Blog #6: Education and Democracy @ The Universidad de la Tierra de Oaxaca

The past few days have been difficult for me, as I have been struggling with all sorts of maladies, and for the most part I wish I were home. Yet I have this sense, this constant reminder in my head, a little bird tweeting away telling me to wake up, to recognize all of the things that I have learned each day that I have been in this foreign country. It is as simple as learning to not buy food from street vendors, as my host family assures me that the sickness came from “la hamburgeusa.” With each day has come new unique experiences, and learning how to approach these experiences. It has been argued that the foundations of knowledge, wisdom, thought, and even existence are held up by experience. Clearly, there is some value in examining the attitude to which we approach our very own experiences. Furthermore, a large component of our study in Oaxaca is experience based, from our experience with the culture, food, and our host families, to taking trips to historical sites, a women’s center, and a migrant sending village. The reason we are able to fit a full three-credit course into little more than two weeks of classes is due to the fact that each day has been jammed packed with experiences, with learning. In fact one of the trips we took was to a place called the Universidad de la Tierra de Oaxaca, a learning center that emphasizes the importance of individual experience and learning.

 

At the Universidad de la Tierra de Oaxaca, there is one rule, that is the two feet, if something bores you, if you have had enough, get up, walk around, explore, experience the world out of your own volition. If you are interested in the current conversation stay and listen, contribute if you wish. The Universidad is a place of freedom, of creativity, and of inquisition, a place where real life individual experience is held to the highest degree, and all of the other stuff is simply there to have fun with, to meld with the lives of real people.  Essentially, the Universidad de la Tierra is a learning space, a place to demonstrate oneself, a place where the authenticity of individual experience is held up to the highest standard, that of the experienced, the individual experiential arbiter; each and every one of us are the authority over our own learning process, a sovereign self. The Universidad is simply a place for those who thirst for knowledge, real world learning and experience, to come together and be, to share their being with one another, to experience one another as unique beings. As pointed out by Gustavo Esteva in Back From The Future, one of his many writings on The Universidad, “None of the participants have any expectation about the results. We are only enjoying ourselves by sharing every week, around a table, our insights or perplexities after some readings or experiences.” (14)

 

The American pragmatist scholar John Dewey once said, “faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education.” The reason I mention Dewey is because I have found Gustavo Esteva’s writing to be very similar to Dewey’s. In particular Esteva stakes claim to the need for a radical democracy, out of which the true needs and desires of the people may be fulfilled. The foundations of democracy echo through two parallel statements made by Esteva and Dewey, “Again, radical democracy is basically language of freedom and freedom includes respect to the others; includes looking for harmony.” (G. Esteva); similarly, from Dewey, “the task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.”

 

The ability for people to learn and become educated in an authentic manner is key to the enactment of a true, or radical, democracy. Essentially, people who truly believe in democracy, in striving to genuinely govern oneself, must be in a constant pursuit of learning, becoming more and more capable of responsible action. Since the capacity for responsible action and learning occurs at the individual level, apparently individuals are held accountable first and foremost to themselves. The term radical democracy as explained by Esteva includes both the notion of democracy as a self governing society, or “peoples power,” and the use of radical in its Spanish sense “means to come back to the roots, the root of things.”  In the case of human rights, first turn to the root of the discussion of such rights, which is human freedom. Esteva makes clear that the talk of rights includes a notion of authority, or a central state that can provide for such rights. He argues that a change is needed in the way we talk about these matters, we should not argue that we have a right to such and such, rather we should argue for the freedom to pursue such and such. At the Universidad, learners do not argue for the right to an education, made evident by the fact that there is no curriculum, no rules, no grades. Students leave the school when they find themselves doing what they set out to learn to do, or in many cases what they figured out they wanted to do at some point along the way. At the Universidad students have a space where they are free to learn, where there is no pressure or set measure for accomplishment other than that which one sets for oneself. 

-Jeremy-