid seeing it. Onthe ether hand, I don't think 11), change isbrought about by people who are hopeless, by

I.

people who are so depressed they can't thinkand act. People have to have hope, have tosee the possibility of change and want change.If things are too bad, people will be hopelesr,and thi will despair. For the last 20 years Ihave said we need the third world countries toget us off dead center. I used to work at a sawmill, and as the wheel went around, the armsometimes got stuck in the center andwouldn't go up or down. What we had to dowas sit on it to get it off dead center. I usethat figure to talk about how we are on deadcenter. We're in what we call the organizingstage. WI-tat we have to do is sit on it andsomehow get it off dead tenter. We are notgoing anywhere with these short-range goals;they always tend to reinforce the system.Third-world pressure and our concern withthird-world countries can get us off dead cen-ter and get us moving. We have to understandour inter-relationships in a lot of ways. For ex-ample, we banned DDT in this country butsend it to Latin America where they spray iton fruit and send it back for us to eat.

I think we have to learn from third worldpeople. Not that they are better--they havenot been corrupted; they have not been ex-posed. They may have a fresher look at thingsand may come at it from a different perspec-tive. So I have hope that they may get usmoving and get us thinking. It means we haveto understand that we are part of that world,that we have to work with people throughoutthe world. The president of one of the com-panies in the United States that has had a lotof expansion in the third world countries saidin the New York Times a couple of weeks agothat wc had to change the laws in this countryto make it easier for them to make a profit inother countries. He said they are no longerresponsible to this country; they are systemsof the world.

What does a mean in this internationalizationof capitalism that we now have factory workersin Tennessee who are being portrayed as havingaccomplished a great victory because they haverejected the oppression of this union that wastrying to take it over in the name of Japanese-owned factory?

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I predicted that vote because they had notexperienced the situatim long enough to beindustrial workers. The country people aresome of my relatives and they are hungry;they want good-paying jobs. So they will settlefor anything as long as they get those wages.They don't care about their health right now;

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'''....iy care about debts. Eventually 'they willrealize they have no freedom and they arepart of a machine. It takes some time to be-come unhappy about that, but eventually theywill. nen they will Nvant a union so they willhave a voice. Now they don't want a voice;they nnt to be told. It just takes time.

Radical Pedagogy: Constructing an Arch of Social Dreamingand a Doorway to Hope

Peter McLaren

Dedicated to Myles Horton

I have been invited to speak to you todayon the topic of social context and learning inadult education. I don't specialize in the fieldof adult education, as many of you are aware.Most of the work that I do at the Center forEducation and Cultural Studies is with publicschool teachers and students, prospectiveteachers, university professors, and studentand community activists and it cross-cuts anumbe- of disciplinary domains: the politics ofliteracy, the sociology of education, politicaltheology and the theology of liberation, cur-riculum theory, cultural studies, and criticalsocial theory. Today's talk will no doubtreflect these various theoretical trajectories asI discuss some of my own work, and that ofother educators who place a great deal of em-phasis on social context both in their researchand teaching; and while it is not specificallylocated within the general tradition of adulteducation, I hope my talk today can shedsome modest light on some of the issues andconcerns to which you have invited me tospeak.

I am honored to be on the platform todaywith Myles Horton and Janine Windy Boy,both of whom exemplify in my mind the bestattributes of the critical educator. The work ofMyles and Janine is a shining example of whatI refer to as "critical pedagogy," especially inthe way in which their respective projects ofliberation have managed to actively contestand disrupt the ideological mechanisms andsocial practices of domination which plague somany levels of our society; in Myles' case, rmreferring to the path-breaking work he hasdone with the people of Appalachia and othereconomically disadvantaged groups of theSouth, especially in conjunction with his workin literacy campaigns, antipoverty organiza-tions, labor unions and civil rights movement--all of which began with the Highland FolkSchool at Monteagle, Tennessee in 1932 and

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which continues to this day at the HighlanderResearch and Education Center in NewMarket, Tennessee; and in Janine's case I amthinking of her heroic struggles with the CrowNation and other indigenous groups, a strug-gle which takes many forms, not least ofwhich has been unwavering community ac-tivism and resistance against unrelenting for-ces of oppression and the logic of colonizationwhich continue to exact so much sufferingamong the Crow and other Native Americangroups across the country, and the importantwork being done at Little Big Horn College inMontana. Both Myles and Janine recognizethat the homoge.ieity of our cultural worldneeds to be detotalized through a recognitionof and respect for difference and tha the his-torical voice of liberation is the voice of thepoor, the marginalized, the downtrodden, andthe oppressed. Both give serious recognitionto the revelation of the oppressed withoutromanticizing their plight. I would also like tosay that I am honored to be in the presenceof such a distinguished group of adulteducators.

Some of you may find what I am about toshare with you unremarkable or relativelycommonplace, especially those of you who arefamiliar with the work Jf Myles Horton, PauloFreire, Henry Giroux, and others who workfrom a critical education per:pective. Othersmay find my perspective to be relatively un-familiar, perhaps initially unsettling, or maybeeven irrelevant to what you do or think youshould be doing in adult education.

Before I go any further, let me situate mydiscussion by making some initial commentson what I am referring to when I use the term"critical educator" or "critical pedagogy." I'lldo this by summarizing some of the primaryinitiatives taken within the critical educationtradition over the last fifteen years. Althoughtheir work has frequently been marginalized

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and shunted to the periphery of the debateover education in this country, criticaleducators have maintained a particular cogentgrasp of the link between the actual formswhich schooling takes and the wider structuralarrangements of society. They have bothrevealed and unsettled the ways in which theinequities of power and privilege that exist inclassrooms--with respect to the acquisitionand distribution of knowledge and the institu-tional practices which support them--are anextension of the conditions which prevail inthe large colonial society.

Despite their imposed otherness, theyhave managed to counter elitist racist, andsexist assumptions in dominant forms ofteaching and curricula, by sounding disruptivevoices from the margins. In addition toproviding both an oppositional language ofcritique and contestatory social praxis, theyhave paved the way for new forms of socialanalysis. For instance, in their recent engage-ment with continental social thc ory and othernew developments within the social sciences,they have placed under hermeneutical stressthe truths--of seeing, naming, and orderingreality--which modernity has so arduouslystruggled to justify either within an objectivistworld of scientific "truth" or upon transcen-dental grounds of uiliversal reason. Theiranalyses have often served to counter the in-fluence of a debilitating positivism and in-strumental rationalit , which--at least in tht.,

case of educational theory and curriculumdevelopment in the United States--continuesto pervasive tendency of reducing questions ofethics and social justice to those of epistemol-ogy, developmental theories of cognitive/be-havioral development, or to those dealing withhuman capital and group management theory.In particular, these educators have been suc-cessful and for the most part uncompromisingin establishing connections among dominantforms of education--and hence domina.,tforms of literacy--and the present regimes oftruth and dominant social practices whichhelp constitute them.

By distancing themselves from their own"social present," th y have managed todefamiliarize the conventions or genres of ar-

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ticulating the real and the common sensical.That is, what we conventionally accept as thenormal, the mundane, and the everyday arethrown into disarray. Practical consciousness,as Raymond Williams described ideology, isradically dismembered by this group of educa-tional theorists. While teaching discourses andpractices project into "nature" their own ar-tifices calling them "reality," critical educatorshave helped to throw this reality into ques-tion, destabilizing its dominant assumptions.Thus, through such efforts, educators maybegin to see their teaching as a means bywhich the teaching profession has constructedthe "normative teaching event" in which sociallife is codified and legitimated by existingrelations of power and privilege.

The critical educational tradition hasprovided teachers with modes of self-criticalreflection through which they can make thetransition from seeing what they do in theclassroom as isolated, individual concerns tounderstanding them as profoundly social mat-ters requiring a pedagogical praxis that is ableto reflexively change the knowledge basewhich informs their classroom teaching. Thelesson to be learned here is that all action hasa structure of intelligibility to it, and to saythat liberation starts with action--as some so-called progressh educators are want to do--isto woefully misunderstand the relationship be-tween action and discourse. I want to em-phasize here what I have termed critical sub-jectivity." Here subjectivity assumes a

methodological position of both analyzingforms of oppression in the classroom andlarger society in terms of how they havedeveloped the conditions for their own per-petuation and for disposing teaching as anengagement in the nonhabitual, in making thefamiliar strange and the strange familizr.

Specifically with reference to the currentliteracy debate and the struggle within theacademy over the "canon," they eschew apropensity to see the world in Manicheanterms, as gripped by a titanic strugglt betweenthe forms of civilized "high" culture and thecontaminating forces of the culture of themasses. They reject the recent assaults bycritics such as Allan Bloom, whose Closing of

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the American Mind has served as a reactionarybludgeon in debates over the liberal arts cur-1 iculum, and E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy,designed as a cultural thesaurus for everyaspiring student. In the mawkish elegance ofBloom's highbrow paradise, whose salons anddrawing rooms are populated mainly by belleslettristes from ivy league schools, and otherdescendants from the White European, theeducator can confront in its inost hideousmanifestation, power's vertiginous intoxicationwith the selective tradition of knowledgeproduction in our schools. It is here in whichthe classical tradition of European literatureassume an exclusive monopoly on the powerto sanctify human life.

The critical education tradition has,through an emphasis on social theory, at-tempted to uncover how such a Europeanlegacy such as "the Great Works of theWestern World" privileges the discourse ofthe white, male colonizer. The subject--ormodel reader--that has been constructed outof many of the "Great Books" have beenshown by critical educators to be charac-terized by a geopoltical construction of thecenter and the margins within the expansivehegemony of the conqueror. It is also to lockup the ancestral cargo of the Greeks,Romans, Germans, French, English, and othercivilizations of the center into the sedimentarylayers of our collective subjectivity. The Ar-gentinean theologian of liberation, EnriqueDussel, put it well in his book, The Philosophyof Liberation, in which he remarks: "From the'I conquer' applied to the Aztec and Incaworld and all America, from the 'I enslave'applied to Africans sold for the gold and sil-ver acquired at the cost of the death ofAmerindians working in the depths of theearth, from the 'I vanquish' of the wars ofIndia and China to the shameful 'opium war'--from this 'I' appears the Cartesian ego cog-nito." What Dussel has so cogently revealed isthat the "I think, therefor.; I am" of Descarteshas provided the empires of the center--England and France as col mial powers, NaziGermany, and later the United States itsCentral Intelligence Agency--with the on-cological expression of the ideology of the

colonizer.The work undertaken by critical theorists

has helped us to see this literature as essen-tially "constructions" socially produced andreflecting particular modes of subjectivity fortheir readers as well as providing specific sub-ject positions which can be located geopoliti-cally in the way in which the expansivehegemony of the European/North Americanconqueror has been able to define who is per-mitted to inhabit the centers of the empireand who is to be policed at its margins.

The critical education (I'm using the tel m"tradition" here rather tentatively since I maybe romanticizing what is, in essence, a body ofwork which exists on the borderline betweencontemporary theorizing and pedagogicalpractice) has kept alive--in theory and prac-tice alike--the link between the struggle forcritical knowledge and struggle for democracy:perceiving them as inescapably intertwined.

The tradition of critical pedagogy has con-tinually brushed against the grain of thosestrands of the mainstream approaches toschooling, including both liberal and conserva-tive accents, which still enjoy a relatively un-contested hegemony. As well as defamiliariz-ing the "real-seeming' of classroom relations,they have helped to uncover ways in whichdomination and exploitation have become sys-tematized, removing the cloak of sanctityfrom existing social relations and culturalpractices. For instance, they have shown howmany teachers who refer to themselves asprogressive preach liberation in such anethereal fashion it declares them innocent ii:the face of so much injustice. Just look at thedrop-out rates (Latino student: rightly callthem "push-out" rates), the persistence oftracking, the sexism and racism which has be-come institutionalized in our public schoolsystem as well as in higher education, the une-qual outcomes amor,g minority groups thatare structured into the system, and the em-phasis on control-oi iented and narrow techni-cal knowledge that shapes dominant ap-proaches to curriculum design.

