Which way does knowledge travel?

My daughter is five and a half years old. She is observant, kind, witty, and has a wonderful sense of humour.

We have started the search for a primary school for next year, and somehow this logistical task has become philosophical, and emotional. It has put into question what education is, what learning is, and what exactly a school is for. Children are assumed to be empty vessels — to be filled with information, indoctrinated, and taught. Memorisation, repetition, letter of the day, a pledge of allegiance.

We have the immense privilege of choice. She has been in alternative preschools since she was two and a half, and I can’t shake the desire to stretch her childhood out as long as possible, because in these early years I can see how much she already holds, and how little of it the first years of school are built to notice. The destination is reading, writing and counting. Everything else she brings waits its turn, or doesn’t get one. Her critical thinking. Her imagination. Her curiosity. The way she observes the world, and the questions that come out of it. Her tactile memory. Her relationship to her own body, to her environment, to nature, to animals, to the rhythms of the day and the seasons. She holds so much knowledge that adults lose somewhere along the way.

It took me a while to notice that the list I was making about my daughter was also a list about somebody else. Knowledge held in the body. Knowledge of weather and animals and when things come. Knowledge that doesn’t arrive in written form and can’t be assessed in an exam. 

A central part of my work at Food First is advocating that farmers and communities, particularly those that have been historically marginalized, arrive already knowing something. It took the school selection process for me to notice I had been asking the same thing about my daughter all along: does this place assume she knows anything at all?

Freire objection to a word

In the late 1960s, in exile in Chile, Paulo Freire wrote a book to object to a word.

He was working on agrarian reform, among agronomists whose profession had a name: extensión. It is the same word we use in English and it works the same way. A university extension service reaches out from a center toward a periphery. To extend something is to hold it here and stretch it to there, which assumes there is something at one end and not much at the other.

Freire’s objection was that this is not an innocent description of a job. He argued that the word carries transmission, handing over, and what he called cultural invasion, and that a profession named this way will tend to behave accordingly.

Ana Cristina Suzina and Thomas Tufte describe what Freire did in that book as “a harsh critique at the way communication is conceived in the agricultural sector” (2020: 418). They point out that the figure of the extension worker is still with us. Freire saw it as “a very linear, non-participatory concept, promoting what he called ‘cultural invasion'” (418).

He proposed communication in its place: an encounter between two people who each know something. Underneath it he put a requirement he called humility, which Suzina and Tufte describe as “a specific requirement to recognize that people – any people – are knowledgeable” (414). In that view there is no room for charity “in the sense of classifying those in need as lacking capacity” (414).

The book did its work. Writing for Freire’s centenary, Isabela Camini and João Pedro Stédile of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) remember reading it in the early 1980s, when it was still a mimeographed text in Spanish. It was, they write, “a precious guide for us to rethink the form of pedagogical work with peasant families, called ‘rural extension’.”

Five answers to one question

Five terms or approaches circulate in the field of food system education as though they meant the same thing. They do not. Each one answers the question differently. 

Extension

The United States wrote its answer into law in 1914. The Smith-Lever Act created a Cooperative Extension Service attached to every land-grant university, built to carry what the research stations found out to the people who farmed (USDA NIFA n.d.). At the time more than half of Americans lived in rural places and about a third worked in agriculture. It was a serious public undertaking and it put real knowledge into real hands. It still does. At a Federation of Southern Cooperatives meeting in Georgia this year, the extension session was among the best attended of the day, filled with new farmers who had come with questions and wanted answers.

There is nothing wrong with that. Some knowledge travels in one direction and should. A person who has never operated a backhoe needs to be taught how, by someone who knows, before anybody gets hurt. Soil chemistry is learned from people who have studied it, whether that is a scientist or a farmer with forty years on the same ground. Someone starting out is often in absorption mode, and there is no shame in it.

What extension carries is not one-way teaching. It is an assumption about direction, made in advance and permanently. The university generates, the farmer receives, and it is not expected to run the other way. The problem is not that a farmer was taught something. It is that the farmer is never expected to be the one teaching. Every other approach in this list argues with that assumption, not with instruction itself.

Campesino a campesino

The counter-proposal began with Maya farmers in Guatemala working on soil and water conservation, and travelled over three decades through southern Mexico, Central America, Nicaragua and Cuba (Holt-Giménez, 2006). The method is as follows. A farmer teaches on their own land, to people standing in the field, who can see for themselves whether it worked.

