Unfit to Be a Slave - Sense Publishers

ANTI-COLONIAL EDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVES FOR TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE

A Guide to Adult Education for Liberation David Greene Out of over 40 years of experience in adult or worker education, David Greene brings us tools to develop consciousness and leadership for social change. Based on the power of our huge working class to understand this economic system and to organize, this book aims to empower educators, students and other workers with science applied to solving the serious social problems we face today.

Unfit to Be a Slave

Unfit to Be a Slave

ANTI-COLONIAL EDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVES FOR TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE

As a collective and organized force we can transform our communities, our countries and our world. Mythologies that tell people, ‘Things don’t change,’ ‘We can’t do anything,’ or ‘It has always been this way,’ prevent poor and working class populations from taking necessary action on behalf of their own lives and families. Unfit to Be a Slave is meant to be a guide to education for social change.

ISBN 978-94-6209-933-3

David Greene

ACEP 3

A Guide to Adult Education for Liberation David Greene

We are confronted with the issues of low-wage, part-time and temporary jobs, inadequate housing, health care, and transportation, inequality and injustice, at the same time as the greatest concentration of wealth in human history. The disparity of wealth and control has never been greater. The only way out of this deepening crisis is through education. To change this we need understanding that is based on the clearest reflection of the real world. Unfit to Be a Slave employs the tools of theory and informed practice, to guide us to create spaces to share experience, study history’s lessons and develop consciousness.

SensePublishers

Unfit to Be a Slave

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Unfit to Be a Slave

ANTI-COLONIAL EDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVES FOR TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE Volume 3 Executive Series Editor Pierre Wilbert Orelus, New Mexico State University, USA [email protected] Executive Board Members Antonia Darder, LMU, School of Education, LA, USA [email protected] Peter McLaren, UCLA, CA, USA [email protected] Peter Mayo, University of Malta, Malta [email protected] Curry Malott, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, West Chester, PA, USA [email protected] Venus Evans-Winter, Illinois State University, USA [email protected] George Sefa Dei, University of Toronto, Canada [email protected] Pepi Leistyna, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA [email protected] Binaya Subedi, Ohio State University, OH, USA [email protected] Scope Informed by an anti-colonial spirit of resistance to injustices, this book series examines the ways and the degree to which the legacy of colonialism continues to influence the content of school curriculum, shape teachers’ teaching practices, and impact the outcome of the academic success of students, including students of color. Further, books published in this series illuminate the manner in which the legacy of colonialism remains one of the root causes of educational and socio-economic inequalities. This series also analyzes the ways and the extent to which such legacy has been responsible for many forms of classism that are race- and language-based. By so doing, this series illuminates the manner in which race intersects with class and language affecting the psychological, educational, cultural, and socio-economic conditions of historically and racially disenfranchised communities. All in all, this series highlights the ways and the degree to which the legacy of colonialism along with race-, language-, class- and gender-based discrimination continue to affect the existence of people, particularly people of color.

Unfit to Be a Slave A Guide to Adult Education for Liberation

David Greene

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6209-933-3 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6209-934-0 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6209-935-7 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands https://www.sensepublishers.com/

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All Rights Reserved © 2015 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

DEDICATION

To the memory of Calvin Miles, born in 1942 in Gaston, North Carolina.

Calvin Miles was a tireless advocate for adult student voice and organizing and an important inspiration for this book and the promotion of a national campaign to end illiteracy of all kinds in the United States. As an African American boy, Calvin Miles worked as a sharecropper with his family, but had little time for formal schooling. As a young man, in the 1960s, he moved to New York City to seek a better life, but he did not learn to read and write until 1981, at the age of 39. I had the privilege of working closely with Calvin for over fifteen years. Together we tried to raise important issues of recognizing and respecting adult experience. Calvin often reflected that, “Adult students are often treated as children and are not recognized for the wealth of knowledge, perspective and experience that they bring to education.” Our advocacy work was not just aimed at ensuring everyone’s right to learn to read, but at the broadest participation in and democratization of society. In November and December of 2008, Calvin and I were invited to visit Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico to look at literacy campaigns, adult education, and popular education programs (civic literacy programs). We saw examples of how literacy campaigns were symbolically and politically fundamental to social transformation. We returned to the United States more determined to promote this kind of a literacy campaign and social change here at home. Unfortunately, less than a month after our return, Calvin suffered a massive heart attack, went into a coma and died in January 2009. His example, purpose and militancy for literacy and social justice inspire me to move forward. I hope his example will rouse us out of our seats and into action.

Calvin Miles and David Greene at the National Museum of the Literacy Campaign in Havana, Cuba; plaque to the right.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Antonia Darder

xi

Acknowledgements

xv

Chapter 1: Learning for Life: Adult Education as Empowerment

1

My Story Popular Education There Are No Neutrals Here Practice and Theory A Fresh Look Preparation for the Job Market is Not Enough! Listening and Relevancy Limitations and Possibilities of the Existing System An Auto Strike in West Virginia A Fair Elections Committee The Haitian Revolution A Shout Out! Join the Field of Worker-Education! Dialogue Questions for Teachers and Students Questions for Chapter One

2 3 4 6 7 9 11 11 12 14 14 15 16 16

Chapter 2: The Field of Adult or Worker Education

19

Millions of Adult Students Types of Literacy Students and Potential Students Literacy Programs Bake Sale to Support Victims of Hurricane Katrina A Wealth of Experience Teachers Validating the Experience of Adult Education Students Teachers and Organizing Stability and Voice Worker or Adult Education Needs to be Redefined The Status of Adult Education Today Questions for Chapter Two

21 22 23 27 29 30 32 33 34 36 37 38 40

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Chapter 3: Gatekeepers and Social Control

43

What Do Adult Students Find When They Seek Out Classes? Two Roads: Education for Liberation or Domestication? Domesticating Missionaries and Professionals of the State The Professional Gatekeeper The More GEDs the Better, Right? Gatekeeper Myths The Ideology of Gatekeeping Questions for Chapter Three

45 45 49 51 52 53 54 56

Chapter 4: Political Literacy

59

Taking the Blinders Off Popular Education for Students and Teachers Teacher and Student Equality What Do We Lose When Students Are Denied Voice? Making Noise! Workers’ Voices Are Missing Unspoken and Unheard Voices A Mighty River of People Winning or Losing Student Voices — A Force to be Reckoned With Who Benefits from this Silence? Suggestions for a Critical Practice of Adult Education “Listening Good” Recognizing Student Knowledge Dialogue about Adult Education From Dialogue to Action Student Committees Class Content and Lesson Plans Utilizing Public Documents and other Public Resources Little Steps Lesson Topics for Adult Education Teachers Voices Too, Must be Organized Voices for Critical Thinking and Popular Education Questions for Chapter Four

59 60 60 61 62 63 64 68 70 70 71 71 72 72 72 73 74 74 75 75 76 76 77

Chapter 5: The Political Economy and Adult Education

79

Political Economy — A Tool for Liberation Surplus Value Accumulation of Wealth Polarization of Society Polarization in the United States The Base and the Superstructure of this Economic System

81 82 83 84 85 87

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A Class Analysis of Adult or Worker Education The UPS Story Why a Class Analysis is Critical Today! Understanding the Economy is Essential to Changing it! A Broad Look at the Economy Whom Do We Bail Out First? Health Insurance Profiteers Pharmaceutical Bandits The Offensive Military A Very Profitable Prison System Stock Market Recovery Financial and Economic Literacy Examples of Lesson Content Looking at Garment Industry Wages Around the World Questions for Chapter Five

88 89 90 94 94 94 95 95 96 96 97 98 99 99 100

Chapter 6: Tools for Social Change Consciousness and Social Transformation

103

Tools of Theory Tools of Popular Education Practice: Political or Civic Literacy Popular Education is Not Arranging Chairs in a Circle Curriculum and Community Participatory Research Questions for Chapter Six

105 116 118 119 122 126

Chapter 7: Spaces and Schools for Education for Liberation

127

From Robinson’s Cave to Freedom Schools The Coal Miners of South Wales Citizenship Schools and the Highlander Folk School Labor Colleges International Literacy Campaigns Venezuela Cuba Nicaragua Zimbabwe Other Literacy Campaigns International Action The National Right to Literacy Campaign The New York Bill of Rights for Adult Education The Freedom School in Licking County How the School Started

127 127 129 131 132 132 133 135 136 136 137 138 138 139 140 ix

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Education: Inside or Outside Institutions? Questions for Chapter Seven

141 142

Chapter 8: Conclusion

145

Stand Up For Your Rights Start a Freedom School Where You Are! A Recruitment Call for Worker Education and Literacy

146 147 148

References

151

Index

153

x

ANTONIA DARDER

FOREWORD Adult Education as Revolutionary Praxis

To acquire literacy is more than to psychologically and mechanically dominate reading and writing techniques. It is to dominate those techniques in terms of consciousness; to understand what one reads and to write what one understands: it is to communicate graphically. Acquiring literacy does not involve memorizing sentences, words or syllables — lifeless objects unconnected to an existential universe — but rather an attitude of creation and re-creation, a self-transformation producing a stance of intervention in one’s [world]. —Paulo Freire (1973) Education for Critical Consciousness True to Paulo Freire’s recognition of literacy as a question of consciousness, Unfit to Be a Slave signals a revolutionary vision of adult education. It encompasses unapologetically a critical view of literacy grounded upon Paulo Freire’s axiom of literacy as a political process of reading the word and the world. Accordingly, it expresses an unwavering faith in the capacity of people to experience and make meaning of their world. It is these values that most inform David Greene’s praxis as an adult educator, as well as his ideas of education for liberation. At the very core of the thesis that fortifies this book lies a profound experiential understanding of literacy as a means by which human beings come to reflect and express their understanding of their lives and, through this process, discover the power within themselves and each other to rewrite the world. Central to Greene’s critical pedagogy of literacy, honed over four decades of work in communities, is a process “of taking history into our own hands, since this entails ‘rewriting’ of our society” (Freire and Macedo, 1986). The personal stories and pedagogical lessons introduced in this volume speak to a deeply political view of language and its cultural relationship to the world. It is a view of literacy that is fundamentally rooted in the Freirian recognition that language is not a thing to be deposited into adults, but rather a creative force of human expression, born out of our intimate relationship with the world. And, as such, language is inextricably tied to the cultural worldviews and power relations that impact both personal and collective identities, as well as the material conditions that shape human survival. So, just as the bodies of human beings are indelibly marked xi

FOREWORD

by the material conditions in which we exist, so is the manner we read our world and make meaning explicitly tied to how we navigate these conditions. Hence, literacy education in the interest of freedom can never make marginal what adult learners already understand about their world. On the contrary, this must be the site of departure in this intense critical journey toward communicating graphically. LITERACY AS PRODUCTIVE HUMAN LABOR

The new man and the new woman … cannot be created except by participation in productive labor that serves the common good. It is this labor that is the source of knowledge about this new creation, through which it unfolds and to which it refers. —Paulo Freire (1978) Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea Bissau A significant underlying message that echoes loudly throughout this emancipatory missive is an intimate understanding of literacy as liberatory praxis, which can only unfold critically through the on-going communal labor of women and men, involved in the process of reflection, dialogue, and action. Hence, if adult educators are indeed committed to an emancipatory process of literacy, it requires us to approach our work within vulnerable communities with a clear purpose and commitment beyond simply the goal of learning to read and write as a functional activity. Rather the critical spirit of pedagogy here must work with them, in solidarity, to enter unobstructed into rewriting the longstanding inequalities and injustices that persist in their lives and in the larger society. It is only in light of such a humanizing political commitment to life that adult educators working within impoverished communities can genuinely advance with students their fundamental language rights and liberatory potential as subjects of histories. This is to say that adult educators must not only be armed with effective techniques or methods for teaching literacy, but also must be acutely cognizant of the historical, political, and economic conditions that negatively impact the social and political formation of oppressed communities. Inherent to this examination is a political critique of the alienating modes of production of capitalism and the resulting hegemonic processes of banking education, which ultimately reproduce unequal class formations and conditions of estrangement within both schools and most sites of labor. As is so well illustrated by the examples provided in this book, the traditional instrumentalizing process of adult education functions to distance the adult learners and workers not only from their own labor but also from awareness that they too are subjects of histories and creators of their world. It is a hegemonic strategy of the wealthy and powerful, carried out by well-meaning educators; which, wittingly or unwittingly, is meant to shackle the social agency and collective power of critically illiterate and impoverished working populations — populations betrayed by a political and economic system that deems them powerless, exploitable, and disposable. The xii

FOREWORD

outcome is a pedagogically effective gatekeeping function of false generosity, as Freire argued. Such a hegemonic pedagogy ensures an instrumentalized adult education process that effectively serves to protect and perpetuate the deeply racialized and hierarchical class structure of capitalism — a structure that benefits the few, at the expense of the many. In contrast, the liberatory vision for adult education presented in this volume is deeply founded on the belief that education and the process of literacy formation must function for the democratization of society and the evolution of social movements for the making of a truly just world. Moreover, the stories of literacy formation, whether they were generated from emancipatory practices in Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, or the United States, all suggest that adult education must create the pedagogical conditions so that the lived histories and cultural wisdom of the oppressed sits squarely at the center of their educational process. In this way, adult education is enacted as a living praxis, from which the oppressed can not only discover their voice and social agency, but also enter into the collective restoration of their human dignity and political selfdetermination, as not only valuable but also necessary citizens of the world. THE OPPRESSED AS THEIR OWN EXAMPLE

