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1509560440
| 9781509560448
| B0CSWYYTJC
| 3.90
| 1,769
| Mar 09, 2023
| Jan 19, 2024
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it was amazing
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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about rites of passage and how they no longer really match up with the major events in our lives – and tha
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about rites of passage and how they no longer really match up with the major events in our lives – and that it isn’t clear how we might fix that. This is likely to be different in different countries, of course – but in Australia we still celebrate people turning 21. Except, you can have sex from the age of 12 (as long as the person you are having sex with is a maximum of 2 years older than you), have sex with anyone you like over 12 at 16, buy alcohol and vote at 18. That is, basically nothing changes when you turn 21. So, we have a rite, but no actual passage. The problem is more complicated than this too. As I was telling a friend during the week, a rite of passage is a ceremony that marks a kind of death and a rebirth. So that, when you graduate from Primary School, that part of your life is well and truly over. You will never go back to being a primary school student. This is also likely to be true of when you finish high school – although, this is a much less hard and fast rule in high school compared to primary school. Graduating from university might mean barely anything at all – as you might immediately enrol to do a higher degree, or you might come back decades later. Certainly, it doesn’t mean a part of your life is over forever. But this is what such life transitions used to mean – a folk song I like to sing goes, ‘School days over, come on then John, time to be getting your pit boots on, on with your sark and moleskin trousers you start at the pit today, time you were learning the miner’s job and earning the miner’s pay’. And it isn’t that long ago when that transition was, for virtually everyone that made it, absolute. That is, a transition like a rite of passage, where coming out the other side meant your previous life was completely over with no going back. We hardly have those anymore. And those that we do, we generally don’t celebrate as rites. I’m thinking of the major life changes we have where there is mostly no going back to who you were before. Take being diagnosed with cancer. If it is a serious cancer, particularly one that involves aggressive treatment, you are unlikely to come through it feeling you are ‘the same’ person as before. Or take getting a divorce. I know when I separated from my ex-wife my entire world changed irreparably. And not just because I never married again, but also because, as the ‘leaver’, my conception of the type of person I was had also fundamentally changed. Or take being made redundant at work – when this happened to me I used the opportunity to go back to university and get an MA and then a PhD. My life has had few ‘passages’ that compare to either of those – but neither really involved a rite – and when I finally graduated the ‘change’ in my life was already years before. Basically, when I graduated with my PhD, the only thing that changed was that I stopped being called a ‘research assistant’ and started being called a ‘research fellow’. The point is, there is a disconnect today between the ‘rites’ we go through to mark life changes, and the life changes themselves. Han makes much the same point here – but much more generally. He says that we have lost the narrative component of our lives, and this is for a whole lot of reasons – mostly to do with us being connected to the internet and our lives being filled with ‘information’ and ‘data’. He says information and data are the opposite of what a story really is. That a story is made as much from what is left out as what is included – something not true of information. And because we are finding it increasingly difficult to fit our lives into a narrative structure (and my current obsession with rites of passage is part of this – since such rites provided such a narrative structure previously) our lives are no longer story-like, but more ‘one thing after another’. Meaning is story-like. Han links this is the consumer society – and he is not the first to do that, of course. Most of the book is him applying the ideas of Walter Benjamin to the modern world – or post-modern world. The problem is that in this world we increasingly do not belong to a common narrative structure – and so we feel isolated. Consumers are not really citizens, they don’t really belong to a community. This is something Bauman says, that a consumer might be standing in a line with other consumers waiting to buy the latest iPhone, but despite them being in the same place wanting to do the same thing – there is no commonality between them. In fact, if there is a shortage of iPhones, they might really be competitors, rather than within a community of iPhone purchasers. The consumer is an atom. This atomisation is also heightened by the shift from stories to information. And this has a long incubation period too, but is certainly worse today. Neil Postman talked about this in one of his books about the news, or perhaps it was in Technopoly. His point was that most news is of virtually no real meaning to the reader of the news. In my life, there are things that can have a real and immediate impact upon it – for example, when there is roadworks on one of the roads near where I live, or the trains are replaced by buses, it can be a pain in the bum for me. But I would need to go looking for this information ahead of time – not something I ever think to do. Rather, the ‘news’ that I have to spend no time looking for at all is the news least likely to have a real impact on my life. You know, that Trump called someone a nasty person, that King Charles is recovering well from whatever form of cancer he had, that the Blues beat the Swans by 15 points at the ‘G. Another book I read over the weekend on the importance of encouraging kids to read said they were particularly shocked when they realised, in a book written in the US, that their high school students didn’t know who the Vice President was. This was seen as shocking – but really, isn’t it just confirmation of how little most of what we are presented with on the news is trivia and of barely any real relevance to our lives? I’m someone who is obsessed with the news – but I do know that it is little more than a soap opera and of little to no import to my ‘real’ life. And this also breaks down any sense of community. The real events that impact our lives are between difficult and impossible to engage with – the ‘flooding the zone with shit’ news is everywhere and needs to be consciously avoided. I’ve friends who never watch the news – it is hard to say they are ‘ill-informed’ or suffer in any noticeable way. In fact, given how depressed I find so much of the news – particularly over the last nearly 2 years coming out of Gaza – they are probably much better off than I am. And this news is also almost never presented as a narrative. The news is always ‘new’ – and is virtually never presented with any context. If you want context, you would hardly turn to a newspaper – you would turn to a book. But who has time to read books on all of the current events filling our newspapers? So, we get data point after data point from Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico, Ukraine, Iceland, Indonesia – and these might be a demonstration here, a flood there, a building reduced to rubble, a child starving, some guys on the back of a jeep shooting machine guns into the sky. The images meld and blend and are mostly meaningless to us. And Han’s point is that this is also true of the rest of our lives – lives that are increasingly spent online in a world without pause – in a world of information and ‘news’, rather than narrative structure. He says a really interesting thing about the endless photos we have on our phones and that we post online. These are the data points of our lives – but since they have no narrative structure, they don’t tell anything about our lives, rather, all they do is provide clutter. In fact, not only do that not provide a story, they actively undermine the construction of a story – since they provide too much detail, they are too transparent. There is a lovely long bit in this where he retells the story of a young boy who could not tell stories. He gets sent to someone to help him learn how to tell stories – and is confronted with a string of bizarre and even terrifying events. When he finally gets out of the house he was sent to, he says something like, god, what until I tell you what happened. The point being that stories help us to explain what would otherwise appear to be inexplicable. He also argues that when all you have is information, you cannot aim to change your life. Any real change, revolutionary change, requires a kind of utopian vision – a vision of what the world could be like compared to how it is. That is, it needs a story that makes sense of the present and points the way to the future. The endless information we are confronted with does not allow such a story to be told – and so, it confines us to the eternal present – the ‘hell of the same’ as he calls it at one point. God, this review is now nearly as long as the book – and I haven’t covered half of what Han has. ...more |
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Jul 13, 2025
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Jul 13, 2025
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Kindle Edition
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1668023482
| 9781668023488
| 1668023482
| 4.05
| 19,459
| Mar 18, 2025
| Mar 18, 2025
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liked it
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A dear friend of mine has, for at least 20 years, told me he is sick to death of reading about US politics and so on. And yet, nearly every book he re
A dear friend of mine has, for at least 20 years, told me he is sick to death of reading about US politics and so on. And yet, nearly every book he recommends to me is about US politics. It is a strange paradox. And so this is one of the books he recommended to me. He said that it is being talked about a lot and so is one of those books you should read for that reason alone. In a way, it is a left-ish version of how to make America great again. In many ways, it is a less leftwing version of another book I was advised to read years ago – Fully Automated Luxury Communism. I never reviewed the book – as I didn’t think nearly as highly of the book as the person who recommended it to me did. I’m not as convinced that more technology is necessarily the answer to the problems technology has gotten us into – nor that just because technology has been something of a disaster in the past, it will inevitably prove to be the opposite in the immediate future. There is a long part in the middle of this book where the author runs through the problems facing the US. I can’t see how these problems will be overcome. I can’t see a way for them to be overcome given the current political realities in the US. And I can’t see a movement there that is likely to take hold and shift the priorities of the majority of the US population. Someone a few years ago became my ‘friend’ here on Good Reads and, unlike so many other people who become my ‘friends’ here actually wrote to me. I used to do this as a matter of course – write to people to thank them for their friend requests – it seemed like a normal thing to do, at the time. But I quickly learned – from the lack of replies – that this was anything like a normal thing to do. Whatever ‘friend’ means on this site – actual communication doesn’t seem to be a large part of it. She told me that she was a great fan of Musk - and wanted to know if I was too. I told her I was anything but. She seemed very surprised - perhaps she is less so now. But this attitude that the great and powerful in the US are the answer and that they can do no wrong and that we mere mortals should get out of their way and let them fix things seems to be to be a very American attitude and one that is unlikely to change any time soon. I didn’t come away from reading this book with a great sense of how the envisioned future discussed here was likely to come about. It did reaffirm my belief that the American empire is in fatal decline and that there is probably nothing that can be done to stop, or even slow, that decline. That half of the voting population could look at a serial sex offender and bankrupt and think he was the answer, does make you wonder what they thought the question was. Like my friend, I’m quite bored by US politics. This didn’t do very much to persuade me to change my attitude. ...more |
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Hardcover
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1509523065
| 9781509523061
| 1509523065
| 4.02
| 2,422
| 2016
| Apr 30, 2018
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it was amazing
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I want to begin with something he doesn’t say – that empathy is a problem rather than a solution. Empathy is from Greek and means in common feeling. T
I want to begin with something he doesn’t say – that empathy is a problem rather than a solution. Empathy is from Greek and means in common feeling. This commonality is the problem here and something that Han spends a lot of time discussing as a feature of neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberal capitalism is different from the capitalism Marx was concerned with. That form of capitalism pitted worker against capitalist and so there was a kind of common life experience and a common enemy that workers faced. But neoliberal capitalism is more closely aligned with a kind of Hobbesian war of all against each – or rather, a war of self against self. We have become ‘authentic’ in the sense that we see ourselves as projects to perfect. In this world, we are self-exploiting. We differentiate ourselves by our competition with ourselves. In such a world, a revolution is impossible, since it would be a war against ourselves. We define ourselves by our purchases – our labour is a commodity, and our identities are also commodities. We have been sold a myth of self-perfectibility on the basis of positive psychology. But the elimination of the negative involves the elimination of the other. We are confronted with a world of sameness. In such a world, we are attracted to those we identify with and so everything becomes a kind of bland sameness, where all difference is avoided. Positivity itself is the problem here, since it is only in confronting the negative that true growth is possible. This has been something that has been known for a very long time and has been a key feature of human rituals – not least in rites of passage which, virtually by definition, involve a kind of death and resurrection into the new, a process that always involves the kind of pain that we generally shun today in our world of hyper-positivity. Empathy, then, is something we tend to show to people we can identify with – I can show you empathy if I can ‘walk a mile in your shoes’. The problem is that the true other is not someone we can imagine walking in their shoes. At one time, this was the lesson of literature. Today, so much of literature is based on excruciating life experiences of people we can only identify with in the abstract – the victims of Nazi prison guards, those suffering the unspeakable isolation of severe illness, people who have lost everything. But the other who would really shake us from our lethargy are not these tragic figures, but rather those who, like Socrates, were out-of-place. People who are objects beyond the everyday. As he says, “The word ‘object’ comes from the Latin verb obicere, which means ‘throw at’, ‘put towards’ or ‘reproach’.” Something you might object against – the negative in a world of endless positives. Here we do not feel empathy, but rather a challenge. We do not walk in their shoes, but rather go into a kind of life-affirming battle with this other to test our own mettle and to overcome our own limitations. Such military illusions are perhaps necessary in the sense that in standing in opposition to empathy, such an attitude requires more than an understanding of the other, but an openness to risk one’s self in the confrontation. In empathy, we tend to remain the measure of others – in confronting a character like Socrates we must challenge our own taken-for-granted assumptions and ways of being. Empathy, in this sense, then, is a kind of additive process, were we see others as yet another life-style we could, if we chose, have adopted. In confronting the other, we risk our own death. Interestingly, Han doesn’t really use these military metaphors, but rather metaphors of seduction. He doubts we are today capable of seduction. We are much more likely to turn away from eros towards pornography. In pornography, we are either male or female – everything that is hidden in seduction is transparent in pornography. Pornography has all of the negative traits of desire with none of the possibility of transcendence seduction offers. Love is not pornographic – but seduction involves an openness to the other that is psychologically