By Raúl H. Nakasone
Why learning center?
- State or private schools are run/supervised by the government and there is very little room for experimentation. In Peru it is possible to create an institution like a community college in a rural area. This gives some possibilities for experimenting with curriculum, instruction and evaluation. The institution will have the structure of a community college but will offer an education for the entire family. This will involve the creation of a learning center
- Schools are thought to be places were students go to be taught; I dream of a place were participants will go to learn, those participants will be called learners and the place where they will find the knowledge they seek, will be the learning center.
- Learners will not be forced to attend. The center will open so many opportunities for learning that they will choose to spend their time in this center and learn actively instead of going to the larger town. We will apply William Glasser's Choice Theory, Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences theory and Paulo Freire's pedagogy. The facilitators for this center will be well known community leaders who live a happy and satisfied successful life (not in economic terms necessarily).
Why rural?
- It is in rural areas where it is easier to find people who have their four basic needs satisfied: love and belonging, power of the self, freedom and fun. In highly functioning communities most children are born in homes where their basic needs are satisfied. When they are forced to attend institutions, like the school, is when they start loosing their freedom and with it everything else. Schools, churches and states still follow a psychology based on stimulus/response and use coercion. All they (the ones who still have their basic needs satisfied) need is a safe place (the learning center) where they can develop their full potential.
- Children apply multiple intelligences up until the time they attend a structured institution like school which is NOT based in the same idea of multiple intelligences; this can be fatally confusing. In rural areas, children find school so foreign that they retain their idea of multiple intelligences a little longer so it will make a lot of sense to them when they find this learning center where none is forced to do anything and it is up to them to choose what they want to learn.
- Freire's pedagogy works when the education process is centered in the learner and it works better in a place where everybody practices Socratic dialogue. In rural areas, all the knowledge has been passed from generation to generation through dialogue. Dialogue is the main tool for learning and it is one of the main reasons that the strong sense of community is still alive.
- When children and youth find out that they can cultivate their natural intelligences in this learning center without having to leave their village and go to the city, I hope the brain drain from those areas will be diminished.
- So often in large cities, we have someone who has succeeded at something, begin a speech by saying: "I was born in the humble village..." without realizing that her humble village could now have her as one of its finest citizens. One who may have succeeded creating sustainable conditions in her village.
Why Northern Peru?
- I have been preparing for this project since 1994 when I took my first group of Evergreen students to Guadalupe. They spent a great deal of time at schools and the newly created university. In our seminars we started conversations about the psychology and the pedagogy of the education in this area of Northern Peru.
- Since then I have been delivering short courses for teachers, students and parents, and have tried in those classes a lot of the educational strategies we use in Evergreen. Now, I have a number of community leaders who could become the facilitators needed for an enterprise like this. Every year my Evergreen students visit this town and because people use Socratic dialogue, in their everyday exchange, the immersion process for learning about the language and the culture does work wonderfully.
- Since I know that dialogue is NOT an accepted learning tool at schools in this area, by opening a learning center where dialogue will be the main learning tool I anticipate that it will be highly successful.
I visualize my dream as follows:
When the center is already operating; if a group of learners chose to spend their time playing soccer, there will be a real soccer field, soccer balls, soccer uniforms and shoes, and a soccer coach. Learners will have access to learn: the history of the game, about professional and amateur soccer, nutrition, health and trainning, the Physics of the game, the rules, the organizations, etc. Their learning will start in information and comprehension of the sport, go through application of the rules and physical conditioning to play the game, analysis of games and biographies of great players, coaches and clubs. The coach will start teams and coach them. The teams will participate in the local league. The soccer learners will have a nutritionist who will demonstrate how to prepare specific foods for athletes and the physical education facilitator will prepare them physically. A psychologist will facilitate sessions that will help players to mentally prepare them for the practice of this sport. We will not seek to graduate professional soccer players but sports men and women with enough preparation to either play as professional players, to coach in local or regional clubs, to become referees or members of boards in the local soccer league.
Lets say a group of mature women wants to learn to cook new dishes. A complete curriculum can be created based in this interest, and it can serve to recover traditional foods and a new view of their own history. A whole new diet for the area could be started by the participants. Their small children will have the best of the learning center and while the parents learn something of their own interest, their little kids will be exposed to a wide variety of games and toys to learn to speak, to learn to listen, to learn to read, to learn to write and to learn to quantify.
If retired farmers wanted to grow something in a small plot, the center will have enough space, equipment and materials to facilitate this process. The young kids who are interested could join any project and learn by doing. There will be audio visual means to show documentaries in farming and opportunities for retired farmers to exchange ideas with the young ones. The organization will have a Telecenter connected to the Internet.
For people interested in drinking and smoking there will be movies and access to the Internet to learn more about the effects of such activities. Knowledge about the health effects and the economic effects will be available and with statistics.
There can also be opportunities to recover traditional drinks and perhaps to start an industry. There can even be information about the legalities, the treatment and information about the success and the failures in developed countries.
The center will start its own clinic of traditional medicines and will also offer health information on certain days of the week facilitated by doctors from the area. The center will offer health education to start a health program based on physical conditioning and healthy diets to prevent illnesses.
The heart of the learning center: communication.
