Some thoughts on the pedagogy of hooping…
 

Pedagogy, or the study of teaching, is a look into the way we learn, and in academic circles is often confused with the parameters of classrooms and books.  It is sad really that ivory tower inhabitants and followers alike think of school as a place where we learn, distinct from, say, hula hooping at a park or cooking dinner.  There is pedagogy in architecture, pedagogy in basketball, pedagogy in the way an artist decides what where and why to hang her paintings. 

The Hula Hoop is a circle, which is one of the first and most important conceptual notions that a child must have, for an understanding of the metaphors of the circle will allow travel through life in a way that makes sense.  Of course this is my opinion.  Certain Greek English French etc philosophers might see things in a more linear fashion (showing I believe their lust for destruction which they shroud in symposiums about “love” and “freedom” and such).  Ask one of them what one word you would base a philosophy on if you were on a desert island, they would not likely say circle.  Ask me, circle would be the word.  A more complete epistemology of my belief in the centrality of the circle (pun intended) will be available in my forthcoming book on hooping.  However I can tell you this:

The gyration of the body with a hula hoop tells us volumes about physics and movement, should we ever want to study or simply think about the world we live in.  We walk around dumb as shit in the modern world, pecking away at typewriters and not even knowing how the fuck the words get from the fingers (which get trained to do and not think) to the paper – for example, tell me how a copy machine works, dear reader.

So assuming we are all dumb in one way or another (on the outside chance that you can tell me how a copy machine works, can you also tell me the reason that certain parts of the land yield a more healthy orange tree, or how to build a house?) what can we do about our human condition of stupidity?  The draw of modern technology couch potatoism is strong and has been created by ex-nazi experiments and the science of mass manipulation.  The very people and principles that were silently taken from the Nazi German intellectual community after WWII and given new American identities (see Operation Paperclip, I am not being paranoid – now declassified, go look for yourself) were later employed by the advertising and military industries to hone the crafts of mass manipulation and the psychological manipulatory potential during wartime (including Cold Wartime).  The thinking was, lets get these brilliant Nazis on our side or the Russians will snatch them up.  (The other industry effected by Operation Paperclip was the rocket science industry, go figger).

I contend that as honest Americans we must stand up to these Nazi tendencies of couch potatoism.  And I say that things such as Hula Hooping can be the way to achieve this divorce from current behavior.  This is the most dead serious and full-of-potential aspect of a pedagogical thinking around the Hula Hoop.  We must act and we must be strong in these times of increased biopower.

Biopower is a concept from a French philosopher Foulcault that says that government tries to increase its power over life and death of people, and that this power is amped up through the psychological and physical imprisonment of citizens.  This power he calls biopower, the power over life and death.

A hooper would come to realize that life and death are a part of each other, this is the inevitable extension of long contemplation of a circle.  This idea for the hooper, though, becomes different and more autonomous from the idea of life and death as controlled by others.  It takes great amount of thought to clearly come to such conclusions and thus begin to lift yourself from the grips of biopower.  And because biopower is constantly exerted in the modern world upon anyone anywhere, it must be resisted constantly.

Thankfully humans have a natural capacity to resist power exerted by others, it is the same spirit that is called up in the propaganda about “the spirit of the wild west.”  Hula Hoops have a capacity to unlock great amounts of this spirit, which is not only a natural spirit, but one that can and must be learned, it must be taught to our youth and our children, and therefore a Hula Hoop becomes a vehicle for pedagogy that need not be explained in words.

In order for a pedagogy to be successful, it must communicate.  The connective power of Hula Hooping, the sheer fun of doing it in numbers, and the exponential bloom of aesthetic joy one gets from seeing three, or five, or thirty hoops going at once, is spectacular.  What this teaches us on the surface is that there is a great beauty in this thing, like looking at a painting.  What we see as we look deeper is that there is a magnetic phenomenon that the Nazis knew about, that is neither good nor evil in itself, which humans have towards each other (and particularly each other when the other is attached to a pack-of-folks).  Hoops teach us this if we experiment with them.  Take 20 hoops anywhere there are people and space, put them on the ground, start hooping, and folk will come to you, enter into your orbit, talk with you, hoop with you, have fun with you, learn from you, and teach you.  This is pedagogy.