more naked than the superficial nudity of pornography can offer. In seduction, what is desired most is what can never be simply assimilated into ourselves. We do not want to become the other, but rather to become at one with the other. And this implies the most important gift we can offer the other as the object of our desire – the gift of listening to them. Listening is a gift that must be offered before the other begins talking. To truly hear them, we must first show we are prepared to listen. And this listening is not merely transformative to the other, but to ourselves. As such, it is not a gathering of information about the other, but an openness to ourselves being transformed in the very act of our own listening. Such an openness is the opposite of what positive psychology offers us. Positive psychology offers us a better version of ourselves, but this confrontation with the other we seek to seduce offers us more than a better version of ourselves, but rather a transformation in who we are – a kind of rebirth, a kind of death. He makes the point that the blandness of self-perfection has reduced many of us to finding our only means of feeling anything at all is through self-harm. Where cutting ourselves or bulimia are epidemic now because they offer an escape from the everyday and the stultifying sameness of self-perfection. It puts this in a kind of aphorism – much of his short books are really strings of aphorisms – by saying, “Seduction takes place in a space where signifiers circulate without being confronted by the signified.” That is, like our concept of love itself, we have endless words we use to point towards what we mean by it, but none that fully capture its essence. This is eros in a kind of pure form – beyond mere desire – where desire is that which we want while we cannot have it, while this form of eros is a never completed dance we never finish learning, forever offering more, forever surprising us not only with what we learn about the other, but who we become in seeking to learn. Compared to the blandness of self-perfection, such openness to self-transformation through listening to the other and a willingness to being seduced by them is liberating beyond most of our ability to contemplate. And this is our only hope of redemption. As he says, “Only eros is capable of freeing the I from depression, from narcissistic entanglement in itself. From this perspective, the Other is a redemptive formula. Only eros, which pulls me out of myself and towards the Other, can overcome depression.” Rather than empathy, the allusion is to Kant’s notion of hospitality – a word Kant himself said was wrong, but that he could think of none better, in his work Perpetual Peace. Here the rational person is forced to the conclusion, in a global political version of Kant’s categorical imperative, to offer hospitality to the stranger. This acceptance of the other is the basis of all moral feeling – but as Han makes clear, it is also the precondition for our own self-transcendence. This is an absurdly short book – but as I said, it is more a book of aphorisms, more poetry than prose – and if you approach it like poetry, there is much here to consider. As a critique of the modern condition, it offers a path to salvation few other books consider. As someone who believes we have become atomised by neoliberal society – any recognition that our engaging with others, particularly those we will never understand enough to be merely in empathy with, is a step in the right direction. Some quotes “The pathological sign of our times is not repression but depression.” “The violence of the Same is invisible because of its positivity.” “Correlation is the most primitive form of knowledge, being not even capable of ascertaining the relationship between cause and effect. It is so. The question of why becomes irrelevant; thus nothing is understood. But knowledge is understanding. Hence Big Data renders thought superfluous. We surrender ourselves without concern to the it-is-so.” “The numerical makes everything countable and comparable. Thus it perpetuates the Same.” “Being-human then means being-connected to Others.” “It does not seduce. Pornography carries out a complete de-narrativization and de-lingualization not only of the body, but of communication as such; therein lies its obscenity. It is impossible to play with the naked flesh.” “Naked, pornographic truth permits no play, no seduction. Sexuality as functional performance likewise drives out all forms of play; it becomes entirely mechanical. The neoliberal imperative of performance, sexiness and fitness ultimately reduces the body to a functional object that is to be optimized.” “It sets up a ‘banopticon’ that identifies those who are hostile or unsuited to the system as undesirable and excludes them. The Panopticon serves to discipline, while the banopticon provides security.” “It prescribes that one must equal only oneself and define oneself only through oneself – indeed, that one must be the author and creator of oneself.” “Singularity is something entirely different from authenticity.” “The Other is bent into shape until the ego recognizes itself in them.” “Today, we flee desperately from the negative instead of dwelling on it. Holding on to the positive, however, only reproduces the Same.” “In all rites of passages, one dies a death in order to be reborn beyond the threshold.” “Two mouthfuls of silence might contain more closeness, more language than hypercommunication. Silence is language, but the noise of communication is not.” “Today, we live in a post-Marxist age. In the neoliberal regime, exploitation no longer takes place as alienation and self-derealization, but as freedom, as self-realization and self-optimization.” “Today, the silent voice of the Other is drowned out by the noise of the Same.” “All attention is focused on the ego. It is surely the task of art and literature to de-mirror our perception, to open it up to the counterpart, for the Other – as a person or an object.” “Listening is not a passive act. It is distinguished by a special activity: first I must welcome the Other, which means affirming the Other in their otherness. Then I give them an ear. Listening is a bestowal, a giving, a gift. It helps the Other to speak in the first place.” “The art of listening takes place as an art of breathing. The hospitable welcoming of the Other is an inhalation, yet one that does not absorb the Other, but instead harbours and preserves them.” “The ego is incapable of listening. The space of listening as a resonance chamber of the Other opens up where the ego is suspended. The narcissistic ego is replaced with a possession by the other, a desire for the Other.” “But anyone who seeks to evade injury completely will experience nothing; the negativity of injury inheres in every deep experience, every deep insight.… The wound is the opening through which the Other enters.” “Community is listenership.” “Today, everyone is somehow on their own with themselves, with their suffering, with their fears. Suffering is privatized and individualized.” ...more |
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Jun 24, 2025
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Jun 24, 2025
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Paperback
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B000OI134U
| 4.26
| 19
| Oct 25, 2001
| unknown
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it was amazing
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I’m in the process of marking essays by students in a masters degree I’ve been teaching this year. Part of what they are asked to do is based on this
I’m in the process of marking essays by students in a masters degree I’ve been teaching this year. Part of what they are asked to do is based on this book. Essentially, they are to watch a video of a teacher teaching and to pick out a student and notice something about them that they can link to the educational theories we have been discussion over the last few months. This is one of the books they were asked to read to help them with their noticing. Noticing is a much more complicated thing than you might expect. The problem is that mostly we don’t really notice things and even when we do they are quite fleeting and hardly register in our consciousness. One of the things I’ve noticed in reading over the essays is how rarely the students question their own assumptions and biases in what they notice and what they might be ignoring. This is true even when they say this is one of the more important themes in this book. The idea being that noticing takes work – and that work is made easier if it is theory driven. That is, you see what you are looking for and so having a new theory that tells you to look for particular things means you are more likely to see things you otherwise would not have. I’m a big believer in theories working as lenses to bring things you otherwise take for granted into view. A few years ago a friend of mine got me to do a lecture on Cinderella which he then posted on Youtube. In it, I analyse the fairytale using a whole range of different theories. The idea was that Cinderella is something people generally think they know ‘everything there is to know’ about. But by thinking about what feminism, Marxism, Freud, Vygotsky, visual discourse analysis, Foucault and others might have noticed about the story, you get to see it in quite different ways. Here’s a link to the lecture if you have a wet weekend coming up and want to listen to me stuttering and stammering my way through a couple of hours of slides. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUw-z... Reflection needs something to reflect upon and so noticing needs to be challenging in one way or another. That is, you reflect upon things that annoy you in some way. In the context of the classroom, this can be anything at all, I guess, but one of the things that often gets under my skin when I observe classrooms is their incredibly gendered structure. A while ago I was helping to observe a classroom where boys and girls were being shown how to sew. Now, this is generally understood to be a female task – but the girls hardly asked or answered a single question – and because the person talking to them wasn’t actually a teacher, I’m not even sure she noticed this at all. I’m not sure why I have become quite so sensitive to gender issues in the classroom – but I know I became particularly aware of it in an English class at university when someone was ‘randomly’ asking students in the class their opinion on something and I noticed that in a classroom dominated by women, not a single woman was asked anything. When I pointed this out, the man was embarrassed and the female teacher said something like, “oh, don’t ask questions like that Trevor”. I assume this was reverse psychology, since I haven’t stopped wondering about it since. And once you start noticing it, it is everywhere. Our biases determine what we see – but getting to see outside of our biases requires real effort. One of the things recommended in this book is to try to describe what you are seeing in a way that is objective in the sense of having as few value judgements place on top of it as possible. That is, to literally describe how a child moves, speaks, frames their answer, blushes, gesticulates – and to then use empathy to seek to understand what might be going on in the child’s head. Education is a complex human activity, with layers and layers of things that can stand in the way. Finding ways to observe non-judgementally is a handy tool to have to see where things might be going wrong. The other thing about it all is that it is a reflection task – that is, you might be trying to see the world through the eyes of the student – but really, you also need to see what it is that you can or could be doing that might make the situation easier for the student to learn in. That’s where challenging your own biases and assumptions ought to come to the fore. And we are a mess of these – we have all spent too long watching other’s teach and therefore we all have fallen into the habits of our previous teachers. Getting to see outside of those habits and dispositions is really hard to do. Stereotypes are as hard to avoid as they are to notice. Most of our lives are lived in living out our stereotypes. And this is a feature, not a bug. If things weren’t automatic we would spend our whole lives as if it was Sunday morning – deciding if it is worth getting out of bed or not. One of the memes that is on repeat play on my social media feed at the moment sort of goes, everyone things people with glasses are intelligent, which is odd, since to get glasses you literally have to fail a test. And we become the stereotypes others hold of us – as the work of Claude Steele shows. Our expectations of others too often become the expectations they hold of themselves. A teacher’s role is to create new expectations in our students – expectations that they are capable. But because our noticings are so fleeting, we need ways to being them to conscious awareness. Having a structure that we can fit them into helps here, as does taking notes and wondering over what we have observed might mean. This book provides tools for doing just this. It also encourages communities of practice where we can put what we have noticed to the test. This is an interesting book and a relatively quick read. It is obviously written mostly for teachers, but I think the lessons here are much more general than that. Developing empathy and close observation are hardly skills only needed by teachers. ...more |
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not set
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Jun 05, 2025
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Jun 05, 2025
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0415560799
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| 5.00
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| Jan 01, 2013
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it was amazing
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There is a chapter in this on marginalia, and, well, in someways this review is going to be a bit like that. Notes written on the side of the page, ra
There is a chapter in this on marginalia, and, well, in someways this review is going to be a bit like that. Notes written on the side of the page, rather than a comprehensive review of the book itself. Or let’s get that over and done with first. This is a book about revisionist histories – and the thing is that most histories are going to be revisionist in a sense. And made more likely now that if you want to get one of the few jobs available in academic history, you probably need to make a name for yourself fast, and that’s going to involve you coming up with some revisionist version of something or other. The other week I read that some people were complaining that science has been put back by years by simplistic readings of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In that he argues that there are two types of science – normal science and revolutionary science – science conducted during normal science is bread and butter stuff, but revolutionary science isn’t just accumulative, it involves a paradigm shift. The person was arguing that since everyone wants to be the paradigm shifter, it means more and more research is directed at bloody stupid ideas, rather than stuff that might actually expand our knowledge. Revisionist history is a bit like that too. Except, of course, that history has tended to be written by pale, stale middle-aged men with a comfortable bank account and a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that we live in a meritocracy. So, revisions aren’t outrageous. The idea that there is a single history that can be written once and for all time misses the point of history. History is like a map. If it was comprehensive, it would be as long as the historic phase was itself. A one-to-one map wouldn’t be useful. You have to leave things out to see where you are going. And that’s the same with history – but if you leave stuff out then you are being selective and being selective is based on value judgements and value judgements are located in class and race and gender and ability and sexuality and all the isms. So, of course that means that other people are going to be able to tell another story from a different perspective – because perspectives are all that there is. I can draw you a map to get from here to there, but an uber driver will probably give you a better map that will get you there quicker and a person in a wheelchair might draw one that will take longer, but have fewer hills to go up. Now, one of the things she says, and this is where the marginalia comes in, is about Foucault saying two things. One I’ve just told you – that history is heteroglossia, it is many voiced. The other is that history has been too often thought of as temporal, whereas maybe it should be thought about spatially. We struggle not to think of history as being about time. Things happen in time and if they happened recently they are likely to have a bigger impact on you now than things that happened further back in time. But that is also spatially true too. Things that happened far away are also likely to be less important to you. But history happens in places. And this is part of Foucault’s point. If I’d been writing this book I’d have compared this relationship between