No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption. —Paulo Freire (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed To exist as examples of our own redemption is to understand that who we are and how we have been conditioned to see ourselves is not necessarily a product of our own making. This is to say, that who we are — with respect to our abilities and access to opportunities as both individuals and communities — is fundamentally tied to an intricate system of racialized, gendered, class formations grounded upon a deeply unequal and hierarchical economic structure. Hence, an emancipatory process of adult education and literacy formation requires opportunities to interrogate why certain sectors of the population are rendered economically marginal, politically powerless, and pedagogically abandoned; while a very small sector has access to the lion share of social and economic power and privilege. In essence, as Paulo Freire insisted until his death, to restore a sense of personal and communal dignity among the most oppressed populations requires the political transformation of consciousness — but a transformation that must be rooted in their own lived histories and cultural expression. This entails a revolutionary praxis of adult education that opens the cultural field of pedagogical engagement to an understanding of educational success or failure as inextricably linked to the social and material conditions of communal survival, rather xiii

FOREWORD

than to the intellectual inferiority or cultural deficit of a people, as traditionally presumed. This then must involve the creation of opportunities within the process of literacy formation that support adult education learners and workers to critically interrogate oppressive myths and unexamined historical circumstances, which are directly linked to their educational adversities or deprivations of schooling. Through such a process of critical awareness of literacy formation, learners can break away from false assumptions often internalized about their intellectual inferiority and inabilities to learn. Such a liberatory pedagogical process, guides students to work together, in order to recapture the power of epistemological curiosity nurtured by reflection, the social imagination rooted in dialogue, the conviction anchored in their own voices, the social agency to act upon their lives, and the political solidarity and grace necessary for the transformation of their communities. It is from such a pedagogical process of literacy, as embodied practice — illustratedso powerfully in numerous examples of adult education in this book — that adult education learners and workers develop a critical sense of hope and possibility for themselves and their communities. Moreover, an emancipatory journey of adult education enlivens within students a sense of genuine respect for their own histories and a dynamic understanding of the arduous process of survival they undergo daily, as a consequence of the poverty and political disempowerment that has shaped, controlled and limited their social and political expression as self-determining individuals and cultural citizens of the world. As adult learners who experience a genuine process of empowerment born of their own collective making, they can more genuinely become their own example in the struggle for their redemption. Ultimately, this David Greene speaks to a revolutionary ethos of adult education (and literacy) as a deeply political realm of possibility. His purpose here is not for the development of a functional ability to read and write, so that formerly illiterate adults can better fit into the deceptive and veiled process of working class enslavement and the consuming machine of the capitalist marketplace. Diametrically opposed to such a future, Unfit to Be a Slave unapologetically calls for an adult education for liberation that cultivates and nurtures the intellectual and political formation of truly empowered subjects of history — free human beings who can not only read and write, but who indisputably know the collective force within themselves and can undeniably access the political grace born of community, in order to struggle toward the revitalization of democratic life and a future where poverty and illiteracy become the ills and suffering of a perverse and greedy past. Antonia Darder Loyola Marymount University

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

New knowledge and understanding are created through praxis — the interplay of experience and reflection and summarization. It is always based on past accumulated knowledge. In this way, I believe that we all stand on the shoulders of others; our ideas and conclusions are based on what others have done before. There are so many people who have contributed to my education and who have helped and supported my work on “Unfit to Be a Slave.” I would like to acknowledge many of them in this limited space, but I am sure that I will do some an injustice. My family has been a tremendous support in so many ways. My wife Dr. Janet Greene, has always helped to guide me and take care of me through too many sicknesses. She has read, challenged and enhanced this writing. Our daughter Rachel, our son Josh and his wife Ana have supported, encouraged and sometimes edited parts of this work. A two year-old grandchild, Juliana Juliet, is truly a child without borders, with dual citizenship in Mexico and the United States who gives us all hope for the future. Dr. Antonia Darder, a critical educator and writer has consistently supported, edited and offered constructive critical guidance from the day seven years ago when I first spoke with her about this project. Dr. Jerry Curtis has put my chicken scrawlings into book form and always pushed the work forward, both supporting the points of the book and suggesting positive sharpening of my writing. Many wonderful educators including; Ann Meisenzahl and Gregory Tewksbury have contributed and helped to review early drafts. Ira Yankwitt, Margery Freeman, Cynthia Peters, Helen Lewis, Ira Chaleff, Doris Jane Conway, Doug Gamble, Dwight Davidson, Nina Gregg, Lyn Robertson, Paula Allman and John David have encouraged this work. Phyllis Cunningham and David Hill helped in publishing earlier articles that were the basis for two of my chapters. I am grateful to Sense Publishers for their assistance in the publication of Unfit to Be a Slave. So many leaders and teachers have contributed to my development and this project without knowing they had. These include; Deacon Alvin Jones, Charlie Clayburn, Thomas Tolliver, Helen Powell, Shelva Thompson, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Washington, Anise Floyd, Bill Worthington, Willie Baptist, Beth Gonzalez, Albert Turner, Bill Thompson, Nancy Weeks, Reynaldo Casanova, Ethel Brewster, Lyn Sherman, Shirley Curtis, Oona Chatterjee, and Paula Rojas. Workers from the more distant past who stood for emancipation and education, including John Brown, Eric Williams, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Z. Foster, W.E.B. Dubois and others provoked my thinking and action. Educators of the working class, Paulo Freire and Myles Horton energized my learning.

xv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My mother, Juliet Bella Greene helped to infuse me with a consciousness that workers and their families can intellectually understand and change our world. She and my father Samuel encouraged critical thinking and organizing, while both of them worked to hold the family together and survive. I owe so much to all these people, but they should not be held responsible for the contents of this manuscript. That will fall on me, but I hope that it will be useful.

xvi

CHAPTER 1

LEARNING FOR LIFE: ADULT EDUCATION AS EMPOWERMENT

Ser Cultos Para Ser Libre/ The only way to be free is to be educated1 This book takes its title from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which Douglass recounts his story as an enslaved ten-year-old AfricanAmerican boy being prohibited from learning to read by the master of the plantation. Mr. Auld, the slave-master, insisted, “If you teach him to read . . . it would forever unfit him to be a slave” (emphasis mine). It is this particular incident that allowed Douglass to understand “the white man’s power to enslave the black man,” that is, through the bonds of illiteracy. Today, education is not outlawed. However, we are told that it is not useful or necessary to have education beyond “job training.” Today, we are still enslaved because we are ignorant of our circumstances. In my 40 years as an educator, many people have explained to me what they think would make them free. Mothers on welfare, tenants of rental properties, people with black lung disease and other disabilities caused by their employment, factory workers, young people seeking jobs — all expressed frustration that they needed information about how to solve problems in their lives: What are the rules? What are our rights? How best can we work together for the good of all? How did things get the way they are? The following pages will describe the obstacles to empowerment and ways in which many people have shown me how determined they are to understand the context that renders them powerless over their lives and their future. We have education today, but it is not the right kind of education, and it does not benefit the people who need it most. This book is both a guide to what is wrong and a guide to what we need in order to produce education which is truly liberating. The guiding spirit of this book, in the light of Douglass’ discovery, is that human beings have vast untapped potential. As a collective and organized force, we can transform our communities, our countries, and our world. Although this revolutionary potential has not yet been fully realized, history demonstrates that it can be awakened and mobilized. There are abundant examples of poor and working people who have taken and are taking the power of literacy into their own hands, demonstrating this vital truth. Worker and adult education, literacy campaigns, and popular education efforts hold the keys that can open the door to our transformative potential. 1

CHAPTER 1

Mythologies that tell people “Things don’t change,” “We can’t do anything,” or “It has always been this way” prevent poor and working class populations from taking necessary action on behalf of their own lives. The field of adult education, in fact, has been widely isolated, underfunded, underappreciated, and hugely misunderstood. According to UNESCO, about 774 million adults across the globe lack the minimum literacy skills. One in five adults is not literate and two-thirds of them are women. About 75 million children are not in school and many more attend irregularly or drop out.2 In response, this book seeks to recognize and seize possibilities for popular education, or processes of adult learning connected to empowerment, selfdetermination, and social justice, with the underlying intent to support the potential participation and development of leadership among millions of people in the United States and abroad — people for whom becoming literate has not been an option. Today, we either move to support education that promotes learning for social transformation or hide under a blanket of false objectivity or neutrality by passive acceptance of budget cuts, the elimination of innovative programs, and the perpetuation of adult educational programs that are most acceptable to the powers that be. Counter to this passivity, Unfit to Be a Slave is meant to serve as an active guide in supporting adult education for liberation. Adult education and literacy in this context includes basic reading and writing, but also economic literacy, political and civic literacy, and environmental, health, cultural and scientific literacies. It is this broader view of education that empowers and liberates individuals and communities. MY STORY

I was born in the East New York section of Brooklyn. My father was an electrician and my mother, a teacher. After years of working in the basic industries of coal mining, auto manufacturing and construction, and in community organizing and education in West Virginia and Ohio, I moved back to Brooklyn. In 1987, I began teaching young adults in East Harlem with an orientation toward assisting working class people to gain power over their own lives. I became active in the education and leadership development of teachers and students. Working many different jobs along the way, I saw myself as part of the working class. I understood something about class relations and I knew that I was going to always work for a living, like so many millions of other people. Early on, I also recognized that adult students and teachers were part of that working class, too, and that we were really all in the same boat. I taught adult education with an understanding that students and teachers were equals, despite their different roles and the different forms of knowledge they bring to the classroom. This philosophy and educational principle of popular education have informed my teaching practice and enabled me to work closely and effectively with students and teachers for over 40 years.

2

LEARNING FOR LIFE: ADULT EDUCATION AS EMPOWERMENT

POPULAR EDUCATION

In my work, the act of listening and learning from other educators and students became increasingly important. I found many students and teachers who were inspirational. One amazing man was Calvin Miles, to whom this book is dedicated. As a leader of adult students, he was an important inspiration to me and to so many students and teachers everywhere. We worked together for fifteen years, developing a strong and close relationship. On one occasion, while Calvin and I were facilitating a workshop for student leadership development, we handed out an article on the Venezuelan campaign to wipe out illiteracy. When I asked if any of the sixty students attending the workshop was from Venezuela, a young woman in the back of the room, Ana Maldanado, raised her hand. She and her husband Gabriel had worked in Venezuela’s literacy campaign and spoke about their country’s success in ending illiteracy. One student in the workshop, Sam Santiago, said that he was amazed that a country could actually end illiteracy. Others echoed his amazement. Calvin and I were excited to hear about Venezuela’s campaign as we had been fighting for the same goal here in the United States. Ryan Springer, a young adult student leader and organizer, said, “If they can wipe out illiteracy in Venezuela, why can’t we do the same thing here, in the richest of countries?” His comment reminded me that too many of us, students and teachers alike, do not believe it is possible. It is too easy to have our dreams deferred or crushed by the political obstacles placed in the roadway. We became good friends with Ana and Gabriel and they invited us to come to Venezuela and see what was really going on in their country. So the seeds of a trip were planted. We started organizing it and felt more excited each day, as its reality came closer. Then we added Cuba to our itinerary because of its history of literacy campaigns, its revolutionary past, and our burning curiosity about that country. We made connections with an education center and programs in Cuba. Last, my son Joshua, his wife Ana, and her family from Jalisco in Mexico invited us to visit and look at popular education and literacy programs there, so this became the third leg of our trip. After scraping together donations and kicking in some of our limited resources, we left on November 12, 2009, for Venezuela, then Cuba, and finally Mexico. The trip was wonderful and though we raised many questions along the way, we were both thoroughly excited by the literacy campaigns, popular education, and revolutionary educational possibilities we witnessed. In these countries, adult education and literacy were integrated with the study of history, community issues, and social problems. Classes became forums for adult students to become more involved in the political process and, by so doing, confront and solve real problems that affected their everyday lives. These ideas were not new to us, but their implementation, practice, and potential were stunning. Literacy campaigns in Latin America symbolized the democratization of society and the movement for social justice. A government that supports and implements this kind of literacy demonstrates the fundamental and 3

