Conversations in Korea
After the excitement of attending a first international conference, I find many of the formal programs rather predictable. What makes many conferences worth the time and money spent are the conversations that happen during the breaks, at meals, or at night over drinks. Of course they may be triggered by something said at the formal sessions, but not always.
We give such encounters the grand name of “networking.” Since veteran delegates usually complain about the formal sessions, and yet find the informal and side discussions fruitful, I wonder why we don’t reduce the time for the formal sessions and give more space for chance and self-organized meetings.
One of my interesting conversations here in Korea is with Carlos. The name evokes the almost mythical terrorist in the 80s. But though Carlos Torres admits to having been a Marxist as a young man in Argentina, he describes himself today as an anarchist.
When I first heard his name, I wondered if he is the professor in California who mentored Sung-sang, the Korean Ph.D candidate who interviewed me about popular education in the Philippines for his thesis on the influence of Paolo Freire in South Korea and in the Philippines.
Happily, he is. So I asked him “How did you get into popular education and Freire?” He said that he has been asked that many times, but still retold his story.
“Because of love.” he said. “I was a 19-year old Marxist when I met this revishing beauty. It was instant mutual attraction. I was poor, she had money, and so she bought books for me to read. One of her favorites was Paolo Freire and she gave me Education as the Practice of Freedom.“
Carlos flashed his rakish smile, and added. “Reading that book convinced me that Freire is a hopeless populist. But I couldn’t tell that to her, or that would be the end of our affair. So when she asked me what I thought of Freire, I said I was still trying to understand him.”
Then she gave him Pedagogy of the Oppressed. At first reading, he found no reason to change his critique of Freire as a “populist.” This time, however, he decided to be frank and argued with his girl friend. But eventually, after re-reading Freire for the eighth time, Carlos became a Freire admirer. He wrote Freire, laying out his criticisms and questions, which Freire answered. He visited Freire in Sao Paolo and worked closely with him until his death in 1997.
After Freire’s death, Carlos started a Freire center in the California univesity where he teaches, and is a founding member of an international network of Freire centers. He says that his graduate course on Freire draws an unusal number of students, as many as 200.
So what happened to his love affair? “I must confess that I fell in love with a second woman,” he said, “who was also very beautiful. And at one point I had to make a choice.” He decided to marry his second girl friend and says they lived happily with their children for 25 years. But eventually they got divorced.
We had an early dinner tonight, and the other participants asked why we were laughing a lot at our table. It was because of Carlos, and his many stories.
He started by referring to my metaphor on “birds learning to swim and fish learning to fly.” He said he liked it but felt ambivalent, since he is angry at a bird that kept eating the “koi” fish in his backyard pool. He informed us that “koi” is considered a good luck fish, and can live till 70 years.
Somehow talk turned to salmon, which is my favorite fish. “Don’t you know” he told us, “that it’s a good thing salmons swim against the current to go to upstream where they were spawned? Otherwise we would all be salmons now.”
After the laughter, we asked why. “Salmons lay billions of eggs, but since they swim against the current only a small percentage survive. If they did not do that, they would overpopulate the world.”
After we clinked our glasses for a toast he warned me, “Don’t look at the glass when you do a toast; look at the person. If you look at the glass, that is bad luck.” Rosie from South Africa agreed:”That means five years of bad sex!”
But how do you know what is bad and good sex? “Well, since I specialize in methodology,” Carlos said, “I would just keep on trying so I have enough samples for comparison. Or even better, triangulate.”
Yesterday we were both at the workshop that discussed a learning region in South Africa and Changwon as a learning city. I did a short presentation on the possibility of “learning villages” in the Philippines, based on participatory local governance.
Although we all agreed on the advantages and greater possibilities of local area-specific partnerships for lifelong learning, we also acknowledge the importance of policies and politial changes at the national level. And there is the continually increasing impact of global dynamics.
Both the Korean presentor and I cited the concept of “glocal” to describe links of global forces and institutions to the local, that bypass the national.
I ended my talk by posing the question of scaling up from the village and town level. It is sometimes tempting to adopt a strategy based on the answer to the question: How do we eat an elephant? “Bit by bit.”
But we need to find appropriate “scales of sustainability” – small enough to allow the effective participation of the grassroots, and yet big enough to have an impact on the national and the global.
Carlos had a last word. “If glocal refers to a top-down impact of globalization on the local, Ed is posing an important question – is there a possible bottom-up combination of the local and the global? We need to find a name for that.”
After the workshop, I told him that he may have read more into my question than what was in my mind. We could have taken off from that to revisit Freire’s ideas on coding and dialogical decoding.
