Opinion | School and Politics | Observatory - Institute for the Future of Education

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Dream Drivers

This morning I had a dream. It happened in high school: a crowd of my friends gathered to form a school theater group. Soon, two proposals arose, and shortly after, the author of one of them assumed that his was the best one and began to direct the group, doing it most naturally. I knew that the work of that theater friend was excellent but too strict, and that it would soon cause most of the group to desert, if not all. I decided then to stop them and explain that we must take a step back and make a decision consciously to generate a more or less viable commitment.

However, the dream began to take on nightmarish tones. When I spoke, people listened attentively, but suddenly (as dreams often do), they scattered again, talking about other things. This happened over and over again, and over and over again. There was no way to stop them. I asked them to listen and managed to organize some peers to attract the attention of others. I woke up, insisting non-stop, “Listen, please listen!” The friends supporting me walked around the place, requesting it too.

I still had not quite awakened, but it was already clear to me that the command “Listen!” is, certainly, the most repeated in humanity’s history (and, of course, the least heard). This dream revealed to me why some human beings organize themselves to govern others. The reason is that it is almost impossible for all of us to listen to each other. This deafness, this inability to open ourselves to others, is the “(closed) window of opportunity” that politicians leverage to direct us, instead of sitting down to dialogue. If my dream had continued, those of us who were interested in listening would have gathered apart from the others and, after a period of debate (which could have created opposing factions), we would have chosen one of the two proposals, the one that seemed more viable to us (including, of course, the non-listening crowd). We would guide everyone in the chosen direction.

The first and vivid impression I had upon awakening struck me suddenly and clearly: the extent to which politics is a means by which some members of the community exercise their ability to listen while adapting to the deafness of others. From there, resigned or resentful, politicians take one of two paths: they devise ways for people to hear and participate in decisions, or, conversely, they leverage their deafness to partaking in the proposals, without further discussion.

Our image of politicians coincides mostly with this second path: “our politicians” are characters who plot “in the dark;” they do not care if the majority listens (sorry: those who care – and a lot – that the majority does not listen); they are people whose success is based on public indifference.

Is it possible to change this image? The answer is yes, if society teaches itself to listen. (The first thing to guarantee this is to demand that politicians also listen.)

How do we achieve this? The first answer was given to me by my dream. A living art form, such as theater, captivates people’s attention. The same thing is achieved by music in its theatrical and concert forms. When a crowd gathers to listen, it becomes a political actor, recognizing its power and the ability to exercise it. These gatherings (should we say “events”?) are about crowd politics, ways of listening to one another, public moments where we are all one because we are truly present.

Something similar happens with education, an excellent setting for teaching one another to listen. The teacher (as well as the politician and the artist) can show students the power they have, or hide it from them; they can make them know, or not, that they are capable of hearing.

In my dream, the “polis” (originally Greek for “city-state”) was comprised of friends from high school, which leads me to the question of whether the exercise of politics is already present in school (the school institution in general), in the sense I described before, that is, that of students who organize themselves in private groups to listen to each other and to provoke some effect in the community. At the school level, these forms of underground organization would not require a formal structure or a public front, like political parties, but they could be youth experiments that would later evolve into them. These small groups would not necessarily be comprised of the most popular young people. On the contrary, even if they feel they own the school, they would likely be wasting their time if they are not truly listening to themselves and are unaware of what is happening around them. In reality, the true leaders could be the apparently marginalized students who meet in pairs or trios, speaking softly.

Are these our politicians of tomorrow, people who have leveraged their time since childhood, creating alliances while the rest of us lose to the chatter of non-listeners?

My conspiratorial tone rings with some truth. For the time being, I think we must be aware that the school polis may well be the true model of our social policy, both in its public sense, promoting common listening, and in the other, the clandestine and opportunistic sense. In the first, we would find those who seek the common good, and in the second, those who are willing to charge us dearly to lead us.

