Tap into our repertoires and build on our strengths.

Tap into our repertoires and build on our strengths.
Can be maddening, our capacity to hold several contradictory ideas at the same time, but useful as well. I think of it as almost like a having wide gene pool--we have more ways to respond to the crises that come up.

If we often parrot the corporate line, most of us also have alternative stories of fairness and freedom. Not suprisingly, once we dust off these more hopeful stories, glue back the broken pieces, they are far more powerful than some finished work someone else drops in our lap.

As always, there are two main ingredients in this recipe: raw experience and how we’ve cooked it. We can ask our conversation partners about both.

One time I was talking with Valerie, who is a little older than me. Her parents were sharecroppers. She told me that when she was looking for clothes at a local charity, staff told her she couldn’t have anything, and then rushed around to find stuff for immigrants. She had some unkind words for immigrants. I asked, What do you think rich people say about people in public housing, getting SSI checks? Do you know the woman who cleans the toilets at the agency? Is she one of those people you’re cussing out? Valerie said, So I should change my thinking. I said, Get more information. Ask who they are. Ask the staff why they helped the immigrants but not you. She said, They won’t tell me.

I had a series of conversations with the Reverend Harry, early 30’s, a friendly, confident student in the GED class. We were studying the Constitution. I asked the class how they would set up a government if our town suddenly became its own country. We talked about what people need, what government does, and the dangers of big government. A couple days later Harry chose government as his essay topic. We went through the usual routine of listing and organizing ideas.

Harry had a lot of complaints about our government: it has too many wasteful or programs, the IRS is a menace, Congresspeople just keep voting to raise their own salaries, the FBI had no business attacking all those people at Waco, the moon landing of 1969 was a hoax (flags can’t flutter on the airless moon, don’t you know). Welfare fraud, CIA dirty tricks, abortionist judges on the Supreme Court . . . . You must have been one of those hippies, he told me. Don’t you agree with Ronald Reagan that government is too big?

I tried to tease out details. When I asked what institution could affect him most, he said the IRS. Then I asked him about his employer. Yes, my life has changed a lot since I got laid off, he told me, but fortunately my wife has a government job. Doing what? She works with disabled kids.

So we talked about programs that help people. He talked about his granddaddy with Black Lung, and the disability checks he got. I mentioned Bush 1’s “thousand points of light,” by which he meant church-based social services that should replace government programs, and the Reverend told me, churches hand out meals at Christmas but can’t really carry out all the day to day services people need.

I added a few bits of new information, such as the fact that Reagan substantially and intentionally increased the government deficit. Mostly I tried to get Harry to consider things from a different angle, pointing out, for instance, that government includes the military, the police, mine inspection programs, Medicare, and the very GED class we were in. Which of these shall we cut, and how much?

I agreed with Harry about a lot of the corruption and asked him to consider the sources. When Congress gives itself a raise, does your wife get one? Who’s responsible for the $500 toilet seats the Pentagon bought? Harry went back to welfare fraud: there’s a woman in California receiving 40 government checks. Without challenging this factoid, I asked, so we should close down the program because some people abuse it?

I asked Harry whether it’s “big government” to intrude into decisions about abortion.

We went back and forth for a while. Eventually he drew a more nuanced conclusion than he’d started with: Big government is institutions like the FBI, CIA, IRS, and the Supreme Court. “Money talks”, as with Reynolds tobacco lobbyistst and crooked Senators. But though there are rip-offs and abuses with some social programs, the benefits are worth the costs. I’m pretty sure he didn’t write that just to please me.

The Reverend was unusually articulate and confident, and didn’t mind arguing. Not everyone has a grandfather in a militant union. But Harry’s generosity and experience of depending on government programs are quite common. He packed plenty of slogans that I tried to help him reexamine. I asked him to consider the gaps and contradictions in his claims. As his teacher, working in an accepted framework (writing the essay), I was in a good position to push the discussion. But the main thing I did was not to contradict his knowledge, but to ask him to reconnect the data in a different way.

Did the conversation change anything for Harry? I’d be surprised if he recategorized his politics. But maybe now he has an expanded framework to which to attach the knowledge he has and will come across that does not fit the Big Governmentt cartoon; maybe he’ll demand a little more from right-wing sloganeers; maybe he’ll see some possibilities he didn’t see before; maybe he'll be open to new conclusions from watching the new regime in Washington. Clearly, he recognizes his economic class interest. On the other hand, his church will bind him through issues like abortion and gun control.


Everyone has experience they can use to construct a more truthful understanding. But where that’s been beaten out of us, we can borrow some from our neighbors. I think of the guy at the listening session of a local councilman, patiently disputing another participant’s racism. So that’s another reason to have several people in the discussion, especially if they don’t all come from the same country club. The workshop manuals rightly emphasize that good discussions depend on a good mix of participants-- to include uncomfortable ideas, not to exclude them.

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“ . . . a way of knowing we call constructed knowledge-- began as an effort to reclaim the self by attempting to integrate knowledge that they felt intuitively was personally important with knowledge they had learned from others. . . . As Adele described it, ‘You let the inside out and the outside in’” (Belenky 1986 135).
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*~*~*~*~*~*~* Learning from experience takes practice. *~*~*~*~*~*~*
“Experience-based learning” is the first principle of democratic education, because we like to see personal experience as truer than and opposed to all the corporate nonsense we’re trained with. If we can strip away the lies imposed on us from childhood --the toy guns and Barbie dolls and beauty pageants and burning hell and obey obey obey-- we can recognize our real needs and develop effective ways to meet them. “Be true to yourself,” “This is who I am” are common ways we express the idea.

