Dr. Arie Kizel, Israel and Dr. R. Michael Fisher, Canada
In this recent dialogue (FearTalk #26), these two educators dive deep into the organizational ideology of "pedagogy of fear" in socialization and schooling, and they offer a way out of this "prison" via critical open thinking as philosophical inquiry for/with children.
This 1960 classic free-school alternative book is about child-rearing and education. The organization begun by A. S. Neill and others in the UK was a "school" by definition and that was to serve a parent community who wanted their children to have an entirely different experience of learning in and as part of a living residential community. They remained a "school" in order to get some funding from the government, and to follow the curriculum requirements to some degree re: the State, because they still wanted to hire teachers and be able to mentor the students/learners to achieve what they wanted to achieve if they wanted to go on to access the channels of higher education, which some children chose, while many did not. There was no requirement ever that the child would be forced to attend lessons. It was their choice how they wanted to spend the day as long as they did not hurt themselves or others or damage the community's property. In that sense, Neill believed the only radical way to fully commit to building a new society not based on fear, was to build a community not based on fear.
Some of you may know that I have long studied the alternative education movements since my late 20s. I also was a public school teacher for two years. All these experiences have led me to now working in a burgeoning new school, Nanaimo Innovation Academy (NIA), which started as a daycare (for 4 years) and is now a kindergarten, with a proposed grade 1-2 class starting this next fall in 2022 if all permits are granted and the parents show up to support our non-profit private school operation. My role thus far is "policy consultant", albeit, I have also just completed a five months artist residency at NIA where I worked from an artist's point of view, which included working with all members of the community in some way--I was interested in the whole organization and larger community and "everything was my medium" for artistic expression and exchange with all involved. I'm doing upcoming artist talks and websites on this project which I shall let you know about later. I had some lovely and interesting and not so pleasant interactions at times with my "medium" as one would expect in any community. But one of the things in the back of my mind during the residency was "How do we all deal with fear?"
NIA founder and Director, Keely Freeman has been gracious in allowing me to slowly integrate and find my way into this new school community. She is someone very practical and in that sense not overly radical in her approach to a daycare/school culture, yet, at a recent staff meeting she held up this book by A. S. Neill, and said, with pride that this means a lot to her to be part of a legacy of trying to bring 'alternative education' to children and families in this world. I was touched. So, I'm starting to look at what might we at NIA glean from the "Summerhill" experiment in child-raising and education today. Note, several Summerhill-type schools have grown from the original movement started in the UK. A. S. Neill is no longer with us but has left a powerful message of possibilities and this book he wrote about his experiment in 1920s- onward is worth reading. I'm just allowing myself to dip into it and see what I think about it. As my first reading about Summerhill was back in the early 1980s and then late 1990s a bit but I didn't go further. I was aware of several educators as critics publishing about Summerhill and giving it a bad name in those years. I have not made up my own mind about that aspect of how good it was or bad it was empirically. That's really hard to assess.
As I turn to begin a brief fearanalysis of Neill's philosophy, I realize neither Neill and the faculty and parents may not have written and published or talked much about a "fearless school" that was their ideal for themselves, and as a model for the rest of society. I do sense they wanted to show society that it was possible and their school was an experimental case study. So, it was not perfect and they worked out a lot of the kinks in their system and culture by learning as they went. That is admirable. IF I was starting a school today, I would want to do the same. However, it is near impossible to find enough parents in the world where I live to be truly interested in entering into such a community and school experiment. People are way more freaked out these days, and thus more conformist, than the 1960s-70s, and maybe also compared to the 1920s when A. S. Neill began the Summerhill experiment.
I find parents and teachers and just about all leaders very much caught in the "culture of fear" overall. This is a global cultural phenomenon I have written about extensively for over 3 decades. Education if it is to remain in its integrity (and much in line with a free-schooling conception as A. S. Neill argued for), is going to have to confront its relationship (i.e., its collusion with) the growing insidious culture of fear.
Fearanalysis has many possible directions of starting to assess anyone or anything. For simplicity, I scanned the back chapters of the classic book by Neill (above), and saw on page after page of how he responds to many of the questions that came to him as founder of Summerhill, he often was talking in his answers to the issue of fear. In fact, I believe he was doing that because most of the questions he received, often had fear at their base of motivation for being asked. For example, the questions about the freedom of children and youth in the Summerhill community to have access to sex. Neill, answers, they are as an organization and school not telling kids not to have sex, not to masturbate. All humans have a right to enjoy the sexuality of their bodies alone or with others, and Neill is not at all interested in creating taboos and rules about that. He wanted to raise children who were not afraid of adults and/or the laws and authority of adultworld in general. What was truly educative for him, and I agree, is when educative experience transcends the dependency socialization of young people based on fear-induction-learning (or "shock learning" via punishment regimines). "Control" is such a tricky concept and Neill wanted as least amount of it as possible in regard to what children feel, think and do. Adults/parents/caregivers can be children's worst enemy, he would likely have argued, and I hear that as I scan the pages of his book and the answers to his questions. I and some others have called this adult-child relationship one that is riddled with adultism, oppression in one of its base forms, from the start--it is part of a culture of fear dynamic. I won't go into more details in this blogpost but if you are interested in more quotes and details from the book and want more discussion, I'll do so. Just post comments below, or sign-up or sign-in on the FM ning and write your own blogposts.