However, be careful. The fact that things are like this (and even worse, that the common tendency is to take the second path) does not mean that we are doomed to remain a deaf society. When education unleashes its vital force, it opens its ears, and if, in addition, it synergizes with art and other authentic forces, it is capable of transforming the population into the primary political power. Only in this way can we speak of a true democracy.

Listening is taught by listening.

It must be done.

Imposing goodwill

It seems my text would end here, but something significant has caught my attention. It has not been easy to recognize it. In fact, it has taken me several days to wake up and, finally, dare to write this postscript, which is actually a second article. I’m sorry because I think the ending turned out beautifully.

You see: everything I have told you was based on a dream, but it was my dream, and, as such, it hid my true intention. It was indeed hidden under the veil of “goodwill,” which – as we all know – is always very difficult to lift.

Who can judge the goodwill of others? Our goodwill is so convincing that it ultimately convinces us. A good part of our self, who we are, is based on the deep conviction that our goodwill is genuine. I am sure that this happens even when we are “bad” (when we consider ourselves, or are considered, “bad”), which includes when we are bad politicians and politicians acting badly.

Our goodwill is like a dream, i.e., a kind of refuge from reality, but, if one is sincere, one that can be awakened. Perhaps, we wake up from dreams in an attempt to be honest with ourselves (yes, deep down, I believe in human innocence, to which we can return after many awakenings).

In my dream, a crowd of students appears, gathering with great enthusiasm when they are summoned to form a theater group. Proposals arise, and they listen to them, and it seems that they are willing to vote, but then, as if nothing had happened, they adhere to the first one who tells them, “This is the one.” Then, the dreamer (me), labeling everyone as “passive” and “manipulable” (we call them “sheep” in Mexico), looks for a way to redirect them. But what this dreamer has not considered is that, perhaps, what people really want is to allow themselves to be guided toward something whose end they do not know or even toward something they know is going to fail. Perhaps they don’t want to form a theater group; maybe they want to go with the flow while discussing their own things, which is precisely what the battered “leader” offers them. The dreamer, on the other hand (my political self, the one who does not accept that desire), insists that we fulfill the purpose for which we have supposedly met. (It is my perspective as a leader, which I hang onto afterwards, already half-awake).

However, they are there for something else. That’s why, when I speak, they listen to me… but soon they start doing what they really want to do. I tell them to listen, and they listen, but not to me. I ask them to “give their opinion” and “vote,” and they do, but not on what I want. So, when I awaken, the only thing remaining in me is a great resentment, hidden under the veil of “goodwill.”

This is what we all are, politicians: we deem our dreams as collective, and then we reprimand – and even condemn – those who do not fight to achieve them. We write articles or make good speeches in which we take it for granted that people aspire to a particular way of being and that, by working together, we will achieve it. But maybe (I say it for the last time), people don’t want any of this, they don’t want anything, or perhaps they don’t want what the rest of us dream of.

They do not want our goodwill.

And they have the right to do what they want, even if their lives look like failures to us.

Perhaps we ourselves, deep down, do not want that goodwill either.

When I say that they have the right, I am not referring to a civil, criminal, or political law, but to human rights, which are based on human dignity, about which no one can say, much less decide, what we deserve.

Some readers will disagree with this second version of my dream. They will prefer the first, which is that politics responds to everyone’s dream, at least when it is exercised with genuine interest in the common good. I respect their position. All of us, in a corner of ourselves, believe that good intentions do exist, and that they are compatible with the exercise of power. Perhaps, then, I should propose this second version as a new position to debate (it is a position that has always existed, although in politics, we have known it for a century and a half as anarchism).

I conclude by acknowledging that writing a text like this is risky, where, in a postscript, one can contradict everything that has been said. Perhaps it is an offense to some who feel that they have been deceived or, at the very least, their time has been wasted. Maybe they are right. Probably, underneath my second version, there is another, and another, and another, like onion layers; at the bottom is a dreamer who will never wake up. On the other hand, perhaps this second version is not of someone who sleeps and continues to dream more profoundly; instead, it is of someone who awakens and has the opportunity to gaze at the sky and explore the spaces that lead to the tremendous awakening that is reality.