Operating within a theoretical subterrainoutside of the policing structures constitutedby the dominant culture's "imperial" discour-

ses (which set the limits of what can be said,by whom, and under what conditions), whereboth the teacher and the student rarely as-sume their appointed role and places, thetradition of criticai pedagogy continues tomake unconventional alliances between realityand representation, between description andmeaning. What critical pedagog has managedto do is to seriously challenge the social usesof pedagogy; so I like to think about thistradition as not a hidebound compendium ofprescriptions and proscriptions but rather alocus of ideas and prntices where new in-scriptions and transformations can take place.Critical educators are not, in my mind, sub-mission to any one disciplinary trajectory orsocio-political current; they may be con-sidered "critical" in the best sense of the termin that they are fiercely antagonistic to con-ventional ideas and practices which constitutethe expansive hegemony of disabling socialrelations which promote gender, race, andclass oppression, and other oppression such asthose which have to do with sexual preferenceand reh6ious and political freedom. Broadlyspeaking, critical educators have ruptured thesense of the objectivity and homogeneity ofthe social and the proliferation of the logic ofequivalence.

The tradition of critical pedagogy worksfrom a particular conception of culture whichhas far removed its standard view as a

monadic site of harmony and control. Withinthe critical perspective, culture is site of dis-juncture, rupture, and contradiction--a terrainof contestation that serves as the loci of multi-valent practical-discursive structures andpowers. That is, culture is viewed as struc-tured by a combativeness among competingdiscourses. Culture is a labyrinthine play ofdiscourses, including the practical andmaterial effects of their multifarious con-figurations and articulations; it is the placewhere signifying chains flow into thecatacombs and subterranean spaces of the so-cial, as well as the structured space of socialsilence where coherency and uniformity isforged. That is to say, culture is perhaps moreappropriately viewed as a heterogeneous andtransgressive zone, as circuits of repre-

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sentation on a battlefield which is unequallyand unevenly occupied. Culture is apower/knowledge network in which a specificre:...ity is produced through institutional prac-tices and discursive regimes which allow sucha reality to proceed untrammelled by

democratic imperatives.Within this view of culture we need a new

understanding of power, and people such asMichel Foucault have helped us in this regard.Power, as Foucault has shown us, is not acapricious spirit; it is :lot a disembodied forcethat lventitiously insinuates itself in humanaffairs. Rather, it is historically rooted, social-ly constructed, participates in a culturalpolitics, and serves interests which are struc-tured into society. It can, of course, serve toresist these same conditions. If discoursestransform ways of speaking into ways of ac-tion, we have to see power implicated in this

ocess. Foucault has shown us that the exer-c:se of power creates knowledge and thatknowledge also induces effects of power. Ithink this is what Foucault meant when hesaid everything is already interpretation. Wedon't possess power or even apply it since it iseverywhere and contiguous with discourseswhich help to constitute our bodies and struc-ture the direction of our desire. Powerproduces certain forms of knowledge and suchknowledge is used to legitimate and extendthe interests of those served by the effects ofsuch power and to justify the subjection andcertain groups on the basis of transcendentnorms. Power therefore subjectivizes (permitsus to speak and desire) and also subjugates(by empowering certain discourses over othersand thereby constraining the way we can thinkabout our own subjective formation and act toreshape those cultural forms and social prac-tices which constrain and disrupt our narra-tives of and paths to liberation and freedom).Every ideological guarantee--or idea that goesunquestioned in public discourse and socialpractice--carries with it unstated assumptions,unsuspected cons..2quences, shrouded in ethi-cal and epistemological issues. All discoursesbear the effects of power.

So what is the point of all of this foreducators? I want to suggest that a renewed

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understanding of culture can assist teachers tosituate their own classroom practices withinlarger structures of power and privilege sothat they are better able to acknowledge theinterests served by their own ideologicalpredilections, rather than purging the culturalfield of diffe, ence through the universal cal-culus of putatively disinterested, objectiveanalysis.

This perspective of culture slices up itspresumed uniformity into di.erse pieces ofshifting perspectives and untold possibilities.Our teaching practices do not possess normsbut continually remake cultural and socialnorms (which are remade again and again).Our task as critical educators is to disrupt theauthority of these practices in the interests ofgreat social justice, of "what could be."

Given the language of efficiency which hasbrutally and insidiously colonized the discipli-nary domain of education in recent years, andthe current stress on management techniques,accountability schemes, and classroom-readycurricula--features which readily strip school-ing from any substantial concern with justice,equality, or democracy--it is hardly surprisingthat the debate over culture and schooling hasonly just begun to spill beyond the crampedand insulated boundaries of mainstreameducational research. In particular, Anglo-Saxon educators have been generally in-cautious about their pretenses to occupying aprivileged cultural vantage point with respectto other cultures; they have, for the most part,remained loyal to a view of culture which per-mits them to anchor their meanings in abedrock of their own prejudices and in sodoing have failed to disturb the popular as-surance of received -rthodoxies about the cul-tural fields that inform the classrooms wherethey teach. The discourse of technocracy,which has insinuated its disturbing presenccinto school policy and practice over the lastdecade, and which has been seriously imasiveof democratic life, has proliferated due to thelack of attention to the way cultural contexthas been defined and understood byeducators. It is my hope, and I'm sure thehcpe of a number of you gathered here today,that in taking up the issues at stake in the

recent work on context and culture, educatorswill become better equipped to both resistand transform the recent assault on educationin the United States by neoconservatives,reactionaries, and fundamentalists of all sorts--whose disarmingly familiar rhetoric natural-izes oppression and inequality under the guiseof meritocracy and fairness--and to strive fora greater role for schools to play in thedeepening of our vision of democracy.

Let me conclude here my summary of thecritical tradition, which I hope has made clearthat all teaching and knowledge formationconsists of rhetorical tropes of some kind oranother, which both reflect and shape th P... waywe engage, and are transformed by, thepolysomy, contradklion, and social, friction ofeveryday life. This process has been morefully explored in my own work, and the workbeing carried out at the Center for Educationand Cultural Studies, where I have the goodfortune of working with Henry Giroux andothers on a number of critical themes.Giroux's work, in particular, has advanced thenotion that reality does not possess a pre-sig-laying nature but is an interactive cultural,social, and historical process. What I'd like toemphasize is the important way the criticaltheorist articulates the relationship betweenthe discourses of literacy and the workings ofpower, and reveal the various ways in whicupower operates as a regulating force whichconforms to its sway dominant ideologies andtheir institutionalized supports as well ascentralizes and unifies often conflicting andcompeting discourses and subjectivities in theinterest of capitalia social relations. Please bereminded that subjectivity deals with the"inner sign" which must take into account notjust our experiences but the language we useto mediate and understand our experiences.

I want to make the case here that, despitetheir rhetoric of disinterest, traditional modelsof teaching and learning, as well as those ofeducational research, are never innocent. Iwant to go so far as to argue that the con-struction of knowledge, whether within theprecinct of the classroom, or more informallyin the world-at-large, is never self-authenticat-ing, self-legitimating, or self-ratifying. The

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concept and the real are non-identical orasymmetrical. Put less abstractly, becomingliterate or a knowing person is not a processwhich can determine its own effects or speakits own truth in a manner which transcends itsrelation to the socio-political context in whichmeaning takes place. And here we touch onthe central theme of today's talk: knowledgeor the act of knowing is always a creature ofcultural limits and theoretical borders and assuch is necessarily implicated in particular"selective" economies of truth, value, andpower. Knowledge is always indexical to thecontext of the knower and knov. n. Knowledge,in other words, is always ahead./ implicated inrelations of power and power is distributedlaterally and historically, which ie to say une-qually among groups differentiated byrace/ethnicity, gender, and class. What peoplesay and do and the interpretations they con-struct art attached to everything related tothe whole of social and material reality, andnot just the interests of their respective inter-pretive communities.

Most mainstream educational researchremakes reality within the frames of referenceembodied in the language employed by the re-searcher or else within the researchers' owndiscursive oundaries. Critical educational re-search .,,ttempts to situate the construction ofmeaning within the life worlds of the par-ticipants themselves and the specificity of his-torical trends and cultural forms which shapethe subjectives of the participants. Researchwithin the critical educational traditioncreates conditions which enables individualsto investigate their own reality and the socialconditions which shape their daily lives.

In relation to these larger social axes ofpower, it is necessary for educators to remindthemselves: Whose interests are being servedin the social act of becoming literate? Whereis this process situated ethically and politicallyin matters of social justice? What principleFshould we choose in struc,turing our pedagogi-cal endeavors?

To avoid asking such questions is to runthe risk of enlisting our services as educatorsin such a way as to demote our critical facul-ties to custodians of sameness and system-

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stabilizing functions which serve the collectiveinterests and regimes of truth of the prevail-ing power elite. To assume a "centrist" posi-tion--in which a balance of political perspec-tives is sought by refusing to capitulate to thediscourse of either left or right--is to supportthose whose interests are preserved by thestatus quo, it is to patrol the ideological bor-ders of common sense, finding in the stabilityand familiarity of the mundane and predict-able a recompense for the current instabilityof social life.

Not only is it important to contest what Ihave called a "centrist" position, but it is alsoimportant to challenge what liberals havecalled the "pluralist" position. The key to es-tablishing knowledge forms which are liberat-ing is not simply to offer a menu of every con-ceivable position, since it is obvious that manyof these perspectives harbor racist, classist,and sexist assumptions. We need not insist oncultural diversity, if by that we mean trans-forming culture into a living museum of con-temporary choices, but a critical divershy. Acritical diversity means that choices need tobe seen as social practices which are themsel-ves historically and socially constructed andteachers need to learn to distinguish culturalchoices as liberating or oppressive. In otherwords, moral, political, or epistemologicalchoices under the name of democracy ortotalitarianism all occupy specificable loca-tions in relations of power. Within pluralism,demands for justice among the oppressed areoften treated simply as threats to diversity, asprivileging one group at the expense of thefreedom of another. This position refuses torecognize that choices are themselves socialconstructions which exist in relations of powerand must be understood as existing asym-metrically and hierarchically in relation toother choices.

For instance, the pluralist may argue thatwomen and men need to be given an equalvoice in our society but fail to recognize thatthe frames of reference for how such voicesare to be heard are constructed within adecidedly male discourse. Similarly, a criticalpedagogy needs to counter the essentializa-tion of difference which occurs in the liberal

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humanist position with facile tolerance orcelebration of difference or diversity. Thisposition amounts to a mere tolerance of themultiplicity of the voices of the marginalized,the disenfranchised, the oppressed. As HenryGiroux and others have pointed out, acelebration of difference without investigatingthe ways in which difference or diversity be-comes constituted in oppressive asymmetricalrelations of power often betrays a simple-minded romanticism and exoticization of the"Other."

This brings me to two important issueswhich I want to only touch on briefly before Iget to some studies which bear directly on thetopic of social context. The first has to dowith the relationship of education to theory,and the second deals with the issue of lan-guage and experience and language andclarity of expression.

Let me share my position on the impor-tance of theory and for educators and stu-dents employing a theoretical language.Theory occurs as teachers come to understandwhat they know about their teaching and outof this create new and informed meanings.Theorizing, the way in which I am envisioningit, does not have to be applied to practicalsituations because there is no separc:tion ofone from the other to start with. The relation-ship between theory and practice needs to heunderstood as dialectical, such that theory al-way3 emerges out of practice, and practice isalways informed by some form of theory. Justbecause people dort:t self-consciously raisequestions about the theories which informtheir practice doesn't mean they don't hmetheories, it &imply means that they are inar-ticulate about them. Theory is not a means ofdistancing yourself from the minute and par-ticulars of everyday life; ratIver, theory is aneffort to understand the liturgies of the mun-dane and the everyday even more profoundly.Theory moves toward what Mathew Lambcalls the "complexity of the concrete" indicat-ing the contradictory tensions in reality. Inthis way, theory can guide the transformationof reality.

