Capability for Becoming

For sure, PSCS did not create the idea of “community-centered education” as we’re calling it now. Marginalized and racialized families and educators have built, and run collaboratively, free community schools for decades, centuries, both as a tool for survival and as a means to celebrate and grow the creativity and joy of Black and Brown people. In the last 25 years, many progressive school models and intentions, PSCS included, were built with a focus on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

Physiological Needs ➡️ Safety and Security ➡️ Love and Belonging ➡️ Self Esteem ➡️ Self Actualization

This pyramid has Self Actualization at the tippy top. Self Actualization as success, the GOAL. We know better now that Maslow, studied, appropriated, and distorted, without (much) acknowledgement, the Blackfoot Nation’s niita’pitapi, roughly translated to “capability for becoming”:

Self Actualization ➡️ Community Actualization ➡️ Community Perpetuity

This would of course be best represented as circular (or as a MOBIUS!), but self-actualization is one part of a whole, a scaffold for actualization of us all. PSCS is neither free (yet!) nor fully actualized. We teach to understand systems and ground ourselves in history and the necessary equations. We educate to see through those same systems, to ground ourselves in community when those same systems do not want us to. PSCS acknowledges community perpetuity and becoming as more in line with our with our efforts AND recognize we are growing seeds in a previously planted garden.

Resources include @sacredrelatives