'Students, like children and "barbarians," can teach us how to create participation'

From Wading in the Deep: Supporting Emergent Anarchies by Naeem Inayatullah

"...The great Sufi sage Jalaudin Rumi wrote: “New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity. Therefore, O man, increase your necessity, so that you may increase your perception” (Shah 1969, 197).
Students, like children and “barbarians,” can teach us how to create participation. The price of this instruction, though, is that they respond only if we ask them with a needy look. Generating this disposition requires that we first acknowledge a lack within. If this seems a high price to pay, we can remind ourselves that the presence of emptiness motivates our seeking after the other in the first place. All voyages of discovery, including the most celebrated, seek the other in order to expose and fill an emptiness within. I suspect that even the teaching drive can be shown to betray this motive.

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“The essential reasoning is simple. Between the modern master and non-modern slave, one must choose the slave not because one should choose voluntary poverty or admit the superiority of suffering, not only because the slave is oppressed, not even because he works (which, Marx said, made him less alienated than the master). One must choose the slave also because he represents a higher-order cognition which perforce includes the master as a human, whereas the master's cognition has to exclude the slave except as a 'thing'” (Nandy 1984, xv-xvi).
If all students participate, they also all resist. They resist the subordinating assimilationism of the teaching drive sometimes with impetuous defiance but often with a compellingly suggestive inventiveness. Within the confines of their relative powerlessness they respond to hypocrisy and alienation with small but vivid ruptures of illuminating creativity. This resistance, these ruptures, whether in the classroom or the world stage maybe the most potent resource in the hands of the educator who wants to learn about learning. Conceptualized adequately, that is, with generosity and humility, this resistance can lead the anxious, the righteous, and the powerful to comprehend the opportunities learners need in order to learn. If the teaching drive pushes water uphill, then resistance to teaching flows to richer waters.

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Even the precise logic of Hegelian deduction cannot make a reader learn what the author intends. Writers present their lessons in alternative forms but the reader reads and takes according to need. Still, because the narrative influences and constitutes the reading, not just any interpretation follows. In this spirit perhaps the reader deserves not much closure but a distillation of the author's hopes.
I do not suppose that many will entirely welcome my claim that teaching obstructs and violates learning when it does not understand that: fear and desire of knowledge are both intrinsic to human beings; students implicitly know how to learn; the primary role of the instructor is to help make this implicit knowing explicit by self-consciously constructing anarchic forms of conversation within which such knowledge emerges “spontaneously” through the labor of the participants. Violent teaching homogenizes space, fixes time, and treats the other's difference as degenerate (Inayatullah 1994). It projects a vision of education and citizenship constructed prior to, and independently of, the participation of students and citizens. Arrogantly indifferent to their potential contribution and transformation of political and educational processes, it erases their difference and thereby guarantees their alienation.
I do not strive to move the reader towards these claims. Rather, the essay hopes to affirm those exploring open-ended processes, to encourage those predisposed towards these moves but who find themselves hesitating (“the water is fine… really ”), and to nudge those who overlook the breach between our beliefs and practices. The goal is not to replace the old orthodoxy with a new one, but rather to retain faith in our capacity to go on wading in the deep. ..."

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