自由學社 ‧ 自由學野
在官方的地圖上，在資本主義底下的金融中心，佔領中環彷彿畫出了一塊「不可能」的空間。這兩個月來，我們嘗試離開金錢掛帥的交易模式，重新掌握自己 的生活、資源、時間和空間，建立自主自治的社區。但同時，我們亦發現種種來自現實及自身的局限，令生活無法自主遂意，迫使我們思考平日隨手拈來的種種理所 當然。由打水、煮食、清潔、發電、空間分配；到對金錢、工作、共享的概念，以至對周圍的社區地理脈絡等的理解；甚至自我身體、心靈的調息和平衡……在這 裡，一切彷彿要從頭學起。我們不禁問：到底從前所經歷的，是怎麼樣的教育和學習，而造成今日我們的無力、無語？
思考教育，我們想起從小要戴起厚眼鏡、背著超重書包的莘莘學子；想起憂心無奈卻仍要帶子女去學鋼琴、游水、繪畫、西班牙文、奧林匹克數的家長；想起 每天已被課程進度、時間表、課外活動、開會行政所壓垮，還要面對不停考核、再進修、再提升的老師；想起為了一紙文憑而背起一身債務，畢業後卻仍無法安居樂 業的青年才幹；想起本身擁有一門手藝的技人、工廠工、農夫，甚至以為學會一種專業就可以無憂的人，轉瞬間面對自己的知識被宣佈過時，被迫再培訓重投勞動市 場……什麼時候開始，教育就只剩下考試、增值、競爭、慾望和金錢？
西班牙無政府主義者Francesc Ferrer提出Free School的概念，以反抗當時被教會操控的西班牙教育制度。今天的課室縱然不再被十誡所規範著，但取而代之的是市場邏輯的無所不在 (omnipresence)。教育的每一個細節，充滿著成本效益的計算，學校成為了資本主義社會裡的工廠，為了日新月異的市場需要，而製造不同的人才 (生產工具)。甚至學校本身就是一個市場，教和學變成了交易的關係，而透過不停製造、淘汰、再製造新的知識標準，令這盤生意可持續。弔詭的是，今天我們仍 會把學校幻想成捍衛知識和自由的堡壘、價值中立理性的庇護所，儘管它的課程內容和編排、考核制度都是為資本市場而設計；儘管教育工作、學習成果，和資源分 配都要依從量化的方法衡量；儘管學習年期的限制，令我們沒有空間消化沉澱、應用、再創造；科目分類的過分專業化，令我們喪失跨向其他知識領域的動力，進而 一步步將我們廢人化(proletarianize)，令我們無法不依附整個勾結的制度而存活，看不到這套邏輯以外的可能性，更加無法思考如何改變現狀。
在佔領中環，面對每天增加的問號，我們找到互相分享、學習和深化討論的動力。同時透過不斷與路過／加入、支持／質疑我們的人對話交流，讓我們尋回一 種在功利社會的人際關係中，消失了的聆聽、感知和表達的本能，過程中一方面堅實自己的信念，亦叫我們重新檢視和反思自己的態度、既有的知識和價值。學習與 不同的個體溝通，或許就是教和學的開始。我們嘗試追溯free school的理念，希望在市場邏輯以外，重新思考教和學的關係。而且我們相信，這並不只是佔領者的問題，也是每一個追求自主生活的人所要思考的問題。
就如佔領中環，free school也是一個「不可能的空間」，在市場主導的環境裡面，嘗試潛越、騎刧，和創造一種資本主義邏輯所企圖抹煞的社區／群體／人與人的關係。free 除了是免費，拒絕以金錢衡量教育；也是透過開放所謂「專業」的知識，令每個人逐步「去廢人化」，實現生活上的自主和自由，例如：學習身體和心靈保健的知 識，可令我們了解、保護和珍惜自己，並思考是什麼制度和工作的壓力，令我們陷入沮喪和通宵達旦地殘害自己。學習不只是傳承知識，更重要的是學習去改變。透 過分享和生產可以應用、改變日常的理論知識和技能，反覆實踐、思考和討論，令改變的種子得以萌芽和成長。
在這場沒有限期、沒有規則、沒有任何既定模式的實驗裏，每個人都是老師、每個人都是學生。我們希望和你一起，共同討論什麼是free school，共同決定教學的內容、方式和時間，希望每個人都以自己的步伐，學習醫學／針灸／推拿／詩／結他／煲湯／地理／太極／純數／物理／縫紉／建屋 ／UFO／星際政治學……並且透過生活的實踐，共同掌握，共同創造知性討論的公共空間，令不同籌疇的知識可以對辯和交流，並打破其界限，重新思考知識是什 麼；將知識「去專業化」，實現社會條件局限以外的實質平等(radical equality)；讓每個人從日常生活開始，重新掌握何謂自主、何謂美好、何謂自由。
一月七日，帶你的學問／技能／口水／好奇／疑問／熱情／理想來！
Shortly after the Occupy Wall Street movement was evicted from their quarters in Zucotti Park, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the city’s sanitation department to dispose of the 5,000 volumes that made up the People’s Library of the movement. Though much has been made of police brutality towards occupiers across North America over the last few weeks, this event has, for the most part, been passed over in silence. The significance of this act, particularly when one considers the pretext of said eviction (the protection of ‘public health’) is blindingly clear, rendering transparent the basic nature of the law.
