Learning to Teach/Teaching to Learn: Hope, Joy, and Political Inversion for Revolutionary Friendships

• In Event: Establishment De-Zombified: Moved by Stories of Illich, Revolutionary Friendship, Inversion, and a Hospitality of Belonging

Abstract

Recognizing the pervasive hopelessness of neoliberal capitalism and its restrictive conceptions of hope and joy in conjunction with love and radical friendships; this paper shares stories that education supportive of addressing the ills of the Anthropocene requires rethinking deeply rooted understandings of hierarchy, dependency, and difference and embracing the messiness of responding to the great possibilities of community all around us when we turn our attention to a liberated notion of friendship and mutual aid. Illich and Verne (1976) in Imprisoned in the Global Classroom wrote vividly of the rise of a Carceral State and they urge important questions of proposed “social goods” posited by authoritarian guardians of Western industrial cultural watching over infantilized societies. However, there is often a tension in how rethinking and posing challenges to institutionalization is embodied in Western education. This work posits that through political inversion and through stories of learning with Illich and within revolutionary friendships there is most certainly a hope for a humanity dezombified from learning to balance hope and joy that creatively coexists with grief and suffering.

Authors

• John J. Lupinacci, Washington State University

• Brandon Edwards-Schuth, Washington State University