Igniting a Fear Praxis for Teaching
Samuel N. Gillian Jr.’s Life and Courage
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Young People
- Chapter 3 Party of Freedom and Progress
- Chapter 4 The Other-Side
- Chapter 5 More or Less?
- Chapter 6 So I Thought
- Chapter 7 Still Gives You Chills
- Chapter 8 Higher Grounds-1
- Chapter 9 Higher Grounds-2
- Chapter 10 Higher Grounds-3
- Chapter 11 Sobering Fearanalysis
- Chapter 12 Fear Wars-1
- Chapter 13 Fear Wars-2
- Chapter 14 Blazing a Solo Trail
- Chapter 15 Worse Than You
- Chapter 16 Fearless Psychology
- Chapter 17 Cannot Hide
- Chapter 18 Two and Two
- Chapter 19 Leaders
- Index
- Series Index
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fisher, R. Michael, author.
Title: Igniting a fear praxis for teaching: Samuel N. Gillian Jr.‘s life
and courage / R. Michael Fisher.
Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2024. | Series: Counterpoints,
1058-1634; Vol. 548 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023041872 (print) | LCCN 2023041873 (ebook) | ISBN
9781636674803 (hardback) | ISBN 9781636674575 (epub) |
ISBN 9781636674513 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Gillian, Samuel Nathan, 1939-2006. |
Teaching— Psychological aspects. | Fear. | African American
educators— Biography.
Classification: LCC LA2317.G49 F57 2024 (print) | LCC LA2317.G49 (ebook) | DDC
370.92 [B]--dc23/eng/20231012
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041872
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041873
DOI 10.3726/b21298
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
The German National Library lists this publication in the German
National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG
ISSN 1058-1634 (print)
ISBN 9781636674803 (hardback)
ISBN 9781636674513 (ebook)
ISBN 9781636674575 (epub)
DOI 10.3726/b21298
© 2024 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne
Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, USA
info@peterlang.com - www.peterlang.com
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the
publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and
processing in electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
About the author
R. Michael Fisher, Ph.D., is an artist, educator, lecturer and independent scholar who has coined the word “fearology.” He is author of 15 books, including The Fearless Engagement of Four Arrows (Peter Lang, 2018) and The Marianne Williamson Presidential Phenomenon (Peter Lang, 2022). He lives and works in W. Canada.
About the book
With current surging polarities of perspectives, dangerous culture wars and immanent threats to the human social and ecological fabric, it is a good time to rediscover the true meaning of fear through the eyes of a creative and endearingly outrageous educator who taught ‘Fear is not the enemy.’ Through a combination of fi ction and non-fi ction, this book offers a fi rst documentation of the philosophy and story of Samuel Nathan Gillian Jr. (1939-2006), an African-American educator-activist from the Bronx, New York. Fisher takes readers on a journey of growth and development with a protagonist named Deana, a sophomore college student, as she comes to understand the radical importance of her Uncle Sammy’s life and work. Embellished with the intellectual rigor of a biography of a wise man, Fisher tracks his own relationship and those who knew and loved Samuel as the tension grows to a pitch in the story. Yet, the real brilliance lies in the psychological, philosophical and spiritual twists Sam Gillian brought forward in two stunning books on fear (2002, 2005) that this book revives. Fisher, who has studied fear systematically since 1989, has never met a unique thinker like Sam Gillian. Through Fisher’s eyes, the special signifi cance of Gillian’s work is brought to the general and well-educated reading public. An essential book for post-secondary education on fear management, a resource guide for school teachers, parents, psychologists, policy makers and anyone who seeks to help humanity establish a sustainable, moral and healthy relationship with fear.
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
Contents
Acknowledgements
This book has many who helped it sail. There are many scholars and leaders of high calibre utilized in this text for quotations and inspiration—they are my intellectual medicine. Outstanding in contribution to my thinking have been Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa aka Don T. Jacob) and Marianne Williamson. Although too many to mention, they are acknowledged in the Endnotes and References for further reading and study. I appreciate being able to reprint the poem “A Child’s Thought of Death” written by B. G. Hosmer ©1868. I’m calling this a found poem, because at some point I found it on the internet and now cannot find it nor who published it—as if it has since disappeared. I acknowledge Phemore Press, Inc., the publishing house Samuel founded, for allowing me to republish a good deal of copyrighted material in this book, written by the late Samuel N. Gillian Jr. Appreciation to Don T. Jacob ©1998 to publish a quote from his shaman friend/teacher Augustin Ramos.
