While it is good and appropriate if not necessary to direct our voices and actions toward getting big government to provide “universal quality education,” it is equally required that the people return to the “classroom.” What I mean here is that unless we turn to ourselves at a local level and create a vital vision for the particular quality and content of education that each community and/or culture desires for itself, big government is unlikely to provide the kind of education the people need.
The Secretary of Education, with Obama’s blessings, may institute higher formal standards, bureaucratic reforms in administration, testing requirements, teacher qualifications, length of school year, even reducing the number of pupils in the classroom. However, until each community re-appropriates ownership of and entitlement to a relevant quality education available in each community and orchestrated by each community, we will in effect be trying to get the tail to wag the dog.
It is time that the need and desire for the greatest of educations be a genuine expression of that “people’s populism” that has been wrongly exploited for over a century in America by various pseudo-populists, even and especially Obama himself. It is time that the presidential call for better education be made the mere echo of the people’s own political call for the autonomous re-constitution and control of their own spiritual and intellectual self-formation. This call must be understood however to be not simply a request or appeal for quality universal education but a demand for quality universal education. Universality does not mean the same dumbed-down, standardized training in passivity, uniformity and useable skills, whether intellectual or manual for all equally. In the first place, this is a demand that big government get its hands off the stranglehold it has on local life and culture and, for openers, release significant tax monies to the people for use in their own locally controlled education rather than for such things as a militarized economy geared for meaningless and/or unnecessary wars.
Formal changes of educational law and practices as recently proposed by Obama will ultimately not get us what we want and need in order to make a real difference in communities. What we need are new cultures of learning initiated from the grass roots of America. Changes from atop the bureaucratic educational hierarchy, and sanctioned by the Washington political class, have historically done little to advance the quality of education in America. Reforms such as raising standards, for example, have been shown not to correlate with achievement. The other kinds of changes from above also have not made and will not make a difference in the quality and substance of local cultures of learning even if national educational statistics make it look, as they have in the past, that we are making “progress.” We are not making progress. We need to administer our own education and take it out of the hands of the Ministers of Education who are jaundiced by their own social class’s economic and political interests -- interests which essentially preclude the will, understanding and action necessary for the popular education revolution that we need.
Just as with the ongoing fight for democracy, so also with the fight for education, dramatic change must start at home. We have all heard the phrase “All politics is local politics.” So also, all democracy and all education is local democracy and education. This does not mean to invoke a project of involutional inbreeding and turning away from the understanding of the world and our part in it. It means to awaken ourselves to the fact that the alienated power in Washington will respond to and respect only those willing to live their most sacred values authentically and autonomously. In short they will respond when we are listening and doing for ourselves. They will respond when we withdraw our lifeblood from their veins, a lifeblood that takes not only the form of our egregiously squandered tax money but the form of a false consciousness that is manipulated into legitimating their continued misrepresentation and patronization of the communities, cultures and values of a heterogeneous populaition. Such consciousness must wake up from this delusion and realize that “what can be done at home must be done at home.” This is the principle of subsidiarity. It means that all social tasks should be performed as nearly as possible by those whom they directly affect at a local level and that centralized authority of “big government” should be reduced to playing only a subsidiary role coordinating and expediting cooperation among local communities.
This re-appropriation of culturally, and therefore educationally, self-constitutive behavior is even much more than the old notion that we aren’t really alive until we find something we are willing to die for. This may be true and we may in the end need to be willing to die for local cultural autonomy, political freedom, self-determination and identity. But such willingness to die is predicated first and foremost on how passionately and compassionately we are willing to live fully and robustly for what we love, desire, believe and create in our daily lives. Politically, this is the profundity of a radically new democratic and multi-cultural populism, in short, the simplicity of the self-realized abundance of autonomous and self-determining local life. Its heart is self-education for local power, knowledge and the will to be heard. It is the cultural rebirth of local sovereignty. Today its signs are everywhere as local communities and regions struggle to be heard, not only in America but internationally.
What we must understand first is whether we really hear ourselves and are struggling to hear and respond to ourselves. Until as much attention is turned toward a vision of the kind of life we want to lead and away from the project of a globalized culture, a one-dimensional Americanized world where one size fits all, then education will always be made prêt a porte by the purveyors of conformist pedagogy.
