Excerpted from Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva. 1998. Escaping Education: Living as Learning Within Grassroots Cultures. Peter Lang Publishing: New York.

"O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." Pindar, Pythian iii

"Naming the intolerable is itself the hope." John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

"Radical hope is the essence of popular movements." Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy

This book takes the all-too-familiar tale of education and stands it on its head.

We do not tell the history of education from the perspective of the perspective of the educated. We write about what we have learned to learn from those who have no access to education; who cannot get the developed person’s prescribed quota or recipe for education; or those who, having trustfully and diligently undergone the education planned for them, have by now come to know too well the bitter taste of false expectations, dubious benefits, or failed promises.

This book does not attempt to package and sell one more reform initiative or proposal about improving or expanding the educational system. It has no new literacy project for the illiterate. It has no "informal education" remedy for those left sick or incapacitated by "formal education." It does not create multicultural medicines for the diseases of monoculturalism.

Instead, it celebrates well-being: still enjoyed in the commons and cultures of peoples living and learning at the grassroots. It celebrates the cultural richness, the prolific abundance that still exists in the many and diverse words of the social majorities. For they need no classrooms, no computer workshops, no laboratories nor libraries, nor even Walmarts to teach and learn from each other. They have not forgotten their diverse arts of survival and flourishing "in lieu of education."

We write for our friends within the social majorities, courageously taking the initiatives we describe in our book. In telling their stories here, we hope that they will find further inspiration and arguments for their initiatives; for strengthening and carrying further their endeavors to protect their cultural spaces; to prevent the cultural meltdown of the global classroom.

We also write for our colleagues and friends in the educational system who share our concerns, our perplexities, our disenchantment, our frustrations with educational outcomes, our anguish with the horror of what the educated do to each other as well as to the uneducated and the illiterate.

We hope that we can be of some use in building strong walls to contain and limit the ambitions of the educational enterprise—today, as in the past, aspiring to save the world.

The social majorities need no saviors, no conscientization, no empowerment. They are impressively skillful in saving their worlds. They have been able to do so for five hundred years. The newly minted expert as well as the established scholar have much to learn about living well from the uneducated and the illiterate—if they can give up the arrogance of their expertise.

We suspect that many educators will find it difficult to follow our argument to the end, and that many others will resist or reject it from the very beginning—perceiving it as a threat to their expertise. We hope that those dismissing us will at least dare to give serious consideration to our insights and experiences—however counterfactual or counterintuitive these appear.

Educators who cannot bear to impose their universe of the academy upon the untamed pluriverse that still stretches beyond its boundaries will resonate with the ideas explored here. For those within the academy who sense its counterproductivity, the line of ideas followed here will not appear like paths to Nowhere: impractical, irrelevant, or utopian. Educators who cherish cultural diversity will find in these pages more reasons to curtail the spread of their own disease, their plague.

Our encounters with the Other are no longer burdened by the Mission of saving their Minds, as our predecessors braved the world of savages and primitives to save their Souls. Freed from any and all salvational projects—of educators, developers, and others of their ilk— our journeys into the lands of the illiterate and the uneducated are filled with delightful surprises of discovering the riches of the Other, with the joy of the unknown and the unexpected that invariably constitute these adventures beyond education.

As pilgrims, we journey to places where notions of the good life have not been contaminated or destroyed by the plague of Homo educandus or Homo oeconomicus. We journey to gaze, to learn, to come to understand how magnificently they flourish in the absence of our needs, necessities, or certainties—jobs, day-care, classrooms, offices, eateries, restaurants, hospitals, and other constitutive elements of the global economy.

We would like to offer for consideration John Berger’s (1991) observation: naming the intolerable is itself the hope. Naming the horror impels people to do something about it. All those who read these pages may not share the specific hope we have discovered among the social majorities. All the same, we hope that they will be less prone to impose their own salvational urges on the Other. We know that our arguments are unavoidably controversial. But nothing in these pages can be called a closed game. From this collection of seeds, many diverse fruits can be grown, eaten, and enjoyed.

By old habit or new force, carrot or stick, educators and education are rapidly changing . . .to stay unchanged.

Blind political and economic forces are pushing the educational system out of the global market. To protect it in this turbulent time, educators, parents, governments, corporations, its guardians and consumers, continue to commit their will to the latest brands of educative potions and ever-new trinkets or teaching technologies.

The uneducated, the miseducated, and the undereducated are neither blind to, nor non-conscientized about, those efforts and processes. They are capable of seeing through the latest educational formulae being concocted for their secular salvation. They have their own ways, their own rich and ancient traditions for expressing their disenchantment, skepticism, or discontentment with the education they got failed to get. They are teaching each other how to become refuseniks.

The counterproductivity of education and the educational system evidenced in almost two centuries of history. The time has come to abandon this modern myth; not to give it a new lease on life with its postmodernization.

Enough is enough! Ya basta!

***

What is good for the goose is good for the gander. In fact, education is a good for the goose precisely because it is good for the gender according to assumptions and conclusions of the educated. It is a universal genderless good; so good, indeed, as to be declared a basic human need; so needed as to be claimed a universal human right.

