The perfect song has just come on my ipod. Its "dreamland" by Robert miles. How coincidental. This slow song relaxes my mind and allows my flow to leak from my mind to the pixilated paper before me. I have had many thoughts today and collective thoughts emerge over this week. I am coming into focus and understanding myself and my movement. Movement is what drives me. Often, movement is revolution, perhaps even militant, but I now realize that my movement is here. We often neglect the symbols around us that direct towards our calling, understanding, and reflective being.
When I moved to Indiana to start my graduate school I hated it here. The people were fundamental Christian and covert racists. I was catapulted into developing a heightened sense of politics and religiosity that existed outside safe liberal realm of the university. My first year here I taught in a small community 35 miles south of Bloomington. It was very conservative, very, Christian, and there was little questioning the dominant (hegemonic) routine of the school and community (See Micheal Apple's Offical Knowledge and Educating the "right" way). I’m not one to live on my knees (See Emiliano Zapata) so I stand with my fist in the air. It wasn’t my intention to go to this community to shake things up, but it happened. A multitude of events transpired during the single school year that I taught there. At the end of the year, I couldn’t stay. One student talked with me and was upset. He asked how I could talk so much about revolution and change and then just leave. I told him that the revolution had to come from the people, not from the outside. He was upset that I was leaving, but I think he came to understand my effort as an educator, advocate, and revolutionary was to only plant the seed, ignite the spark or whatever other cliché one may choose to use in this case. It was a very hard year and at first I was conflicted in trying to negotiate and rationalize my leaving (though I was given the choice to resign or be formally declined a.k.a fired otherwise). What movement had been caused? Was it my place? I was trying to do as Paolo Freire (See Pedagogy of the oppressed) said and join with the oppressed to counteract the oppressive, dominant, narrow minded, thought sedation that was so evident in the school and community. Were my efforts in vain? Was it my revolution or was it theirs? Three years later I still talk with students, they still email me, several have taken my class at IU in the school of education, and more than one has said we now know what you were saying. I came to realize that revolution does not always mean an instant militant over throw or radical (overnight) change. A revolution simply is the growth and process of overcoming what plagues the oppressed.
As I look for jobs and talk with people about revolutionary thought and education people keep directing me to California, Oregon, Florida, New York, and Wisconsin. They say that these are the places where progressive liberal thoughts and ideology are most prevalent. Frederick Nietzsche said “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” It’s very comfortable to be with other people who believe the way you do. At the same time, we relinquish our motivation and drown our desire to challenge the ideologies that are oppressive. Should I be concerned with the areas that already have a large liberal activism? Just as I am not concerned with the students that are succeeding. I am concerned with the students in the remedial classes, the “bad” ones, the ones who have given up on the system because the system has given on them. JJ Rousseau (See Emile) discusses a similar thought in addressing the understanding of survival. Rousseau says that the rich elite is in more need of education and training in survival than the poor working class because the poor student has been surviving all his life, the rich student has been given his means of survival for which he knows not where they come form.
We often want to go to places that are comfortable and familiar (culturally and in ideology). These places do not need me. My revolution, my movement is wherever I go. To sleep with the enemy is the only way to know it and I have made a mistress of it. Revolution need not be large scale movements nor championed only in popular areas. Revolution and the pedagogy of humanity are needed in the areas that have been sheltered from the world under the guise of hegemony and ideological dominance (mostly, Eurocentric, Christian (protestant), conservative, and republican). I do not mean to infer that Christian or conservative or republican are bad; however, the areas that are most racists, resistant to progressive ideas, and willing to accept critical thought (and dissent) are areas that are comprised of such demographic characteristics.
Revolution is not a physical movement it’s a way of life. The pedagogy of humanity is not a way of viewing life and society; it’s a way of being in life and society. All that we do must be understood as a process, a path, and an experiment. What worked yesterday may fail today. What was exemplary yesterday is criticized today. What will be needed tomorrow is uncertain. We search for the right mixture for today but we will never find the cure. We will only find a way to slow the effects of today effects. Absoluteness and arrival are the utopia we dream of. We must understand utopia as the carrot in front of the horse. It keeps us going because we believe we can obtain it. Yet, what would happen if we could have utopia? Would we not consume it and commodify into a product that we could further define ourselves as more utopian than others? As such, we should seek never an end and maintain an understanding of the means. Our revolutionary soul wills our future, it critical examines our past, and understands that we will continue in means with no end. A struggle? yes. A mentality for hope? yes. A way of being? If not then my end has no means and no further meaning.
Antonio Garcia
Indiana University