history and geography to women and giving birth. History is sort of seen as masculine in our society, and it happens in that most feminine of subjects, geography. Geography is like the womb that history develops in. But because we live in a patriarchy we don’t really respect that womb all that much. We just think of it as a kind of nice, tucked away place. This is from the Ancient Greeks, in a way. They thought that when a man ejaculated a little person was in that fluid and it tucked itself away in the woman’s womb until it was ready to be born. The womb was a bit irrelevant. Like a box that kept the person safe until it was grown enough to be born. But it is nothing like that at all. We still think a bit like this today – and so we think we can bring back long extinct animals by putting them in the wombs of similar-ish animals and we’ll get the extinct animal back – because wombs are nice little boxes that you can tuck things into where they can be safe and grow. And history and geography are like that too. That geography – space – plays no other role in history than as a nice place for history to grow in. But men make history and women just provide the nice place for it to develop. The turn to space is a turn to history’s feminine side. A couple of times in this she refers to Hegel and his views on the development of history. And it made me think of how little people understand Hegel. I’ve been making my way slowly through the Phenomenology of Spirit. I’m not going to pretend it is an easy book to read. But I’ll tell you one thing. No one who has ever read it would make the mistake she makes multiple times in this book. That is, to say that Hegel is really about ‘the Hegelian method’ which is thesis, antithesis and synthesis. That is, there’s one idea and then it ends up in conflict with another idea and they fight it out for a while and eventually they resolve their differences in a kind of unity at a higher level. This is not at all what Hegel was on about. He even criticises this simplification of his work multiple times – but the thing is, because that idea is clear and easy and obviously wrong, people use it to both say that is what Hegel was on about and to reduce him to ridicule. And she quotes others who say things like progressives and conservatives are opposites, but there is no synthesis between them. Well, there you go. The perfect refutation of Hegel. How did people ever fall for that stuff when it can be swept aside so simply. Of course, Hegel said nothing of the kind. Rather, the thesis and antithesis are not resolved in the synthesis, but the development continues to contain the contradictions between them and finds itself, at a higher level of abstraction, in an even new and deeper level of contradiction. All while retaining the previous contradictions it is composed of. The contradictions are ongoing – they don’t disappear. There are parts of this book that are very challenging – not least the bits on holocaust denial, for example – and what are we to do with that sort of nonsense? Is that ‘revisionist history’ and then, if we say yes, which I guess it is hard not to, does that mean that we have to accept the ravings of anyone who is just contrary to also be revisionist history? A million years ago I was an archivist and a guy came into the archive and told me he was researching the original white race of Australia who had been here a long time before the Aboriginals. To be honest, at first, I thought he was taking the piss. But it quickly became clear he wasn’t. He told me he was one of the immortal ones. And that most of his race had been killed upon white settlement here and their bones were now mixed with the sand at Port Melbourne or something. And he was looking for evidence in the archive of this tragic event. Fortunately, I decided it would be at least as insane for me to argue with him as it was for him to believe this crazy shit. We searched for records for a while, long enough for him to convince himself that whatever records might have existed in the past had been destroyed in the huge conspiracy that both settlers and Aboriginals had perpetuated at his people’s expense. Thank god for conspiracy theories, I guess. I enjoyed this book, more than this review probably makes clear – but I think that is mostly because I really liked the idea of writing marginalia on the side of the page of this book – and like I said, that’s more or less what this review is. ...more |
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it was amazing
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I’ve already started telling everyone I know that they should read this book. I’ve given my copy to my ex and told my boss, daughters and ‘the boys’ t
I’ve already started telling everyone I know that they should read this book. I’ve given my copy to my ex and told my boss, daughters and ‘the boys’ that they need to get hold of it. It is a very quick read – shorter than it even looks, given the print is quite large. But even as a quick read, I’ve learnt an awful lot from it – much more than I was expecting when I started. Someone read my review of Invisible Women and suggested I read The Privileged Sex. Basically, it argues exactly what this book counters – that is, that women are a net drain on society and that they take more than they give. This is an odd argument, but based on the idea that women generally don’t contribute nearly as much as men to society and GDP as men do. Rather, men work and produce things and women consume those things. This is the ‘deficit’ in the title. She got the idea for the book after reading just how much each woman drains from the common pool, and therefore someone had calculated the overall cost of each woman to society. So, how do you argue against this – given it is presented as simple mathematics and objective truth? Her argument is that economics has very strange ideas of what constitutes value and what is an economically productive person. She gives a history of various theories of value. The one she barely mentions, which I thought was a bit odd, was Marx’s labour theory of value – but mostly she is interested in the current economic theory – I guess as a short-hand version we could call neoliberalism. Under this theory value has a precise monetary equivalent. And since the only things that have such a precise monetary value are things that exist within markets, that then means that is whatever you do is not included in a market and cannot be given a precise monetary value, its actual value is zero. This rigs the game from the beginning. Women are clustered in what Nancy Frazer calls pink collar jobs – and most of these are in the caring industries. Care is something that is very difficult to quantify. Not least since often women do this work for free. That is, they do not get paid to do it. And if you are not paid for your labour, economics sees it less as productive labour and more as a leisure activity. What is made worse is that since economists do not place a value on care, it is seen purely as an expense. This is true of all forms of care – from housework, to health, to aged and childcare and to education. And since we live in economically rational times, the priority is to reduce these ‘non-productive’ expenses. We talk of ‘efficiency dividends’ and austerity. As the state reduces its role in care, too often it is women who provide these services for their families for free. And while this might well make immediate economic sense – long term it is anything but rational. The idea that just because you cannot measure something it is of no value is pretty close to insanity. Virtually every human activity that makes life worthwhile is impossible to measure. How much is love worth? What is the dollar value of a poem? This is also particularly true of other forms of the care economy. There is that line that when you teach someone something you affect eternity. It is hard to know the impact or outcome of so many activities in the care economy – because saving someone’s life, or providing them with a sense of safety, or feeding them while they are thinking great thoughts do not necessarily have immediate and quantifiable benefits or outcomes. It is nothing like making widgets. We cannot know what someone might go on to achieve or what the world would have been denied if our act of care had not been provided. Perhaps nothing will come of it – perhaps the world will be changed in ways it is impossible to imagine. Feminist economists have long spoken of the role that was assigned to women by capitalism – that while capitalism only focuses upon production, women’s unpaid work makes capitalism possible because they are reproducers – not only in the sense of having children, but in providing the work needed to allow workers to return to work tomorrow. And because capitalism does not pay for this reproductive work, this work becomes literally invisible – assigned a zero value – and taken for granted. As she says, in economic theories people do not get old, they do not get sick, they never die – they just go on being maximisers of their own utility. The danger is that women are increasingly being drawn into the productive economy too. This leaves them little time to fulfil the needs of the reproductive economy. As the author makes clear, women’s work is grossly undervalued when compared to work that requires the same level of education in other industries – whether this be teachers, nurses, house cleaners – any highly feminised industries – and this lack of respect and recompense means that women are being forced out of caring industries due to economic necessity. She quote a figure that one-in-five nurses in the UK want to leave nursing. In Australia at the moment we are living through a teacher shortage crisis. Particularly since Covid, teachers have been leaving the profession and fewer young people are choosing to graduate as teachers. This is because teaching is becoming seen less and less as a part of the caring profession and more as something that needs to be administered, managed, measured and dictated to. Scientific management is being applied to education – and the effects are devastating. Research conducted nearly a decade ago here found that many of the reasons why early career teachers were leaving the profession were due to the impact of new public management on what it meant to be a teacher. Teachers no longer felt trusted, they were increasingly being given ‘classroom ready’ materials for them to teach, they were sick of being shown that those employing them wanted them to follow curricula and pedagogical practices that would make education ‘teacher proof’. That is, they were sick of being de-skilled with the underlying assumption that it would only be when teachers were all the same that children’s chance of learning would be enhanced. You do not need to be in a class for very long to realise that learning comes via the relationships you develop with your students – rather than however cleverly someone has developed a one-size-fits-all teaching package. The problem is that far too rarely, those developing these packages have not been in a classroom since they, themselves, were students. The difference between being a student and being a teacher isn’t obvious until you have been a teacher. But it is the care part of being a teacher that is most important – and it is the care component of being a teacher that is impossible to measure – and therefore it is this component that economists value at zero. All of which helps to explain the perversity of so much of government education policy. This book is therefore a kind of call to revalue care in the economy and in life more generally. But it is also more than that – it is effectively a call for us to become more fully human – since care is, itself, the highest manifestation of what it means to be human. Rather than it being of no value, perhaps it should rather be understood to be of near infinite value. The author claims that one of the main driving forces of economics is its need to fit within the enlightenment project – that is, to prove its scientific credentials. And so it awards itself mock Nobel Prizes – just like the ‘real’ sciences like physics and chemistry do. And it looks down on the other ‘social sciences’ due to their lack of rigour. But you can have all the rigor you like – if your ‘science’ can’t see when something like the global financial crisis is about to hit (or worse, pronounces beforehand that such a crisis is impossible) or can’t explain the shift to inflation across the world at present – your rigour doesn’t look like it is worth much. As with everyone else I know that I’m advising to read this book – you should too. ...more |
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I’ve read a couple of books by this author now. I want to start by saying again something I absolutely believe – that not only is eugenics one of the
I’ve read a couple of books by this author now. I want to start by saying again something I absolutely believe – that not only is eugenics one of the great evils, but also that it is a virtually inevitable part of capitalism. This is perhaps the connection that is never made in this otherwise fascinating introduction – and intentionally short – to the whole question of genetics. I particularly liked the first part of the book which deals with the history of eugenics. I’ve been fascinated by it forever. That people can use Darwin’s theory of natural selection as a basis for ranking humans. And the harm that has been done by this idea is nearly infinite. Not just the horrors of the holocaust, but the sterilisation of people deemed to be a pollution within our genetic pool, the refusal to allow certain people with physical characteristics we deem to be unfit to be forced to live lesser lives. Eugenics is inevitably associated with racism – but this is only part of the story. And this is why I think it is inevitably linked with capitalism and is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Capitalism is premised on the idea that it is essentially a system of merit. It is different from other forms of social organisation in that it says that everyone is given an equal opportunity to rise to the top. Of course, any objective look at how the world works would have us laughing at such a statement – but the point is that the statement is taken-for-granted more often than it is stated outright. There is always someone who started at the bottom and made it to the top – and these outliers are presented to us as proof that capitalism is a system based on merit. The problem is that capitalism is also, clearly now, and increasingly so, more and more unequal. If both are true – that capitalism is all merit and all inequitable – then humans must also be grossly unequal too and so capitalism simply appropriately rewards these natural inequalities. And where do such inequalities come from? From within ourselves. And this is where eugenics come to the rescue – we are born unequal and that is down to our genes. Grossly unequal societies that also want to claim to be meritocracies need a mechanism to justify those inequalities – and few mechanisms work so well as genes do. I’m going to end with a quote by Winston Churchill. As an Irishman, I’m genetically predisposed to despising Churchill. As someone who has been in a relationship with a woman of Indian heritage, maybe I’m also epigenetically predisposed to hate him too. He was also a eugenicist. And that is quite amusing, since he was also clearly an alcoholic and the eugenic movement would have had him sterilised for that. Still, his loathing of the ‘lesser races’ is well known. The quote I’ll end on makes this particularly clear. In reference to Chinese people, in 1954 he commented: “I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them.” His loathing for working class people was at least as strong as that for other races. Eugenics is a disgusting evil in our world – but while it continues to serve a purpose in justifying capitalism, don’t expect it to disappear anytime soon. ...more |
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0729100510
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it was amazing
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In Raymond Williams’ book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, he, naturally enough, includes a large definition of the word culture. As thi