There are some very naive educators whoclaim that critical education mdst start with

action. I would argue that critical educationleads to action--but it's a particular form ofaction we call praxis. To claim that action andexperience is all that you need is wrong-headed and reflects a profoundly stupid un-derstanding of emancipatory teaching and so-cial transformation and really constitutes aprofound misunderstanding of people such asPaulo Freire and Myles Horton. Experienceor action does not speak for itself. There is nopristine, unmediated ground of experiencefrom which to speak or act. I disagree that ex-perience provides you with some kind oftransparent access to reality. Experienceshould never be celebrated uncritically. No ex-perience and language are irrevocably inter-twined. One cannot simply give primacy to ex-perience, without taking into account howexperience is structured through language. Inmy classes, I often hear teachers complaining:"What can all this critical theoretical stuff dofor me? I live my experience in the classroom.This is just a lot of big words that don't speakto my experiences." I think that it is very im-portant that critical theorists speak to boththe heart and the mind of the educator, ofcourse, since critical knowledge is not only anabstraction, but something that is embodied,felt, and lived out. But it is also important toremember that many teachers read their ex-periences in ways that blame students,demonize them, and construct them as the"other." In some cases, for instance, their ex-perience is informed by the language or dis.course of reactionary conversatism. Hereeducators confront the legacy left by thecolonizer, especially in relation to minoritypopulations in U.S. schools where there havebeen concealed attempts to integrate the op-pressed into the moral imperatives of theruling elite. Some teachers have, after all, em-bodied in their teaching practices discoursessupported by the Reagan administration inwhich Blacks, Hispanics, and other groups areessentialized as either biologically or culturallydeficient and treated as a species of inferiorvertebrates, as phylogenetically defective,lobotomized Allan Blooms, driven by urgesand impulses either to violence or lethargy.Such a perspective of the subaltern also sur-

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faces, in more sophisticated, but not less in-sidious forms, as in the . amonstrations ofliberal reformers whu argue that Blacks andHispanics can become good, obedient workersjust like their lighter-skinned counterparts. Sowe see that we are dealing with more thansimply experience here, but also a language ofanalysis.

On the other hand, one cannot simplyprivilege the langume of theory, either be-cause ideology is not only lived through ex-perience but also through language. Learningthe language of racism, of decoding its forma-tion in institutional and social sites, is not thesame thing as living as a victim of it. I think itis important to think of language not as priorto experience, but as constitutive of ex-perience. Social experience can be criticallytransformed through a language that enablesan educator or student to situate himself orherself as an active social, cultural, and his-torical agent. We need a language thatenables us to understand the process, alwaysprofoundly socia. 'sses, through which wehave been formeu, which includes the con-crete and specific constitution of the historicalmoment in which we have been given ourvoice with which to speak. Within the uneventopography of needs and desires to which wehave given the label "postmodern condition"we too often discover that our voices havebeen sounded by what Fred Pfeil calls"anonymous, unplaceable tongues" which is

the result of the chaos of identity in which wefind ourselves uncomfortably installed--a bab-ble of discourses without one orchestratingnarrative around which our identities cancohere.

In this age of postmodernism the grandnarratives which contained and recuperatedour subjectivities within one secure epis-temological and moral frameworks are cur-rently splintering and cracking apart. Theprivatization and withering of the publicsphere is being replaced by the conceit of theconsumer moment The doctrine of salvationby consumer freedom is rapidly displacingparticipatory democracy and communal self-management for the pursuit of private happi-ness through material acquisition. But if you

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believe, as I do, along with Raymond Wil-liams, Henry Giroux, and others, that domina-tion cannot exhaust all social experience, thenacquiring a critical vernacular can enable usto forge alternative acts and oppositional in-tentions in that social space which is not al-ready colonized by the oppressor.

For me, the issue for the development ofcontextual, critical knowledge and under-standing is, first of all, affirming the experien-ces of students to the extent that their voicesare part of the dialogue. You affirm that lan-guage and speak a language that resonateswith the concerns expressed by the students,but you also must be careful not to take suchexperiences at face value, as if it speaksromantically for itself. What happens, as PaulWillis notes in his book, Learning to Labsir,when student vuices are burdened by the dis-course of rdcism and sexism? For me, thepedagogical implications of this are very im-portant. How do you affirm these voices whileat the same time questioning and challengingthe racist and sexist assumptions which informthem? The issue here, as my colleague HenryGiroux notes, is understanding that it is im-perative for teachers to critically examine thecultural backgrounds and social formationsout of which their students produce thecategories they use to give meaning to theworld. For, as Giroux notes, they are notmerely dealing with students who have in-dividual interests, but rather are dealingprimarily with students whose stories,memories, narratives, and reading of theworld are inextricably related to wider socialand cultural formations and categories. It is

important here to understand how 1Ith thevoices and experiences of the stuuent hasbeen subject to and shaped by historical andcultural factors such as those o: race, class,and gender. Critical educators can help clarifyfor groups and individuals their histo:ical experience of oppression by linking individualnarratives of specific instances of suffering toan even larger historical framework in orderto recover the social memory of awareness ofother struggling or oppressed groups. That is,it is important to engage the subjugatedknowledge of other subaltern groups so that

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we can develop a solidarity with them and attimes this will involve our co-suffering withthem.

A critical pedagogy is, therefore, onewhich involves the curtailment of the monopo-ly of educational power exercised by the es-tablished sacerdotal body who preside overthe development of curriculum practices andeducational policy which obliges such prac-tices and policies to the satisfaction of theheterogeneous exigencies of the competingcategories of educators working within thesystem. But it is also a pedagogy that linkssuch policies and practices the productioa ofsocial dislocatlon caused by structural con-tradictions and the historically-rooted processby which subjectives of both students andteachers are formed such that this social dis-location is allowed to persist and reproduce it-self through the schools and other institution-al and secial networks of power/knowledge.This means more than a simple causal movefrom understanding to undertaking but ratherthe social construction of a new historical sub-ject through categories and formulationswhich exist outside of and in opposition to theexpansive colonizing logic of the dominantculture. The new historical subject is nut onlyable to denaturalize the appearances ofcapitalist society but assume an active resis-tance against the excremental ethics ofpostmodern culture--an ethics which ispropelled, as Ernesto Laclau has pointed out,through "a pure logic of the circulation of sig-nifiers"--and those contemporary economiesof powel and privilege which would attemptto subvert the autonomy of the margins in theinterests of the discursive and materialmonopoly of the center. It is a pedagogwhich restores the individual as a subjectrather than as object of history. Henry Girouxspeaks of this process as the development ofteachers and students into transformative in-tellectuals. Transformat intellectuals aremobile subjects sensitive to the shifting con-texts of contemporary social life--in fact, tothe very contingency of the social and therelation character of all identify--and do notdefine themselves as the uniform vanguard ona steady march towards the liberation of the

proletariat. The transformative intellectual isengaged in the act of the cultural struggleacultural politics, if you will--in which newforms of identify and subjective formationsare sought. They are sought in the context ofa deepening of democracy. The issue here isone of the intersection of language, theory,and power and is not an attempt on the partof theorists to form an elite intellectual classto administer to the uninitiated.

For those of us involved in developing anew, ri positional language, there is alwaysthe si,Mous charge that we are convoluted,abstruse, elitist, and exclusionary because wedon't adopt the language of television jour-nalism in our critical work. There have beenchodges made by some teachers and students--both on the right and the left--that the lan-guage of critical educational theory is esoteric,and that leftist critioal theorists ar2, primarilyconcerned with speaking to each other. Butthis ignores the important point that RichardWolff has recently made, namely, that majorshifts in ways of thinking usually interact invery complex ways with related shifts inmodes of speaking and writing. He goes on tosay that you cannot equate clear, easy and ac-cessible language with a proper radical'srespect for the public because to be clear andeasily understood often means resonatingideologically with the prevalent presumptionsand desires of the postwar public which hasgrown increasingly hostile to radical ideas.Those who write with clarity and accessibilityin mind may have, Wolff claims, "abandonedthe tough work of convincing readers of politi-cally unpopular truths." To write in a clearand straightforward way often means writingin harmony with certain ideological sen-sibilities of the American public, of which ahostility to radical theory is one. Of course,this is not an argument for complexity for thesheer sake of being complex, nor is it adefense of leftist theorists who are, quitefrankly, terrible writers.

Why is it, then, that critical social theorLtsspeak in what often appears to be a denseand arcane- and I dare say often alienating--language? Why can't the social theorist justadopt the language? Why can't the social

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theorist just adopt the language and reasoningof the social actors he or she is attempting tostudy?

Certainly, the critical social theorist mustacknowledge the fact that the social actor un-derstands a great deal about the world by vir-tue of his or her participation in social life;thus, the critical social theorist must includethe actor's own rationalization of his or herbehavior in any critical analysis. On the otherhand, as Anthony Giddens points out, "Therationalization ot action is always bounded, inevery sort of historical context; and it is in ex-ploring the nature and persistence of thesebounds that the tasks of social science are tobe found." While, as Giddens notes, we cannotdismiss in our analysis ordinary language andthe world of natural attitude, by the sametoken we need to avoid the "paralysis of thecritical will" which has been brought about bythe rediscovery within social critique of ordi-nary language and common sense. To engagecritically in forms of social life is to par-ticipate in that life, but it also means under-standing how what is taken to be "commonsense" is socially organized through tacitpresuppositions which form the background ofevery discursive formation. Giddens suggeststhat this involves making a distinction be-tween "mutual knowledge" and "commonsense." Mutual knowledge mediates frames ofmeanings and brackets the factual status oftacit and discursive understandings; it is ap-plied in often tacit and routine ways. Com-mon sense, on the other hand, refers to the"un-bracketing of mutual knowledge" and aconsideration of the status of :ts belief claims.The critical assessment of common sensebeliefs does not logically presume drawingupon mutual knowledge and, of couise, hi

reverse is also true.Following Giddens, the critical discolzse

which I am trying to develop, respects themutual knowledge that participants shore ineveryday life yet such an appreciation doesnot serve as an obstacle to a critical assess-ment or "un-bracketing" of sach knowledge.Of course, this all ties in at one level with aneed to resist prevailing forms of anti-intellec-tualism.

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Much of the specific forms of anti-intellec-tualism that you find in the United States atthis present historical juncture has to do withthe production of specific modes of electroni-cally-produced meaning, and I don't have timeto go into this here, but it invr' es an analysisof television, 1.dio, film, and ir raetive videoand computer technology. SuL productionhas to be understood eulturally and historical-ly, of course, and if you take a look, for in-stance, at American film, you will often judgethe worth of a film in terms of its ability toentertain while books usuaLy possess twoprimary categories: entertainment and pack-aged information for practical application.Foreign films, such as those by Bergman,Wenders, or Fassbinder, are often deemed asunacceptably intellectual and, in their forgoingof the formulaic car chases and their emploj-ment of actual dialogue among characters, areoften considered brooding and depressing. Itappears that Americans don't want to wandertoo far away from the mind set of cheerfulideological subordination. A he happy-faceicon emblazoned on T-shirts and buttons andother cultural artifacts that greets you withthe exclamation, "HAVE A NICE DAY!" is,of course, sending you concurrent messagesbeneath the threshold of the obvious whienare equally emblematic of the American na-tional consciousness: Don't think too much, itmight make you sad; don't waste your timeanalyzing or worrying about som,-thing thatcan't be changed. Print media is equally asproblematic. Popular books today include self-help volumes on stock investment,psychotherapy, home repair, the art of sexualseduction, subliminal programming, etc. Be-cause much of leftist social theory doesn't giveyou classroom-ready, prepackaged lessons onwhat to do on Monday morning, but insteadraises issucs and presents challenges to exist-ing ways of thinking and acting, and because itisn't "lite" entertainment putting, instead, con-siderable responsibility on the reader to grap-ple with .:omplex thought, it is often dismissedas irrelevant, jargun-filled, and not muchmore than discursive puffery. Of course, thisattitude is precisely in accordance with theprevailing hegemonic articulations which have

grown up with the logic of consumerism.In response to the debate over language

and clarity, Henry Giroux has made somevery significant points which I will attempt tosummarize here. First of all, language must beseen as a terrain of contestation that allowsfor the generation of multiple and competingvccabularies regarding how knowledge, ex-perience, and social relations are constructedin schools and in the larger social order. Lan-guage is not only an issue of clarity, but ratheran issue of the politics of social and moralregulation that is deeply implicated in thelarger politics of representation and power.To claim that complex language must beabandoned in favor of a language of clarityand accessibility often legitimates a form of

m that is increasingly becom-ing a code word to legitimate a form of red-baiting. A stress on clarity and simplicity fre-quently suppresses questions of context andthe specificity of multiple audiences to whichsuch writing can be directed, suggesting in-stead that there is a justifiable normative lan-guage that should envelope the entire publicarena. According to Giroux, this attitude alsosuggests that language is able to act as atransparent window to the "truth" and that thelanguage which most closely approximates thelanguage of truth is that of popular jour-nalism. Further, such a view takes a demean-ing view of the teacher-as-reader, suggestingthat teachers are not intelligent enough tograpple with complex theory. This attitude fitsperfectly with a society comprised of powerfulinterest groups many of whom serve tobenefit from keeping teachers and other in-dividuals unconnected from a theoretical con-nection with emancipatory social projects.

