I wasn’t sure how class would go but I actually feel like it went really well. I think we were able to connect the movie and the article well and that they, combined, lead to a good discussion. I also felt like people really did read the article and that they found it, at least to some degree, stimulating. Thanks everyone, for that. By the end I felt that we were potentially going in circles a bit, but that we were still agreeing with each other in the process. I felt our discussion hit a bit of a brick wall in that I felt my only options were to suggest that we all drop out of school right away, and then to do so. Obviously I didn’t do that but I still don’t feel optimistic about my time here, as the university is a site of violence and began as a colonial instrument (to teach Indians to be more Western/British in their thinking) Maybe, if I had been payed to go to Cambridge I’d be thinking about this differently, but as it stands right now, that isn’t the case and never will be.
Sorry everyone, I’m very sad this morning reflecting on these conversations, and also I’m sad because Jian Ghomehi just got acquitted of all five crimes.
Here is a rough lesson plan:
I thought we would discuss:
Times when we have felt ourselves hitting a proverbial “brick wall” and brainstorm as a class ways to potentially avoid those experiences in the future?
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” – Audre Lorde
What does this quote mean for us/the university/us, at the university?
Do we ever personally see ourselves as “embodying diversity”?
What are some concrete examples of radical action, coming from below, in the university?
Lesson plan? But yes, I agree with your assessment of the class: it went well on the whole, but we lost a bit of momentum towards the end, and didn’t have the time to bring things back. I hope, however, that we return to some of the important issues you raised in the sessions that remain to us.
Meanwhile, the university may be a “site of violence,” but that doesn’t say much per se. It would be good to be more specific and precise in your criticisms. Likewise, UBC is surely bound up in colonial relations in many ways, but not because it was founded “to teach Indians to be more Western/British in their thinking” (it wasn’t). In addition to Deschooling Society, another book I recommend is Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins, which (among other things) does a great job at providing a critical history of the institution.
And if you want to get (auto)biographical and personal: yes, I was paid to go to Cambridge; but I also did drop out. (Though I later dropped back in; every story is a long one.) The irony is that sometimes the best place–as well as the worst place–to criticize is from within.
Do you want a lesson plan? I jut had a list of questions/related quotes in my head.
Maybe founded isn’t the right word, but it was/is certainly used for that purpose.
I didn’t mean to be rude with my reference… I think it’s definitely cool and good that you were payed to go there and I wish it was more like that now. Sorry.
Yes, some kind of lesson plan, please. It could be just a list of questions. (I know that to some extent you did this in your previous blog.)
I’d say that the main purpose of the colonial university (here and elsewhere) was to educate the elite, and prepare them for governance and administration. The indigenous were simply excluded for the most part.
Not unrelatedly (and no worries about being rude), in some ways it was indeed cool to be paid to go to university–though I shouldn’t exaggerate; it’s not as though we were paid much–but at that time only about 8% of the population were able to go. Moreover, though the student grant (because that’s what it was called) was means-tested, which meant that supposedly the poorest got a full grant while the richest had to pay their own way, this did little in practice to counter-act other, more deep-rooted forms of exclusion.
So in the past few decades we’ve seen a massive expansion of “access” (as they like to call it), but at the price of ever-spiralling debt. I wouldn’t argue that we should go back to the old days, but I do think there’s something to be rescued from that time, if we can also mitigate (if not totally eliminate) the rather extreme forms of elitism and marginalization it propagated.
OK, this is already too much for a blog comment. Much to say.