The Consultation 01 12 08

Snapshot: The room is corporate, neutral, beige carpet and walls, floor to ceiling windows all around show gray skies and rain. There is much talk of thunder and lightning broken trains and how wonderful it is we've come regardless, as if we had a choice to come to this Adult Education Consultation. Could our young leader be utterly unaware that he is colluding leading us all to slaughter? Because he knows nothing about education he can tell himself he knows better than the veterans in the room about what is good education. We are here ostensibly to create a vision, a consensus of what is good practice for a zero sum game. The consensus will be the standard used to justify the shutdown of the programs that lose the game. The rest of us sit around in small groups participatorily chatting away about this outcome and that action plan, drawing this picture of our education vision, listening to an inspirational panel of student successes, complying, letting ourselves be led to slaughter.

Conversation when milling around by the coffee table before the meeting, as the more than 100 participants in the Consultation arrive wet from the rain, irritated by the airport like security [we took off all metal objects and handed them to the guard before stepping through the screener]
Me to my old colleague from the settlement house literacy program:
I'm worried about this process.
A: You mean all the decisions are already made?
Me: What the decisions are: We're creating a pseudo consensus around pseudo standards that will then be used to justify shutting down some of us. And we don't seem to realize we're doing that. We're agreeing to all kinds of monitoring demands that will require another burocratic layer to enforce. That'll take more money away from programs. We're sitting around blindly complying..
A: [We're arriving at the security line. I can see he's trying to ditch me, always bringing up death at the cocktail party.]Well, programs are going to be shutdown anyway. Not much we can do about that.

I get distracted by having to hand over my metal spined clogs, my cell phone. I try that conversational volley with several people and finally hit paydirt with R's wife who is come candela. We moan to each other in soft voices. The meeting is being recorded I later find out. For all I know I'm on tape pretending to gag, to strangle myself, asking people over and over why is it that we're simply complying? Ideological domination is corrosive.

In my small group I'm not with any educators, I'm with data people, public assistance people. When the blonde next to me turns away from me for the "speak and listen" toward the white man on her other side, is it racism, agism? She then turns away from him and toward a man left straggling from the adjoining table. So maybe she's all around rude. I end up paired with the man and during my two minutes on the subject of "getting here" I talk to him about my funding concerns. He then spends his two minutes responding. Turns out he's from the Mayor's budget office and wants to help me understand the rationality of cutbacks.

We draw our visions of the power of literacy and then tell each other what they mean...rushed through, pro forma..The group picks a drawing of a prison box representing life before literacy, with a green x through it representing the liberation of literacy. The best drawing of all, shared with the whole group is by R who draws a picture of people marching in a protest with signs for civil liberties, work, end to the war. Literacy is the entry into the world of revolution. What might any of that mean here where everybody is in survival mode, utterly dedicated to complying?

Then the Deputy comes to speak of the vision we are all here supposedly being consulted on, ostensibly it's come from the ongoing consultation and represents us. "Better outcomes, better use of the money" translates to do more with the same, or less. To me he's saying, 'te las voy a meter monga'. Later in our small groups we say what we heard. I heard: they are going to shut some of us down. The popular based education programs that don't fit this template are going to go. I say it out loud during the report back: This means programs will be shut down. When the deputy returns to respond he says it explicitly. "Some programs will be found wanting."

The question is: who will decide they are wanting?

All the while I'm feeling I'll be bored to death..Erased to death..I am unable to call out: this is not the way to play with the blocks. It is another iteration of the: let's all race for them and you keep what blocks you grab.