The Role of Activist Pedagogy in Combating Dehumanization, Enhancing Personal Agency, and Establishing Shared Life

• In Event: Activist Pedagogy, Critical-Democratic Citizenship, and Shared Education in Divided Societies: International Perspectives and Next Practices

Abstract

There are manifold forms of crippling and disempowering human agency. Most notable are the phenomena of enslavement, tyranny, racism, male chauvinism, castes, religious fundamentalism, authoritarian hierarchies, social exclusion, impoverishment, and political populism. In the 20th century humanity witnessed new peaks of injuring human agency by means of totalitarian regimes, concentration camps, workaholism, technocratic thinking, and the commercialization of everyday life. In the context of our 21st century global reality, the following forms of dehumanization are mostly evident: the colonization of the mind by digital technology, obsessive consumerism, and the growing alienation from one’s own authentic self, from social relations, from the riches of culture, as well as from the natural environment. It seems that Paulo Frieire summarized best these phenomena in stating right in the beginning of his Pedagogy of the Oppressed that dehumanization has been the central problem of humanity and that the principal challenge of education is to lead the struggle toward a more humane and just society.
Having in the background the above critiques of diluting human agency, it is my aim in this paper to introduce activist pedagogy as an educational strategy to prevent, counter and combat such mechanisms of dehumanization, as well as to offer ways for regenerating and empowering aspects of human agency – for the sake of enabling personal fulfillment and flourishing as well as for the establishing a humane and just common good that develops out of shared life and shared education.
In my discussion I am by no means liming myself to the discourse of critical pedagogy: “to struggle for ways in which the pedagogical can be made more political and the political made more pedagogical”. Of equal importance are the neo-Aristotelian versions of human development by means of perfectionist self-actualization, exercising the essential human capabilities, and towards human flourishing and rational autonomy. Similarly of great relevance are the existentialist insights stressing the transformation from inert ways of life towards authentic self-creation and self-fashioning as well as the employment of creative and social imagination.
It seems that Martin Buber – who witnessed the mass atrocities of the 20th century, developed the most notable paradigm of dialogical education, and lead in Israel a political agenda for shared life and shared education – it is his text that fits best to conclude this short presentation:

“Today host upon host of men have everywhere sunk into the slavery of collectives, and each collective is the supreme authority for its own slaves … This is true, not only for the totalitarian countries, but also for the parties and party-like groups in the so-called democracies. Men who have so lost themselves to the collective Moloch cannot be rescued from it by any reference, however eloquent, to the absolute whose kingdom the Moloch has usurped. One has to begin by pointing to that sphere where man himself, in the hours of utter solitude, occasionally becomes aware of the disease through sudden pain: by pointing the relations of the individual to his own self”.

Author

• Nimrod Aloni, Hakibbutzim College of Education