In Raymond Williams’ book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, he, naturally enough, includes a large definition of the word culture. As this book says, it is too often associated with what is often its preceding adjective ‘high’ as compared with low and debased forms of culture. This book considers how we should welcome children into our culture and what that might mean as a curriculum. The problem is that we can too often think this means a process of indoctrination into an ideology – something the authors here say is inevitable and should be, in some ways, accepted. The point is for us to be critical of our own culture and thereby give our students the tools to also adopt a critical stance. But to do that, we need ways of reflecting upon our own taken-for-granted assumptions and otherwise unchallenged ideals. Which is something that is insanely difficult to do – given they are, almost by definition, hidden from us. The authors start from the premise that every society is composed of a set of core beliefs that children must learn if they are going to be, in any way, successful within that society. These are cultural beliefs, but like any system of belief, they must be taught and learned, rather than merely taken in by a kind of osmosis. This core curriculum ought to be made available across all of the society – and in large part it asserts what it means to be human. This book was written in 1976, and so, one of the interesting little examples of the taken-for-granted nature of culture is how the authors use the male pronoun to cover all humans. Something they might have been unlikely to have even noticed when they wrote the book. A central idea to this book is that what makes us human is a culture of shared semiotic experiences – and therefore language, but also the arts and science, are essentially cultural in the sense that it is this system of signs and significations from which we construct meaning and therefore understand what it is to be human. They begin with a story of a couple going to a restaurant in Hong Kong and trying to explain to the waiter that they would like him to feed their dog. There is much confusion. They can’t literally speak to the waiter, but through a series of hand gestures they think they have gotten it through to him that the dog needs to eat. Unfortunately, the bewildered expression on the waiters face becomes clear when their meal arrives, and it is their dog cooked with pepper sauce and bamboo shoots. As the authors say, we should examine this story from the perspective of the semiotic differences in meaning making between the couple on holiday with their pet and that of the waiter. These differences smash up against the lack of understanding between two very different cultures and ways of making meaning. Their point is that this is easier to see when ‘east meets west’ than it is within one’s own culture – even though the differences that exist between groups within our own society might be just as divergent and incommensurable. As such, the authors refer to Bourdieu and Bernstein’s work on social codes and cultural capital to explain how such differences in social semiotics can impact communication within cultures as well as between them. They disagree with Marx and Foucault on the relationship between knowledge and power. Their case is that although the ruling class does want to structure the curriculum in a way that makes their social dominance appear natural and inevitable, this is almost impossible to sustain, since teachers do not necessarily share the same ideas as the ruling classes – given they are, themselves, from quite different classes to those of the ruling class. This means, their own life experiences are likely to come to the fore in the curriculum they are there to teach. Anyway, some knowledge is more or less objectively true, and so being taught this, if not totally pure of ideology, is mostly free of it. I guess my problem here is that we are much more likely to see things as being non-ideological and objectively true than is actually the case. Take how high school students are generally taught about the structure of the atom. They are most likely to be told of the Thomson, Rutherford and Bohr models – basically, Thomson’s plum pudding model, where electrons are the plums scattered about in the pudding of positive charge, Rutherford’s model, where there are big, heavy protons in a kind of sea of tiny electrons, and Bohr’s model, where the atom is like a little galaxy with the proton as the sun and the electrons as the planets. And this isn’t too different from how we learn the difference between Darwin’s and Lamarck’s theories of evolution – natural selection based on sexual success if you acquire an advantageous trait against acquired characteristics being passed down to your offspring. What is interesting here isn’t so much the objective truth of the theories themselves, but rather how their progression is discussed and the implied pathway to truth that our culture adopts. That is, invariably there are two theories competing – Thomson’s and Rutherford’s first of all, then Rutherford’s and Bohr’s. The competing nature of the theories is the cultural semiotic aspect I want to focus on here. There are binary views in competition. Facts are accumulated. One is proven right, the other wrong. The same can be said of other binaries too – socialism and capitalism, religion and science, classism and romanticism. Evidence is accumulated, facts are told, truth wins out in the end. But life is rarely so simple. I’ve read that Bohr’s model of the atom is basically wrong in every detail – it is fairly good at describing hydrogen, but in explaining anything more complicated than the simplest atom it falls down. And yet, this is most people’s mental model of atomic truth. You would also think that Lamarck has been relegated to an historical footnote – but I believe some epigenetic phenomena are usefully explained using Lamarck’s ideas. They are certainly useful in understanding how culture works – with what your parents learn needing to be passed on to you if you are to learn them as well. But why this focus upon the competition of ideas and the ultimate defeat of one and the victory of the other? What cultural purposes does such a presentation of the history of ideas serve? In who’s interests does such a presentation of the progression of ideas serve? This, I think, is the ideological question that we rarely engage with – competition is seen as the essential component here and the real lesson to be learned beyond the details of the ‘objective science’ being taught. Is there another way we could teach this history? For example, could we, instead, focus upon the reasons each had for proposing their view and what their view solved and what their solution left unexplained? To me, this seems like a better approach – not least in that it provides a worked example of the reasoning behind the models – and that reasoning might later prove useful as an example of how reasoning works – even if, ultimately, it proved insufficient in the case at hand. The book ends by discussing how teachers might tackle the problems of culture within their classrooms. If the idea is that we need to ensure we are teaching our students in ways that they will understand, then we have to understand the cultures they are coming into the classroom with. As such, the authors stress Freire’s ideas of ‘teaching the word and teaching the world’. That is, the teacher does not go into the classroom merely to teach the core curriculum, or to impose their culture upon their students, but rather to understand the culture of the children they are teaching and to work with the children and their community to better understand the world in which they find themselves in. This means that the function of schools is to, “set out to analyse, assess and think critically and creatively about their culture, looking for ways of contributing to its future development” (p.127). This is significantly different to how schools operate today, were we are much more likely to transmit culture as a taken-for-granted whole – unanalysed and perhaps even unacknowledged as a culture among others – hopefully not leading to dogs continuing to be cooked up for dinner, rather than given something for dinner. ...more |
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it was amazing
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I would probably go a bit further than Skilbeck here. He points to a confounding range of factors that have driven the expansion of tertiary education
I would probably go a bit further than Skilbeck here. He points to a confounding range of factors that have driven the expansion of tertiary education. I believe the changes in universities over the past few decades have been less in response to the economic needs of late stage capitalism interns of skills alone than to the shortage of jobs in the labour market for young people to perform and therefore with what to do with so many unemployed youth. And this has generally been the reason for the shift in education from an elite phenomenon to a mass and the universal one. The same thing happened with the growth of primary education – brought about by children no longer being needed as cheap labour on farms after they had been displaced by agricultural machinery in the mid to late 1800s, and then similarly with the shift to mass secondary education due to the lack of jobs in industry throughout the start of the 20th century. From the mid-1980s onward, the collapse of employment for youth drove the expansion of tertiary education, and for much the same reason – the need to keep youth occupied when other forms of employment had dried up to the point of virtually disappearing. The shift has been in all three sectors from elite, to mass, to universal. Skilbeck provides percentages to explain these shifts – with elite being less than 15% of the population having the relevant qualification, mass being between 15 and 35% and universal being above 35%. This has also witnessed the devaluation of the tradable worth of a university degree. A graph I put together for my students compares the entry salary of those holding a university degree in Australia with the average fulltime male wage from the 1970s until the present day. In the 1970s, a university degree more or less guaranteed entry to the middle class – that is, a graduate could expect a job upon entry to the labour force equal to that paid to the average male worker. Today, that is closer to 70% of the average fulltime male employee’s wage. And now the average graduate is also burdened with a debt perhaps equivalent to an entire year’s salary. This is discussed in much more depth in books such as The Global Auction: The broken promises of education, jobs and income. The fact that this shift in the need for people to pursue tertiary education was not driven by the need for increased skills of employees alone is seen in the fact that it is harder today for graduating young people to find employment that matches their educational skill levels – rather we have witnessed credential inflation, alongside a remarkable stability in the skill requirements for employment. Jobs that once only required the completion of high school now require an undergraduate degree. Often the actual skills needed to perform these roles has actually reduced over time, rather than become deeper. That said, one of the things I found most interesting at the start of this book was the idea that no one quite saw this change coming. In fact, he says most analysts in the 1970s expected the opposite to happen – that enrolment in universities was likely to decline. However, not only was this not the case, not only did the proportion of those from the ‘relevant cohorts’ – that is, young people we had up until then expected to be the overwhelming majority of those attending university (late teens, early twenties) – continue to increase, but the idea of a relevant cohort also became increasingly irrelevant as a descriptor. The concept of lifelong learning became so entrenched that it shifted the demographic makeup of tertiary students. He points to the remarkable speed of this transition on p.42 of the book, where in the US, which led the way, in the decade between 1969 and 1979 enrolment of college students increased by 42%. There was also an increase of 10% in the proportion of these students who were part-time and half of all those attending university were also employed. This explosion of those enrolled, and the reasons why they were turning to universities – at least in large part to make themselves more vocationally employable – inevitably had an impact upon the nature of what they were taught and how. It is not that universities did not previously have a vocational orientation – you didn’t get to be a doctor or a lawyer without having gone to university – but as an elite institution universities had cultural roles that appeared to be threatened by this movement towards mass and universal education. This initially lead to the expansion of ‘lesser’ places of tertiary education – technical colleges, for example, that focused almost solely upon providing vocational skills to their students. The divide intended to be between those places of higher education that focused solely upon providing vocational skills, of one sort or another, and those that stood at the pinnacle as elite institutions that could continue to provide an ‘elite’ and cultural education, one based on their ability to draw on the resources provided by their depth in both teaching and research. However, the ‘lesser’ higher education providers were, virtually by definition, more closely linked to industry, and so often found themselves better placed to do particular forms of research than the old, elite universities. At the same time, the massification of education meant that there was also more call upon elite institutions to provide teaching. This, in turn, shifted the focus away from research – and positions where academics did both research and teaching – towards teaching only positions. These positions were often the most precarious roles – with limited opportunities for tenure and not provided with the kinds of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ necessary to welcome early career researchers into the profession. I hadn’t realised this was quite so obvious a trend in the early 2000s as this book makes clear it was. Having worked fulltime at a university since 2017 with no prospect of acquiring an ongoing academic position, I am living the life anticipated in this book – although, in research, rather than in teaching. The point made here is that even though there are clear grounds for encouraging teaching only positions – if only to meet the demand for teaching brought about by mass tertiary education, and the fact that many educators might well make poor researchers – this helps to undermine a central purpose of university education. That is, that tertiary education ought to provide graduates with the critical skills to not merely question the status quo, but also to investigate how to effect change. As such, they should leave university with the skills to research their current circumstances and this would best be achieved if they are being taught by those with skills in such research born of their own practice in these skills. This book was written at a time when it was becoming clear that communication technologies were going to have an impact on how teaching and learning occurred within universities. This shift accelerated with the Covid pandemic – with ‘blended’ learning becoming not only accepted, but expected. The implications of this for ‘lifelong learning’ are only starting to be truly felt – although, Skilbeck noted it as a key challenge for the sector in this book as well. The purpose of universities has always changed and always responded to the needs of society at large. But with Neil Postman, we need to ask, in the midst of constant change, not only what we are gaining in this change, but also what are the potential losses. The role universities played in the past, admittedly, often only for an elite audience, of a place for disinterested knowledge, debate and a ‘life of the mind’, does not seem to me to be something we should celebrate losing. The current ideological attacks on universities in the US is a warning for all of us as our world shifts towards more authoritarian modes of government. These governments reject knowledge that does not serve the immediate needs of the corporate elites they serve for. The attacks upon diversity, equity and inclusion stand against the broadening of participation in tertiary education we have witnessed over the last 50 years. The defunding of programs and courses that are not viewed as directly vocational is similarly a form of short-term thinking that undermines the ability of graduates to be truly critical. The similar defunding of research that does not match the ideological preferences of corporate overlords – whether in climate change, medicine, the humanities – is also an attack on the notion of universities as standing at the forefront of humanity’s quest for understanding. In Australia, this was witnessed in our previous government increasing the cost of a humanities degree to match that of one in science and engineering, despite a humanities degree being much cheaper to provide. The economic penalty of pursuing an Arts degree was intended to push students towards more vocationally relevant degrees. And this at a time when the myth of a STEM education providing access to secure employment is being shown for what it is. This book was written to address some of the challenges faced by Ireland in relation to its university sector – however, the discussion, even if 25 years old – is still relevant, and not merely to the Irish context. More could be said about the changes taking place at that time and how they have shifted since. Although he discusses the impact of globalisation, for example, this has also accelerated in the years since. Supplementing this books with, say, Rizvi and Lingard’s Globalizing Education Policy, is also useful in understanding why these changes have not been limited to some nations – even to only developed nations. As I said at the beginning of this review, we are witnessing a shift from mass to universal tertiary education that is being driven by similar forces that drove the shift from mass to universal primary and secondary education. The difference being that these had been accepted as a social investment in the future and therefore provided by society in the words of the Australian slogan for primary education, that it should be universal, secular and free. The ‘cost’ of a university education is not merely measured in the levels of debt young people face upon completion of their degrees, but also in how those attending university then require proof of ‘value for money’ in their ability to gain employment that will help them repay that debt. The ability for universities to sustain providing an education that is not limited by simple, economic calculus is being increasingly diminished. We should be concerned by what we are losing in the process. ...more |