CHAPTER 1

vital priority for participation of the masses of people in society and the future. The trip, needless to say, rekindled and broadened our dreams for a transformative adult education project in the United States. This book is the product of many years of work in adult education. This work not only includes the trip to Venezuela, Cuba and Mexico, but also the fight for an Adult Education Bill of Rights, the National Right to Literacy Campaign, and a continuous struggle over the years against budget cuts to literacy programs across the United States. The stories of Unfit to Be a Slave are not only mine, but also those of other teachers, adult student leaders, and their communities. The book is written as a call to recruit new and potential teachers of worker and adult education, with the courage to teach that which is kept out of the curricula of mainstream education in this country. It is written to support veteran teachers who are already working in this direction, and to encourage others to make adult education into an effective tool for changing the society in which we live. The intended audience here includes teachers, adult students, and potential students and their communities, and we urge them to take leadership in the struggle for more classes and educational programs that can honestly address the social, political and economic issues of the day — on the road to making literate citizens of the world. The outlook that informs this work is one that sees teachers and adult students as part of a great working class in the United States. A central concern, then, is the need to create opportunities for workers everywhere to develop political consciousness and to move toward democratic action in the transformation of their lives. Throughout Unfit to be a Slave are stories of working people and their families, from enslaved Africans to autoworkers on the factory assembly line. What has this to do with adult education and its students? The perspective I embrace in my work, as I mentioned previously, is that we are all in the same boat; we are all in the working class. This is true whether we are students, parents, or teachers. This is true whether we are paid wages that enslave us to our work or whether we are enslaved without pay. Adult education, at the heart, is worker education and thus, needs to support and grow the consciousness of working class life. THERE ARE NO NEUTRALS HERE

Fundamental to popular education and issues of empowerment is the concept that education is not neutral. Simply put, adult education either serves to preserve the current economic, political, and social relationships of capitalism or it serves to move us toward a more equitable and just society. In an interview, the late historian Howard Zinn, explained: “People can be changed by things that happen to them. How do people change? Sometimes one very vivid experience, coming on top of a semi-consciousness that becomes crystallized by an event. It happened to me at the age of 17, when I was hit by a policeman and knocked unconscious. And I woke up and said ‘My god this is America,’ where, yes there are bad guys and good guys, 4

LEARNING FOR LIFE: ADULT EDUCATION AS EMPOWERMENT

but the government is neutral. And the police are not neutral, the government is not neutral. That was a very radical insight.”3 In his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2002), Zinn again returns to the issue of neutrality and the importance of education, consciousness, and social action, in speaking about his teaching. In essence, his message asserts that it is impossible for a teacher committed to social justice to be neutral in the classroom. As he saw it, the world is “already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that.”4 For Zinn, to be politically passive, when dreadful things are happening in the world, is the same as collaborating or colluding with destruction. So by placing the emphasis on objectivity in schools, wittingly or unwittingly, students are domesticated and ushered into embracing an oppressive notion of neutrality. A powerful example from labor’s past further illustrates the non-neutrality of society and education. In 1931, when coal miners were fighting to organize unions and protect their families, Florence Reece, a coal miner’s wife in Eastern Kentucky, wrote the words to the song “Which Side Are You On?” after coal company thugs had searched her house for her husband. One of the verses reads: They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there. You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair.5 Reece described what happened that night: Sheriff J.H. Blair and his men came to our house in search of Sam — that’s my husband — he was one of the union leaders. I was home alone with our seven children. They ransacked the whole house and then kept watch outside, waiting to shoot Sam down when he came back. But he didn’t come home that night. Afterward I tore a sheet from a calendar on the wall and wrote the words to the labor song, Which Side Are You On? to an old Baptist hymn, Lay the Lily Low. My songs always go to the underdog — to the worker. I’m one of them and I feel like I’ve got to be with them. There’s no such thing as neutral. You have to be on one side or the other. Some people say, I don’t take sides — I’m neutral. There’s no such thing. In your mind you’re on one side or the other. In Harlan County there wasn’t no neutral. If you wasn’t a gun thug, you was a union man. You had to be.6 The same is true for education. Education is not neutral. It either works to reinforce and reproduce the existing social relations of capital or it works toward the liberation of humankind and toward the transformation of society. Thus, as an educator, I have chosen to encourage a critical examination of the world and promote active student and teacher involvement toward changing the educational system, which is in turn tied to changing our society. With this purpose in mind, I have worked to apply a popular education curriculum and pedagogy in the classroom. It is essential to take a fresh look at the emancipatory potential inherent in popular critical education. 5

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Over the years, many teachers have asked for help to encourage student voice, leadership and organization. This book is also in part a response to that need. Much has been written over the past 40 years, since Paulo Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), and in the 80 years since Eduard Lindeman wrote, in 1926: “Adult Education will become an agency of progress if its short term goal of selfimprovement can be made compatible with a long-time experimental but resolute policy of changing the social order.”7 And it has been twice as many years since Karl Marx wrote of the essential role of consciousness in transforming societies. Hence, true to the politics of working class struggle, popular education has become an essential tool for the development of consciousness in students and teachers. PRACTICE AND THEORY

Joseph Dietzgen, an 18th century philosopher, described how the working class was encouraged to do manual or menial labor and not to apply analysis or science to the world around them.8 If one views theory as the summation of experiences that can guide practice, then reflection on experience can lead to more effective action. Too often theory and practice are separated or dichotomized so that we cannot use accumulated experience to teach us the lessons we need most. Adult education and even our universities rarely teach theory and practice together. The advancements of societies have been made through the application of science, but this has rarely been applied to social problems and societal change. Most people summarize experience in their daily lives and work to guide their decisions and actions. The working class, including adult education students and teachers, is disempowered when theory is not applied to addressing social problems and challenging injustice in schools and communities. Sometimes people say that we don’t need theory, it’s “too complicated.” They often resolve to just work on the immediate problems confronting them. This consumer and individualistic society argues for less thinking and more buying. Without understanding how things became the way they are, it is too easy to be misled and manipulated. We should not be afraid of analysis and theory. These can be very important tools in the hands of those who have been oppressed and disenfranchised, and can assist them in asking important questions about the nature of society. What has been the experience of society, historically and internationally? What experience and analysis have students and teachers developed through their own lived histories? Analyzing social problems and their causation is fundamental to taking effective action, if we are to change conditions of inequality. In too many cases, an artificial wall has been erected between intellectual or theoretical understanding and the world. Knowledge is often tucked away in universities, while practical educational activities remain solely in the field and communities. However, workers and their communities are also an essential source of knowledge and analysis. It is partially my intention here to begin chipping away at the constructed walls, which falsely separate theory and practice. The most useful 6

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theory learns from, guides, and enriches practice. The most useful practices, in turn, enrich theory. In the field of worker or adult education, this is essential to an education that is aimed at human liberation. Later chapters will look more closely at the application of theory to the practice of adult education. A FRESH LOOK

In 1986, when my daughter was two years old, we were living in Newark, Ohio. I was working seven 12-hour shifts weekly on a construction job at the Owens Corning fiberglass plant. For the previous 20 years, I had worked in community organizing and adult education projects in Southern West Virginia’s coal fields and already had developed problems walking from osteoarthritis. When I switched jobs in 1986 to one that had health insurance, I was able to afford getting my hips x-rayed and checked out. The osteoarthritis had eroded the cartilage that cushioned my hip joints, which caused me pain and severely limited my movement. With medical coverage, I was finally able to get a right hip replacement and began to stand up straighter and walk more freely. On crutches, I first realized how much I had been missing, by looking down all the time to see where I was walking. For years I had been adapting to a limp, but with that new hip, I could begin to see and visit other worlds. Similarly, in our lives, we are so limited by what we don’t see. I remember Calvin Miles saying how he had adapted to illiteracy and how “learning to read had opened new worlds” to him. In my adult education classes, we read Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass: An American Slave written in the book, Douglass tells the story of his life, first as an enslaved African American and later as an abolitionist fighting to end slavery and inequality. My students came to recognize how after being denied the opportunity to learn to read, Douglass “understood the white man’s power to enslave the black man.”9 It was his tenacity and commitment to the freedom of African Americans through education that made Douglass a leading voice in the fight for human rights in the nineteenth century. As mentioned earlier, this book takes its title from a passage in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which Douglass recounts being a ten-yearold African American slave, prohibited from learning to read by the master of the plantation. Mr. Auld, the slave master, insisted to his wife, that “if you teach him to read . . . it would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Over the years, I have used this excerpt in classes many times to provoke wonderful dialogues among students and much critical reflection. The following excerpt from Douglass’ life makes clear the value of a new perspective in changing our view of the world and what we do. I include it here as an example of adult education materials and discussion that can be useful for the development of consciousness and leadership: My new mistress [tutor] proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at the door — a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings. She had never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to her marriage 7

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she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living. She was by trade a weaver; and by constant application to her business, she had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery. I was utterly astonished at her goodness. I scarcely knew how to behave towards her. She was entirely unlike any other white woman I had ever seen. I could not approach her as I was accustomed to approach other white ladies. My early instruction was all out of place. The crouching servility, usually so acceptable a quality in a slave, did not answer when manifested toward her. Her favor was not gained by it; she seemed to be disturbed by it. She did not deem it impudent or unmannerly for a slave to look her in the face. The meanest slave was put fully at ease in her presence, and none left without feeling better for having seen her. Her face was made of heavenly smiles, and her voice of tranquil music. But, alas! this kind heart had but a short time to remain such. The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon. Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an “ell.”10 A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master — to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty — to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it. Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. 8

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The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both. As one might imagine, with questions for classroom dialogue, it was easy to broaden the educational process beyond just reading and writing to one that included the development of critical consciousness, as students could interrogate issues of knowledge and its use for either social control or liberation. Through such a classroom process, a fresh look evolves in the perspective of students. Similarly, I believe it’s time for us to take a fresh look at adult education and its possibilities. PREPARATION FOR THE JOB MARKET IS NOT ENOUGH!

Over the past years there has been a greater push for the educational system to serve the needs of corporations and employers. In New York City, school chancellor Joel Klein came from Bertelsmann AG and used his corporate background to apply a business model to adult and K-12 schools and classes following his appointment in 2002. In this model, the job market and available employment in low wage work become determining factors of the policies and practices of the education system. Adult education is geared toward preparation for what very limited job opportunities are available. When jobs are scarce, the orientation of adult classes becomes more exclusively about passing the GED or going to college. However, it is important to underline here that none of this is aimed at the development of critical thinking, social consciousness, or leadership for much needed social change. The absence of these critical educational objectives clearly serves the corporations’ immediate needs for efficiency and maximizing profits. As long as we allow our taxes to be used for this kind of education, it will only serve profitability, rather than enabling working class students and their communities to better understand, analyze, and change the conditions of inequalities they face daily. Education for working class students should aim for the maximal development of intellect, understanding, culture, and awareness of the world around us. It should aim for the preparation for leadership and empowerment, not relegate students to low wage menial jobs or their dispensability. Education should engage critical questions: What jobs are available and why? What prospects lie ahead with new technology and what jobs are being replaced with 9

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electronics and global integration of markets? What do we produce and what are the consequences of these dramatic changes upon the majority of the population? Slavery in the United States did not encourage education for liberation of the enslaved. Severe laws were enacted in many states prohibiting slaves from learning to read. The 13th amendment to the Constitution, passed after the Civil War, abolished slavery except as a punishment for crime. So, prisoners could be considered slaves and the growth of prison industries and the extremely low pay for prison labor are testimony to this exception. More broadly, we live within the heart of a capitalist system. While working people today are not the titled property of corporations and banks, they are in fact often forced to sell their labor cheaply, in order to feed their families. Hence, it should be no surprise that Marx described the working class as wage slaves.11 During World War II, the Nazi regime in Germany enslaved millions of workers and their families to produce munitions and other commodities for their efforts at world domination. Concentration camps were established across Europe. At the entrance to the infamous death camp at Auschwitz hung a sign that read “Arbeit Macht Frei.” The English translation is “work makes you free.” More than three million people, mostly Jews, were killed there during World War II.12Work did not make these and millions of other people free. Thinking and questioning were not prisoner skills that were valued by Hitler’s Third Reich. This alone should give pause to today’s efforts to make education and particularly adult education primarily a tool for assimilation, domestication, or social control. Technological development and scientific innovations have provided humankind with many great improvements and possibilities. The introduction of technological advances into the educational system can benefit learning and create opportunities to reach adult students who would not otherwise be reached. However, there is a massive push to convert classroom and community education into distance learning or individualized computer instruction. For many, technology is a fetish, where the belief is that just providing computers will solve all problems, despite the fact that many individuals in the U.S. do not have access to computers or the knowledge necessary to use them. Such moves in the educational system and in worker or adult education serve to isolate students from one another, obstructing collective dialogue or organization. The intellectually stimulating and socially nurturing interactions that adult students can provide to one another in the classroom are often diminished in technology- driven education. The reduced opportunities for interaction work to divide and separate workers. Education aimed at liberation can certainly use technology; however, an effort must be made to give individuals a sense of their collective potential, rather than merely focusing on individual achievement in isolation. The benefits of technology can be severely limited by how it is used. The United States is arguably the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, yet poverty and unemployment are growing. We have been viewed as the lone superpower, but we have high rates of illiteracy and homelessness, as well as inequitable health care and criminal justice systems. Our national security has been secured by 741 military bases in 105 countries, we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and we possess more nuclear weapons than any nation. 10

