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