One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Refuseniks are learning to resist any and all universal formulae of salvation; to recognize the cultural roots of each promoted globalism or universalism; to realize that all of them—including the different brands or breeds of education—are nothing but arrogant particularisms. What for some people is the proverbial dream come true, for other people is a waking nightmare: a plague, a disease destructive of their traditions, their cultural and natural spaces.

In the epic now evolving at the grassroots, the social majorities are taking steps to liberate themselves from the social minorities. Those classified and categorized as uneducated, underdeveloped, poor or undeveloped are struggling for their freedom from those who consider themselves to be educated or developed. Step by step, the former are dismantling all the institutions and projects of the latter which discriminate against them—including the educational enterprise.

In articulating these initiatives as "Grassroots Postmodernism," we seek lucidity, courage, and imagination. These are necessary for creating solidarities with communities and groups suffering the most marked and vicious discrimination of our times—imposed by the educated as professional assistance, aid, or help upon the three contemporary [lower] castes: the miseducated, the undereducated or the noneducated, who constitute the majority of people on earth, the Two-Thirds World.

 "But What to Do with the Children?"

Philipe Aries (1962) and others reveal that childhood is a very recent invention. All kinds of economic and political pressures—including compulsory schooling or the legal control of so-called "child labor"—continue to be exerted upon the people, forcing them to accept the transmogrification of their offspring into childish beings.

The resistance of the social majorities to this specific form of colonization has succeeded for the most part. Their daughters and sons, nieces, nephews, and godchildren are accepted as full members of their communities rather than individuals whose childishness must be justified as a necessary feature of teens, preteens, and postteens.

At the grassroots, children are really desired, not only in emotional terms but as responsible members of the household—sharing work, obligations, and predicaments as well as opportunities for enjoyment. Far from being irrelevant or an economic burden, they constitute the very center of family life. Among peasants or marginals, the question of what to do with the children, how to entertain them, how to get rid of them, cannot even be posed or conceived. Radical differences distinguish the family life of the social majorities from that of other social classes.

Wearing the spectacles of economists and other professionals, we can objectively conclude that children are highly profitable investments for their underdeveloped parents. After the first two or three years of life (in which the mother provides most of the food needed, and expenses for the child continue to be limited), the new member of the household and commons starts to contribute towards their sustenance. In other social classes, in contrast, "children" and young people represent a heavy "investment." Professionals we know personally bemoan the fact that, given how expensive daycare and other services have become, they have to postpone bearing a child till they can economically afford to have one.

What this economic mind hides, however, is that the "care" and "protection" of children in the modern context, in fact, disables them: represents a radical discrimination against a vast group of people, explicitly excluded for years from a robust participation in family and community life, doomed to confinement in "caring" institutions which additionally disable them (Illich and Kenneth 1977).

This situation is better understood if the size of the family is also considered. The so-called nuclear family—a creation of the economy— has already appeared in Mexico. The number of families of four or five members, like the middle classes, constantly increased in the last decades, and now represents a third of the population. Fortunately the extended family still prevails. Half of Mexican families still have more than five members; 10 percent have more than ten members. To complete this picture, it must be considered that these figures refer to the household. In both urban and rural families, several households belonging to the same family often live in the same neighborhood at the grassroots. This brings the numbers of the extended family up to several dozen. In the villages, families of 50 or 100 members, living close to each other, are far from being the exception.

Dwellers of the land still live in a commons. After all these years of expert analyses on emigration through development, the last census revealed that six out of every ten Mexicans still live in the province in which they were born. In the 1980s, the decade with the highest rate of migration between provinces, when a fifth of the population changed their place of residence, a number of them were coming back to their province of origin. These flows are in clear contrast with the American pattern where every person changes his/her place of residence seven times, on an average. If the figures in their coldness tell anything, they establish radical differences between developed "residents" and underdeveloped "dwellers" of the land. (Orr 1992)

Questions about what to do with the children at the grassroots cannot be conceived as problems or challenges, or, even less, as requiring imported caring institutions. Bypassing education and giving up childhood, peoples at the grassroots are not renouncing the joys and pleasures of having children; nor are they renouncing the natural human act of learning—through living and doing. Quite the opposite. Keeping alive their own cultures, regenerating their cultural spaces, they are recovering historical continuities damaged by education; they are enriching and multiplying their opportunities for learning and strengthening every form of cultural initiation.

They refuse to mimic developed peoples’ goal of no demographic growth—a condition that they cannot conceive. There has been a radical change in their "reproductive patterns." The annual rate of demographic growth in Mexico fell almost to a half in the last twenty years. But it still was 2 percent in 1990, Mexican women still have an average of 2.5 children, and Mexico’s population will double every thirty-five years.

In many rural villages, the first birthday is celebrated when the child is three years old. That very day, accepted as a full member of the community, the child begins participating in most community activities: births, deaths, feasts, funerals and all the regular rituals of a rich cultural life, becoming part of productive, religious, or political activities. Two out of five Mexicans are less than fourteen years old. If they were given the usual professional treatments applied to modern childhood, they would suffer severe discrimination. At the grassroots, people have successfully learned not to renounce the freedoms and opportunities for contributing to the community enjoyed by their children.