It Is Time to Unlearn What We Learned in School

A lot of community education involves unlearning what we've learned in the school system, things that undermine our faith in our own ability to think for ourselves, undermine the development of our unique abilities, undermine our ability to be happy. These are some of the things we need to unlearn:

Competitiveness: Instead of seeing others as fellow beings, we learn suspicion and deception. Competing for grades is our main goal, and in our race for grades there is more and more cheating — destroying the trust that is so necessary for a culture.

Consumerism: Our style of learning is basically one of consuming — we devour the experts' ideas without even digesting them.

We go to school so we can get high-paying jobs in order to have enough money to consume without limits. And we become the world's ultimate consumers, destroying the planet. Education has become a form of consuming where you get what you pay for — students have come to see themselves as paying customers, demanding good grades for their money.

Commercialization: When everything is for sale, nothing is sacred. We have sold our souls. Education has become a commodity and the "quality" of the service you get depends on how much you can pay, just as in medicine or legal representation.


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Careerism without conscience: All of these are expressed in the goals of our educational system — choosing a career because of the amount of money and power you'll acquire. Underneath, almost all education focuses on helping people in their race to get the most prestigious, best-paid jobs.

Caste system: Our education system reflects the main society and has produced a caste system. People learn to know their place, and those on the top learn to scorn those beneath them. This produces bitterness and hatred between the levels of society. The people at bottom resent the people at the top, and the people at the top fear those at the bottom.The people at the top are taught that they're special, and they learn to disdain people in the slower reading groups. People who are disdained feel it, and they resent it. This is reflected by Rick Santorum, one of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, calling President Obama a "snob" for wanting everyone to go to college.

Cynicism: Education should enliven and enlighten, but it makes people cynical because they have no ideals to work for other than the diminished goals of fame and money.

Closemindedness: My experience with the highly educated is that they often do not want to consider any ideas not stamped as worthy by the academy. Think of how most medical students learn to view alternative health strategies.

Corporatization of life: Philosopher Ivan Illich talks about the institutionalization of our lives — everything is taken away from the individual or the family or the community and given to the experts or authorities. Thus, people no longer educate their children, have family prayers, handle health issues, fix their appliances, grow their own food, make their own music, or entertain themselves. There is an "industry" for each of those: the entertainment industry, the agricultural industry, etc.

Community Education as Living Room Learning

It Is Time to Unlearn What We Learned in SchoolSo, in community education we are rebelling against an educational experience that has been corporatized. Based on my experience in getting my doctorate in education at Stanford, it's not too strong to call higher education an experience of anonymity, coldness, regulations, sterility, hypocrisy, boredom, conformity, and dehumanization — which is how I would also describe the corporation.

People want to liberate themselves from overt and covert oppression that keeps them from living fully. Much of people's education deals with freeing people from oppression. The poor Black people in the citizenship schools learned that they had a right to be free and equal. They knew they were oppressed. But how many of us in the educated classes understand that we are also oppressed in many ways? Are we really free and equal? There are many ways that we are kept from living with joy and happiness, so many that we don't even realize. We settle for less, because all we've ever known is less.

My Vision: Asking the Big Questions and Learning to Become Citizens

My vision is of people gathered together all over the country in our living rooms — all addressing the big questions: How do we live fully? What is our country doing to help us live fully? How is it hindering us? How can we create a supportive culture? We need soul searching.

We need to recreate citizenship schools in our living rooms. We ourselves need to learn how to become citizens. What can we do today that can come anywhere near what those citizenship schools did? How can we help build a movement that will defeat the forces of our corporate, consumer society that are killing the planet and destroying everything that is decent and honorable?

©2013 by Cecile Andrews. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
New Society Publishers. http://newsociety.com


This article was adapted with permission from the book:

Living Room Revolution: A Handbook for Conversation, Community and the Common Good
by Cecile Andrews.

Living Room Revolution: A Handbook for Conversation, Community and the Common Good by Cecile Andrews.The heart of happiness is joining with others in good talk and laughter.  Living Room Revolution provides a practical toolkit of concrete strategies to facilitate personal and social change by bringing people together in community and conversation. The regeneration of social ties and the sense of caring and purpose that comes from creating community drive this essential transformation. Each person can make a difference, and it can all start in your own living room!

Click here for more info and/or to order this book.


About the Author

Cecile Andrews, author of -- Living Room Revolution: A Handbook for Conversation, Community and the Common GoodCecile Andrews is a community educator focusing on voluntary simplicity, "take back your time," the "Sharing Economy," and Pursuit of Happiness Conversation Circles. She is the author of Slow is Beautiful, Circle of Simplicity and co-author of Less is More. She has a doctorate in education from Stanford University. Cecile is very active in the Transition Movement in the US. She and her husband are founders of Seattle's Phinney Ecovillage, a neighborhood-based sustainable community.