UNESCO-CCNGO/EFA seminar in the framework
of the
“Alternative Discourse in Education:
Towards New Notions of Quality to Promote Lifelong Learning
for Social Transformation”
TRANSCRIPTION OF THE DEBATES IN ENGLISH
Carlos Zarco Mera: Good evening, welcome. We are here tonight to try and construct a space
for collective reflection. To start this, we will try to know who we are here
and where we are coming from. [People from different regions raise their
hands.] It seems that we have a full house. We are not the United Nations but
we are individuals from diverse nations who are in the process of interaction.
We are going to try to host this reflection in a different way because the
subject of this seminar, is there [point to the poster on the wall] written in
big letters as you can see: “Alternative discourse in education: towards new
visions of quality to promote lifelong learning for the social
transformation". The person who can memorize and repeat this title by
heart will receive an award!
The idea
is that we do not only want to talk about alternative discourse in education,
but we want to try here, between all of us, to find new ways and formats to
also construct this knowledge, this discourse and these ideas for social
transformation. Because all of us, we want a critical education, a liberating
education, an education for social transformation. This is the reason why we
would like to request you to take some time for brief exchanges with the person
seated next to you. There may be some language difficulties…but it seems that
there already are language groupings. You are requested to discuss the
following question: “Why we are here to reflect on an alternative discourse on
quality and education for social transformation? What is the need to do so?”
Your active involvement is important because a central principle in alternative
discourses is that we are all intellectuals, that we are all specialists in
life. Nobody can say I know everything and you know nothing, we all know
something.
Therefore,
we will initiate the first part of the dialogue with a reflection between the
specialists of life, that is, every one of us. The suggestion, then, is to
interact about the main questions you have regarding tonight’s proposed theme.
You, who are the specialists in life, education practices and social
organization, what are your experiences and what questions do you face?
Unfortunately, we will not be able to listen to all of us because it is just
not logistically possible. However, we will request that three or four people
come forward to share with us the results of their interaction, one or two key
ideas please. Our colleagues here on the panel will also interact quickly on
the main ideas that they want to share to begin this collective reflection.
[Discussion begins amongst the audience members.]
Good. We are now ready for the first round of interaction and we would like to invite three or four people to come up and take the microphone to very briefly share one or two of the questions that they discussed with their neighbours.
Woman in Portuguese : One of our concerns is how to guarantee that
learning is central to what is going on in the classroom? How to keep children
interested in learning? This is the core of the problem. We will not see any
social transformation if we do not guarantee that the learning that occurs
evolves from the commitment of children to constructing knowledge for the
common good. My main preoccupation today is the corruption of learning in the
classroom.
Huguette Redegled : The question that we discussed was the
following: “Why are we here, in
Our small group
was very international since there was a lady from
Carlos Zarco
Mera : Thank you. Before hearing from our panelists, we are going to
watch a short slideshow presentation that our friend Manish from India would
like to share with us.
Manish Jain : Just to help set the mood for the evening,
we had a conference last month in
Manish Jain shows the
slides
Carlos Zarco Mera: Good, this gives us a first glance at possible
interactions around learning. One of the issues raised is to question the
underlying assumption behind our habit of looking for quick answers instead of
looking for deeper questions. In this sense, we would like to use this time to
explore questions together – and at the same time why not some answers, but in
a particular way, that is the essence of unlearning and learning.
This
dialogue is organized by the UNESCO and several NGO networks involved in the
UNESCO partnership mechanism called the Collective Consultation of NGOs. This
includes networks from Asia, the Arab Region, Africa and Latin America. It is
in this international spirit that we have invited some personalities that have
a wide variety of experiences in the field of education. To my left is Munir
Fasheh, of Palestine, the director of the Arab Education Forum and professor at
the Centre
for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. Next to him, is our colleague Aminata Traoré psycho-sociologist working with a
very interesting initiative called the African Initiative for Ethics and
Aesthetics. On the other side, we have Manish Jain from
Munir Fasheh: First, I have a comment on the title
“alternative discourse in education”. We fall into the same logic if we try to
find a discourse which is universal. So the question here is not if we are
finding a discourse or not, but it is about regaining something very
fundamental -- which is the ability of every human being to make sense of the
world. This is for me one of the most important characteristics of what we call
a human being. It is the ability to create meaning, to form meaning, and I
think this is where I have a big problem with schools because they wipe out
that ability totally.
