From the educaion of domination to learning in freedom

The duty of the teaching system is the teaching of the system. Thus, at school one learns mainly to obey authority of the teacher –afterwards it will become the authority of the corporation or the boss- one learns to compete with the classmates –that shall become with time in co-workers- to do everything with the goal of obtaining points and titles –which later on will be money- and not doing for the simple satisfaction of doing, one learns to perform imposed tasks, to forget and hide what we want, to make no questions about what we are told or ordered, etc. Gradually we have our heads filled with a series of habits and beliefs that, when the moment arrives, they will serve to adapt us to the system docile and resignedly.

No doubt that there are excellent professionals and remarkable students in our classrooms. However, unfortunately, they have to obey certain imperatives (exams, obligatory attendance, etc.) that inspire disunion, frustration, and submission. The current educative frames, as well as the rest of the system, are not designed with the purpose of promoting human happiness but with the lucrative and expansionist aim of market economy. The natural reaction of most teenagers before this situation is a negative, apathetic, and even aggressive rebellion; and so it is not unusual that illness and depressions are more and more frequent among the teaching staff.

On the other hand, the process of privatization and commercialisation that has taken place in all ambits during the recent decades has not left aside the educational sphere. The European dominant elites have decided that the conception of university as a public service at the reach of everyone was not useful for their interests and, thus the university had to become an institution of and for the market, not of the people and for the people. The result is the so-called Bolonia process that received more and more opposition from students and professors.

So it is not outstanding that we can talk about educational crisis, and that such crisis is day by day more evident. Just as this society has a high degree in ecological knowledge but is not capable of stopping destruction of our natural resources, also this society holds great knowledge and pedagogic potentials but is not able to stop the deterioration of educative institutions.

The first step for leaving this dead end is that children and adults des-educate ourselves from the values that the system has injected in us. In order to do so, we need to boost our reflexive and independent learning capacity, and create alternative educative institutions that replace imposition with autonomy and competence with cooperation. The actual denial of the neoliberal reforms should lead, sooner or later, to the development of a positive vision that will generate freedom schools and self managed universities. It is here where all of us have a great future to explore.

If we are going to explore, we should start from the beginning. As early as in the primary levels of upbringing, most babies and children are soon separated from what is natural to them, such as breastfeeding and not sleeping apart. Their emotional development is cut in the bud, thus, when they grow up, they will be prevented from learning through games so they are modelled as adequate pieces of the materialistic gear, like it is already explained.

Luckily, there are alternatives along the different stages of education. From the auto-gestion, the co-responsibility and the daily implication, multiple spaces for natural upbringing and freedom education are being created in order to offer places and adult guidance, which respects the evolving process of the child, responding to its needs for developing individual autonomy and real social values that are not only explained but applied. It is necessary to create more alternatives like this, and not only to liberate the first years of a child’s life but also to construct vital paths freed of the pressure from the utilitarianism of the commercial benefits. Curricular paths that connect the learning as children to the learning as adults need to be created.

The crisis context, with a sinking productive system, makes obsolete most professions based on growth that are still taught at universities, and this demands a redesigning of learning, which ones are important for our future and how they could be realised. Recuperate the capacity to auto-administrate our ways of life implies recuperate many practical learning that are not taught in official educational system and that will be fundamental for our well being from now on. Thus, it will be important to recuperate the knowledge of older people, who only two or three generations back knew ways to live more auto-sufficient than how we do now.

Let us recuperate the capacity to learn and teach to enjoy life directly, without unnecessary complications, stimulating our natural potentials. Let us stop being prisoners of our self-concern, of our feelings of loneliness and insecurity. Let us try to develop the sense of responsibility towards our fellows instead of glorifying power and materialism. Students and professors can stop sharing classrooms by obligation and start sharing the educative fact just for the joy of learning and teaching.

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The necessary literacy

Official education also creates submission by preventing emotional education, mutilating the learning of other necessary languages besides oral and written. Cultural evolution has allowed us to develop five languages: the natural ones developed through the physical senses (hearing, touch, and sight), the musical, the gestures, and the visual, together with the said written and spoken. By putting aside those three natural languages, most human beings are deprived from fundamental educative tools that enable an integral development. In order to acquire them we must be alphabetised in languages associated to the physical senses which, precisely, aids in ulterior learning, as well as to be creative in the rest of the subjects and in any field on which we will eventually work.

Everyone is a potential artist, however, the necessary languages to practice are only known by specialists and are hidden knowledge to most part of the people. Keeping, holding back information is a form of domination. Such widespread illiteracy inhibits the human auto realisation and creates submission.

People educated in the five human languages, are free people, creative and prepared to auto administrate and solve their human needs in an efficient and harmonious way.

Initiation handbook for visual language, to make easy auto learning: www.17-s.info/es/manualvisual

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Getting ready for action!

* If you are parents of babies and children, get information on natural upbringing. Close to you there are groups regarding this matter, or you can contact other families in the same situation with whom a common project of upbringing can be constructed. “Natural Upbringing” is the reference for internet search.
* If your kids are already a little grown up, you might be informed about educational projects near your home or also, other families in the same situation with whom a common project of upbringing can be constructed. “Freedom Education” is the reference for internet search.
* If you are a teenager, you can organize with your mates in order to learn about what is of your interests and not those interesting for the ‘market’.
* If you are already in the university, we encourage you to question if what you are being offered is what you really want to learn and how you would like to learn it. Si you conclusion is a no; you can organize with other students with similar opinions and set off another university starting from the self management. If you object the payment of the registration fees and invest your efforts and money to this ideal learning, future shall be what you decide it to be.
* If you are parents of college and university students, we encourage you to question the principles that university careers are the best for your kids and inspire them towards their free choice in view of the lack of future for conventional studies.
* If you are an educator, dare to act according to your conscience and not under the given standards. Getting together with others makes it possible.