Article 26 of The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) names education as a fundamental right. We can further intuit that in many less tangible ways, learning is close to the heart of what makes us human. So what has happened in the lives of people who have a difficult or joyless relationship to learning? They are experiencing a violation of their human right to learn, accomplished through moments of being violated in various ways.

And the Latin etymology common to these words indicates how: violence.

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Quick story: Sunny Saturday morning and I’m paying at the convenience store kitty-corner to my house and I hear a voice beside me: “Oh my god it’s you. I’ve been looking for you for so long to thank you.” I turn to a woman I don’t recall ever having seen before, but I smile and open my energy to her.

As we walk together into the hot haze on the sidewalk, she recounts how she had been leaning off her balcony, late night a year or so prior, announcing her intention to jump to her death, and I’d been on the ground below. Apparently what I’d said caused her to abort mission, and also to go and seek the help she needed; she’d been in a mental health support group ever since.

It took two minutes flat for her to pull up and disclose the roots: abusive parents – father terrifying when occasionally present, mother vicious, oft-repeating she wished she’d had an abortion rather than this story’s heroine. Yes, the mother’s still alive and in town and still terrorizing her. She learned in group about the ‘cycle of violence’, and is grieving how cruel she’s been to her own son, even as she acknowledges what must have befallen her own mother. She’s wondering if she can ‘break the cycle’ and make it up to him, or if it’s too late…

After my wholly predictable but today, unusually impassioned sermon about how it’s never, ever too late, our heroine risks a further hope: she wants to start life over, like maybe a job or even a… career… but

Unsurprisingly, she has no schooling, no credentials, dropped out, not confident she can even really read and

Unsurprisingly, she firmly believes she is stupid and that school is for other people, smart people, legitimate people.

So I bring her to my front yard, to grab a pen and give her my contact information; as we walk I share what I do for a living (devoted to putting into practice the research I do on the impacts of violence on learning, I have the good fortune of acting as professor in a progressive access/transition program in a downtown college – we provide entrance credentials for post-secondary programs, but also a few semesters of love and guidance). She lights up, pointing to her arms, which bear goosebumps the size of blueberries: “That’s why I met you! This is why I ran into you.” The sense of serendipity threatened to hook even me, one who is slow to hope and a stranger to faith, who rests more naturally in a jaded yet still-vibrating despair.  

But there remained a hesitation in her eyes, as if she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Of course! “It’s a free program, I added hastily, “It’s funded by the government.” She almost cried as I enjoined her to meet me in my office on Wednesday morning, giving my co-ordinates and extension. The sense of new possibilities was palpable. School. Life. School = Life.

*

In my many years engaging with adult education, I’ve not met more than a handful of people who were loved and seen and heard and supported as children, yet who, as adults, struggled to read and write or who didn’t have at least high school credentials. This handful is almost fully accounted for by the pitfalls of economic poverty.

No, the overwhelming majority of people whose learning has been compromised are those carrying wounds around, carrying them like robin’s eggs or like hand grenades, carrying wounds weepy and gory, or scarred and paved over into armour. When I listen tenderly to students’ accounts of their relationships to learning, from the frustrating to the harrowing, I need never wait long to hear about violence.

The stories told are usually from deep in the past, and usually about adults doing very poorly indeed at taking care of them, and you can feel the presence of that little one still hurting inside the grownup student speaking. The hurting was rendered by tyrants making war and genocide, yes, but also by garden-variety adults – too often parents – who bequeathed to their children neglect, hungers of all kinds, and sometimes abuse so acute I couldn’t sleep after hearing. Perhaps I’ve never slept well again.

Educators at all levels continue to bemoan the rates of attrition and underperformance, and we tirelessly research correlation versus causation… but it’s unlove. It is violence. It’s almost never something else.

It’s funny, I didn’t cry the whole time I was writing this, until now, at the end, when my begrudging honesty forces me to admit: She didn’t show up. She’s never shown up.

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