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In response to the decaying educational world, my intention was to create community-learning experiences for the NYU/NYC community. Throughout college I was co-chair of a progressive school organization with ideals of educating local individuals about the necessity of active community participation. Our primary responsibility was to the ideal of a flourishing democracy “by and for the people”. Democracy was nothing without participation. Participation meant identifying community priorities and bringing them to the forefront of local debate. Empowering ourselves and others to share ideas, discuss current issues, and debate opinions was accomplished through movie screenings, lectures, conferences, benefit concerts, seminars, both national and campus-wide awareness campaigns, and marches. We helped organize them all.
The goal was to raise community awareness about NYU’s role in both the local and global situation. The hope was for awareness to evoke participation, and from participation would flow democratic change. By the fall after I graduated the Princeton Review rated NYU as one of the most politically active campuses in the country. Students were brilliant teachers, the campus community was becoming more aware of itself, and professors often remarked at how much they were learning.
Initiating, organizing and facilitating community-learning experiences brought on a profound recognition of the internal and external obstacles to changing how we learn. In my junior year I worked with a Mexican activist to found a 501C-3 organization “Seeds for Self Reliance”. Healing the North-South Wound 1999, an interdisciplinary conference at NYU, would be the first initiative of Seeds. Our ambition was to create a hemispheric network and resource for community initiatives in political, economic, social, cultural, or spiritual self-reliance and self-determination. Healing was envisioned as a process that demanded a new kind of learning, one that exposed and engaged the connection between personal, communal, international, and ecological awareness and health. The conference focused on the psychological-ecological-historical “wounds” which persist within and around us, obscuring the underlying interdependence of the human and non-human global community. We advertised ambitiously to the entire diversity of our community, artists, students, academics, activists, therapists, business people, and families. Participants heard panels of international specialists from various disciplines speak about critical issues between the US and Mexico. While these panels were interactive we offered a more profound learning experience by facilitating small group workshops in painting, theatre, and movement. The workshops were designed to maximize the reflective process by engaging participants through multiple intelligences. Learning would become a new mirror, to reflect the qualities in ourselves which are often hidden, aide us in becoming more fully human, and to attain our personal potential.
For me the conference highlighted the importance of understanding the context of education with an examination of the cultural paradigms assumed by modern modes of life. While the Global South is the birthplace of the humanity’s oldest and most sustainable cultures, the dominant paradigm devalues tradition, favouring the progress and economic development of Northern cultures. Why, for example, does the industrialized North attempt to unilaterally feed, house, protect, and educate the developing South? A Martian scientist studying Earth who saw the tons of food shipped worldwide would dangerously assume that no one starved in America or that Africa had no arable land.
In an alternative scenario, reciprocal North/South partnerships could inform a shared global community helping balance interdependence, self-reliance, and global ecology. Yet regrettably in North-South relationships unilateral imposition of policy is commonplace while reciprocal integration of successful practices is unheard of. Trade partnerships are commonly masks for economic exploitation. There is a viable argument among progressive thinkers that equates the globalization of neo-liberalism with a new colonialism.
While North-South distinctions are not concrete they open the door to examine a dominant paradigm that legitimizes a global minority of powerful leaders, and inequitable access to technology, information, and wealth. How then does a high school education in a small American suburb fit into this macroscopic picture? Communities enact a similar cultural paradigm when they build the walls of the classrooms, station a teacher in the front of 50 children, enforce strict behavioural norms, and demand test scores. Accounting for the change in scale, the basic paradigm of the modern teacher-student relationship appears to parallel the north-south relationship. Without a critical examination of our cultural paradigms, educational institutions perpetuate the personal internalization and local manifestation of the inequities that cover our planet.
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Daniel Roth
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Hello richard | Dec 19th, 2011
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