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By chance, I came across an old note written by Karina Fuerte, Editor-in-Chief of this IFE Observatory, in which an article under the title What is the Use of Knowing if We Do Not Know How to Live? mentions the book Apprentice School by the Spanish philosopher and essayist Marina Garcés. The article begins by quoting the book’s central question: How do we want to be educated? The idea captivates me immediately. How do we want to be educated? I had never thought about this, that one could ask this question.
Education, as others have told us and we have told ourselves, is a decision of families, teachers, and those who grant it; it is not a choice and much less a desire of those who receive it. It has never been. Are you really asking us how we want to be educated? Are we wondering? The surprise immediately leads me to a “How good this sounds!” I soon gave free rein to my fantasies of how I would like education to be in my country and the world. In a twist of imagination, I go back to my childhood and tell my parents how I want to be educated. Then, I go to my teachers and tell them the same thing, step by step. Thus, I abruptly surrender to this reinvention of my entire history until I reach the present, where I continue to learn, letting myself be carried away only by the question, How do I want to be educated?
It’s not even a question of what education I believe people should receive. My thoughts do not entertain the idea of duty nor beg the question of what I think is the best way to achieve specific school objectives, purposes, and skills. No, nothing like that. It is about wanting; how I feel like being educated.
So, here I begin this letter to Santa Claus to see if (it is only February) next Christmas, I will receive the surprise that education is just as I want, as I am wishing and asking for it. (I really wish that my “want” was as fresh as that of a child; I cannot help but remember the wonderful answer my son gave to the question of what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I want to be a boy,” he replied. However, my adult desire can only be a mixture of fresh fantasies and certain reasoned arguments, even with some intrusive ideas, those we call “realistic” but which are nothing but the disappointments of adults misinformed about the miracles that can happen to us human beings).
Thus, I give rise to this series of articles which I call THE EDUCATION WE WANT, where I hope to be able to express myself with total freedom, that is, without concerning myself about whether these philosophical fantasies popping out of my head are truly possible.
Unlearning
The first thing that occurs to me when I ask myself the question posed by Marina Garcés is that I want a school with much love. Edgar Morin and the co-authors of the book Educating in the Planetary Age say that education needs “what is not written in any manual but which Plato pointed out as an indispensable condition of all teaching: eros. It is simultaneous desire, pleasure, and love; desire and pleasure for transmitting the love for knowledge and students. Where there is no love, there are problems of (academic) career, of money for the teacher, and boredom for the student.” However, the reader surely agrees that the word “love” is complicated because it has innumerable definitions and because, in practice, we could come to exclaim about it what was once, tragically, said of Freedom: “Love, how many crimes have been committed in your name!” So, I decided to leave love for later, and I kept thinking, or rather, feeling, “What education do I want?”
I remember when I was a young theater student of the theater and, like all my classmates, I idolized one of the heroes of the moment, the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. His book Towards a Poor Theater was part of our academic curriculum and was extremely popular in the independent stage environment (which most of us longed to join soon). The “poor” did not refer to social class or lack of economic resources (although in Poland in those days, to dedicate oneself to the independent theater was to submit to this type of deprivation) but, instead, to a concept of theatrical art where only the acting was assigned value. Almost every other resource was dispensed with: music, scenery, lighting, costumes, makeup, sound effects, and generally, all the scenic paraphernalia. What remained were actors dressed only in street clothes or very modest garments, using their gestures, voice, extraordinarily expressive movements (illuminated by their own light, we could say), and occasionally some extremely simple object (a cloth, a stick, or something like that).
My colleagues and I (and people in Mexico in general) did not have access to see Grotowski’s plays or films, and we had to be content with some photographs included in the book, where the actors were making impressive facial gestures that looked like authentic masks. However, I remember that what struck me most in the reading was one of the concepts that Grotowski mentioned as the core behind this magic: During their training, the actors did not “learn” new expressive techniques, but on the contrary, they had to work diligently to rid themselves of all vices of expression and bodily impulses and mental and cultural tendencies that, like us all, they had internalized and which prevented them from giving real life to their scenic expression. One had to get rid of things and not add them. In Grotowski’s words, “Ours (is not) a collection of techniques but the destruction of obstacles.”
Another idea complements the above. In an old interview that can be seen by clicking here, Grotowski mentions that in the Stalinist regime imposed on Poland, the plays were greatly censored but not the rehearsals, which were exercised in total freedom. This privacy was an element that favored the essence of his work: Grotowski turned the rehearsals into the most critical elements of the process. In the rehearsals, meaningful human encounters took place (between the actors and the director and the actors with each other), and the highest forms of artistic expression were attained. The resulting shows were extraordinary, and the Grotowski Laboratory Theatre became one of the pillars of this art in its time worldwide.
