Understanding the World: Critical Consciousness

What?

In his 1963 speech, “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin describes the paradox we are confronted with when we think about the education system. On one hand, we know that “the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society” (1). This is very clear. And, yet, Baldwin notes that “the purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity” (1). Also very clear — as students start to become conscious throughout their education they start to look at the world in new ways.

But then we come back to the problem of what the school is designed to do — the fact that “what societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society” (1), and we see an obvious clash. There are two ideas existing at once, and this creates a tension in the schooling system, which I would argue does not go unnoticed by students. Students — and especially students of color, because they see the world of inequalities that confronts them every day and yet doesn’t line up with what they hear about the world in school — feel this tension, this paradox, even if they cannot name it. In marginalized students, it often creates internalized oppression. There are, in the schooling system and national narrative(s), these very broad and very false ideas — the American Dream, unquestioning pride in one’s nation, and so on. If students truly try to live up to them, truly try to believe them, and don’t understand the reasons why it’s not working, this will lead them to believe it’s their fault, and that they should believe everything the world has told them about themselves.

If schools were able to foster critical consciousness, or, as Freire puts it, conscientization, marginalized students would be able to find a way to put words to what they feel and see and experience. In her work, “Paulo Freire,” bell hooks writes about her own experience with this: “I was coming from a rural southern black experience, into the university, and I had lived through the struggle for racial desegregation and was in resistance without having a political language to articulate that process. Paulo was one of the thinkers whose work gave me a language” (46).

A key component of fostering critical consciousness in schools is, as the article frames it, teaching the “language of inequality.” Educators can offer frameworks and language with which students can understand their world in new ways, and through this students can gain agency. The article we read about critical consciousness states that “Oppression is easiest to sustain when the disenfranchised ignore it, miss it, or support it rather than resist it.”

The choice between

1. validating students’ understanding of the world by giving them a language and a framework that explains it

and

1. ignoring realities of oppression and injustice, in essence gaslighting marginalized students and preventing them from understanding their history or worth

is, at this point in time, primarily up to individual educators. And I think Myles Horton’s understanding understanding of neutrality is key to giving educators the understanding of what this choice is.

Horton states that, in all actuality, neutrality doesn’t exist, but that the word is used as a “code word for the existing system” (102). “Neutrality” he says, “is just following the crowd” (102). There is so in our schooling system that claims to be neutral, unbiased, and objective, and of course can never be. And when teachers and administrators claim to be neutral (even in disciplines we think are objective, such as biology or chemistry or algebra), they are, as Horton puts it, refusing to oppose injustice. Neutrality is a strong stance in itself — so isn’t it better to, as an educator, take a strong, transparent stance on something one actually believes in? This honesty on the part of the educator, this willingness to discuss not just to discuss the history and biases of the subject they teach but the the history and biases of themselves as educators and human beings — all of this will help one’s students to make sense of the world they live in. It will help them understand how they can rise in it, and it will help them understand how they can change it.

So What?

James Baldwin states, in “A Talk to Teachers,” that “It is not really a ‘Negro revolution’ that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change all the curriculum in all the schools so that all Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you’d be not liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history” (4–5).

Teaching an honest history of the U.S. that centers the black experience and (as Baldwin so well puts it) black contributions would transform our country in ways we can’t imagine. (Obviously, this speech was written in the 60’s, so perhaps it is more prudent in this current time to propose a curriculum which is inclusive of other communities of color as well — but for now we’ll stick with Baldwin’s words). It would be endlessly liberating to black students, in so many ways. And, as Baldwin states, it would be liberating to white people, as well. The more I am around white people in this country, the more I am convinced that the only thing that defines white American identity is a lack of identity (and white privilege, too, I suppose). We don’t understand what it is to be white, because whiteness is seen as the default. And so when white people no longer feel like the default because people of color start to gain entry to their spaces, they get angry because they have to begin wrestling with an identity that is made up entirely of their status as oppressors, and not much else. If white people learn about their true history, they might be able to make sense of the world and their place in it instead of just sitting in unaddressed guilt and/or denial; this would in turn, I think, maybe help create a world that is able to be understood and worked on by everyone.

Even the tiny moment in “A Talk to Teachers” in which Baldwin very truthfully discussed the founders of this country reshaped my views of the entire country and where we are now. He stated, “What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled” (5). To realize that the founders’ mindset was more of a response to their experience and their hurt than one that was driven by their strong beliefs and ideals — that feels so much more like the America I know. And, contrary to what America wants, it makes me feel hopeful about revolutionizing. If the original “revolutionaries” of this country were just everyday people and not untouchable heroes with unshakable ideals, then I/we can mess up what they made, no problem.