If :,ou think that I'm exaggerating the im-portance of language, ask yourself whether ornot ideas are logically prior to language. Inanswering this question, Sam Bowles andHerb Gintis suggest that we perform an ex-periment: Take three groups of social scienceinitiates, and provide each with a distinct setof works and rough definitions to supplementtheir everyday language. Give the first groupthe terms function, norm, structural differentia-tion, role, and pattern variable. Give the second

group marginal productivity, utility function,and catharsis. Plunk them down in Chicagoand ask them to explain poverty and crime.Will their "ideas" be unaffected by their"tools"? Bowles and Gintis think not. I agreewith them.

The point that I am trying to make to youthis morning is a simple one. Please excuseme for repeating it so often, but I think it'simportant to recognize that language in factconstitutes reality rather than merely reflectsit. It is a symbolic medium that activelyshapes and transforms the world. This is notmeant as a defense of the strong form of theSapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language deter-mines thought, although I certainly supportthe notion that language imposes structureand content to our relationship to reality.Language influences thought but does not lin-guistically determine it since groups oftenchallenge dominant signifying practices forreasons which are highly political. Linguisticcommunities invest differently in different ex-periences depending on the contexts whichstipulate the struggles over the merinings ofsuch experiences in which such communities--or groups within them--are engaged. Here weneed to follow A. Wilden's advice inmaking a distinction between language anddis,ourse; we can't reduce them, one to theother. What is most significant in the presentdiscussion is to recognize the diversity of thediscourses created at different times andpint, and to realize certain discourses usual-ly dominatL uthers. Wilden defines discoursesas "some people talking to some other peopleabout some relationship or another." Unlikelanguage proper, a discourse has a subject anda subject matter, which forms the ground ofwhat all members of society accept as trueand false, legal and illegal, legitimate and il-legitimate. Language is not some conduit toan immutable order of coherence and stabilitybut is generative of the reality which it evokesand to which it speaks. Of course, my em-phasis here on language and experience, dis-course, and praxis, could make me, in the eyesof some social theorists, some sort of em-piricist to which I would answer "yes" if this Istaken to mean empiricist in Raymond

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r,

Williams' fashion of challenging the categorieswhich the human subject is produced throughthe relationship between linguistic construc-tions and social life.

Language always stamps the world with asocial presence which is never neutral or un-problematic. When meaning is producedthrough language unreflectively to the extentthat it gets sedimented into common senseknowledge--which we call ideology (properlyspeaking, even critical knowledge is very muchideological)--it often masquerades as a "fixedtruth" or "a brute fact" about the social world,as if such "factuat knowledge" were immune toparticular relations of power or certainmaterial interests. Knowledge is never im-mune. All knowledge speaks to particular in-terests, particular relations of power in whichcertain groups benefit over others and certainnarratives of identity are accorded a certainstatus over others. Again, I suppose this iswhat Foucault meant when he said that every-thing is already interpretation. The languageI'm using right now at this moment certainlyisn't neutral and I would never claim other-wise. It is already populated by interpretationsof others.

I've spent cons derable time in setting outthe importance of recognizing the relationshipbetween lan9uage, discourse, and power be-cause I thinx it is vitally Important thateducators understand their own aituatednesswithin the professional and pracjcal discour-ses which they draw upon in their daily work.It is also important to understand the limita-tions of the languages that are made availablefor helping them to understand both theirown everyday experiences and the categoriestheir students use to speak their reality, theirtruth, including the relationship between suchcategories and the cultural forms aad modesof Nubjectivity in which they become articu-lated.

Let me turn now to some recent studieswhich help add some narrative as well assome explanatory substance to some of theideas surrounding the topic of knowledge andcontext. The primary context of knowledge isthe language that speaks it, and the formwhich that knowledge takes. For instance, tc

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use terms given to us by Jurgen Habermas,knowledge can assume certain knowledge-constituting interests. It can be technicalknowledge, which helps individuals and groupsin facilitating technical control over their sur-roundings. This is the instrumental knowledgeof the natural sciences, which claims for itselfan unbiased or value-neutral status via strictmethodological procedures. Practicalknowledge, on the other hand, results from theprocess of meaningful dialogue and graspingthe social-meanings constitutive of a sharedlifeworld, tradition, culture, and history. Thistype of knowledge relies on interpretive un-derstanding which can inform and guide prac-tical judgments, as well as the interpretationof texts and social events. Emancipatotyknowledge, on the other hand, seeks a form ofnon-alienated communication and an under-standing of the social contradictions whichstand in the way of human freedom and socialjustice. This form of knowledge wives beyonds.:1)jective knowledge to that of critical praxis,As Habermas has further noted, eachknowledge has its own criteria of validity, andyou can't judge one in terms of the other.You can't judge critical knowledge, for in-stance, hti terms of its technical potential toenhance the control of the physical environ-ment. The type of knowledge I will be em-phasizing in the following studies is that ofcritical knowledge.

The first study I want to review is onewhich was recently conducted by Lois Molland his associates, Carlos Yelez-Ibanez andJames Greenberg, at the University ofArizona. Moll studied families in Tucson,Arizona, who lived in an Hispanic,predominately Mexican, working-class com-munity. His idea was to create collaborativeactivities among teachers that would drawupon what he terms the "funds of knowledge"that the families in the area already possess.His analysis focused not only on how literacyactivities occurreJ within the households ofthe community, but examined the features ofa significant and pervasive socio-cultural prac-tice or activity which Moll and his researcherscall "confinanza" or mutual trust. This term,explains Moll, refers to reciprocal exchange

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relations that form social networks amonghouseholds in this working-class community,which were often developed in response todifficult economic situations. Now these net-works also penetrated the labor market in set-ting up pipelines to possible jobs in both theformal and informal economy. Specificmarkets included child care, plumbing, con-struction, and folk medicine. Shared proficien-cies in these areas served as social contextsfor the construction of krowledge in the class-rooms.

What Moll and his researchers did was toinvestigate how knowledge gets constructedwithin the family dwelling: within the family interms of job sharing, and between the familiesof this particular working-class community.

Moll wanted to understand the qualitativecharacteristics of the pedagogies employed byparents, as well as by uncles, aunts, and com-munity leaders. His goal was to educate thetochers in the local schools, how to affirmand build upon the funds of knowledge whichthe students brought with them into the class-room from the surrounding community. Thefunds of knowledge possessed by certainfamilies were quite wide ranging and abun-dant. Parents and relatives were knowledge-able in a variety of areas including soil cultiva-tion, planting, seeding, water distribution andmanagement, animal husbandry, veterinarymedicine, ranch economy, auto mechanics,carpentry, masonry, electrical wiring, fencing,herbal cures, midwifery, and first aid.

So Moll analyzed how the specifichousehold activities made use of these fundsof knowledge and the domains within whichthey were organized and transmitted. Further-more, Moll stressed the social matrix in whichfunds of knowledge were acquired. That is, heresisted seeing funds of knowledge as simply arepertoire of skills, and focused instead on thevarious contexts in which these funds ofknowledge were used, and how knowledge wassocially organized within them. The socialrelations provided a motive and a context forapplying and acquiring knowledge. Much ofthe teaching and learning that went on in thehousehold was obtained by the children notthrough imposition of adults, but rather

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through the children's own interests and theirquestions. In Moll's school-based literacyproject, teachers obtained funds of IPlowledgeby connecting the literacy activities in theirclassrooms to parents, community organiza-tions, libraries, and other resources.

In the literacy projects, students initiatedalmost all of the writing. Some students choseto communicate with a school in Puerto Ricowith a computer; others students formed a so-cial group who preferred to be taught inSpanish. Some students chose as their topic ofinterest, the study of how buildings were con-structed. This v,as an interesting choice con-sidering the fact that house construct:' I wasone of the most prominent fur.us ofknowledge found in the homes within thiscommunity. Parents were invited to the schoolto speak on this and related topics, and thechildren were surprised by the thought ofseeing their parents in the role of experts,especially given some of the parents' lack offormal schooling. Parents contributed substan-tively to the development of lessons, and theirfunds of knowledge were deliberately accessedfor academic purposes. Moreover, this was anintellectual contribution to the content andprocess of classroom learning. In their class-room literacy approaches, teachers were ableto tap the following funds of knowledge; thestudent's own knowledge; the knowledge pos-sessed by students' parents and relatives; in-dividuals from the teachers' own personal net-work of friends and colleagues; school staffand teachers; community members withoutschool-age children, university faculty and stu-dents.

Moll concludes his study by arguing thatboth the content and process of exchange offunds of knowledge developed in householdsare enormously useful for classroom instruc-tion. By incorpor ting social networks of thehome into instruction, v.eachers can mobilizefunds of knowledge in order to transformclassrooms into more advanced contexts forteaching and learning. This is especially tme,claims Moll, in bilingual classrooms, wheR.special linguistic characteristics allow qudentsaccess to broader and more diverse :ial net-works and funds of knowledge. Moll's re-

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search points to one way in which classroomscan be viewed in the context of broader socialrelations and practices wherein the funds ofknowledge which exist wnin the students'community become the most importantresource for educational change.

Let me turn now to another study whichappears in the forthcoming MulticulturalEducation and Empowerment, edited by Chris-tie Sleeten. In her analysis of a high school inthe District of Columbia, Signithia Fordhamdevelops an alternative way of peer-proofingBlack students' academic performance whichwill directly empower the students themselvesrather than the school officials. This is an ap-proach that goes against the general policy ofplacing academically successful Black studentsinto advanced placement or gifted programsaway from their age cohorts and peers. Itmeans immersing them in what Fordham callsthe "fictive kinship system" or "collectiveethos" of the Black cirnwunity. As Fordhamsuggests, this means comb:ning the desire ofBlack students to be achdAmically successfuland their ethnic and/or racial identity. It alsomeans beginning academic instruction withstudents' own cultural predisposition to ideal-ize the collective ethos within the Black com-munity and structuring the school curriculumand academic learning in ways which makethem feel responsible for each other ratherthan being engaged in one-to-one competi-tion. What she basicail... argues is that a grow-ing number of Black students in the UnitedStates are in some form becoming raceless,being located in the position of racelessness.To understand what Fordham means by race-lessness, we have to understand what shemeans by a fictive kinship system amongblacks. It is a kinship system not related byblood or marriage, but by a people who havesome reciprocal social or economic relation-ship, a kind of collective ethos whicf. .hapesthe way which black people structure anddefine the relationship to one another. In e..amining the expressive dimension of therelationship between the dominant cultureand the indigenous culture of BlackAmericans, Fordham discovers what she con-siders two important factors which are impi:-

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cated in the unique texture of Black-Whiterelationships in the United States: What shecalls an "oppositional collective or social iden-tity" and the oppositional cultural frame ofreference. Black students struggle against un-acceptable options--denying their emergingpeoplehood by suppressing issues of identityor, as Fordham puts it, camouflaging theirdesire to be academically successful bypreteoding not to be doing well in school orputting forth the effort necessary to retaintheir identity as Black Americans. Fordhamdescribes the fictive kinship system amongBlacks as a kinship system not related byblood or marriage by among people wha havesome reciprocal social or economic relation-ship--a type of collective ethos which struc-tures the way in whi...h Black people definetheir relationship to one another. The kind ofsocial interaction characteristic of this fictivekinship relationship which exists among theBlack population in general within the UnitedState .; is what Fordham, citing Williams,desaibes as a preference for depth overbreadth, an interest in rich, vivid, personal,concrete, tangled detail in which human inter-actions are replete with repetition and den-sity, and the mining of situations from manyfacets and angles--characteristics whichFordham maintains sharply contraFt with whatis expected of students in tbe Anglo schoolcontext where there exists a strong separationof the personal and non-personal and anethos of individualism, greater attention tobreadth than depth, competition rather thancooperation, and noninvolvernznt rasher thandeep, tangled engagements.

