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25 FREEDOM SCHOOLING RECONCEPTUALIZING ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES FOR OUR COMMUNITIES Glenn Omatsu . . . new situations bring new contradictions, requiring new visions.1 —GRACE LEE BOGGS The possible is richer than the real.2 —ILYA PRIGOGINE “The educational system today is designed for failure.” I hear this statement often these days. I hear it often, and I say it myself. I hear it from K–12 activist teachers as they confront mandates for standardized testing and orders to “teach to the test.” I hear it from college teachers who work with first-generation college students as they cope with stringent new policies limiting those who can come to the university and those who can stay. Yet, behind this indictment of the educational system is neither cynicism nor passivity. Based on a critique of today’s educational system, activists are crafting a new paradigm . Currently, this paradigm exists only in its broadest outlines. We call this paradigm Freedom Schooling. In an L.A. Koreatown public school, Tony Osumi is teaching third-grade students about the importance of teamwork, interethnic unity, and communitybuilding . His classroom consists almost entirely of children of low-income, new immigrant families from Latin America and Asia. Tony’s teaching approach draws heavily from his work as a community organizer and neighborhood artist, his past graduate work in Asian American Studies, and his appreciation of liberatory pedagogy from the Civil Rights Movement, Asian American Movement, and popular education. He calls his approach to teaching “Freedom Schooling.” Several thousand miles away in Philadelphia Chinatown, activists associated with Asian Americans United, including ESL high school teacher Debbie Wei, are launching a Chinatown Freedom School for inner-city youth long abandoned by the public school system. The plans are based on AAU’s fifteen years of political organizing work with youth in Chinatown, including its summer Freedom Schools. The efforts of Tony Osumi and AAU are emerging independently of each other; in fact, until recently, neither knew of the other’s existence. Moreover, in this period of severe problems in the U.S. educational system, many other long-time activists are engaged in similar grassroots efforts aimed at not simply reforming educational practices but placing at the very center of their teaching approaches the goals of community-building, community organizing, and liberation. Like AAU, some envision actual independent schools, while others like Tony Osumi have begun to practice Freedom Schooling in day-to-day work in their classrooms. The concept of Freedom Schooling itself goes back to the Civil Rights Movement where African American parents and community activists in the South created their own schools in response to segregation and the barring of their children from the public school system. According to long-time activist Grace Lee Boggs, the new schools did far more than teach traditional academic subject matter: In the 1960s Movement activists had to create Freedom Schools in the South because the existing school system had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. To bring about a kind of “mental revolution,” reading, writing and speaking skills were taught through the discussion of black history, the power structure and building a Movement to struggle against it. Everyone took this basic “civics” course and then chose from more academic subjects, like algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum.3 Today, Boggs is associated with Detroit Summer, a Freedom School for the new millennium that challenges young people to “rebuild, redefine and respirit” devastated inner-city neighborhoods. She and other seasoned activists interpret today’s emerging Freedom Schooling movement as part of an overall revolutionary effort to create new institutions in society. Specifically, today’s Freedom Schools not only overturn outdated teaching methods and curriculum but also are based on goals fundamentally different from current schools. According to Boggs: Just as we had to create a Movement in the 50s and 60s to challenge racism, we now need a movement to challenge the concept of schools as mainly training centers for jobs in the corporate structure or for individual upward mobility and replace it with the concept of schools as places where children learn firsthand the skills of democracy and the responsibilities of citizenship and self-government. This will require a profound change in our own thinking because...

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