Achieving education for a new political, economic, cultural and spiritual intelligence is in effect to democratize intelligence, creativity and social participation. It creates the autonomy and power needed to begin dismantling big government, decentralizing big government and returning both democracy and education for democracy to the people. Social intelligence is not fixed in the genes no matter how much the Regents of the intelligence bureaucracy at Princeton, not to mention our own ‘street mythologies,’ would have us believe it.
Social intelligence, the democratized intelligence of communities, evolves when communities educate and form themselves to achieve the highest quality of life that they love and cherish in mutual trust. The individual is only as intelligent as the wisdom his community allows. Unless of course one strives for the specialized skills of the new globalized cosmopolitan Man who really has no qualities nor content but is fully useable by the technocracy, bureaucracy, military or financialized business world of transnational capital.
To appreciate how alienated we are from our own power of self-determination, we must ask ourselves some simple questions: when was the last time, if ever, that you sat in on a local School Board meeting let alone, let’s say, a history or social science class in the local High School to experience what and how the students are learning. When have we last thoroughly checked out the text books our children use and asked if they are worth using. Do we even know enough to make that judgement. When was the last time you took a course at the local community college or university to expand your intellectual horizon. When was the last time you tried to address local government regarding issues of any sort in the community. When was the last time you got into a substantive debate with your neighbor about the quality and content of local education, the values and laws of your community, the latest issue in state politics. When was the last time you chose to write a letter to the editor in the local papers or participate regularly on a political blog or started one of your own. When was the last time you questioned how we can continue to do the same things and expect new results whether in education, politics, spirituality, cultural self-expression or especially the love life of your own families and friends. How can we change Washington and America when the roots of such change are not planted firmly in our own hearts and minds. How can we require educational change when we are not changing educationally.
The spiritual and community leaders who are not the mouthpieces of Washington, Wall Steet, Hollywood’s commercialized culture or religions institutionalized spirituality must not only speak truth to power but wisdom to the people in the provinces. She must not only funnel protest toward the professionalized leaders but pull the people back to the neighborhoods, schools and lost souls of local life.
The return to meaningful or effective local power involves the retrieval of lost cultural and historical possibilities. We find this in our pain, our confusion and our lost pasts. Such return is moreover the re-constitution of multi-cultural values and new cultural practices themselves not yet foreseen. It is not a matter whether such values and practices are universalizable across all cultures. It is a matter of whether the particular values and practices can sustain democratic communities, that is free multiplicities of communities living and creating as they see fit. It is a move into the future by recovering the past, a past in which we find the spirit of lost selves and re-create and re-invent their spirit today at home for a sustainable joy, freedom, peace and love.
Several years ago, at the end of the Million Man March on Washington, Louis Farrakahn, leader of the Black Muslims, issued a call I didn’t expect him to make. Having mobilized a million men of color to Washington to ask what it means to be a black man in America and to empower a decimated ethnic group, I expected Mr. Farrakhan to make a play for national power and possibly even prepare the way for a run for the Presidency. But in fact what he asked this inspired throng of supporters to do was not mobilize further for monolithic mass action but to go home and build their communities. In his own way he was asking them to do what the Black Panthers had been doing in the Sixties before they were infected with the self-defeating idea that they were social revolutionaries who might even take national power for themselves. Originally these “panthers” were, wisely enough, community organizers, supporters, creators and builders. Presumably they saw the strength and power of local well-being, consciousness, co-operation, pride and purposefulness. Until they lost sight of what real populist power is capable of today when understood in terms of the primacy of community and local culture.
The revolution in education begins when we realize that it is preceded by proper political action. This is not action from the standpoint of a totalized national consciousness aiming to transform the whole on the basis of a vision of absolute universal uniformity. It begins when we recover the populist consciousness which realizes its power lay in the protest against outside control of local affairs, values, identities, practices and purposes.
The age of the mass collectivization of the people, whether of the communist or liberal kind, is over. The center of the artificially homogenized nation-state of mass robotized pseudo-individuals does not hold. America is too large for its government to presume to legislate for all the particular peoples, communities, traditions and cultures across this great land. American government is overly confident if it continues believing it can bureaucratically manage opposition and control and constitute the cultural existence of vastly diverse communities of people.
The democratic experiment is beginning again in a new way in the name of the only practicable democracy, that of relatively small communities directly participating democratically to govern themselves and create their own lives. American education should play a part in imparting such democratic values if there is to be any real thread internally connecting the particularities of geographically, culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse peoples.
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