cross-posted from Where The Blog Has No Name
Staughton Lynd, author, attorney, radical historian, and civil rights leader presented one of three keynote addresses at the Rouge Forum’s 2009 Conference at Eastern Michigan University last month. His speech – which shares its title with Lenin’s famous work on the principles of democratic centralism – draws on his experiences as director of the Mississippi Freedom Schools of the mid-1960s to identify where we can can begin to resist the antidemocratic impulses of greed, individualism, and intolerance in our work as educators. Lynd’s talk reminds us that people learn by and through experience, not by reading the "right newspapers" or attending lectures. A claim that is somewhat reminiscent of Guy Debord’s assessment of what revolutionary organizations should be about:
"Revolution is not ‘showing’ life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation." – Guy Debord ["For a Revolutionary Judgement of Art"]
The bottom line in Lynd’s talk is as simple as it is challenging, let’s make every school a freedom school. Read Lynd’s talk here and in the upcoming issue of The Rouge Forum News.
E. Wayne Ross is Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. He research interests focus on the influence of social and institutional contexts on teachers' practice as well as the role of curriculum and teaching in building a democratic society in the face of antidemocratic impulses of greed, individualism, and intolerance. In recent years he has examined the influence of the educational standards and high-stakes testing movements on curriculum and teaching. His most recent research investigates the surveillance-based and spectacular conditions of (post)modern schools and society in an effort to develop both a radical critique of the "disciplinary gaze" and a means by which teachers, students and other stakeholders might resist its various conformative, anti-democratic, anti-collective, and oppressive potentialities. He has published in a wide variety of academic journals as well as the popular press, including Z Magazine. His books include: Neoliberalism and Education Reform (edited with Rich Gibson); The Social Studies Curriculum; Race, Ethnicity and Education; Defending Public Schools, and many others.Ross is a co-founder of The Rouge Forum, a group of educators, parents, and students seeking a democratic society. He is also editor of several academic journals, including Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, Cultural Logic, and Critical Education. A former secondary social studies (grades 8-12) and day care teacher in North Carolina and Georgia, Dr. Ross was Distinguished University Scholar and Chair of the Department of Teaching at the University of Louisville prior to his arrival at UBC in 2004. He has also been a faculty member at the State University of New York campuses at Albany and Binghamton.
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