The assumption is that the farmer next door already knows, and that you will believe a neighbour in a way you will not believe a visitor with a clipboard. This we have heard time and time again in conversation with grassroots organizations and academic institutions working with historically marginalized farmers and communities. 

After Cuba’s national peasant association adopted the methodology in 1997, the movement grew “from just over 200 families in 1999” to “110,000 families 10 years later,” close to a third of the country’s peasant families, carried by farmer-promoters rather than salaried technicians (Rosset et al. 2011).

Food First published Eric Holt-Giménez’s account of this movement in 2006. It has been on our own shelf, saying this, for twenty years.

The pedagogy of alternation

The third answer assumes that knowledge has to survive the trip home.

It began in France in 1935, in conversations between a farmer named Jean Peyrat, his twelve-year-old son Yves, and Padre Granereau of the village of Serignac-Péboudou. Yves did not want to go back to school, because the school felt alienated and distant from the rural life around him. Other farmers recognised the same thing in their own children. Together they built a structure outside the ordinary school system, grounded in the relation between everyday knowledge and school knowledge, in which young people spent one period studying and the next at home on the family’s land (Vergutz and Cavalcante 2014: 374).

It reached Brazil in 1968, at Olivânia in the municipality of Anchieta, Espírito Santo (375). There are now 148 Escolas Família Agrícola and 120 Casas Familiares Rurais across the country (Begnami 2011, cited in Vergutz and Cavalcante 2014: 375). The Latin American School of Agroecology, on an agrarian reform settlement in Paraná, still runs its three-year technician course this way.

The alternation is a test. Anything taught that fails on the family’s land comes back the following month as a question, so the curriculum is corrected by the territory rather than by the faculty. Vergutz and Cavalcante describe the whole approach as pedagogical work “with” the subjects rather than “about” or “for” them (372), which is Freire’s objection to extension, applied to children.

The MST has taken this further. Its Itinerant Schools move with the encampments, and teachers bring what Alessandro Mariano and Rebecca Tarlau call “portions of reality” into the classroom, so that what is happening outside the school becomes the material of the lesson inside it (2019).

I notice that a school built this way begins from the same place I did. A child goes home, and home has something to teach.

When I sit with that, it stops being a question about schools. It becomes a question about what kind of place we think the world is. If home teaches, then the question is how far home extends. A house. A piece of land. A watershed. At some scale the answer is the earth, and once the earth is the place you go home to, it is something you are in relationship with, something you depend on for shelter, and something you owe care.

That is an inconvenient way to describe land for capitalism. An economy that treats soil and water and forest as inputs needs them to be somewhere else, belonging to nobody in particular, carrying no obligation to whoever has to live there afterwards. Extraction depends on nobody going home.

Comunalidad

In Oaxaca, comunalidad names the whole communal way of life of Indigenous peoples. People are not taught it. They are socialised into it, through what Benjamín Maldonado describes as continuous and profound civic formation in communal responsibility. Its elements are territory held in common, collective labour or tequio, the assembly, the fiesta, and reciprocity. Learning is not one of those activities. It is what happens while you take your turn at all of them. Territory comes first in that list, and it is not the setting the others take place in.

Oaxaca has built schools on this. There are language nests for the youngest children, a teachers’ coalition coordinating community education across more than 300 preschools and primary schools, eleven Indigenous community secondary schools, 49 comprehensive community high schools and 73 community telebachilleratos, a Communal Intercultural University opened in the Mixe town of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec in 2012, and since 2016 a master’s degree in communal education (Maldonado Alvarado and Maldonado Ramírez 2018).

Across institutions that otherwise have little in common, three commitments recur: research is the method of learning, community knowledge is the axis that hegemonic knowledge has to articulate with rather than the reverse, and the original language is the vehicle of formation (2018: 3).

In the community secondary schools, the timetable moves with the agricultural cycle (Kreisel 2016). The learning year is arranged around planting and harvest rather than the other way round.

Follow this far enough and you reach Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, founded in 1998 after Indigenous communities named schooling itself as a threat to what they knew. It has no teachers, no students, no exams and no grades. In practice it works by apprenticeship. Someone who wants to learn begins by working alongside a person who already does it, and the theory comes from reflecting on that work. Coordinators connect people rather than instruct them. Study circles form around what participants want to know, and nothing is graded or certified at the end (Vargas Hernández 2022).

It would be convenient to stop there. Comunalidad has been in Oaxaca’s state education law since 1995, as the fourth guiding principle of educational practice, won by pressure from Indigenous communities and the teachers’ union. Two decades later, Lois Meyer found it had changed very little in the state’s ordinary public schools. The community schools that run on it were built alongside that system rather than by reforming it.