In particular, I thank the young people, and relatives of Samuel, who stepped forward to make this book richer in details and inspiration; for example, I appreciate the stories provided by Dana Chambers, Kandes Ross and Crystal Ross, and especially for the enthusiasm of Samia Shearn, who kick-started the book project with her curiosity and for contacting me to ask about my relationship with Samuel. It’s has been an honor and privilege to meet the family. And finally, I am indebted to Bernice Gillian for her soft patience and willingness to trust me and this vision I had for this book. I’m inspired by your courage to walk again with memories of Samuel, that obviously still course through your blood. This particular form of a book, of hybrid writing of fact and fiction wouldn’t have come together without you Bernice. I so enjoyed each interview.
And, lastly, I want to thank all the near and far ancestors in the relationship nets that swirled in and out of this book’s story and stories—and that, continues to nourish the many who are part of Bernice and Samuel’s life. As a writer, I cannot do just to all those who knew and supported Samuel to become the wise person he became. I take my hat off to all of you, and perhaps I will get to know you better in the future. As Samuel so often did in his own two published books, he acknowledged the intelligence and dignity of what he called “Dear Reader”—and, in that vein, I too wish to acknowledge you “Dear Reader.”
Preface
By getting involved in helping others, we reduce the negative fear that we feel and increase the positive fear that we all have a right to feel….Strength, courage, and wisdom require that we examine ourselves inside, for as the Greek philosopher Socrates is reported to have said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ All too many of us have been just too negatively terrified by life itself to begin bringing any of our deeply repressed fears out into the open.
–Samuel N. Gillian Jr.1
One American boy, brown-skinned beautiful as his ancestors tracing back to Africa, led a Socratic examined life. This difficult path challenged every fibre of his existence—including, at times, the will to live. That chosen life defied all prejudices that surrounded him with walls, from all ages, genders, classes and races, that were thick-n-rigid if not mean in the face of soaring growth of a brilliant mind. The boy learning to become man—was one with powerful, often rebellious ideas—a complicated, discomforting and meant to be remembered life.
Shy and quiet for most of his youth, Sam eventually found his often vertiginous voice, learning to play the game in American life and to make the best of struggles, with some help from his parents. In short,
Both parents were born in Virginia. Father, Samuel Nathan Gillian, Sr., was born in Lynchburg, VA in 1908 and died in Grasslands Hospital in 1966, after three years of illness. Mother, Alma Lee Gillian was born in Surry County, VA. in 1912 and died in the Bronx, NY, May 10,1988. They married in 1934 in Mt. Vernon, NY. They separated sometime after the birth of their last son, Alan Gillian. The exact circumstances of their separation is unknown but likely Samuel Sr. was ‘a man of the world.’ Not one to stay put in duty alone. He had a few famous friends and wanted intimate relations beyond being a loyal father and husband. When they separated, the wife and children went to live with the mother, until she moved to the Bronx. Samuel Jr. was picked by his father, amongst the seven siblings, to live with him for eight-plus years.2
So much to tell—and, try to paint a collective-portrait of this man/teacher/author in this hybrid approach to writing “story”—of both fiction and non-fiction. Virtually anyone he would spend time with was likely to encounter his rhetorical wit and logic, smattered with heartful vulnerability.
He loved a good pedagogical story, true and/or false, to capture his students’ attention and make them really think. A follower of the great synthetic scholar the late Ernest Becker, he agreed that the human condition is not clean and clear cut—not mere truth of fact, not mere myth of fiction. The art of living wisely is to weave these realms of experience and knowledge into problem-solving tools, pragmatically useful and ever creatively evolving.
I like his thinking a lot. I admire the knowledge he pulls from diverse sources, from the Bible, to the daily newspaper advertisements, to the mouths of toddlers in his family or from strangers riding on the New York subway. He observed acutely everything around him.
