unSchooling Oppression Conference – Day4
Thursday, November 8, 2007
All conference activities are FREE!
__________________
6:30pm (doors at 6:00pm)
Keynote: Cindy Milstein, of the Institute for Anarchist Studies
Location: Ottawa Public Library Auditorium, 120 Metcalfe St (at Laurier St)
Title: “Education for Freedom”
In the 1930s, Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta wrote that our task is to embolden “people to demand and to seize all the freedom they can.†The way forward, in his view, was via “provoking and encouraging by propaganda and action, all kinds of individual and collective initiatives. It is in fact a question of education for freedom,†he asserted, “of making people who are accustomed to obedience and passivity consciously aware of their real power and capabilities. One must encourage people to do things for themselves.†Many others on the libertarian Left—from anarchists to council communists to autonomists—have stressed education as key for fundamental social transformation or revolution. But for anarchists in particular, education has always been a crucial prefigurative path for getting from “here†to “there,†from a hierarchical society to an increasingly egalitarian and humane one. The process of how we educate ourselves and others, and the organizational forms we use to do that, is already part of the better world we’re building, or minimally should point toward it. And such experiments should combine the two interrelated poles of anarchism itself: a social critique and a social vision, precisely to strive for a free society of free individuals.
In this talk and discussion, I’ll explore some hopeful examples of the integration of engaged thinking and doing, such as developing horizontal models of anti-authoritarian scholarship, popular education, and radical public debate and decision-making. Some of these case studies—but not all—will include projects from my own experience, such as the Free Society Collective, the Institute for Anarchist Studies, and the Institute for Social Ecology.
__________________
Cindy Milstein is a co-organizer of the annual Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies, and a member of the Free Society Collective and Black Sheep Books Collective in Montpelier, Vermont. For many years, she taught at the “anarchist summer school†known as the Institute for Social Ecology, an independent institution of higher education in Vermont that incorporates directly democratic and non-hierarchical politics into its own structure and operation. Please see http://unschoolingoppression.wordpress.com/schedule/ for a description of her talk!
Her work appears in anti-authoritarian periodicals and the following anthologies:
· Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World (2004)
· Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement (2004)
· Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (2004)
· Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority (2007)
**************************************************
Love to learn, but hate school?
Think there must be something better than this?
Want to arm yourself against the weapons of mass instruction?
unSchooling Oppression at the University of Ottawa
Conference, November 5-10, 2007
Registration Cost: FREE, but donations are encouraged to cover speakers’ travel and accommodation costs
See the full schedule and speaker bios at: http://unschoolingoppression.wordpress.com/
This is not your average conference! unSchooling Oppression is an original, student-led initiative designed not only for academic professionals, but for students, teachers, professors, activists, and community members alike. It is both a critical examination of the various forms of oppression within traditional schooling models and a hopeful exploration of liberating educational alternatives.
Five evening keynote presentations will feature speakers on a broad range of topics, each concluding with a period for questions and discussion. Various aspects of their talks will touch on the historical roots and purposes of traditional schooling; power, authority and oppression; institutional violence; curricular racism, sexism and homophobia; freedom and deschooling; alternative models for learning; and much more. Confirmed speakers include: David Noble, John Taylor Gatto, Cindy Milstein, Tara Guenette & Julie Lalonde, and Matt Hern. These presentations will allow attendees from the university and the broader community to critically examine current teaching practices and envision alternative education models that are student-centered and promote independent thinking, self-motivation, equity, and solidarity, both inside and outside the school. The speakers will be traveling to Ottawa from around Canada and the USA. See our website for full schedule and speaker bios.
The conference will also include a series of daytime workshops organized by members of the community as well as guests from the United States on issues that they consider relevant to the themes of education as oppression, and education as liberation. Themes will include the deschooling movement, self-motivated learning, militarization and education, and more.
The most exciting part of the conference will be the concluding caucus, wherein conference attendees will have the opportunity to brainstorm together a way forward in applying some of the ideas presented during the conference. Our goal, as conference organizers, is for this event to catalyze a new movement of projects and campaigns here in Ottawa to directly address the issues presented.
We hope you can be a part of this movement!