Liberatory Practices for Learning

Dismantling Social Inequality and Individualism with Ancient Wisdom

Julio Cammarota

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030566845
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030566852
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This book promotes collaborative ways of knowing and group accountability in learning processes to counteract the damaging effects of neoliberal individualism prevalent in educational systems today. These neoliberalist hierarchies imposed through traditional, autocratic knowledge systems have driven much of the United States' educational policies and reforms, including STEM, high stakes testing, individual-based accountability, hierarchical grading systems, and ability grouping tracks. The net effect of such policies and reforms is an education system that perpetuates social inequalities linked with race, class, gender, and sexuality. Instead, the author suggests that accountability pushes past individualism in education by highlighting democratic methods to produce a collective good as opposed to a narrow personal success. In this democratic model, participants contribute to the common goal of elevating the entire group. Drawing from a well of creative praxes, reflexivity, and spiritual engagement, contributors incorporate collective dreaming to envision alternate realities of learning and schooling and summon the spirit into action for change.

© The Author(s) 2021

J. Cammarota (ed.)Liberatory Practices for LearningPostcolonial Studies in Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56685-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: We Already Know

Julio Cammarota¹

(1)

University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Julio Cammarota

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

What We Need to Know

Writing against individualism in education while lauding the virtues of collective learning constitutes somewhat of a dilemma. I have spent most my life in educational institutions structured around a philosophy of individualism, asserting that everyone is expected to fend for themselves, and individuals are solely accountable for their success or failure. When I became an educator, I vowed to challenge individualism in education by promoting collaborative ways of producing knowledge with my students. However, all my educational experiences, both learning and teaching, have been situated in an individualistic container where I may push back but inevitably cannot escape the institutional exigency to place people in isolated silos for assessment purposes. For example, my pedagogical approach at the university is based on a strong belief in the heuristic value of collaboration in which students collectively teach and learn from each other. Accountability, however, for the students’ learning and teaching falls squarely on the individual student, which is measured by a single grade. In the final moment, grading throws all the talk about “learning community”, “shared accountability”, and “co-construction of knowledge” out the window. In effect, everything the student knows becomes reduced down to an individual achievement focused only for the benefit of the Self instead of a knowledge production that is shared and distributed equitably for the advancement of the entire group.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes how Western epistemologies applied in just about every Classical era institution, including prisons, hospitals, and schools, aimed to turn the masses of people into individual cases to render them easier to know and thus easier to control. With this in mind, the “birth” of individualism in Europe is linked tightly to power in that individuals are trained and provided the “freedom” to increase their productive capacities and potentialities while simultaneously placed in a normative structure that mitigates any deviances or resistances to the norm. These placements occur within a hierarchy because certain “bodies” are deemed more distant from the norm and therefore require higher levels of discipline to secure their “docility”. Foucault argues that the practice of placing people into individual spaces is about control and hierarchy.

Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyse confused massive or transient pluralities. Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed. (Foucault 2012, 143)

The historical roots of individualism indicate that people receive and understand the idea through hegemonic means. On one hand, people consent to this idea that they follow a course of action leading to an increase of individual potentialities. On the other hand, this course, according to Foucault, is marked by power in that epistemologies applied by traditional institutions require and encourage people to think of themselves primarily as individuals for the purpose of “partitioning” and “dividing” them in ways that allow for subjection to disciplinary powers. Moreover, there are marginalized people who may be partitioned but also exist outside the benefit of “freedom of choice”.

A False Illusion of Freedom

The argument for this book, Liberatory Practices for Learning: Dismantling Social Inequality and Individualism with Ancient Wisdom, is that the “freedom” and social mobility espoused in individualism is a false illusion for many people who are considered non-normative and subordinate subjects. In reality, institutional practices permitting expressions and experiences of individualism are designed to foster constraint and division. On the surface, the historical idea of individualism appears to provide an avenue to escape the caste-like grip of ascribed status by suggesting that people determine their own way in the world through their own individual merits. At a deeper root level, this idea was meant to dissolve group solidarities and partition people into singular cells or units for studying, knowing, and controlling them while placing them in a social hierarchy to mark any potential threat of “bad” subjects. The irony is that millions of “bad” or subordinate subjects, namely people of color, poor, women, and LGBTQ, in the US school system find themselves adopting individualistic philosophy and thinking that they too will succeed with it. When in reality partaking in individualistic practices may contribute to their own subordination and thus failure.

