The Pedagogy of Unlearning

Sor Juana's intellectual method involved rigorous questioning of received doctrine—not wholesale rejection, but careful examination of what deserved continued belief. The pedagogy of unlearning applies this method to faith departure: it's not merely forgetting, but actively studying what you were taught, why you believed it, how it served institutional interests, and whether it serves your authentic development. This framework treats unlearning as serious intellectual work requiring time, resources, and often external support. You must identify what was instilled (shame about sexuality, fear of questioning, binary thinking, authoritarian submission patterns) and systematically examine its origins and functions. Unlike passive apostasy, this pedagogy makes deconstruction a deliberate practice of reclaiming your mind from colonization. It honors the difficulty of changing fundamental beliefs while insisting that identity reconstruction requires active, conscious disengagement from internalized authority.