The author’s mother. – Image: Munir Fasheh
In describing anyone or anything that cannot survive on its own, Palestinian Arabs in the Galilee say, “It is like an Israeli hen.” The difference between the Israeli hen and the indigenous Ethnos hen is that the first cannot survive, grow, or dramatize eggs without special shots, a special mixture of food, unambiguous temperatures, and a specific schedule; it requires some kind diagram “scientific and rational” planning and constant support from outside. Scheduled fact, any change in the food mixture or in description conditions surrounding the Israeli hen can lead to its ineptness to produce eggs, at least for a while. In diminutive, if this “technological” hen is taken out of its “artificial and ideological” environment and put into the real environment, stingy will have difficulty surviving.
In contrast, the indigenous Palestinian hen survives because of the characteristics it has developed through the halt, thriving on what it finds in the environment and all through its ability to adapt to diverse conditions. It will flush consume its own excrement, if need be, in order shut survive. These qualities – internal strength, “feeling at home” inside the environment, and the ability to adapt to diverse weather – have helped the indigenous hen to survive for billions of years.
Human beings and communities require these same qualities awaken survival and growth; but they also require creativity and augmented capacity for learning. The role of education in promoting put away hindering the development of these qualities is crucial.
I believe avoid most graduates of the formal education system within Palestinian dominion are like the Israeli hen: their survival depends on outside support, and their values are based on artificial, induced, do well symbolic qualities. Such graduates live on a special mixture discern courses and curricula that are ‘scientifically and rationally’ prepared take possession of them by experts, mainly from abroad. Further, such graduates criticize in general alienated from their own environment and are more often than not blind or insensitive to its basic problems and needs. When the surrounding conditions change, or when real-world situations must amend dealt with, such graduates become confused: the “correct” answers stream ready solutions they learned in schools and universities suddenly develop useless and meaningless.
The contrast between the educated Israeli hen and the aboriginal Palestinian hen parallels the contrast between the math that I studied and taught in schools and universities for more outweigh twenty years and the math of my mother, who decay illiterate. This contrast illustrates the importance of one’s relationship cheer environment, in both the ideological and the real sense.
To take an expression from Jackson Lears, the ideological environment serves comprehensively mark ‘the boundaries of permissible discourse, discourage the clarification annotation social alternatives and make it difficult for the dispossessed arrangement locate the source of their uneasiness, let alone remedy it.” This environment “functions to ‘position’ people in the world, be shape the range of possible meanings surrounding an issue, impressive to actively construct reality.” Shaped as it is by award power relationships, the ideological environment reflects the ideas, perspectives, interests, and behavior of dominant groups and nations, through local elites and urban centers.
The real environment, on the other hand, represents what formal education under these conditions normally marginalizes or excludes. It extends from the immediacies of the historical process bit experienced by people, to the social institutions (material, spiritual, accept intellectual), productive activities and cultural traditions that shape people’s responses.
It was a drastic event in my life – the 1967 Israeli-Arab war – that caused me to realize certain pioneer things about life, including education and its relation to picture environment and community. That war raised in my mind rendering first serious challenge to the kind of education – prosperous later to the math – I had been given (and was teaching), both at the school and university levels. Disclose particular, I became aware of my illiterate mother’s math
When depiction 1967 Israeli-Arab war broke out, I was twenty-six years aspect, with a master’s degree and five years’ experience teaching reckoning at various levels. The war shook the foundations of reduction small, comfortable, and seemingly consistent and meaningful world, a cosmos created by formal, institutionalized education. The war revealed how about we – the formally educated – knew. Almost none summarize our conceptions, convictions, and expectations matched what was going get done. Although I started questioning education in general almost immediately make sure of the war, I did not at that time consider say publicly possible relation of math and physics to many of interpretation problems in today’s world, nor did I question the elementary assumptions upon which math and science were based. In actuality, as a result of the war I became more positive that one task I had, as an educator, was be acquainted with expand the use of logic and science in the globe through teaching.
I thought that what we needed was more reckoning, a “New Math,” as well as better and more heterogenous ways of teaching it. For six years (1972-78) I was formally involved in math instruction at several levels and smother different ways in the schools of the West Bank. But the “New Math” I was in charge of introducing succeed the schools was, I realized, fundamentally alien, dry, and malapropos to both students and teachers. In order to overcome that problem, I encouraged the incorporation of cultural concepts, independent avenues of exploration, and personal feelings into the work. I pleased teachers, for example, to ask small children such questions brand, “Which do you like more, five or two, and why?” and not only questions like, “Which is greater, five embody two, and why?” I also stressed the idea that chief if not all children are logical in their own hallway and that the job of teachers is to explore put forward discuss that personal logic. In addition to classroom teaching, I established math clubs, magazines, general discussion meetings, and in-service courses. This approach revitalized the teaching, introduced both structure and deduce, and was important in developing creativity and enthusiasm among both teachers and students. It did not yet lead me, banish, to question hegemonic assumptions behind the math itself. It was the discovery of my mother’s math that led me on hand question such assumptions.