Schools, maintains Fordham, reward be-haviors and an interaction style which are theinverse of the indigenous cultural patterns ofBlack students. Fordham assigns the term"racelessness" to the predicament of those stu-dents who minimize their connection to thefictive kinship system or oppositional culturalframes adopted by resistant Black groups. Inthis context, she attacks homogeneously struc-tured classes which separate Blacks fromtutelage from their peers and those who arzracially similar. This suggests, in Fordham'sview, that academically strong Black adoles-

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cents come to believe that in intellectual andnonintellectual ways they are different fromother Blacks and, except for phenotypical fea-tures, little more than clones of their whitepeers. Fordham writes that "Separating Blackadolescents and other nondominant groupchildren--both spatially and psychologically-from their peers and other members of theircommunities regardless of its benign inten-tions, appears to exacerbate the conflict suchstudents experience around academic achieve-ment and school success. This appears to beespecially traumatic for Black students bornand/or schooled during or immediately fol-lowing the Civil Rights movement. Accordingto Fordham, peer-proofing in the traditionalsense is "internally disconcerting, forcingBlack students to questio die value of theirracial identity and leading them to questionthe value of what they were doing and beingasked to do even though they continued to doit."

Fordham ends her research by examiningthe work of Uri Treisman, who helpeddevelop a group-centered approach to learn-ing at the University of California atBerkeley. The success of this program, inFordham's view, is due to its focus onstrength of the students rather than remedia-tion of their apparent weakness. Success is de-pendent upon their willingness to collaboratewith each other. When this approach was util-ized at UCB, Treisman reports that Black stu-dent participants outperformed a similargroup of Asian students.

Schools teach Black students that workingin isolation is the way to make it, and most in-ternalize and distort the peer-proofing mes-sages supported by their high school teachersand other school officials. This leads to an un-willingness, Fordham claims, to seek supportfrom white peers whom they often do nottrust, or their Black peers, :h whom they so-cialize with but with whom they do not study.Fordham maintains--and I agree with !,er--that traditional measures of peer-proofingBlack adolescents' school performance havelargely been unsuccessful because in seekingto peer-proof the child to fit into the cultural-ly different world of the larger society, school

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people tend to make the student a misfit inboth contexts.

Now let me turn to another study in thatsame volume edited by Christie Sleeter. Sheand Carl Grant argue that there is a bi-firca-tion between school knowledge and real-lifeknowledge, with the pc.tency of real life con-trasting dramatically with the lifelessness ofsuch school knowledge. Students who are dis-abled by their school experience do not ex-perience a congruence between schoolknowledge and knowledge they bring toschool with them. They cite Everhart's distinc-tion between reified knowledge and regenera-tive knowledge. Regenerative knowledge is"created, maintained, and re-created throughthe continuous interaction of people in a com-munity setting;" it is contextually based, mean-ing that understanding comes out of thespecific historical context in which studentsare immersed. It is forged in the home andcommunity. Regenerative knowledge assertscreatii e control over the knowledge produc-tion process. Reified knowledge, on the otherhand, is that which, while abstract, is treatedby students as if it were concrete and real.Like regenerative knowledge, it is created in agiven historical context but is encoded fortransmission and therefore remains decontex-tualized and static. Sleeter and Grant's studyin a working-class neighborhood supports theidea that students have little ownership orcontrol over public institutions and publiclearning, and hence, regenerative knowledge.While they have power to create, manipulate,and understand life, that power is usuallyrestricted to their own localized neighborhoodor peer group. They write that the students'"own cultural knowledge did not simply com-pete with school knowledge--school knowledgewas subsumed within it, and understood as aset of tasks to do." School knowledge was notabsorbed by students as a conceptual systemfor helping them understand and act on theworld--it was compartmentalized within theirown conceptual system and though of as setsof activities done for someone else in a par-ticular social context. The cultural knowledgepossessed by students was rooted in their ownconcrete experiences and was divided into

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those events which were controlled personallyby the students and those which were control-led by adults. Sleeter and Grant articulatetheir challenge to teachers as one which callsteachers to connect public knowledge with theknowledge and meanings students bring withthem. No matter who the students are, theirpower to learn and act begins with knowledgegenerated within their own lived experience.What Sletter and Grant advocate is "bridgingschool knowledge or public knowledge, andstudent's own cultural knowledge, and thusencourage students to analyze this internction,and then use the knowledge learned to takecharge of their lives."

These examples by Moll, Fordham, Slet-ter, and Grant reveal the importance of un-derstanding knowledge and meaning as social,historical, and cultural constructions. A criti-cal pedagogy is one in which the personal isalways understood as social, and the social isalways historicized to reveal how subjectivhas been produced in particular and selectways through interests of gender, race, andclass as well as other interests. We must notsiinply speak of knowledge but knowledge,since all knowledge is relational and can onlybe understood within the context of itsproduction, its distribution and the way it istaken up or consumed by different individualsand groups. The idea I want to stress here isthat knowledges are invariably mutable, con-tingent, and partial; furthermore, theirauthority is always provisional as distinct fromtranscendental. Know ledges may, in fact, pos-sess the power of truth but in reality they arehistorically contingent rather than inscribed bynatural law; they emerge, in other words, outof social conventions and sometimes in op-position to the same.

A pedagogy of liberation works by rootingitself in the imagination of the oppressed, byspeaking directly to their experiences. In-dividual subjectivity is constantly traversed bycontradiction; its positioning within the cul-tural field is always as subjectsenter the struggle over subjectivity from dif-ferent historically-given levels of material, cul-tural and social endowments. Our formationas individual subjects is therefore understood

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as not the product of mere chance--some ar-bitrary collision of significations, events, andrandom meanings--but rather as a field ofrelations forged within a grid of power, ethics,and meaning.

Let me be clear. I believe that the primaryreferent for the liberation of oppressedgroups should not be the extent of theirmoral, ethnic, gender, or political strangenessor displacement outside the boundaries of thedominant and familiar but rather the estab-lishment of criteria which can distinguishclaims of moral, ethnic, gender, or politicalsuperiority which we exercise as outsiders. Ibelieve along the Milhevic that the other hasa hermeneutical privilege in naming the issuesbefore them and in developing an analysis oftheir situation appropriate to the lived contextin which they are situated. How we ex-perience and place labels on our sense ofreality are the primary referents for construct-ing a critical pedagogy.

When letzsche talked about going"beyond good and evil" he wasn't referring toan escape from a world unsullied by ideologi-cal interest or the binary oppositions whichplague the grand narratives of the Westernmetaphysical tradition. Rather, as philosopherand theologian Cornell West has pointed out,he was seeking new distinctions andcategories of good and evil which wouldenable the creation of new subjectivities, newsocial spaces, new communities. We need tofollow Nietzsche and Marx at least this far,and we may surprise ourselves with how muchcloser to a deepening of democracy we canachieve. We don't need to sow future priestsof deconstruction in the desacralized horizonon the postmodern scene. Rather, we need totransform present social practices and rela-tions because history compel' us to do so, be-cause the present historical juncture in whichwe witness so much human misery and suffer-ing, necessitates it. History compels us be-cause our subjectivities are forged in it; it iswhere the furnace of our will lies buried, ig-niting both ...ams and desires. For in theiron womb of history we cast the shape of ourlongings; and to reclaim history is to be fullypresent in its making.

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We need to do more than to redescribeour--'ves in new ways--although the way weseek to imagine ourselves is an important stepin the struggle for liberationwe need mostpressingly to both reform and transform ourpresent ways of contesting the capitalistmodes of production, with all of their atten-dant forms of social mystification, tech-nologies, and hydra-headed bureaucratic net-works. We need to outface the barrenness ofpostmodern culture by employing a discourseand set of social practices that will not be con-tent with resurrecting a past which can neverbe reclaimed, or with redescribing the presentby simply textualizing it, leaving in place itsmalignant hierarchies of power and privilege.For these latter acts only stipulate the lineageof and give sustenance to those social rela-tions responsible for the very injustice one is

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trying to struggle against. We need to stareinto history's grim visage and assume our nar-rative space within the very contours oi itsflesh, a space where we can speak our ownstories and dream our own dreams withoutthe dead letter of burgees ethics weighing likea nightmare on minds still capable of en-visioning, still willing to hope, still intent uponconstructing a space of difference, a space ofpossibility. That spate does not wait for us,beckoning us to occupy it, or thinking that wewill one day stumble into it. There is no act ofgrace suddenly bestowing the path for us. Werequire an ultimacy of commitment, an un-bending intent, a continually renewed effort tobrush reality against the grain. It is a spacethat must be fought for and defended, terrainwhere hope will remain forever the enemy ofdespair.

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Learning in the Social Environment: A Crow Perspective

Janine Pease-Windy Boy

The thoughts I would like to share withyou today are some of the ways in which wehave composed, constructed, designed, andcreated at our own tribal college. It is a bring-ing together of the ideas from adult andhigher learning, and it is one constructedwithin the confines of the Crow Reservationas chartered by the Tribal Council of theCrow Tribe. It was designed and created overa period of about 20 years with the goodwishes of elders who had an idea about ourown scholarship, our own interest, and ourdestiny.

When we consider the idea of the workwe needed to do to get along in society todayas Crow Indian People, we start from the verybeginning of where we are in the universe.Our culture commission met for many, manyhours back in 1962 to talk about the way inwhich learning had come about with people inour tribe. In 1962 I was still in high school,but in 1975 I joined that force--that heritageof planning in hope. From the nearest I cantell from the heritage I have, it started fromthe place where the humar. being is in theuniverse. That is that the Creator is amongsteveryone; elements are in friends and in na-ture whetner it is the rocks, the rivers, thebirds, or t:Ie animals, and it certainly lb felt byhuman beings, the sky, the stars, and the,whisper of the wind. A Creator could vest inthe person knowledge--knoMedge in any num-ber of things. Knowledge can come fromspending time in prayer n.nd fasting, from thetop of a mountain or the river boaoms, orfrom a small spirit.

One of ou ,. greatest wisdoms in the CrowTribe is from the chickadee, the smallest birdin our environment. The chickadee is tnemajor lesson of i rotection to the Crows. Weare a small tribe. We were always at oddswith the Sioux; there were thousands of them.The Blackfeet were to the north, and theShoshone and Arapaho were to the south.Lots of tribes did not like us, and we did notlike them. Defensively, that little bird taught

us when to observe anG listen. It was thefinest tool we could possibly acquire--medicine and knowledge.

One woman that we have heard from hada very important message from a tiny crea-ture--an ant. In her tepee, one little antcrawled in and gave her an extremely impor-tant message that did in fact save all her lovedones around her.

When we looked at where our knowledgecame from, we knew that all of our knowledgeemanated from the Creator whether it wasfrom messages from our environment or fromeach other. The Creator had told us that weneeded to be a part of a family, and our fami-ly ways and our family ties were expressionsof the Creator's love and regard and respectfor us. As Crow:, we have a clan system thatfollows the mother's heritage line. For every-thing we do and for every achievement or mo-ment of success, we have a recognitionceremony; that is, we bring in the clan'speople to celebrate along with us. For theachievement, we do not receive gifts; we givegifts to those people who have prayed with usall aiong.