If this short reframing made this much of an impact on me, I can’t even comprehend the change that would happen, in this country, with the introduction of a curriculum that facilitates a deep and broad understanding of the history and value of the people, and ties that into all content, across disciplines.

I was also struck by the Antonio Faundez quote that bell hooks references in her work, “Paulo Freire.” Faundez states that “… abstract political, religious, or moral statements did not take concrete shape in acts by individuals. We were revolutionaries in the abstract, not in our daily lives” (48). hooks also references Freire’s statement that “human beings do not get beyond the concrete situation, the condition in which they find themselves” (47).

I want to take a closer look at this, because I think it holds very true within America’s political context, in which we the citizens (even the white people, maybe particularly the white people — I’m saying that because it seems like this is the first time white people are seeing what a mess the country actually is) are mass panicking about what’s happening in our government and, at the same time, taking no action. We are aware — more than ever, I think — political and social articles are being passed around 24/7, it seems, but (besides pink pussy hats once a year) all this thinking doesn’t, for the average citizen, translate into action. I don’t want to get into why the situation is still the way it is, because that’s endlessly complex and big — I’m only concerned about measurable action on the part of the people.

What are some reasons this is occurring? The thought crossed my mind that we haven’t been taught how to revolutionize but I don’t think this is a very good excuse — revolutions happen all around the world that aren’t taught or encouraged in any way. (That’s why they’re called revolutions.) A much better explanation is that it is due to our schooling, or really due to the much larger pattern of socializing young children to become part of an existing social order and not make waves; this is a pattern which occurs everywhere but is especially potent and real within the school system. It’s also explained by our desire to fit in, to be part of the social order, which I think is both natural and socially conditioned. To some extent, it’s also the bystander effect — we think someone else will deal with it. Baldwin notes this in “A Talk to Teachers”: “It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should contrive, as we do so abjectly, to say, ‘I can’t do anything about it. It’s the government’” (6). We also don’t know anything about how our own government works. This is true especially right now: even the functions of the government that the average citizen learns in school, such as the system of checks and balances, aren’t happening.

But is all of this enough to explain the gap between the amount we theorize (a lot) and the amount we, as a collective, revolutionize (next to none)? I understand how powerful this tradition of indoctrinating younger generations into the dominant ideologies is. But even if we began to change our world into one which encourages and facilitates cultural consciousness, I can’t imagine that directly translating into action by any equal measure.

Is it because I myself am entrenched in this system that I can’t imagine taking action at the same rate as I am reflecting? Or is it encoded somewhere in human nature to stay in, as Freire puts it, the condition in which we find ourselves? Something to keep thinking about.

Now What?

In “We Make the Road by Walking, Freire states, “I don’t believe in the kind of education that works in favor of humanity. That is, it does not exist in ‘humanity.’ It is an abstraction. Humanity for me is Mary, Peter, John, very concrete” (100–101).

I feel that Canal Alliance is working really hard — and succeeding — at trying to do this. At our orientation, Melissa, Karla, and Air avoided generalizations about the students in a way that does not come naturally to most people. For example, Melissa broke down class demographics in a precise way (for example, saying that 13 students were from Guatemala and 2 from Mexico, instead of simply saying the students were mostly Guatemalan). We talked about personalizing the questions we ask: “What’s the biggest city you’ve been to?” versus “What’s an example of a big city?” We spoke a lot about considering the needs and interests of all students, and we also talked about how important it is to learn and use the names of each of the students. All of this added up to a curriculum and teaching philosophy that centers, respects, and works in favor of each student on an individual basis.

On page 98 of “We Make the Road by Walking,” Freire elaborates on Myles Horton’s concept of a “people’s knowledge.” Freire explains it as as the kind of organic knowledge that is not learned in books but is with the people, from their lived experiences. He states that teachers and educators must understand this knowledge that the students they’re working with hold. They must come to the people and get to know them. It is then that they can apply their knowledge of the structures of society to the situation, and work with the students to rise to a new place in their understanding of the way the world works.

In the orientation, Canal Alliance talked about how, in their classes, there is no “target language.” In their classes, students can use whatever they have, pull from whatever they have, to speak. I think this way of doing things centers the knowledge the students already have, and the teachers are there primarily to work with the students to take their knowledge to a new level. The way Freire talks about the educator having a broader understanding of the structures of society seems to parallel the way the ESL educator has a broad understanding of English as a whole. Utilizing the lens of this broader understanding, educators can work with the ESL students to rise to a new place in the students’ understanding of what they already know.