In schools, the
meanings are given in the curriculum, the words are given in books, and all the
answers are given as ready answers. So, we, as creators of meaning (I do not
like the word “creators” as much as “co-authors” of meaning), author meanings
together. Notice that the word author comes from authority, which means once
you author the meaning, you have authority over others. So the only way I can
deal with this is if every one of us is an author of meaning. And I think this
is one of the ideas that I would like actually to talk about in this meeting
and emphasize, because during the past two days in our sessions, amidst almost
all the words that were used - maybe there was some words that I missed - I did
not heard a word that was not originated in Western countries. And I mean by
Western countries mainly
At that point, I would like to introduce a word
from Arabic, because I think it’s a beautiful concept, and again it is about
putting our own words and our own meanings. I think Portuguese may have some similarity
with Arabic in the sense that every word in Arabic has a root. There is no word
in Arabic to mean “an individual”, in the sense of separate from history,
separate from the society, etc. Now, the word for “dialogue” in Arabic is “tanakosh”. “Tanakosh” comes from a root in Arabic, which is the same as
“chiselling a stone”. Now when you chisel a stone, in a sense, you form some
shape out of the stone that you make into a statue or something else. In
Arabic, when we discuss, the meaning is to “chisel each other’s minds”, to
“chisel each other’s souls”, to “chisel each other’s hearts” -- which means I
make you a little bit more beautiful, and you make me a little bit more
beautiful. It doesn’t mean that I want to change your point of view with my point
of view. Nor does it mean that I do discuss with you only so that one of us
will win. Rather, the purpose of our discussion (according to the root meaning
of the word), is to try to come out of the discussion a little bit more
beautiful as people. I think that this idea is totally different from the
current debates and current dialogues where eventually there is a winner and
there is a loser, or there is somebody who has really better arguments, etc.
I will stop probably here, and then will pick up
again, but this idea is to bring in our own words, looking at ourselves.
Whether we are two years old or eighty years old, we are constantly creating
meaning. We should not ever lose sight of this very important fact and how we
can introduce it in anything that we call learning or in any activity of life.
There are several examples, but I will give just these two examples. “Human
rights” is a universal concept that killed diversity, pluralism and killed the
dignity of human beings in almost all societies except Western society. In a
different way, it may have killed it in Western society, but I don’t want to
talk about it as if I am representing the West. I'm talking about representing
my own experience in my own country, and I feel that I can see it everyday – the
dominant concept of human rights has actually robbed me of many of my rights.
Aminata Traoré : I will start with where Munir ended, that is, with the question of meaning. What is
the meaning of our presence here in
At the same time, the
current state of the world also gives us this new possibility for a level of
conviviality that we have not experienced before. I think it is fabulous for the
history of human kind. For the first time, thousands of people are gathering
here in
Because it is obvious
that the entire system is wired and it is based on pure madness – precisely
because the interaction with the Other started and
continues to be carried out with violence. This interaction is on-going, and it
is imposed upon us. We do not have any control over this form of interaction.
It has been declared that it is the age of globalisation, but one needs to add
that it is a neo-liberal and mercantile kind of globalisation. As soon as we
say globalisation, at least in some parts of the world, we are under the
impression – and this is what has always been fed to us - that we are
second-class human beings, backwards people, until we follow the path of those
who dominate (the winners of the Cold War and other conquerors of the past.
Therefore, the challenge today is to understand the destructiveness of this path, which has two dimensions. First, it is destroying the human being at the level of the mind – in our capacity to imagine who we are. Second, it is destroying our capacity to imagine our place in the world, our relationship with the Other. This form of symbolic violence goes hand in hand with economic, material and military violence. If you do not comply with how you are told to behave, then you will have a war launched against you. It is this unbearable reality which we should question today.
So
now, how to reinvest in the human being, how to reconstruct our humanity? I
believe that it is this challenge before us today. How to rebuild the human
being, invest in him/her with a view to help reconcile him with himself and
with the Other? Because they
succeeded in inculcating hatred in us through competition. What shall we
do after all this brainwashing – that we cannot exist
without competing, country against country? Even inside our countries,
unfortunately, social systems are completely demolished because, within
families, within households, people have the impression that they can only
exist through competition; they need to constantly be above the Other. Because education today is above all concerned with
teaching you to be the enemy of the Other. Then, how
to break free from this form of training? How can we escape this kind of
learning? How to de-link us from this school which deforms and dehumanises? How
to get away from this school, which makes that you feel that you cannot exist
if you cannot consume?
Now,
if we are talking about alternative discourse, this discourse should be defined
in the framework of the current state of the world: a world in which we do not
recognise ourselves anymore. Thus, the other possible world that we are
asserting here should start with revisiting learning and education. We need to
delve deep into our inner selves, in our memories, our inheritance, to reclaim
these “know-how” and these “know-to-be” that enabled us to exist, to resist
until now. This is what is being destroyed through the media, through hegemonic
thinking. And when these fail, then military violence is used. So now, even if we refuse the war, they still
will impose it on us.
Manish
Jain: I think I’ll also start with the title “Alternative Discourse in
Education”. From the perspective of our work in
So if we are to actually talk about “Alternative
Discourses to Education,” it means
that we’re opening ourselves up to a whole set of different kinds of questions:
questions around nationalism, national identity, national boundaries; questions
around an industrial, military paradigm of growth; questions around what it
means to be modern, what it means to be civilized, what does progress mean. I
think these are the kinds of core questions that are confronting us today and,
unless we ask these kinds of questions, the trap of globalisation is going to
get worse. In
I’ll give you an example from
I believe that the central question in facing us
today then is: What does it mean to reclaim control over our own learning?