Co-production of knowledge

The fifth is the newest, and the one our sector uses most. It describes research in which communities and researchers frame the question together instead of the researcher arriving with it already written (Norström et al. 2020). Its assumption is that neither party knows alone, which is the most generous sentence in this list.

It is also the easiest to claim. An institution can co-produce in its methods section while the question, the data and the published result stay where they always were. Of the five, it most often names an ambition rather than a practice. 

What this means for food system education

Read down the list and the question has quietly reversed. It started as how do we get knowledge to farmers. By the end it is why we assume it was not already there.

That shift is not abstract. It runs through every extension service, every training curriculum, every farmer field day, and every capacity-building line in every grant budget our sector writes. Programs built on the first assumption produce dependence. Knowledge arrives, a project cycle ends, the knowledge leaves. Programs built on the second produce teachers. 

So here is a test you can use. When a program calls itself participatory, or farmer-led, or co-produced, ask three questions.

Who set the question? Who holds what gets produced? Who can read it afterwards?

Answer those honestly and you will know which of the five traditions a program belongs to, whatever it calls itself.

Conclusion 

In food systems, most of the knowledge in question was never written down. It is held by particular people, about particular places, and it is seasonal, which means it gets practised once a year. When a generation stops farming, or a language stops being spoken, or a community is moved off its land, what they knew does not survive somewhere else in a weaker form. There is no archive to recover it from. Agricultural knowledge is one of the few kinds that can disappear completely inside a single lifetime.

That is what makes learning infrastructure rather than an activity. A road can be rebuilt from plans. A seed variety with nobody left who knows when to plant it is gone. This is the practical case for changing how we do research and training. Starting from what people already know is not a courtesy we extend to them. It produces better results, because that knowledge is the only knowledge specific enough to the place it comes from. 

The question this comes down to is not what kind of school works best. It is whether we find out what people already know before we decide what to teach them and how. That is worth thinking about in how we design research, training, and the programs we fund.

References

Camini, Isabela, and João Pedro Stédile. “Paulo Freire’s Meeting with the MST.” Friends of the MST. https://mstbrazil.org/content/paulo-freire’s-meeting-mst Cite by section heading rather than page. Your PDF pagination came from the print.

Holt-Giménez, Eric. Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture. Oakland: Food First Books, 2006.

Kreisel, Maike. “De lo comunitario a lo escolar: elementos para el debate sobre la escuela comunitaria indígena.” Diálogos sobre Educación 7, no. 13 (2016). DOI 10.32870/dse.v0i13.234

Maldonado Alvarado, Benjamín, and Carlos Luis Maldonado Ramírez. “Educación e interculturalidad en Oaxaca: avances y desafíos.” Sinéctica 50 (2018). DOI 10.31391/S2007-7033(2018)0050-006

Mariano, Alessandro, and Rebecca Tarlau. “The Landless Workers Movement’s itinerant schools: occupying and transforming public education in Brazil.” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2019. DOI 10.1080/01425692.2019.1565989

Martínez Luna, Jaime. Eso que llaman comunalidad. 2010. ISBN 978-607-7713-25-8.

Meyer, Lois M. “Teaching our own babies: Teachers’ life journeys into community-based initial education in indigenous Oaxaca, Mexico.” Global Education Review 3, no. 1 (2016): 5–26.

Norström, Albert V., et al. “Principles for knowledge co-production in sustainability research.” Nature Sustainability 3 (2020): 182–190.

Rosset, Peter M., Braulio Machín Sosa, Adilén María Roque Jaime, and Dana Rocío Ávila Lozano. “The Campesino-to-Campesino agroecology movement of ANAP in Cuba.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 1 (2011): 161–191.

Suzina, Ana Cristina, and Thomas Tufte. “Freire’s vision of development and social change.” the International Communication Gazette 82, no. 5 (2020): 411–424. DOI 10.1177/1748048520943692

USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. “History.” https://www.nifa.usda.gov/about-nifa/who-we-are/history

Vargas Hernández, José Leonel. 2022. “La Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca: interculturalidad y vinculación comunitaria.” Runas: Journal of Education and Culture 3 (5): e21060. https://doi.org/10.46652/runas.v3i5.60

Vergutz, Cristina Luisa Bencke, and Ludmila Oliveira Holanda Cavalcante. “As aprendizagens na pedagogia da alternância e na educação do campo.” Revista Reflexão e Ação, Santa Cruz do Sul, v. 22, n. 2 (2014): 371–390.