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The affluent standard of living that has been enjoyed by a small sector of our population has been built on profits reaped from the labor of poorly paid workers around the globe. In the past, a higher standard of living in the U.S.A. has served to create an acquiescent working class, yet this higher standard of living has been eroding. With the current widening gap between the rich and the poor, the working class population with middle level incomes has been carried away by the rising tide of low-wage jobs, layoffs, evictions, and foreclosures. Our political, financial and military leaders have made the United States into the policeman of the world and precipitated a massive financial collapse. While the productive forces and instruments of production (technology and worker skills) have changed many times since the founding of this country, the relations of production (ownership of the tools of production) have not. The injustice and inequalities of American society cry out for a humanizing education and social action in the interest of democratic life. Hence, we are left asking what form should a liberatory pedagogy take, in order to transform our country? LISTENING AND RELEVANCY

Popular education stresses that the first step to enacting an emancipatory education is the act of listening. As such, the process of listening begins where the people are, not where educators want them to be. For educators to be relevant, they must listen in order to understand the knowledge, perspectives, and analysis of the students. This is especially true of workers or adult students who bring with them a wealth of life experience. The task of the popular educator is to support students in mining the gold from their lived experiences, through both the process of questioning and listening. In response to that wealth of experience, a popular educator adds his knowledge and understanding of the world. Together in dialogue, collective knowledge and new ways of thinking and knowing are created. Central to the aims of Unfit to Be a Slave is the strengthening of the role of worker leadership and community organizing. Popular education underlines the importance of the student as a subject in the historical process. In other words, student voices, experiences, knowledge, perspectives, and analysis must play a central role in the educational process. Leadership, organization, and action are essential components of a practice of education for liberation. In line with this approach, I encourage teachers and students to challenge oppressive currents of the mainstream educational system and to organize, in order to change the institutional policies and practices that replicate racism, gender inequality, and other forms of social injustice in their education and communities. LIMITATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES OF THE EXISTING SYSTEM

Many educators make tremendous efforts to plant the seeds of learning and raise important questions, just as farmers sow their seeds for the later harvest. Their stories 11

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of teaching should be shared, for many more are needed for these seeds to germinate, mature, and produce the foundations for social transformation. We cannot expect that within the current economic system mainstream educational forces will call for this change. Individual and collective efforts must be garnered, in order to undermine the dominant ideologies of social control that disable mass action for social justice. In his writings, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian theoretician and revolutionary who was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist government in Italy in 1926, analyzed the economic base of capitalism and the superstructures that sustain the system.13 He saw that these structures, which include schools and universities, the police, courts and penal system, the military, philanthropic foundations, media, government leaders, social services, the church, etc., have evolved to ensure the continued rule of banks and corporations. The constant frustrations that individuals feel in their efforts to improve their lives are the result of the hegemonic control sustained by mainstream structures that support gross inequalities in this country and abroad. In general, both mainstream media and educational curriculum make little effort to teach the experiences of workers fighting back, of resistance and political organizing. We seldom hear about the many organized efforts throughout the past that have served to change the conditions of disenfranchised workers — for example, few know that in the United States alone there have been 1,500 recorded revolts of enslaved workers in addition to other workers organizing for their rights. Such knowledge could potentially illuminate economic and political relationships for transformation. Yet, steps can still be taken and seeds can be planted to nurture critical thinking and inspire action for change. Critical dialogue in the classroom can be introduced and used to unmask contradictions, so that new knowledge can be developed and created. Within existing social relations, the struggle that is waged for better conditions can expose the weaknesses of the present system and the possibilities for its reinvention. The following three stories, describing an autoworkers’ strike, a fair election campaign, and the Haitian Revolution, illustrate important lessons to be gleaned for adult education for political consciousness. AN AUTO STRIKE IN WEST VIRGINIA

This role of society’s structures under capitalism became clearer for me in 1978. I was working on an assembly line at an American Motors automobile stamping plant in South Charleston, West Virginia, which had a contract with the United Auto Workers (UAW). I was an active member of the UAW Local 1933. At the time, as I do now, I believed that all workers need unions and other forms of organization to protect their interests. Going at it alone to get more pay or better working conditions from multinational corporations is a futile battle. As John L. Lewis, a past president of the United Mine Workers of America (1920-1960) asserted, “With organization you have the aid of your fellow man. Without organization, you’re a lone individual, without influence and without recognition of any kind.”14

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In the 1970s, American Motors Corporation (AMC) was unsuccessfuly competing with the Big Three Automakers (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler), as well as facing a growing invasion by foreign car manufacturers. Toyota, Volkswagen (VW), Honda and others were moving into the American market and VW created Volkswagen Manufacturing of America, to produce cars in the States. VW agreed to take over the AMC plant in South Charleston and retool the operation. They made a deal with then- UAW president Leonard Woodcock to keep the UAW labor contract in place, in exchange for a guarantee of labor peace (no strikes, work stoppages or disruption of production). The 400 members of UAW Local 1933 were not consulted or even informed about the agreement. Conditions, especially safety conditions at the plant, were deteriorating. Many injuries resulted from a speed up of the assembly lines that cut and shaped the ever thinner and sharper metal for car parts. I was head of the local union’s education committee and helped to put together a stitch list, which showed that workers had an average of 33 surgical stitches each from injuries at the plant. The local chapter of the UAW, under the leadership of Glen Hawkins, tried to get support from the international UAW for improvements and a possible strike over safety. We did not know then about the prenuptial agreement that had been signed between VW and Leonard Woodcock. Needless to say, we received no support from the International. A “wild-cat” strike or walkout was called when several workers were seriously injured on the job. Production at the plant was brought to a standstill. An informational picket line worked to keep the plant closed until safety issues were addressed. A new VW assembly plant in New Stanton, Pennsylvania with 2500 workers was shut down briefly, in support of the South Charleston strike. After one week, some of the workers at the South Charleston plant, escorted by the police, snuck back to work. The strike ended in defeat and seventeen of the 400 striking workers were fired. The rest went back to work. Eventually, the union negotiated and got thirteen of those fired seventeen workers back on the job. Four of us were not rehired. I filed a grievance claiming wrongful discharge, followed by a lawsuit against the company and the union. I was told that I had to exhaust the contractual grievance procedure first. To this day, 36 years later, I have not heard back from the UAW about my grievance. When I did file a lawsuit against the company and the union, the judge dismissed the case, claiming it was not filed in a timely fashion. To add insult to injury, the company successfully petitioned the court to have me pay for their inconvenience and time. So, unemployed and with little income, the court informed me that I had to pay court costs of $760. During the strike, the mainstream news coverage of the strike was one-sided. Newspaper articles and television reports criticized the striking workers as interfering with VW’s plans for economic development. Much that was written exaggerated the potential for violence by striking workers and none were interviewed. This experience added to my understanding of the role of social structures (courts, police, media, union contracts, labor leaders, etc.) in support of the basic economic control

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of corporations. Unions, can and have been the most important tool to defend workers interests, but they can also become corrupt and used in support of capitalist interests. It is in our interest as workers to demand that our worker organizations fight for our interests. Adult education classes that teach the history of the working class and of industrial development can help broaden our consciousness and empower us as leaders of our own destinies. A FAIR ELECTIONS COMMITTEE

In 1968, West Virginia’s Mingo County was known for its electoral corruption. In many campaigns for office, the number of dead people on the voter registration rolls and actual voting rosters outnumbered the living residents of coal mining towns. Local politicians could ensure their own election by falsely registering a certain number of dead voters. James Washington, a brave community leader in Mingo County, established the Fair Elections Committee to cleanse the voter registration rolls of dead people. Washington became the president of the community action program, which, as part of the early years of the War on Poverty, had required a majority of low-income residents on its board. Washington was attacked for his efforts to clean up the elections. In the process, however, he built a campaign that exposed the structures that maintained poverty and nearly feudal-type relations in coal-producing counties. Election laws and oversight were eventually changed to create a more transparent system, but the economic relationships remained the same. Over the years, efforts by many working class people around the country (like James Washington) to democratize their communities and to obtain some measure of economic justice have caused a great deal of concern in the board rooms of coal companies and corporate suites, especially with political leaders who were sworn to protect these business interests. As a result, Congress passed the Green Amendment in 1967 to limit the control and number of low-income people on community action program boards. Amidst the limits of community action programs, government interference and powerful energy corporations, Washington found maneuvering room to raise critical questions and take action to expose inequalities. More often than not, struggles to improve conditions and to challenge the powers that be are lost, but within those defeats are also powerful lessons of growing consciousness and working class unity, which can serve as the basis for both adult education and social movement. THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

The history of industrial and social development is almost completely ignored in our educational system; and when it does appear, it has little connection to people’s lives. For example, we rarely hear about the history and lessons of the earth-shaking Haitian Revolution of 1804. In his writings on this momentous revolution of the early 19th century, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes that enslaved workers of Haiti, in 14

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defeating Napoleon’s army, destroyed the mystique of slavery: “Although slavery was created for economic purposes and maintained through the use of violence, it also carried a mystique. The Haitian revolution broke this spell, showing that freedom could be won. Everywhere slaves became more daring and slave owners became more fearful. Slave revolts and conspiracies increased, in part because of Haiti’s example.”15 Similarly, capitalism too, has its mystique. This spell too can be broken and a more humanizing system of life and governance can be created. Often teachers, workers, and students alike do not believe that they can change the conditions of inequality in their lives, but they can. In Unfit to Be a Slave, I look at models for political adult education and what we need today. Examining literacy campaigns, freedom schools, labor colleges and curriculum for the development of consciousness, I seek to show that educators can play a critical role in changing society. For the purposes of this book, I will use the term adult education to refer to all levels and kinds of literacy. Popular education is the form and content of this adult education approach that can help us to understand our world, in order to change it. Today more than ever, popular education or education aimed at political consciousness and social transformation is essential. Unfit to be a Slave is written as an attempt to guide and support popular education for literacy and liberation. Much more needs to be discussed and written, but a politically grounded movement is needed to spur this kind of education forward. Just as in Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, or the U.S., popular education for adults is an important instrument for challenging the staggering social problems we face today. Once students and working class communities are armed with a fuller knowledge of their own history and tools for economic and political analysis, they have the potential to develop the critical consciousness necessary to take history into their collective hands. A SHOUT OUT! JOIN THE FIELD OF WORKER-EDUCATION!

Education for human liberation is based on a great love for people and the nurturing of their fullest potential. This must be based upon dialogue where the knowledge, experience, and analysis of teacher and student are respected. In popular education, student and teacher contradictions can be engaged critically and utilized to better understand the world. Students become teachers and the teachers become students, so that their joint input can become the foundation for the creation of new knowledge and understanding. This demands a mutual recognition and appreciation for cultural and historical baggage that people carry with them. Popular education or critical pedagogy is also linked to the great anger caused by the injustices of society. This river of anger has been a central force in the process of social transformation, historically and around the world. Education for liberation can never be only an individual act; rather, it must be a collective emancipatory process — one that teaches and integrates all our experiences and cultural wisdom as part of the historical process. Paulo Freire, Karl Marx, and many others have argued persuasively that humankind 15

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makes its own history and that for the disenfranchised working class, the purpose of education is not only to understand the world but to change it. Unfit to Be a Slave is a battle cry to teachers, potential teachers, students, and other workers to join this field of work, with the purpose to help create together a more just world. DIALOGUE QUESTIONS FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

Finally, at the end of each chapter, there are questions aimed at (1) stimulating dialogue among students and teachers; (2) generating new questions about the existing socialpolitical- economic relationships and the role of education, particularly adult education and literacy, in the changing of dominant relations; (3) developing individual and group research and thematic projects, including the creation, implementation and evaluation of surveys of an issue or problem. This participatory research can take many forms and is essential to developing and expanding critical and analytical thought and action; (4) initiating teacher discussions and staff development; and (5) expanding to include classroom and community discussions, analysis of different views, interviews, research papers, analyzing government reports and educational projects, and producing materials for informing others. What follows, then, are critical questions used to stimulate dialogue about the narrative of Frederick Douglass and the Haitian Revolution. These dialogue questions also represent practical examples that adult education teachers can use for classroom dialogues, as well as for research questions that will stimulate more critical examination of issues surrounding the specific topics. QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER ONE

1. What does Douglass’ story teach us about the relationship between ignorance and social control? 2. How did the Haitian Revolution affect slavery in the United States? Why is this important, historically and for today? 3. What lessons were learned in Haiti’s fight to end slavery and establish an independent nation? 4. What did the attempt to stop Douglass’ learning to read have to do with the slave master’s efforts to control the slave and what were its results? 5. How does his experience compare to your own, as a consumer, as a worker, as a citizen, as a student of adult education, as an immigrant, as a spouse or partner, as a parent, etc.? 6. Why do you believe this history is omitted from most curricula? 7. What other pieces of history have been omitted from our learning? What history do you know from your lives and countries that would enrich our learning process?

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EDITOR’S NOTE

One of the most powerful tools used to prevent people from uniting to change society is the divide and conquer strategy employed by industry and government. To fuel this division, working class groups are told how different we are from each other. We are all workers, whether we are evicted, foreclosed upon, homeless, low income, literacy students, ‘middle class,’ enslaved, disabled, unemployed or underemployed. Worker or adult education can enlighten our understanding of the same boat that we are in, so that we can organize for a better life.

