Learning to Teach/Teaching to Learn: Love, Hope, and Political Inversion in Troubled Times

• In Event: Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, and Opening Imaginations to the Liberating Possibilities of Creative Societies

Abstract

Reading closely—and with humility—Illich’s In the Mirror of the Past (1992) this paper will focus on how dominant assumptions about independence and success often found in schools impact the day-to-day kinds of interpretations and actions that not only make global capitalism possible but also undermine efforts to teach toward multispecies justice and planetary peace. Reflecting on a love for—and having tensions with—teaching high school in Detroit and Boston, the authors share examples from studying Illich that call attention to the realities that even with hope present in their teaching, peace was too often lost in the embodiment of a critical education without learning to teach for peace actively but not violently and mechanistically.

Authors

• John Joseph Lupinacci, Washington State University - Pullman

• Mary Joan Ward Lupinacci