But the distinction between direct experience and inserted ideas is not so clear in reality. Our minds don’t naturally file Barbie under “sexist consumerist propaganda” and other kinds of make-believe under “creative imagination”. Rather, once we’ve acquired a belief system we tend to trim new experience to fit our preconceptions, or to discard it entirely.
We know of some people, in fact, who have come to distrust their own experience, to disbelieve their own senses, whenever these contradict what they’re told by parents, lovers, teachers, bosses. These are the silent women described by Clinchy et al: “Trying to explain why she stayed with a man who battered her for ten long years, she said, ‘You know, I used to only hear his words, and his words kept coming out of my mouth. He had me thinking that I didn’t know anything. But now, you know, I realize I’m not so dumb. . . . And my own words are coming out of my mouth now’” (Women’s Ways of Knowing, 30).

Others, the “subjective knowers” (Chapter 3), take the opposite tack; they so distrust treacherous Authority that they listen only to their “inner voice”, their “gut feeling”.

Nevertheless they nurtured a strong sense of defiance and a trust in their subjective truth to which they sometimes gave voice in diaries or poetry. They might even have expressed a feeling of omnipotence vis-á-vis authority, described by one woman as an ‘intuitive feeling. I just know. And when I do, fifteen experts won’t change or affect me (67).

I’ve met several people like this. Their resistance encourages my own. The trouble is, that “inner voice” is just as likely to be composed of corporate baloney as any cable channel. Not knowing how they learn, distrusting the very idea that the world and learning about the world are two different things, perhaps seeing learning as another trick of the intruders who want to overturn all the unquestioned truths they grew up with, these folks may be even more entangled in the dominant ideas than the rest of us. They can’t see see the corporate and patriarchal authority because it’s all around us, and the “authorities” that enrage them may be a couple liberal professors who dispute the notions that beating kids is good for them, that racism is a thing of the past, that there might be other things we could do with $600 billion than spend it on killing Arabs.

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“Although it sounds contradictory, what we call objective thinking is possible only after we come to understand the subjective nature of thought. This is because objectivity requires that we differentiate between the internal world of private thoughts and dreams and the external world that exists apart from us” (Cromer 29).
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Second, our personal experience can’t possibly cover all the knowledge we need. I was struck by the scenes in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 in which the Georges are gladhanding all those oil sheiks. That’s just not part of most folks’ experience. Sure, we see the TV shows about celebrities and their palaces and their gold-leaf toilet paper but we don’t get to see how the money flows. For instance, most of us don’t have our own personal emirs popping up like the Disney genie to bail us out when we screw up another business. It’s sounds far-fetched, because it’s so far beyond our ken, but it’s commonplace for the Halliburton set.

At the same time, a lot of folks give George a pass for not knowing Saddam had no WMD. After all, it was in all the newspapers; all of us thought so. Unfair to blame George for the general mistake-- unless you remember it was George and his pals who planted all those phony stories, contradicting the U.N. inspectors on the ground and their own agents such as Ambassador Wilson. So our own lives are not good guides to how the masters think and operate.


Not all of these “subjective knowers” are as dismissive of neighbors as they are of the experts. That’s fortunate, because we need to be able to learn from each other. That’s why we have language and culture. Others’ stories establish a context to help us sort out what’s unique and what’s shared in our own, and what’s important about both. In sharing our knowledge we take it more seriously and examine it more closely. We combine our experience to build a fuller, truer picture of the world. But this kind of learning is a reciprocal process; we are each both teacher and learner.

The other thing organizers never forget is that effective education incorporates opportunities for new experience-- not just “education for action,” but education through action. The best way to learn how politicians and corporados work is to poke ‘m and see what happens. What better way to understand Jerry, the fatherly exec, than to ask him about that new chemical we’re supposed to use to degrease the parts? The most telling scene in the TIRN video about the maquiladora factories along the Mexican border was when the visiting Tennessee woman asked the Deltronico manager how much he paid his employees; he hemmed and hawed for two minutes, seeking a pleasant way to say “We pay starvation wages,” before finally refusing to tell (From the Mountains to the Maquiladoras, Tennessee Industrial Renewal Network).

As Myles Horton used to say, however, “We learn from what we learn from.” If we’ve no opportunity to reflect on what we’ve seen, to raise new questions and seek new information, then we’re liable to apply the same old stock answers, and make the same mistakes over and over again. A lot depends on what alternative ways of seeing the world we have access to. I’ve seen folks jump from a desperate faith in paternalistic politicians, for instance, to a bitter disillusion that they use as an excuse to disengage. They substitute unfathomable conspiracy theory for practical, actionable analysis.

People learn many things from their own experiences, but those experiences always need to be interpreted. I remember in the ‘60s, some people said that people became radicalized if they were beaten by a cop at a demonstration. Well, some folks did become radicalized, but others drew very different conclusions, e.g., stay away from demonstrations. Labor education needs to be about interpreting the experience of the working class, through their own eyes.
--labor activist Bill Fletcher, speech at the Merton Center, 10-21-99