NOTES 1

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11

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13 14

15

Words by José Marti, the great Cuban revolutionary and poet, in “On Education” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 35–37. Address by Irena Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, Int’l Literacy Day, September 9, 2013. See http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/un/ international-literacy-day, website for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Int’l Literacy Day. An interview with Howard Zinn, “Conversations with History,” Institute of International Studies, U.C. Berkeley, 2001), http://www.youtube.com/ watch?vIMt7cCCKPeM. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer, Songs of Work and Protest (New York: NY, 1973), p. 55. Ibid. Eduard Lindeman, The Meaning of Adult Education (New York: New Republic, 1926). The volume was republished in a new edition in 1989 by The Oklahoma Research Center for Continuing and Professional and Higher Education. See Anton Panneokoek, “The Standpoint and Significance of Joseph Dietzgen’s Philosophical Works,” The Positive Outcome of Philosophy (Chicago: 1928). The book can be found at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/ Autobiography/A1.html. See also www.projetguttenburg.org/files/23/23-h. html. An expression in southern dialect that connotes a distance, similar in meaning to that of the more common expression “he’ll take a mile.” Theories of Surplus Value: a critique of Linguet, The-surplus-value/ ch07.htm”4051319957_ss1217. See http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1863/theories-surplus value/ch07.htm. Cf. Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit (New York: Int’l Publishers, 1935). Trials of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nürenberg 14 November 1945 — 1 October 1946, Volume 1, page 251. Letters from Prison (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 42–55. The John L. Lewis Papers, 1879-1969, published in 1979 by the Microfilming Corporation of America: Sanford, N.C. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Caribbean Connections, “The Haitian Revolution and its Impact on the Americas.” Address to the Third World Plantation Conference, Lafayette, Louisiana (October 27, 1989).

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THE FIELD OF ADULT OR WORKER EDUCATION

Education is not the filling of a pail, but lighting a fire. —William Butler Yeats This chapter reflects on experiences in the field of adult education as an important example of workers’ education. Adult students and teachers are workers, part of the United States’ working class, and the field of adult education is ripe with lessons that can be applied to teaching and learning for social change. From 1987 to 2009, I worked in New York City’s adult education programs, teaching literacy, basic education and GED classes, trying to use the opportunity to develop consciousness and political engagement of working-class students. I didn’t plan to be an adult education teacher. The economy in West Virginia and Ohio where we lived was going from bad to worse and like adult students, teachers and millions of others, we moved to look for work and a place to live. I found a job teaching young adults in East Harlem and a place to live in Brooklyn, New York. So we moved, and while I taught out-of-school youth, my wife Janet obtained a PhD in American History and continued to teach the development of industry and labor in the United States. As an adult educator, I learned from students and teachers and developed my understanding of the theory and practice of adult education. I worked for the huge New York City Department of Education, where few programs use popular education. This is true across the nation. Adult education programs enroll over three million workers each year, but potentially they could register twenty to thirty times this number. The teaching position I took in 1987 was split between Youth Action Program and Young Adult LearningAcademy, both in East Harlem. The two programs had been created and funded through the efforts of young people in the community and teachers who saw the need for constructive relevant education programs for out- ofschool youth in the city. These community advocates saw that young people needed more than just hanging out and wandering the streets. Those working in the programs typify the spirit and commitment of educators that enter the field of adult education. In April of 2006, students and teachers protested threatened cuts to adult education programs in New York City. Nearly 3000 people gathered at Union Square listening and cheering as student leaders spoke on the importance of classes to their future as workers and active members of their communities. Immigrant and native-born men, women and children from across the globe rallied to make city government hear their voices. Their action was a success. Together they managed to stop massive cuts to adult education classes in the city. 19

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Rally of 3000 students and teachers for adult education, held at Union Square, NYC, in April 2006.

Adult education teachers pour their energy, hearts, and intelligence into the job of educating people in nearly every city and county in America. They most often work for low pay and in substandard learning environments. Like other teachers in the field, I have worked in makeshift classrooms where mice, roaches and rats shared the learning space. Teachers sustain back injuries and muscle strains from carrying class sets of books, papers, and other educational materials to classrooms. Programs are severely stressed by mandated standards, without the funds to support teaching these standards. Many teachers work part-time, and are required to travel long distances to classes. They put in many extra and unpaid hours dealing with the distances, difficult schedules and insufficient paid planning time. They often have few materials available for teaching and no place to store them, or work in inadequate, makeshift teaching locations, like the leaky basement where I taught with the complimentary crawling pests. Administrators, educators and programs are so engaged in survival and in meeting governmental requirements and guidelines that they rarely look at the big picture of adult education, its social- economic-political context, or its real possibilities. In too much of the field of literacy and adult education, practitioners do not see the forest for the trees. However, the more broadly we understand things, the more we can see their effects and possibilities, and the more we can see how to change them. That is to say, we have to go to the top of the hill to view the whole forest and to see the way out. Unfortunately, as previously noted, the field of adult education is poorly funded and is dealt with as an unwanted distant family member or second-class citizen. 20

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To take effective action, then, it is essential to take the broadest view. Through such a vision and understanding an exciting and untapped potential for changing society unfolds. The cornerstone of education for liberation is the effort made by students and teachers to critically understand the world and to become politically active, in order to work for educational justice. MILLIONS OF ADULT STUDENTS

In the U.S., the number of people in literacy and adult education classes is approximately 2.1 million, which possibly constitutes 3.4 percent of the actual need. In our inner cities and rural areas, the statistics may be far worse.1 One of my students in New York was Paulette (Maisie) Henry, a strong, independent, hardworking Jamaican woman who makes delicious chocolate fruit cake. Through her life experiences, she has learned to read people, to be world smart, and to be cagey enough to survive. In an interview she explained: “Some people, even programs, say that adult students are lazy. This is not true. We work hard to even get to class and sometimes cannot go. I take care of a 94 year-old woman, which is a more than a full- time job all by itself. I take care of my new granddaughter Ariel, so my daughter can go to college and work — another full-time job for me. I am like a full-time nurse, cook and housecleaner and I try to go to school as much as I can, so I can learn to read and write and improve my math. I have no man around, and frankly I don’t want one. I’m independent because I have to be. If the government thought it was important enough for me to get my education, they could help with child care, elder care, transportation, better scheduled classes and in many other ways but they do not!”2 In the U.S. there is very little support for adult education and literacy programs (ESL, Literacy, Basic Education, GED classes, civic literacy, etc.). An essential lesson of the story of Frederick Douglass’ learning to read as an enslaved African American child is that ignorance and the lack of education are the most powerful means of social control. As Paulette (Maisie) Henry says, “They do not think my education is important.” The stories of people like Calvin Miles and Henry are echoed repeatedly across this country by tens of millions of people who could benefit from such instruction and, more importantly, whose participation in literacy classes, and in turn, society, would enrich and benefit us all. However, much more than simply increased enrollment and attendance in programs is needed to address the deficit in adult or worker education and other social services. As Frank Youngman, writing in the Political Economy of Adult Education, explains, “An outstanding practical task is therefore to develop a transformative pedagogy of adult education.”3 This transformative way of teaching and learning must involve active student participation and leadership in order to change the current system of education and society. What does Maisie Henry’s story mean for us? It is most revealing when we consider Maisie’s situation next to your own conditions of schooling or your access to education, or your experience teaching adult education. 21

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TYPES OF LITERACY

My experience in adult education has taught me that there are many different levels and kinds of illiteracy and that they are interconnected. Unfortunately, literacy has been too narrowly defined. Although it most definitely refers to the tools and abilities to read and write (basic literacy), this instrumental definition serves to disable and limit the manner in which we conceive both the field of literacy and the pedagogy of adult education. Functional literacy is the ability to participate usefully in society, including the ability to comprehend and navigate the social service systems of health care, housing, employment, education and welfare, as well as work and consumer culture. Civic and political literacy includes the skills and knowledge needed to understand social, economic and political issues, analyze government policy and actions, and actively participate through advocacy, leadership and organizing — to take action toward social change at all levels. Health literacy includes an understanding of the health system and alternative medical care, understanding basic anatomy and physiology, diseases and treatment, drugs, insurance, prevention, and nutrition and alternative therapies, and obtaining skills needed to organize to change the whole system of services. I learned how illiterate I was following a cancer diagnosis. In 2009, after moving to central Ohio, I became seriously ill and was diagnosed with both nonHodgkins lymphoma and thyroid cancer. I did not think that I would survive, but with chemotherapy, surgery and radiation I did. The support of friends and health care workers was a powerful force in my recovery. My wife and I found that dealing with the costs of medical care and medications, and the insurance industry, to be as stressful as the cancers. Through this ordeal I survived and came out stronger, but I also became more aware of the importance of health literacy. Most working class people need help in navigating the waters of the health care system. Critical health literacy can begin to address this need and support our organizing for a more humane health care system. Literacy also impacts work, job health and safety, basic labor rights and organizing skills. Environmental literacy is necessary for understanding the problems we face with our air, water, soil, energy, climate and food production, in order to arrive at solutions. Financial and economic literacy must include learning how to manage our personal finances, as well as how this economic system works, so we can take action, both individually and collectively, to affect change in the material conditions that impact our lives. In the 20th century, teaching masses of people to read and write was an important part of changing society to be more equitable and participatory. In Latin America, for example, the literacy campaigns in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela directly tied the content of adult education to many social issues and addressed structural changes in society. Literacy and adult education classes became forums for the discussion of community problems, for understanding the real causes of those problems, and for 22

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beginning to solve them. Education was not just to teach reading and writing, no matter how important that was. The purpose of education in these literacy campaigns was to teach in order to promote active civic participation and social change. These campaigns and many other education initiatives served the revolutionary process in those countries and became symbolic of the actions of people on the path toward liberation. Their successes have served as a source of hope and possibility for millions of people. Many other countries, like Tanzania and Bolivia, have made this broad approach to literacy a national priority, in order to guarantee the most active participation of poor and working people, those who comprise the working class. In the United States, literacy for the working class is not a priority, though we have more wealth and technology than most of the world. Maisie Henry’s story illustrates the interconnectedness of education and social problems of unemployment, housing, health care, poverty, education, etc. To survive, she was forced to navigate her way through bureaucratized and almost incomprehensible systems of health-care and insurance, housing rights, and the law, social services, the criminal justice system, and a briar patch of bills and statements. She needed the advocacy skills that she was forced to develop, just to survive and protect her family. As a consequence of her own struggle, Maisie Henry has sought to understand more about how to organize with others, in order to help increase the availability of resources in her community. There is no question that the organized force of millions of people in the United States like Maisie Henry, who need a broad civic education, could help to change the priorities of the government and its leaders. As critical educator and writer Antonia Darder states, “We need a revitalization of the adult education project in the United States.”4 It’s time to rethink what adult education is and could be in the richest country in the world. STUDENTS AND POTENTIAL STUDENTS

Literacy and adult education programs were created partially to serve the developing needs of industry and finance by preparing the workforce for a changing job market, but because they were also instituted to serve student populations, it is important that we explore who the students are. The demographics of student populations in the limited number of classes around the country vary from region to region. Adult education students come from all over the world and from every part of the United States. They are women, minorities, disabled people, prisoners, immigrants and overwhelmingly working people. They bring years of life and work experience to the classroom, which too often go unrecognized and unvalued. They have experience as parents, community leaders, refugees, union members, students, workers, professionals, and much more. Some students have licenses, diplomas, skills, degrees and professional credentials from other countries, which are generally not recognized in the United States. 23

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During the 21 years of teaching adult education for the New York City Department of Education, I had the pleasure of working with students from seventy countries and from many regions across the U.S. Some student bodies were more homogeneous, like the 26 students from China in my classes at P.S. 124 on Division Street in Manhattan. Other class populations were as diverse as the United Nations and corresponded to the local geographic areas or neighborhoods where the classes took place. The nationalities of adult students reflect the areas of the U.S.A. where programs operate. In Florida, a large majority of students are from South America, Central America and Cuba.5 In California, many adults from Mexico fill the classes, and these percentages vary from Los Angeles to San Francisco. In New York, Dominicans, Asians, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans make up a large portion of students. Generally, the more international the immigration is to an area, the more different countries will be represented in the classes. Overall, 70 percent of adult education students are women. The foreign born population in the U.S. grew to 39.9 million in 2010 from 20 million in 1990.6 The percent of foreign born went from 8 percent in 1990 to 11 percent in 2000 and 12.9 percent in 2010. Immigrants make up a large percentage of adult education students nationally, and with rising immigration the need for classes has increased. Nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Education/National Reporting System-29 2004-5, 70 percent of adult students were Hispanic or Latina, 14 percent were Asian, 8.8 percent were White and 5 percent were Black. In the overall population, 16.3 percent or 50.5 million people were of Hispanic origin, 12.6 percent were African American and 63.7 percent were non-Hispanic White. Of the 50.5 million of Hispanic origin, 31.8 million were Mexican, 4.6 million were Puerto Rican and 1.8 million were Cuban.7 Most of the 90 million potential students of adult education and literacy are in the same economic boat, whether they are immigrants or born here. How many students attend literacy and adult education classes and what is the real need in communities around the country? Close approximations of attendance or enrollment in classes are part of Census data, but estimates of the problem or need vary greatly, based on whom you ask, what definitions of literacy they use, how strongly they need to defend their numbers, and who funds their positions and the research they cite. Numbers and statistical data are important, because they are used to determine priorities, funding and programs, but critical pedagogy encourages us to pose questions and examine such information by asking questions that unveil the conditions that produce the phenomenon. Governments at federal, state and local levels are reluctant to admit the severity of the problem, often defending their present policies and the status quo. One of the strongest methods of social control is to keep disenfranchised populations ignorant, fearful, isolated and hopeless. To expose the severity of a problem is to seriously criticize the inadequacies of the entire economic system. The officials in government 24

