After our Community Panel, the main task facing our group of students is identifying exactly what project they want to work on. The community panelists provided several recommendations on the ideas that the students presented, but our group is running out of time to plan and implement any project. Our time was shortened even more when our PA coaches went to MHS this last Friday and found that our students had the rest of the day off. Fortunately we ran into a few of our students and were able to give them some instructions for what to do during the week to prepare for the next two Fridays, our last two Fridays to meet with them before most of our students graduate! It is crazy to think that all of our time with the students at Manual has boiled done to two short days of 43 minute periods to finish our project.
From the start of my involvement in the Public Achievement program at DU in the fall of last year, my supervisors and other PA coaches have told me that the process of PA is more important than the result. They have said that it is more important to provide the students with an awareness about what they can do, then to actually conduct a fantastic project. When we are down to the last two weeks, with no idea still about what our project will be, it is hard to feel as if the process is more important than the result. It is hard not to feel as if our efforts have been somewhat incomplete and that we have only grazed the surface of the potential of our students.
In Alice in Wonderland, after Alice exits the pool of tears with a slew of various animals, they hold a race. This caucus race has no start or finish, and everyone begins and stops at their own initiative. It is easy to claim that such a race, with no obvious goal is meaningless. After all, why race if you cannot win? But the whole incident has another purpose altogether. The animals and Alice just emerged soaking from the pool of tears and the race provides them a way to dry off. I believe for PA the difference between process and project is much the same. While everyone likes to win the race or complete the project, maybe our real goal should be just to dry off and to step into the world with new clear eyes. So just what does the drying off equate to in PA? What benefit do we get from running without there being a finish line?
These questions strike at the purpose of Public Achievement and the goal of attempting to develop political relationships in a non-hierarchical structure. On one hand, our awareness as college students of our own ability to build up our community and engage in public democracy building should encourage within our students a similar awareness. In another sense, the process of building and organizing a community provides the students with a template that they can apply to their future engagements with politics in their communities. In this, learning the process of putting together a project is as important as the project, because the project itself cannot and should not be replicated in other circumstances exactly, but the process can. The process and all the skills associated with it become the empowering force that provide the PA students with both awareness and individual power to make tangible change in their communities, whether that change occurs today or ten years from now.
Prioritizing the capabilities earned over the singular goals accomplished seems to me to be a revolutionary departure from the usual trend in our society. We provide ribbons and awards through all of primary and secondary school and continue the race into college and our careers, constantly competing with one another for status, recognition, and glory. I watch college students in classes, whose sole purpose is to receive a grade to gain a degree to get a job to have what they want in life, never caring much for the what they actually learn, what skills they actually gain, and what power actually becomes invested in them. I even find myself doing the same at times, running the race for the finish line, rather than for the journey. But ultimately the consequence of living that way, of being solely goal-oriented instead of balanced between accomplishing goals and gaining capabilities, is that our life becomes dependent on the races, and we determine success by where we finish.
But can we live another way? Even when we devote time to developing capabilities and awareness, are we not doomed to reenter the flow of competition, to bend our will to achieve our interests and to beat out our competitors? Here is where I feel the PA model fails to escape tradition. After all, it is based around the self-interest of the participating individuals and when self-interests do not coincide then there is little incentive to work together. The PA model misses out on the unconditional aspects of friendship and advocates a solely political relationship between coach and student, though I doubt that in practice the relationships ever turn out so clearly cut one way or another.
I have never been a fan of communitarian ideals when they are forced on a group, but nevertheless I believe that the greatest thing we as humans can do is to unconditionally invest ourselves in the building up and empowering of other human beings. This is the primary reason why I admire teachers and one day hope to teach at the college level. But as to how to spread those values without force, while allowing each individual to still enjoy the individual freedoms that are the cherished heritage of this society and expanding upon the equality among groups in enjoying those freedoms, I have no answer now. Ultimately, I can thank the PA process and experience for awakening these questions and thoughts within me, even as I agonize over what shape these final few weeks will take.
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