That same spirituality comes about in theframe of our language. In the language wefind no posoessives; that is, the world is notdivided up and owned by anyone. It is asociety and a commurity that has beencre.ted and vested wits- life and breath. Thereare no coercive verbs such as r 2ve to, youmu.st, you should, or you ought to. All of thesethings do not exist in our frame of language.There are myriads of kinship terms todescribe relationships, such as those for veryclose relationships in which first cousins saywhatever they think in terms of first-linecriticism or in which an uncle corrects anddisciplines. Also we find there is no simplepast! The past is so real that it is always withus is present. We love life. Those weresome of the things that we looked at as thebase of our assumptions as we began to dealwith the relationship with our learning en-

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vironment.We are sort of one of those back water

societies where if we don't care, nobody elsecares. For 100 or so years, we just had no onegoing to college or the formal sort of learningth'It many in the United States enjoyed. Asrecently as 1970, we had only 30 of our adultmembers with college degrees of any sort. In10 years fre,n 1970 to 1980, we increased curnumbers to 200, and that was when the big in-vestment of the federal money assisted a lotof us to get there. Then things dropped downto the bottom, and absolutely nothing hap-pened after 1970. So we really had to make adecision.

What was it that we wanted? Wechartered a college, but we got there by wayof tutoring each other in voluntary places likekitchens on wintery nights. The :dea grew thatwe could in fact do this on our own; we didnot accept the assumption that we had to im-port teachers from someplace else. Because ofour understanding that knowledge was vestedin all of us throughout the community, weknew this, and we agreed with the Creatorand his greeting on us. We not only had men-toring systems in our society, but people werementors in one field and learners in another.Even in my children's life time, this is so ineducation. We inherited all these ways inwhich knowledge could be learned whether itis through observation, from listening, frommentoring, or through very, very meticulousstudy. We inherited a faith in our ownscholarship and in the idea of education.

So we began to look at how this would beplaced together. We were convinced we didn'thave to have a building even though peoplesaid there is where it would be. We didn'thave a building until our sixth year of opera-tion. Even then the building that we had wascalled submarginal, and lots of people called ita dump. We knew that if we were not in thisbuilding, we would be some place else. Somepeople still look at our college and see at itthat way. When we moved there, we pulledtogether about 60 volunteers; we washed, wescrubbed, and we knew that it was a place tobe together and do some learning.

We also knew that since knowledge came

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from the Creator, we didn't have to pay for it.We wanted very much to provide those clas-ses, those places of learning, at no cost. Westarted out with the assumption that our clas-ses could be free to our students--our commh .ment was so complete. The first time we hadan accreditation review (and we are a collegestriving for accreditation), we were told thatstudents would not value what they did notpay for.

We found how deeply rooted our culturalsense was in terms of where knowledge comesfrom and how this differs from someone else'sassumption that somehow knowledge can beboxed, packaged, and weighed or that itequals a certain dollar value in the eyes of astudent. Being in this back part of the UnitedStates, we never have ,had a history of wagelabor. We work hard in our lives. We care forour families, but we almost always have 50 to80 percent unemployment. The knowledge wt .acquire is the living of life and living it as wellas we possibly can. It may be but mostly isn'trelated to our credit ability.

So as an institution, we have had to recog-nize those knowledges that we want to conveyto each other. We went to our elders at atribal meeting with a long list of those thingsthat they recognize as elements of ourscholarship--ttn science of our kinship, thescience of our relationship, the sciencP of ourpolitics, the science of our philosophy and ourpsychology, and the science of our sociology.They knew this. These are not people whohave formal degrees, but they have eminentscholarship. As people who were assigned tounderstand what we were putting together, wedetermined we would have the largest depart-ment in our college called Crow Studies andhave it based on that eminent communityscholarship. If you look at our catalog today,you will find 35 chsses in Crow Sliidies. It isan interdisciplinary kind of study area. It isour knowledge, and it is not taught anywherein this universe except at Little Big Horn Col-lege. That took a tremendous level of commit-ment because when you try to sell AmericanIndian literature or the oral literature that hasnever been written down but only spoken inthe most respectful terms to somebody who

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comes through to accredit your institution forliterature in the finest sense, such people say,"Where is your English literature? Where isyour Russian literature?" I say, "They teachthat at Montana State University. Our stu-dents can go there and get it and have a fineversion of whatever is Russian literature.Here we study Crow Indian literature."

There are seasons for knowledge. Thereare seasons when certain classes can betaught. Oral literature for instance is one ofthem. Our elderly people know that andrespect those stories. But they told them onlyin winter time and when food was served--usually in the evening /hen it was cold andsnow was blowing around. They are told insuch a fashion that all attention is on them.And we do that. Every class time we have ourkettle of berry pudding and fried bread, andwe sit down with a variety of our scholars, ourstudents, and study again in this wonderfulway--a way in which it has been all along.

Another aspect that we looked at was theoddity that the Creator gave us many chancesto acquire knowledge; not just one, not two,not ten, but as many through our life time aswe wish. We wanted to have a mechanism forstudents to have not one, not two, or not fivetries but to have as many tries as they wish.Now you know there are admission standards;if you fail the first quarter, you are on proba-tion, and if you fail the second quarter, youare suspended. Our regulations do not followthat. We even went so far as to eliminate theF because we felt that no one had to bear theburden of failure. We were close enough toour students to understand negaing factorsbut also the element of compassion.Knowledge can be acquired, and there aremany mitigating factors. We can have thecompassion aF educators to give our studentsa number of tries.

Time packaging was another concern.How do you bundle knowledge into time? Insome classes our stndents were ready to han-dle the regular quartet system, but in othersthey wanted to take more time--time for dis-cussing, lots of time. Time is a funny puzzlingthing, and it is amazing to me how often weconstrain ourselves to time in lots of different

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minutes; an hour, an hour and a half, twohours and that is it--we are done. Our stu-dents and people really felt that we needed tolook at different sorts of time packaging.

At Little Big Horn College, we also recog-nize the achievement of our students. Wewanted very much to have achievement notedin ways as among their families. Our gradua-tion ceremony, for instance, is the recognitionceremony of the returning warriors, and wehave our warrior singers who sing along withthe teachers and faculty. In the midst of theceremony, we bring in clan representatives topray for our graduates in their success.

Our school basketball team won the na-tional championship among 22 tribal colleges.When they came back, we decided to tap intoa meLlanism in our community that had beenthere traditionally; that was the return of thewarrior ceremony. This ceremony is one inwhich a young warrior is paired with 12 com-munity members. There is knowledge in eachof the officers of the ceremony. The playersgo out into the community so v.e have toidentify those 12 office holders in theceremony. We bring the parents and theplayers out to the home of this office holder.Planning for this takes about two months.There are dances, there are lessons, there areprayers, and each office is different. Ourplayers were able to acquire this knowledgeand to take part in that ceremony. The eve-ning that we had it, we must have had 600 ofour community members come to observe thetremendous community solidarity that stoodout in our success. We were so excited aboutthis mechanism, this way of conveying unityand historical roles, that we wrote it up in ouraccreditation study. It just looked like a circusto them! But to us, it was one of the mostsolid things we ever did to tie to our history,to our recognition system, and to the way inwhich there is learning from each other inter-genera tionally.

We also believe strongly in political par-ticipation. If Crows can do anything besidesbasketball, we love our politics. We enjoymeeting and participating. In our tribal elec-tions, we often have 85% participation. In thelast 10 years, the college has been extremely

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involved in voter participation. We haveregistration drives; we have educationalforums; we have brought enemies together inforums where Republicans and Democratscome to present their platforms. We haveeven had some of the white candidates comedown and talk with the Indians. There aremany things that we do to show our L.:liefthat our people have citizenship, and that hasnot been easy for us. We have been accusedof many things and have been investigated. Imyself have been investigated by the FBI onall kinds of accounts. Of course, I am heretoday, and I have not spent any time before ajudge.

What we are doing is investing ourscholarship in ourselves and that really upsetssome people. We have learned from our ex-periences. One thing we learned about ourcultural commitments is that there are thingsthat really are our expressions, our scholar-ship, and our learning. We are discoveringmore about that everyday. Three of our clas-ses are instructed in the Crow language byprofessors who have masters degrees, andsome working on doctoral degrees, likemyself, do instruct in that language.

The biggest test has been the scrutiny ofthose. from mainstream society who have astandard model in mind of what the com-munity college ought to be. Our board of trus-tees are 12 Crow Indians who have beenelected from among people interested ineducation. We have gathered together on ahilltop isolating ourselves for about 12 hoursto decide on our curriculum. When the daywas over, we looked over the Big Horn River,one of the most holy places in our land. It wasa tough decision to make that sort of commit-mant. Some people cried; I know I did. Butwe also knew that many options were in frontof us. The scrutiny which we have been put to

made us realize our commitment. I was toldby visitors that because I accepted a really lowsalary, I was not worth a whole lot. I was alsotold things by visiting evaluators such as"minority groups are awfully good with theirhands." Now you might find this a surprisingstatement in 1986 by a person who held ourdestiny in her hands; she took us so lightly!Academic pride is Pour business. The way wefeel is that we do what we want to do. Thenthey suggest that we need off-reservation ad-visors because we really are not aware of whatwe want to do! My biggest challenge in life isto contain my ferocious anger. Dr. Tietz, thepresident of this university and a person I ad-mire greatly, once told me, "Write it out fourtimes. You will then begin to take out theanger and to speak in a language they can un-derstand." I can't tell you what a struggle ithas been, -_xcept to say that we are surviving.I guess we must be finding some language tocommunicate what it is that we have ac-complished.

Our colleges are struggling. There are sixother tribal cdeges in Montana, and I amproud to see scme of my colleagues and fel-low graduate students here because theyshine. The story I told has been experiencedat Blackfoot Community College, at SalishKootenai College which is our senior institu-tion in the state of Montana, at Dull KnifeCollege on the Northern Cheyenne reserva-tion, at Stone Child to the north, and at ForkPeck and Fort Belknap. The State Commis-sion on Higher Education was not very inter-ested in us; this year we met with them forthe first time in our 20 year history. These aremoments in history. Building or no building,we are going to be around educating ourpeople in our way rather than just sittingaround.

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From an Adult Educator's Perspective

Lloyd KorhonenChere Coggins Gibson

Lloyd Korhonen and Chere CogginsGibson served as members of a reactionpanel for presentations made by Peter Mc-Laren, and Janine Pease-Windy Boy.

Korhonen's Comments

We have a very wise philosopher in Ok-lahoma who once said, "It wasn't what I didn'tknow that done me in. It was what I was socertain about that was wrong." Many times Ithink we in education t' 'fame so certain ofwhat we know that this certainty comes out astruth. I am Leminded of that when I listen towhat is truth, to how truth is understood, andto why it makes sense. So the first observationand reaction I had is this: it is not so muchwhat I didn't know that done me in; it is what1am so certain about that is probably wrong.

My second reaction grows out of a wholeseries of impressions I have had over life thatwere reinforced by the stories today. A num-ber of years ago, Pat Mu llens and I used tocollect folklore among Indian tribes andMexican American people. I'll relate one storyout of that experience and draw my reactionfrom it. As we were trying to collect whatpeople understood in life, we described thingsin stories to people, and they described thingsto us. We were talking about rocks, but thewords they were using for rocks were wordsused for animate objects. We tried to expiainto them that rocks were not alive. At thispoint an older gentleman asked us if we were.sure. You know, I really wasn't! I have thatreaction now as I listen to the stories that Ihave heard.

A third reaction is we have attempted tocreate a science out of what we do in educa-tion and learning. It all goes back to an earliercanon. There is a word we use with great fre-t!, ency in our study of learning, and that ispsychology. I was thinkAng of the root word--psyche. Most people translate psychology asthe mind or the study of the mind. But youcan go back to the earliest canons where

psyche actually means soul. It doesn't meansoul in the Christian sense of an immortalsoul, but rather it means all of you, all that isyou. It is the essence of what a person is. Ithink what we have created is educationwithout a soul, without an understanding.

My fourth reaction is something thatshould give us some pause. We have done avery poor job, or no job at all, of separatingout credentialing from learning. That I pose'o you as our problem, our problem asacademics. We have done a very poor job inthe world of education of pointing out thateducation and learning are not necessarilyschooling ana credentialing. That is somethingwe all know, but evidently we have done apoor job of conveying it.

Those are my four reactions. One hopeful-ly spiritual enough, two hopefully reflectiveenough, and the last one hopefully directionalenough that we might have something to talkabout.

