The 'genius' of our school teachers and university lecturers is to "attach the creature they have rendered inferior with the strongest chains in the land of stultification - the child's consciousness of his own superiority."
These chains are the feeling of superiority over those who have not yet learned such and such, those who did not get five A stars, while still feeling inferior to the Professors who sit in judgement over us. So this system of superiority /inferiority imposed by the school system is more
like a mind cage than it is empowerment.
Explication (the act of making clear or removing obscurity from the meaning of a word or symbol or expression)
You have read the book, and I have read the book
I am not going to make it clear to you why your interpretation is wrong and mine is correct.
This educative process might be termed the annihilation of one mind by another.
To be an educator at all it seems likely that one would have at least an implicit theory
of mind, such that one knows what one is doing (or, at least, what one aspires to be doing) when standing at the front of the classroom. Is education merely the transplanting of
gobbets of information onto the blank slate of a student's mind (we could call this the Lockean approach), or are we drawing out forms of rational and creative capacity possessed
(equally?) by students qua rational beings?
How about the possibility of a radically de-institutionalized autodidacticism that predicates all learning merely on the basis of the will of those desiring to learn. This stance is the very opposite of the Lockean approach, which emphasizes the passivity of the student-receiver.
Mainstream education arguably operates with two major contradictory imperatives: that one should in principle be able to teach everyone openly and equally and, at the same time, one must constantly rank these same students via tests, marks, and, in the case of higher education, final degree classifications. The rationalist educator is constitutively torn. But how to reconcile the desire to – on some level – treat students equally, with the simultaneous recognition that injustice necessarily lies at the heart of all assessment?
Mainstream education arguably operates with two major contradictory imperatives: that one should in principle be able to teach everyone openly and equally and, at the same time, one must constantly rank these same students via tests, marks, and, in the case of higher education, final degree classifications. The rationalist educator is constitutively torn. But how to reconcile the desire to – on some level – treat students equally, with the simultaneous recognition that injustice necessarily lies at the heart of all assessment?
on the one hand, the "everybody knows" type of social fact we repeatedly have to hand – for example, that 7 per cent of people in the United Kingdom attend private schools, that class mobility in Britain is at an all-time low, that some schools get all their pupils to apply to Oxbridge, while others send none (regardless of their A level scores), etc. – and the theoretical and philosophical assumptions that underpin any conception of education. From the start, I think it is important at once to recognize "the facts" but also to put the anger generated by them to both practical and theoretical use. When we see the missed educational opportunities, the subtle but pernicious mechanisms whereby students are told or, more often, tell themselves, "I can't do this," "this is not for me," "I don't belong here," we should recognize that all these things are cause for intense frustration, but to stop with the acknowledgment of them would be to concede too much to the existing state of affairs. Furthermore, there is a way in which these kinds of sentiments, far more often held by those who are more carefully reflecting on their increasingly schizophrenic role as students than those assured of their place in "the world" after years of confidence-bolstering at expensive schools, may possess a utopian kernel if their collective and class dimensions are exposed.
there is much to this idea of thinking of education without hierarchy
If one thing characterizes the current status of students in the university, it is confusion. Confusion about their status – are they clients, as the university brochure is at pains to assure them, or are they subjects-supposed-to-be criticized (or even failed)? Are they buying a degree, or are the students themselves the "product" to be sold (or to sell themselves) to employers?
The pressure on universities, too, to serve up as many adequately qualified students as possible has led to well-documented grade inflation and an ambivalence towards previously abhorred practices such as plagiarism
We could update Foucault's question – "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" – with t
he amended query "what is so astonishing about the fact that our universities resemble our businesses, our shopping malls, our corporate meeting rooms – all of which in turn resemble our new proto-privatized universities?"[
The shift from disciplinary societies to control societies, so acutely described by Foucault and Deleuze, means that, indeed, "[c]ontrol is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous."[8] The university has been transformed from a "closed environment" to an eminently porous one, with spaces of further and higher education doubling up as conference centres, spaces for credit card companies to hawk their wares, where books are replaced by corporate-sponsored computers and lab equipment. dkey manifesto pledge to get 50 per cent of young people into higher education would create a heavily indebted, desperate workforce, and prevents too many 18-year olds appearing on the job market for employment that doesn't exist.