Institutions of education have taken that control from us; they define it for
us all the time. But I think that we can learn without the experts to always
tell us how. When we hear this idea of co-authoring meaning, or this idea of
regenerating our imagination, I would say that reclaiming control over our own
learning is essential step.
For us, part of that process starts with what we
call “unlearning”. Unlearning certain mental frameworks we’ve been conditioned
by – mental models, narratives and assumptions about who we are, what our
future is, what our past is, what our problems are, what our potentials are.
Unlearning certain fears we have, unlearning that there are no alternatives,
unlearning stereotypes about our neighbours and about the Other.
This process of unlearning is very important, I think, when we are talking
about alternatives to education, and it is something that we have been doing a
lot of research on recently. The most interesting (and provocative) thing that
we have found so far is that there can be no curriculum for unlearning. This
raises the question, then: What are we talking about when we say unlearning is
necessary? If we’re trying to think of another world, or other worlds, then we
have to unlearn the worldview of education that we have all been indoctrinated
in. The problem is that there can be no curriculum for doing that. So what do
we do?
Carlos Zarco
Mera: It could be an interesting task to try and elaborate a curriculum for
unlearning….Now, I would like to invite to Carol to share her initial
reflections with us.
Carolyn Medel-Anonuevo : First of all, let me start by telling you my
story. I come from four generations of teachers. My grandmother, an elementary
school graduate was already a teacher during American colonization in my
country. My mother was a high school science teacher while I used to be a
university teacher of sociology and my eldest daughter is now a lecturer in the
university in my country as well. So in a way I have been exposed to the
different ways of learning in these four generations and these have shaped my
understanding and my practice of teaching and learning..
When I was teaching, I always started my class by
saying, “I will not teach but instead provide an environment for learning.” As
for me, the essence of teaching was to provide an environment for learning.
Through the years, I have slowly deconstructed this idea provide an environment
for because now I think, one also has to contend with the questions of, “What
is learning, what are we learning, and what should we learning about? I think
that Munir, Manish and Aminata have all raised these
questions and maybe let me give some of my reflections on the question, What should we be learning? Coming from the women’s movement
in the
Now that I am working at the UNESCO Institute of
Education in
I think that as we are here in
Carlos Zarco
Mera: Thank you very much Carol. In our discussions around alternative discourses,
there is indeed this idea that for education to play a liberating role, we all
need to go through a critical self-reflection process vis-à-vis the values that
we have been taught. This is what happened in Palestine, when Munir talked
about co-authors. And in the case of Palestine this is not simply a word or a
metaphor. This is what starts to happen when Aminata speaks from Africa and
says, "they colonized to us and so we spoke French. Now, we want to think
differently about that language, with which they colonized our minds."
When Manish asks, "what is development, what are the main concepts that we
have inherited in education and what is their real meaning and agenda?” When
Munir says, “the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted by 20 people
in New York but still claims to be universal.” And when Carol shares her
experiences about the meaning of being a woman, teacher and immigrant engaging
in intercultural dialogue.
In this
complex debate, I would like to ask a question. In the field of popular
education or alternative education, we talk about empowering people. It is a
statement that is always present when we talk about our practices. We say that
that we want to empower women, to empower the poor, to empower the young
people. I would like to invite our participants to share their reflections
regarding this word “empowerment”.
Munir Fasheh: For me, the word “empowerment” is another
one of the words that I feel is part of the problem. Whether we talk about
“educating others” or “empowering others” or “saving others” or “helping
others”, it always out of a relationship of somebody who knows more and who is
actually treating the other as “less”, instead of putting enough effort to
understand and to realize what the other has. And this is really where
unlearning comes in. The person who helped me unlearn a lot of what I had
learned or what I was educated in through schools and universities was my
mother who was illiterate. I was “educated”, my mother
was not and did not have any of my symbols. I somehow thought that she was
ignorant and that she always needed somebody to tell her how to do things. But
all of a sudden something really clicked in my mind, and I discovered, and I’m
still discovering (she died in 1984) not only how much she had that I can
understand, but how much she had that I can not even understand.
I have a doctorate in “education” and she had zero
“education”. The environment that she created for me and my sisters at home – she and my father – is something that I couldn’t
create for my children. I have a doctorate in education, but I couldn’t,
because the creation of an environment is not something that you can do just
from reading books. It is something that you learn from life through so many
different ways. One of the ways that have been wiped out in education is
wisdom. And wisdom has been locked in jail since Descartes declared that
somehow thinking is above life, is above existence: “we think, therefore we
exist,” instead of “we exist, therefore we think”. His statement is a very
strange of perceiving the world; and for me, that was one of the problems that
I had to unlearn with the help of my mother. Because her thinking and her life
were so much a part of each other that you could not even separate them. For
me, things were separated. I studied mathematics, and I taught mathematics at
every level for a long time, and then I discovered – and this is the story of
my mother – that my mother really had an understanding of mathematics totally
different and really superior in every sense to my understanding of
mathematics.
