Fundamentals Students and the RC Community
It is interesting to read about the different successes RC teachers have had in teaching fundamentals classes online. I am glad it has been a beautiful challenge that is being overcome.
I have also had to teach fundamentals classes online. I agree with the advantages of the online format that people have mentioned. On the other hand, I have experienced a series of difficulties and would like to share them so that we can continue to think together about how to overcome the challenges these new times pose for us.
This year is the first time I have taught a complete fundamentals course (twenty classes) online, not being physically present with my students. I’ve had to continually think, and discharge on feelings of giving up, despair, abandonment, futility—both the students’ and mine.
More important than the challenge it has posed for me has been the challenge it has posed for my students. I already have the knowledge and experience not to doubt the validity of RC theory and practice, but they do not. And they have not been able to absorb the teaching in a face-to-face group, which has affected their learning, their sessions, and, in general, their understanding and use of RC.
Every year I usually close my fundamentals classes with a series of four classes in a row in a weekend workshop format. I also invite the students of all the fundamentals and ongoing classes of the Region, their teachers, and the leaders who have helped the classes understand the different types of liberation from oppression.
Being in a group of about forty people committed to their re-emergence and liberation is a direct and real way to experience what an RC Community is, its strength, and its human resources. It is usually a crucial activity for helping the students decide about getting involved in the Community.
This year the closing workshop was online and lasted one day, as many people in my Community cannot be on a screen for too long, have poor Internet coverage, or lack good devices or an intimate place to be in and discharge. It was also the first time that, after finishing a year of fundamentals, my students did not automatically decide to become part of the Community. I think this was due to how they had not experienced RC in person. They had not been able to feel the power of direct human attention, the strong contradiction [to distress] of having a human being in front of them in full, with all of that person’s resources—mental, emotional, physical—available. A direct look, a voice, a hand, a whole intelligent and attentive biological system turned on you is simply irreplaceable.
Half of my students have not yet decided to know more about the Community. Now we need to work with them until they can understand more deeply and correctly the importance of our project and that everything works better together as a group. That is a job I did not need to do before teaching online, and it’s making me think about how to alleviate the lack of face-to-face contact and all its contributions. It also makes me think about online classes that include people from different countries and how to facilitate the entry of these people into RC Communities.
It would be useful to know how each Community is organizing the transition. From my experience, the sooner a student knows the (local) RC Community, the sooner they take advantage of RC and the better they understand its dimensions and value.
I suppose the transition depends largely on how we understand the concept of community and how we transmit it to our students.
All of us had a first contact with a community, in our own family or in some other group. Our perspective on the collective, the community, is based on that experience. The more I discharge and think about my own experience with my first community, the more I understand how it determined my current understanding of what a community should be. And I observe the same with the Co-Counselors I encourage to discharge and think about it. I observe that what we understand as a community has more to do with what we lived in our first community, and later ones, and less with what we are trying to build in RC.
For example, for some people their first community was a space in which they had to strive continuously without receiving care or rest, in which they were valued and accepted for what they did, not for who they were. Today these people may work incessantly for the RC Community and end up feeling burned out [discouraged and exhausted] and disappointed. They are usually people of working-class heritage.
For others, their first community was a place of continuous oppression and abuse. These people tend to have a hard time accepting the idea that a community can be beneficial or benevolent.
Others experienced their first community as a place in which they should serve and receive rewards in return. Today they may understand a community as a space in which to exchange services: “If someone gives me something, maybe I will offer something.”
Other people, with another type of class inheritance, may simply wait for some service to be offered to them, as if the community owes them something.
Still others, coming from an early hierarchical community, may ask for permission to do things.
In short, it seems that there are as many ideas about community as experiences each of us had. This I think affects how we explain what a community is, how we organize to build and expand our RC Community, what relationships we implement among ourselves to support such a community, and what resources we offer to our students to accompany them in their transition from fundamentals classes to the Community—a transition that to me is of vital importance.
It would be interesting if we could discharge and think enough about all our experiences to be able to approach the concept of community free from distresses and understand that we are a network of people working together to free all human minds from the irrationality that has come from growing up in oppressive structures.
We would then understand better how the Community belongs to all of us and that all of us should be able to think about and take part in its development and expansion, even if we do not play teaching or other leadership roles. We would offer a prototype of community devoid of our distresses and more coherent, horizontal, supportive, and inclusive. We would also facilitate the transition of students from fundamentals classes into our RC Communities, even though we are facing the online factor.
Do you have something to say about these ideas?
Eskerrik asko (“thank you” in Basque).
Erribera Goitia, Araba, Basque Country
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC teachers
(Present Time 205, October 2021)