Learning, unlearning, relearning with the movements : a study of the Greek education movement and its prefigurative potential

Abstract

This paper explores the way in which education movement activists in Greece have been conceptualising and experiencing the economic crisis. Moreover, it explores the potential for learning through praxis. It is suggested that through their participation in the movement, activists would re-appropriate key terms, such as ‘debt’, in order to decode the crisis. As such, an unlearning of the ‘dominant grammar’ was attempted. This and attendant learning processes were underpinned by two mechanisms, ‘naming’ and ‘reflective vigour’, which would lead to a new reading of the crisis, more akin to the needs of the people rather than the elites who are responsible for it. The ensemble of learning processes analysed in this paper offers insights to the contribution of activism in nurturing hope amid despair. As such, the education and more generally the anti-austerity movement, constitute sites where Greece’s social and political imagination is being re-moulded. This ‘learning through praxis’ points to the existence of possibilities ‘from below’ which seem powerful enough to unleash the participants’ creative imagination and serve as ‘counter-negations’ to the negation of human dignity they have been subjected to by the crisis.