{"id":326,"date":"2022-11-04T15:25:03","date_gmt":"2022-11-04T19:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/?p=326"},"modified":"2022-11-04T15:27:16","modified_gmt":"2022-11-04T19:27:16","slug":"session-seven-just-us-thinking-about-the-final-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/2022\/11\/04\/session-seven-just-us-thinking-about-the-final-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Session SEVEN – Just Us (thinking about the final project)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A good seminar today. We committed ourselves to a session in which we would focus on some of our own thematic concerns (as they have emerged across the first six weeks of our work together) and<\/em>, importantly, on our final project (a concrete plan for which is starting to feel urgent). I took responsibility for the write-up of the session, so here we go\u2026<\/p>\n

We spent the first hour and a half or so discussing the three readings, with a focus on Yves Citton\u2019s pr\u00e9cis<\/em> of Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s The Ignorant Schoolmaster<\/em>. There was a little resistance from the outset to the \u201cJacotot theory of learning\u201d \u2014 and such ambivalence is by no means unreasonable. Lauren offered a personal story that involved the enormous pleasure (and relief?) of being taught<\/em>. Meaning, having someone pick up the chalk, go to the blackboard, and explain the problem: where it came from, ways of solving it, and directions for further inquiry.<\/p>\n

Chandler followed up and expressed skepticism about the ubiquity of \u201cintellectuality.\u201d\u00a0 What might this even mean? What kinds of fantasy must one indulge even to posit such a thing?<\/p>\n

Lauren spoke of her friend who is a social worker, whose committed lifework involves, to a significant extent, the enormously challenging business of trying to get marginalized and compromised people to engage in the most basic forms of self-care (showering, eating, sleeping). This is teaching<\/em>. To suggest that, under the right conditions, such persons might somehow better be permitted to \u201cdiscover\u201d such matters on their own initiative can seem, in context, positively cruel (consider, for a moment, R. D. Laing\u2019s experiments at Kingsley Hall in the 1960s<\/a>).<\/p>\n

And yet, we also had Julia\u2019s striking story of teaching poetry in a penurious mental asylum in Argentina: yes, it was overwhelming to try to read and write poems with individuals of enormous poverty who had spent lives, in some cases, as outcasts of society, and who were subject to spells of genuinely frightening mental instability; at the same time, how overwhelming, in a very different way, to discover the extraordinary poetic genius that emerged in such environments.<\/p>\n

It is difficult to do justice to the richness of the conversation about pedagogy that ensued. But there are some shining moments. I think all of us were probably affected by Navjit\u2019s contribution. She offered us two very different (but equally beautiful) images from her own public education in India: on the one hand, the open lecture halls of the public universities permitted a coming and going of those who were interested (exams could structure individual trajectories, but there was little formalized \u201ccourse of study\u201d \u00a0that brought students under the surveillant scrutiny of professorial expectation or curricular programming); on the other hand, her training at the hands of a recognized master of (as I understood it) Hindustani vocal performance (where for five years she rarely, if ever, was permitted to sing more than a single note for her guru\/teacher\u2014who sequenced her through a lengthy and tributary novitiate). Others, too, had teaching stories, and learning stories.<\/p>\n

Before we moved on, I did try to underscore how powerfully I had been affected by Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s argument on this read. Yes, I have made my way through his texts before. Yes, if pressed (like, in a generals-exam setting), I could have \u201cgiven\u201d his argument. I knew the story. But, as I admitted to you all, only on this reacquaintance did I genuinely feel how completely I had missed<\/em> the dialectical power of the core claims of Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

He is really flipping the script<\/em> on us professor-types. Did you all fully inhabit this?<\/p>\n

I think it is not easy for people like us to do so. We wouldn\u2019t be in a graduate seminar if we didn\u2019t, in some basic ways, \u201cbelieve\u201d in the form of education (its methods, its implicit theory of knowledge, its sociology) characteristic of the modern research university \u2014 where we seem to be intent on nesting ourselves in perpetuity, if at all possible. In that context, we are probably a little \u201chard of hearing\u201d when what is being said is \u201cthe educational project you are part of is in fact an elaborate machine for producing<\/em> ignorance\/stultification \u2014 things which are in no way natural, and come into being through the dynamic of \u2018teaching.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked us to attempt, heuristically, fully to inhabit such a perspective. Did we succeed?<\/p>\n

Hard to say. I\u2019m not sure I myself can fully get there.<\/p>\n

But perhaps doing so involves really zeroing in on the political stakes<\/em>. Since the question is NOT \u201cDon\u2019t some people know how to do math problems better than other people?\u201d (The answer to that is, presumably, \u201csure.\u201d) The question Ranci\u00e8re is asking us to ask ourselves, the question Ranci\u00e8re is saying Jacotot was asking, is \u201cWhat is the right kind of education in a democracy?\u201d And more specifically, \u201cWhat is the form of education suitable to a truly egalitarian ethos?\u201d<\/p>\n

The key moment appears on page 33 of the Citton, where Ranci\u00e8re is quoted as follows: \u201cEquality is not a given, nor is it claimed; it is practiced, it is verified<\/em>.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is, I think it must be acknowledged, a proposition of challenging profundity. If it is true (and is it not?) then a form of education that genuinely works to practice<\/em> and verify<\/em> equality may indeed be something more than just \u201cnice\u201d in a democratic polity. It may be absolutely obligatory, and possibly even constitutive of a meaningful democratic politics.<\/p>\n

But if this is the case, is it not also the case that the deepest presuppositions of the educational system of which we are (I believe, all of us) the products, and which we propose to extend and perpetuate are hopelessly wrong-headed<\/u> \u2014 indeed, diametrically at odds with what is wanted?<\/em><\/p>\n

Strong medicine. We walked this inquiry into a conversation about academic training (grad school) as opposed to undergraduate teaching, etc. But, interesting as that was, I don\u2019t want to lose the force of the original challenge. Our system of teaching and learning stratifies, sorts, and very definitely produces an attunement to (nominally justifiable) dominance<\/em>. As in \u201cthis person is better than that person.\u201d\u00a0 Our education system is ALL ABOUT THAT.<\/p>\n

Is this what we want? Is it just happenstance that we have ended up with such a system (in a democracy that feels less and less \u201cdemocratic\u201d)? Is it happenstance<\/em> that the system we DO have accords so smoothly with the needs of transnational meritocratic capitalism?<\/p>\n

And even if you find that question sort of tediously knee-jerk leftist, do you not smell something weird in the way the \u201cdemocratic education\u201d we are endlessly subserving can never show us equality now<\/em>, but only offer a (notional) equality of endowment<\/em> (anyway dubious) or an aspirational equality of outcome<\/em> (which is continuously and assiduously deferred\/falsified by the very educational apparatus itself)?<\/p>\n

Smells fishy to me\u2026<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

We pivoted away from all this at the end of the first half of class, and talked about the footnote piece from Critical Inquiry<\/em>, and we also stirred in a bit of quick appreciation for Proctor\u2019s agnotology <\/em>essay, by this point we were basically all ready for a short break.<\/p>\n

WHEN WE CAME BACK, we dug in on the final project proposals.<\/p>\n

I am not going to try to r\u00e9sum\u00e9 this conversation qua<\/em> conversation.\u00a0 I am instead going to go ahead and try to do the work of formulating a WORKING PROPOSAL out of what got said (while also taking a moment to surface some of the ideas that were a bit off the emergent \u201cpath\u201d of collective energy\u2014some folks may want to opt for developing this or that aspect of those, and going other directions\u2026)<\/p>\n

In the end, I sensed that a lot of us might be able to coalesce around something like this:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n