What I am sure of is that we all want to keep going, some under a particular leadership to an established place, and others wherever they want. (I think the most skilled will combine both ways.)

Will there be some dialogue that will allow us to walk together?

The logic of awakening

One begins and then can’t stop. After finishing writing the above, I read with painful interest a sensitive article about the case of a Mexican girl (14 years old) who died due to breast augmentation surgery. Justice has fallen on the adults who authorized the operation. The case is terrible and full of anomalies; it must be reviewed rigorously and the law firmly applied. Simultaneously, it is necessary to thoroughly analyze the case at different levels, as it alludes to issues of deep current debate, while avoiding the contamination of the pain of the moment.

In the mentioned article, the author Sara España emphasizes an entirely different perspective from most of the articles I have read on the subject. I bring it up here because her questions jolt those who do not know if they are part of the nightmare or a call to wake up. They seem sincere to me, and therefore (according to what I said in the previous section) I am inclined to think that they are the wake-up call.

In fact, the author, as affected as anyone else by the terrible event, puts the young girl’s pain in parentheses for a moment, as well as the family drama. (The surgeon was the sentimental partner of the mother; apparently, the father had not been warned of the intervention and was deceived.) She focuses on examining the ideological aspects that can influence public opinion and shape trends in the judgment and revision of laws. In particular, she emphasizes the social stigma that exists about cosmetic surgery, especially for women, which becomes scandalous in a case of death, acquiring diabolical overtones when the one who dies is a minor, especially in a surgery approved by her mother. The Inquisition itself could take up the case. (That, precisely, seems to be the overall tone of public opinion at the moment, which seems to overshadow the legal aspects.)

Awakened by Sara España’s article, I find myself in a position to add something that clarifies how our attachment to particular stigmas prevents us from reflection, and also distracts us from noting equally significant problems.

Let us dwell solely on the idea that a mother authorizes cosmetic surgery for her minor daughter. Let’s suppose that it is done with total family transparency and without any medical anomaly, and, nevertheless, the girl dies. Immediately, society (national and international) prepares for the lynching. How does the mother allow herself to put her daughter at such risk for something as unnecessary – even banal – as a breast augmentation? As if the case were a magnet, all our gazes turn towards it, enraged, which, as always, prohibits us from worrying about other things equally serious, which are impossible for us to denounce simply because they involve characters much more powerful than our women.

Let’s take an example of unnecessary interventions in the medical field. Do we know, or at least have wondered, how many young people die or become disabled by often shady medical care received in private institutions, which make health a business? I don’t recall any public scandal about this.

Has anyone done serious, published research on this matter? Or do people consider this well-known rumor about a health system that falsifies diagnoses and prescribes unnecessary surgeries to be just that, a rumor that does not deserve further attention?

Is this less important than a mother allowing her daughter to undergo breast augmentation surgery? By prosecuting a case like this inquisitorially, are we not trying to satisfy our conscience that we are fulfilling our quota of protection for young people and venting the fury that other situations evoke in us, which, unfortunately, no one attends to? Isn’t this nothing more than the practice of scapegoating, by which society atones for its faults and powerful people direct social attention? Do we believe that we are waking up to react fairly, when, in reality, we are falling into a more profound slumber?

These are undoubtedly troubling questions, but consistent with the distressing panorama we are experiencing. They are similar to those that the article’s author asks. She seems to assert that we must be wide awake to answer them. It is, ultimately, a matter of appealing to the exercise of a logic that clarifies our perspectives and allows us to see the light (a logic towards which, as teachers, we can guide our students: nothing else can teach them to think).

There are no definitive answers, but there are questions. The first version of my dream (perhaps) sinks us deeper into more dreams. The second (possibly) allows us to awaken.

Translation by Daniel Wetta