Wide-Awakeness

Nearly every practicing teacher has had experiences with students withdrawing from what is happening in the classroom. Some sink into a kind of lassitude; others, into a cloud of boredom. The [Page 945]philosopher Martin Heidegger said that boredom was a response to a feeling of meaninglessness. When we recall the 19th-century poets' complaints of “ennui” or boredom in the face of an industrial world that felt alien to them, that offered nothing relevant to their interests or desires, we can understand what Henry David Thoreau would call the “somnolence” of those submerged in the ordinary.

The effort to arouse the inattentive may be described by the metaphor of awakening them. The phenomenologist Alfred Schutz used the term wide-awakeness to describe what he called the plane of consciousness of highest tension, this “originating in an attitude of full attention to life and its requirements.” Rejecting mere passive taking in, the awakened person performs in a way demanded by the lived world as she or he perceives it. Conscious of lacks and deficiencies in that world, she or he may well exert energy to modify it. At once, there might be dialogue among those concerned with change, dialogue that makes audible diverse perspectives. Wide-awakeness requires translation of ideas. John Dewey, critical of fixities and “the crust of convention,” infused his views of “doing” and “undergoing” in transactions with the environment with a requirement of reflective action. It would not be sufficient simply to interact with the human and physical world. The live creature must attend to what is happening as she or he moves through the problematic aspects of experience to intervals of resolution and on to often unexpected obstacles. Such obstacles demand deliberation as the individual goes on to decide whether to overcome what stands in the way or to bypass and avoid it, no matter how desirable the view on the other side. Wide-awakeness is necessary when alternatives are considered and choices are to be intelligently made. Committed as he was to the nurture of aesthetic experiences he called “extraordinary experiences,” Dewey named the opposite “anaesthetic” perhaps another term for numb, or somnolent, a condition incompatible with an “attitude of full attention” or any effort to change the world.

Wide-awakeness is in some sense synonymous with Paulo Freire's concept of conscientization. Engaged in efforts to break through what he called “cultures of silence” or cultures where oppression deprived people of “voice,” Freire stressed the development of critical literacy. He fought what he called “banking education,” a widespread tendency to “deposit” pieces of knowledge into the minds of passive students, old and young. Conscientization meant resistance to lack of awareness and lack of initiative in posing worthwhile questions.

Only through posing such questions could the oppressed name their worlds rather than simply accepting the interpretations or constructions made by their oppressors. Accepting in this fashion, the voiceless ones (peasants, say, excluded minorities, women in many parts of the world) were far too likely to internalize distorted, impotent images of themselves, agreeing in a peculiar way to be inferior beings at the pleasure of those with poweror thought to have power. Freire, probably more explicitly than others, identified what he called “humanization” with being highly conscious. His “pedagogy” became a process of humanization, of learning to pose the kinds of questions that might enable them to become critical and aware enough to make sense of their lived situations. Thought of in relational or dialogic terms, however, it was not enough to know or reflect or to “name.” There had to be a transmutation into reflective practice to bring about change. And there had to be a coming together for the sake of cultural change.

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