Overall, I wrote this book to capture a diverse and hybridizing integral knowledge to gain, something that Gillian sought with his life-long passion from womb-to-tomb.3 More than entertaining, as a creative intellectual biography, my educative task is for understanding, and possibly healing and transformation. And most importantly, it is in understanding that there is a formulation herein these pages of collective humanity’s gain of real possibilities for “saving this planet.” Not to spoil the mystery of his solution, I can’t help but sharing his concern (penned in 2005), with his sometimes hyperbolic language, both for the planet and for the way we ought to re-fashion our understanding of the fear we experience naturally when faced with real threat. He wrote,
Once we understand the one-to-one relationship between fear and knowledge, then we should have no problem understanding that we can use scientific knowledge as a fearful [useful] weapon of mass instruction also. For example, an organization working to protect our environment sent out a letter with this statement above the “Dear” line: “Our planet is undergoing the greatest die-off of species since the disappearance of the dinosaurs over 65 million years ago. According to scientists, an estimated 25,000 unique plants and animals are vanishing each year—that’s at least 70 each day! And with each irreplaceable loss, our own survival becomes a little less certain.” (My emphasis.) What all this shows is that no matter what our intentions, we have no choice but to use fear to teach and motivate. The law of fearful instruction cannot be denied.4
He offers his own version of a justified pedagogy of fear—which, for many progressive educators, including myself, is likely most discomforting. Passing over that for now, comes every intellectual biographer’s larger challenge: how to tell that story of growth of ideas in the history of an individual and their times and the knowledge and understanding it wrought—and, to tell it through Gillian’s lens as much as possible. I am necessarily humbled. There are lots of quotes from Gillian’s texts. I also utilize characters, some based on my real research interviews, who meet Gillian in the fictional world to also give their perspective and lens on who Gillian was, his values, beliefs, and how he thought as a philosopher and educator.
Unfortunately, I had not spent face-to-face time with him and those who know him. But risk I must. To tell Gillian’s story as best I can is not easy nor politically and culturally unproblematic. I am white, he is black.5 He is from a generation before me. I am a boomer. He is born and raised Christian and American on the East coast of the Atlantic Ocean. I am born and raised secular and Canadian closer to the West coast of the Pacific. As North Americans, Gillian and I couldn’t be further apart. Because of his published books on the topic fear, we exchanged emails for nearly a year, then each of us went our own ways. His passing in early 2016 (age 76), without me knowing until 2020, leaves a gaping hole, a place of mourning, an incomplete border-crossing in our collegial connectivity.
Endlessly, I snoop for the glue to our disparate existences. There has to be something beneath mere biography that intrigues me to commit years to a person and their work. Perhaps the spark which ignites boils down to this man’s steadfast passion and analysis to figure out the deeper why—in order to explain human behavior.
Along an earthy path and practical but potent way, Gillian Jr. sets forth on a rare and ground-shaking quest: “I have learned that fear can be positively enjoyable. One step in learning how to do this is to understand how we first learn to deceive ourselves about fear.”6 Okay. You’ve got my attention brother!
Gillian’s Fear Teaching(s)
He cuts to the chase of the core of the human problem—that is, “our human confusion about fear.”7 Now, you’ve really got my attention, brother! I wish for more people to read and hear the guidance he brings us as a species as we face the massive and dangerous global problems today:
Having been conditioned by life itself to be negatively afraid of life, we are unable to have an open and honest dialogue about fear, unable to have an open and honest dialogue about life.…Furthermore, a self-deceptive view of fear prevents us from dealing honestly and realistically with serious human problems—problems that will never be resolved until we learn to see through our self-deceptions concerning fear. Therefore, it is time for each of us to revise our view of fear itself.…8
His first-step guide (above) to learn about the “beauty of fear,” as he would often teach, was not a naive prescription. Gillian well-knew the confusion and conditioning of people’s minds was deep. Their en masse phobia around talking about fear itself is a topic that has greatly interested me for decades as a fearologist. Whether teaching his middle school students, adults in his night classes, or parents that came to his workshops on motivation, he was well aware they would typically struggle to understand what he was saying added to their struggle to understand fear itself. Bottomline, he’d exclaim: “self-examination is terrifying” and people avoid that terror—but “strength, courage, and wisdom” are required for the examined life.9 His mission would be a long and difficult one, that he himself did not always see the fruits of his labors in his life time. Yet, he was a devout believer: “We all have the power to change our world right now where we are by simply changing our minds, by simply changing the way we view things.”10 That’s where you start. He concludes his hopeful pragmatic message in working-class terms: “I don’t need to go away to some quiet [expensive] retreat on a mountaintop in some far away country to make changes in myself.”11
In terms of deeply and widely understanding fear, I knew I met my match (and then some) when I first reached out and corresponded with Samuel Gillian Jr. in spring 2004, some two years after he had written and published his first book The Beauty of Fear. That production was his first priority upon his forced early retirement, after 30+ years living and teaching middle school youth in the Bronx, New York City Board of Education. In 2002–07 he founded his own publishing company and saw before him a string of books to write for children and adults.12
What a day job, teaching inner urban mostly black and poor junior high students. He still had energy to boot. At nights, for 15 years, he taught adults in a GED program life and essay skills, in Harlem. His About the Author page in the book it’s noted: “Sam is retiring…to devote his time to writing and lecturing. While he is leaving the classroom, Sam will never leave ‘teaching.’” It is “the best of all possible jobs to have.”13 Indeed, a main aim of my biography study is that his ideas and writing never leaves the planet—is accessible—and always provocative, in the spirit in which he meant his life and thinking to be.
