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Julie Andrzejewski

I have to thank Charles for bringing this article to my attention. It’s long so I publish an extract from it and refer you to the site for more.

Reader discretion is advised: Reports of assassination of activists.

Education for Global Citizenship and Social Responsibility

by Julie Andrzejewski & John Alessio

http://tinyurl.com/yctc5ndy

On November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa, an Ogoni author and Nobel peace prize nominee, was executed for trying to stop the ecological devastation wrought by Royal/Dutch Shell Oil Company and the murders and human rights violations against the Ogoni people by the Nigerian government on behalf of Shell (Sachs, 1996, p. 11).

Similarly, Chico Mendez was assassinated in 1988 for trying to protect the jobs of Brazilian rubber tappers and stop deforestation of the Amazon rainforest by wealthy cattle ranchers (Sachs, 1995, pp.1-2). How do these events pertain to people in the United States? Are teachers prepared to help their students develop the global consciousness needed to support human rights and ecological sustainability?

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John Alessio

Our educational experiences did not provide us with the information and tools to understand what is happening in the world, how it affects our lives, the lives of others and the planet itself. We were not taught how we, as ordinary (non-rich) people, might live our lives and actively participate in creating a safer, more humane, sustainable world.

Much of what I, Andrzejewski, now teach, I did not learn in my formal education. As a result of social movements, I encountered information that was never addressed in all of my years of schooling. Non-profit alternative press helped me realize that certain perspectives were also not represented in the news media I normally read.

Information from these sources challenged and contradicted many things I had learned in my formal education. They connected deeply with my own life experiences, as a female, first-generation college graduate, whose mother worked as a retail clerk and whose father was chronically underemployed. My experiences with this new information sparked a life-long self-education process through which I analyzed, questioned and investigated the conventional wisdom of many issues.

As the son of Italian immigrants, I, Alessio, was taught in school that immigrants came to the United States to escape the hardships of their backward cultures. What I learned from my father, and later from reading more accurate accounts of Italian migration, was that southern Italians were recruited with promises of riches by American companies seeking cheap labor. My father, like so many others, found himself working twelve hours a day in unsafe coal mines for essentially no pay. His boat fare was taken out of his paycheck, so he was forced to buy food on credit from the company store.

Each “payday” he received no money, only a note saying how much he owed the company. At a certain point the store cut off his credit denying him even a loaf of bread for his children. My father became a union organizer to seek basic rights and some sense of dignity. I did not learn about the deception and exploitation of immigrants in school, nor the importance of unions to millions of workers. Personal experiences such as this made me acutely aware of other major gaps and forms of misinformation in my education.

The fact that we had to engage in self re-education might not seem very startling or distressing if students in the United States today were learning very different things than what we learned. However, in spite of the sincere efforts and dedication of talented educators in underfunded schools, the students in our classes seem to arrive at the university with many of the same myths and misinformation that took us years to investigate and unravel.

With few exceptions, the basic information and skills taught have remained, by and large, the same for many years. Despite two decades of various state rules and mandates for multicultural, gender-fair education, most school districts, lacking in resources and overwhelmed with problems, have found ways to meet the surface requirements of such rules while changing very little actual content. In far too many schools, Columbus still “discovered America.” George Washington is still the “father” of “our” country. History is still too often the stories of great white males with the few “exceptional” women and people of color added for “diversity.”

The U.S. is presented as the best nation in the world; one which, despite a few “mistakes,” fights for human rights and democracy. Other countries are primarily studied for the natural resources available in them. People from other countries are generally portrayed as less knowledgeable, less advanced technologically and often incapable of handling their own country’s affairs. Science is presented as a value-neutral system representing the only accurate information in the world, and always working for the betterment of society. Nature is often portrayed as a commodity, to be exploited, sold or altered for human consumption or profit. Democracy is presented as the study of how effectively the United States government works within the comforting system of checks and balances. The familiar list goes on.

It is widely acknowledged that education rarely challenges the prevailing paradigms and interests of national governments, wealthy elites, or dominant groups, whatever the economic or political system. In fact, there is a substantial body of literature documenting the revision and misrepresentation of history, education, and science in the United States (Charnes, 1984; Fitzgerald 1979; Harding 1993; Loewen 1995; Zinn 1995).

Such myths, lies, and distortions serve to certify the superiority of certain groups, maintain their dominance and privileges and project their view of the world. This is done by justifying their actions or policies, omitting differing perspectives, discouraging student concern or questions and downplaying the significance of the actions of ordinary people for constructive social change. Misinformation survives from generation to generation if teachers teach what they have been taught. As teachers, we have a responsibility to critically review our own education and seek out viewpoints that were not represented.

(For more of the book, go here: http://tinyurl.com/yctc5ndy.)