March For Our Lives, centered in Washington, DC. leading Millenials' speakers, from 11 years old to teens of all kinds, shown giving voice, in numbers of hundreds of thousands, to their anger and frustration, their fears and hopes of the future ... and mostly showing they will no longer wait for adults to solve the problem of violence, trauma and social deterioration because politicians, community leaders, and adults generally have not done enough to make their lives safe and secure. The surface symptom of their battle centers on gun violence (especially in America). To see this movement and their rebellion in words, "without fear" and "enough is enough" and "never again" go to the four hour media coverage https://www.democracynow.org/live/watch_democracy_now_march_for_our
To understand one core dimension of this problem that these children and youth are standing up for, is to understand that when the so-called "safe," "wealthy" and "privileged" youth are attacked by a mass murderer in one of their schools (e.g., Parkland, in Florida Feb. 14, 2018), then enough is enough and masses of organized protest happens. And it was a revolution and movement very evident, very rooted, very generationally based. Youth will not lay down any longer, so it appears, and watch their future deteriorate before their very eyes by threats of being killed in schools or traveling to school--by terror(ism) and the resultant fear from victimization and collective trauma, etc. They are speaking out they do not want their schools and communities to end up as militarized "war zones" [1] where just about anyone has a gun hidden away in wait for the next battle. This is not the fearful kind of lives these traumatized youth want to live.
"The truth about youth... is that they have learned and been conditioned to trust humans less and less since the Boomer's generation of peace and love. Youth now face the great challenge of whether to continue down that road of fear and mistrust or turn their generations' perspective around. Without them on the path of fearlessness, we can be certain the result will be deadly."
The protest of these youth of course has great historical ripples recently as I have documented the "No Fear Movement" in America (especially) since the early 1990s. I see this March for Our Lives as the culminating breakthrough and much needed, of what started as a commercialized "No Fear!" slogandia in 1990 in California when a few young entrepreneurs began to put No Fear! on just about everykind of clothing thinkable that youth were buying. This was a time of wars and especially the HIV contagion which shook so many people because of deaths from a disease mostly sexually transmitted and traveling through youth-based communities without anyone knowing the cause or cure at the time.
The word "Fearless" was then a follow-up as the next branding term for many commercial products and advertising, all of which are meant to capture what the young people were wanting in their lives, as they were getting sick and tired of living in so much fear and terror. With more acts of mass murders through guns and terrorism attacks, etc. the world was just becoming more and more unsafe and it became harder to trust just about anyone.
I have to say, I so appreciate the youth movement today of children and teens, and seeing such masses united on the streets, are no doubt a revolutionary change ... trailing and necessarily built on the young adult movements of Occupy in 2011, of Black Lives Matter, of the women's and #Me Too movements --all led at a time of total frustration by so many people, especially post-9/11 and especially with elitism and facism growing rampantly, and especially the levels of violence everywhere. The trauma and fear has led too many young people to be paranoid. If you listen to their talks at the March for Our Lives, you'll hear this comment about fear, and how they want to live "without fear" in their daily lives, but I was pleased they didn't just throw around the arrogant slogans of the past, of "No Fear!" or "Fearless" ... no, they were more talking about how paranoia was now their norm, and their ghost, living with it everyday, they have simply seen too much too close and they are hurting and grieving and ducking bullets. They do not believe most forms of adult management of fear (or guns) is doing much good at all. They don't want to live in a war zone in their communities and schools anymore. Of course, the marginalized youth and adults in America have been saying that for decades, and so have the wartorn countries of the world, and refugees. But now it seems, the tide has come in, and the scales of intolerance to living in paranoia have flipped. And it is damn well time! Good for all youth for being intolerant of an insane normalization of fear/paranoia [2] that has occurred in the world in the last century especially.
But youth need assistance from adult allies to be successful in their goals to overcome the terrorism, the toxic fearism-t, and paranoia in societies. I invite adults and youth on this FM blog and elsewhere to join dialogues and actions to help the cause. There is so much good knowledge and wisdom available throughout the world's fearlessness teachings and non-violence movements to provide wise guidance for youth and everyone. It is obvious the March for Our Lives has tapped into some of those experiences of nonviolent protest but there is much more too. There is quality information on the faults of oppressive adultism and how it makes youth's concerns secondary. It is there. I have worked with some others, to make this available. Let me know how I can help (r. michaelfisher52 [at]gmail [dot] com).
p.s. it seems my prediction in the late 1980s is coming true--it will be fear that unites the most people for the common good, not love ... love comes into it but fear is the major driver for liberation--and, fearlessness is the meta-motivation more invisible in joining the natural telos of Fear towards Love ....
Notes:
1. Eventually, more or less, the truth is going to come out in these youth protests, and actions. The truth is, that America is a warring country, always has been, and wants to dominate the world. You do that by "guns" of one kind or another. So, within the domestic sphere of society, school culture, urban realities, guess what... guns are everywhere because people for the most part are so afraid and so think war is the answer. America can truly change if youth rebel and don't stop... on this way to making countries everywhere give up on the war strategy as primary in fear management (i.e., safety and security management)... of course, we need lots of other strategies to handle the conflicts going on, which are real, and in which some take up arms to try to win.
2. This is like an "addiction to fear" which is arguably characteristic of what many critics call the "culture of fear" phenomena.
