Carnival of Monsters

Carnival of Monsters is a story from Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who. The Doctor and Jo encounter an alien called Vorg, kind of a travelling galactic showman. He charges passers-by for a look in his miniscope, a cabinet device that contains a zoo of miniaturised monsters from across the Universe: one cyberman, one ice warrior, a couple of giant worm things that want to eat Jo and the Doctor, some humans, a funny dinosaur, etc.

It struck me that the old Department of Adult and Continuing Education (the DACE of this blog's title) was a similar collection, though not miniaturised and of university academics rather than exotic beasties: one astronomer, one zoologist, one historian, one literature specialist, one philosopher... It didn't travel around in the same way, although we did run courses across a very wide swathe of the West of Scotland. Like the miniscope we were not cherished by bureaucratic mentalities.

I really liked our DACE Carnival of Monsters and I believe it was very valuable, in a hundred different ways, to lots of people - possibly too diffuse and diverse a range of outcomes to survive now that Statistics has usurped Philosophy. For some decades it was the sort of cabinet that universities thought they should be constructing but that time has passed, for now anyway. I certainly became a rather rare sort of academic world monstrosity while working there; that time also has passed.

This blog was born in a time of change. The original intention was to keep the multi-disciplinary character of DACE alive virtually when it seemed it might otherwise be swallowed up in institutional restructuring. That didn't quite work out but I kept "sounding off about things that amuse me" anyway, Physics and Astronomy among them. However it's become dominated by my attempts to understand what happened to us and why, something I've given increasing amounts of thought to (possibly as the attempts at optimism and the notes of threat became more and more pronounced). Perhaps that will be the main focus from now: my developing thoughts on the value of adult education - no doubt a rediscovery of what clever people already understood some decades ago - and the particular perspective on universities and their purpose that results from that. For other stories, music, science, there's always Twitter. Maybe this will be a different but equally appropriate Memorial to the DACE Carnival of Monsters.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

By Paulo Freire; 1967.

I read it in bits, mostly on the bus to work. These points stuck with me.

The oppressors are comfortable. They benefit from a relationship of oppression and have no interest in changing anything. The consciousness of the oppressed people has been colonised (cf. Fanon) so that they are existentially resigned to this situation; the possibility of change, far less any actions that might result in change, lie outside their awareness.

"Banking education" is Freire's phrase for education that aims to dump skills and knowledge into the head of the educated; to make a "deposit" in the head of the subject of material that the educator - or more likely her employer - has decided meets their agenda. It must be avoided because it will never lead to any worthwhile change, either in the consciousness of the educated or their political situation.

(I think that many academics across the world now expend some effort in trying to avoid this sort of sterile experience, for instance at the moment in flipped classroom approaches. They're not usually asking political questions, however, more thinking about how people actually learn and how the teaching process can better enable learning. For Freire this phenomenon of banking education is essentially tied up with the political location of the educational process and the relative status of the educator and the educated.)

So a strategy is described, a procedure that roots the educational process in the situation and priorities of the educated, in which the dichotomy of teacher and students is avoided. This approach still acknowledges that the educator knows things the people don't, but they need to be involved as equal partners in a process that identifies what is important to them, to the point that a syllabus can be constructed and the professional knowledge of the educator can be put to their ends. One aims for a process of conscietisation (I think the Portuguese word conscientização is nicer). The oppressed become conscious of their situation and have enough understanding, of for instance political, historical, economic, legal aspects, to start working for change.

The oppressors are perfectly happy. So, in a way, may be the oppressed; resigned at least. Why should we bother trying to change anything? There are a hundred good reasons, of course, inequality, poverty, health, etc., and Freire is well rooted in the Marxist aims of revolution and liberation, but ultimately because the oppressor/oppressed relationship is a form of violence, in which the oppressed are prevented from fulfilling their human potential. It's not really healthy for the oppressors either, although they may be perfectly happy. It is a life-denying situation; necrophilic in the sense discussed by Fromm. If we deplore a situation of violence, if we care about enabling as many people as possible to grow as humans, to fulfil their potential, in an authentic way, we should want to do something about this. These imperatives could remain even if economic inequalities were somehow eliminated.

I had already heard a little about Freirian pedagogy many years ago. In some ways I found the starting position most interesting: the fundamental wrong lying behind the state of oppression is that of dehumanisation. Now there are many agencies in the world that dehumanise, that colonise consciousness, that bend people to their agenda. The Preface to the English edition by Richard Shaull astutely notes that "Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us..." and suggests that Freire's thinking and approach will remain valuable for many years, far beyond the setting that gave rise to them, hinting at a vision of a society in which "...men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

Starless

I'm at home. Not on holiday but not working, not until Wednesday; the new state of affairs. It's September. Outside the weather is dreich: overcast skies, bushes trembling in the wind, drizzle. Inside we have the opening mellotron chords of King Crimson's Starless which just seems right.

Optimism

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting Joyce, Ian and Helena in the Old Bank Bookshop, Wigtown. I've known Joyce since our student days. We compared notes on the state of the world and shared thoughts on how we'd arrived at the present desperate situation. "Got any Erich Fromm books?" I asked. "They pass through the shop, yes, but we can't keep Philosophy books on the shelves," was the surprising answer. "And it's all young people that are buying them."