So, back to the word “empowerment”… When they talk
about “women’s empowerment” or “empowering women”, I say: Who would really
empower whom? I couldn’t empower my mother in any way, in any sense, while she
empowered me for the past thirty years while I have been really trying to
rethink education and development and the whole process that is called
progress. This idea that somebody has the right and authority to know what is
good for another is, I think, the seed of dehumanising the other. It is the
seed that we really have to unlearn to regain our humanity. I will probably
give my mother something, but she gives me other things. This is not decided by
who has a higher degree, who has a higher rank, but
actually by our relationship to our environment. Her relationship to life and
her relationship to her surroundings and to her culture was
almost organic. For me, my relationship to my surroundings was always through
words – they really control (and limit) my whole understanding. This is very
problematic for me.
Carlos Zarco
Mera: Without a doubt, women’s movements around the world are clearly actors in
education. They are helping us to unlearn many things, to question many other
things. Carol, drawing from your experience in the women’s movement, could you
also share what you think about the subject of power and empowerment?
Carolyn Medel-Anonuevo: Of course
“empowerment” is a very slippery term. The World Bank uses the word
“empowerment”. The private sector and big business use the word “empowerment”,
and so a big question among women’s groups, among the women’s movement is
should we use the word “power” at all? On the other hand, we also say that
there are different kinds of power which we have to learn and to appropriate.
This would be the “power to” which
means the capacity to change, the capacity to become an agent of one’s life.
And this is what women have been trying to learn. For many years, for many
decades, for thousands of years, they have learned that they are properties of
men – that what men want to do they can do to women, they can violate women,
they can rape women. Many women still have to realize that they have within
them their own capacities to change such situations.
Another kind of power is “power with”. It means
that women and men can work together, and if they are able to work together
towards certain goals, realizing at the same time that there can also be
conflicts between women and men, “power
with” can be a viable force. Often, individual women think that they can do
it on their own: “I’m a successful woman so I have arrived.” But what women’s
movements, what groups are saying is that we have to work together,
and working together can be very powerful. For us, it is very important to look
at these different meanings of power. To be able to appropriate the term
“empowerment”, one has to be critical about the root word “power”.
Unfortunately, many groups do not look at the term “power” because it’s a very
strong word. Many women do not want to talk about power, but I think this is
one of the key words that women need to learn.
Aminata Traoré : In reference to the question about
the significance of our presence here, I think that by participating here we
are defying an extremely powerful system. But this process is also to challenge
ourselves because the deconstruction of a system of thought – the questioning
of entrenched concepts -- is shifting the whole architecture of our thinking
regarding the meaning of development and co-operation. The main difficulty is
at this level because starting from the very words we use dominant institutions
continuously put on new clothes. Often these words do not have much meaning for
the very people which they claim to help.
In
addition, many initiatives claiming to think about the state of the world and
to transform it, emanate from those institutions
which, like the World Bank, are at the origin of the majority of people’s
problems. The intervention of the World Bank to strengthen the capacities of
women is a political curiosity for me because it is the Bank which inflicted,
over the course of two decades -- in a unilateral way -- structural adjustment
programmes onto our countries, without the large majority of the Africans
knowing what was happening to them. Today what do they ask in the name of
expenditure control? School fees for everyone, including the most marginalized.
In the area of health, the same is happening. Any woman in my country can die
while giving birth because she cannot pay 25,000 francs for a "kit."
So, where is “empowerment” when the right to life is violated? There is a
proverb which says "when the person seeking the needle is putting one’s
foot on it, it becomes impossible to find." It is a travesty that the same
institutions which declared a certain type of development -- and that have
destroyed a good part of the world -- now claim to transform society by
empowering women. And to follow Munir, I will give a
concrete example.
I
refer to a fishing village in the
In
North-South relationships, there is this cleavage between the feminist vision
and gender perspective from the North. But this solidarity between women is
also shaken when women from the South narrate this type of reality. Our friends
and sisters from the North find it tough to accept sometimes when we say,
"It may look difficult for us from the outside, but we would like to be
able to think about certain solutions from within." I wanted to share this
story to relate it with transformation and learning. The challenge before us is
not only a challenge against the Dominant powers and the forces of money, but
it is also a day-to-day challenge amongst us -- in our practices of solidarity,
in our approach to development which sometimes does not match what people want
for themselves.
Manish Jain : I think for me the
problem with the empowerment discourse is that it gets again framed within a
certain set of institutions, so we empower people within a certain framework.
And what happens as a result of that is a few things.
