To Be Human Is to Be Capable of Action

I think I really needed the “what now”-esque portion of these readings right now. I’ve been confined at home long enough that I’m just interested in action. Luckily, Bill Ayers offers many life-sustaining, thirst-sustaining strategies for action in “Another World is Possible/Another Education is Necessary” (which, by the way, is a great title). I needed his beautiful prose, but more than that, I needed to hear that we, as people, are capable of action.

Some of Ayer’s ideas that really worked for me were:

• Reconsidering what qualities we want to foster in students, and the steps we are taking to do so. Ayers has some good words, “initiative, questioning, doubt, skepticism, courage, imagination, entrepreneurship, and creativity” (196) among them. Many of these qualities, I think, are qualities schools and educators like to say they value. But do they really value them, when they harshly punish black and brown kids for any ounce of questioning or skepticism, courage or creativity that isn’t being utilized in the passive, conforming way they want? Educators should defend these qualities with all they have, even if these qualities make their lives harder at times. But they don’t defend them. We have a system that punishes initiative and creativity (and all these other words) when they are not done in the “correct” way, by the “correct” students — and then it turns around and praises other students for showing initiative and being creative. Ayers writes, “these are the qualities we must find ways to model and nourish, encourage and defend in our communities and in our classrooms” (196). I’d like to see an education system that truly values — and not just values, but fiercely defends — each and every one of these qualities, in each and every one of its students.
• Unlearning cultural ideas we have about school as nothing more than a training ground for jobs. Ayers writes, “The dominant metaphor in education today posits schools as businesses, teachers as workers, students as products and commodities” (195). In this model, teachers have valuable, indispensable information they present to their students, and the students swallow enough information until they can successfully market themselves to the world as a product to be bought. I’m noticing this process function in a really scary way right now. I’ve been talking to my friends in universities across the country, and feel that many of our teachers seem to be totally missing the fact that we are in a global pandemic. I have a lot of friends who just started a whole new quarter on Monday, and they’re noticing that teachers are just pretending that they’re teaching a regular, standard online class (regardless of whether they’ve ever taught one before). There’s nothing whatsoever about the virus in the syllabi or as a caveat in their lectures — which is crazy when it’s affecting every part of our lives. My girlfriend told me that someone in one of her Zoom classes had a spotty internet connection and, as such, asked the professor if she could please post the slides later because he missed many of them. The professor said no, because, “Students steal them and post them online and then I’m out of a job.” This time is a powerful opportunity for reflection and reinvention, and teachers are instead deciding who is or is not worthy of an education based on their family’s internet plan. Ayers states that “The reason so many young people drop out of school is because they are voting with their feet against an educational system that sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies them like products in a factory” (198). This student was, more or less, rejected from the factory in one fell swoop. Teachers pretending that Zoom lectures are just as good as the regular thing is impersonal and neglectful of students’ needs as full human beings in this world. In these Zoom classes, it seems like teachers have information to impart to their students and they will impart it — whether or not the student is even listening, caring, or engaging doesn’t seem to be on their minds. We need to undo the hierarchies in place, the ones that tell us who deserves what kind of education. If we can get away from this passive, capitalist mindset and go towards a school system that treats students as individuals, facilitating each one to be the most conscientious and awake person they can be — not because it’ll help them get a job, but because it’ll help heal our world and our kids. Deep respect for the inherent worth of all human beings is a major part of that—which brings me to:
• Supporting students’ knowledge of their self-worth. Ayers writes that, “if we hope to contribute to rescuing education from the tangle of its discontents, we must rearticulate and reignite — and try to live out in our daily lives — the basic proposition that all humans are of incalculable value” (195). Supporting this proposition is simple: it is listening. It is care. It is unconditional respect that subsequently provides bodily and psychological safety to others. What if we reframed everything to realize that each of us has inherent value and worth as a birthright — it is as essential to us as bones or a brain. How much would future generations be able to flourish if we taught them they have worth and value within them from the day they were born? This is such a beautiful concept, because it goes against the toxic mindset that we must do something great, be something great, in order to be respected. We live in a competitive, individualistic society in which each person is looked at as being responsible for their own success, and, in turn, the success of the society as a whole. We are looked at as being responsible for following strict codes of behavior, for falling into easy-to-manage categories. Any stray away from “success,” either professionally or societally, is looked at as a failure to ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ and contribute to a high-functioning society. People become irrationally fearful that any person who strays from what the world wants of them is a burden on society that everyone else, somehow, has to carry. But with the realization of one’s own inherent worth, regardless of their “success,” comes a sigh of relief, of belonging.
• Implementing peer restorative justice in our schools, instead of defaulting to harsh and violent punishments. Ayers writes, “Imagine building in every school and every community a movement to end the criminalization of youth, and to open creative spaces for moral reflection and positive action, redemption and recovery, whenever someone has made a mistake or wronged the community” (199, 200). We live in a world centered around punishment as a major organizing principle. Particularly this is true in schools, where zero tolerance policies have become the norm. But thanks to Ayers, I’m imagining a world without punishment. This world feels good, on the body. In this world, I understand the meaning of community. I understand what it means to do wrong to people, and this understanding comes from an internal place of respect for others, rather than from shame and rules and mixed messages from the world about what is right and what makes a person less than.
• Using kids’ questions as a frame for what’s important.