Gibson's Comments

When you are asked to be a reactor, youdo one of three things. You can get fullyprepared, that is read a lot of good books andthink things through In the second tactic, youtake voluminous notes, which I do anyway.Or, one can just sort of react. I think I willjust react and give you a sense of the thingsthat I wrote down as others spoke.

The thing that strikes 1115 first andforemost is the degree of emotionality that isbehind the stories we have heard here today.Any of you who have done communityproblem solving and research in the areaknow that you get very caught up in people'sstories and people's victories. It is a very spe-cial arena to work in.

One of the things that I wrote down was"change as norm." Many of us have grown upthinking that stability is what we aim for. Ithink what we need to help people understandis that change is what we aim for. Change is

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built on an examination of the past and asense of where we want to go in the future.We need to instill that in ourselves, our stu-dents, our children, and those around us.

Another point and one that Lloyd alludedto is that it is so frustrating that when we sayeducation, people automatically tie it to some-thing formalized and institutionalized. Thus,they devalue their own experience and theirreflection on their experience. Also, othersname our roles for us if we allow that to hap-pen. How important it is to be able to tellyour own story and once you are able to tellyour own story, to be able to reflect on it, toexamine it, or to interpret it. I found this indoing some research on community problemsolving. When you asked people to reflect onwhat they had done as they intervened ontheir own behalf and to recall the action theyhad taken, that kind of reflection alloweditem to reaffirn their value and to reaffirmthat they really had learned and that they hadmade a difference. I think that is an arenathat adult educators have failed to do enoughwork in many ways. We have not workedenough in the whole realm of communityproblem solving, social action, and workingwith those who have made such a difference.As adult educators we have played in saferarenas, and in some ways have cheated our-selves and others of some valuable learningexperiences. One of our speakers spoke of

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those who call this another type of education;a type of education that is important becausetheir lives depend on it. And it really isn'tanother i ind of learning! We know that. Weneed to help people understand that com-munity problem solving is an educational ex-perience that results in learning.

When I listened to Janine, I heard her sayagain that knowledge comes from variety ofsources through a variety of experiences. Welearn from the smallest, the chickadee for ex-ample. We do learn from the smallest, fromour children for example, and we learn fromthose smallest experiences. But again, we can'tdo that unless we take the time to reflect onour experience, to examine that experience, tointerpret that experience, and to reaffirm theimportance of our experience. But we hustlealong so quickly we don't take that time, andwe don't help our students take that time.

As I look at the words I wrote down--power, powerful, empowerment, and value--there is an awful lot of power in the people,but sometimes we fail to help people recog-nize the power in themselves. We must helpourselves and others acquire a questioning at-titude, a problem-posing attitude at all times.So often we look for solutions. We need to belooking at the problems and posing problems,reflecting and reacting, and learning andgrowing all the while.

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,ilwit

The Arch of Social Dreaming: Teaching Radical PedagogyUnder the Sign of Postmndernity

Peter McLaren

Let me share with you this morning, if Imay, some thinking I have done related towhat I sometimes refer to as "the arch of so-cial dreaming." Yesterday, I tried to sharewith you some perspectives on social contextand some of the aim; and objectives ofeducators working with the critical education-al tradition. I was highlighting perspectiveswhich could be labelled as post-structuralist,and yet these perspectives are shared amongonly a small number of theorists who workwithin the critical educational tradition, acomment which is in no way meant todenigrate the political economy approachwhich characterizes the majority of criticaleducational work. Both approaches make atransgressive commitment to challenging exist-ing institutional and social apparatuses ofdomination and oppression, in giving voice tothe unsaid, in heeding the unacknowledgedpower relations sealed into the structuredsilences of state bureaucracies and sovereignregimes of truth. The post-structuralist posi-tion, however, is better able to highlight thehistorically and culturally specific functions ofdiscourses in maintaining social arrangementsof power and privilege. This perspective isable to insist that theories of schooling ac-knowledge their status as discourse and thattheorists be able to narrate the contingenciesof the formulations from which they work.Similarly, teachers and students are en-couraged to use some of the insights from thecritical tradition to be able to analyze howknowledge reflects prevailing social arr..nge-ments, and how knowledge and experiencear_ never unmediated but always politicallyinterested. Critical educators were portrayedas engaged in the act of denaturalizing the so-cial and articulating the process of schoolingas a form of discursive production, as theproduction of not only school subjects but alsosubjectivities. Further, they .*ere unable touncover the ways in which schooling repre-sents itself as shrouded in an illusion of neces-

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sity and permanence. It accomplishes thisthrough rituals of the ordinary and the mun-dane, by smoothing over and dehistoricizingand defusing fractious antagcnisms related torelations of class, gender, arr.; ethnicity. Sociallife and classroom life were similariy articu-lated as constituted by discourses vetich struc-ture and delimit the practice of ete possibleby providing not only constricting internalizednorms of intelligibility to social and institu-tional life but also rituals which order sociallife and provide students and teachers withways of embodying normative modes of sub-jectivity. Let me now expand on some of thesepoints 1 presented to you yesterday.

One principle which I take as more or lessdefinitive in constructing an arch of -ialdreaming is that teat.11ers need to draw on thecultural resources which students bring toclass in order to understand the categoriesthat those students use to construct their ownmeaning, their own reality, their own locationin histoiy. Students need to acquire forms ofknowledge, meaning, and literacy which notonly challenge the discourses of the dominantculture but alf.o enable students to ap-propriate the codes and vocabularies of dif-ferent cultural discourses so that they can pos-sess the critical skills necessary to shape andtransform rather than merely confirm the ex-isting social order. Adopting what someteachers call a "balanced" pedagogical ap-proach, one which veers neither right nor leftis, in effect, to perfect and help 7ncrease theresilience of forms of dominatior

Constructing an arch of social dreamingmeans developing a politics of differencewhich actively contests the devaluation ofthese whom we have relegated as the "Other."The discourse of many mainstream ap-proaches to pedagogy recursively constitutesitself through cultural fictions of the marginal,the deviant, the immiserated, the disaffected,and the underclass. In complying with such adiscourse, we may be insinuating our

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pedagogies into the hostile displacement ofminorities which celebrates as the privilegedpoint of reference of the so-called culturalevolution of the white, Anglo-Saxon male. Inthe United States, there seems to be a ten-dency of equating difference with deviancy, sothat the marginalized "other" (e.g., women,minority groups) become the baleful bar-barian. My second point is that educatorsneed to take a more critical and political rolein defining the nature of their own work andthe ethica ". direction of their own labor, apoint which is strongly emphasized in thework of Henry Giroux. A third and closely re-lated point is that students deserve the oppor-tunity to question from a critical vantagepoint their own history and their own voices.This means that educators must develop apedagogical language that can question issuesof public policy an,d redress social injustices, avoice capable of dismantling the tyranny ofthe present with the hope of bringing into ex-istence what is yet to be. My colleague, HenryGiroux, suggests that educators can begin tobuild for a better future by recognizing thatknowledge is neither neutral or objective, andinstead is socially manufactured and producedand necessarily embodies particular interestsand certain selective assumptions. Knowledge,if it is to serve a socially transformative func-tion, must be linked to the concept of power.This, of course, suggests that educators mustraise questions about its truth claims as wellas the interests which such knowledge serves.Giroux ciaintains that knowledge defined assuch does not become valuable because it is

legitimized by curriculum experts, or adulteducation experts, but because it is directlylinked to the power it has as a vehicle of andplatform for critique, as a means of socialtransformation and a medium of self and so-cial empowerment. So in the terms set forthby Giroux, knowledge becomes important tothe degree that it is able to assist individualsto understand not only the assumptions em-bedded in particular archival forms based oncontent, but also the processes wherebyknowledge is produceC, appropriated, andtransformed within specific social, cultural,and historical settings. Thus, as 1 see it, one

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essential question for building an arch of so-da! dreaming for adult education is to askhow we, as educators, can better unravel andbeam comprehend those lived antagonisticrelations that characterize school cultures, andhow we can better enable students, particular-ly those students from subordinate classes andgroups, to transform the dominant school cul-ture in the interests of d more just society. Atthe same time, teachers need to raise theissue of how it is that the dominant culture isable to function in such a way that studentsare often rendered voiceless and powerless.The answer to these questions lies, at least inpart, in putting the myths and the injustices atthe very center of the dominant discourses ofteaching and learning 'under erasure" (to coina popular term within literary deconstruction)and in building a critical mode of teachingthat refuses to suppress students' histories,that refuses to deny them their claim to sub-jecthood. Henry Giroux takes this idea a stepfurther by urging educators to engage a visionof community in which students voices definethemselves in terms of a distinct social forma-tion and their broader collective hopes.

Another point which I would like to em-phm,ize in discussi*.g the construction of anarch of social dreaming for adult educators isrecognizing that, as teachers, we can neverspeak exclusively for the "other," although wemay align ourselves with the "other" withrespect to issues of social struggle and justice.While we must abandon the retrograde andviolent notion that as white, Westerneducators, we are in a position to definereality for others, we can--and should--workwith diverse others to deepen their and ourunderstanding of the complexity and transfor-mative potential of the traditions, histories,and funds of knowledge which exist in boththe school and the surrounding community.And I would also suggest that not only sho...ildwe acknowledge in the school curriculum andin the practice of pedagogical possibility thediverse voices, experiences, histories and com-munity traditions which increasingly charac-terize urban schooling, but we should also beable to respect the specificity of differencewhile at the same time articulate "differences"

within a politics of solidarity and 'Aeration inwhich dreams are given birth and realizedthrough the development of communities oftrust and affirmation. We need to develop asocial/critical utopian praxis which calls forour unconditional withdrawal from in-humanity and for our movement towards whatAgnes Heller calls a "common good." That is,towards a praxis which promotes the goodnessof persons who prefer to suffer wrong than tocommit wrong.

In achieving a common good--and weshould recognize that there is never only onecommon good--educators need to furtherdevelop a language of hope which togetherwill allow the oppressed to speak outside theterms and frames of reference provided bythe colonizer, whether this be the teacher, theresearcher, the administrator, or public ser-vant. Educators also need a language ofanalysis and hope which permits women tospeak in words outside of "name of the Fathervocabularies" and which does not deny ex-cluded minorities from speaking their narra-tives of liberation and desire.

Several questions come to mind withrespect to further giving shape to the arch ofsocial dreaming. What are the moral, ethical,political, and cultural variants against whichwe should construct ourselves as social agentsof historical change? If we recognize peda-gogy and learning as forms of cultural politics,then what are the ways in which educntors un-consciously silence and exclude those ,ifferentvoices from dialogue? Here we need to makea distinction between dialogue and conversa-tion. I see a conversation as referring totaking turns while speaking to a variety ofcommon themes. The concept of dialogue,however, suggests to me a dynamic anddialectical process in which assumptions areuncovered which inform the way each par-ticipant articulates his or her specific view ofreality. To participate in a dialogue with sig-nificant others is, in my way of reasoning,being attentive to the deep structure, therhetorical tropes, the relations of power, andthe gender and class-specific constructions ofwhat we are conveying to one another. This iswhy I detest the popular metaphor of

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deruocracy as simply one big conversationwhere everyone gets his or her turn to speakand, as Andy Warhol once noted, where it ispossible to be famous for twenty minutes. ibelieve, in contradistinction to this, thatdemocracy needs to be modelled on criticaldialogue where while evety voice is heard andacknowledged, every voice is also equallyrendered problematic. We need to challengethose voices that preach hatred, sexism,racism, dassism, homophobia, and religiousintolerance, that speak the name of truth inthe interests of dominating--not liberating-.others. So the praxis which I have been refer-ring to over these two days is a praxis which islived in solida ,ith all groups struggling toovercome suffering and alienation. The praxisof solidarity which I am advocating is onewhich seeks tt agage and not simply recoverhistory. It is one which confronts history criti-cally so as to assist the powerless in locatingthemselves in it. We need to situate the chal-lenge of adult education as a task of em-powering the powerless from states of de-pendency to conditions of autonomy as bothan laformed movement for revolutionary so-cial and economic transformation, and as ameans of achieving a state of reflexive or criti-cal consciousness. This is what Freire, Giroux,and others have been arguing for the lastdecade. For instance, we need to recognizeour complicity as teachers in the process ofconstituting our own subjectivity against thatof ette "other," who becomes in reality, a crea-ture of our own struggle for puwer. This mayseem utopian in the categorical sense, but Iwant to emphasize that I am being utopian ina provisional sense. I am not imposing anyblueprints here except to argue that we needto develop a praxis of liberation in whichpeople are able to distinguish genuine needsfrom the corporate manipulation of theirdesires, and in which they have the power andautonomy to determine rationally and freelythe nature and direction of their U .1'1, bothindividually and collectively. In achievinb sucha praxis, social theorists and educators alikeneed to free themselves from what RenatoRoksaldo calls "imperialist nostalgia," whichrefers to a longing for the very forms of social

life which have been altered or destroyed,often in the process of conducting research, alonging for the passing of what they, themsel-ves, have transformed through their supposed"civilizing" mission. We need, also, to remem-ber that the objects of our social analysis andour pedagogies are not just vacant and waitingreceptacles to be penetrated by and filled withour wisdom--a rather violent and phallocentricimage with which to construct the basis of apedagogy--but rather analyzing subjectsor-ganic intellectuals--whose perceptions must betaken as seriously as we take our own.