A philosopher and astute psychological observer and interpreter,14 a teacher and self-confessed informal “preacher”15—at that point of first contact between us he had studied “fear” as his focused subject for 30 years and I had done so for 15 years. Sam was my senior, born in 1939, while I was born in 1952. He was American and seemed mostly proud to be but also was critical. He put his youth life on the line to serve in the US military between 1958 and 1961. I was a Canadian long-haired rock musician embedded in anti-war 1960s–70s love-in peace protests. Our distrust of authorities comes with good reasons, and his more so than mine. However, one bridge of mutual interest is that we both embrace the prime importance of “fear” in shaping human behavior and institutions—and, we are both staunch critics of “love is the answer” rhetorics of idealism gone overboard.16 We are both critical theorists and hold that knowledge-fear-power (an inseparable trialectic17) dynamics of society are more potent in determining how a society works than—in his words—“peace and love that we give so much lip service to.”18
Contrasts between us aside, we both knew what growing up working poor was all about. We both had some family members who were born-again Christians; his were two brothers, mine were my dad’s oldest brother and all his children, my cousins, and his father and mother. My paternal ancestors fled Russia (as Germans) after a repressive regime was actively stamping them out. Sam’s ancestors were stolen from Africa and brought into slavery in the United States. For the most part, history had not been kind to our ancestors. He and I would not forget but we’d learn to forgive.
We also have in common a love of Nature and were keen observers. But Culture is equally fascinating. Gillian tells many stories pointing to the cultural behaviors that spin around the most simple things, that most people do not notice or at least they do not carefully observe and record behaviors and their potential meanings. For one of many examples, I was surprised to read Gillian’s description of a poster pasted on a bus going by in New York City, and from the juxtapositioning of the major words he takes an everyday observation and gives an exegesis on “power” related to danger and fear.19
Mostly, neither Gillian nor myself felt that people took us seriously, especially, when we spoke our truths in our youth and when we struggled to learn in formal institutions. Being rejected was our daily bread. We naturally rebelled to forced conformity because of an inherent and resilient righteousness but not that alone. We mostly sensed people were not being fully truthful. As we matured, we loved books and became life-long learners, advancing on our own spirited steam and self-generated finances to reach graduate school in the field of Education. He completed his MA in Education from City College New York.
If we imagined sailing a ship, with a big flag flowing, on it would be written: True Freedom and Creativity Are All Children’s Right! We both felt pain, our own, and witnessed many abuses upon others, from gross to sublime, of excess fear/terror wrought upon the children and youth of the world. We may not have always spoke out against it because of our lack of confidence in our youth, but that tragedy we would not let go unnoticed. We became writers and teachers. Philosophically, we ended up around the same time, in 1972, discovering Alan Watts’ Zen philosophy books, which led to us both questioning the taboos in society that eschewed fear, insecurity and nondual no-self conceptualizations, which was for us a taboo that served a malign worldview of cancerous ways of perceiving and thinking, which is dysfunctional evolutionarily and historically—and still dominating to this very day.
Details
- Pages
- XXX, 318
- Publication Year
- 2024
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781636674513
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781636674575
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781636674803
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21298
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2024 (January)
- Keywords
- education fear moral courage African American author future curriculum management critical pedagogy sociology psychology philosophy Igniting a Fear Praxis for Teaching Samuel N. Gillian Jr.’s Life and Courage Michael Fisher
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2024. XXX, 318 pp., 1 b/w ill.