Why 'The Unlearning'?
Naming a Substack isn't as easy as I thought...
I’ve finally settled on a name for this new platform after a whole week of dithering. As you may have noticed, subscribers (all 94 of you - hello!), I have decided to call this new space ‘The Unlearning’.
At the end of my training sessions across schools/organisations I work with, I always finish with a call to Unlearning. I mean, in short, that we ought to position ourselves as people who have been conditioned to think in certain ways, to view the world in certain ways. When we learn, we are subject to all sorts of forces - political, social, moral, cultural - and we do not always question how knowledge comes into being.
Knowledge, and our learning of it, is profoundly biased. Sure, some knowledge is immutable or substantive, but a lot of what we are told about our history and the construction of our identities is steeped in power structures that we may not even be aware of.
Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better - Maya Angelou
When we recognise that we have been subject to all sorts of information that may be inaccurate, or formed with biases, then it is our responsibility to examine that closely. Can we start to unpick those power structures and those biases? Through establishing ourselves as subject to these forces, we are surely compelled to unlearn and relearn so that our thinking is not stagnant.
I am half inclined to declare that the processes of unlearning triggers cognitive development, but I’m not a neuroscientist, nor an established expert on cognition. I just know that light bulbs keep going off inside my head when I unlearn something and go about the process of asking questions as to how I can relearn it differently, perhaps better.
A good example is the concept of reparative semantics. I grew up thinking that the language of slavery was fixed. Slaves were slaves, not ‘enslaved people’. Escaped slaves were escaped slaves, and not ‘freedom seekers’. Plantations were romantic Southern landscapes, not ‘forced labour camps’. I read an article about how language can be adjusted to reflect reality, to make reparation, to decentre power (incidentally, here) and it changed my world view significantly. Why do we call people ‘slaves’ as if there is something inherent in them that makes them so? Why do we not acknowledge that enslavement is an act perpetrated on bodies by other people?
Unlearning takes time and effort, but not as much time and effort as you’d like to think. In a world where information is at your fingertips, you can simply fall into the rabbit holes of ideas that come with race and racial identity, gender, sexuality and so on. It is important to cross reference what you are relearning through reliable sources - the peer reviewed, the published and acclaimed, and the data-supported.
How you choose to do this Unlearning is up to you. Ask yourself some questions:
What have I always believed about race/gender/sexuality/disability?
Where did I get that information from?
How far was that knowledge passed on to me without question, or adjustment for our modern society?
How does it affect my thinking daily?
What impact might that have on others?
What can I read/listen to/watch to help me Unlearn and relearn?
What might the benefits be to me and others?
These questions are supremely important if you are an educator, in any form. We have the privilege of passing on knowledge to the next generation. Let’s make sure that we have interrogated it fully.