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This year is the 50th anniversary of the university that I work in. As part of that I have been asked to help put together a book celebrating the life
This year is the 50th anniversary of the university that I work in. As part of that I have been asked to help put together a book celebrating the life and work of the university’s second Vice Chancellor, Malcolm Skilbeck. I literally knew nothing of him at all six months ago. But since I’ve been reading as many of his works as I’ve been able to get my hands on – I’ll be trying to review them here over the next few months. Skilbeck was a deeply interesting man, one I’m now sorry I never got the chance to meet. He was deeply involved in education, and not just as a university administrator – but he also did work with the OECD and in Northern Ireland and as a consultant. I’ve also just reviewed one of his books on nature and my boss at work has found some paintings and drawings he produced. This book is old now, from 1984, but it is still an incredibly interesting discussion on the problems facing the development of curriculum. When I teach students about curriculum I often tell them that we end up being much more bound by our metaphors than we like to think. And this is even true when we don’t even know that they are metaphors. Curriculum comes from Latin – it essentially means racetrack. It is also where we get the term curriculum vitae from – which means basically ‘life course’, rather than ‘why you should employ me’, which, I guess, is what most people now think it means. A racetrack has a cluster of other meanings that then go to shape how we think of the curriculum, because this is a race. Not least that there will be winners and losers. But also that to take a shortcut is to cheat. That we all line up at an equal starting position and that the ‘winner’ is the one with the most merit/ability. These clustered implications constrain how we then go on to deploy the term. At its most basic level, the curriculum is defined as “the learning experiences of students, in so far as they are expressed or anticipated in educational goals and objectives, plans and designs for learning and the implementation of these plans and designs in school environments” (p.21). The link to the metaphor of a racetrack is still retained here – not least in the other aspects of schooling that are time bound – in timetables – or in competitive performances and in the awarding of prizes for achievement. What does it mean to have a school-based curriculum as the foundation for school reform? Is this even something we wish to strive for? Can we trust teachers with setting the goals for education? And if not teachers, then who should set these goals? This book argues along with John Dewey that education is a primary concern for any civilisation but also that education, as the definition of curriculum given above implies, must be focused upon the needs of the student. These needs are deeply situated and therefore are not identical across society. But that does not mean that the goals of education should be different depending upon the group you happen to be born into. Rather, that to reach the same destination, some students, some schools, will need to pursue significantly different pathways. These are matters that cannot be left to the decisions of teachers in classrooms alone. People have been trained to accept this as a fact for a couple of reason. One is the ongoing de-professionalisation of teachers, not least because it is a largely feminised workforce. While we all enjoy telling stories of the teacher that changed our lives, we also remember all too well the other teachers who we would not give sole responsibility for deciding what children ought to learn. In fact, if the last few decades of education policy can be defined by any one single trend, it is that of seeking to make the education of children ‘teacher proof’. This has mostly been done by those outside of the profession itself and by those whose main experience of education has been as a student, rather than as a teacher. One of the things I’ve found most interesting about the recent policy documents that have dominated the Australian education scene is how few of these ‘expert teacher panels’ that create these documents have any teachers on them at all. If the pendulum of history is prone to swings, then surely we are at point of maximum displacement away from teacher centred curriculum development. It could be argued that in an increasingly globalised world, where children will be in competition with the children from other countries they might never meet, that leaving curriculum development local teachers or even local schools sounds like a recipe for disaster. Skilbeck doesn’t shy away from this concern. He is certainly not advocating for schools to stand in pristine isolation from their community, society or the world more generally. However, he doesn’t believe that a one-size-fits-all curriculum is possible or welcome. What he is arguing for is more balance than we currently have – or even had 40 years ago. The lack of trust in teachers, schools and local communities has become a defining feature of the education system – but not one that is in the interests of the students in classrooms, the ultimate clients of this system. What is also obvious is that the students themselves are even more voiceless than their teachers. You might think that this is reasonable, given that they are the recipients of education and that this means they have too little knowledge to make a worthwhile contribution – however, this is not really the case. Young people are often far more aware of the options open and closed to them than their parents or even their teachers. Once they are able to choose courses of study, they often vote with their feet for the curriculum that they believe will offer them the best opportunities in life. Part of the problem here is that we have set up a dichotomy between school-based curriculum and a core curriculum – and then decided that all of the emphasis should be placed on the core, with schools mandated to merely implement what is contained in that. The core curriculum is then ‘designed by experts’ so that it meets the demands to keep the nation competitive internationally as judged by various rankings. The idea being that teachers in classrooms are too far away from the centre to truly understand what curriculum options would best meet the needs of their own students. That is, that the best way to know the needs of students is to be as far away from them as it is possible to be. This is the opposite of what the last 100 years or so of educational theory has asserted – that is, that we must address the learning of our students at their point of need and adjust our teaching and learning so that it is tailored to those highly particular needs. Here we can also talk of the ‘hidden’ or ‘effective’ curriculum, again terms that are highly contested. And as Bernstein made clear in his research, the hidden curriculum is often premised on the assumption that the normal student is white, male, middle class and where the education system is a continuation of the social situation of their home life both in manner of education and in forms of discipline and expected behaviour. If the student does not fit this highly cultural location, then they must be made to fit – since any accommodations made for them would immediately be interpreted as devaluing the whole system. That is, meeting students at their point of need is therefore defined out of the system by definition. In this book, he again uses one of his favourite quotes from Robert Linton, “The individual at birth is a cultural barbarian, in that he has none of the habits, ideas, attitudes and skills characterizing the adult members of society” (p.34). It is therefore the role of the school to indoctrinate the child into the habits and essential knowledge that will make them ready to participate as individuals within that society. But how do you go about achieving this. He is certainly not saying that this should be left solely to teachers. Rather, he sees all levels of society as having a role to play in this process. A core curriculum is one tool in this, but not the sole tool. Teachers, schools and local communities also should have a role here. The problem is that teachers and schools have been so de-professionalised that they cannot be expected to fulfil this role without extensive assistance and professional learning. This reflects something Hattie notes in his research, where reducing class sizes rarely, on its own, results in better teaching practices to take advantage of the new circumstances opened up. A change in circumstance is not enough – what is needed is that this be met with a clear program to meet the new challenges presented. And this is best achieved by a change in the role of teachers towards them being engaged as teacher-researchers. Here is the other major problem with a centralised curriculum – it is rarely as evidence based as it pretends to be. The level of research supporting the mandated decrees from outside the school are rarely tested by rigorous research or evaluated after implementation to ensure they meet their aims. That is, rather than imposing teacher proof strategies, the point ought to be to provide teachers with the skills so they can assess the needs of their students and develop ways to confirm that the strategies being implemented are actually meeting the needs of the students to reach these aims. Rather than this being imposed upon the students, the aim of a progressive education should be less structured around the traditional disciplines, and more integrated towards the lived needs of the students. To achieve this, the students themselves need to be active participants – and this can only be truly achieved if they also have an active voice in their own teaching and learning. A progressive education has been a central demand since Dewey – and it remains progressive, because its implementation has always been hampered by those outside education who believe they already know what is best. The shift towards integrated learning and away from the hierarchical structures based on subject disciplines has too often been reduced to an argument over the rigor of the disciplines against the fluffiness of inquiry-based learning. But given life beyond school is inquiry-based, this dichotomy is a false one. This is a fascinating discussion of the problems facing education and curriculum studies. The shame is that it is still so relevant today, forty years later. And since Dewey was writing well over 120 years ago – it is starting to look like progressive education will always be an idea whose time is about to come. ...more |
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it was amazing
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This is a truly beautiful book – and in all senses. The plates in this are stunning and do more than merely illustrate the text. Sometimes, they right
This is a truly beautiful book – and in all senses. The plates in this are stunning and do more than merely illustrate the text. Sometimes, they rightly are the text. And the story told here is utterly fascinating. The book starts with three chapters on Broken Hill, where the author grew up. Australia is a strange place. The overwhelming majority of Australians cling to the coast. But our myths are of the inland, of the bush, of the harsh interior. Mumford talks of mining as being the first truly capitalist enterprise. This is both true of the need for massive capital investment, but also of the destruction mining wrought upon the natural environment and of the inhuman existence it imposed upon the miners. The transformation described here of the wrecked environment of Broken Hill back from this destruction is one that fills you with hope. Something that the rest of the book seeks to sustain – despite the overwhelming evidence of our continued destruction of the natural world. At its heart, this is a book about humanities moral relationship with the natural world. As such, much of the book is devoted to seeking to understand and track how the ‘religions of the book’, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, have sought to come to terms with nature and humanities role towards nature. There are some telling points made against what I guess could be called the New Atheists. Where they reduce religion to an overly simplified and dogmatic shadow, the author shows the various forces that shaped religious beliefs towards nature and some that went against the trend to uncover and preserve the majestic wonder of the natural world – or of ‘creation’ – and what it might mean for humanity to have ‘stewardship’ over that creation. This is far from a clichéd retelling of creation myths, although these are retold and interpreted across a wide variety of traditions and across time, but a deep, sociological analysis of the relationship between humanity and nature. Religion plays a starring role here because religion was, for much of this history, the guiding moral force shaping how we might frame our relationship with the natural world. Anyone who has read any of my other reviews will know that I do not hold much hope for the world. I cannot see the force that will hold those hellbent upon the destruction of the planet to account. I can see the same people mentioned here – the Attenboroughs and the Thunbergs – but I also see the international corporations and their shrills in the corporate media who distract and lie and deceive. In a just world, it would be clear which side would win. That we are certain who is most likely to win is proof enough that we do not live in a just world. Still, this is a powerful book, a beautiful book, a book written with great compassion and intellect. Find it. Read it. ...more |
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| Sep 08, 2022
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it was amazing
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The main premise of this book is pretty easy to understand. That is, that capitalism can only continue to exist if the economy is growing. In part, th
The main premise of this book is pretty easy to understand. That is, that capitalism can only continue to exist if the economy is growing. In part, this is because capitalism is based on debt, and to be able to repay debt the economy must be larger tomorrow than it is today. But what if the world could not sustain any more growth? What if growth was killing the planet? That is the situation we find ourselves in today. A lot of this book is dedicated to explaining just how big a mess we find ourselves in. We are in lots of trouble – as a friend of mine used to say, about as much trouble as a superhero finds themselves in just before the last ad break. And none of the ‘solutions’ we are told to hope for are actually able to fix the mess we find ourselves in. Whether it be solar and wind power, nuclear energy, carbon capture and storage, or praying for a new technological fix. Every solution creates other problems. The only possible solution is first, to take the level of the problem seriously, than to fight it as if we were going to war, and along the way we are going to have to accept de-growth. And with de-growth comes the end of capitalism. Like Marx, the author here points to the incredible dynamism and advantages that capitalism has brought us. These are all very real and very tangible. However, it also has incredible problems – not least the gross inequality that it has produced and the raping of the planet. De-growth means sacrifice, but perhaps not as much as we might otherwise imagine. As he points out, the remarkable growth in GDP over the last 50 years or so has done virtually nothing to improve the happiness of most people in most of the richest nations in the world. In fact, it wouldn’t be too hard to show that it has done the exact opposite. What most of us would probably prefer would be to have less ‘stuff’ cluttering up our cupboards and more time to be with family, friends and doing things that actually bring us joy, rather than working in ‘bullshit jobs’. This is a very quick read – and worth the read too. If you are not a climate change denier – and what a luxury that level of ignorance must provide – then the problems discussed in this book ought to be at least known to you. We are fast running out of time to address climate change. As the endless memes repeatedly say – science doesn’t care about your feelings (or your hopes and dreams). If we are going to have a planet not only for our grandchildren – but for ourselves in a decade or so – we are going to have to start actually addressing the real issues that face us right now. As a pessimist, I think it is already too late. Humanity have proven to be too stupid to deserve to not go extinct. Which is a real shame – because I really like some people and love others. Oh well. ...more |