Consider, first of all, the use of the word ‘public’, which is applicable both to the general welfare that the state purportedly protects as well as Zucotti Park itself. What the term ‘public health’ and ‘public space’ have in common is the fact that the ‘public’ that they designate refers, at one and the same time, to everybody and nobody. The ‘public’ is, in this sense, nothing more than a phantom, an abstraction in whose name the state speaks and legitimates itself. ‘Public space’ is space that is supposedly space that is for everyone’s use, but precisely because everyone has the abstract right to use it, any concrete, actual use of it is in a certain sense an abuse, an infringement upon somebody else’s virtual right to use the space. Public space is always-already occupied by this fugitive ghost, the absent ‘public’. Thus, the only way to ensure that everybody’s right is respected is to leave the space empty. To take up space in a public venue is to stake an illegitimate claim to room that every other member of the ‘public’ has an equal right to. Such is the logic of the ‘citizen’s’ complaint against the occupations movement- that certain selfish miscreants are abusing resources funded by respectable taxpayers.
The term ‘public health’, however, is of much greater interest to us for the purposes of this essay. The very fact that the sanitation department was entrusted with the duty of destroying the books in Zucotti Park speaks volumes about the very nature of the ‘public’ that the state invokes. The ‘public’ is not a group of people, but a certain state of affairs that keeps the people in their assigned places. The ‘public’ is the passive populace from which the state draws its power, and it is content to suffer the state in silence, to allow the state to speak for it, as long as it answers to this name every time the state calls it. The ‘public health’ that the state intends to maintain is the fragmentation, timidity and weakness that keeps the social body in order. ‘Public health’ is what reduces each and every body to nothingness, each and every person to a no-body. That is, the police must stand in the way between a body and what it can do, it has to reduce the body to the lowest point of intensity while confiscating its capacity to act. Once a body becomes enflamed by unhealthy passions, once it is consumed by a death-defying love that can transmit and communicate itself to others, infecting them with the will to live, that is when the police are called in to terminate the virus.
Occupy Wall Street sparked a worldwide movement of which we are a proud part, and the fact that it has resonated with so many nobodies across the planet, that it wants to awaken bodies and minds to their collective power and intensity, this is the ‘unhealthy’ excess that the state cannot tolerate. This is why the books were destroyed that day, because over the course of the last few months books have become something other than dead words on a page that are consumed for private edification and enjoyment. Sometimes, words and ideas pass into acts that are carried out in common, acts that produce possibilities and potentialities that remain unspoken, unwritten, unknown. This is when the ghost of the ‘public’, the collection of nobodies separated from and fearful of one another, the aggregate of individuals united by the protective umbrella of the state, is exorcised by the presence of a community of equals. When this happens, men and women discover what they were always capable of, the creative powers and capacities that they were divorced from by those who tell them that they have nothing intelligent to say, that the running of society is best left to those with the certified ability to decide on behalf of everyone.
At Occupy Central, we have talked and thought more in 56 days than we have in the last 56 months. We have accomplished things that we had hardly thought possible prior to our encounter in this space, we have tested the limits of possibility directly by freeing goods, resources, time, space and the relationships that form within space from the law of value and exchange. Our hunger for knowledge and ideas stems from the immense poverty that capital has inflicted upon each of us, rendering us utterly dependent upon supermarket ‘food’ flown across immense distances and grown under industrial conditions, upon lawyers acquainted with the arcana of legislation, upon technological experts who program the machines and networks that we are plugged into our whole lives, upon economists who dictate our destinies in jargon that we hardly understand, upon doctors who suck up our savings by treating chronic flus, neuroses and anxieties that we could easily have avoided if only we didn’t spend so much of our lives losing sleep at work and worrying over the immense debts that we have to shoulder…’public health’, among other things, is the blight, the sickness of ignorance that afflicts us all, leaving us dependent and destitute.
Keenly aware of the immense spiritual and existential impoverishment that we suffer, we have made attempts to recover the immense wealth of practical knowhow and knowledge that is scattered between us- one of us helps the others to understand the dynamics of the capitalist economy, another teaches us to treat colds through homeopathic means, another teaches us how to make a nutritious vegetarian meal from scratch, using food scraps that are thrown away by vegetable vendors every day. Each of these skills- critical, medical or culinary- has, when shared, increased our collective power to think and to do, to produce a form of being-together that is rich with meaning and possibility. Through the course of our discussions, deliberations and experiments in the communization of knowledge, we hatched the idea of starting a free school, so as to make this experience open to the public.
