What is a Next System Teach-In?
What is a teach-in? The major waves of teach-ins of the past 50 years have gone beyond the committed choir to inspire large numbers of people to expand their sense of the necessary and the possible. A teach-in brings a community together to face, understand, and take responsibility for a question of great importance. We call it a “teach-in” because we reach out to everyone in our community — whether that is defined as a campus, institution, organization, neighborhood, city, or region — and invite them in for education, sharing, and debate.
Teach-ins usually are multi-day events that involve large-scale gatherings combined with smaller, more intensive sessions; they can include everything from lectures and workshops to festivals, trainings, debates, and artmaking.
Teach-ins as a strategy for helping catalyze change have been important both to building social movements and to the emergence of new fields of study for more than five decades. Beginning in the United States in the mid-1960s with the teach-ins on the war in Vietnam and continuing on through the 1970s and 1980s with the use of teach-ins by the environmental, women’s, anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear movements, into the 1990s and 2000s with the Democracy Teach-Ins and Tent State Universities, and most recently with Occupy and Black Lives Matter, the periodic revival of the teach-in tradition has not only strengthened social movements but also contributed significantly to the emergence of fields like peace studies, environmental studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, and global studies.
What makes a Next System Teach-in special? The question of great importance that we face, seek to understand, and take responsibility for with a Next System Teach-In is that of the next system. Or put another way:
“If we take our social, political, economic, and ecological crises seriously enough, can we build a world that is democratic, sustainable, and just?”
This is the big question that animates the Next System Teach-Ins. It is a question that leads us to ask, additionally:
- How well do we understand the crises of our time?
- What do we need to know about alternative designs to our current system?
- What can we learn from movements for system change?
- What must we know about the different pathways for system change?
The particular ways that people in you and your communities address these questions will depend somewhat on what seems most relevant to whom and where you are. Teach-Ins planned for the neighborhoods and campuses of Chicago will share some things in common with those planned for the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), but they will also differ in important ways. There are many important ties between Chicago and Mexico City, and both relate to the same world system and the same global crises — but they relate in different ways.
This is one of the beautiful things about the Next System Teach-In approach: We can each learn and build in the ways most appropriate to our own particular circumstances while also learning and building together across institutions, communities, distances, and borders.
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