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offices who draw high salaries and benefits may not want to jeopardize their positions by criticizing the system from which they so well benefit. Many “experts” in the literacy field as mentioned earlier don’t see the forest for the trees. They covet their individual titles, but refuse to deal with the root of the problem. Like medical specialists, they are rewarded for the narrowness of their focus, yet are fearful of or unable to look at the context and integration of problems, and therefore cannot and will not look beyond to the real causes and real solutions. Taking a stand in opposition to the status quo may lead adult educators to being isolated, severely chastised, or unemployed. Often, representative experts from state and federal departments of education would visit our local adult education or literacy programs and focus only on student retention or how many students became employed. These evaluations took place without regard to the current job market, conditions of life that students were facing, and the limited funding of programs. Standards and requirements are most often applied without flexibility or input from either teachers or students. Unemployment data, for example, underestimate the economic crisis. When a person is employed for one hour a week, or working temporarily, or part-time, she can be listed as employed, making it appear that the overall unemployment problem is smaller. Statistics for those out of work do not include the underemployed or those who need more work but cannot obtain it. Those who have given up looking for work are also excluded from the unemployment statistics. An official release from the U.S. Department of Labor claims that 6.1percent, or 11million workers is the national unemployment rate, while an actual representation of the problem might approximate 20 percent, or 28 million workers.8 Bureaucratic representations of the problem ignore the large numbers of people working part-time, those in prison, and the increased percentages of people working in temporary and low wage jobs. All these statistics serve to minimize the problem. Inaccurate or false data impede those who need work from understanding the systemic nature of the problem and from organizing to call for change. The smaller the perceived magnitude of the problem, the easier it is to focus on blaming the victims of the crisis for their own unemployment. Many on Wall Street are quick to boast (in their own financial interests) that we are recovering from the economic recession, but it doesn’t seem that way to the unemployed and those who have lost their homes. There is clearly a disconnect between the statistics we hear in the media and the lives of working people of modest means. The reported data on the number of individuals and families living in poverty provides us with another example of the numbers game. Official figures on poverty — which rely on outdated poverty levels — exclude millions who would swell the rolls. The 2014 Poverty Guideline considers a family of four with income under $22,800 to be officially poor.9 Similarly, in housing and homeless data, in spite of the record number of foreclosures (in Cleveland, in 2010, one in every 13 homes was boarded up), statistics do not include a huge number of people for which there is no follow-up. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty reports 25

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that approximately 3.5 million people, 1.35 million of them children, are likely to experience homelessness in a given year.10 They point out that many more are out of sight, surviving on the edges of society — off the record, so to speak. The late Reynaldo Casanova, a leader and organizer of the homeless, who led the struggle for housing in Tompkin’s Square Park in NYC in the 90s, stated, “There is a whole industry of people who make good incomes by providing services, such as they are, to the homeless. They do not want to see an end to homelessness and they give the government and the public information to maintain their positions and to maintain homelessness.”11 There are lots of organizations that profit as intermediaries to the poor. Their jobs are not to solve the problem, but to act as go-betweens between the rich and the poor. They provide blankets and food to the homeless, perhaps, but ending homelessness is not part of their job and telling the truth about homelessness, if they knew it, could create conflict and jeopardize the salaries and life-styles they enjoy — thanks to homelessness in America. This said, ending homelessness could potentially eliminate many of the jobs and salaries of gatekeepers to the homeless in this country. Over the past dozen years, Ruby Payne has promoted her Bridges Out of Poverty program in thousands of schools and community agencies around the country, and, more recently, Payne has crossed the ocean to carry her message to Australia: she argues that the poor have a “culture of poverty” which keeps them from attaining the middle class values that would liberate them. She speaks, writes and conducts training sessions for educators and social service workers. The success of her programs belies the prejudices, racism and stereotypes of deficiency they promote. Like a salesperson operating a pyramid sales scheme, she is doing very well financially, but her words do nothing to address the causes of poverty or homelessness. The increasing numbers of people without homes and income only seem to legitimatize her work, while little is done to confront growing inequalities and the subsequent impoverishment created. On the issue of national health care, we had only recently begun to acknowledge that more than 48 million people have no health care coverage and that free medical services have been constantly either on the chopping block or dwindling. Information about an additional 25 million people who are under-insured and have little protection, has more recently been brought to light by Consumer Reports, books like Janet Prince’s Health Care Crisis in America,12 and films like Michael Moore’s Sicko. The total number of people in the U.S. without adequate health insurance surpassed 73 million — 24 percent of the total population. Reform of the health care system broadening coverage was finally passed in 2010 with much difficulty by the United States Congress. Yet far too much power was still left in the hands of insurance companies and the pharmaceutical and health care corporations. As a consequence, there is still a major struggle to obtain quality health care protection for millions of uninsured and underinsured workers and their families. Other countries with fewer resources such as France, Japan, Germany and Sweden, provide far more comprehensive and guaranteed health care, without cost to the individual or family.13 26

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Recent articles in the Columbus Dispatch, The New York Times, and the Dallas Daily News have pointed to the high rates of incarceration in the United States. Over 2.3 million people are in U.S. prisons today, the highest number and rate of imprisonment in the world. Simultaneously, education and literacy programs, once promoted inside the penal system, have all but disappeared. The rate of incarceration in the U.S. is almost five times the rate in China.14 In the state of Georgia, for example, one in 13 adults are entangled in the criminal justice system, either in prison, on probation or parole. According to a 2003 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 75 percent of state prison inmates (more than 1.4 million prisoners) and 69 percent of jail inmates did not complete high school, as compared to only about 18 percent of the general population, 18 or older, who did not complete high school. Yet, barely half of all state prisoners participate in any type of educational programs during their incarceration, a rate that has been steadily decreasing in the last two decades. Like other adult education programs, literacy and diploma equivalency classes in the criminal justice system have also been reduced or eliminated. These cuts have disproportionately affected minorities, women, immigrants and low-wage workers. Given the conditions that working people and their families confront each day, whether dealing with health care, welfare, housing, or the criminal justice system, disenfranchised people in this country require more educational opportunities to develop basic literacy skills and a critical understanding of their world, not less. LITERACY PROGRAMS

Similarly, the national statistics for illiteracy provide a confused picture of the problem. Many people are excluded from the counts because they are hidden or because they have learned to bluff very effectively. One student at a rally for adult education recited her poem: “Bluff is What You do When You Can’t Read and Write:” Life is but a struggle when you can’t read or write, You can’t reach your destination when you can’t read or write, I said, bluff is what you do when you can’t read or write, I said, bluff is what you do when you can’t read or write, The tunnel that you’re in as black as night, But a book in your hand is everlasting light.15 Calvin Miles talked about the many ways that people who can’t read and write learn to pass, so that they won’t be identified as illiterate. Sometimes, this bluffing can help them climb the job ladder undetected. Miles emphasized, “What happens in a conversation where you state that you cannot read and write, how all of a sudden the conversation stops, as if you are considered an imbecile. No one has anything to say to you, because you are considered less than them, not worthy of adult conversation.”16 The same thing that is true for other issues is true for literacy. It is clear that we need accurate statistics to assess problems and gauge solutions, but more often than not, lower numbers are used to minimize the problems. 27

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In New York City, the Mayor’s Office and the Literacy Assistance Center both estimate the number of people who need classes in the city at 1.5 million. This is out of a total of 6.3 million adults in the city. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) conducted by the United States Department of Education in 2003 would suggest that the number is closer to 2.3 million New Yorkers. Furthermore, according to the NAAL report released in 2005, 13 percent of the U.S. population or 30 million people were at a Below Basic Level in Prose literacy and 29 percent or another 63 million people were at a Basic Level in Prose. A basic level here indicates a low level of functional literacy, including the inability to pick out the main points in a newspaper article and reading, writing, and math skills that are not up to the demands of the 21st century workplace. The national statistics for document and quantitative illiteracy are even worse. The NAAL points to the fact that in the U.S.A., anywhere between 90 million and 100 million people need adult education, including basic literacy classes. In looking at economic and political literacy, an even larger population and majority of our working class could be empowered. Using former Mayor Bloomberg’s number, the fact that there were 70,000 available seats in New York City for students in adult education classes meant that less than 5 percent of the identified need was being met in some way. From the U.S. Department of Education numbers, the percentage drops to 3 percent; but neither percentage represents any serious effort to begin to address the problem of illiteracy. When we begin to assess for economic, civic, and other illiteracies, the numbers are even more startling. Above, I pointed to the issues of housing, health, unemployment, poverty, and incarceration, to describe the statistics on social problems and how they are often used to minimize the crisis and to avoid addressing serious concerns, by characterizing people as shirkers, bums, lazy, ignorant, and socially isolated. All of these descriptions are conveniently used to describe immigrants, minorities, and poor Whites, the unemployed, women on welfare, and low-income workers. As Maisie Henry’s situation illustrates, students in adult education classes are directly affected by the issues of housing, health care, poverty, childcare, employment, and imprisonment. Sandro Cordero, a burly, intelligent and intimidating 30 year-old Puerto Rican man with a gentle spirit, passed his GED test in 2008 and we celebrated together at an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. His experience as an inmate in the prison system led him to tell me, “It seems like you’re in a hole and each time you try to do the right thing and climb out, your history and your poverty drags you back down. I’m strong and I want to work, but it seems like I’m a branded convict.” Sandro Cordero, like so many men and women in his position, keeps struggling to make a life for his family, but many doors are closed in his face. His efforts to further his education and improve his family’s standard of living are further compounded by his difficulty finding work in Brooklyn, New York.

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Many students, feeling less valued because they lack academic skills, hesitate to share their lived experience; yet personal histories and active participation are essential to an education for liberation. The narrowness of an education program that solely teaches reading or math skills or GED test preparation can serve to not only limit the personal contributions of adult students but also important opportunities for their critical development and civic participation. When encouraged to share their stories as part of a community of learners, students begin to lose this hesitation and more readily assert themselves. BAKE SALE TO SUPPORT VICTIMS OF HURRICANE KATRINA

In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina created havoc and destruction and our government failed to act responsibly, millions of people throughout the country and the world were eager to do what they could. For students in my GED and ABE (Adult Basic Education) classes, the disaster became both a stimulus for collective action and a multifaceted learning experience. Under the leadership of Sophie Romain and Bianca Armstrong from Trinidad-Tobago, several women from the Caribbean mobilized the class to hold a bake sale. Like so many women all over the world, they had a strong commitment to community and the skills to achieve it. Together, they took charge of the entire project, arranging to hold the sale at the church where the class met, and they masterfully mobilized the materials, the bakers and the sellers. Of the 60 students in their classes, 45 participated actively, along with many members of their families. The Saturday of the sale, a dozen students stayed the entire day, managing everything including the active recruitment of customers off the street. Even though it turned out to be one of the rainiest days of the year, the event raised nearly $600. The enthusiasm generated by the bake sale fueled a rich thematic learning project. Students spent many hours discussing and planning the event and where they should send the money raised. They enriched classroom dialogue and critical thinking by sharing expectations and perspectives based on widely varied experiences. They wrote letters of support to the people of the Gulf Coast, which helped prepare them for the GED essay and writing test. They strengthened their reading comprehension skills by collecting, reading, summarizing, and discussing newspaper articles about the disaster. They conducted research on climate, meteorology, and global warming and on financial investments and explored the roles of federal and state governments, including FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), which was placed in charge of managing the crisis on the ground. Both at the bake sale and in class discussions, students compared and contrasted the New Orleans disaster and its aftermath with their own hurricane experiences in the islands of the Caribbean. Most of them viewed the people in Katrina’s path as their brothers and sisters. This perspective, and the sense of community and collaboration that these students developed within the class, imparted lessons we could learn from and use in New York City and elsewhere.