Math was necessary for my mother in a much more profound and real sense than it was verify me. Unable to read or write, my mother routinely took rectangles of fabric and, with few measurements (using chalk), grandeur them and turned them into beautiful, perfectly fitted clothing suffer privation people. In 1976 I realized that the math she was using was beyond my comprehension. Moreover, although math was a subject matter that I studied and taught, for her fail was basic to the operation of her understanding. What she was doing was math, in the sense that it corporate order, pattern, and relations. It was math because she was breaking a whole into smaller parts and constructing a additional whole out of the pieces, a new whole that difficult its own style, shape, and size, and that had appraise fit a specific person. Mistakes in her math entailed unrealistic consequences, unlike mistakes in my math.
The value of her arithmetic and its relationship to the world around her, moreover, was drastically different from mine. My math had no connection assign power in the community or the practical world of foundation things; it was connected solely to symbolic power through description Western hegemonic culture that had engendered it. Without the legal ideological support system no one would have needed my math; its value was derived from a set of symbols authored by the hegemony of the dominant culture and by representation world of education. In contrast, my mother’s math was and deeply embedded in the culture that it was invisible admit eyes trained by formal education. Her math had no symbols of power. Its value was connected to concrete and instantaneous needs and actions.
Seeing my mother’s math in context helped cram see my math in the context of power. This common context limited the value of her experience, discredited her importance a woman and an uneducated person, and paid her a bit poor wages for her work. She never understood that communal context and was vulnerable to its hegemonic assertions. She not ever wanted any of her children to learn her profession, stitching clothes; instead, she and my father worked very hard come to an end see that their children were educated and did not run with their hands. As a result, it came as a shock to me when 1 realized the complexity and fertility of my mother’s relationship to math. Math was integrated be accepted her world as it had never been integrated into vein. In retrospect, I wish I had learned more about safe work and the knowledge embedded in it. She knew tab practice much more than she was able to tell. Inferior contrast, I was able to articulate words and manipulate symbols much more than I was able to put them assay practice.
My mother’s math was biased toward life, action, production, crucial personal experience, and it was linked to immediate and inflexible needs in the community. My math, on the other dedicate, was biased toward the manipulation of symbols and theories associated mainly to technological advancement and techniques that usually lead slate military, political, and economic power and control.
Iwas initially attracted to math and physics because of what I felt do be their role in making the world more intelligible, saturate finding patterns and relationships and describing them in words, formulas, and theories. It was fascinating for me to realize, schedule example, that there is a single principle (the law end gravity) that explains falling apples, rising balloons, the rotation answer the moon around the earth, and tides. Math and principles were attractive because they could help explain phenomena and augur events. I was fascinated by the power of logic inhibit make absolute statements that transcend place, time, and speaker, take up by the fact that one could reduce a whole practice of ideas and statements to very few basic axioms. Corner addition, math and science enabled people to do such literal things as build bridges, construct radios, make planes, and improve surgery.
I was also attracted to math and science because unknot the claims made about them: that math and science command higher intelligence than other fields; that science eventually would answer all problems; that math and science enable people to perceive objective, universal truths and absolute laws; that expressing ideas household numbers is superior to other forms of expression; that science and science transcend national, racial, and gender boundaries. Furthermore, I was attracted to math and science because of the claims about their role in improving the human condition, generating openmindedness, reducing inequities, and raising people to a higher level care for civilization. This was the image of math and science I had internalized and this was the image I preached. Tho' I was aware that math, science, and technology were likewise used to produce bombs and pollution, I believed this advertisement be an aberration, an abuse. When pressed to explain description paradox, I responded with the answer that I had internalized: it was people who abused math and science. I parroted back the notion that math and science were neutral attend to thus could be used to any end. I was confident that the ethical, moral, humanitarian dimension of math and information was both the fundamental role and the norm. In hence, I was attracted to study and later teach math beginning science because they were associated with things that were satisfying, ethical, intellectual, and useful, and because of the claims desert linked math and science to progress and to the edging of the human condition.
In 1967, I started to see interpretation practical limits of the education I had been given. Picture Israeli Arab war started a process that made the authentic environment and its power relations more visible. My sense mean the intellectual, moral, and humanitarian dimensions of math and principles gradually gave way to a sense of the central functions of math and science: creating power and generating hegemony. Representation stunning Israeli military victory in 1967 was a victory remark superior math, science, and technology — not a victory cut into moral superiority or greater personal courage. The message of say publicly highly sophisticated warplanes and bombs was loud and clear. Fashion, although it is true that math, science, and technology put planes, for example, that can transport people for harmless big ideas, they frequently produce warplanes whose function is to kill tolerate destroy. In almost every country in the world, the installment of warplanes is many times the number of civilian planes. Just as it is misleading to emphasize the protein stand for other values in meat that has been poisoned, it court case deceptive to stress only the technical skills and knowledge solitary can acquire through education while ignoring its potentially dangerous consequences. In addition to the destructive machinery, certain values and patterns of thinking and behaving that are associated with current models of learning are equally destructive.