One is those is that institutions have defined power as a zero-sum game, so it
forces everybody to fight against each other for certain limited power within
the framework of those institutions. The other thing that happens is that our
own notions of power, and our ability to develop and
to generate different forms of power somehow gets reduced. I can give you an
example from
When we talk about swaraj (I mentioned this idea earlier), the idea is that we start
to create our own reference points – that we do talk about power but we talk
about it in relation to a different set of possibilities, a different set of
structures, a different set of assumptions, which are not always going to be
within a framework of scarcity in which we have to always fight one another.
There are also notions of power that stem from a worldview of abundance: power
is there and I can actually share my power without losing anything in the
process. The problem is that anybody today who thinks through the lenses of
institutional frameworks thinks that they cannot share their power because
they’re always doing calculations about “how I’m going to lose this or that”.
Until we get out of those limited frameworks, I don’t think that we can
actually really regenerate new possibilities, new worlds, new
opportunities.
Carlos Zarco
Mera: When we talk about alternative discourses, there is also the idea of
expressing things through our bodies. We are going to try this now. Ok. Please raise your left hand up and
down. Very good, now you must be getting a nice tingling feeling in your hand.
With your right hand, make some horizontal movements like this. Ready? Good,
now use your left hand and right hand together to try to coordinate both
movements...historically. Is it difficult? [laughter]. Now, here’s another very
simple exercise. Put one foot please up, and the other. Ok. Now, raise the
hands above your head, stretch your two hands and try to touch the ceiling of
the room...little by little...one is to touching the ceiling.. here we go, here
we go! Very good, bravo!
Manish Jain: I just wanted to add
one more point about this notion of empowerment, which I think is really
critical to what we are talking about. It is the assumption that we need
experts to come and empower us, some professionals to empower us. However, the
idea of swaraj means that this
search, this struggle for meaning, for generating one’s own power, has to come
from a different place. It doesn’t come from experts who come and run training
courses on empowerment, and tell us the latest theory from the West on
empowerment. For example, these days, one thing I am very disturbed about is
what is happening with the notion of creativity. There are now “creativity
kits” which are packaged and sold to us by experts! Something that is so
natural to our way of life, that permeates everything
from our food to our clothes to our festivals. Why is it that we now need some
professional to come and give us a course on creativity? I think this is where
the trap starts.
I believe that today, in
Carlos Zarco
Mera: In a short time, we have discussed the issues of culture, development, power, human rights, language, and the social and
political realities of marginalization and colonization. These issues raise
many challenges for learning and education. Several points of view have been
shared, and we would like now to explore with you what ideas you have taken
thus far from this dialogue and what questions have arisen within you. We would
like to invite you to share these with the person next to you, or sitting
behind and ahead of you. Please try to highlight a few points that you would
like to stress in this debate. We would like you to reflect during these
exchanges on new questions that emerged, with a view to go deeper into our
collective reflections. A little later, we will ask two or three people to
share some of their points with us.
Woman in Portuguese :
Our group discussed
that we all who are present here represent the privileged elite. But when you
work at a grassroots level with children that have no education, no economic
opportunities, etc., how can we give them hope, support, motivation and have an
impact for changing the international situation? How to link this discourse
with our teachers, in our regions, so that they can effectively believe in what
we would like them to believe? How to foster change together with teachers and
educators?
Woman in French: Really, I have to say that I did
not want to speak with my neighbours…this is violence for me. I do not know,
perhaps what you said is beyond my intellectual capacities. It is very
symbolic. Say that I agree with you – that the school is a destructive
institution, that everything is imposed upon us – but what are the
alternatives? What are the solutions? Really, I have not been able to
understand. Excuse me.
Claude Vercoutere : A
little more than one year ago in
However,
there are a certain number of points that you raised with which I do not agree
completely. When you denounce human rights, I can understand, but for me, human
rights have been a part of my culture since the French revolution! You referred
to your parents, but I remember my great-great grandparents who fought against
oppression…then won, lost, and won again. In this perspective, human rights are
very important and I hold on to it! However, I can agree that this is perhaps
not good enough a reason to transmit this framework to the whole world, but
still! It is true that today I feel very disturbed when the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights is held up in one hand while the other hand
promotes "big business" and depends upon Dollars, Euros or Yens. I
agree with those denouncing it, because it is a reality that the two are
presented on the same level. So I show solidarity with this battle. At the same
time, if I can understand that some cultures wish to refuse human rights, it is
only with certain conditions – which are that those cultures do not oppress
their people. I am aware that in societies recognising human rights there is
oppression and misery, but there are also forms of oppression which affect the
weakest, which affect women. Thus if one argue against human rights, one should
at the same time specify what kinds of behaviours or conditions are absolutely
unacceptable.
