We are a small collective that participate as individuals in various horizontal anti-hierarchical educational groups and assemblies. We are generally critical of education as a whole and as it has developed as a form of social conditioning to submission, dependence, and subservience. Furthermore we have grown critical of "alternative" education or the various attempts that have been self-identified as "libertarian" education. As libertarian approaches could not possibly be oriented at the individual liberation, how could libertarian education have the individual as its object, we have concluded that libertarian education can only be oriented at a community and its problems and therefore it can only exist as a learning tool within a participating community.
Furthermore, teaching and learning traditionally forms a hierarchical relation between teacher and student. The product of such efforts can not escape their primary authoritarian nature and the result becomes a commodity. Even if the lesson is free, the preparation and administration of teaching becomes a process of producers and consumers. The reason is that teaching has been organized by "groups" and is aimed at students as separate entities, which by default forms a hierarchy. In the few groups that such hierarchies have been addressed and avoided, the "student" still is an individual and learning is a process by the individual. The individual's education can never lead to social change but can only lead to the individual's change in perception and behavior against all others. In a way, libertarian education as has been tried a few times before, may be counteractive to what it proposes.
The student according to our perception and proposals can not and should never be the individual but a group, a community, an assembly, etc. It is the community that has needs for information and skills that dictates what the school teaches. The individual should be part of a group that is learning collectively. It is not that we are opposed to the individual's needs for education but it is an irrelevant activity to libertarian education and irrelevant to the community itself. The real need and definition of libertarian education is education that will bring freedom, and this may only be achieved collectively.
A group may never really develop the need to learn something without reason. An individual could have personal curiosity which the individual could prioritize against other needs. Material conditions always force "groups" to prioritize collective material needs over personal desires. The class, must be formed by a conclusive discussion of what the problem is, how to address the problem, to develop the need for information that must be obtained in a collective manner, as a tool, sufficient to solve the problem. Material problems absolutely need "physics" as a study and as a source of knowledge, as a tool for carrying out the process that is presented as a solution. Poetry, although very desirable, can not be utilized to solve problems such as shelter, water and sanitation, nutrition, health care, transportation needs, protection, etc.
Unless all basic material needs have been addressed adequately in a collective manner for "all" collectively there can never be any priority for "self-improvement" and "spiritual enhancement" of the individual. Physics is of utmost importance to any community, the basis for social organization itself from which "education" is a sub-process developed to meet specific social needs. Finding alternatives to teaching what has been taught for ages is a fallacy. The key is in what has not systematically been avoided from schools. Nowhere in schools, even higher education, will one find a curriculum based on the teaching of social structure development. Nowhere do they teach a community to build and organize a hospital, a water purification and irrigation system, a transportation system, or even a school itself. That has been an art developed by those who control wealth and have the power to decide. Education has been a training system for those that will fill the positions according to structure decided from above.
We do not aim to redefine either "physics" or "education" within the academic, scientific, or educational community, but explore the reasons their definitions have grown to be so obsolete as tools and processes for communities to develop autonomy, sufficiency, and environmental sustainability. The only community we would like to be in and address is the community of people who struggle for life, justice, dignity, self-sufficiency, equality, and freedom. We encourage all to form such communities and engage in the struggle for change and communicate and struggle with all other communities that struggle for the same values.
We do not want to change the world, as it may be difficult, impossible even. We want to contribute in building a whole new world. To do so we must find and define who we are and in this inquiry we will find and define who they are who are preventing us from building this new world. When we do we will work together with those that are doing it already, as equals among equals.
This is an essay of how we came about being what we are, our trajectory sort of speak.
And just so this effort does not get misunderstood as an other effort of alternative progressive departing from urban collective struggle into the wilderness of new-worldism and natural living, we have written this specific critique as representative of a more general critique of things going on all around us. Other similar efforts of criticism will follow.
