Transcending Yonder Social Mill

Transcending Yonder Social Mill
Critical Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy

“To enable students to envision alternatives, to inspire them to assume the responsibility for collectively recreating society.” (97)

While certainly the quoted phrase above sounds noble, I find it to be endlessly troublesome. This pedagogy is just bursting at the seams with politics, which happens to be my least favorite subject. Conflict lies at its center. People cannot seem to discuss it without descending into impassioned argument, even when they know relatively little about the topic at hand. Perhaps the trouble is that what we are striving to change is not one singular idea existing ‘out there;’ it resides in the mind of each individual. By the nature of society, each individual, consciously or unconsciously, plays a major role in its construction and perpetuation. In interacting with others, each models ‘correct’ behavior and reacts to ‘incorrect’ behavior, as Lord Tennyson observes in his “In Memoriam:” “For ‘ground in yonder social mill / We rub each other’s angles down’” (89 ll. 39-40), and so we already collectively create society.

Emily Dickinson observes the conflict inherent in socially constructed truth; it privileges the most commonly held belief and views other, foreign ideas as subversive and threatening:

“Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness. / 'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails. / Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, -- you're straightway dangerous, / And handled with a chain.”

To envision alternative ideas is not only to threaten others, it creates a division in one’s own mind between others’ ideas, contained in one’s own mind, and one’s own ideas, ultimately dividing oneself in two. George points out this dualistic phenomenon in Finlay and Faith’s students who felt a “gulf that caused them to feel oppressed despite acknowledged economic privilege” (103), one that I can speak to from personal experience. This ‘oppression’ manifests in the way I perceive choice in my life. I wonder whether I truly want to be “funnel[ed] … into [an] appropriate middle class job” or if there is some other possibility that I cannot currently perceive due to my social ‘training’ that tells me the social structure in which I live is “natural, as unquestionable … as air” (96). While in many ways I reject the opportunities presented to me as the ones I should take, I also do not want to lose access to them.

This entire business of teaching students “to envision alternatives, to inspire them to assume the responsibility for collectively recreating society” (97) is simultaneously a gift and a curse. We cannot in good conscience mould young, peaceful minds, into troubled, social threats. This is not to say we should abandon the endeavor, but we cannot force it upon them, nor should we sneakily insert it into benign-appearing coursework. It must be something that a student chooses for himself and we must make him aware of the consequences.