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it was amazing
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This is a stunningly good book. Over the last few years, I’ve been coming across people who are deeply into positive psychology. They are very well me
This is a stunningly good book. Over the last few years, I’ve been coming across people who are deeply into positive psychology. They are very well meaning. And it seems churlish in the extreme to be opposed to people being ‘positive’. How could that be a bad thing? I work in educational research and many schools are adopting positive psychology and particularly resilience – again, being opposed to these things sounds a bit like being opposed to motherhood. The problem is that I find that I am opposed to these things – while acknowledging that the people supporting them are, as I said, well meaning. Okay, so what is positive psychology? Basically, it all started with Maslow and the humanist psychologists. They noticed that psychology tended to work with people who were dysfunctional. People with ‘issues’ – whether this be autism or anxiety or depression or schizophrenia – have been studied and studied. But the humanists said that rather than studying what makes people dysfunctional, perhaps we should also consider what it is that makes people psychologically well. So, positive psychology, rather than negative. Resilience is about bouncing back after a setback. It is about grit and fortitude and going on the offensive and attacking your fears and combating adversity – and other military metaphors with all of their hyper-masculine implications. There’s a lovely bit in this where she talks of Shackleton and how he overcame endless adversity to get his men home safely. She makes a couple of really telling points about this story. The first is that much of what he did in motivating his men to stay alive involved him in deploying what are generally considered to be feminine traits. The second was that he couldn’t have made the expedition in the first place without the support of women – not least his wife. And that ultimately, he died on yet another expedition and left her and their children in debt and danger. Men may get to be adventurers, but they only do so with lots and lots of support. And that is the most telling criticism of resilience that she makes and makes repeatedly throughout the book – that too often it is taken to be, like merit, something held by individuals and therefore about character. She says that this is simply not the case. That resilience mostly comes from a position of privilege – and that privilege is social in nature, not individual. We claim it as our own, but really, like merit, it takes a village. Overwhelmingly, it is men that get to be resilient and so masculine traits are virtually identical to the traits that we associate with resilience. When was the last time you heard a story of resilience that involved a woman doing things we define as feminine? Our resilience myths almost always involve men doing manly things – killing the enemy in wars, rescuing the wounded, running into oncoming fire to take out the machine gun nest. She gives statistics in this that make your jaw drop. The growing number of young girls in the US who are committing suicide, the growing number of young people who, after being told to be resilience and to push through pain, end up having sports injuries, the mental health implications for students so exhausted from study who keep on pushing themselves beyond endurance because their whole lives depend on the marks they get on this one last exam. Our obsession with performance and being our best has become an illness. This reminded me of Beck’s The Risk Society – we no longer belong to communities or unions or religions or even really nations. Now, we must fully rely upon ourselves to meet all of the challenges of life. That is why we need to be resilient – we have no one else we can rely upon. But what is this resilience other than a total dependence upon a resource – our own isolated selves – that is simply not up to the task of overcoming the challenges we face. You cannot fix climate change on your own, you cannot end gun violence on your own, you cannot restructure the economy on your own. All of these things can only be addressed by us working together. And so, resilience is looking at the world down the wrong end of the telescope, where we see ourselves magnified and our connections to others diminished. But it is those connections that make us strong. Perhaps the best of this is towards the end where she discusses the power of stories to remake ourselves and our world. The importance of crafting stories so that our audience is capable of hearing the intent of them. She links this, and so much else in the book, back to native peoples and their intimate connection to the land and to their communities. She contrasts this with the hyper-masculine nature of our modern world and how this has made us all so terribly sick. Not just in the extremes of gun violence or our remarkable lack of empathy for the sick, the poor, the weak, the old, but also in our own self-loathing for not being good enough. We are thwarted desire – but rather than seeing our defeat as being a symptom of how we have structured our society, we end up believing that our failures are due to our own lack of resilience. As with merit, this sickness impacts everyone – the successful as well as the botched and bungled. In our grossly inequitable world, the successful need to prove that they got where they are due to their superior work ethic. And so, we hear stories of CEOs who get up at 4am and spend an hour in the gym before working 16 hour days. What they are doing in that time is anyone’s guess, just as it is anyone’s guess if any of that work amounts to anything productive or worthwhile. Except, it must, right? Otherwise, why are they getting so many rewards? All of this is pure nonsense – but if you are a winner in a grossly unjust world, you need to believe it is justified by your efforts – and so, like a rat in a cage, you keep pushing the lever to prove you deserve the rewards. We need to step out of this rat race. We need to be kinder to each other and to ourselves. We aren’t just killing ourselves with our resilience, but the planet too. The other statistic she mentions in this that made me wonder how I’d never noticed this before was that so many of the books that are banned in the US were written by either women or people of colour – often both. These are stories we prefer not to hear because they are stories that stress empathy as a curative for the disease of individualised resilience. This is such a powerful book – powerfully written and with a powerful message for all of us. One based on hope and one that points us towards a world that would not only be better, but a world we all would likely prefer to live in. Resiling yourself to live in a world that would otherwise be insufferable is not the highest level of human nature. Resilience in the face of unsufferable pain is not courage, but cowardice. Saying ‘enough, no more’ is sometimes what is necessary – rather than, ‘I can push through, I can overcome this’. Together, we are stronger than any of us can be alone. Great book. ...more |
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it was amazing
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Oh my, this is such a fabulous book. My manager at work suggested I read this for a paper we are working on looking at how education policy in relatio
Oh my, this is such a fabulous book. My manager at work suggested I read this for a paper we are working on looking at how education policy in relation to initial teacher education has changed over the last twenty years. I often tell people that one of the things I most like about my job is how varied the work is. I never know one day to the next what I will be working on – and I love the idea that I’m playing at being a polymath. Anyway, if I was going to be a standard academic and just specialise in one thing, I think this form of critical discourse analysis would have to be up there on my list of most likely things to pursue. I just love this stuff. Okay, so what is corpus analysis? Well, say you are interested in how newspapers have reported on LGBT identities – literally one of the chapters here. What you could do is get a corpus of text – as many newspaper articles as you can find on the topic – and then run them through some software to see what words they use and what words come close to those words. This is remarkably powerful. It gives you a glimpse into the prejudices that we might otherwise take for granted about how we speak about LGBT people. One of the interesting things in this chapter is the idea that we talk about homosexual acts – rather than identities. Another is that we use LGBT people as a way of categorising countries – with ourselves as wonderfully liberal in our treatment of LGBT people and other nations as terribly illiberal. And because people can claim asylum because of how they might be treated if they are forced to return home, there is a lot of discussion about what you need to do or be or how you should act if you are going to be defined as being LGBT. That is, you’d better act as if you fit the stereotypes of LGBT that exist in western nations – otherwise you might not be considered, as one woman is told in this, lesbian enough. Some of my favourite chapters here looked at the use of incredibly simple words, like ‘a’, and how these were used differently by different groups of people in business situations. Men were more likely to use the indefinite article than women and managers more than staff. This was used to show the male managers were relatable. There is a chapter on the dropping off of the use of usury across time, as banking became a greater feature of capitalism. A fascinating chapter on how the media reports on schizophrenia and how they are so often reported as being dangerous murderers – whereas this is very much not the case. What I found most interesting in this chapter was the statistic that about one in a hundred people will experience schizophrenia in their lifetimes. Now, if you’d have asked me I would have said that the chances of having schizophrenia would have been about as likely as winning the first prize in the lottery. But in 2023 there were only 500 winners of the lottery. One in a hundred seems remarkably high. There is a lovely chapter on advertising language, but perhaps one of my favourites was on the use of language in films, when compared to speech. Now, the films that are most like speech, it turns out, are the Marvel films. Not something I was expecting. To be honest, and because I’ve read Goffman, I almost expected that no cinema would be quite like speech at all. Cinema is a visual art form – what is most remarkable about it is how little speech there is in it. And Goffman explains that what is said in a drama is quite different from what you would say in a conversation. When you are having a conversation you are generally having it with someone you know. And so there is a lot of stuff that is taken for granted. I don’t have to explain to you that Millie is your aunt or that she has diabetes or that uncle Jack cheated on her. You know all of that already, most likely. But this isn’t true for the audience. They need to be told all of that – but in a way that makes what is being said between the two characters seem natural. I assumed these constrains would have shifted dialogue in a film away from natural speech in person. What Bernstein referred to as the difference between explicit and restricted codes. There is also an interesting chapter on US legal language. The short version is that some judges believe that when we interpret the law we should rely on the original meaning words had when the laws were written. This makes some sense – the only problem is in knowing what this original meaning was. One way to check is to look up dictionary definitions from the time – but dictionaries are always behind the times, virtually by definition. This is where corpus analysis comes into its own, since it uses a large sample of contemporary texts and can therefore show how a word was used at any given time in history. There is also a nice chapter on academic discourse – one that stresses the use of passive sentences, nominalisations and Latinate phrases. Nothing particularly surprising, I guess – but it does go some way to confirming Bourdieu’s ideas on academic discourse as a relation to culture, rather than it being used due to how well it meets the demands of academic thought. Like I said, a fascinating book. Well worth the read. ...more |
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1350238228
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| Feb 23, 2023
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it was amazing
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Years ago, Raymond Williams wrote one of those key texts that then go on to inspire others to copy him – Key Words. You know, if you write a kind of d
Years ago, Raymond Williams wrote one of those key texts that then go on to inspire others to copy him – Key Words. You know, if you write a kind of dictionary, you get quite a lot of power. It’s that thing that Humpty Dumpty says in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” The difference is that Williams was a working class boy who struggled with the meanings of words other academics took for granted, and so wrote his dictionary as a way to complicate the meanings of these words, rather than to provide the taken-for-granted meanings they had. Words like culture, democracy or civilisation. Bourdieu does a cute thing that is similar too. In his Academic Discourse he has his researchers take down the words used by professors in their lectures, and then asks those who attended the lectures to define them. Unsurprisingly, most couldn’t. We generally go with the flow – but we really shouldn’t. This book is a tribute to Williams, in a way. It sets out to define the word Expertise. Again, another word we think has a simple meaning that we all mostly understand, but that really does need to be, as post-modernists like to say, troubled. One more random reference – a million years ago I went to see Laurie Anderson in concert, and she sang Only An Expert – yes, I’ve been lucky in my life, gorgeous woman. “So if there is no expert dealing with the problem It's really actually twice the problem. Cause only an expert can deal with the problem Only an expert can deal with the problem.” This book is about education and education policy and how that impacts on educational practice. It starts by showing that most ‘experts’ in education are from a very narrow pool. And most of these experts don’t have very much connection to what goes on in actual classrooms. They are experts in a very narrow sense – that is, they mostly know quite a lot about economics, but not an awful lot about learning. One of the great tragedies to have inflicted the world was the success of books like Freakonomics. These essentially said that economics is the god of all social sciences and that the world would be a much better place if people just followed the science and agreed with the sometimes counter intuitive conclusions that come from this glorious science. It’s all about making measurements and being objective and following the data. The problem is, well, if you are not an expert, that you might notice that what gets measured is often what is easy to measure, rather than, say, what actually matters. You might also notice that what gets measured tends to also reinforce a very particular (and peculiar) notion of what education actually is. And so we create measures that can show clear lines of improvement in learning – as if learning only ever occurred in straight lines with fixed gradients. We create curricula that follow the straight lines of our assessment metrics. And that forces us to ‘teach to the test’, otherwise we will fall below the standardised line and show that you have ‘failed our students’. And since all of this is purely objective – questioning it proves you are some sort of crazy hippy, more interested in your own ideological purity than in the education of children. The point of this book is to show that the ideological driven people in this field of experts is actually the experts themselves. That the policies that they pursue are driven by the values they hold and the power they wield, rather than the pure objectivity of the science they assert they represent. This is made clear by the evidence that they endorse and the evidence that they ignore. And when I say ignore, I mean wilfully ignore. It is not that there is no counter evidence or that this evidence is hidden away somewhere – that are a number of truths about education that remain true despite economics. One of those is that education is always contextual and should always start from the context of the learner in all of its richness and complexity. But that isn’t something that experts like to talk about. Rather, they want to be able to propose teacher-proof teaching and learning. Teaching and learning that is universally applicable. They want teachers