I would like to also to
come back to another point, which is the rejection of schooling. I can
understand that one condemns schooling… Nevertheless, if I owe a lot to my
parents, I also owe a lot to the French public school. This, I will never
disavow. I agree that this school does not function as I would wish it to
function, and this is why I have fought for 30 years to transform it. And it is
difficult. Why? Because one trains the teachers in didactics, but one does not
give them genuine skills in the area of pedagogy to make them into genuine
educators. Because, as it has already been underlined during the conference,
one does not give them the means to do it. However, if the school is
demolished, one leaves power to the rich, to those that were given everything
in their cradle when they were born. I excuse myself. I am the son of a
mechanic fitter. I learnt a lot from him, I have already said this. But it is
also the school that made me who I am now today. And I do not agree that we
should leave all power and possibilities only to these who were born with
wealth in their cradle! Thank you.
Coumba Touré : First of all, I would like to express my
sincere thanks to this panel. It has been a very long time since I attended a
panel like this one, where one really lets people participate in this way. I
would really like to congratulate the people who organized this. My question,
after having listened to you - because it has been really extraordinary to hear
your ideas – is the following: After accepting that it is necessary to shift
the paradigm, after accepting that schooling as it exists in our the
communities is an oppressive if not sometimes criminal institution, after
accepting many things that you have said, what happens when you face a power
that is ready to eliminate you physically? Because when you want to shift the
paradigm, when you refuse to follow the path that has been laid out for you
(and not just limit yourself to proposing a petition or a law or something like
that), when you decide to actually do things differently, then one goes beyond
a certain boundary where one finds oneself facing people who are ready to kill.
This has been happening for a very long time. Thus my question is: what does
one do after all that?
Samir Jarrar: Thanks
for opening the discussion. I had a big problem listening to you and if I
didn’t know at least three of you very well, I would have done something
foolish. I am bothered by the fact that what you’ve done here is you’ve put
yourself in a trap. All we have done in the last hour and a half, roughly, is
fallen in the same things we are trying to change. We give the word
“empowerment” to the World Bank, and we gave other ideas to colonizers, and we
made them the force that are looking over our life and forcing us. At a certain
point in time, yes there was colonizers, and there
still is globalisation. There is a World Bank and other institutions that are
even worse in this world but if you are going to keep falling in their hands by
spending all our energy trying to deconstruct them, we are not going to be able
to help those that are growing now and looking for a better future. This
discourse is very good at the intellectual level for a small group. Here, I’m
afraid, as a member of the audience, it really made me feel that I have no hope
whatsoever.
All these things are happening, but much of it we
are doing to ourselves. Within a paradigm of education, I think the school too
has failed totally in delivering what we want. Can anybody in this room tell me
one country in the world that’s happy with its schooling system? Raise your
hand! Nobody raises hand This proves
the point. We are spending zillions of dollars on schooling with a certain
curriculum, and all we have done over the last fifty years at least, that I’m
aware of, is we are trying to find means and ways to make this thing that does
not belong, this paradigm of education that does not belong, produce something
that it was not designed to produce. So what we really need as an alternative
is an alternative way of thinking towards what needs to be available for us to
help our people learn.
This means we need to start looking for a positive
rather than a negative. I don’t want to see “not what”, but the “yes of”. I
don’t want to use my time saying no. I want to say yes to the alternatives,
whatever the alternatives are. My thinking tells me that what we need is a
group of visionaries who should revisit the paradigm of education and look at
what the human being is going to be doing in the coming fifty years from now.
They can call back the educators to develop the type of things that needs to be
shared with the people to learn how to improve their living. They might find
out that maybe 80% of what is in the school needs to stay there, but they might
also find out that that much needs to be cut. Do we still need 16 years for
human beings with a brain to get to the level that we can make a computer reach
in a couple of hours?
Man in Spanish (26.9): In our group, we noted that we are
now listening to several cultures and they are giving
visions that are different that the ones that we normally hear. I do not know
if this can be considered a new paradigm, but being open to the different
cultures, and recognizing diversity is indeed a central subject. We reflected
upon two main points: first, our friend from Palestine pointed out a very deep
irony, "I am a doctor in education and my mother was illiterate. She gave
us a home and a warm familiar atmosphere, but I am not able to give such an
atmosphere in my home." That is a very radical critic, a very radical self-criticism
indeed. If I relate it to my own environment and familiar images, I see that it
is not lie. Because education is something that separates us from the reality.
We are seeing very similar things in the poor sectors of society in which we
work. We think it would be very useful to reflect a little more on this.
The
second point on which we reflected was the issue of empowerment. We understood
that our friends from Africa and India question this concept because coming
from outside, it is a discourse from the World Bank. Our group agreed with
that. Ideas and concepts should arise from the reality of each country. Our
companion from Africa explained that women in her country want their reality to
be respected and reject outsiders coming with ideas that do not correspond to
their culture. We also agree with that. At the same time, we also agree with
the point made by our friend from UNESCO in Germany about the necessity to talk
and learn about power. We did not reach a conclusion but tried to contextualise
the debate in our own context in Latin America. We try to defend our cultures,
we try to generate local pedagogies building on the roots of our cultures, but
we would like to explore in greater depth the links between these local
processes and globalised processes because we see that these lines are not
fixed. We think that it is a complex situation, and believe that it would be
interesting to deepen our understanding of it.