Rancière's conception of intelligence is worthy of careful exposition in this regard. Rancière's claim is disarmingly simple yet explosive the moment it touches on educational practice. Rancière takes his cue from the maverick nineteenth-century pedagogue Joseph Jacotot, whose simple question was "[w]ere all men virtually capable of understanding what others had done and understood?"[11] What this means, as Peter Hallward puts it, is that:
Nevertheless, Bourdieu and Passeron's claims were a revelation to a generation of thinkers who wanted other explanations than the purely economic for the ways in which class reproduces itself. One is struck, Rancière says at least, by the "origi¬nal commonality" of Bourdieu's problematic. "Cultural capital" includes all of those forms of knowledge (not capacities) that directly relate to one's educational and cultural status. One of these forms of cultural knowledge, according to Bourdieu and Passeron, is aspiration itself, which has a self-perpetuating effect in the context of education and the likelihood of going to university. Their theory of cultural capital tries to make sense of the advantages that tend to accrue to the same kinds of people from the same kinds of background. In this sense, it is usually understood in isolation from exam results or other kinds of academic achievements, which aim to measure native intelligence. Instead, it incorporates modes of comportment such as attitude towards study, information learned outside of the school, and the cultural knowledge possessed by the family of the student in question, particularly those regarded as elite (opera, theatre, art, classical music, "serious" literature, etc.).
"Cultural capital" began life as a primarily educational term, and it can be used as a tool to explain why middle-class parents are much better able to understand the "rules" of their child's school and seek improvements – for example, asking for extra help for their child or knowing the right "language" to be able to talk to teachers on parents' evenings. It became a central term in attempts to understand why class mobility is often so limited, even when intelligence is taken into account. It describes the forms of extra-curricular knowledge that students from certain backgrounds possess, which, although not directly transmitted by the educational institution, are highly valued by it. Cultural capital went on to become important in more general studies of class culture, beyond its narrower educational focus, and is widely used to explain various kinds of "elimination," examining the process which ensures that middle class children go on to get middle class jobs, for example
These chains are the feeling of superiority over those who have not yet learned such and such, those who did not get five A stars, while still feeling inferior to the Professors who sit in judgement over us. So this system of superiority /inferiority imposed by the school system is more
like a mind cage than it is empowerment.
Explication (the act of making clear or removing obscurity from the meaning of a word or symbol or expression)
You have read the book, and I have read the book
I am not going to make it clear to you why your interpretation is wrong and mine is correct.
This educative process might be termed the annihilation of one mind by another.
To be an educator at all it seems likely that one would have at least an implicit theory
of mind, such that one knows what one is doing (or, at least, what one aspires to be doing) when standing at the front of the classroom. Is education merely the transplanting of
gobbets of information onto the blank slate of a student's mind (we could call this the Lockean approach), or are we drawing out forms of rational and creative capacity possessed
(equally?) by students qua rational beings?
How about the possibility of a radically de-institutionalized autodidacticism that predicates all learning merely on the basis of the will of those desiring to learn. This stance is the very opposite of the Lockean approach, which emphasizes the passivity of the student-receiver.
Mainstream education arguably operates with two major contradictory imperatives: that one should in principle be able to teach everyone openly and equally and, at the same time, one must constantly rank these same students via tests, marks, and, in the case of higher education, final degree classifications. The rationalist educator is constitutively torn. But how to reconcile the desire to – on some level – treat students equally, with the simultaneous recognition that injustice necessarily lies at the heart of all assessment?
Mainstream education arguably operates with two major contradictory imperatives: that one should in principle be able to teach everyone openly and equally and, at the same time, one must constantly rank these same students via tests, marks, and, in the case of higher education, final degree classifications. The rationalist educator is constitutively torn. But how to reconcile the desire to – on some level – treat students equally, with the simultaneous recognition that injustice necessarily lies at the heart of all assessment?
on the one hand, the "everybody knows" type of social fact we repeatedly have to hand – for example, that 7 per cent of people in the United Kingdom attend private schools, that class mobility in Britain is at an all-time low, that some schools get all their pupils to apply to Oxbridge, while others send none (regardless of their A level scores), etc. – and the theoretical and philosophical assumptions that underpin any conception of education. From the start, I think it is important at once to recognize "the facts" but also to put the anger generated by them to both practical and theoretical use. When we see the missed educational opportunities, the subtle but pernicious mechanisms whereby students are told or, more often, tell themselves, "I can't do this," "this is not for me," "I don't belong here," we should recognize that all these things are cause for intense frustration, but to stop with the acknowledgment of them would be to concede too much to the existing state of affairs. Furthermore, there is a way in which these kinds of sentiments, far more often held by those who are more carefully reflecting on their increasingly schizophrenic role as students than those assured of their place in "the world" after years of confidence-bolstering at expensive schools, may possess a utopian kernel if their collective and class dimensions are exposed.
there is much to this idea of thinking of education without hierarchy
If one thing characterizes the current status of students in the university, it is confusion. Confusion about their status – are they clients, as the university brochure is at pains to assure them, or are they subjects-supposed-to-be criticized (or even failed)? Are they buying a degree, or are the students themselves the "product" to be sold (or to sell themselves) to employers?