to teach according to the ten high impact teaching strategies using pedagogies that have been approved by experts who have never set foot in a classroom since they finished their degrees. This, they say, is just common sense – even if it seems counter intuitive – because it is backed by the science. They have the data, they have the evidence – teachers should just shut up and follow the curriculum. That experts often follow the wants of powerful interests is never mentioned. That the metrics they impose often actively work against students becoming critical consumers of the education they are provided is also deemed irrelevant. Learning is about learning essential facts – and those facts are deemed beyond criticism. The other aspect of this rejection of critical learning is the current fetish for opposing the teaching of things like critical race theory or climate science, or in some parts of the US, evolution. How you could reasonably teach biology without teaching evolutions is quite beyond me, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. Whenever you hear someone talk about expertise you should immediately consider which powerful interest is being enabled. Expertise and power are intimates. As Foucault says, knowledge enables power and power decides what will pass as knowledge. And it does this by getting to choose what will pass as evidence. There is a lovely part in this book where a teacher climbs under a table to hug a child that is distraught. Finally, the teacher, who still doesn’t know why the child is crying, finds herself also crying – showing the child that no matter what has happened or what will happen next, she has someone who will be there for her and who will accept her as someone worthy of love and worth fighting for. Fit that into your teaching metric. Do you give it a seven-out-of-ten? Or a more scientific 6.873? Or is it something that cannot be turned into a number? And who would deny that this isn’t an important learning experience for both the teacher and the child? Education is about relationships – education requires real expertise, but not that which is divorced from the classroom. The reason why we need expert, professional teachers, is because where education occurs is always contextual, always situated. The needs of students require teachers qualified to interpret those needs and to research those needs and to apply their professional judgement to find a path towards learning, even in the most difficult of circumstances. But our system has been hijacked by those who would turn teaching and learning into a set a simplified numbers that can be graphed and used to hold those teaching in our schools to account. We have expertise the wrong way around. We need to include the voices of teachers more in the setting of curricula, in the deciding on the most appropriate ways to teach and in the most appropriate ways to assess that teaching. The example given here is of doctors. Doctors have their own professional organisations that decide how other doctors should be judged and considered worthy of remaining in the profession – in Australia this is done by government departments. This should also be understood in relation to power in society. Teaching is dominated by females – and that immediately calls into question their expertise. As I tell my students – most teachers are female, but most education heads are male – there is a glass ceiling for women and a glass elevator for men, and that has got to change. This is well worth the read, even if you are not involved in education. The criticism of expertise is useful across so many other parts of our society and education makes a useful case study. ...more |
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0415901707
| 9780415901703
| 0415901707
| 3.96
| 118
| 1990
| 1990
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it was amazing
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This is a lovely book. It isn’t the first of hers I’ve tried to read, but it is the only one I’ve finished. The other books I’ve started are more abou
This is a lovely book. It isn’t the first of hers I’ve tried to read, but it is the only one I’ve finished. The other books I’ve started are more about literary criticism – but of texts set in developing nations and therefore, mostly texts I haven’t read. It just makes me feel stupid reading criticism of texts I haven’t read – and I’m teaching a lot at the moment, so tracking down the texts and reading them isn’t really an option. In fact, reading anything other than the stuff for the lessons I’m giving is a bit of a stretch at the moment. What I liked most about this was that, like me, she doesn’t really feel like she belongs anywhere. These are always my favourite people. I don’t like nationalities and think the world would be – as John Lennon says – better without them. Nothing to kill or die for… I guess she is a kind of post-Marxist. Heavily influence by Derrida, although, at one point in this she says that is a label she sort of rejects – a lot of her work seems to be around questions like ‘given we now live in a world that is after theories can exist as ‘grand narratives’ – is liberation possible?’ She also uses ideas from Foucault – not least that power is related to knowledge and knowledge to power, and that the point is to resist and seek to reshape these power/knowledge relationships in a way that allows us to overcome the restrictions they impose upon us. She often talks of deconstruction as having become a kind of formulaic response that really limits its power. Deconstruction shouldn’t just be about proposing a contrary view to everything, but rather in seeking to understand the underlying structures that guide ways of engaging with the world and considering if other ways are also possible. She’s particularly interesting in relation to feminism and race. As a woman of colour who lives and works in both the US and elsewhere – but also India, her ‘background’ country – she is often presented as the go-to person on feminism or intercultural ideas. And she tries to get people to think again about their own assumptions when they make these assumptions about her. She doesn’t like how certain people - including people like me, say – get excluded from being able to speak about certain topics. I’m basically the zero category of humanity – male, pale and stale, as something I read recently said. I have all of the privilege and virtually none of the hurdles others face. And so, often people in my position have been encouraged to shut up and listen. And in the main, this isn’t terrible advice. However, like anything, it is terrible advice if it means I am never able to speak up, or speak out. As she says of Marx, his point wasn’t to give the working class the same advantages as the ruling class – but to abolish all classes. Other of her books are about allowing the subaltern to speak. Her point being that if the ‘lower orders’ are given the right and ability to speak, then that is the first step towards them no longer being the ‘lower orders’. The point not being to interpret the world, but to change it - again, as Marx would have it. This book is a series of interviews and I think that helps. I like it when people talk about their ideas. I think they often feel they ought to be clearer when they talk than when they write. And this book covers a lot of ground – which is nice when you are like me and just dipping your toe and really want to start with a helicopter view, rather than a microscope. As such, this was a really useful place to start. I’m hoping that I will do more than just start with this author – I’m not sure when, but I will need to read more of her. ...more |
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161039674X
| 9781610396745
| 161039674X
| 4.07
| 3,571
| Sep 11, 2018
| Sep 11, 2018
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it was amazing
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A friend of mine here on Good Reads, Wick Welker, recently reviewed this book and said it was a must read. This is going to be sort of a companion pie
A friend of mine here on Good Reads, Wick Welker, recently reviewed this book and said it was a must read. This is going to be sort of a companion piece to his review – here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... So, what is value? You might think that this would be the central idea of economics, and for a long time it really was. From Adam Smith to Karl Marx, figuring out why things had particular values was something that they had strained their brains over. And they decided that the value of an item was due to the quantity of human labour that it contained. This idea makes intuitive sense. If there are two items of equal value and one requires you to work for a day to create and the other requires only 15 minutes of effort – well, everyone would make lots of the second item and none of the first. One of the few absolute laws in the universe is that people don’t like doing more work for less return. But is there another way to understand how products acquire value? For Marx, commodities embody two different types of value – use and exchange value. No one is likely to want to buy something from you if it has no use – broadly defined. But use value isn’t the type of value Marx was interested in – or economists more generally. It is that thing they say all the time in philosophy lectures, use value is necessary, but not sufficient to explain value in economic terms. So, what we need to explain is exchange value – why do commodities get exchanged in particular ratios when compared with other commodities? As I’ve said, the early economists – Smith, Ricardo and Marx, for example – said it was due to the amount of socially necessary labour time that was embodied in the commodities. If one commodity costs me 15 hours work to produce and another costs you one hour, then the exchange rate between the two commodities is likely to be 15 to one – on average. The world is messy – but not so messy that something that takes 15 hours to produce will be exchanged on a one-to-one basis with something that takes one hour to produce. This isn’t how neoliberal economics sees value. To the Hayek’s of the world, the economic transaction is fundamentally based on personal desires, not objective values. Hayek and Co are essentially agnostics – in the true sense of ‘not knowledge’ – and so their market-based understanding of the economy is based on this. No one can know what value an item has until it is tested in the market. The price it achieves is its value. If you are prepared to pay ten times what someone else is prepared to pay for something, that clearly reflects the value YOU place on the commodity. Value is thus a kind of personal preference and has no deeper meaning than that. That is, price and value are completely functions of demand and supply – the higher the demand and the lower the supply, the higher the price. This has nothing to do with intrinsic ‘value’ placed in the item by the amount of labour expended upon it – it has everything to do with the vagaries of human tastes. This is where homo-economicus comes onto the scene – that is, each of us fully understands our own best interests and what will best meet our needs. We understand the only value that is important – the value we place upon a commodity, regardless of the labour that is contained within it. Since no one can know what value other people will place on any particular item, we therefore need markets. This is, as an aside, why we have money and why neoliberals are so concerned with inflation. If we can’t know anything about the needs of other people, we must have a pricing mechanism that shows the value that people place on bread and milk and cars and salt. Inflation distorts this pricing mechanism and confuses investors who are merely seeking to meet the demand for each item that exists within the market. Price, then, becomes the most important part of economics. The guiding principle of the entire system. Price shows demand and supply. It is ‘the truth’ – and any interference with this truth distorts the entire system with catastrophic effects. This is why it is called a ‘market system’ and the followers of these ideas are sometimes called ‘monetarists’. Money provides price signals and the whole system depends on price signals. All of which has very important social implications, if you chose one theory of value over the other. If value isn’t something intrinsic to the commodity itself, then the only things that have value are things that have a price. This means that virtually all government services are without value. In such a world it makes total sense to privatise government services because then they do have a price and the market can then decide, through the price people are prepared to pay for these services, which services are worth continuing to do, and which should be allowed to disappear. Since there is no other way to judge the value of anything, and since government services exist outside the market, outside the price mechanism, there is no way to judge their ‘value’. This also helps to explain why monetarists also believe in small government – government limited to two functions, defence (and a police force) and ensuring contracts are enacted. Everything else is believed to be better performed by the market since the market determines the value of any activity via the price it achieves. The one valid source of all truth. I’ve constructed this argument as a kind of either/or. But it is possible to have market mechanisms and also understand that items have a value that is intrinsic to them via the quantity of labour they contain. It is also possible to see that certain activities have a value beyond their price. It is also true that some things can have a price due to how we have constructed our economy. This is sometimes referred to – by people who are not neoliberals – as rent seeking. That is, some people in an economy can, due to how the market has been constructed, have the power to basically not produce anything at all, or not add any value to what they produce, and effectively collect a rent for your access to that service. Rent on land is a case in point, but, as the author points out, so is the extortionate price placed on pharmaceuticals, for example. The pharmaceutical industry argues that you shouldn’t think of how much it costs to produce a particular medication – but rather think of the value it provides you in not being dead, or not being unwell for an extended period of time. Therefore, they should be able to collect ‘rent’ on their invention, even though this seems disproportionate to the amount of labour that went into creating it. The idea that things do not have an intrinsic value other than the price people are willing to pay ignores a number of facts about our society. As Polanyi explained in The Great Transformation, markets aren’t ‘natural’, they are human creations based on human choices and only exist because of the choices we have made. And there are other choices that we could also have made. I think any theory that discards value as being intrinsic to items is missing the point. I am not saying that demand and supply do not play a role in setting prices – but it seems to me equally absurd to argue that labour does not play a role in determining value too. Exchange is a deeply social concept – something of a tautology – and Marcel Mauss in The Gift makes it clear that the role of money in society is necessary for deeply human reasons, beyond merely overcoming economic problems of exchange, but also psycho-social ones too. Governments provide services that the market generally is unwilling to provide. From roads to rubbish removal. In most of the world that is not the US – it also provides health care – if you wanted an example of market failure, the US health system would be hard to ignore. The notion that governments do not create value is based on a sleight of hand trick that is then taken to be something proven beyond the possibility of doubt. This sleight of hand is decided by the definition of value as price – something which, as the author points out, is also tautological – where value is the price someone is willing to pay for something and so really, price becomes price. When a theory is shown to be, as I take neoliberalism to be, purely in the interests of the powerful and at the expense of everyone else in society, then that theory needs to be challenged. Sure, it might prove to be true – but its truth can’t be assumed, it must be tested and justified. In the case of value, as this book makes clear, that ‘truth’ is on very shaky ground. ...more |
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1771861835
| 9781771861830
| 1771861835
| 4.26
| 35
| unknown
| Jun 01, 2019
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it was amazing
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I’ve been getting into arguments with people on Facebook recently about US culpability in the genocide occurring in Gaza. Their argument is a rather s
