Reflections on “We Make The Road by Walking”

I read this book like one reads scripture. These men’s experience in social justice and education goes deep, reaching so many fundamental cords. I finished the book a few weeks ago. My copy is all marked up and I find myself picking it up every other day to pull out some bit of wisdom or strategy.

Both Paulo Freire and Myles Horton believe in liberation through popular participation. Both arrived at literacy as a vehicle for this participation and developed educational models that built literacy into larger citizenship practices. I had encountered this idea of citizenship over the summer with my class on Human Rights and Media in Brazil. To be a citizen is to be an equal, human member of society as a political entity. I realized in reading this book that much the same language and struggle, in terms of promoting literacy as a means to securing civil rights and thus citizenship, happened in the southern United States mid-century. (I am also coming across the concept in my research on slave narratives for my history class; literacy equals freedom.) This is no news flash but it is striking to see the similarities between Brazil and the US as these educators hash out their philosophies and methods.

The book is a series of transcribed conversations between Freire and Horton. It reads like a more accessible and tangible version of Pedegogy of the Oppressed, Freire’s earlier seminal work. The question is how do you educate people in a way that helps them access the knowledge they already have, but don’t know they have? And then, how does this get channeled into social change, into people making their lives and the situation of their community better?

Both men were bad students growing up. I am starting to think that you have to be a bad student when you are young to be a good teacher when you’re older, not bad in the grades sense but bad in that the system doesn’t suit you. Going out on their own and reading gave them the counterpoints and confidence in their own knowledge to get through what the teachers were dishing out at them. Freire at one point talks about the relationship between the authority of the teacher and the freedom of the student, how they are mutually reinforcing. As soon as the authority of the teacher is imposed, rather than demonstrated, the freedom of the student is curtailed resulting in authoritarianism. There is a balance where the authority of the teacher enables the freedom of the student, kind of like good parenting.

I especially enjoyed this passage from Horton, where he describes a covert authoritarian teaching style. I have had this frustration with teachers who are rather gingerly and self- aggrandizing in their methods:

They said I was always advocating democracy and decision making when I was a student, campaigning for the rights of dissidents to express themselves. They said, now here you are, you’re imposing your ideas on people who come to Highlander. I said, “Do you impose your ideas?” “Oh, no we’re very careful not to impose ideas.” And I said, “Well, you have one problem I don’t have. You’re such powerful teachers that if you even breath what you believe, it would influence everybody. I don’t have that problem. I’ve always been glad I could get somebody to pay attention to my ideas, just to share them with them. I don’t have to worry about being so over powerful that everybody will take everything I say for granted.”

I think the most frustrating thing I have ever had a teacher tell me is that they don’t want to influence me. That stance certainly closes the door to me influencing them.

Horton talked about positive imitation as a way to test ideas and practices, and as a way to constantly be innovative. Horton established the Highlander School in Tennessee. He says they weren’t interested in operating successful programs because anyone can do that. Rather, they wanted to work with a few people intensively and let them go out and spread the work. The methods and concepts that were most relevant were the ones that took hold and spread, resulting in people imitating the idea. This method gave the Highlander Center the freedom to constantly change the program and try new things, rather than maintain a constant, unchanging set of practices. Horton recounts finding a little citizenship school that taught literacy somewhere in the countryside, and the woman there though she had originated the idea. Horton just listened, not depriving her of the ownership of her concepts and work. I liked that. The importance is that the work be done, not that it belongs to this person or that person, or that the only useful application of the idea involves somehow being original with it.

The reason certain ideas took hold is because they were already with the people. The education model looks at asking questions as a means for people to dig up what they already know and make connections that weren’t possible before simply because the knowledge was buried. It is about bringing common sense to the level of structural change with the help of authentic theory and practices.

One tricky line that Horton and Freire discuss is the line between education and organizing. The difference as far as I can tell, and it seems to be their distinction too, is that organizing has some external goal that is being worked towards, a problem to solve. Education is more flexible in creating personal tools for solving problems. Education is essential to organizing, and organizing can be an educational experience. There are places where they come into conflict. You either have to stop moving toward the external goal to do some education, or you have to put education aside to reach the immediate goal. This is very much the dilemma my New Orleans class is having (I talk about this in an earlier entry). We have a goal of completing this design competition entry, but it is a class and education needs to happen. Right now, things are coming to a head where some education is being put aside in order to get the work done. This is not to say that the process is not educational; it’s a matter of immediate goals.

Something I want to look into more is the concept of being “impatiently patient.” Paulo references it as an idea of Amilcar Cabral. I think this is something I get complemented on, not that people put it in these words. I was at the printer’s earlier this week working things out for the next phase of the postcard project. I needed to work some stuff out with him, so I just showed up. We had been in conversation over phone and email sporadically for months. After spending nearly an hour talking about the project and many other things, he thanked me for being respectfully persistent (I can’t remember the exact words he used). I like thinking of it as impatient patience because doing so adds intentionality to a strategy that I have already started to pick up from somewhere.

“I say it’s not important to be good, it’s important to be good for something.” – Myles Horton

“Neutrality… is the best way for one to hide his or her choice… Then, instead of saying I am dominant, I say I am neutral.” – Paulo Freire