The pressure on universities, too, to serve up as many adequately qualified students as possible has led to well-documented grade inflation and an ambivalence towards previously abhorred practices such as plagiarism
We could update Foucault's question – "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" – with t
he amended query "what is so astonishing about the fact that our universities resemble our businesses, our shopping malls, our corporate meeting rooms – all of which in turn resemble our new proto-privatized universities?"[
The shift from disciplinary societies to control societies, so acutely described by Foucault and Deleuze, means that, indeed, "[c]ontrol is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous."[8] The university has been transformed from a "closed environment" to an eminently porous one, with spaces of further and higher education doubling up as conference centres, spaces for credit card companies to hawk their wares, where books are replaced by corporate-sponsored computers and lab equipment. dkey manifesto pledge to get 50 per cent of young people into higher education would create a heavily indebted, desperate workforce, and prevents too many 18-year olds appearing on the job market for employment that doesn't exist.
Rancière's conception of intelligence is worthy of careful exposition in this regard. Rancière's claim is disarmingly simple yet explosive the moment it touches on educational practice. Rancière takes his cue from the maverick nineteenth-century pedagogue Joseph Jacotot, whose simple question was "[w]ere all men virtually capable of understanding what others had done and understood?"[11] What this means, as Peter Hallward puts it, is that:
Everyone has the same intelligence, and differences in knowledge are simply a matter of opportunity and motivation. On the basis of this assumption, superior knowledge ceases to be a necessary qualification of the teacher, just as the process of explanation – together with metaphors that distinguish students as slow or quick, or conceive of educational time in terms of progress, training, qualification, and so on – ceases to be an integral part of teaching.[12]
This might of course mean that we are undermining the role of the lecturer or teacher from the start. The educator is no longer the source of or repository for greater understanding or knowledge, nor does he or she remain the figure behind the original meaning of "pedagogue" (leading the child). To rid education (and politics too, for that matter) of the figure of a certain kind of "master" is Rancière's guiding ambition.
There is a peculiar public character of the intellect" as the site of both
current practices of exploitation. All of these questions come into sharp focus when geared towards educational institutions and players – the "school," the "university," the "student," the "teacher." If we are to accept the claim that we live in an age in which "flexibility," the capacity to communicate, and the ability to manipulate lan¬guage have more importance in the graduate job market than the facility of doing any one thing in particular (summed up in the ubiquitous but meaningless phrase "transferable skills"), then students and their lecturers are really very much on the same side, whether they like it or not.
Higher education no longer operates in terms of excluding those not deemed suitable to attend, but rather operates on a principle of what we might call "differentiated inclusion". That is to say, almost anyone can go to university, and indeed is encouraged to do so both by governments keen on avoiding having to find jobs for 18-year olds and by loan companies who make a profit on the interest on student debt. In this sense, the discussion of cultural capital in Bourdieu
Higher education no longer operates in terms of excluding those not deemed suitable to attend, but rather operates on a principle of what we might call "differentiated inclusion". That is to say, almost anyone can go to university, and indeed is encouraged to do so both by governments keen on avoiding having to find jobs for 18-year olds and by loan companies who make a profit on the interest on student debt. In this sense, the discussion of cultural capital in Bourdieu
Pitching the question of capacity to learn at this level invites the open-ended question of whether universities are necessary at all. It is worth briefly remembering the ideas of Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society, at least one of which prefigures the pedagogical possibilities of the Internet (or at least a certain kind of use of the Internet):
I will use the words "opportunity web" for "network" to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. "Network" is often used, unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one another.[20]
The planning of educational institutions must begin, Illich argues, not with the question, "'What should someone learn?' but with the question, 'What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?'"[21] Rancière takes this abolition of mastery even further when he argues that one can teach and learn together something that one knows
nothing about: "
As Mary Evans puts it in her attack on contemporary higher education, Killing Thinking: "perhaps the real democratization of the universities will lie in the departure of future generations from them."[23]
This approach is a kind of mastery, disavowed in this case and all the more pernicious for it – I know enough to tell you that you do not need to know. It is the supercilious attitude of the newspaper columnist who chucks in references to Marx, postmodernism, etc. before airily informing the less-informed reader that he or she doesn't need to bother finding out anything about them for him- or herself. Equality of intelligence is here smothered by the laziness, not of the students, but of the teacher, who churns out information without really believing.
