“Girls don't have to learn much. All a Jewish woman needs to know is how to prepare gefüllte fish, cut noodles, and bear her husband a large brood of children,” Abraham Goldman told his daughter, aged 15, when she begged him to let her continue her studies. A year later, Emma Goldman would escape the fate awaiting her within the narrow confines of the home, moving to the United States where she would become one of the most controversial and exciting revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century.
A male chauvinist father was not the only obstacle in the path of Goldman, born in Lithuania in 1869. According to historian Richard Drinnon, author of Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman, Emma was a passionate student who wanted to go to high school and even passed the entrance exam. But her religion teacher, who often hit her with her ruler, considered her too rebellious and refused to sign the certificate of "good character" that she needed in order to register. So Goldman had no choice but to become self-taught.
Autodidactism (also known as self-education or self-teaching) is education without teachers or institutions. It involves the student learning about topics of interest to him/herself in the format and at the pace of his/her choice. The concept may seem impractical to those of us who have always learned in an institutional framework, but sometimes it seems to be the only way – not only for a Jewish teenager from a traditional family a century and a half ago, but for anyone who, for whatever reason, lacks access to other avenues for education.
“The very notion that knowledge can only be obtained in school through systematic practice, and that school time is the only period during which knowledge can be acquired, is in itself so absurd as to completely condemn our education system as arbitrary and useless”, wrote Goldman in an essay entitled, “The Social Importance of the Modern School” (1910). Several years had already passed since she had devoted the time and effort to educating herself. By now she was educating others on those ideas that had transformed her. Goldman was an anarchist activist, and was one of the staunch defenders of the pedagogue Francisco Ferrer Guardia when he was imprisoned for leading a rebellion, and after he was assassinated because of his ideas. Goldman was also among the founders of the Francisco Ferrer Association, which aimed to disseminate and replicate Ferrer's visions of a future of less oppressive education, in which the student would be free to develop spontaneously, choosing for him/herself the branches of knowledge to be studied.
The future of self-learning
I personally know a software engineer who currently works for one of the most successful Start Ups in Latin America, and who is regarded by many as model of creativity, overcoming obstacles, and success. When he started programming in 2009, Facebook was the “next big thing” among young people and WhatsApp was not yet widely used. He is proud to call himself a graduate of "YouTube University". I can think of simpler, less dramatic examples, like that of an illustrator friend, who learned her everyday work techniques on the Domestika platform, or myself – I have been editing videos for a long time and I learned to do it by “googling”, as almost all content creators do. How many of the things that may not necessarily be part of our job today, but may be in the future, are we learning on digital platforms at our own pace and for our own personal interest, without institutional mediators?
It is said of Goldman that she always carried a book wherever she went because of the chance (in many cases the certainty) that she would be arrested and sent to jail - the same jail that Ferrer had invoked as a metaphor for school as it had been thought of until then, as a place of obedience that nullified individuality, creativity, and critical thinking. Ferrer's modern school was not a school without teachers, but rather a school without rules or uniformity, without separation by sex, and without seeking to squeeze all students into the same mold. It was a libertarian school, where boys, girls, mothers and fathers could all learn.
In her public defense of the Catalan educator, Goldman maintained that there were "other environments and spaces for socialization that would also be potentially educational," says historian Nilciana Álvarez Martins. That, perhaps, was – and still is - the key to the challenge facing education: transcending conventional educational spaces. The anarchist who delivered passionate speeches in Yiddish on the streets of New York at the beginning of the 20th century and who edited a magazine that included texts written by herself and by colleagues from other parts of the world, knew that education had to transcend the physical school space. She was open to new ideas and critical of whatever had come before (she even questioned Ferrer for not having enough gender perspective). She was capable of questioning even her own daily activities.
Over time, schools became less like that prison that Emma Goldman had criticized as an oppressor of individuality. The broader context in which schools function - society as a whole - has also continued to change. That dynamic - if we believe in the critical role of school - should not be halted. Our challenge is to continue adapting the school to the community's needs and to the present time. While Emma's school was quite different from "YouTube college," the young Jewish activist who was once described by the director of the FBI as "the most dangerous woman in America" may have understood, in her own way, the challenges faced by the educational world in times of remote self-learning.
Sources:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-living-my-life.pdf
https://www.meneame.net/m/Lib%C3%A9rtame/francisco-ferrer-escuela-moderna-emma-goldman
https://jewishunpacked.com/emma-goldman-anarchism-feminismand-judaism/
https://jewishunpacked.com/emma-goldman-anarchism-feminismand-judaism/
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-francisco-ferrer
Waldstreicher, D. (1990). Radicalism, Religion, Jewishness: The Case of Emma Goldman. American Jewish History, 80(1), 74–92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23884473
MARTINS, N. A. . Ideias em movimento: um diálogo entre Emma Goldman e Francisco Ferrer y Guardia. REVISTA DO ARQUIVO PÚBLICO DO ESPÍRITO SANTO , v. 4, p. 116-131, 2020.