Carlos Zarco
Mera: Many of the questions that were raised during the exchanges are
concerned with what does alternative mean. If we challenge
and deconstruct the system, the current paradigms, then how to generate new
dynamics? I would like to invite our panel members to share some ideas
on this.
Aminata Traoré : The last speaker reassures me. If
not, I would have had the impression that we wasted our time criticizing the
World Bank and the institutions. I believe that we did not even speak
sufficiently about these institutions, with regards to their capacity for doing
harm in the world. We could have gone on further. Now, as far as alternatives
are concerned, we cannot take about one alternative, but many alternatives. It
has to be plural. I believe that our quest -- this quest that is going to be a
long journey -- starts with questioning certainties. This is what we have done
since the beginning of this dialogue. Because certainties consist in believing
that there are teaching methods and pedagogies that are more or less good for
everyone, and in believing that human beings are like receptacles which must
fed by these in order to be able to adapt.
Both the force
and the weakness of this type of forum stems from the plurality inherent in the
world. We speak from different points of view, different life experiences. As
far as I am concerned, I speak about my own experience of being dominated, on
behalf of a people that has been dominated for more than five centuries, a
people devastated by slavery, colonization, neo-colonization and globalisation.
This is this experience that is familiar to me. This is what I would like to
share when I talk about the type of education given to Africans -- an education
which does not allow us to resolve our problems. This education system has
primarily propagated a feeling amongst that we are somehow inferior human
beings -- a belief that until you resemble the Dominant culture, you are
nothing. Those individuals which betray their people
are well-paid for it. Today, our leaders know this game better than anyone.
Reconsidering
our certainties, revisiting them, saying that today we can construct only by
drawing upon ourselves -- it is all a question of self-confidence. It is about
children and adults learning together. This is the meaning of the question: how
to regenerate the human being? This is what I said in my introduction. Today,
if we are to assess education and lifelong learning vis-à-vis the current state
of the world, I have to say that there is nothing to be proud of. We are at a
stage where desacralization of life and vulgarisation
of death is such that we must ask ourselves the question: What humanity is left
within us? And that points us to the question: How do we re-link with culture?
One participant was saying earlier that she does not understand. But I do not
think that there is a ready-made package of alternatives which one can use --
life does not work like that. It is a process of questioning and the
difficulties which emerge from this are tremendous. Maybe it is difficult for
us to figure out what an education that re-invests in humanity might look like.
And today, given the current power games at stake, where shall we find the
necessary financial and logistical resources to re-anchor education with the
human being? When Education itself is becoming an economic good? Because today,
schools are looked at in the same way as bread and medicines, they are all
marketable goods. And it is the children of the poor, precisely, who do not
have right to this bread or, in any case, it is not bread of quality.
We
are in the mercantilisation of the world, and we sold
education a long time ago. I have a duty to address the central role of the
World Bank in this process. There is no sovereignty in my country anymore -- it
is the Bank who decides about everything for all and this is the reason why I
have to challenge it. It is not for personal pleasure,
it is because I do not have a choice. To answer the question of my sister Coumba: how to say this and maintain the right to live? Because the simple fact of denouncing it puts you in danger under
our skies. Fortunately, our opportunity today lies precisely in this
world social movement because the leaders, all the tyrants of the world, have
begun to realize that somewhere a counter-power is building itself.
What
is important today is to create, at the level of each country, a critical mass
of citizens, of men and women who understand that transformation today is not
done in the interests of present and future generations, but continues to be
done on a path that leads us towards greater dispossession, a path of built on
plundering. Today the richest countries -- which keep us in indebtedness, which
are pressurizing us because we do not correct our budget deficits -- know that
at the heart of their own territories, there are certain measures that they
cannot take because if they do, all of their citizens will begin demonstrating
in the streets. But in our countries there is no freedom of demonstration. So
this poses serious problems. Today, we plead for our lives, the lives of our
children.
Munir Fasheh: First, I would like to say how wonderful it
is to hear all these different points of views. That does not mean that I agree
with all of them, but I definitely feel that this really tells us a little bit
about where we can go into the future regarding education and other aspects:
having a space for all views to be presented, and for me this is the true
meaning of pluralism. I would like to use “pluralism” more than “cultural
diversity”, because it is possible to have cultural diversity in a zoo sense,
in the sense that we are all in cages, but we don’t talk to one another. We
have diversity in a zoo, but the animals in the different cages don’t talk with
each other. Right now I work in
The kind of diversity that I care about and that I
really love is when I can listen to what others have to say but I am not forced
by anybody to agree with them. First, I do not compare and second I do not
measure. I do not really like to conclude that there is one view which is
absolutely better than the other. I will go on believing what I believe in, but
having the dialogue with others ongoing. This really leads a little bit towards
pluralism, towards an alternative. A basic thing, in my opinion, for
alternatives is to move away from universal thinking that has universal tools.