that the audience will be interested in receiving it. As Rancière puts it, "explication is the work of laziness".[24] The fear masked here, both by assuming student apathy and by preserving the knowledge you yourself possess, is the idea that actually there is nothing "special" about your capacity to learn. As Bourdieu and Passeron put it:
The whole logic of an academic institution based on pedagogic work of the traditional type and ultimately guaranteeing the "infallibility" of the "master," finds expression in the professorial ideology of student incapacity, a mixture of tyrannical stringency and disillusioned indulgence which inclines the teacher to regard all communication failures, however unforeseen, as integral to a relationship which inherently implies poor reception of the best messages to the worst receivers.[25]
Plato is one of the first to recognize, in the Phaedrus, "the way in which the speaker who knows the truth may, without any serious purpose, steal away the hearts of his hearers."
there is an erotics of pedagogy, and those forms of hierarchy that are predicated on a romantic attachment to the teacher on the basis that he or she "knows more" than the student are hard to deny and perhaps even harder to prevent.
If the hierarchical mode of teacher-student learning involves one person in a position of power over many, then Rancière's solution seems to propose instead a one-on-one relationship between the reader and the text. But wouldn't a collective – if paradoxical – form of autodidacticism be more egalitarian, precisely because it would accept the minimal empirical claim that each of us has something to learn from the other? Books can be just as dogmatic masters as any human.
Sociology suffers, argues Rancière, from the need to make secret what lies on the surface:
Condemned to remain within the apparent movement of doxa, ( a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion, from which are derived the modern terms of orthodoxy) prevented from returning it to a real movement that would no longer be a part of his domain, [the sociologist] divided the apparent movement into two. He hollowed out a dimension of paradox in the platitude of the doxa: it is because everybody knows that nobody can know.[29]
Nevertheless, Bourdieu and Passeron's claims were a revelation to a generation of thinkers who wanted other explanations than the purely economic for the ways in which class reproduces itself. One is struck, Rancière says at least, by the "origi¬nal commonality" of Bourdieu's problematic. "Cultural capital" includes all of those forms of knowledge (not capacities) that directly relate to one's educational and cultural status. One of these forms of cultural knowledge, according to Bourdieu and Passeron, is aspiration itself, which has a self-perpetuating effect in the context of education and the likelihood of going to university. Their theory of cultural capital tries to make sense of the advantages that tend to accrue to the same kinds of people from the same kinds of background. In this sense, it is usually understood in isolation from exam results or other kinds of academic achievements, which aim to measure native intelligence. Instead, it incorporates modes of comportment such as attitude towards study, information learned outside of the school, and the cultural knowledge possessed by the family of the student in question, particularly those regarded as elite (opera, theatre, art, classical music, "serious" literature, etc.).
"Cultural capital" began life as a primarily educational term, and it can be used as a tool to explain why middle-class parents are much better able to understand the "rules" of their child's school and seek improvements – for example, asking for extra help for their child or knowing the right "language" to be able to talk to teachers on parents' evenings. It became a central term in attempts to understand why class mobility is often so limited, even when intelligence is taken into account. It describes the forms of extra-curricular knowledge that students from certain backgrounds possess, which, although not directly transmitted by the educational institution, are highly valued by it. Cultural capital went on to become important in more general studies of class culture, beyond its narrower educational focus, and is widely used to explain various kinds of "elimination," examining the process which ensures that middle class children go on to get middle class jobs, for example
summarizes Bourdieu's claims about working class students in the following way: "they are excluded because they don't know why they are excluded; and they don't know why they are excluded because they are excluded."[
Nevertheless, Bourdieu's claims about cultural capital cannot fail to continue to resonate in an educational system that increasingly privileges the empty form of higher education as a marker of aptitude for a certain kind of job, a certain kind of lifestyle.
