Confessions of a recovering communard:
Posted by amy at January 29th, 2006
I spent the better part of the week trying to do this as a podcast, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out my Garage Band and I am resistant to blow the $$ on an upgrade to a program I didn’t know existed a week ago.
In our class forum, Elaine offered the following as a supporting objective to an apprenticeship I taught a few years ago: “students will choose a charity, through the act of consensus, to receive the afghan.” I will confess that my immediate reaction wasn’t words so much as a sound of frustration coming through my nasal cavity. I don’t have a problem with the apprentices * choosing the charity, although in this situation I had picked out a group called Erin’s Afghan’s as the recipients because I thought inner city kids might be able to relate to an organization who provided afghans and fully loaded backpacks to boys and girls ripped from their homes and literally dumped into foster care. I remember picking out the charity before our first meeting as a deliberate action, I didn’t want to distract my apprentices from the process of learning to knit and this was an organization that for some reason really tugged at my heartstrings.
It was, instead, the idea of choosing a charity by consensus that irked me. Consensus is a wonderful idea in theory but in my experience, may be one of the surest ways to kill debate and actually encourage apathy. And I say this as a former believer. In my early twenties I was quite involved in a number of leftist causes, including a well-known intentional community that did some pioneering work regarding consensus. The idea of exhaustive debate and reconciliation is liberating and restraining at the same time and requires the explicit consent of the participants. To drop the idea, let alone the expectation of consensus on a group of educationally disadvantaged pre-teens is misguided.
As I was preparing this post, I kept thinking about the early days of the voter registration drives in the south in the early 1960s. It didn’t take long for the white northern students to realize they needed to educate the locals about voting, so in many communities “voter education” programs gave birth to “voter registration” which then gave birth to the political organizing and political parties, but it took time. Days and weeks turned into months and years. To walk in and expect people who have never voted before to form their own progressive political party would be setting them up for failure.
I find consensus decision making more demanding than forming a political party because you need agreement at every stage of the process and you simultaneously water down all decisions that are made while losing less invested members through attrition in the process. Unless everyone in the group is educated in consensus and freely chose it as the process by which all decision are made, to set consensus decision making up as a subsequent goal would be unrealistic at best and irresponsible at worst.
I am still working out the pedagogical implications for this and will explore that in my next post.
* - Citizen Schools is based on a apprenticeship model and my students were considered apprentices.