The education I want shares the two elements I have described. From childhood, one carries many preconceived ideas, imposed needs, meaningless obligations, conscious and unconscious confusions, labels and social stigmas, physical postures, and even diseases and disorders; then, the best thing that can happen to us is to run into a teacher, a medium, or a school that helps us get rid of all that and encourages us to think ourselves, to feel authentic, to express with freshness, and to return to the impulses of one’s body and not so much to the formulas of social behavior. Such a school would be a genuine laboratory where one would learn to overcome resistance and freely identify what is best for us. Of course, “removing resistance” is easily said, as if it were a matter of will. However, what we have been accumulating within us has not left a clear trace of its passage, making it difficult to walk back along the road to rediscover a less affected state of ourselves, less loaded with guidelines and information. This is where the second aspect of Grotowski’s theater comes in, referring to the importance of the process rather than the result.
An environment where one does not have to “comply” with anything, does not have to produce something for others, and is not evaluated immediately for results is a much more conducive environment to find oneself with one’s authentic wants and needs. Such an environment is based on trust and lacks the persecution and judgment of an external gaze. (Ideally, in the classroom, “what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom” should prevail, a motto more typical of therapeutic spaces; thus, another great stage director, Peter Brook, who wrote the prologue to Towards a Poor Theatre, refrains from narrating what he saw during rehearsal sessions directed by Grotowski, out of discretion for the delicate personal search that the participants performed in those.)
I will be told, for some reason, that learning how to build bridges, perform open-heart surgery, or program computers is not a matter of “removing resistance” but learning new skills. Of course, a school is also where we will add some knowledge. Grotowski himself does not rely only on the natural impulse of the body as an artistic expression; for him, it is not just about removing resistance, and that is all: He knows that this impulse must be modeled if you want to “create” a work of art. However, this “modeling” must be based (in its meaning of sustenance and nutrition) on something essential, on a genuinely personal part of us, to avoid falling into clichés or social stereotypes. (David Mamet, another great director and writer of theater and cinema, suggests that this type of arbitrary knowledge provided by schools is flatly useless, “… as useless as teaching a pilot to flap with his arms in the cockpit to make the plane fly.”)
In the school that I want, the knowledge we acquire is nourished by our true personality, that is, a fresh vision of ourselves, as little prejudiced as possible (the least made up, dressed, illuminated … in a word, as little produced as possible), becoming a natural support for life. With this freshness, the actor Riszard Cieslak created the main character of The Constant Prince, the work of the Spaniard Pedro Calderón de la Barca directed in Poland by Grotowski. The play is about a man who, out of loyalty to himself and his faith, dies in prison after years of misery and torture. To recreate it on stage, however, the director proposed to Cieslak to base his performance on memories of adolescence in which the actor had lived moments of the most profound sensuality and joy. This luminous memory functioned “like a raft on a river” on which the tragedy of the constant prince sailed.
What we learn should help us flourish in any circumstance. Only then will it have real value. As teachers, we must believe that students come already equipped with the qualities and capabilities for their desired professions, and it is on that basis that we must help them build their future. The future must never replace what exists in the present. Evaluating what we have learned should never be more important than the beautiful moment of learning something, especially when it helps us eliminate false ideas of reality or wrong beliefs about ourselves.
Perhaps learning is nothing more than a transition to where we encounter the most authentic thing we have. As I wrote in my youth, in a moment of poetic exaltation:
A mind free of digested ideologies must think of detonations, rumblings that force it to listen: philosophy. Let’s give it a little of this thinking that unlocks it and, by an unhealthy diet, some geometry of great beauty. But once it is set into motion, the mind must quickly take refuge in the chaotic forest, where voices come from everywhere, and none wants to impose its accent. There, under the barrage of noises, one awakens their instincts, and a compelling thought of their own opens the body’s floodgates. Every mind seeks the body, where there is no difference between thinking and silence.
Finally, I would like to recommend to the reader a book by the English psychologist and cogno-scientist Guy Claxton. It is a treatise on unlearning, especially regarding habitual thinking. Its name is intriguing and funny (Hare Brain, Turtle Mind), but its subtitle is a real explosive for our most deeply held beliefs and an invitation to remove some of our biggest obstacles: Why Our Intelligence Increases When We Think Less. This simple phrase has become a constant reminder that I need much less than I carry.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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