An educational system based on a traditional type of pedagogy can fulfil its function of inculcation only so long as it addresses itself to students equipped with the linguistic and cultural capital – and the capacity to invest it profitably – which the system presupposes and consecrates without ever expressly demanding it and without methodically transmitting it
We must acknowledge a changed landscape: not exclusion, straightforwardly, but a peculiar form of staggered expansion. The supposedly elite institutions are still there at the top, the old-boys and girls networks still churning out elite fodder for the same kinds of jobs – politics, diplomacy, high-end culture industry work, etc. At the same time, the expansion of higher education and the re-branding of ex-Polytechnics as universities in the UK has created a situation in which no one need be excluded. It is no longer a question of keeping them out, but of ensuring they go where they are supposed to. A further change comes at the economic level. As noted, fees have created a kind of split-subject of the university: the "client" who pays for a service and yet is still a subject "supposed to be criticized" or even failed. Endless feedback forms, along the lines of customer satisfaction surveys, entail that students are supposed to know how well that which they don't yet know is being conveyed. We could call this "the subject supposed to know how it will know what it doesn't yet know." It is a subject a long way from possessing Rancière's "method of the will," and getting further away from it all the time.
The problem is not to create scholars. It is to raise up those that believe themselves inferior in intelligence, to make them leave the swamp where they are stagnating – not the swamp of ignorance, but the swamp of self-contempt, of contempt in and of itself for the reasonable creature
- [1] Plato, "Meno," Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (New Jersey: Princeton university Press, 1999), 370.
- [2] Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford university Press, 1991), 29.
- [3] Ibid., 29-30.
- [4] See, as the latest particularly egregious example, Bruce Charlton's claim that "higher so¬cial classes have a significantly higher average IQ than lower social classes" in Rebecca Attwood, "Elite institutions' class bias simply reflects 'meritocracy,'" THE, May 22, 2008.
- [5] See, for example, Mary Evans's claim that "The surveillance between teachers and pupils is, of course, mutual. Teachers are expected to record the presence of their students, while students are asked to record comments on their teachers." Killing Thinking: The Death of the universities (New York: Continuum, 2004), 59. See also her claim that "[t]he spectre of the student who attends no lectures or seminars and yet emerges with an outstanding degree in final examinations is clearly a terror to the QAA [Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education]." Ibid., 117.
- [6] See, for example, John Gill, "Keep it Stupid, Simple," THE, October 23, 2008.
- [7] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977), 228.
- [8] Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control," October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7.
- [9] This summary of Bourdieu's position can be found in Roy Nash, "Bourdieu on Education and Social and Cultural Reproduction," British Journal of Sociology of Education 11. 4 (1990): 436.
- [10] Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control," 7.
- [11] Félix and Victor Ratier, "Enseignement universal: Emancipation intellectuelle," Journal de philosophie pancécastique, 5 (1838): 155. Quoted in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 4.
- [12] Peter Hallward, "Staging Equality: On Rancière's Theatrocracy," New Left Review 37 (January-February 2006): 114.
- [13] Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 16.
- [14] See Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito & Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004).
- [15] It should of course be noted that "immaterial labour" refers, in the context of education, to the kinds of general skills seemingly inculcated in and "desired" from contemporary graduates, not as a general claim about global labour, which remains overwhelmingly ma¬terial. There is no doubt, however, that the student produced by contemporary British universities is primarily a creature with no skills other than "transferable" ones that lack content, as well as being entirely in hock to debt.
- [16] Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie, "Cognitive Capital and the Rat Race: How Capital Measures Ideas and Effects in UK Higher Education," Historical Materialism (2009).
- [17] Paolo Virno, "General Intellect," trans. Arianna Bove, Generation-Online, www.generation-online.org.
- [18] "Who has the right to think?" is Kristin Ross's gloss on Rancière's approach to education. See her "Rancière and the Practice of Equality," Social Text 29 (1991): 57-71.
- [19] "Oxbridge takes fewer state pupils," BBC News, June 5, 2008.
- [20] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Penguin, 1973), 55.
- [21] Ibid., 111.
- [22] Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 18.
- [23] Evans, Killing Thinking, 152.
- [24] Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 117.
- [25] Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 2nd ed., trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1990), 111.
- [26] Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (London: Dover, 1994), 66.
- [27] Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 12.
- [28] Ibid., 4.
- [29] Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham: Duke university Press, 2003), 170.
- [30] Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 9.
- [31] Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, xi.
- [32] Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 168.
- [33] 'Systems of Education and Systems of Thought', in M.F. D. Young, ed. Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education. London: Macmillan, 1971. Quoted in Pierre Bourdieu: Agent Provocateur, Michael Greenfell (New York: Continuum, 2004), 72.
- [34] Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction, 99.
- [35] Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 101-102.
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