Let me refer briefly to the concept ofdesire which I have been employing hereduripg the seminar. What has been occupyingmy interest for the past year has been theconcept of desire and the process by whichideology is grafted into and mobilized by theflesh. Ideology, in this sense, isn't somethingthat is simply lived through some form of ra-tioncii consensus but is, in fact, something thatis lived in and through the body. If we want tounderstand the concept of ideology, par-ticularly as it relates to Gramsci's articulationof hegemony, then we need to ask ourselveswhat makes us consent to various forms ofdomination. How does the dominant cultureencourage this to happen? What makes bzingoppressors comfortable and perhaps evenpleasurable? How is it that we can watch amusic video, for instance, and try to en-courage students to critically analyze theproduction and reception of media discourses,to ideologically contest the militarism, thesexism, the violence of these television videos,yet simultaneously enjoy those very Pulturalforms we are pronouncing as oppressive sincesomehow our bodies--pleasure's bodies makea connection with the n usic. On the onehand, it gives us visceral pleusure to feel therhythm in our bodies and we make an invest-ment in that pleasure with our bodies; yet onthe other hand we abhor the ideological im-plications and ramifications of witnessing theobjectification of women, the militaristic/fas-cist representations, etc. Ideology is positioning us in this case through the mobilization ofaffect, as Lawrence Grossbcrg has argued.

Needs presuppose the possibility of fulfill-

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ment whereas desire seems to suggest an end-less deferral of fulfillment and in this way,desire becomes its nwn object. Madan Saruptalks about the "desire for desire." Desire iswhat cannot be specified by demand, andemerges when satisfaction of need cannot bemet. Desire is never free-floating but is alwaysproduced in historical and culturally-specificways. Do we have any control over the direc-tion of our desiring, and has capitalist societyconfused desire with real need? How is theconstruction of desire within late ,apitalismlinked to the instrumental rationality, theEurocentricity, the patriarchal discourses ofmodernity and postmodernity?

Desires which students express in schoolcannot be understood outside the manner inwhich they become institutionalized and so-cially legitimated, without taking into accountthe ends and purposes for which these desireshave become r ianufactured, both in relationto established educational discourses and inrelation to economies of power and privilegein the larger society. The question thatshould, in my mind, arise here for educatorsis ht. w have ow wills and our sense of agencyas teachers, and the wills and desires of ourstudents, become colonized by modes ofeconomic and symbolic production within thelarger society? This amounts to saying thatdesires are always mobilized by the cont;ngen-cy of the social, and its particular discourse ofpower, which are often tied to the economicrequirements and dominant modes ofmaterial and cultural production. Withincapitalism, modes of desire are invariablylinked in some way to the production of someform of surplus labor and consumption.

Grossberg has revealed the manner inwhich attitudes and moods are organized inhistorically specific ways (e.g., such asGramsci's "optimism of the will") aseconomies of affect or impassioned ways ofrelating to the world. By itself, the productionof mood is not ideologically charged but it ar-ticulates itself into ideological systems andspecific conditions. Whereas libidinal needscan be satisfied, at least partially satisfied,moods are never satisfied, only realized, andconstitute the investments and commitmonts

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made by individuals to the empowerment ofdifference. And, as Grossberg notes, whatmatters most in the age of postmodernity isthat something specific and different matters. Itdoesn't matter what matters, as long as themattering is intense and significant in itself.Structures of power are able to articulatethemselves through this mobilization of affect.Let me give you an ..xample of what I mean.My friend and colleaguL, John Novak ofBrock University in Canada, attended aprincipal's conference in the Eastern UnitedStates last year. He was a featured speakeralong with another speaker of an entirely dif-ferent ideological and pedagogical cast--prin-cipal Joe Clark (of the movie Lean On Mefame). Clark had been featured on the coverof Time Magazine with his baseball bat whichhe carried oil patrol through his New Jerseyhigh school to ward off the so-called "thugs"who were causing trouble. I'm sure most ofyou here have heard of Mr. Clark and sufficeii to say that John Novak works from a machmore liberal pedagogical and political orienta-tion than does Joe Clark, yet both speakersreceived standing ovations from the largeaudience in attendance. Novak wanted to findout why and interviewed a number of prin-cipals about why they had applauded Mr.Clark. Most individuals remarked that whilethey didn't like the values and ideology whichinformed Clark's leadership in his school, theyadmired his commitment and style. I think thesame thing can be said P. aout the popularity ofOliver North. What matters to malyAmericans is that something really matters toJoe Clark and to Oliver North, and I think itwas North's impassioned style rather than hisideas that stole the show in the TV fanfaresurrounding Contragate.

I want to shift gears here because time isrunning out and I feel I've jumped over a lotof areas, and I dare say I have not given suffi-cient attention to any one of them. So let meend on a final nott. which I hope will be of in-terest. I want to bring the theoretical importof what I have been saying to discuss themovie, Dead Poet's Society, starring RobinWilliams. A lot of students have wanted todiscuss this film in class, and it frightens me

to think that the teacher played by Robin Wil-liams is viewed as practicing what my studentsfeel is critical pedagogy. When this film getsreleased as a video, I will no doubt use it inclass because I think that a lot of teachers willm'..s the dangers inherent Pa the classroomapproach used by Williams. For those thathaven't seen the film, I just want to mention abit abont the pedagogy used by the centralcharacter who in the 1950's returns to aprivate, authoritarian ruling-class school forboys he one:: attended as a student. Com-pared to the dictatorial approach ins'olvingrote learning and severe military-style dis-cipline which is used by most teachers, theclassroom approach used by WiPiams is veryinnovative--you could call it liberal and not bewrong--and amuuats to shattering mainstreamconventions in the school. For instance, Wil-liams hrs the class rip out pages of the rathergrim ten used to teach poetry, and has thestudents take turns at standing on his dr;sk sothat they can see the classroom from a dif-ferent point of view. The students find Wil-liams to be quite a refreshing teacher, if notliberating, and their curiosity about his historyas a former student at the school leads themto discover that he once belonged to a ;ecrctclub called the "Dead Poet's Society." Un-beknownst to Williams, some students decideto resurrect the club, which began meeting ina cave in the evenings and where membersrecited poetry, painted their faces, and playedmusical instruments. I won't spoil the moviefor you by giving away the plot, but I trustyou've got the general idea of the pedagogicalapproach used by the main character.

The problem that I have with this form ofpedagogy is that it suggests that self-improve-ment and empowerment can exist withoutcallint, tin,. existing social order into question.Issues of doss, gender, and ethnic inequalityare ne%er raised. In fact, I would go so far asto claim that this form of liberal, humanistpedagogy senes to contain the political, todiscursively police revolt, to equate liberationwho the personal over the social, and to maskforms of domination. There's also a repugnantsexism that informs this pedagogy, illustratedin William's remark that poetry is si-aply a

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device to "woo women." The students are con-spicuously not invited to problematize therelationship among the authoritarianism inthe school, the way power works in the largersociety to silence certain groups, and its en-tanglements in social practices which serve therich and powerful. In Jim Berlin's terms, thisillustrates a form of "expressionist rhetoric"which, although it includes a denunciation ofeconomic, political, and social pressures toconform--to resist the institutionally-spon-sored production of desire, attitude, and be-havior--it is resistance in the service of theprivatized ego. As Berlin notes, expressionistrhetoric reinforces entrepreneurial virtues ofindividualism, private initiative, risk-taking,and subversion of authority. It is the ideologof the unique, private vision of a DonaldTrump and devoid of a concern with how thematerial and social constraints prohibit other,less fortunate groups to realize their privatevisions. It is as if consciousness is somehownot connected to the workings of power, or asif hierarchies of power and privilege arenatural hierarchies. While Williams as theteacher attempts to defamiliarize the ex-perience which the students have of rotelearning and blind obedience to adultauthority and the ruling-class economies ofpower and privilege, and while he is intent,perhaps even insistent, on getting beyond thedeformation of the individual as authorized bythe discourses of tradition and the prevailingregimes of truth of the time, the end result isthe struggle for the uniqueness--perhaps eveneccentricity--of individual expression. Jim Ber-lin describes this kind of subversiveness asmore apparent than real. It is debilitatinglydivisive of political protest becaire it en-courages individuals to achieve unique per-sonhood in antiseptic isolation from any realsense of collective struggle around thereferent of difference and otherness. It is apedagog which operates without considera-tion of how power works to privilege certaingroups over others on the basis of race, class,and gender, and Williams takes no pains tonarrate the contingency of his own and thestudents' race, class, and gender privilege. It isa soft mode of resistance easily co-opted by

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those forces it seeks to delegitimate; actually,it represents a form of resistance which ac-tually compliments the capitalist ethos of pos-sessive individualism. A critical pedagogymust attempt to de-authorize and rewrite themaster narratives of liberal post-industrialdemocracy and the humanist, individualist,and patriarchal discourses which underwrite itwhile at the same time undermine andreconstruct the idealized and romantic con-ception of the subject which is structured byeurocentric and androcentric discursive powerrelations. In Terry Eagleton's terms,Williams's pedagog is a form of moral tech-nology which structures modes of desire thatthe society needs in the; era of late capitalism.It teaches what he terms a "bourgeois modeof subjectivity" precisely in the way itcelebrates learning for the sake of learning,which is a mistaken virtue : believe, becat.selearning never speaks for itself and is alwaysinscribed by political interests and supportedby certain relations of power. Freedom andcreativity are valued as ends in themselves inthe discourse of liberal humanist pedagogywhereas the critical educator believes thatfreedom and creativity should be part of alarger pedagogical project, one that poses thecrucial question for the students which is:Freedom and creativity for what?

Mas'ud Zavaradeh's critique of the :beralhumanist classroom is, I think, very ap-propriately applied to the pedagog of theDead Poet's Society. The pedagogy employedis one of "fancy"--what Zavaradeh calls a "ped-agog of p.easure." Here liberation is personaland eminently historical and has litfle to dowith emancipat-Jn. It is a pedagog formally"at odds" with the "serious" workaday bour-geois world but doesn't seriously question theunderlying assumptions or relations of powerwhich inform it. Questions involvingpower/knowledge relations are Juspended,and dangerous memories of human sufferingand rebellion are never raised. I leave my stu-dents with the following questions in relationto the pedagogy represented in the film: Whatvision of the future inheres in the pedagogy ofthe Dead Foet's Society? What vision of socialjustice? What model of the individual subject?

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What suppositions involving democracy?I have raised the issue of the pedagogy

employed in the Dead Poet's Society as a wayto make concrete some of the theoreticalpropositions I have been discussing with youover the last several days.

Might I say in conclusion that I hopesome of these ideas will provoke discussionover the remainder of the conference. I

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believe that the more we attempt to clarifywhat we mean by "critical pedagogy" the moreopportunities will present themselves for dis-cussing and elaborating the values, supposi-tions, and basis for practice which inform ourteaching, learning, and research practices,and, perhaps most iffy, mt of all, the visionof the future which hut Les in them.

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