Very few realize that true liberation derives from pre-colonial indigenous ways of being that position the meaning and understanding of Self in relation to Others. This idea of a relational Self is captured in the Mayan concept of In lak’ech, which translates as “You Are My Other Me”. In lak’ech is a rather complex concept because it turns on its head the hegemonic way we think about ourselves as individuals—no longer viewing people as separate, distinct entities with particularized ambitions but rather as linked together to form a group that shares desires, needs, interests and concerns collectively as a whole. Embedding this concept in education renders accountability a much different phenomenon! “You Are My Other Me” means that if you succeed, I succeed, because our interests and growth are intimately tied together as One. Success, in this way, is measured with group benchmarks that recognize achievements only at the collective level, forgoing the recognition of individual accomplishments to ensure that everyone excels. If all rise up, then nobody falls down.

This introductory chapter reviews the history of individualism and how liberalist ideals such as “free will” or “freedom of choice” were intended to serve only the interests of white men of means. In other words, early Enlightenment philosophers may have implied that individualism was a universal idea applicable to everyone, but in reality, it only applied to those who had the social and economic power to make individual choices. Many were still perceived, a perception held even by some Enlightenment philosophers, as less than human due to reasons of race, class, gender, and sexuality, thereby imposing a status of inferiority and preventing them from making any choices for themselves.

Individualism, nonetheless, has been a key idea structuring the development of education in the United States. Therefore, the chapter review continues by tracing the impact of individualism on educational policies and practices. The impact is noticed particularly in how the singular student represents the primary unit of analysis for assessments, accountability measures, evaluations, and standards. Placing all the focus on the individual student is the hallmark of neoliberalism and its preference for hyper-individualism in which complete accountability falls entirely on the individual. A more robust macro view of education is rarely taken up by the larger system to conduct an institutional wide, accountability study. Analysis of performance overwhelmingly tends to drill down to the individual student, which often exonerates the system of any responsibility for outcomes. The individual within neoliberalism is required to assume sole responsibility for success or failure within the system.

Finally, I discuss a vital counter-story derived from our ancestral past that speaks about indigenous ways of being with an emphasis on maintaining a collective consciousness. The world is perceived, understood, and engaged through a collective framework that guides thought and action away from individual practice to more communal sensibilities in which decision-making and knowledge production are processed collaboratively within a community. Collectivity, in this regard, serves as the dominant paradigm shaping perceptions of Self and ways of being not through isolated experiences but rather through relationship with Others. As mentioned above, In lak’ech represents this idea of understanding who I am in communion with you such that my being or existence is connected to and articulated through those bonded together within the same group. I am me not because of you but because I am you; there is no separation. We are integral parts of one, unified social organism.

A Brief History of Individualism

One of the early architects of individualism, John Locke wrote about the role of the individual primarily in the economic realm. His philosophy has contributed to what has been described as “possessive individualism” in which the emphasis is on people having the “freedom” to possess their own labor and acquire property from its deeds (Balibar 2002). Writing against Feudalism, Locke believed in the capacity of human reason to allow for the control of one’s labor while the ensuing productivity led to ownership of property. These ideas around labor and property ownership were revolutionary given that the organizing principle of Feudalism was “birthright” and that individuals’ ability to possess their labor and land lay with where or to which social status one was born. Simply, the Feudalists or those marked by nobility had full possession of their productive actions and land, whereas peasants or serfs did not. Locke argued against birth determining status or more specifically wealth by claiming that all civilized humans have the capacity of reason and therefore could work hard enough to become property owners.

However, Locke’s thinking behind possessive individualism appears to favor, on the one hand, a universal accessibility, but on the other, he contradicts himself by claiming that African slaves and Native Americans both exist outside civilization and thus fail to engage reason. Historian Roediger (2019, 12) points to how Locke implied that “alleged African (and Indian) deficiencies in commitment to labor and property, and therefore in reason, might justify their enslavement”. Locke’s appeal for the universality of possessive individualism applied primarily to those who existed in civilization. For a variety of reasons, including their so-called savagery and ambivalence around possessing their labor and land, African and Native Americans were deemed uncivilized and therefore ineligible for the individual rights extended to people of European descent.

Possessive individualism is only but one type of individualistic philosophy that emerged from Enlightenment thinking. Philosophers, such as Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Descartes, and Rousseau, contributed to the development of several “individualisms” that pertain to different aspects of life: morality, religion, economy, politics, education, and so on. Some contemporary analysts of individualism contend that the core individualistic perspective common throughout these various Enlightenment articulations “is on the importance of self, and especially the notion of self-development with no restraint or help from without” (Soares 2018, 16). Enlightenment philosophers consistently emphasized how “individualism . . . is probably best described as a tendency or attitude . . . centering on the idea that the individual human being is a maker of the world he/she inhabits” (ibid.).

