Erasmo Calzadilla
And the whole process is managed and legitimated by a whole army of high-level psychologists and pedagogues in the name of the common Good.
I was a university professor for a number of years and a high school teacher for some months. During this time, I never once heard anyone say anything about libertarian teaching methods. I met dissident teachers, disaffected teachers, teachers who didn’t give two shits about anything, students who were delinquents, students who were rebellious, unstable or alienated.
But I never came across anyone who was coherently and systematically in favor of any of the following principles:
The song by Pink Floyd where I found the title for this post had given me reason to think that, somewhere in the world, there had to be a movement opposed to traditional, repressive education. I was seeing a ray of hope, but didn’t know where it was coming from. Only many years later would I discover the libertarian pedagogy movement.
One of its founders had been the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer y Guardia. Around 1901, in Barcelona, Ferrer y Guardia had founded the Modern School, an institution where children of both genders and of every social class (something revolutionary for the time) would learn at their own pace, through different games.
The initiative was so disturbing for the owners of the country’s spiritual monopoly at the time (the Church and State), that they led a war against Ferrer y Guardia and did not stop until he was lying dead in a mass grave somewhere.
Three of the martyr’s reflections can help us get a sense of what his enemies were so afraid of.
Fifty years later, in revolutionary Cuba, Ferrer y Guardia would not have been put before a firing squad, true, but he could well have been imprisoned or harassed. What’s certain is that he would never have been able to create a school or to publish anything that Fidel Castro could not agree with.
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