New Anne Event Pictures

Irene has put up photos from the Vancouver Exhibit. Mostly setting things up with JP, but it also includes a photo of me with Richard Cavell appreciating the posters.

Post-Fordist Education

Aaron Schutz at the Education Policy Blog Post-Fordist Education: “I think emancipatory education must involve teaching skills that actually generate collective power, which progressive education does not.”

Stewart Martin writes about the “Pedagogy-of-Human-Capital” at Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net

Efficiency is the name of the game, with reduced resources per student the supreme goal, both from the side of provision and from the supplements students must contribute. The rich can buy more resources, but not another goal.

Of course, many of these phenomena and their apparent conflicts can be understood as a direct consequence of commodification. This is certainly fundamental, but what form does this take exactly? Stacking high and selling cheap only accounts for part of these developments. It doesn’t explain their ideological function, which draws on certain emancipatory claims. The liberation of ‘choice’ and ‘opportunity’ is usually the carrot; the stick is the threat of deserved poverty, whether of the individual or the nation. It is all too clear that education has become a way for rich nations to manage class conflicts, either through keeping people off the unemployment register, or through seducing their populations into the idea that they can all be middle class, with proletarianisation becoming an attribute of newly industrialised nations like China or India, or immigrant work forces. Within this ideology, failure is educational failure. The idea that contemporary education is characterised by the move away from authoritarian forms of indoctrination and towards forms of self-directed or autonomous learning is perhaps the most powerful emancipatory ideology in this context. ‘Life long learning’ is exemplary. The phrase oscillates between the dream of fulfilling self-transformation beyond the privileges of youth, and the nightmare of indiscriminate de-skilling and re-skilling according to the dictates of a ‘flexible’ labour market. It modifies the ideology of meritocracy, which is perhaps the core educational ideology through which the contradictions of capitalism and democracy are recoded as the successes and (more usually) ‘failures’ of disciplined individualism: ‘life long learning’ extends ‘meritocracy’ to the whole of your life. Qualification is a receding horizon; its promise of maturity takes the form of infantalisation.

While in Rethinking Domination and Resistance: Challenging Postmodernism (pdf) Schultz writes:

I explore the possibility that postmodern fascination with the pastoral may divert attention from the blunt discipline generally experienced by those at the bottom rungs of society. I look to different examples that indicate how these different forms of oppression tend (or fail) to incite different forms of resistance. I then explore a range of efforts by scholars and activists to develop more effective resistance strategies.

I like anything that rubs the educational nose into fordist and post-fordist tangents, but primarily due to my opposition to the institutionalization of lived experience and the necessity for autonomous spaces. But I realize that I get a bit reductionist in that approach; mainly because it is still often a novel thought for peeps. I would like to see if I can figure out how to get Schultz paper into my course that starts in 2 weeks.

Should You “Ferberize” Your Baby? - Freakonomics

Should You “Ferberize” Your Baby? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog points to Game Theorist: Data-driven parenting talking, in part, about “Trixie Tracker, that allows parents to record and revisit information on sleep, nappy changes, feeding (both breast-milk and solids), medicines and pumping. You can then go back and see how things have been going.” Trixie Tracker - Baby Tracker Software sounds like a dream form of data collection for parents who want to have minute details at their finger tips, via their PDAs. Whatever works for them.

But uploading this data to a site is scary regardless of the safety procedures. Scary because it initiates a life of invasive surveillance on children that once again removes a point of autonomy over basic bodily functions from ever forming. Being tied to the regulatory statistics of our bodies, for the purpose of regulating growth and development seems like a small price to pay to identify and fix minor developmental delays and issues… but keep thinking about it until the bigger picture comes to mind, and you wonder what we’ve done to ourselves over the century that has allowed us to see the standardization of human experience as a good thing.

Recognition at last for Japan’s Ainu

recognition for ainu in japan:

In the 19th Century, Japanese people called the northern island of Hokkaido “Ezochi”.
It meant “Land of the Ainu”, a reference to the fair-skinned, long-haired people who had lived there for hundreds of years.
The Ainu were hunters and fishermen with animist beliefs.
But their communities and traditions were eroded by waves of Japanese settlement and subsequent assimilation policies.
Today only small numbers of Ainu remain, and they constitute one of Japan’s most marginalised groups.
On Friday they will have something to celebrate.