>Not all institutional formations are equally coercive in this respect. I
>think it will be interesting to analyze coercivity, not just in relation to
>interests served, but also in relation to the fundamental problems of scale
>in social organization. Schools and curricula, I believe, represent an
>extremely pathological form of social organization, essentially defeating
>their announced function. This is much less true of libraries or museums,
>which have comparable scale considerations, but not comparable functions.
I think all institutions are coercive in similar respects, in terms
of structural limitations and ideological barriers towards radical
re-organization, like de-institutionalization and de-centering authority,
ad nauseum (...insert tired old anarchy rhetoric / blather here) - even
museums are architechturally designed to control people, to control what
and who will be seen, like women painters, or LACK thereof (ref Guerrilla
Grrls 1996)
libraries are often bastions of censorship, and also structurally designed
to coerce certain behaviours (like don't stand in the medical/science
section and shriek, "Where'd y say that pus was oozing outta?") ...
although I do think there is the most hope, socially-speaking, in
libraries, with some serious help in defining who their public may be...but
with regards to education in the formal sense, libraries often more than
schools...
I think the problem may not be with educational or library or
museum concepts about how to teach, nor how to make learning the cultural
processes and representations of education which emphasize and criticize
persistent misecognitions
(my favourite is Magritte's drawing of a pipe; pun a la Freud ("Sometimes a
cigar is just a Cigar..."), where in colloquial french, "Ceci n'est pas un
pipe" (the slogan beneath the drawing of the pipe) means "this is not a
penis"...Magritte is claimed to have laughed out loud when he heard that
his work was being interpretted as challenging conventions in
representational art by conflating the image against it literate
contraditction, and so on, and Magritte screamed in the hilarity, "CECI
n'est pas un pipe!!!!!!!!!" grabbing his pants and dancing.
Why not more Debussey? More Laurie Anderson? Persimmon Blackbridge? Bikini
Kill? Cultural productions that teach by demanding you attention in the
re/presentations of ideological cultural commodities.
,...but the legitimtion of those as invariably lapses into prescriptive
resolutions to what is a vivid breakdown of society; thus, insulating
participatory institutions, such as science & pharmacological institutions
(ritalin=learning management/prozac=developmental supplement)- and so we go
on ...
and then there is the private/public school domain, which is like Boca
Raton and some ditch at the New Mexico border in comparison to resources
and so forth.
Both are learning sites (not especially Boca Raton and a NM escape route;
but private & public schools)'
which is all about ownership, isn't? "MY" child deserves the best education
I can afford;
of course, decentralizing incurs all sorts of social responsibilities, a
level of humanity perhaps that most folks haven't quite got together on
yet...
there is a time for formal instruction because knowledge is scary and by
gawd someone here better know what's what: but the political relations that
determine "what's what" ought to be an explicit part of the curriculum;
and students should be mobilized to lobby and reform schools - there are more
students than bureaucracies and school authorities...
diane
"When she walks,
the revolution's coming.
In her hips, there's revolution.
When she talks, I hear revolution.
In her kiss, I taste the revolution." Kathleen Hanna
(Bikini Kill)
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diane celia hodges
centre for the study of curriculum and instuction,
faculty of education
university of british columbia
2125 main mall,
vancouver, b.c. canada
V6T 1Z4