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A WEALTH OF EXPERIENCE

Nadia Aguida, a GED student from Morocco, woke up many students and raised their consciousness when she described what happened to her small town, Qued Zem, after the main textile factory closed down and moved to China. Students from different parts of the world told of their own experiences with the role played by multinational corporations and the effects of the corporations’ departure upon their communities. These classroom discussions served to place their knowledge at the center and demonstrated its value in collectively understanding a global economy that directly impacts all of our lives. When another student, Antoine Brunvil, co-taught a class on the history and politics of his homeland, Haiti, he engaged his classmates and validated their own life histories. Brunvil’s words challenged and enlivened the discussion of our common histories with his dreams of returning to Haiti to start a school and library in the town of Plaissance. Many students, feeling less valued because they lack academic skills, hesitate to share their lived experience; yet personal histories and active participation are essential to an education for liberation. The narrowness of an education program that solely teaches reading or math skills or GED test preparation can serve to limit not only the personal contributions of adult students but also important opportunities for their critical development and civic participation. On the other hand, when encouraged to share their stories as part of a community of learners, they begin to lose this hesitation and more readily assert themselves. Adult students, potential students, and teachers are workers and they have a wealth of accumulative experience and understanding to offer, in helping us all to make better sense of our world. The elimination of illiteracy is a serious political question. Like the elimination of poverty, homelessness, racism, and inequalities in health care, it challenges the existing societal power relationships. As such, it is a moral, social, and economic question as well, with no ground for neutrality. The existing hegemonic apparatus of capitalism is not invested in displaying social conditions with clear pictures of inequalities. Exposing the manufacturing of inequality endangers the financial and political empires that sustain the enterprise. Hence, for the powerful, the truth of inequality in this country must be obscured, as much as possible. In the game book of capitalist relations, corporations do what they deem necessary to bamboozle, tranquilize, and confuse us, through spin-doctors who deliberately provide false, limited, or distorting pictures. In contrast, one student, Ryan Springer said: “Education should prepare us to organize ourselves, to advocate and to empower us. We have a right to voice our opinions and should be respected for what we have to say.”17 Reading and writing, while essential, do not in and of themselves promote questioning, civic involvement, critical thinking, intellectual development, student or teacher activism, or the transformation of conditions that led to illiteracy and inequalities. Freire asserted that, “Our schools should teach people to live, not 30

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just to read and write.”18 Reading and writing can be used to either make learners submissive or to support their empowerment. The overwhelming mass of the students in adult education and literacy programs are working class parents who feel responsible for the nurturing and teaching of their children. Many scholars attribute the success of children in elementary, middle, and high schools of this country to the educational level of their parents. Ryan Springer, an adult student leader and organizer, argued that, “Education for the children will end if the parents are not educated.” For teachers, students and their communities, administrators, as well as political leaders, it is critical to recognize and value the important roles that adult students play with their own children and thus, one of their most important contributions to society. When students lack English language skills or remain silent out of deference to the teacher, it is easy to believe that they have little to contribute to the classroom discussion and learning. Drawing them out sometimes takes considerable effort and trust, but with sufficient encouragement most students are willing and often eager to share their knowledge and insights with the rest of the class, just as the women from the Caribbean did in the aftermath of Katrina. At such moments, I think of Jude Desinor from South Carolina, who shared some of the harsh realities of the African American experience with students from Pakistan, Jamaica and China; the two women from Sierra Leone who described the almost unimaginably brutal civil war they had escaped; brilliant, sensitive Miguel Rodriguez, who began our education on the history of Mexico and its relationship with the U.S.A. before his visa expired, forcing him to return home without achieving his goal of using his Mexican nursing credentials here in the States. These adult learners are full of living history, culture, perspective, skills, and human understanding to offer society. With knowledge and improved skills they enrich our world and our lives. Carl Poree, a former student leader used to say, “An adult student is like a rare vase that has been left in the dirt. All it takes is some polishing to bring out the beauty and richness underneath.” Recognizing this wealth requires that educators do away with the misconception that they are the deliverers of knowledge and that students are empty vessels waiting to receive their beneficence. Unfortunately, many teachers operate with blinders on. The stereotypes that permeate program curricula and teachers’ attitudes are often an impediment to student voice and participation, hindering the rich possibility of teachers and students joining forces to challenge and change errant policies and practices within the educational system. However, for students and teachers to recognize their equality and interdependence, it is essential that educators recognize the wealth and potential of adult students and of working-class communities. Adult students have made efforts to organize themselves around the country, in many cases with the direct support and involvement of the programs they attend. On a local or state level, there have been independent student organizations like SALU (Students of Adult Literacy United) in New York City, and STAND (Students Taking Action Now w/Determination) in Rhode Island and groups in Palm Beach, 31

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Florida. On a national level several organizations like ProLiteracy and the Coalition for Literacy push for changes in funding and policy, but VALUE (Voice of Adult Learners United to Educate) has been the only national organization led directly by adult students in the United States. Calvin Miles was the national president of that organization from 2003-2008. The task of organizing adult students, potential students and teachers in the field is indeed a challenging one, and the continuing efforts of adult students certainly deserve the greatest support. Over the years, I have worked with and supported student leadership in many ways, learning effective approaches from students’ diverse cultural and national experience. The development of listening skills for students and teachers has always been critically important toward this end, along with basic organizing and advocacy techniques that are key to the collective remaking of a more just world. TEACHERS

Since adult education is not well respected in our society, it holds true that neither are adult education teachers or students valued. The labor and contributions of teachers in adult education and literacy programs are not considered equal to those of doctors, lawyers, or even K-12 teachers. Through my wife’s work as an archivist and historian, I was invited to accompany her to a formal dinner at the Hundred Year Club in New York City. At my table were lawyers, bankers and real estate developers. When we introduced ourselves and I said that I was an adult education teacher, the conversation ended. Like the illiterate student, it was as if I no longer existed or had anything valuable to contribute to the dinner conversation. Like me, most teachers of adult education and literacy classes did not plan their careers in this field. They may have had other positions (in the K-12 system, as college instructors, housewives, retired workers, etc.), but somehow they fell into adult education work. Teacher Brad Baker explains, “I was a musician, and when that area of employment collapsed in the 1980s, I drove a taxi and worked construction for a while. In 1989, I began teaching adult education classes full time in Brooklyn and I loved it. I have been teaching and working with adult students for the past 20 years.” Tamara Clements was a Basic Education teacher who went from majoring in modern languages at NYU to earning an MA in African Studies at UCLA, to working for the American Red Cross to teaching Adult Education in New York City. It is rare that someone in college actually chooses adult education or literacy as their career or life vocation, and this seems a reflection of the low value placed and little respect afforded this area of study. Few universities or colleges offer degrees in adult education, and many do not even consider it a legitimate field of study or career for employment. Those that do offer courses often gear them to adult workforce preparation or abstract them from students’ lives outside the classroom. Professional or staff development for teachers is severely limited and mainly geared to a domesticating educational agenda that 32

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prepares adults exclusively for the job market and the submissiveness required to insure their social control. Phyllis Cunningham in The Political Economy of Adult Education writes, “Human capital formation now drives adult education in the United States. This has turned adult educators into agents of social control. Adult education has been reoriented and reduced to education for work. This movement has been relentless and accompanied by the professionalization of the field. It is a natural outgrowth of a noncritical stance of functionalism, capitalism, and technology by those who once saw education linked to personal and social transformation necessary for democracy. A critical response from the field has occurred with a number of persons challenging the way adult education is being reduced to human resource development.19 In concert, Frank Youngman concludes that, “The majority of adult education programs have a reproductive character and serve to sustain and legitimate the capitalist social order.”20 There is an unfortunate dichotomy between theory and practice in our educational system. This is seen as a clear separation between the academy (universities and colleges), with its official knowledge forms, and the community outside, with its unofficial forms of practical knowledge. Freire describes this as a separation of study and reflection, disconnected from the concreteness of reality. This type of dichotomy serves those in power. In line with the dominant ideology of this society, it devalues the knowledge and experience of adult education students and their marginalized communities and exalts the more ‘abstract’ knowledge of universities and so- called education professionals. Freire describes this as part of the banking method of education, based on the inequality and passive role of the student as an object of this process. From this approach, the student simply passively accepts deposits of knowledge. In contrast, popular education values the student as a critical thinker and as a subject in history, who can understand and change the world. For example, when a program for adults was threatened with major budget cuts, the administrator told me that he didn’t tell his students for fear that they would become demoralized and quit. This underestimation of students’ capacity to engage with the conditions related to their education infantilizes them, obstructing their evolution as critical subjects of history and their democratic participation in the struggle for their educational rights. VALIDATING THE EXPERIENCE OF ADULT EDUCATION STUDENTS

Too often, teachers see their students as incapable of comprehending theory and creating new knowledge. The myth that theory is only the territory of university professors or credentialed educators, and off-limits to working class people, isolates the academy and disarms those communities that must struggle the most for their self-determination. This is certainly true for adult education and literacy, which is barricaded behind an instrumental wall of false assumptions and stereotypical notions 33

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that create untenable divisions between theory and practice. This wall between theory and practice must be torn down, so that both our communities and universities might benefit from these two powerful sources in their efforts to carry out what Freire called “reading the world and the word.” Clearly, change is needed in our society and joining practice and reflection is essential to fighting for this change. The political agency of students and teachers, organizing to demand more from programs and the government, can create cracks in this wall, opening up the field of adult education to greater participation in the struggle for social justice in this country. Teachers in the field of literacy or adult education often exhaust themselves in their efforts to assist adult students. They support many to improve their math and language skills and to achieve their high school diplomas (GEDs), often under very difficult conditions. The potential for adult or worker education, though, is enormous, including the greater participation and leadership of millions who are now excluded from the mainstream political process. Many teachers struggle against the tide of government and corporate pressures by employing alternative and popular education methodologies and content to radicalize their classrooms. It is clear that the economic and political system works, for the most part, against these efforts, rendering us all gatekeepers in the process. Nevertheless, the development of critical consciousness is key to emancipatory educational efforts in the field, if workers are to break the shackles that aim to confine our labor. TEACHERS AND ORGANIZING

Historically, adult education teachers have been predominantly middle-aged Caucasian women, although this is beginning to change. In recent years, teachers have been younger, but the pay and unclear ladder for improvement have discouraged many potential teachers from entering the field. The current economic crisis, however, may bring a more diverse group of new teachers because of limited job opportunities, although simultaneously, many adult education positions are being cut. Teachers are often hired for their academic skills, training, and specializations, though in the past flexible availability was most important to the decision. Most adult education teachers have little experience with community organizing, advocacy, and leadership development; yet, with guidance and experience they can play a powerful and transformative role in shaping and democratizing society. In the midst of the growing economic crisis we face today, teachers need to support students to critically re-examine their world, so that they might find ways to transform the conditions that negatively impact their lives and their communities. The voices of teachers can be supported by their own participation in strong, outspoken organizations and by their relationship with informed and organized students. When teachers and students are organized and engaged through popular education, they can insure that their voices are heard and that the conditions that impact the majority of disenfranchised workers and their children become central to social policy debates at the local, state, and national level. 34

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Organized or unionized teachers can play an essential role in defending the interest of teachers and students that will not be protected by bureaucracies and politicians. This point was driven home to me between 2003 and 2008, when I taught adult education classes in New York City in the basement of Our Lady of Refuge Church in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Working for the New York City Department of Education and as an active member of the United Federation of Teachers, I saw the importance of teachers’ unions in protecting the voices of teachers. This is especially true for activist teachers, whose classroom lessons are often infused with opportunities for reflection about social justice issues and activities that assist students in the development of critical thinking. The New York City Department of Education, with the largest student population in the country, currently spends $25.9 billion a year and is a powerful bureaucratic institution (New York City Department of Education FY2014 Budget Report).21 In recent years, city government leadership in New York City, as in other areas of the country, has moved at an accelerated pace to govern the educational system as if it were a corporation, with the interests of business at the forefront. Only organized teachers and communities can stand up against such a powerful force. Unions, which are still guided by their historical role to defend workers, are in an excellent position to protect and support the independent voices and liberatory pedagogy of teachers, as well as negotiate contracts that protect teacher rights to decent pay, benefits, and tenure. It is in the interests of working people to support strong organizations and to fight to ensure these truly represent their interests. When an autocratic administrator took over as a director in New York City’s Department of Education, he acted to stifle the critical voices of teachers. Discarding the knowledge and experience of hundreds of teachers, who had a wealth of accumulated years in the classroom, he arbitrarily closed programs and threatened to cut classes, including mine. Adult education is different from the education of children in the kindergarten through 12th grade system, in that it demands a flexibility that takes into account the work schedules and life commitments of adult learners, most who are also workers, parents, etc. This administrator ignored the need for this flexibility and, instead, treated both adult students and teachers like children, ignoring their life conditions and constraints. Similar to an earlier example, when I was told that my classes would be closed, I was also told not to inform my students. In spite of this order, I immediately informed students, who were invested in ensuring their own educational opportunities, about the impending cut to classes. With encouragement and support, students decided to organize meetings with school officials, including the administrator and the superintendent. Their objective was to confront the problem and to ensure the continuation of the classes and their own educational process. My voice, along with that of many other teachers, who felt outraged by the director’s actions, moved the Adult Education chapter of our union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), to write a letter of censure, listing many grievances against the administrator and calling for his removal. The whole UFT (160,000 35