I believe education should be a road to liberation and not a highway to domestication. The educational systems I am familiar with have a strong tendency to form citizens with very poor critical thinking skills. This lack of skills can lead them to easily embrace a colonial mentality. The masses formed through this type of education are heavily dependent upon the few strong leaders that appear once in a while. Entire nations move this way or another under the direction of those few leaders. These masses live under oppression without even knowing it, many even believe that it is easy to change ideological gears when another leader wins elections. It is almost impossible to realize that those changes are solely passing from one oppressive state to another. According to brasilian educator Paulo Freire, nobody can liberate an oppressed person; only the oppressed person can liberate herself and by doing this also liberate her oppressors. If we put together these ideas, we can see that we need to offer our children a different education, one that doesn't try to domesticate them.
We also need to offer adults an education that will help them discover their own state of oppression so they can start the hard road to freedom. This way if children are growing up free and adults working to liberate themselves we will be building societies formed by free individuals, this will make true the existance of free societies where social justice and peace are practiced.
When we carefully review the history, we find how so many bloody revolutions have mostly accomplished nothing, they have just taken the masses from one oppressive state to another, mainly because after their revolution, as Freire says "the oppressed ones became the new oppressors." Education needs to be changed but this change can not come from the top; liberation is an individual business, there is no way to free everybody by passing a new law. This business to liberate oneself has nothing to do with violence, it has nothing to do with blaming someone else and killing them. It entirely has to do with reflection and building self esteem, freedom is a very personal matter. We are born free, we should remain as free as possible, and we should be able to build free societies.
When we look around the kind of world we have created, it is visible that it is all based on the stimulus-response model of thinking. This in educational terms means that we teach our children in the very same way we train our pets. There have to be winners and loosers, first places and last places, rich and poor and so on. If each one of us could just review the psychology and the philosophy that drive our life, we would at least ask the question, is there another way?
Mi Sueño
Cuando decidí dedicar parte de mi vida a realizar trabajo voluntario internacional, lo que estaba haciendo era unir la teoría con la practica. La educación debería ser un camino hacia la liberación y no una autopista a la domesticación. Los sistemas educativos que conozco tienen una fuerte tendencia a formar ciudadanos con pocas habilidades para pensar críticamente. Esta pobreza para pensar críticamente les conduce a abrazar fácilmente una mentalidad colonizada. Las grandes masas asi formadas dependen demasiado de los escasos lideres que aparecen de vez en cuando. Esto hace que naciones enteras sean movidas al vaivén de lo que hace o no hace un grupo que dirige. Estas masas viven en estado de opresión sin saberlo y creen que pueden recibir fácilmente una doctrina y mas tarde cambiarla por otra sin darse cuenta que sólo estan pasando de un estado dependiente a otro. De acuerdo a Paulo Freire, nadie puede liberar a la persona asi oprimida; solamente la misma persona puede liberarse a si misma y ayudar a liberar a sus opresores. Entonces si unimos estas ideas, necesitamos ofrecer a los niños una educación que no los domestique; y a los adultos una educación que les ayude a darse cuenta de su estado de opresión. Asi con niños creciendo libres y con adultos luchando individualmente por su propia liberación estaremos construyendo sociedades libres formadas por individuos libres y en donde se practique la justicia social y la paz.Todas las revoluciones han producido muertos por millares y las masas vencedoras no han logrado la liberación que ofrecian, sólo han servido para pasar de un estado de dependencia a otro. En algunos casos, los oprimidos se han convertido en opresores, lo que sólo ha significado libertad para nadie.
La educación necesita cambiarse pero este cambio no puede ordenarse desde arriba, la liberación es un asunto personal, no se puede decretar la libertad de las personas (aunque la libertad física si). La educación como sistema se ha establecido para determinar una forma de pensar y una forma de actuar y claro, en favor de quienes la han establecido; por eso, las reformas educativas mayormente han estado dirigidas a mejorar los resultados en los exámenes estandarizados; no han estado dirigidas hacia la formación de los individuos como seres humanos librepensadores. Para compartir estas ideas realizo mi trabajo comunitario internacional.
there where they are born. The primary
education they receive in their home town needs to prepare them to
become not only citizens of the world but citizens of their own town
first. I consider myself a citizen of Guadalupe, I have been spending a lot of time there doing community work with my students from The Evergreen State College and with local youth organizations and schools. Evergreen students and I have done research on learning/teaching in schools around the area and have established excellent relationships with educators, parents and students. I know this dream of mine will not just happen, I have been doing a lot of preliminary work since the summer of 1994. I am ready to start experimenting for long periods of time doing field work.
I did a three month program which started in December 2001 and ended in February 2002 in Guadalupe. This program's main objective was to demonstrate that the teaching/learning methods we use in The Evergreen State College can be replicated in rural schools in Peru with K-12 students and adults. I had a six week intensive program during the Peruvian summer right there in their beach town called La Barranca. I invited high school students from the Olympia area and college students from TESC to come along to assist me as facilitators. This short program served to build a small community at the fishing village. There is a lot of potential to ignite programs there every summer. This time the enfasis was in recycling and the concept of garbage, we used solar energy toys to learn the concept of energy and recycled empty plastic bottles to invent floating devices. I hope to offer this program for two more winters at TESC (summers in Peru) while I find the person/organization willing to finance the rural school of my dreams.
To visit Guadalupe, click here please
If you are interested in knowing more about this project, write me at: nakasonr@evergreen.edu