I started last term by asking my students to write what their purposes in life are (a question that my father has asked to several generations of teachers).
Mabel Encinas
Many of my students, future child psychologists and current teachers, answered that they want “to make a difference”. I love the spirit implicit in their assertion whilst I wonder: What kind of a difference do they (do we) want to make?
When Teresa Forcades, the progressive Catalan nun, talks about abortion, she uses the expression ‘self-determination’. Although the foetus has the right to live, as the foetus is non-viable without the mother, the decision of abortion cannot be separated from the woman’s right to self-determination. Interestingly, she uses ‘self-determination’ and not ‘freedom’.
‘Freedom’ is often placed in opposition to ‘determinism’. In Western dominant thinking (neo-liberal), freedom is abstracted (separated) from the world and from the lives we live. ‘Liberal’ in this sense refers to individual unrestricted freedom and decision making.
Freedom is seen as detached from the situation, and thus, from determinants or constraints. Freedom is like the soul for Decartes, independent of a body.
At the other extreme, determinism implies the negation of the possibility of freedom, and the idea that human actions are the result of a cause, and so actions are a consequence of the conditions that determine them.
This view is summarised in expressions such as ‘we are what we eat’ or ‘past is destiny’.
Some definitions of ‘freedom’ were clearly shown in the Latin American Cultural Week dedicated to the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, an event that I coordinated back in 2010. Artists offered insights on both extremes: individual freedom (we only have to free our individual selves, by realising that actually we are already free) and determinism (although we can decide to gamble, the dices are loaded and so, the result is pre-determined by others).
Responding to the theme of freedom, artists also invited us to wonder about the complexities of decolonising Brazil (if it is still depicted as an exotic land), about the challenges of collective action and consciousness in Zapatista communities (which is work in progress), and about the difficulties that educators face (which sadly make education often look like a pile of rubbish).
Freire’s freedom implies consciousness rooted in action. Freedom means ‘reading’ the complex and mixed sources of our determinants (in what cultures we grew, what contradictions we have) and becoming aware of our possibilities as we act in the world.
This ‘freedom’, self-determination, acknowledges not only its grounding on particular conditions, but also looks for transformation of those conditions, opening up alternative futures.
‘Freedom’ as self-determination is then simultaneously a collective and an individual construction towards consensus and collaborative doing and thinking.
If my students (if we) want to make a difference, we need to spell out what kind of a difference we aim to create.
Social justice? Liberation from oppression?
Inclusion and the expansion of civil rights?
A world in which we fully acknowledge the rights to employment, health and education?
A world in which we have more ‘commons’ (not only parks and woods, but goods and services)? A world that we re-create together?
In the meantime, while we become clearer, let us work to make the difference as we relate more intentionally with those with whom we live and work on a daily basis.
(Translated by Mabel Encinas) – Photos: Pixabay
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