Musings on learning and transformation with an alumni lens (Part 1)
Written by Ján Michalko with Dušan, Judka and Peter
In the first instalment of a two-part essay series, our Senior Project Lead Ján reflects on the role of inter-generational dialogue and learning in contexts of crisis and transitions. The essays bring together experiences from our friends and colleagues around the world – from Slovakia to South Africa. They demonstrate how teachers and young people engage in difficult conversations on histories and social justice and how alumni can play a role in the process of social transformation.
It was quite a surprise. A plane with COVID-19 vaccines landed in the eastern city of Košice in my home country of Slovakia to the welcome of the prime minister. You might think that in the midst of the pandemic, when our hopes were latched on the vaccines, this would be a reason for unconditional celebration. A positive surprise, one might say.
The vaccines were, however, the Russian manufactured Sputnik V. At the time, the vaccine was not approved for use by EU authorities. Its arrival sparked an old, familiar line of questioning: Does Slovakia face the East or the West? Does the country and its people feel tied to the EU or Russia? We were once again faced with a test of our identities and allegiances as a post-communist nation, floating between the imaginaries of the East and the West.
I have grappled with these identity questions throughout my life too. I still remember the first time my Eastern Europeanness became evident to me. I came to the USA as a 16-year-old young man for a study abroad programme. Here I met friends from Germany and Spain – cool and kind youngsters who came to Pennsylvania just like me. Yet, I felt angry; angry for not being like them and having their lifestyle and opportunities. I attributed this ‘unfairness’ to my parents being born on the wrong side of the iron curtain. The real privilege of my position and situation escaped me then, as I did not situate myself within the more complex picture of power and advantages around the world.
It is now more than 30 years since the end of the communist regime, and young people born into the post-communist era are still facing the legacies of the transition in our identities and opportunities. So, what does it really mean for them – for us – to study and learn in a society of transition – in the liminal space of the ‘post’?
When history is too fresh – or not the past at all
When I was in high school in the early 2000s, the post-socialist transition of the 1980s/90s seemed too fresh for us to learn about in history class. My former history teacher, Judka, tells me that it was not something we tackled in our lessons, as much as she would have liked to do it. As we walk around one of our city parks, fully masked of course, I meet with Judka after many years. Last time we saw each other, she was still standing in front of a classroom and her two boys, who are about to enter the first grade, were still just a dream.
Judka in front of a class of high school students at Evanjelické lýceum, where she taught Slovak language, literature, art history and history for many years.
She tells me that part of the challenge for her was that there was no time to do critical discussion on the most recent history. History syllabi were packed with centuries of global and national history. We raced through the decades in order to do well on the standardized national matriculation examinations. Back then, as a young teacher, she had limited opportunities to teach something that was so recent and outside of the core expectations.
As Judka taught literature and Slovak as well, we discovered the challenges of the past through literature instead. It helped us understand what life was like as we learnt about propaganda or topics that authors had to write about because of the state censorship.
Several decades later, however, it seems that critical study of recent history and its ongoing legacies is still out of reach. Dušan and his colleagues at PDCS have been helping teachers to foster critical thinking amongst young people for several decades. They support teachers to tackle issues of polarization and show educators how to better support young people to know key parts of our history, whose legacies shape our current society.
Dušan, pictured here, and his colleagues at PDCS have been promoting critical discussions and approaches to tackling polarisation in Slovak schools, including at popular festivals.
He reflects that when their team published a teaching manual for 9th grade history, many teachers went up in arms because of the way that communism was approached in the book. Dušan tells me how steeped in romanticized nostalgia of the communist past some of them are – clinging to the clichés that ‘everyone had a job back then’ and that a litre of milk cost only 2 ‘koruny.’
In the country’s capital, where I grew up, and other urban centres and economic hubs, the situation is by and large different from much of the peripheries. Many people in communities, which haven’t benefitted from economic transformation to the same extent, tend to have a different view of the past, in light of their present condition as they see it. Their teaching is shaped by these lived experiences and in turn it contributes to the younger generations’ misunderstanding of key political actors like the EU.
There are several other initiatives in Slovakia like Dušan’s and his colleagues, which try to reform how young people learn about the past (for example, Milan Šimečka Foundation, Postbellum or Inconspicuous Heroes). Experiential learning and encounters with people who have suffered through the worst of humanity are part of this effort. Holocaust survivors, prisoners of conscience and pro-democracy activists are sometimes invited to speak at school assemblies or are recorded for video documentaries. Teachers and principals, however, are often gatekeepers that stop such efforts from taking place at their schools, or do not create the linkages between this past and our present.
Experiential learning of history
As I meet Peter, I know that many teachers are also exceptional enablers and transformative leaders. Peter and I have met once or twice before – most likely over hors d’oeuvres and a glass. We are both alumni of a secondary school scholarship programme, so our paths have crossed at some alumni socials before. While our paths have been quite different, there is a sense of familiarity as we enter the virtual zoom room.
Peter is the Director of Development and teacher at one of the country’s leading high schools, C.S. Lewis Bilingual High School. Young leader himself, he supports his students to be the best they can be.
Warm and with a self-deprecating sense of humour, Peter has palpable passion for the school he helps to lead and from which he graduated years before. He is keen to ensure that their students become critical thinkers and active citizens. They link them with advisors so that they can think through their future plans, but also allow them to participate in climate activism, such as Fridays for Future campaign.
Peter’s school also seeks to tap into alumni to serve as advisors and role models. They are one of a handful of institutions in the country that do so purposefully, having recognized alumni as a resource. They foster a sense of community amongst their former students and nurture what Peter refers to as the ‘special atmosphere’ that keeps them coming back years later.
Peter’s school, however, is a young private institution. They have leadership that has experienced the power of alumni in schools abroad and the foresight and freedom to pursue it. Only a few of the hundreds of public schools in Slovakia would think about alumni as people to help teach the young people about the past and its legacies.
The alumni’s lives may not amount to the heroic expectations that we hold of freedom fighters or survivors, who are depicted on historical monuments. Their relatability is, however, in the acts of the everyday and the choices they’ve made to be complicit or subversive to the systems they were part of.
From crisis to catharsis… or not?
There are many reasons why cross-generational exchanges are crucial for Slovak schools, not least because of the weakened commitments to human rights and democracy amongst several strata of our society. We face xenophobic attitudes and behaviours targeting the most vulnerable, be it Roma, Muslim and Jewish, or Black and Brown immigrant communities.
These social challenges and debates are layered beneath the ‘post’ pandemic transition as well. I guess that most of us are keen to get into the ‘post’ -pandemic era – to leave COVID-isolations, deaths and wants behind.
Seismic events like pandemics give people the impetus and opportunity to mobilize for change. The pandemic certainly shifted how we live our collective lives. We changed behaviours, but also the norms or expectations, which we have of one another. As someone who hopes to see change towards a more equitable, kinder world, I find some solace in the learning from this pandemic that social norms are truly subject to change. We can be reassured that inequalities are not set in stone or natural.
If social norms and expectations are learnt and un-learnt, then schools are crucial spaces where this process occurs. They represent opportunities to discover the past and envision the future. But how we learn our histories, is not an objective, straightforward question. As a result, neither is the lens through which we are taught to understand our present.
So, here’s to learning lessons from incomplete transitions to build back better our post-pandemic world.