Opinion | Brothers and Classmates: Key Players in Global Education

Testimony of an Autodidact

Of the many forms of autodidacticism that exist, my vision is limited for the moment to only one, the one that I have always practiced. It is a radical vision that, if put forward in theoretical terms, would emanate more or less from the following statement: The absence of solid bonds with a loving mother from birth leaves the sufferer kind of outside in the elements, in which learning to survive autonomously at all costs displaces structured social learning (including homeschooling) to a large extent.

Let’s clarify a couple of terms: I call maternal love the affection that establishes with the baby a relationship of “mine” or “my baby,” so it can also come from the father; it is better called maternal/paternal love. On the other hand, by “surviving at all costs,” I mean that type of situation narrated in the fable of the mouse that falls into the bucket of milk and, refusing to resign to sinking, kicks until it churns the milk into a thick cream that supports it so it can jump out.

Clearly, the mouse (or be it, the reader of the fable) has learned something from this experience: namely, that not giving up brings good results. However, if the mouse continues his life on the self-taught path, he will soon learn firsthand that kicking is a solution in a bucket of milk but not in other circumstances. He must then enter into a process of trial and error, deception, and disappointment, which will take him a long time to travel because, to top it all off, it is a path full of false successes that, in the long run, turn out to be very unfortunate. (I’m thinking of the little girl who kicks what she thinks is a wall when someone does not fulfill her whim. It shakes because it is actually just a partition. Believing it is a wall, she becomes convinced she has enormous strength and can knock down the entire building. She threatens to do so if she does not get her way. It will take her years to realize she is not that strong).

As for the mouse, indeed, his long journey would be shortened if he went to school and a rodent master explained to him the value of not giving up and some ways to do this successfully so that when facing danger, the little animal can apply in practice what it had learned without having to verify it for himself.

Unfortunately, autodidacticism as radical as the one I describe is not optional: those subjected to it will have to endure it, while those fortunate enough to receive the maternal/paternal love “of milk and honey” will indeed be spared many lessons based on suffering. (Erich Fromm distinguishes the motherly love that only nourishes [milk] and the love that also gives sweetness [honey].) They are spared suffering because love equips them with confidence in themselves and what they can learn and trust in others for what they can learn from them.

The fable (and fables in general), a didactic genre par excellence, shows us that life imposes challenges on us. To face them, we need to learn something; if the obstacles increase, the need for learning increases. That explains the thousands of courses, tutorials, conferences, seminars, diplomas, and careers in our hyper-challenging contemporary society. At the same time, millions of people insist on the necessity of educating with love and raising children and students to trust themselves and others, which is a sine qua non for society to become a flourishing place, full of challenges and people prepared and happy to face them.

The problem is that the challenges increase enormously while love diminishes, with the fatal consequence that society withers. (Something that has ceased to be a metaphor and has become real is the excellent water crises, which not only comprise a natural challenge but also challenge the emotional intelligence to resolve them.)

In some respects, the world has reached conditions of survival in which unprecedented challenges impose the need to improvise and assume a radical self-teaching process. At this moment (a “world firefighter” moment), people who have somehow survived have much to contribute. An example is our young people who have embarked on working in a hurry, like the mouse in the story, resorting to self-learning at a crazy pace to move the world forward. They cannot be blamed for doing this with so many resources at their disposal. We should all join this crusade and contribute everything we know about surviving our ignorance, something in which many of us are experts, even if we do not know it. Perhaps this is not so difficult, only requiring sincere introspection and our testimony to others (as the pedagogue and psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati invites us to do).

I have started this series of writings on autodidacticism to put my personal experience at the service of my readers so that they can leverage it if there is any value in it for self-learning. That is why I have already spoken in past articles about the relationship with my sick, fragile, and present/absent mother; with my father, whose craving for affection coupled with his insecurity made him give me a wavering love, and with my nanny, who managed to fill my parents’ gaps with remarkable efficiency.

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Now, I turn to my brothers, five innocent mice who had already fallen into the bucket of milk before me and from whom I learned many of my survival techniques. The relationship with siblings is unique. While parents are something of a sacred object, untouchable, what unites us with our sisters and brothers is entirely different. It is a relationship among peers, and therefore, for us, it is the beginning of all ethics: they are the first subjects in our environment, the first people we recognize as related to us, the first ones we cannot treat as objects (try and see!). With our siblings, we learn that we can only take others as a means to our ends if we violate the social/family principle of equality, i.e., if we also betray something within ourselves. This experience will be repeated with cousins (brothers of different fathers, as my beloved cousin Gerardo says), friends from the neighborhood, and schoolmates, who are a compensation for those who have no brothers.

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With siblings – and with friends and fellow students – one learns the three critical elements of peer relationships: advocacy, support, and collaboration. In defending itself, our body is biologically equipped to react to aggression. However, this “reflex ” is compounded by more sophisticated ways through which we learn to “negotiate” our responses with opponents. One means of learning how to do this is play, which establishes rules for aggression and defense. That is why the game has to be among peers, that is, among siblings, friends, classmates, and beings who all abide by the same rules. (The incredible joy of playing with parents, teachers, or any authority is specifically to enjoy them as peers for a while).