I remember hearing about To Have or To Be when I was a student. The ideas seemed important, interesting. I've been led back to him because he's one of the key starting points for Pedagogy of the Oppressed. From http://www.erichfromm.net/: "Fromm’s works are infused with a genuine and philosophical humanism. The condition of human life and the evolution of man’s physical and intellectual abilities fascinated Fromm. In a world gradually heading towards a soulless mechanical existence impelled by technology, he fought for ways to preserve the spirit of man, the lifeblood of existence, the purpose of life..." In a world that now seems poised between the non-human priorities of the giant corporations on the one hand and the worst of all possible responses, a resort to hatred and xenophobia on the other, it gives me some hope that young people are turning to philosophy and looking for humane, life-affirming ways forward.

Drumlemble

In the Access Maths class I was asked about the detailed geometry of an old test question. In the question the students were told the angle above the horizon of a meteor, as viewed from Drumlemble and from Taynuilt, and the distance between the two villages. They had to draw a wee triangle from this information and use trigonometry to calculate the height above the ground of the meteor. I was asked to give a little more detail of the solution. Few if any of my students have ever been anywhere near Drumlemble so I decided to add a wee bit of background, quite irrelevant to the mathematics of the problem. Here it is.

Drumlemble is a small village close to Machrihanish. I grew up just a few miles from these places. Machrihanish is famous for its golf course, possessor of supposedly the most beautiful first tee in all of golf; its beach, stretching for a few miles up the coast to Westport where the windsurfers hang out; the Seabird Observatory; its airport, quiet now but formerly a cold war NATO airbase boasting Vulcans (picture), Lightnings, Buccaneers, Hercules, etc., and indeed its very own nuclear weapons dump. In the 1960s the Machrihanish coal mine still operated, and the Campbeltown-Machrihanish light railway used to carry coal from the mine across the Kintyre peninsula to the harbour in Campbeltown. Apparently it involved an unusual narrow gauge of track that needed a special Act of Parliament. The railway closed in 1932 but remnants can still be seen, if you know where to look. Below Campbeltown Grammar School a curious narrow path, still known as "the Cutting", runs from Meadows Avenue to the seafront. Enclosed by the old railway embankment it was, probably still is, a preferred haunt of courting couples looking for a wee secluded corner in that spare half hour between lunchtime and the first afternoon class.

Drumlemble - "Drumlenan" locally - is essentially a small mining village and there is a wonderful portrait of the Machrihanish mining community in Jan Nimmo's documentary film, The Road to Drumlenan.

One of Machrihanish's grand sandstone villas has a funny wee hut in the garden which in the 19th century was a small, private observatory. I have read and forgotten most of the background - still got some photocopied details somewhere - but I believe the owner was a serious astronomer who went in to be involved in bigger observatories in other parts of the world. So I don't really know if anybody in Drumlemble was ever tried to do the sort of thing described in that question, but it is not completely unlikely. I might have chosen Machrihanish instead of Drumlemble but then there would have been two letter "M"'s in the question and that would never have done. With Drumlemble, Taynuilt and a (M)meteor we can talk about "triangle DMT".

Isn't Maths fun?

Paulo Freire; Tony Blair

When I joined DACE, Lalage Bown was Head of Department. I was interested to locate myself in this new environment and thought I might go along to the Wednesday afternoon seminars in the Centre for Science Education. Lalage boycotted this, however, and insisted I sit in on a course in Principles and Theories of Adult Education that was being held at the same time. It took me a long time to digest some of what I heard there but Lalage was right; those were important ideas to hear about at the start of an adult education career - and conversations I had with the Director of the Centre for Science Education, Alex Johnstone, were probably just as useful as the seminars would have been.

Many years later I'm finally reading a book I heard about in that course: Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. The academic discussion of adult education lacks paradigms, drawing on a wide range of ideas from across the Arts and Social Sciences, but Freire's ideas are one of the few common points of reference. Here's his Wikipedia page.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed expounds an approach to adult education that seeks to avoid perpetuating existing power structures and oppressive relationships, instead serving the ends of revolution, liberation, human development, "the awakening of critical consciousness". Inevitably he also has a lot to say about those oppressive structures. I will probably come back to the ideas in that book. Just now I thought I'd share this snippet:

In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a "quick return to power", forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to form an organisation, and strays into an impossible "dialogue" with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls into an elitist game, which it calls "realism".

Is it just me or do these words, conceived in exile and published in 1970, nonetheless provide a concise history of the rise and fall of New Labour in the UK a couple of decades later?

An unforgiveable sin

Luke 12:10 says, "And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven." Humans are imperfect. All will sin at some point. Most sins can be forgiven but for a very special category there is no remedy: those that deny the nature of what is being sinned against.

In the modern, neoliberal university, it's easy to commit an unforgiveable sin, a sin against the true, essential nature of the organisation. The university no longer thinks of itself in terms of research, scholarship, value to society, etc; just as the fish has no regard for the primordial soup. The University is now a ding an sich. Its reality is composed of metrics: REF, TEF, NSS, league tables, income. Once you represent some activity that has not been codified in this way, does not contribute to any of the existing metrics, then you deny the university's true nature. This is an unforgiveable sin. No penance will suffice. Move on to some other field of endeavour and you may be allowed to survive; but you are fallen.

How do we rescue continuing education, say, in modern higher education, which serves a great range of aims for many people, but doesn't fall neatly into the ambit of any one of those metrics? Only by action where the metrics get defined, at the political level. In heaven.