Before we elaborate on this, it would do us well to spare a few words for the wretched state of education today. Now that the idyll of the ‘ivory tower’, the image of the school as a shelter from the social, political and economic stress of the ‘outside world’ have been demolished by the incursion of the private enterprise into the campus (more on this in our supplementary pamphlet, available soon), now that the school has been thoroughly rationalized and transformed into a processing plant for future proletarians and professionals, it would do us well to excavate the etymological roots of the word ‘school’, in order to assess if its original signification should be retrieved or abandoned for good.
It would do us well to remember that the Greek word ‘skhole’, from which the English ‘school’ derives, is saturated with philosophical significance. The word contains a certain understanding of time and a certain understanding of space, tying the school, the lecture and the discussion to leisureliness and spare time. The school, then, is designated as a space for studious leisure and otiose discussion, wherein thought is given the room and time to gather and develop itself. The term ‘nursery’ supplies a fitting metaphor for this understanding- the school is imagined as a hothouse where the seeds of youth are sown, incubated and tended to with all the care and time that is necessary for saplings to grow.
What this means is that the notion of the school was originally tied to an emphasis upon care, upon taking care and taking the time to (as the prefatory quote indicates) let learners learn. In today’s economic climate, the notion of ‘lifelong learning’ is taken literally by parents who shuttle their four year olds from piano class to Spanish class to ballet class, to graduates who are thrust into the workplace, where their bosses subject them to endless training seminars, who spend significant amounts of their ‘leisure’ time ‘improving’ (a euphemism for ‘working on one’s employability in an intensely competitive job market’) themselves by reading self-improvement manuals and getting crash courses in golf, wine-tasting, transcendental meditation (to put the lid on one’s ‘negative emotions’). Bodies are driven to exhaustion by the discipline of debt, the evaporation of employment opportunities as companies downsize and outsource, the fear of falling behind hungry young vultures with an eye on your job…Today, one is not permitted to ask what or whom knowledge is for. One is commanded to learn, to compete, to adapt to the shifting caprices of market demand, at the risk of being axed and cast on the scrap heap.
In this hell, this purgatory where one is continually placed on trial, the utopian imagination is crushed by the cruelty of the present. And yet, as our occupation proves, utopia is an ever-present possibility that is lodged at the heart of our world, and it is this possibility that capital must exterminate at all costs. Why do we speak of our occupation as a utopia? Simply because, unlike the common understanding of utopia as an imaginary fancy contrived by fantasists, the word ‘utopia’ really refers to a place that, according to the logic that governs this world and determines what is possible/thinkable within it, cannot exist. To say that there is no such place as utopia, is to prohibit it, to render it into a logical impossibility. For capital, the world cannot be anything other than what it is, and it is prepared to back this identity of the world with itself with armed force.
For us, we are not simply content with negating this statement, we are intent upon experimenting with other forms of relationship and other forms of sociality, if only to prove to ourselves that the world can be as rich as our imaginations. We are doing two things at once- negating and critiquing this world from within, while moving beyond it. Nothing could be less foreign to us than the idea of ‘changing educational policy’ or becoming teachers to infiltrate the education system from the inside. The free school is of a piece with our belief that we have to create something other, a space for learning and discussion outside of the institutional domain that, if it spreads beyond its confines, could undermine the very ground upon which institutions stand. The free school will re-connect knowledge with an ethos, a way, a form of life, with our ongoing experimental efforts to live full lives free from hierarchy, exploitation and the sadness of work. It will be a laboratory in which we will test the possibility of breaking with the division between manual and intellectual labor, with the pedagogical model of the teacher who knows and the student who is spoonfed…
Naturally, these are simply a set of rough notes. They do not, in any sense, indicate a clear direction towards which we will move. As the Zapatistas say, the way is made by walking, by asking questions while we walk. We have merely listed a set of questions that have arisen during our discussions, and they are by no means exhaustive. This is a call to fellow conspirators and collaborators to join us in multiplying these questions, in performing and testing provisional answers. We invite you, then, to participate in the General Assembly on the Free School.
“General Assembly on the Free School”
Date: 7 JAN 2012
Time: 3 PM
Location: Occupy Central
G/F, 1, Queen’s Road Central, Central
Please write to us if you are interested in teaching and/or learning any specific subjects and tell us about your opinion on education and Free School.
Our email: occupy.central.hk@gmail.com
Don’t Lament, Experiment!
Occupy Central
Link to the Chinese statement on Free School: http://occupycentralhk.com/?p=1088
Download link for the Free School pamphlet: http://minus.com/mXZJeUm2P
