Unfit To Be a Slave: A Guide to Adult Education for Liberation
Unfit To Be a Slave: A Guide to Adult Education for Liberation
by David Greene (Sense Publishers: Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei, 2015)
Book review by Steve Leberstein, a social historian who has written on French syndicalism, working class culture, and on issues of academic freedom, especially the early Red scare at City College which cost the jobs of 50 faculty and staff in 1941. Steve led the campaign to persuade the CUNY Board of Trustees to issue a formal apology for the actions of its predecessor, and was a founder of City College’s Center for Worker Education, where he taught history and served as its executive director for 20 years. He has also taught at the National Labor College, Cornell ILR (NYC), and Brooklyn College. He served as chair of the City College chapter of the Professional Staff Congress, AFT 2334, and is now a member of the union’s Executive Council.
David Greene’s Unfit To Be a Slave: A Guide to Adult Education for Liberation is a deeply felt, personal journey through the world of adult and worker education programs. Influenced by Paulo Freire, the great Brazilian activist and educator, Greene has worked in adult literacy programs in New York City, where the staff was represented by the United Federation of Teachers, as well as in community and union sponsored worker education programs in Ohio and West Virginia. Greene’s personal story sets the stage in understandable language, a welcome relief from the prose of some other education writers.
The inspiration for this book comes from Frederick Douglass, whose master forbade teaching his slaves to be literate for fear that ability would undermine their subservience. Of course Douglass embraced the challenge, setting the example for the empowering tonic of an education that, as Greene explains, can help working people understand the world and change it.
The book begins with an account of Greene’s experience in a New York City Board of Education adult literacy program when the schools chancellor was Joel Klein, an anti-trust lawyer in the Justice Department and then counsel to Bertelsman AG, an international media corporation. His critique of that and other similar programs is that they are geared to preparing students for the limited, low-wage jobs available, not for understanding the world and their place in it. When those programs were threatened with cuts in 2006, he recounts the protests that soon broke out, led by students.
There are a few victories in Greene’s account of adult literacy programs. In 1994, a group from Young Adult Learning Academy, a publicly funded program, mobilized with some of their teachers to protest at City Hall to protest proposed cuts to the City University and other education programs. Although they were prepared to confront newly elected Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, they did succeed in meeting with his Deputy Mayor without getting arrested. And the worst of the planned cuts were averted, but for Greene the greatest “victory” for the students was the development of “student leadership skills and critical consciousness.”
For public school teachers at all levels including public higher education, his critique hits home: underfunding, continual threats of closing, low pay and poor conditions will strike home. So too will the stories of students leading demonstrations for maintaining the programs and better conditions. Putting these accounts in the broader context of such literacy campaigns internationally misses an important point. Most of the examples he cites, beginning with the heroic Cuban Campana de Alfabetizacion were part of revolution in the case of Cuba, Viet Nam, and of radical anti-colonial movements in other countries.
Greene also misses an opportunity to explore a different kind of challenge for progressive educators, that is how to work effectively to change public educational institutions to allow the kind of work that Greene celebrates. Can a space be carved out in the public sector for programs that serve workers, not just for the paltry place usually accorded them but for an open-ended, critical and engaged future in a society that is socially and politically very conservative? Is his concept of “progressive education” as identifying the “political content for liberation” viable in many public institutions, again a vexing issue for many.
The book does offer a valuable guide for those teaching adult workers, beginning with the admonition that teachers have to strive to create a context of mutual respect for their work. Especially in the halls of public colleges it is sometimes too easy for professors to remember the need for a show of respect if we wish to engage our students and even be open to learning from them. In this regard, the reminder that the role of the educator is not just to “fill an empty vessel” with words, but to open the world to students as they explore their hopes and dreams from the perspective of their own lives and so enrich their own education. Greene does provide practical advice, “ground rules for mutual respect and equality”, and offers some good examples of practice to follow.
Greene offers insightful accounts of his personal experience as a miner in the coal industry, a member of UMW Local 750. There he learned that miners in southern Ohio in the 1890s would meet in Robinson’s Cave to organize away from the boss’s surveillance. His discussion of his experience with the Freedom School there and with Highlander in Tennessee led him to arrange for a group of Ohio coal miners to participate in a trip to visit the National Union of Miners in South Wales in 1976. His experience inspired him to help establish the Southern Appalachian Labor School on his return to West Virginia, framed by how Myles Horton described how Highlander structured an adult literacy program make it effective.
These experiences led Greene to survey labor colleges in the U.S. and conclude with a call for “educators, students and other workers” to join worker education programs “to change society…not to remain the inactive objects of history, but instead to become the subjects who make history.” This hopeful conclusion brings to mind an account of the London Corresponding Society, workingmen’s groups with branches across industrializing areas of Britain in the 1790s, a time of growing ferment among English workers under threat of official repression. The Society’s leader, Francis Place, remarked that “The moral effects of the Society were very great indeed. It induced men to read books, instead of spending their time at public houses… It taught them to think, to respect themselves, and to desire to educate their children. It elevated them in their own opinions.” For the English historian E. P. Thomson, the work of the LCS represented “the first stage of the political self-education of a class…”[1] Greene leaves us to wonder how to achieve a like movement, one perhaps far more effectively built within the labor movement than in the public schools.
[1] Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class, p. 155 ( New York, Vintage, 1966).