How does education work, and how could it work? This theme is the school studying itself. It covers Freire, Horton, popular education, the folk-school tradition, the politics of literacy, and the long history of people learning together against a world that does not want them to learn. It is the ground the other themes stand on, and it pairs closely with the Pedagogy document and the facilitator guide that shape every session.
How to use this theme
This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.
- Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
- Historical: How did this come to be?
- Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
- Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
- Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?
A session does not need to use all five lenses. A study circle may move across them. Use what serves the room. This theme also works well as a first theme for a new group and as a facilitator training, since it makes the school’s own method the object of study.
Anchor questions
These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script. Take the ones that fit the room and leave the rest.
- When have you learned something that changed how you see the world? How did that happen?
- What was school like for you? What did it teach you about yourself and your place?
- Who have been your real teachers, in or out of any classroom?
- Have you ever been taught as if you were empty, a container to be filled? How did it feel?
- What do you already know that no school gave you?
- What is this room for? What kind of learning are we trying to do here?
- Can education free people, or does it mostly train them to fit? When is it which?
Recommended sequences
Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document). Because this theme is about the room’s own practice, notice throughout whether the way you are studying it matches what it argues.
Single-session entry point (2 hours). Start experiential: people’s own histories as learners, and the teacher who saw them or the classroom that shut them down. Watch a short piece together (Freire in his own voice, Paulo Freire: An Incredible Conversation). Read the banking-model passage of Pedagogy of the Oppressed aloud and test it against the room’s experience. Close by asking what kind of learning this room is for. A strong first session for any new group. See the single-session template.
Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential (our own schooling). Week 2 historical: the folk-school and Freedom School lineage, using Horton and the SNCC materials. Weeks 3 to 4 theoretical: Freire’s banking model and conscientization, with bell hooks and We Make the Road by Walking. Week 5 practical: how to facilitate, using the Highlander methods, Theatre of the Oppressed, and the study-circle guide, ideally by practicing on each other. Week 6 liberatory: the arguments about the method itself, transform schooling versus deschool it, and the feminist, Indigenous, and practitioner critiques of critical pedagogy. See the six-week template.
Weekend intensive. Compress the arc above into a Friday-evening-through-Sunday structure. This theme makes an excellent facilitator-training weekend, with Saturday on theory and Sunday spent practicing facilitation and Theatre of the Oppressed exercises. A screening of You Got to Move or Freedom Summer works well on Saturday evening. See the weekend-intensive template.
Related themes
Because this theme is the school’s method, it connects to every other theme. Most directly:
- Labor, Work, and Organizing shares the Highlander lineage and the tradition of workers’ education.
- Race and Racial Capitalism meets this theme in the Citizenship Schools, the Freedom Schools, and abolitionist teaching.
- The State, Strategy, and Power shares Gramsci on the organic intellectual and the politics of hegemony and education.
- Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration carries forward the horizontalist and self-organized pole of liberatory education.
- Socialism and National Liberation carries Cabral’s liberation pedagogy and the popular education of the national-liberation movements.
Status
First pass across all five lenses, and it may be a while before there is a second. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.