On the surface, becoming a history maker would seem very empowering to those who were denied opportunities to do so. However, many are prevented from experiencing the “freedom” to make one’s way in the world. There are de jure and de facto restraints holding back marginalized people from obtaining the rights necessary to receive the true benefits of individualism. During the Enlightenment, slavery, various forms of bondage and land expropriation impeded the universal application of individualism to a point in which many (in particular people of color, women and those in poverty) had few to no chances to choose their life path. In fact, many were forced onto paths leading to subordination. Despite classical liberalist phrases such as “All Men Are Created Equal” implying a universal reach, ideas about individual “freedoms” were only meant for a select few. With some progress, de jure restraints have been somewhat reduced in our contemporary period, whereas de facto barriers still provide white heterosexual cis-gendered men with greater social value and thus greater mobility to reap the benefits of individualism.

Besides, the idea of success based on individual merit or “meritocracy” is a myth. People rarely, if ever, gain social status purely through their own merits. Most of social status or position has much to do with inherent social and economic factors such as race, gender, class, and sexuality. No one is self-made; everyone who rises receives some sort of help along the journey. This help may come in the form of access to resources or opportunities available only to those who can participate in “high-leverage” social networks. In other words, a white cis-gendered heterosexual man could be connected to a social network (i.e. other white cis-gendered heterosexual men) in which ideas, resources and opportunities are shared to the benefit of only those permitted to participate.

Writing some years after the so-called Enlightenment Era, Dewey reflects on how discussions about individualism from this earlier era center on the individual as an economic being “free” to make rational choices that solidify personal gain. Although there were other treatments of individualism concerned more with morality, religion and philosophy, its economic implications seem to be the most salient take-away from this particular time period. Dewey explains how “older” ideas of individualism remain, albeit somewhat changed, within newer articulations.

It is not much to say that the whole significance of the older individualism has now shrunk to a pecuniary scale and measure. The virtues that are supposed to attend rugged individualism may be vocally proclaimed, but it takes no insight to see that what is cherished is measured by its connection with those activities that make for success in business conducted for personal gain. (Dewey 2009, 86)

Dewey goes on to proclaim a “new” individualism in which people are unfettered by socio-political constraints holding back their creativity, imagination and ingenuity. According to Dewey, individualism works better if “freedoms” are not directed solely at the accumulation of wealth but more toward self-expression of intellect. The individual, however, in this philosophical perspective must develop “ideas and beliefs” from “a communal life in which he[sic] shares” (Dewey 2009, 79). The importance of the social component to one’s development is so that the individual (with freedom of intellectual expression) learns about and understands the concerns, interests and needs of Others.

Although Dewey seems to advocate for a socialist individualism, he is skeptical that this version would even survive the US capitalist context:

For the chief obstacle to the creation of a type of individual whose pattern of thought and desire is enduringly marked by consensus with others, and in whom sociability is one with co-operation in all regular human associations, is the persistence of that feature of the earlier individualism which defines industry and commerce by ideas of private pecuniary profit. (Dewey 2009, 85)

Relinquishing the constraints that prevent an individual’s pursuit of wealth would indeed qualify as “a persistent feature” of Enlightenment thinking. Its persistency is even evident in current forms of economic and political thought with roots in Classical Liberalism. Dewey could portend the challenges of US capitalism, but he hoped that it would progress ahead to a social democratic version. At that time, he failed to foresee that several decades of progress would not lead to adopting socialist ideals but more toward a revival of classical economic theory in what we now call neoliberalism.

The Individual, Corporations, and Schools Within Neoliberalism

The idea of an independent economic being unrestrained by social, political, legal, and moral codes emerged clearly in the Enlightenment Era from attendant liberalist philosophies. The individual seems to have gone full circle, from the Enlightenment past short periods of anti-monopoly progressivism to Keynesian public welfare and back again to our current neoliberal era. Similar to Classical liberalism, neoliberalism centers the individual in political and economic theory as the primary unit of analysis for the development of policies and practices facilitating business/market conditions that are conducive for the accumulation of profit. The difference between the Classical era and current neoliberalism is how corporations hold the same status as individuals by receiving similar treatment in regard to loosening the restraints that prevent the singular pursuit of wealth. Neoliberal philosophy encourages not only individuals to practice individualism but also organizational entities (i.e. corporations) to participate in self-promoting actions leading to “personal” economic gain. Although anti-monopolist in the early 1900s attempted to limit the market control of individuals, neoliberalism in an unprecedented move has unleashed the corporation to access economic and political power for gaining greater control of markets and industries. The individual and corporation both are situated in an economic and social context heavily influenced by market principles, except the latter has in most cases the clear advantage to succeed from its power to garner financial and political resources.

In neoliberalism, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: We Already Know
• 2. Living Praxes and Principles in PAR EntreMundos
• 3. Spill the Tea
• 4. Mathematics with Open Arms
• 5. I Am Because We Are
• 6. Reclaiming Our Excellence
• 7. Conclusion: Dreaming Between Worlds
• Back Matter