All of us probably believe that what we believe in is universal. That’s not
necessarily harmful, but it becomes harmful when I develop universal tools like
education has done.
I’m not against schools for those who want them,
but I’m against imposing them on those who do not want them. If you like
schools, that’s fine. Build schools, send your
children to schools, that’s fine. But don’t impose them on me. And I have the
right to regain the taxes going to a central office that decides what my
children have to learn. I have to have that option and have to have that demand
– the demand for the means rather than the demand for a particular meaning or a
particular way of doing things.
I got my doctorate from Harvard, and during the
period I was studying there three teachers were expelled. These teachers were
not expelled by a government. They were expelled by the senior faculty, and
they were expelled because these teachers actually made a lot of sense to
people like me, who come from outside, who really want people to think
differently. It was a professional, institutional act that expelled the three
teachers, and they were actually very, very good. One of them was the teacher
of Noam Chomsky. He was expelled from the
Now, I want to talk very specifically about an
alternative that I was involved in. In a sense, I was privileged because
schools in the
So when people ask, “What are the alternatives?”, what you are actually saying is, “Let’s again regain
diversity in learning and talk about pluralism in living.” As I said, pluralism
and trying to measure people according to a universal measure do not go
together. So one thing we have to start to demand is to stop measuring people
against one another, because there is no idea that I find more dehumanising,
more degrading than grading people. If you reduce a human being into an A
student, that is one of the worst things that you can do, even if that student
is doing well on exams. Because by telling that student, “You are an “A”
student,” that student becomes a slave to your words and to your measurements,
and loses connection to his or her inner world, and control over the growth of
his or her inner world.
There is another thing that I want to talk about
that I learned – again because I was privileged to be in a place where
institutions either did not exist or did not have a lot of resources. Because
we did not have a lot of resources, we had to be very creative and very
inventive. And I have several examples of this. I will give very quickly one
example, and, if you are interested, I can give more. I was a science and math
teacher, and we didn’t have laboratories, we didn’t have any of these things
that usually are considered as part of teaching science and I said, “Let’s
start clubs, science clubs and math clubs.” And the students asked, “What do we
do? There is no lab, there is nothing. What can we do?” I said, “Science does
not start with a lab. Science starts with a question that you have and you
would like to pursue. So, let’s start, if there are 20 students, each one will
come with a question. Then, they form a science club, and we move from there.”
I asked, “Do you have flies in your classrooms, you know, the flies?” Of
course, almost every classroom, especially in hot weather, has flies, every
home has flies. I said, “Alright, if you really allow students to observe the
flies, everything as much as possible about the flies, and bring together what
they observe and compare. That will be the best curriculum for the learning and
teaching of science.” So we have plenty of things. This is the concept of
abundance that is, there is a lot we can use, but somehow we are made not to
see it.
Manish
Jain: So many questions. One thing I will just say right away is a direct
response to the question about the discussion we were having on empowerment. I
was trying to articulate, and maybe this is again a cultural difference, but
there is a different notion of power, of sharing power, of growing power that
is in our culture, and it’s related to swaraj.
My point is: Can we start to create our own language, our own meaning, around
these kinds of terms, which has a different worldview? I think that this is
what, in
One is: What does it mean to create another world
that is neither driven by Western neo-liberalism nor dictated by Western
socialism? Is there another world or other worlds beyond these two worlds? This
is what I’m trying to explore, and with this exploration, my first question to
myself is: What can I learn from illiterates? This is what Munir
has raised, what Aminata has raised. What can I learn
from illiterates, in my quest to create other worlds? In
In the issue of water, we have a drought in my
state. None of the engineers in our state have any solutions that we can
afford. The solutions are coming from illiterates who have developed, over
thousands of years, indigenous ways of rainwater harvesting in the desert. Some
of our engineers, to their credit, have become open enough that they’re
actually going and trying to learn these ways. In terms of food, we are
experiencing today the devastating impacts of the Green Revolution -
fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Another world is emerging from those illiterates,
those illiterate farmers who have still retained control over their local
seeds, who have still retained knowledge about other ways of nurturing the
plants and soil, other ways of dealing with pests. The issue of health: today
everyone is aware of the rising costs of medical care. There is another world,
another way of knowing, which is linked to indigenous knowledge systems around
health, around medicinal plants. In
The question then comes: “If we recognize these as
valid knowledge systems, how do these knowledge systems actually regenerate
themselves?” Because what is happening in
The second question is in terms of our own
understanding of ourselves: What is our own role in
creating that other world? How does our own dependence on text, the creation of
textual minds – which is what schooling has done to us – limit us in our
articulation of other worlds? How does the fact that we have been totally
inculcated with dominant narratives around who we are, what our histories are,
what our stories are, prevent us from creating our own stories? How does that
prevent us from looking at our own experiences? Today in