“Youth tend to ask the most fundamental and essential questions that are, like the young themselves, always in motion, dynamic, and never twice the same. Who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices and my chances? What did I learn that the teacher didn’t know? What’s my story, and how is it like or unlike the stories of others? What’s my responsibility to those others? In many ways, these kinds of questions are themselves the answers, the very frame of a forward-thinking curriculum; keeping these questions vital, alive, and fresh is a huge challenge as we search for ways to live within and beyond the contingent and partial answers, as well as the setbacks, discovered and encountered along the way” (196, 197).

The ability to constantly ask questions is critical consciousness. Curiosity is one of the primary things we need to foster in students — let me rephrase: keep alive in students — if we want to develop active citizens with strong critical thinking skills. Questions are the answers, always. This world is too complex to believe anything else.

• Ayers asks us to “imagine a massive initiative to bring parents and unemployed folks into schools as aids and teacher candidates, and to bring school people into communities as peers and colleagues” (199). It’s all about community. Messy, beautiful community. (Do I sound thirsty for community? It’s because I am.) The first part of how he frames this initiative — parents into schools — happens sometimes, at least for parents who have the time and financial freedom to participate in field trips and PTA meetings. But the second part of that — school people into community — almost never happens. Service Learning is the first time I experienced community engagement as a tool for learning (at least, as encouraged by school). And that’s way too late. Schools should not be sequestered away from the world, every second of every day — they should be engaging with the world they are a part of, and plan to send their students into.

“Just imagine how much safer and livelier and more peaceful our neighborhoods and communities would become if we reorganized education in a fundamental way; instead of trying to keep children isolated in classrooms, envision engaging them in community-building activities with the same audacity and vision with which the Black Freedom Movement engaged them in desegregation work forty-five years ago: planting community gardens… organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals… researching the local waste system… painting public murals. By giving children and young people a reason to learn beyond the individualistic goal of getting a job and making more money, by encouraging them to exercise their minds and their hearts and their soul power, we would tap into the deep well of human values that gives life a richer shape and meaning” (Ayers 198).

Ayers writes that hope “is the capacity to notice or invent alternatives, and then to do something, to get busy in projects of repair” (194). I’m not sure this is true, at least for me. Hope seems to me like generating enough motivation to (hopefully!) do something. It seems like a driving force that can be behind decisions. It doesn’t seem like the decisions themselves. This quarantine is showing me that thoughts and feelings are very different from actions (because I’m having a lot of the former and they aren’t necessarily leading to the latter). Hope is hope. Action is action.

But Collins’ terminology, visionary pragmatism, is hope and action. Collins describes visionary pragmatism as “taking principled steps that should guide behavior” (178). Everyday life, she says, is dynamic and holistic. It is “characterized by infinite opportunities to engage in critical analysis and take action. In everyday life, principles and actions give life meaning” (178). She writes that there is a “creative tension between vision and pragmatism” (179). I am struck by how important creativity is, in and for this work.

All of Ayers’ ideas foster creative, self-generating people with strong principles who are more than capable of using visionary pragmatism to guide their life and work.

Earlier in the semester, I was so concerned about why I see so much thoughtfulness and good critical thinking around how to change the world, and little to no action. I was so concerned — how do we mend the gap between hope and action? bell hooks, in her piece about Freire, brought in his statement that “human beings do not get beyond the concrete situation, the condition in which they find themselves.” I think this is true, unfortunately.

But today, I also realized that kids are capable of getting beyond the concrete situation. It’s what they do naturally—it’s how they grow, naturally. Maybe this means that naturally, if it’s not trained out of us, adults can do so too.

Through Ayers’ work, I can imagine kids’ capability to act. I see it in my last two bullet points, in particular:

• I see it in his idea of making a curriculum out of kids’ natural questions. They naturally have the blueprint inside them that shows us what is important, and I think this shows that they inherently know how to act, if we (the system) don’t train it out of them.
• I see it in his idea of getting kids engaged in their communities. “Like all human beings, children and young people need to be of use… Their cognitive juices will begin to flow if and when their hearts, heads, and hands are engaged in improving their daily life and their surroundings” (196). Again, he writes that “by encouraging them to exercise their minds and their hearts and their soul power, we would tap into the deep well of human values that gives life a richer shape and meaning” (198). This well of human values — this is our principles. This is visionary pragmatism.

Kids know how to dive into action, they know how to transcend the condition in which they find themselves. They know visionary pragmatism. We just teach it out of them.

And, in essence, this means we have taught it out of ourselves.