I know the module is over, but I really wanted to write a final reflection, and I found it difficult to find the time to do so in the alotted time.
For me, the two most thought-provoking readings in the module were Henry Giroux’s “Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom” and bell hooks’ “Engaged Pedagogy,” one of which I hated and one of which I loved. Both engage Paulo Freire’s notion of education as a practice of freedom. I haven’t read Freire, so I am dependent on these and other readings from the module to understand what he meant by this notion. It seems that, at its grossest level, education as freedom is contrasted with the “banking model of education,” in which knowledge is deposited by teachers into the minds of passive students. Education as freedom requires active participation. Education as freedom engages the student with the learning in the context of their own life. Education as freedom engages the student’s imagination, asking them to imagine things as they are not.
You’ll get no argument from me against this kind of active, engaged learning. Because passive learning is boring as hell. But this is me, who for as long as I can remember loved the fun of thinking. In elementary school math class, the only problems I liked were word problems, because they required a little bit of thinking to figure out. Nearly everyone else hated them.
Neither Giroux nor hooks advocate for education for freedom because it is more fun. Education for freedom serves a purpose. Its purpose is to set students free. But the definition of freedom is always contentious, and Giroux and hooks each have their own definition.
For Giroux, freedom is defined politically. Students are repressed by corporate, capitalist forces that want education to produce conformist workers who don’t question the system. These same forces produce educational theories and management practices that curtail teacher freedom in the interest of these ends. Freedom is the freedom to be critical, to see the forces of oppression at work in the system, to work to dismantle them, and to create a system that is more free and fair.
It is a fairly standard progressive analysis, and Giroux presents it as if it were established fact that everyone agrees with. The fact is, higher education is a de facto gateway to better jobs and better wages, and many students pursue higher education for the purpose of securing a better job and better wages. Many students’ financial situations are an obstacle to their freedom, and many will willingly trade away some freedom to participate in the corporate, capitalist system and secure a better financial position. Corporate capitalism may look like a great evil to an academic with the free time and resources to travel the world enjoying fine meals and wine with other academics he admires, but it may look like a great good to someone trying to escape the cycle of poverty.
hooks offers a different vision of freedom. For her, freedom is holistic, it encompasses mind, body, and soul, and its goal is self-actualization. She has her politics, like everyone else, but her definition of freedom goes beyond merely focusing on people material situation. Our society, our material situation will always be in need of improvement. This is the human condition. Living a good life is not determined by one’s material situation. There are some basic needs that need to be met, but our higher needs, finding meaning and purpose, finding delight and wonder, depend more on internal conditions than external conditions.
Freedom is a central concern in yoga and in Indian religion in general. Yoga is a spiritual discipline whose goal is freedom. Freedom is the ultimate aim of the spiritual life. It is achieved through spiritual knowledge, and it brings with it the end of suffering. Spiritual ignorance is the cause of selfish desire, which is the cause of suffering. Selfish desire leads to selfish action which sullies the soul and pushes freedom farther away. The discipline of yoga purifies the mind and makes it fit to achieve spiritual wisdom.
I found it very surprising, and very refreshing, to hear hooks talk about teaching as a “vocation that is sacred,” about the “spiritual growth of our students,” and about a “union of mind, body, and spirit.” The spirit seems to be a taboo subject in academic discourse, even though it is a critical part of living a good life for many people. I personally find it difficult to talk about spirit in my academic context, even though the subject I teach is fundamentally concerned with the sprit and the spirit is central to my own understanding, study, and practice of yoga.
Part of our discomfort with talking about the spirit comes from the large-scale turning away from the confines of mainstream Christian religion in the 1960s, part of it comes from worries about offending individuals or groups in a religiously plural context, and part of it comes for the fact that many of the people we hear talking about the spirit come off as right-wing nut jobs or airheaded new age platitudinarians. But I think our reticence to discuss the spiritual does a disservice to our students. While we certainly don’t want to try to push some spiritual agenda, why should we shy away from asking our students to engage with spiritual ideas just as we would ideas from any other subject matter?
One of the ideas I find most provocative in yoga and in Indian religion is its challenge to individualism. Individualism, in Indian religion, is a product of spiritual ignorance and a hindrance to spiritual growth. With spiritual wisdom comes the insight that the individual self is a construct of the mind, that the true self (the spirit) is identical to the spirit in every other being, and that selfish action is ultimately self-defeating. I find this idea so provocative and radical because individualism is so central to capitalism and consumerism, but to the classical liberal idea of individual as rights-bearing entities, and to critical theories that criticize the power structures in culture and society for their trampling on the rights of individuals. Some might dismiss this as a fundamentally conservative idea, but why shouldn’t we look critically at the assumptions underlying our theories, both liberal and conservative?
I am grateful to have encountered bell hooks’ work in this module, and I hope that I can become more comfortable addressing spiritual ideas in an academic context, and ultimately, I hope that I can center the meaning and purpose of my own teaching practice on the mutual, holistic spiritual growth and self-actualization of my students and myself.
