Teaching at the Edge of Empire, Part I
- What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine... There's a difference I take pains to impress upon my students between schooling and education. Schooling is when I, acting as a teacher, know something you don't know, which you ought to know, the knowledge of which will make you a better person, almost as good as me. Education is the creation of an environment in which people can learn, and become more themselves. Schooling occurs in a classroom, and involves a teacher who knows, and students who don't. Education involves human beings in a place. Schooling encourages getting the right answer. Education encourages asking good questions. Schooling results in more productive workers, more concerned consumers, more compliant citizens. Education results in people who are more fully themselves. Schooling separates disciplines and subjects, and segregates emotion. Education synthesizes knowledge types, worldviews, and perspectives, and is conducted entirely in the first person. Schooling is primarily about the importance of abstraction. Education is primarily about the importance of experience. Schooling promotes one right way of thinking and acting. Education recognizes a plurality of wisdoms. Schooling requires individuals. Education requires communities. Schooling necessitates the use of coercive violence. Education necessitates a reliance upon love.
From Derrick Jensen's Walking on Water: "The word education comes from the latin root e-ducere, meaning 'to lead forth' or 'to draw out.' Originally it was a midwife's term meaning 'to be present at the birth of.' I would contrast that with the root of the word seduce, which is closely related, but with a striking difference. To educe is to lead forth; to seduce is to lead astray... Who knows what sort of trouble I could have gotten into had I begun talking about the relationship between classrooms and seduction."
I teach 'transitional studies' English to three classes of mostly Navajo college students. That's fucked up. Gallup is a colony town, here at the edge of the largest Indian-held landscape in the continental United States. The curriculum I have been hired to teach is a colonial curriculum. Valuing English over Navajo on land illegally, by our own laws, claimed, is gauche at best, genocide at worst. In this instance, I fear for the worst. There is no requirement for teachers to learn to speak or write Navajo, nor is there any training in the traditional knowledge systems of this part of the world for incoming faculty. Students are required to learn how to read and write Academic English and take Western science and mathematics courses. Kachina dolls, bought at Hopi and Zuni trading posts decorate the directorial offices like trophies.
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks said something to the effect that, for all our liberal talk of multiculturalism, unless a legitimate cultural exchange takes place, in which the dominant society gives up some of its deeply held beliefs and adopts some from the 'minority', rather than simply taking the material trappings of that subjugated culture and claiming ownership, we are still in the same colonial straits we were when this whole righteously outraged movement started.
The Navajo word 'Diné', often translated as 'the people', has a quite different meaning. Literally, diné translates as 'a dying man'; its adoption as national moniker is unsurprising in an era of increased oppression of Navajo women and of ruthless cultural suppression under the rule of the United States. The culture is being destroyed, and, more to the point, it is being deliberately destroyed.
Failing students because of absences taken to support ill or dying relatives further undermines the traditionally tightly-knit extended family structure common in this part of the world. Abusive teaching, be it overt, "do your damn reading- do you want to wear buckskin for the rest of your life?"* or implicit, "I expect every single person to be in class on time," reinforces the attitudes of harm that are currently tearing up relationships in town and on the rez, Anglo and Native alike. Culturally monotone resources ("Daryl boosted his career and calmed his nerves") insist over and over the desirability of being White, working for money, and being an individual separate from other people and from the land. We teachers no longer need to fixate upon killing the Indian to save the man, this job has been ably accomplished by years of McKinley County public schooling and the ministrations of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, now we need focus only on killing the human to produce the Productive Member of Society. Bonus points to whoever can guess whose society that is.
This genocide is subtler still, in the sorts of music deemed popular (by which magazines owned by whom?) by the Western clothing styles now so commonplace as to be almost invisible (thou shalt wear slacks and a button-down shirt to work lest ye be disparaged) by the laws enforced, based not upon local traditional conflict resolution techniques but on European city management, by the monetary valuation of goods, by the insistence upon labor as the path to happiness, by the language spoken (English) by the language written (English) by the language untranslated, unsubtitled, unapologized for (English) by the language taught in schools (English). All of these things destroy Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi culture, just as surely as they've destroyed Fijian culture, Lenape culture, and Makah culture.
Continued below (or above, depending upon your format)...
*Quotations here are from actual teachers, and the writing workbook, respectively.
From Derrick Jensen's Walking on Water: "The word education comes from the latin root e-ducere, meaning 'to lead forth' or 'to draw out.' Originally it was a midwife's term meaning 'to be present at the birth of.' I would contrast that with the root of the word seduce, which is closely related, but with a striking difference. To educe is to lead forth; to seduce is to lead astray... Who knows what sort of trouble I could have gotten into had I begun talking about the relationship between classrooms and seduction."
I teach 'transitional studies' English to three classes of mostly Navajo college students. That's fucked up. Gallup is a colony town, here at the edge of the largest Indian-held landscape in the continental United States. The curriculum I have been hired to teach is a colonial curriculum. Valuing English over Navajo on land illegally, by our own laws, claimed, is gauche at best, genocide at worst. In this instance, I fear for the worst. There is no requirement for teachers to learn to speak or write Navajo, nor is there any training in the traditional knowledge systems of this part of the world for incoming faculty. Students are required to learn how to read and write Academic English and take Western science and mathematics courses. Kachina dolls, bought at Hopi and Zuni trading posts decorate the directorial offices like trophies.
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks said something to the effect that, for all our liberal talk of multiculturalism, unless a legitimate cultural exchange takes place, in which the dominant society gives up some of its deeply held beliefs and adopts some from the 'minority', rather than simply taking the material trappings of that subjugated culture and claiming ownership, we are still in the same colonial straits we were when this whole righteously outraged movement started.
The Navajo word 'Diné', often translated as 'the people', has a quite different meaning. Literally, diné translates as 'a dying man'; its adoption as national moniker is unsurprising in an era of increased oppression of Navajo women and of ruthless cultural suppression under the rule of the United States. The culture is being destroyed, and, more to the point, it is being deliberately destroyed.
Failing students because of absences taken to support ill or dying relatives further undermines the traditionally tightly-knit extended family structure common in this part of the world. Abusive teaching, be it overt, "do your damn reading- do you want to wear buckskin for the rest of your life?"* or implicit, "I expect every single person to be in class on time," reinforces the attitudes of harm that are currently tearing up relationships in town and on the rez, Anglo and Native alike. Culturally monotone resources ("Daryl boosted his career and calmed his nerves") insist over and over the desirability of being White, working for money, and being an individual separate from other people and from the land. We teachers no longer need to fixate upon killing the Indian to save the man, this job has been ably accomplished by years of McKinley County public schooling and the ministrations of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, now we need focus only on killing the human to produce the Productive Member of Society. Bonus points to whoever can guess whose society that is.
This genocide is subtler still, in the sorts of music deemed popular (by which magazines owned by whom?) by the Western clothing styles now so commonplace as to be almost invisible (thou shalt wear slacks and a button-down shirt to work lest ye be disparaged) by the laws enforced, based not upon local traditional conflict resolution techniques but on European city management, by the monetary valuation of goods, by the insistence upon labor as the path to happiness, by the language spoken (English) by the language written (English) by the language untranslated, unsubtitled, unapologized for (English) by the language taught in schools (English). All of these things destroy Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi culture, just as surely as they've destroyed Fijian culture, Lenape culture, and Makah culture.
Continued below (or above, depending upon your format)...
*Quotations here are from actual teachers, and the writing workbook, respectively.