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.

Funes the Memorious

At least once a year my thoughts turn to Ireneo Funes. The first few weeks of Access Maths mostly deal with topics I think people should already have met: basic algebra and trigonometry, logs, etc. After this the tone of the course gets more grown up as we start to discuss sets and functions and it's at this point that Borges' story, Funes the Memorious gets a mention.

Funes is a most remarkable man, superhuman in some respects, proto-human in others. He has perfect memory and remembers every sensation he has ever experienced but these hyper-detailed recollections torment him and he suffers from chronic insomnia. To mitigate his insomnia he sets himself nocturnal projects, one of which involves giving every (whole) number a unique name. "...in a very few days he had gone beyond twenty-four thousand". This is a completely crazy project, of course, "precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration" and requiring an infinite length of time for its completion. It makes a charming footnote, completely optional as such footnotes are, to the introduction of the natural numbers.

Consistent with his perfect recollection of every experience, Funes is almost incapable of abstraction. He would struggle to understand why the word, "dog" could apply to both a Scots terrier and an Irish wolfhound. If each object we meet in the world is unprecedented, why would we even need numbers at all? They could become a game of the sort that Funes plays.

It's typical of Borges that a story of just a few pages should contain such rich, deep ideas. The story was first included in the collection, Ficciones, translated in English as Fictions, and can be found in other collections. I think the first translation of Fictions was published in 1962, so these stories are probably still copyrighted. I will leave it to you and Google if you want to try to find a free copy online.

Last Thursday, discussing functions, I wanted to underline the idea of "dummy variable", that we use a letter like f to stand for a function, not its value or its operation, and that once we have temporarily introduced a symbol, e.g. x to stand for "the number we are going to give to f", we don't really care about x again after that; x is just a placeholder and we discard it once it's done its job, of explaining how the function works. So we can write, e.g.

f(x) = 2x-1

but then ask, what is the value of f(2), f(-14.7), f(a), f(p²), etc. We can even suppose that a more modern Ireneo Funes has chosen to call one number, Bobdylan and write

f(Bobdylan) = 2*Bobdylan-1

We supposed that Bobdylan was Funes' name for 17. Then the result of this operation would be 33. From the class came the suggestion that Funes would have named 33, Batman. So we were able to write,

f(Bobdylan) = Batman

Of course there was a reaction: "Please leave that on the board for the next class."

Some reasons to be cheerful

My wife and children. Close friends and family. People in whose house you're always welcome just because you're you, irrespective of successes or failures, good deeds or bad, even if you've been a shit, a disappointment to the decent, a source of pain. Beyond those:

• Landau and Lifshitz course of theoretical physics
• Borges Fictions: Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tetrius; The Approach to Al Mu'tasim; Funes the Memorious;... Here's a Borges eulogy; no such article can really reflect what these stories do in the head of any individual reader.
• cask strength single malt whisky
• Paul Bley
• Consume Red
• Diamanda Galas
• Cardiacs (this song is so fantastic, it shouldn't be freely available like this. Go and make the world a better place to say thanks because you could listen freely to this. And buy the CDs)
• Trout Mask Replica; Mekanik Destruktiv Kommandoh; Red
• Keith Tippett
• random Glasgow people, don't even know their names mostly
• horizons as the Sun goes down
• Ito calculus

That'll do for this evening. More next lifetime.

Drunk

I don't get drunk any more. Or maybe if I do, it doesn't make any difference. When I did get drunk I had a favourite conversation: "what was the greatest gig you were ever at?" How vulgar. Next time I get drunk the conversation will be, "what was the greatest gig you weren't at?" Probably this one.

Only sky

Only sky is what's in this picture (and a little sea). I took it at Westport. Look west from Westport and the sky stretches to Newfoundland.

Only Sky is also the title of a very beautiful record by David Torn; one man, electric guitar and oud, an effects rack and a deep musical sensibility. It's always good to look up.

Books

I've been reading books. Always dangerous.

In The Corporation by Joel Bakan I found ideas like this:

As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. Nothing in its legal makeup limits what it can do to others in pursuit of its selfish ends, and it is compelled to cause harm when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.

Joel Bakan is a Professor of Law at University of British Columbia, no ranting hippy. This view is substantiated in detail via a historical review of the emergence of the corporation, an analysis of the legislative framework defining the corporation, and detailed accounts of particular legal cases. Reviews said things like, "...a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution."

Before picking up The Corporation (and alongside books on quite different topics, and again quite different topics) I had been looking at Neoliberalism: A very brief introduction by Manfred B Steger and Ravi K Roy. For the last few decades much of the world has been run in a certain way associated with the names Thatcher and Reagan, Blair and Clinton. The word, "Neoliberalism" denotes an attempt to define the key features of this project. Again, a quotation:

Neoliberal modes of governance encourage the transformation of bureaucratic mentalities into entrepreneurial identities where government workers see themselves no longer as public servants and guardians of a qualitatively defined 'public good' but as self-interested actors responsible to the market and contributing to the monetary success of slimmed-down state enterprises.

So, we convert the instruments of state - health, social services, education, regulatory bodies - into the same sorts of "psychopathic creatures" that dominate the marketplace. They will operate in a landscape defined partly by income and expenditure, exactly like companies; but also partly by "targets" and "Key Performance Indicators", instruments of management put in place with the intention of ensuring they continue to meet their societal purposes (here's a pretty grim account, not at all reassuring of this process in UK higher education). We are apparently confident we can do this in a way that will offset any psychopathic tendencies they might start to display. Good idea?