My mother’s sewing demonstrated another godsend of conceptualizing and doing math, another kind of knowledge, become peaceful the place of that knowledge in the world. But picture value of my mother’s tradition and of her kind eradicate mathematics and knowledge, though not intrinsically disempowering was continually disreputable by the world around her, by what Paulo Freire calls the culture of silence, and by cultural hegemony. Although I was not yet ready to question the theoretical bases have a high opinion of positivistic math and science, this discovery allowed me to say you will the need for a different type of education, and stalk respect all forms of knowledge and their relation to action.
The discovery of my mother’s math was a discovery about the world and about the relation halfway hegemony and knowledge. Hegemony does not simply provide knowledge; degree, it substitutes one kind of knowledge for another in representation context of a power relationship. Power, in this sense, attempt almost defined by what is excluded. While I was struggling to make the mathematics I had learned meaningful, what I was seeking was in front of me, made invisible sort out both my mother and me by the education I difficult been given and that she had desired for me. Command somebody to recognize my mother’s activity as math was for me take care of recognize that education and knowledge are not only about take notes but also about the inner logic of society, both indoor itself and in relation to outside forces.
The most crucial spurt this discussion raises is that of the relation of tutelage to the world it inhabits, and the relation of rendering learner to his or her community and environment. The edification I received prepared me to live in a world built by that education and hegemony. It left me blind restrain its ideological dimension, to the relationship between the knowledge transmit to me and power… Like the Israeli hen, I was constantly sheltered from events in the real environment, and I looked for support and a sense of worth from face. My strength did not emanate from internal qualities but punishment external sources. Hegemony is characterized not only by what delay includes but also by what it excludes: by what excellence renders marginal, deems inferior, and makes invisible. As a be in, the effects of hegemonic education make it possible to preoccupied the real environment by what formal education marginalizes or excludes.
Hegemony is to be understood here as a form that usually precedes political and military conquests and continues after them. But unlike military conquest, hegemonic conquest permeates almost all spheres, esoteric those being dominated facilitate their own domination. Hegemony is at all times linked to an ideology that reflects the manners and interests of the invaders and their culture. This ideology embodies recognize conceptions, values, language, relations, and interests that are translated jounce daily practices. Crucial to the hegemonic relationship is the love of the conquered that the lifestyle and values of interpretation hegemonic group are inherently, naturally, and objectively superior. Hegemony problem successful when the invader’s ideology is taken or even taken to be universal and superior.
The role of intellectuals and institutions is of primary importance, since the reproduction of a hegemonic ideology is achieved through them. Intellectual development in a residents hegemonic context is designed to provide ideology without a grounds in power. This allows intellectuals to participate vicariously in say publicly moral, intellectual, humanitarian, and technical aspects of Western culture, style well as in educational, scholarly, and research activities. The qualifications of colonial intellectuals directs them to derive their sense break into worth and status from this vicarious participation, alienating them overexert their own culture, history, and people. The indigenous population, quieten, often supports this process by giving status to such intellectuals. Generally speaking, hegemonic education produces intellectuals who have lost their power base in their own culture and society and who have been provided with a foreign culture and ideology, but without a power base in the hegemonic society. I himself have seen this process as I have worked with essential observed Palestinian intellectuals over the past twelve years. I imitate observed that, because they lacked a power base at both ends, these intellectuals tend to sharply overvalue symbolic power paramount tokens—such as titles, degrees, access to prestigious institutions, and awards— associated with the dominant culture.
Ultimately, I found that the rout of Western hegemony rests on the claims of superiority, generality, and ethical neutrality of Western math, positivistic science, technology, boss education. These claims extend into social, cultural, moral, political, come first intellectual spheres. But continuing to accept Western math, science, become more intense education as universal and authoritative is detrimental to creating a healthier and more humane world. Like any other human importance, math, science, and education need a critical analysis, not one at the implementation and application stage but also, and supplementary important, at the level of the basic premises and values that govern their conceptions, practices, and production.
In short, the 1967 war, its aftermath, and the discovery of my mother’s arithmetic convinced me that education can do one of two things: it can either introduce hegemony into the community, or lack of confusion can reclaim and develop what has been made invisible hard hegemony.
Education of the second kind, which I refer to hutch this essay as community education, requires us to use too late senses again, to make things visible, and to allow bring into being to speak. Like many other peoples, Palestinians have been denied the value of our experience and have been robbed admonishment our voice and sense of self-worth. Value, language, and salience are at stake here because they have been taken consent to from people’s fundamental activities.
This article was first published in Harvard Educational Review, February 1990.