Jimmy Santiago Baca found freedom while confined in an isolation cell in Arizona’s Yuma Prison. He found it in learning simply to refuse to comply with the orders of his jailers, merely ignoring them instead.
Read moreLiberating Imprisonment
Those who erect prisons and then lock people up within them may, altogether irrespective of the prison-builders' own intentions, end up liberating the very persons they have so imprisoned. Those whom such prisons are designed to hold captive may, through that very captivity, find themselves set free at last--inalienably so: never again at risk of being held captive by any captors. Henceforth, their capacity will always exceed their captivity, springing open their prison doors, no matter how tightly locked they may remain.
Read moreWhat Education Is For
Education is undergoing the process of learning just what we are, in order that we might then at last truly and fully become it. In turn, when we blossom into what we have at last learned we are, we become in effect the opening of space wherein all the world as well has room to bloom, like a rose.
Read moreBasic Training--and Training, Basically
Training is conditioning for doing determined things in determined settings in order to achieve determined ends. It is not pursued for its own sake, but always for the sake of something else. To train is to make "fit" for doing something, "qualified" or "proficient" at doing it, able to do it effectively with reliable regularity.
Read moreLearning Who We Are
So who are we? The answer given to that question depends on the eyes through which we are being viewed. If we are seen through the eye of modern science, then what we are is only what is measurable and quantifiable about us at any given moment. If, however, we are viewed not through the eye of science but through the eye of love, then we are something else altogether. What love sees in us is not limited to what we have already achieved, to the actuality of us at the moment we are seen. What loves sees in us is all that of which we are capable--our full potential, regardless of how much of that defining potential we may have actualized at any given time, or even all that we may actualize throughout our entire lifetime.
Read moreEducation? For What?
There are two ways to wash the dishes. One way is to wash the dishes in order to get them clean. The other way is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.
Read moreConducive Power: The Power of the Open Hand
Conducive power is the power of softness. What is soft is gentle. It is mild-mannered, comfortable and comforting, easy and easing. Whatever may come, what is soft remains calm and undisturbed, and induces ("brings into") calmness in whatever is disturbed. The word soft itself ultimately derives from the Proto-Germanic root *som, which meant "fitting, agreeable." The power of love, the power of the open hand, is soft power.
Read moreCoercive Power: The Power of the Closed Fist
The greater coercive power grows, the greater the number of those it puts behind bars, and the greater the number of bars with which it contains them. Eventually, those over whom coercive power is exercised can no longer even see the world beyond the bars that enclose them, confining them in their prisons. Their world itself shrinks down to the size of their prison cell.
Read moreThe Use and Abuse of Blindness (8)
Whatever the expectations others may lay upon us, we all have a natural tendency, one to which for the most part we are ourselves blind, to fulfill those expectations. Drawing upon that tendency, expectation itself tends to engender the very thing it expects. Not only do we have a tendency to try to live up to whatever high expectations of us we experience others as having. We have no less of a tendency to to try to live down to whatever low expectation we experience them as having for us, as well.
Read moreThe Use and Abuse of Blindness (7)
Both Milton Mayer’s confidant’s and Valeria Luiselli’s moments of restoring vision are occasioned by passing remarks from their own childen. Furthermore, both invove shame. However, the dynamics of that shame differ significantly in the two cases.
Read more