I’ve been getting into arguments with people on Facebook recently about US culpability in the genocide occurring in Gaza. Their argument is a rather simple one – that although the US is supplying the weapons and providing guidance in directing those weapons to their targets, it is wrong to say that this is a US genocide – since it is Israel that is prosecuting this war and the US is merely acting in a way consistent with its belief that Israel has a right to defend itself – even if the US does not fully support how it is going about doing that defence. This grew out of other arguments I had been having with them about Harris’s unconditional support of Israel during the election – which I still believe cost her the election. Their argument was that the Israel lobby in the US is so powerful that if she had made her true feelings about Gaza clear that it would have guaranteed she would have lost the election and been seen as antisemitic. This book was written before the current crisis – in 2019 – and so, what it has to say about the US involvement is particularly interesting, since it is not impacted by the latest news. That is, if it was impossible to see the US as an innocent bystander back then, it is even more so now. Over the last few days, with the betrayal of Ukraine, many people are saying things like ‘nothing about Ukraine without the Ukrainians’. I’ve no problem with this. But it does highlight that this is anything but a universal principle. If the history of Palestine is about anything, it has been a history of every major decision being made about that being made without the input (and often even the consideration) of the Palestinians. Palestinians have been denied existence or, even if people admit to them being there and having been there for a considerable time, they are considered to be so child-like as to not be deserving of having any right to contribute to the determination of their own futures. This goes back to the British mandate and the decision to create in Palestine a home for European Jews. The author makes it clear that this was a conscious policy based on racism towards Jews. The removal of Jews from Europe was seen as beneficial, not only because of the very longstanding hatred shown towards them, but also because Jews were understood to be troublemakers. One of the things that was understood to make them troublemakers was that they were understood to be a ‘people without a nation’. This fully contradicted the nationalist fervour of the age. It was why Hitler was so opposed to them. The connection between a people and the soil was understood to be fundamental – and since the Jews lacked this connection, they were understood to be essentially degenerate. Worse, not only did many Jews feel like outsiders in the nations they occupied – hardly surprising, since the locals tended to blame them for every hardship faced and kill them due to this – but many Jews therefore believed themselves to be cosmopolitan – citizens of the world, rather than of individual nations. The attraction to Marxism and proletarian internationalism, then, was also hardly surprising. At one point in this the author claims that up to half of all communists were Jews at some point. Removing Jews to Palestine ticked lots of boxes – getting rid of a hated people while simultaneously undermining the left. But, as Hegel liked to say, history is nothing if not contradictory. The other attraction for having a Jewish state in the Middle East was that it would be an essentially European outpost in a part of the world that was becoming increasingly strategic. And a difficult part of the world too. The problem being that it looked very much as if it could be monocultural – speaking more or less the same language and populated with people who saw themselves as more or less the same people. And although not nearly as advanced as Europe, this unity could very easily become a threat to European dominance over the region. The author spends a lot of time discussing how the rule of divide and conquer was applied to ensure divisions were created across the Middle East – particularly in heightening the tensions between the Shia and Sunni, but also by installing leaders that otherwise had no right to rule in places such as Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and so on. Tensions were also stoked with the Kurds, the world’s largest ethnic people without a homeland. Putting a Jewish, European state in the midst of all this was seen as another way to stoke disaffection – something the early Zionists understood and cultivated. The US was rather late to this party – but they have not really changed the rulebook. As oil grew in importance to the world economy, and even though the US had, for a long time, more than enough oil to be getting on with, it was understood that Arab oil needed to be controlled by US corporate interests. This has been a driving force behind much of US policy in the Middle East. From regime change in Iran and Iraq to the unquestioning support of Israel, control of the natural resources of the region has long been the main concern. And as people have repeatedly said, Israel is an unsinkable US aircraft carrier in the heart of the region. The point, then, is not that the US is acting in the interests of Israel – but rather is using Israel to further its own ends in the region. That those ends also suit Israel is merely a side benefit. The driving force is not the Israel lobby, but rather the lobby of corporate America. At one point in this the author points out that the Israel lobby is actually rather small when compared with other lobby groups in the US – take the NRA, for example – but the Israel lobby has so much power, not because of the money it provides both parties, but rather because its aims match those of US foreign policy. I’m a bit ashamed to have never really known very much about Saddam Hussein. I had been too willing to accept that he was the ‘butcher of Baghdad’. It is clear that he was ruthless, but in comparison with other rulers, probably no more so than might be expected. He did a lot to further the rights of the poor in Iraq, was definitely sectarian, sought to have Arab oil for the Arabs and introduced laws that particularly benefited women. He also did much to improve literacy in Iraq. Whatever you can say about Iraq when he was in power – it is a million times worse now that it has been ‘liberated’ by US forces. Much the same can be said about Libya, and perhaps soon enough, Iran too, and certainly Syria. The west has specialised in replacing sectarian leaders with religious fanatics, much to the cost of the region as a whole and to world peace and security. Afghanistan is another case in point. It is perhaps going too far to say that the US expected or even welcomed the ethnic cleansing genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and now the beginnings of this in the West Bank – however, it is clear that they did nothing to stop this and did much to facilitate it. As I said to people on Facebook, if two children are fighting and I provide one of them with a gun, then hold their arm up to point at the other child, push away the parents coming to protect their child, and then aim the gun at the heart of the other child – saying, oh yes, but I didn’t pull the trigger, the child did, does nothing to reduce my own moral responsibility for the action performed. None of which could have happened without my active involvement. As such, the moral judgement needs to fall equally upon myself as upon those I assisted in committing this crime against humanity. And now we are seeing Trump say Gaza has beautiful potential as a resort for the wealthy to holiday, that as a real estate developer he can see how emptying it of its noisome population would be of great benefit to the region – not least since he sees it as becoming US property. The colonial instincts are never too far below the surface – although, in this case, they are right on the surface, couldn’t, in fact, be any more clear. This book is particularly good since it gives a context for what is going on in Palestine, a history of an intention that is now being realised. That makes this book invaluable reading. I can’t recommend it too highly. ...more |
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Feb 16, 2025
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Feb 16, 2025
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082234422X
| 9780822344223
| 082234422X
| 4.18
| 263
| Sep 16, 2004
| May 22, 2009
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it was amazing
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This is the third book in quick succession by this author I’ve read. The first one hasn’t been reviewed yet. It is a discussion of Bourdieu’s three pa
This is the third book in quick succession by this author I’ve read. The first one hasn’t been reviewed yet. It is a discussion of Bourdieu’s three part understanding of space – something quite different from Lefebvre’s one, which I quite like – and I’ll need to let that percolate for a little while longer, perhaps even read the book again. Anyway, I was worried this one would just be a repeat of the book of his on the underclass. And look, in some ways it is – but if you were to read one or the other, I would probably recommend this one. He relates his thinking of prisons back to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – I mean, for obvious reasons, both being about prisons. But I think I would have brought in Bauman’s idea of the new poor. The central idea of this is that in the 1970s there was a movement away from what Erving Goffman referred to as total institutions. This meant that mental institutions were seen as terrible places that really ought to be done away with. This more or less happened. Whether the mentally ill were all that much better off ‘in community’ when they have been given so few supports and so little community is an argument for another day – but the point was that total institutions, institutions where every aspect of your life is determined by someone else, or rather the institution itself, became repulsive to us. The expectation was that prisons would go the same way as mental institutions. That isn’t quite how it worked out – particularly not in the US, which now has the world’s largest proportion of its population imprisoned. So, why? Some people say it is in response to a huge up-tick in crime. The problem is that crime rates have actually been falling across the developed world. Now, the obvious rejoinder to that is to say, see, putting people in prison works. Except, there isn’t any statistical connection at all between rates of imprisonment and rates of crime. The reason explained here in this book – and one Bauman discusses at length in his Consumerism and the New Poor – is that capitalism no longer views certain groups of society as what Marx referred to as the reserve army of the unemployed. That is, literally a group of people who form a section of the working class who are without work, but who can, at a moment’s notice, be brought into the workforce to replace uppity workers who have started to demand higher wages. This reserve army existed right up until about the 1990s – but then they became what Bauman calls ‘waste humans’ and Bourdieu calls ‘the precariat’. By waste humans, Bauman means that they have failed in their primary duty in society – that is, to be consumers. As failed consumers they have no real function in society. In the eighteenth century they would have been shipped off to Australia or one of the other colonies. But today the world is full, and so there is nowhere for them to be shipped off too. What to do with them? The answer has been to put them in prison. The book explains that the law is applied much more harshly towards the precariat than to any other section of society. In the US, poverty is conveniently colour coded. And so, the people you need to put in prison are generally Black. Poverty and violence go together, and so there are generally easy reasons to be found to facilitate this warehousing of the poor. And when that doesn’t work, there is the war on drugs. As just about everyone knows, white and black Americans use illegal drugs in identical proportions of the populations. Not that you would know that from the rates at which whites and blacks are imprisoned. Again, this isn’t about crime, this is about warehousing the poor. If it was about crime, then prisons would be places where criminals would be rehabilitated. And authorities don’t even pretend that is the case any longer. As someone says in this, if you want to avoid prison you need to be habilitated, before you end up in there – since there is no hope for you once you are marked with that particular stigma. I’d never heard of this book before I read it. Then at the end he talks about how incredibly popular it became. This came as much of a shock to the author as it did to me reading it. As he says at one point, he was invited to so many talk shows and interviewed in so many newspapers that he believes the year or so after this book came out, there are more photos of him than there had been for the rest of his life. You should read this book. It has given me yet another reason to hate Rudy Giuliani. But this isn’t just a book where the rest of the world can point and snicker at the US, as the author points out, the rest of the world has realised that the US was onto something when it started warehousing their poor in prisons and they are following along the same path. The author also points out that these are short-term solutions that will in fact produce much worse problems down the track – but if climate change has taught us anything, it is that capitalism is solely interested in short-term solutions to long-term problems, even if those short-term solutions make everything a million times worse. ...more |
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1509552197
| 9781509552191
| B09RHPXP2H
| 4.46
| 13
| unknown
| Jan 28, 2022
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it was amazing
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There are so many words and phrases in English that we can take to be synonyms – but they rarely are. I never really thought too much about the term ‘
There are so many words and phrases in English that we can take to be synonyms – but they rarely are. I never really thought too much about the term ‘underclass’. As the author says here, a preposition ‘under’ is used as an adjective, making it an odd construction to start with. It is intended to be derogatory. As he also says, it seems to cover much the same ground of Marx’s lumpenproletariat, but there are differences, not least since Marx placed these within his overall understanding of how classes work within society. And that is one of the main criticisms of underclass in this book. That as a sociological category, it doesn’t do nearly enough work. The author also mentions that words acquire their meaning through usage, but most of the use of underclass reinforces the narrowness of the definition and the virtually anti-sociological nature of it as a descriptor. Ironically, enough, it is rarely used in relation to other classes in society – and so the ‘class’ part of the category is almost misplaced. It is interesting to note that ‘category’ is from Greek and means to accuse, to accuse someone of belonging to a set. The term seems to have come into use mainly in Reagan’s time – something of a warning in that already – peaked in the 1990s and has suffered a decline since. Although, this decline has seen something of a resurgence recently. It is used to define the Black American urban poor. And is used to stereotype them as without work, dysfunctional and a danger to society at large. The racialised nature of the term is definitional. The part of this book that I particularly liked was his discussion of how few books have been written on the very wealthy, while there are so many on poverty. It is as if these two ideas are disconnected – with one hardly being worthy of comment – rather than intimately interconnected – with one necessitating the other. Again, this is down to our recent rejection of all things class related. Noticing relationships might lead one to look to systemic solutions to problems, rather than merely allocating individual blame. The lack of a class perspective isn’t the only problem here – there is also a kind of blindness to the historical foundations of the underclass as a category too. The idea that Black Americans are work-shy or incapable of sustaining lasting relationships is taken as moral failings, rather than socially conditioned. The term he proposes as an alternative is the precariat. This places whole sections of current society within a framework that categorises people according to social fields in relationship with each other and in competition with each other too. This comes from Bourdieu and not only echoes the proletariat, but also the idea of standing on shifting stands, where one’s footing is never secure. Rather than being a simple spatial metaphor of under and over – it gives a better, visual representation of the enforced insecurity of life for people in these social locations. It also points to the fact that the system itself creates such locations and that these are decisions the whole of society are responsible for – not just those forced to suffer under them. An interesting book using ideas from Bourdieu to challenge a characterisation that does more to hide than to illuminate. ...more |
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3.96
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it was amazing
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Feb 04, 2025
|
Feb 04, 2025
|
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4.46
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 2025
|
Jan 31, 2025
|