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members) backed the letter in 2008. The collective pressure placed by teachers and organized adult students resulted in his transfer out of the adult education system. In New York City, programs providing adult education (Literacy, Basic Education, English as a Second Language and GED) are primarily run by the Department of Education, the City University of New York, the public libraries, and communitybased organizations. The Department of Education serves more than half of the adults in these programs. Unfortunately, too often administrators and superintendents within this department who manage adult education programs have little or no knowledge of the field and make decisions that are disconnected from the real needs of the students they are supposed to be serving. Teachers in adult education, many of whom have 20-30 years of experience teaching adults, also have clear ideas about what professional development and staff training ought to be. Some administrators, responsive to the voices of teachers, do focus on the quality of education; however, all administrators face systemic pressures to make the preparation for a job or passing the GED the only legitimate priorities of their adult education curriculum. This relegates the development of critical thinking, problem-solving, and civic participation to a nowhere zone, or, at best, to an afterthought — “if we have time for it.” Similarly, official requirements and mandatory reporting systems like the National Reporting System (NRS) coerce administrators of adult education programs to both reinforce and perpetuate myopic and deficit perspectives of the field. They can’t see the forest, while focusing on the trees. In response, the New York City Adult Education chapter of the teachers’ union fought simultaneously to improve conditions of adult educators, labor and staff development opportunities, demanding that these be in concert with the needs of both teachers and their students. Subsequently, they have mobilized against punitive teaching assignments, job uncertainty, unsafe working conditions, and excessive paperwork, which all function to effectively limit the energy and time that teachers have to improve classes, be innovative in their classroom, and speak out in their communities. STABILITY AND VOICE

The salaries and treatment of educators are clear indicators of society’s regard for education. Unions throughout history have fought to protect the rights and benefits of workers and to give workers a greater voice in society. At their best, teachers’ unions and organizations have also advocated for education that develops critical thinking, social awareness, and an active democratic participation in society. Although there have been serious weaknesses in the leadership and practices of labor unions, my own experience and that of millions of others across the country underscore the strength of collective voices, compared to the lone individual. In half of the New York City Adult Education programs, teachers are not unionized and they enjoy fewer rights and benefits. Their pay can be less than 50 percent of 36

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unionized teachers’ pay, and therefore they are less likely to persist in the field. In my own experience, the career longevity of an adult education teacher without a union is generally between two and three years, as compared to 10-15 years for a unionized teacher. Non-unionized adult education teachers tend to have poorer health benefits, and many have none. They also experience poorer working conditions and limited protections, have no pension system, and are more easily mistreated by administration. In contrast, the promise of work stability, higher salaries, health benefits, and retirement with pension has served to retain many teachers in the classroom. Over the past 35 years, unionized adult education teachers in New York City have fought for and won quality health insurance, equal pay, and pensions. Even when the union has not excelled as a collective bargaining agent for teachers, it has supported their rights to continue teaching and to speak out. This is an important goal, given that around the United States, most adult education teachers work without unions or only with weak organizations representing their interests. For this reason, Betty Gottfried, leader of the UFT Adult Education chapter, insists, “It is clear to me that adult education teachers need to be organized like other working people to defend their interests. Putting our trust in administrators, bureaucrats or corporations is a guarantee that our wages, benefits and teaching conditions will not be protected. Teachers are workers and need to be organized into strong unions. We have found this out through many struggles over the past 35 years.”22 WORKER OR ADULT EDUCATION NEEDS TO BE REDEFINED

A popular education methodology and content engages the teachers and students as equal partners in the discovery and creation of knowledge. Basic to this approach is dialogue and an understanding of the world and community as a necessary part of class content, to be integrated into the curriculum, studied, and acted upon. As Freire so often reminds us, the teacher is also a learner and the student is also a teacher. Validating adult student and worker experiences and their potential contributions functions to better democratize the teacher-student relationship. This does not imply abdication of teacher responsibility or authority, but rather a redefining of both teacher and student roles, assuring that all voices have a place, and that ideas are engaged in the interest of freedom. This horizontal approach underpins the call for teachers’ rights, better working conditions, and other worker benefits. Such an educational process supports the organized action of teachers and students to improve working and learning conditions, as well as quality of life in their communities. Community and student support for the rights of organized teachers strengthens their efforts and eventually improves the quality of education that all students receive. Adult education that is tied to social justice has often been maligned as both a disservice and a distraction to learning basic skills and GED test preparation. I believe that such false ideas arise from professional narrowness or blind acceptance of an inadequate system of learning. Some educators delude themselves with their status, 37

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expertise, or rewards, often believing that the better the institutional data for their programs or classes, the better they will be rewarded. This may work well for a while, when one dances to the tune of traditional expectations and the dominant ideology, but asking too many questions can be hazardous to your career and health. Unfortunately, it is the interest of corporate America, the needs of the labor market, and the quest for profit that overwhelmingly determine educational policy and practices today. In contrast, critical educators emphasize the important role of ideology and social critique in their classes, given that unexamined assumptions that permeate our educational system can inadvertently function to support inequalities in the world. Regardless of who we are as educators, we carry with us an ideology. In the spirit of critique, one of the questions to ask, is: “Whose ideology and to what end?” The premise of Unfit to Be a Slave, as discussed in the introduction, is that education must serve the purpose of emancipation and justice for all people. Incorporating this purpose in our work as adult or worker educators is then the best way to protect and expand the availability of adult education to all those in need. Other critical questions might include: Why do we have so few adult education and literacy programs in what is often touted as the world’s wealthiest country? Why aren’t there ongoing literacy campaigns in the U.S., as there are in other countries? And, why don’t we have more education programs that support political and civic education? Teachers need to connect the community to the classroom and employ the lived experiences of students, in their efforts to promote critical thought and the evolution of critical consciousness. Organized teachers and those who find themselves isolated should seek to connect with the communities outside their classrooms. These relationships lend greater support to both community voices and humanizing interactions between teachers and students. Such relationships also engender a sense of solidarity and mutually validate the experience and analysis of both educators and their adult students. Teachers and students in these programs, who occupy a common position as working class people, have an opportunity to build shared understanding and, thus, stand shoulder to shoulder in the struggle for social change. In this way, the empowerment of teachers and students can also serve to support the struggle for a more just educational system. THE STATUS OF ADULT EDUCATION TODAY

As previously stated, adult education in the U.S. today is barely considered a legitimate field of study. There are few teacher education programs that prepare teachers with this focus in mind. Dave Hill describes teacher training for the education of children and adults as controlled and curtailed by repressive and ideological means available to the government and corporations.23 Classes or seats available for adult students in the U.S.A. serve less than 5 percent of the actual need that exists in communities across the nation. Even more blatantly than high school education, adult learning is directed almost exclusively toward preparation for a low- wage job market with few benefits. In 38

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large part, the forceful moves toward distance learning, GED to college transitions, and individualized and computer instruction have been used to isolate learners, rather than to encourage their interaction and sense of collective possibility. There have been dramatic cuts in funding for adult education and literacy in the United States. For example, in 2009, thousands of Chicago protesters marched against the loss of 120,000 spaces for adult students in classes. In California, there has been a 20 percent cut in spending on adult education over the past two years and classes that were once free, now require fees. Similarly today, Philadelphia, Boston, and nearly every big city across the country are experiencing serious reductions in funds for adult education and literacy classes. Those programs available are constantly on the chopping block, considered readily dispensable. Programs and educators are forced to try to meet impossible standards with little or no funding. Today, adult educators everywhere, even those who have health and pension benefits, are in danger of losing their jobs, due to the austerity measures of educational districts. While adult education and literacy programs occupy a miniscule portion of city, state, and federal budgets, the established priorities of this government seem clear. The total military budget for 2011 was approximately $718 billion (not including $127 billion in veterans’ benefits). The combined costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already surpassed $160 billion.24 Trillions of dollars have been spent bailing out banks and insurance companies, while the standard of living for working class families, whether on the job, unemployed or evicted from their homes, dropped precipitously. Maximizing profits is the supreme priority of our political economic system, its corporations and banks alike. With the privatization of education, this priority now rules educational decisions, with little regard for the needs of disenfranchised adult learners. Thus, the interest of wealth and power dictate life in schools and beyond. In the U.S.A. this year, there were 492 billionaires — more than in China, Russia, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and France all put together.25 A large number of elected officials in the U.S. Congress are millionaires. Therefore, it is not surprising that maximizing profits is central to the system. Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York and one of the wealthiest men, increased his fortune from $5.6 billion when he took office in 2002 to $19.5 billion in 2012.26 And despite the Wall Street crisis, the wealthy and powerful continue to profit, while disenfranchised students in adult education suffer serious losses and face an even more uncertain future. In today’s climate of fiscal austerity, adult education programs do not only exist tenuously; they are, indeed, an endangered species. Teachers and staff often contend with low salaries and poor benefits. Administrators are forced to compete for small grants, fighting each other for crumbs when so much more is required. Students and staff are constantly threatened with reductions in the number of classes. Although adult education students have a great deal to offer communities, they are often blocked from full democratic participation. In short, this constitutes a huge loss in human potential. There is a real failure of government at all levels. Republicans and Democrats alike fail to address adequately the problem of literacy and adult education in our country. 39

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Political leaders act as powerful gatekeepers of adult literacy programs, through the lack of funding and support they extend to this important educational concern. Yet adult education students, no matter what their reading levels, recognize the importance of obtaining a high school equivalency diploma (GED) to improve their lives. To build on this knowledge and spark dialogue and questioning, I would often ask more veteran students, “What would you do if these adult education classes were eliminated by budget cuts? What could be done if the GED test costs were raised or the test was eliminated?” The discussion that always followed these questions provoked student research and involvement. Several students, in one instance, spoke to their city council representatives and others obtained city and state budgets to better understand the funding of programs. In thinking about the survival, expansion and development of adult education and literacy programs, we need to understand the concrete reality — the context of education in the United States today. The truth that blindsides us and negatively impacts both students and teachers is that the right to an education for all is not a priority in this country. Thus, community involvement, active advocacy, leadership, and organization of students and teachers — namely social action — are the most significant means to protect and ensure the survival of adult education. To promote popular education, civic literacy, and critical pedagogy, educators need to be conscious and organized to challenge the existing socio- political-economic interests of capitalist life and the inequalities it produces. For teachers and students, developing a greater political understanding of the system, (i.e., district budgets, power relations educational organizations, social forces at play in decision-making, etc.) and learning to organize collectively and strategically are all critical steps toward their political empowerment. QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER TWO

1. Describe different levels and types of literacy. Why is a broader definition of literacy important for understanding and social change? In what ways do these definitions affect our lives and our communities? 2. Why aren’t there more government-supported literacy campaigns in the United States? How would a literacy campaign foster and promote justice, equality and democracy? 3. How do people generally view and regard the field of worker or adult education — its classes, students, teachers, etc.? How could this be different and what are the potential effects of this different view? 4. Who are the current and potential students for worker or adult education programs? How do officially reported numbers of people reflect the actual conditions of illiteracy, poverty, un-employment, incarceration, and homelessness? Who benefits from illiteracy and how? 5. Give examples and show the relationship between the issues of health, employment, illiteracy, immigration, poverty, and education. 40

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6. Our stereotypes of adult students make us underestimate their abilities to advocate, organize and change conditions. The perception that they are helpless and failures severely limits the potential for student leadership, consciousness and action. What is the potential role of adult students or workers and teachers in the transformation of society? NOTES 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18

19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26

United States Department of Education, Annual Report to Congress (2010-11), Adult Education and Family Literacy Act of 1998. Paulette (Maisie) Henry Interview by David Greene, August 4, 2008. F. Youngman, The Political Economy of Adult Education and Development (London: Zed Books, 1996), pp. 3-30. A. Darder, Culture and Power in the Classroom (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1991). Greg Smith, Executive Director of the Florida Literacy Coalition, 2009. U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population, 1960-2000 and the American Community Survey, 2010. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (July 27, 2014). Mayur Raghavan, “Real Joblessness Grimmer than Government Stats,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Poverty Guidelines, January 22, 2014. See http://www.nichp.org/hapia.cfm, National Law Center on Homeless- ness and Poverty (2007). Stats, Investor’s Business Daily. David Greene, Interview with Reynaldo Casanova, 2009. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2006. T.R. Reid, The Healing of America: a Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009). See http://www.prisonstudies.org/ International Centre for Prison Studies at Kings College, 2008, London. Carla Wilson, at a rally in NYC in 1994 David Greene, Interview with Calvin Miles, 2009. October 2009, adult student and leader, Interview by David Greene. “Paulo Freire at Highlander in 1984. A videotape of that conversation with Myles Horton by George Stoney was produced in 1987, www.THECIE.1987.org P. Cunningham, “Race, Gender, Class and the Practice of Adult Education in the U.S.,” Towards a Political Economy of Adult Education (Dekalb, Illinois: LEPS Press, 1996), 151. F. Youngman, Ibid., 200. Schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/funding/overview/New York City Department of Education (2014-15 budget). David Greene, Interview with Betty Gottfried, Leader of UFT Adult Education Chapter, 2010. D. Hill, (2005), Critical Theories, Radical Pedagogies and Global Conflicts, State Theory and Neoliberal Reconstruction of Schooling and Teacher Education, (Boulder, Colorado: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). www.washingtonpost.com/WashingtonPost, March 28, 2013, Ernesto Londono. See www.forbes.com/2009/./11/worlds-richest-people. ‘The World’s Billionaires,’ March 11, 2009. www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#tab:overall

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