We Don’t Need No Education

We Don't Need No Education
June 17, 2013
Erasmo Calzadilla

HAVANA TIMES — Till recently, school and repression were for me
synonymous. At least, this is how I felt about Cuba's educational
system, which devotes arduous efforts to inculcate distorted values in
you from the time you enter pre-school, urges you to follow in the
footsteps of someone you don't yet know from the first grade on, and,
when you're still a kid, forces you to join an organization that begins
to train you for the fraud of a democracy you will live under later in life.

And the whole process is managed and legitimated by a whole army of
high-level psychologists and pedagogues in the name of the common Good.

I was a university professor for a number of years and a high school
teacher for some months. During this time, I never once heard anyone say
anything about libertarian teaching methods. I met dissident teachers,
disaffected teachers, teachers who didn't give two shits about anything,
students who were delinquents, students who were rebellious, unstable or
alienated.

But I never came across anyone who was coherently and systematically in
favor of any of the following principles:

- Respect towards the psychological individuality of the child or
youngster, of the kind that abhors emotional coercion and the
inculcation of values.
- Co-management of school affairs by the students, as a form of training
in freedom and responsibility.
- Condemnation of sexual repression and competitiveness.

The song by Pink Floyd where I found the title for this post had given
me reason to think that, somewhere in the world, there had to be a
movement opposed to traditional, repressive education. I was seeing a
ray of hope, but didn't know where it was coming from. Only many years
later would I discover the libertarian pedagogy movement.

One of its founders had been the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer y
Guardia. Around 1901, in Barcelona, Ferrer y Guardia had founded the
Modern School, an institution where children of both genders and of
every social class (something revolutionary for the time) would learn at
their own pace, through different games.

The initiative was so disturbing for the owners of the country's
spiritual monopoly at the time (the Church and State), that they led a
war against Ferrer y Guardia and did not stop until he was lying dead in
a mass grave somewhere.

Three of the martyr's reflections can help us get a sense of what his
enemies were so afraid of.

"We have no fear to stress this: we want men and women who are capable
of evolving constantly, who are able to constantly tear down and renew
their environment and themselves, people whose intellectual independence
becomes their chief driving force, who will never cling to anything, and
who are always willing to welcome what's best, happy to see the triumph
of new ideas and who aspire to lead multiple lives in the span of one
life. Society fears such people. We cannot, thus, expect it to ever want
a system of education capable of producing them."

"Just as science admits no demonstration that isn't supported by
facts, so too is there no real education other than that which is free
of all dogmatism, that which allows the child to direct his/her own
efforts and only sets out to aid in this journey. There is nothing
easier than altering this path and nothing harder than respecting it."
"(…) may the student's own intelligence, influenced only by what he or
she sees and documents, aided by the positive knowledge he or she
acquires, reason freely, without prejudices or any sectarian coercion of
any sort, with full autonomy and with no other restrictions than those
imposed by Reason itself."
Fifty years later, in revolutionary Cuba, Ferrer y Guardia would not
have been put before a firing squad, true, but he could well have been
imprisoned or harassed. What's certain is that he would never have been
able to create a school or to publish anything that Fidel Castro could
not agree with.

Source: "We Don't Need No Education - Cuba's Havana Times.org" -
http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=94783