On the other hand, solidarity also has an instinctive component: it arises as immediate empathy, as a sudden putting oneself in another’s shoes and understanding almost unconsciously that one cannot do something alone. It is present in many animals and homo sapiens; it also acquires a cultural dimension of grand proportions. It occurs among all kinds of people. One example with clear scope is what happens to us when we help an authority who, to our childish mind, is infallible. Helping them in their weakness is opposite to the direction of the game, i.e., instead of experiencing it as a descent of the sacred/infallible towards us, we experience our ascent towards that realm, giving us sublime sensations (I helped my dad… the boss… the police!) and preparing us to occupy that position one day.

However, with siblings, that verticality disappears and tends to become what I have called the third movement of the relationship among peers: collaboration. To collaborate is to create solutions together. As an intuitive movement, it is the most evolved, and in the human cultural field, it reaches its highest sophistication. As I say, it begins as an instinctive act in which I see myself in the other and help him overcome an obstacle. At the same time, by mirroring myself in him, I testify and admit my weakness and now count on his future help. A loop of collaboration (“today for you, tomorrow for me”) is thus formed, allowing us to support each other at different times and simultaneously develop mutual well-being.

Some of us believe that the highest level of this phenomenon is what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls “existential communication,” which I very freely summarize in the following sentence: “If you help me understand what I want to tell you, it will be easier for me to explain it to you.” The idea, which seems like an oxymoron, is actually (at least for me) a kind of magical abracadabra to open us up to the existence of others. This truth is not as unusual as it seems; it is fulfilled every day, for example, when in a conversation, we “read the mind of the other” and produce the word or idea they are seeking inside them. From my point of view, this and all the similar human moments are pure magic capable of awakening the subtlest springs of reality.

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What happens when authority is hesitant and insufficient? As I said above, one of the characteristics of parental love is that they establish full equality among children: that is, as sacred objects, they spread that sacredness to the relationship between siblings, placing them as equals. That is why, without the presence of loving authority, sacred equality (that which is not questioned) is lost, and human relations must then be founded on “profane” cultural and personal principles whose main characteristic is precisely “being questionable.” Thus, a pragmatic morality governs that adapts half-improvised to different situations or, contrarily, imposes itself violently and is completely inflexible. Another way of describing this is the distinction made by psychological science between stable, dysfunctional families and unstable, dysfunctional families, where the latter has an advantage over the former, whose inflexibility can have atrocious effects.

My family was an odd combination of both.

My father, a doctor who was a rigorous scientist with military training, alternated his rigidity with a humanitarian and artistic character, a mixture of love and reverence for ethics on one hand and literature, painting, and music on the other. (He spent his afternoons playing the great classics on the piano). Moreover, he possessed a profound spiritual intuition about love but was very hesitant regarding the dogmas of his religion.

It seems to me that, in the presence of a solid maternal love, these characteristics I describe would have made our home a stable place, certainly overcrowded (we were six siblings!) but with a good combination of love, discipline, knowledge, and art, not lacking in the necessary solidity to face the world. However, my mother’s fragile presence (described in my first article in this series) and the transfer of much of her love to my nanny’s heart put the whole family in a different place.

It was a moving and imposing home, rigid and hesitant. Some of its rules were inflexible, others provisional. Four or five routes were clear, and others would soon be prescribed. Reason and logic sometimes created an atmosphere of tranquility that was quickly violated by more urgent psychic or material needs. Everywhere, a lively but frightening spirituality spewed from religious dogmas and crouched here and there, re-emerging horrifically from every corner. Science was trying to bring order. Knowledge and discipline were given an almost desperate confidence, and art was made a refuge from so much pain. Hope stirred somewhere between doubt and craziness… There was violence and love.

And yet, with all that, the fire in the hearth did not extinguish, thanks precisely to our overcrowding, and all of us did our part without ever giving up.

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My family, and I’ll end with this, was very much like the world today.

I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that in the present day and age, a time of improvisation and, in many ways, self-teaching, the experience of families like mine can be helpful. Indeed, many of us ponder the value of science, education, art, and many simple and complex tools, trying to erect them as batons of command to govern disaster. However, I would like to present here four basic principles that I call from my own experience, like many other people, academic or not, to underpin any attempt to redirect the world:

1. Let’s care for nature as we would a sick mother.
2. Let’s honor technology like a nanny who helps the mother lovingly and prudently without wanting to replace her.
3. Let’s exercise authority without fear, not to demonstrate power but to inspire confidence.
4. Let’s revere equality among human beings.

Translated by Daniel Wetta

Andrés García Barrios Writer and communicator. His work brings together experience in numerous disciplines, almost always with an educational focus: theater, novel, short story, essay, television series and museum exhibitions. He is a contributor to the Sciences magazines of the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM; Casa del Tiempo, from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and Tierra Adentro, from the Ministry of Culture. Contact: andresgarciabarrios@gmail.com

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