Thursday, June 26, 2008
Choice Quotes: Joe Berry #3
This post continues the thread of choice quotes from Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower.
From “Getting Down to Work” (114-5):
Our years of schooling tend to convince us that the best way to change anything is to learn all we can about it and then write up our findings and conclusions in the most balanced, rational, complete, and detailed way we can. We have been conditioned to think that finding the full truth about something, whether in our own academic field or our employment situation, will make us free all by itself. Unfortunately, this is not the case. My father, a teacher for over forty years from secondary to graduate school levels, used to toll me that too much formal education tended to make people lose their common sense. He blamed formal education for the fact that it took most teachers until the 1960s and 1970s to realize they needed a union when most carpenters had figured it out by 1900 or 1910. The idea that individually knowing the truth would make us free, without any collective action on our part, was an example, to him, of that loss of common sense. Luckily, even the “overeducated” can still learn, albeit sometimes painfully and slowly. The key to this learning is doing it together.
So, your first step is not to study and write an article. The first step is to find a partner. Combining efforts with another person is much more than doubling your own power and resources. You not only generate ideas and energy from another person, you start to build the base for a worker organization, mutual help and solidarity between fellow workers. This relationship is what makes it possible to keep going when we’re discouraged, helps us avoid the mistakes we can make when angry, and gives us a wider network of people to relate to than any of us have individually. Your second step is to form a committee, even if only a committee of two. The failure of many of our colleagues to understand this is one reason why more has been written about our situation than has been done to change it. Helena, my spouse and (non-tenure track) colleague, tells the story of how, soon after she got actively involved in her AFT local as a California community college part-time English teacher and writer, she was told by one of her mentors, “Writing is not organizing.” It took her a while to figure out what that meant, but she came to embrace it. Of course, we do need to write: articles, newsletters, books, leaflets, picket signs, e-mails, contracts, grievances, and even manifestos. But what moves people into action isn’t writing per se but the communication that builds relationships and makes information meaningful. Writing is part of that communication, but not the only part.